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Post by the Scribe on Jun 8, 2021 9:38:00 GMT
Simple Dreams – A musical memoir
In Memoir, Linda Ronstadt Describes Her 'Simple Dreams'
Nov 28, 2013
Ronstadt recently revealed that she has Parkinson's disease and can no longer sing. Her memoir, Simple Dreams, reflects on a long career. In this conversation with Fresh Air's Terry Gross, she offers frank insights on sex, drugs, and why "competition was for horse races."
LISTEN • 47:39 www.aspenpublicradio.org/search?q=linda+ronstadt#results
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Post by chronologer on Jun 9, 2021 8:55:30 GMT
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Post by the Scribe on Jun 19, 2021 8:33:06 GMT
Simple Dreams
A Musical Memoir
By: Linda Ronstadt
Narrated by: Linda Ronstadt, Kathe Mazur
Length: 6 hrs and 13 mins
Unabridged Audiobook
Categories: Biographies & Memoirs, Entertainment & Celebrities
4.7 out of 5 stars4.7 (66 ratings)
Publisher's Summary
In this memoir, iconic singer Linda Ronstadt weaves together a captivating story of her origins in Tucson, Arizona, and her rise to stardom in the Southern California music scene of the 1960s and '70s.
Born into a musical family, Linda's childhood was filled with everything from Hank Williams to Gilbert and Sullivan, Mexican folk music to jazz and opera. Her artistic curiosity blossomed early, and she and her siblings began performing their own music for anyone who would listen. Now, 12 Grammy Awards later, Ronstadt tells the story of her wide-ranging and utterly unique musical journey.
Ronstadt arrived in Los Angeles just as the folk-rock movement was beginning to bloom, setting the stage for the development of country-rock. After the dissolution of her first band, the Stone Poneys, Linda went out on her own and quickly found success. As part of the coterie of like-minded artists who played at the Troubadour club in West Hollywood, she helped define the musical style that dominated American music in the 1970s. One of her early back-up bands went on to become the Eagles, and Linda would become the most successful female artist of the decade. She has sold more than 100 million records, won numerous awards, and toured all over the world. Linda has collaborated with legends such as Emmylou Harris, Dolly Parton, Aaron Neville, J.D. Souther, Randy Newman, Neil Young, Bette Midler, and Frank Sinatra, as well as Homer Simpson and Kermit the Frog. By the time she retired in 2009, Ronstadt had spent four decades as one of the most popular singers in the world, becoming the first female artist in popular music to release four consecutive platinum albums.
In Simple Dreams, Ronstadt reveals the eclectic and fascinating journey that led to her long-lasting success. And she describes it all in a voice as beautiful as the one that sang "Heart like a Wheel" - longing, graceful, and authentic.
©2013 Linda Ronstadt. All rights reserved. “Long Long Time”: Words and music by Gary White © Universal Music Corporation. Reproduced by permission of Hal Leonard. “Heart Like a Wheel”: Words and music by Anna McGarrigle © Anna McGarrigle Music. Administered by Kobalt Music Publishing America, Inc. Reproduced by permission of Kobalt Music. “Still Within the Sound of My Voice”: Words and music by Jimmy Webb © Seventh Son Music, Inc., c/o Music of Windswept and Bug Music, Inc. Reproduced by permission of Hal Leonard. (P)2013 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.
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www.audible.com/pd/Simple-Dreams-Audiobook/B00DEL0ZX4?qid=1624090920&sr=1-1&ref=a_search_c3_lProduct_1_1&pf_rd_p=83218cca-c308-412f-bfcf-90198b687a2f&pf_rd_r=S82KZQ2DKSX2957N1QSZ
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Post by the Scribe on Jul 10, 2021 7:56:28 GMT
Linda Ronstadt's 'Simple Dreams: A Musical Memoir' tells of New York memories while at the top of rock
www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/excerpt-linda-ronstadt-simple-dreams-musical-memoir-article-1.1448907
Ronstadt, one of the top female pop singers of the ‘70s and ‘80s, here recalls some of her musical adventures in New York City, which including performing both Puccini and Gilbert and Sullivan.
By Linda Ronstadt / special to the NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Sunday, September 8, 2013, 2:00 AM
Excerpts edited from Linda Ronstadt's memoir, "Simple Dreams: A Musical Memoir." Copyright 2013 by Linda Ronstadt. To be published by Simon & Schuster, Inc. Reprinted by permission.
In her new biography, “Simple Dreams: A Musical Memoir,” Linda Ronstadt shares her New York memories. She was the top woman in rock in 1980, seeing the then-governor of California, Jerry Brown, when she came east to star as Mabel in Joe Papp’s production of “The Pirates of Penzance,” first in Central Park and then on Broadway. In 1984, she would return to star in the New York Public Theater production of “La Boheme” The singer, who recently revealed she has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, remembers it well.
The call came while I was upstairs taking a shower. Jerry Brown was sitting downstairs next to the phone, so he answered it. Jerry had seen “H.M.S. Pinafore” when he was in school, and that was what he remembered of Gilbert and Sullivan, so when I came downstairs, he told me that someone named Joe Papp had called and he wanted me to sing “Pinafore.”
I picked up the phone and called Joe Papp immediately. I told him I would love to sing “Pinafore” at the New York Public Theater. I was a little disappointed when he said that it was “Pirates of Penzance.” He assured me that “Pirates” had a wealth of lovely songs for my character, Mabel, to sing, and if I wanted the part, it was mine.
Just before I met Rex Smith, who had been cast to play opposite me in the part of Frederic, I was introduced to a life-size cutout photograph of Rex clothed in little more than his considerable male pulchritude. It had somehow appeared near the door of the rehearsal room. I suspect Rex was writhing, but he didn’t crack. He was so handsome that I was inwardly groaning and hoping he wasn’t loaded with glamour-boy attitude. He wasn’t. He was eager and exuberant, a little naïve, extremely candid, and had great instincts. I decided to like him.
RELATED: LINDA RONSTADT HAS PARKINSON’S, CAN NO LONGER SING
From left: Rex Smith, Linda Ronstadt and Kevin Kline in of “The Pirates of Penzance.”
As we were walking into the rehearsal room at Joe Papp’s Public Theater, Rex took my hand, his eyes wide with anticipation and excitement. “This is like going into church,” he said.
Kevin Kline began to demonstrate some hilarious physical schtick he had worked out to make his character seem dashing, bold, and hopelessly confused all at once: Errol Flynn with a touch of dementia. Rex was rightfully in Kevin’s thrall, so his character followed the Pirate King around the stage like an eager puppy dog. This set up a most charming dynamic between the two male heartthrobs, and they never had to compete with each other.
RELATED: BY POP-ULAR DEMAND RONSTADT SAYS THE '70S ERA NO LONGER 'FEELS LIKE HOME,' BUT ARDENT FANS STILL YEARN TO HEAR A 'DIFFERENT DRUM'
Performing in Central Park had its drawbacks. We were terrorized by lightning, pummeled by wind, and soaked with rain that turned our costumes into Saran Wrap. There were the bugs. While singing, we swallowed them nightly, but once, just before the kissing scene I had with Rex at the end of the second act, a huge mosquito got trapped in the gluey layer of my lip gloss. I could feel it struggling to free itself, and when Rex leaned in to kiss me, his eyes were bulging out of his head. He was struggling to keep his composure, and so was I. After our kiss, Rex got to leave the stage, but I had to stay and sing “Sorry Her Lot” from beginning to end with a giant mosquito playing its death scene to the very last row on my lower lip.
Because of our surprising success in Central Park, Joe Papp decided to move “Pirates” to Broadway in the fall.
RELATED: A FEAST OF POP FROM RONSTADT AT RADIO CITY MINING HER '70S HITS, SHE FINDS A NEW VOICE
Ronstadt sings onstage at Radio City Music Hall.
For a period of time during previews, we were rehearsing one version of the show in the afternoon and performing another at night. This was exhausting, as we performed eight shows a week, and with rehearsals added, it was like doing 16. In addition to the rehearsals, they added live performances on the “Today” show and “Saturday Night Live.” This meant getting up at 4 for the “Today” show and staying up till 4 in the morning to perform on “SNL.” We played a matinee performance on Christmas Day, and by New Year’s Eve, we were completely fried. We had already done a matinee that afternoon, and in between shows, the pit band went out and got very drunk. (Who could blame them?) Rex and I, painfully sober, were staggering from fatigue around the stage with shredded vocal cords. Exotic, unfamiliar sounds emanated from the orchestra pit. The trumpet player, playing the lead into Rex’s and my tender duet at the end of act one, was either a lot more hammered than the others or more nakedly exposed. He sounded truly awful. And loud.
Giggling is a plague on the nervous system that I believe is hard-wired into some people’s physiology and seems to be a reaction to tremendous nerves, fatigue, or self-consciousness. It is rarely a welcome occurrence to the giggler and can feel like going over Niagara Falls without a barrel. Rex and I started to giggle at the horrifying trumpet notes and couldn’t get ourselves under control. The worst sin an actor can commit is to break character onstage. This shatters the spell for the audience, and it becomes nearly impossible to win them back. Our audience, having forked over their hard-earned cash to see our now hopelessly unprofessional performance, was not amused. They began to boo. Rex and I, still struggling with our nervous system’s tantrum and meltdown, finished up our songs the best we could and fled the stage.
RELATED: RONSTADT VOCAL ABOUT SEX
Backstage, Rex’s eyes were wide with terror and genuine anguish. I was wringing my hands in mortification. Our director, Wilford Leach, told me to change into my second act costume and, with Rex holding my hand, go out onto the stage before the show recommenced and apologize to the audience. It was absolutely the right thing to do, but it felt like going before a firing squad. I have no idea what I said to the audience, but it paved the way for the second act to begin, and we finished the show without incident.
* * *
RELATED: DANCING TO A DIFFERENT TUNE WHY LINDA RONSTADT TURNED HER BACK ON HER POP AND ROCK PERIOD
Joseph Papp with singer Linda Ronstadt.
Shortly after I said yes to Joe Papp’s invitation to present Puccini’s opera, “La Boheme,” at the New York Public Theater in the fall of 1984, I was in New York with Randy Newman to film a television special of Randy and his music.
We were walking along Columbus Avenue on our way to Café des Artistes when a police officer ran past us at full speed, breathing hard and trying to catch up with someone we couldn’t see. He pulled several yards ahead of us, and his gun slipped out of its holster, falling to the sidewalk. We called out to him, but he was already out of hearing range. I reached down to pick up the gun.
“No!” shouted Randy. “Leave it there!”
“What if a child picks it up?” I asked him. “Someone could get hurt.”
“Throw it in there!” he said, indicating a large trash can.
“It might go off and kill the poor garbage collector,” I argued. I decided I would be in charge of the gun and find a way to return it to the police officer who had dropped it.
I picked up the gun and immediately spotted two police officers driving along in a squad car. I raised my arm to hail them like a taxi and started to wave the gun in their direction. Randy, who lacked experience with firearms but had a lot of awareness of what happens to people who point guns at NYPD officers, managed to hide the gun from sight while he explained to me as tactfully as he could that I was a reckless moron. He also saved us from being a headline in the next day’s papers.
After some rapid negotiating, we agreed to stash the gun in my purse, which was actually a metal lunchbox with a picture of Roy Rogers and his faithful horse Trigger on the lid. The gun fit perfectly. We walked over to the squad car and explained what had happened. I lifted the lid slowly and offered the gun in the lunch box as though it were a gift of the Magi. Miraculously, my head was not blown off. I looked down the street and saw the other police officer, minus the gun. He was looking anxiously along the sidewalk. This added credibility to our story.
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Post by the Scribe on Jan 27, 2022 21:34:43 GMT
Jan 31, 2020 4:38:31 GMT -7 the Scribe said:
This might be one of the best insights into the family from 1946 to 1966.
An Excerpt From Simple Dreams
From her new memoir, Linda Ronstadt's look at her musical life in Tucson and what took her to L.A.
By Linda Ronstadt www.simonandschuster.com/books/Simple-Dreams/Linda-Ronstadt/9781451668735
From SIMPLE DREAMS by Linda Ronstadt.
I don't remember when there wasn't music going on in our house: my father whistling while he was figuring out how to fix something; my brother Pete practicing the "Ave Maria" for his performance with the Tucson Arizona Boys Chorus; my sister, Suzy, sobbing a Hank Williams song with her hands in the dishwater; my little brother, Mike, struggling to play the huge double bass.
Sundays, my father would sit at the piano and play most anything in the key of C. He sang love songs in Spanish for my mother, and then a few Sinatra songs while he remembered single life before children, and responsibilities, and the awful war. My sister sang the role of Little Buttercup in a school production of H.M.S. Pinafore when she was in the eighth grade, so she and my mother would play from the big Gilbert and Sullivan book that sat on the piano. If they were in a frisky mood, they would sing "Strike Up the Band" or "The Oceana Roll." We would all harmonize with our mother on "Ragtime Cowboy Joe." When we got tired of listening to our own house, we would tramp across the few hundred yards to the house of our Ronstadt grandparents, where we got a pretty regular diet of classical music. They had what they called a Victrola and would listen to their favorite opera excerpts played on 78 rpm recordings. La Traviata, La Bohème, and Madama Butterfly were the great favorites. On Saturdays they would tune in to the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcast or sit at the piano trying to unravel a simple Beethoven, Brahms, or Liszt composition from a page of sheet music.
Evenings, if the weather wasn't too hot or freezing, or the mosquitoes weren't threatening to carry us away to the Land of Oz, we would haul our guitars outside and sing until it was time to go in, which was when we had run out of songs. There was no TV, the radio couldn't wander around with you because it was tethered to the wall, and we didn't get enough allowance to buy concert tickets. In any case, there weren't many big acts playing in Tucson, so if we wanted music, we had to make our own. The music I heard in those two houses before I was ten provided me with material to explore for my entire career.
Our parents sang to us from the time we were babies, and one haunting lullaby was often included in our nighttime ritual. It was a traditional song from northern Mexico that my father had learned from his mother, and it went like this:
Arriba en el cielo Up in the sky
Se vive un coyote There lives a coyote
Con ojos de plata With silver eyes
Y los pies de azogue And feet of mercury
Mátalo, Kill it,
Mátalo por ladrón Kill it for a thief
Lulo, que lulo Lulo, Lulo
Que San Camaleón Saint Camaleón
Debajo del suelo From underneath the floor
Que salió un ratón There goes a rat
Mátalo, Kill it,
Mátalo, con un jalón Kill it with a stake
Our mother had brought her own traditions from Michigan, and her songs were even grimmer. She sang us a song about Johnny Rebeck, whose wife accidentally ground him up in a sausage machine of his own invention. After that, she sang:
Last night my darling baby died
She died committing suicide
Some say she died to spite us
Of spinal meningitis
She was a nasty baby anyway
We would howl with laughter and chorus back at her in threepart harmony:
Oh, don't go in the cage tonight, Mother darling
For the lions are ferocious and may bite
And when they get their angry fits
They will tear you all to bits
So don't go in the lion's cage tonight
My favorite place for music was a pachanga. This was a Mexican rancher's most cherished form of entertainment. It was a picnic that took up an entire afternoon and evening and could last until midnight. Preparations would begin in the late afternoon, to avoid the worst heat of the day. A good site was chosen under a grove of cottonwood trees so there would be cool shade and a nice breeze. Someone would build a mesquite fire and grill steaks or pork ribs or whatever the local ranches provided. There would be huge, paper-thin Sonoran wheat tortillas being made by hand and baked on a comal, which is a smooth, flat piece of iron laid over the fire. Fragrant coffee beans were roasted over the fire too, then brewed and served with refried beans, white ranch cheese, homemade tamales, roasted corn, nopalitos, calabasitas, and a variety of chiles. Around sunset, someone would uncork a bottle of tequila or the local bacanora, and people would start tuning up the guitars.
The stars blinked on, and the songs sailed into the night. Mostly in Spanish, they were yearning, beautiful songs of love and desperation and despair. My father would often sing the lead, and then aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends joined in with whatever words they knew or whatever harmonies they could invent. The music never felt like a performance, it simply ebbed and flowed with the rest of the conversation. We children weren't sent off to bed but would crawl into someone's lap and fall asleep to the comforting sound of family voices singing and murmuring in two languages.
My brother Peter's beautiful boy soprano voice landed him a soloist's position in the Tucson Arizona Boys Chorus, which at the time had a national reputation. They would travel by private bus giving concerts throughout the country and return covered in aw-shucks glory. On the nights of their homecoming concerts, my father, mother, sister, and I would troop down to the Temple of Music and Art—a beautiful, small theater in downtown Tucson, modeled after the Pasadena Playhouse—and watch them sing. Our whole family would hold its collective breath while my brother emitted the eerie and mysterious high sounds that only prepubescent boy sopranos can make, praying that he wouldn't be sharp or flat. He was seldom either, but when he strayed, he was more likely to be sharp. I have the identical tendency. We all knew from hearing him practice at home which passages were likely to derail him, and we white-knuckled through them as we listened. The boys were dressed in cowboy hats, silk neckerchiefs, satin-fringed and pearl-snapped cowboy shirts in desert sunset colors (the colors being allotted to sopranos and altos accordingly), bell-bottomed "frontier pants" with rodeo belt buckles, and cowboy boots. The stage was dressed with an artificial campfire, a starry-night backdrop, some saguaro cactus silhouettes, and a beautiful full moon projected from the back of the hall. Now, this was some serious production value, in my six year-old opinion! It had a mesmerizing effect on the audience, and everyone listened in hushed and rapturous delight.
Whenever I imagined myself singing for the public, it would be like that: I would stand on a proscenium stage with a real curtain that opened and closed, and sing those beautiful, high, pure notes and give the audience chills. After all, I was a soprano too and could sing just as high as my brother. I wanted to sing like him. I can remember sitting at the piano. My sister was playing and my brother was singing something and I said, "I want to try that." My sister turned to my brother and said, "Think we got a soprano here." I was about four. I remember thinking, "I'm a singer, that's what I do." It was like I had become validated somehow, my existence affirmed. I was so pleased to know that that was what I was in life: I was a soprano. The idea of being famous or a star would not have been in my consciousness. I just wanted to sing and be able to make the sounds I had heard that had thrilled me so. And then one day, when I was fourteen, my sister and brother were singing a folk song called "The Columbus Stockade Blues." I came walking around the corner and threw in the high harmony. I did it in my chest voice and I surprised myself. Before that, I had tried to sing only in a high falsetto tone, and it didn't have any power. Because my brother's voice was high and his performances were so central to our early family life, his sound was the first I ever tried to copy. All artists copy. We try as hard as we can to sound just like someone we admire; someone who evokes a strong feeling that we would like to emulate. The best part is, no matter how hard we try to copy, we wind up sounding like a version of ourselves.
The elements of voice and style are braided together like twine, consisting of these attempts to copy other artists, or an instrument, or even the sound of a bird or passing train. Added to these characteristics are emotions and thoughts that register as various vocal quirks, like hiccups, sighs, growls, warbles—a practically limitless assortment of choices. Most of these choices are made at the speed of sound on a subconscious level, or one would be completely overwhelmed by the task. When I bend my ear to a singer's performance, I often try to track who it was that influenced him or her. For instance, I can hear Nat "King" Cole in early Ray Charles, Lefty Frizzell in early Merle Haggard, Rosa Ponselle in Maria Callas, Fats Domino in Randy Newman. In a recent duet with Tony Bennett, the late Amy Winehouse was channeling Dinah Washington and Billie Holiday to great effect, yet she still sounded like Amy Winehouse.
The regional accent one speaks also affects rhythms and phrasing, so someone who is "copying" has to import the accent too. For me, it helps to know the vocal bloodlines in order to decode the phrasing of a song. I once sang a Tom Petty song called "The Waiting," which has an intricate rhythm scheme for fitting lyrics into the music. Petty, an artist I admire, came along later than many classic rockers and so was able to absorb their elements into his writing and singing style. As I studied his vocal performance, it broke down something like this: Tom with his Florida accent was copying Mick Jagger with his British accent, who was copying Robert Johnson from the Mississippi Delta. And in another part of the same song, Tom was copying Roger McGuinn, who was copying Bob Dylan, who copied Woody Guthrie, who was in turn copying someone lost to our generation. These influences can show up in a whole line or just a word, or even the way that part of a word is attacked. As voices age, the vocal twine can become unraveled, and one hears the seams and joins of the laminated sound that has come to be recognized as that artist's style. It can collapse into a heap of ticks and quirks.
As kids growing up in the fifties, we tried to copy anything that inspired us from the radio, both in Spanish and English. We would harmonize on Hank Williams songs, Everly Brothers songs, or soap jingles. My father brought home a lot of records from Mexico. Of these, our favorites were the mysterious huapangos, sung by the Trio Calaveras and Trio Tariacuri. These songs from the mountains deep in Mexico had strange indigenous rhythms and vocal lines that broke into a thrilling falsetto. We also loved the urban smoothness of the jazz-based Trio Los Panchos.
I spent hours listening to the great ranchera singer Lola Beltrán. She influenced my singing style more than anyone. "Lola the Great" stood for Mexico as Edith Piaf stood for France. She had an enormous, richly colored voice that was loaded with drama, intrigue, and bitter sorrow. Although she was a belter who sang Mexican country music, her voice had the same dramatic and emotional elements as the opera singer Maria Callas.
I listened to Callas with my grandmother. I read later in a Callas biography that she loved to sing along to the Mexican radio stations during trips she made to appear at the Dallas Opera. Lola was the most played female singer on Mexican radio. I am sure Callas loved her too.
When commercial folk music began to play on the radio in my early teens, we really paid attention. Here was something that sounded much like the Mexican traditional music on which we had been raised. Like the rancheras and huapangos, it was drawn from an earlier, agrarian life, was accompanied by acoustic instruments, and had rich, natural-sounding harmonies.
Peter, Suzy, and I hovered over recordings by popular folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary, and Canadian duo Ian and Sylvia. We would learn their songs and harmonies and then rearrange them for our own configuration of voices. I would cover the sopranoalto registers, Suzy the alto-tenor, and Pete would sing tenorbaritone. Years later, my younger brother, Mike, would sing whatever extra part was needed, from bass to high tenor. But he was still little then, so we formed a trio and called ourselves the New Union Ramblers. At the time, Suzy worked at the Union Bank, and I had an Arhoolie recording of the Hackberry Ramblers and thought ramblers sounded folky. We tried our best not to sound too treacly but were not always successful. We were having a lot of fun and sometimes played at the local folk clubs.
Bobby Kimmel, soon to become my Stone Poneys bandmate, played bass. He was short, with the dark, bearded look of the Beat Generation, and prone to quoting lengthy selections from his philosophy heroes, who ranged from the Indian writer Jiddu Krishnamurti to Lord Buckley, the hipster comic of the 1940s and 1950s. Richard Saltus, a preppy, unusually tall and skinny schoolmate of mine, leaned over us playing the banjo and cracking us up with his quirky humor. He was unusually bright, years later becoming a science writer for the Boston Globe. He introduced me to Bill Monroe, the Stanley Brothers, Flatt and Scruggs, and the Blue Sky Boys. Again, their mountain harmonies reminded me of the Mexican trios and the huapangos I loved. They dealt with the same issues: the grueling work of living off the land and the treachery of misplaced affection.
My brother Pete went to work for the Tucson Police Department while he took his master's degree in government at the University of Arizona. He eventually became the chief of police, but at the time, the department didn't think too highly of my brother hanging around beatnik folk music clubs. My sister had three children and less time for music, so I began to play small venues on my own, sometimes with my cousin Bill Ronstadt accompanying me on the guitar. Bill, the most accomplished guitar player in our family, was a serious student of Brazilian music, but when he played with me, we did simpler American folk songs. The professional demands were not great. I could play a set of four or five songs, and Bill would fill in with Brazilian pieces. We occasionally got paid but felt lucky to get the experience of being in front of an audience.
Sometimes Bobby Kimmel would play a set of blues tunes that he had worked out, and I would duet with him on a folkier piece like "Handsome Molly." We played at a coffeehouse called Ash Alley and another called the First Step. They were tiny, seventy- to one-hundred-seat places owned by local folk music entrepreneur David Graham. His younger brother, Alan Fudge, sang and played guitar and was studying acting at the university. He was smart, funny, kind, and political. Alan and I spent most of our spare time at his brother's establishment and became sweethearts. His mother, Margaret, was the first feminist I ever encountered and would scold her sons robustly if they were careless with their girlfriends. She was divorced, and when her son David brought in older bluesmen like Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee to play at his club, she would cook for them, let them stay at her house, and do what she could to cushion them from the bruising elements of Jim Crow still hovering in the Southwest. This was before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and there were signs everywhere bragging about a proprietor's right to refuse service.
Conversations at their house were often about the hoped-for civil rights legislation, the Vietnam War (which few Americans were aware of at the time), and the unconscionable shenanigans of the House Un-American Activities Committee. At the public high school that I attended, my civics teacher, a Ukrainian, showed us films on the HUAC and warned us about the Communist threat that lurked behind every cactus. I also had an English teacher from the Deep South who spent one entire class period making an impassioned defense of the KKK, and awarded an A to anyone who read Gone With the Wind. At Margaret's house, I got another side of the story. She was not like any of the Tucson mothers I had ever met. A free spirit who insisted on personal responsibility, she was very kind to me.
Alan taught me songs he had learned from Pete Seeger and the Weavers about the labor movement. He was performing the lead in a university production of Shakespeare's Othello, and we explored that play together. One night he came home with two records: Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely and the first Bob Dylan album. I thought the Nelson Riddle arrangements on the Sinatra record were stunning. It was the first time I had ever heard Bob Dylan sing, and I liked that too. We spent many evenings dissecting those records. Some of my music friends thought those artists were diametrically opposed, one from "the establishment" and the other from the foment of cultural revolution. I thought they were both great storytellers.
In those days, Top Forty radio was still regional and had a wide-open playlist. When I drove to school, I could turn on the radio and hear George Jones, Dave Brubeck, the Beach Boys, and the Singing Nun on the same station. I much prefer that style of radio to the corporate model we have today, with tightly formatted playlists and the total absence of regional input.
Alan's brother continued to try to build a following for folk music at the First Step. He brought in ace bluegrass band the Kentucky Colonels with Clarence White and his brother Roland. I would watch Clarence night after night, his face an expressionless mask while he flat-picked notes at speeds not equaled until the invention of the particle accelerator. David also brought Kathy and Carol, a duo who sang Elizabethan ballads and Carter Family songs. They were good guitar players, especially Carol, and their complex, shimmering harmonies were completely original. The two were both natural beauties, innocent and full of wonder. Still teenagers, they had an Elektra Records recording contract, were playing folk festivals around the country, and getting to hear and jam with major folk artists that I had read about in Sing Out! magazine.
I remember seeing blues singer Barbara Dane and guitarist Dick Rosmini at David's club. Dick complimented my voice and encouraged me to go to Los Angeles and see what was happening at the Ash Grove, an L.A. coffeehouse that played traditional music to enthusiastic crowds. Tucson being a relatively small city, the folk music venues always struggled, and the shows were poorly attended. I began to wish I could go someplace that had a richer, more diverse, and more appreciated pool of music.
Alan left Tucson to play Shakespeare at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego. Bobby had gone east to Massachusetts to spend time with friends in the Jim Kweskin Jug Band. He wrote to me about this girl singer they had added named Maria D'Amato, who was gorgeous and could really sing. She married his friend Geoff Muldaur, the other star singer in the Kweskin band, and became Maria Muldaur. Geoff was a great admirer of blues singer Sleepy John Estes and cobbled together his own compelling and original style from that influence. Geoff in turn had a strong influence on the singing style of John Sebastian, later a founding member of the Lovin' Spoonful. After spending some time on Martha's Vineyard with the Kweskin band, Kimmel went to the West Coast and moved in with Malcolm Terence, a friend from Tucson who was a reporter for the Los Angeles Times.
My mother and I drove to the coast the summer of 1964 to visit my aunt Luisa, then resident hostess at the Southwest Museum of the American Indian in Los Angeles. Knowing I wanted to sing, Aunt Luisa had sent me a recording, Duets with the Spanish Guitar, which featured guitarist Laurindo Almeida dueting alternately with flautist Martin Ruderman and soprano Salli Terri. It became one of my most cherished recordings. She and Terri were close friends, and when I told her how much I loved the record, she invited me to meet her. My aunt had helped her research material for her recordings, plus she coached her pronunciation when she sang in Spanish. Aunt Luisa also gave Terri many of the costumes she had worn during the course of her own career. They now belong to the Southwest Museum. She drove us to Olvera Street, the original center of Los Angeles, and showed us the theater where she herself had sung while wearing those beautiful costumes, sometime during the 1920s.
Alan drove up from San Diego, and he and I spent the evening with Bobby at Malcolm's little place at the beach. Bobby was playing in small clubs and said that if I wanted to come over, he could find us work. There weren't many opportunities left for me in Tucson. David hadn't been able to succeed with the First Step and had to close it. I decided to think about it. I was eighteen and enrolled for the spring semester at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
I made plans to drive to the coast and visit Bobby again during spring break of 1965. I traveled with some friends who were going to get summer jobs in canneries in California and return to school in the fall. We all slept on the sofa or the floor or anywhere we could fit. Bobby was eager to introduce me to a guitar player he had met named Kenny Edwards. He worked at McCabe's Guitar Shop, which was in the front lobby of the Ash Grove, a club on Melrose, then the mecca for West Coast folkies. We jammed all of us into somebody's car and drove to West Hollywood. We found Kenny seated with a guitar, playing a flashy finger-picked version of "Roll Out the Barrel." It was a nightly ritual that he engaged in with another guitarist who worked there. They would try to outplay each other and also show off the guitars they had for sale. Kenny was tall, with the athletic body of a surfer. He was skeptical and intellectual, dark featured and handsome. He dressed like a disheveled English schoolboy, and at nineteen, his guitar playing was impressive. He suggested we move from the lobby into the performing space of the Ash Grove to hear a new band call the Rising Sons. Kenny loved their two guitar players, Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder. Though just young kids, they played like demons, with confidence and skill far beyond their years. They were dead serious about the music.
Driving back to the beach, Malcolm and Bobby started talking about a new L.A. band called the Byrds, who were playing folk rock, a new hybrid taking hold on the West Coast. Eventually, we went to see them at the Trip, a new club on the Sunset Strip that had a light show and was supposed to give you a psychedelic experience with your music. As soon as I heard their creamy harmonies, I was mesmerized. I recognized Chris Hillman from a bluegrass band I'd heard, the Scottsville Squirrel Barkers. In that band, he had played mandolin. Now he was playing bass guitar in an electric band with Beatle haircuts. It was clear to me that music was happening on a whole different level in Los Angeles. I began making plans to move to L.A. at the end of the spring semester.
I turned in my final exam to my English professor, the noted Arizona poet Richard Shelton. He was also an autoharp player and sometimes joined us at family jam sessions. The final was an essay on something from Yeats that he had written on the blackboard. He said he hoped he would see me in the fall. I told him I was moving to Los Angeles to sing in a folk-rock band. Justifiably bemused, he replied, "Well, Miss Ronstadt, I wish you luck."
I still hadn't told my parents. I knew they would insist that I was too young, hadn't finished school, and had no real way to support myself. I also knew they were right, but I had to go where the music was. I waited until the night I left to tell them. A musician friend had offered me a ride to the coast. He had gigs north of L.A. and offered to drop me off on the way. My parents were upset and tried to talk me out of it. When it became apparent that they couldn't change my mind, my father went into the other room and returned with the Martin acoustic guitar that his father had bought brand new in 1898. When my father began singing as a young man, my grandfather had given him the instrument and said, "Ahora que tienes guitarra, nunca tendrás hambre" ("Now that you own a guitar, you will never be hungry"). My father handed me the guitar with the same words. Then he took out his wallet and gave me thirty dollars. I made it last a month.
The only thing I remember about that long ride through the desert night was searing remorse for having defied my parents. I was still very attached, and they had always been so kind to me. I felt terrible for hurting them and causing them worry.
There was nothing to be done. My new life was beginning to take shape.
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Post by the Scribe on Jul 29, 2022 2:58:35 GMT
INTERPRETING HER LIFE
28 October 2013 Reviewed by Ken Sharp
recordcollectormag.com/articles/interpreting-her-life
Over delicate acoustic guitar finger-picking and a lush orchestral score, Linda Ronstadt sings, “I’ve done everything I know to try and make you mine and I think I’m gonna love you for a long long time.” It’s a line from her 1970 single, Long, Long Time, which was her first solo hit. Had she only recorded this exquisitely beautiful and haunting song, Linda Ronstadt’s place in music history would be assured. But this was just the beginning of a storied and wondrous musical journey. Sales of over 100 million records; winning collaborations with the likes of Neil Young, Randy Newman, Emmylou Harris, Dolly Parton, Aaron Neville, Johnny Cash, Gram Parsons, Rosemary Clooney and Frank Sinatra; shelves groaning with every music award imaginable… Over four decades of music making, Ms Ronstadt is a consummate song stylist who remains one of the US’s most beloved artists.
Ronstadt drew from a deep well of influences, ranging from Mexican folk music to Hank Williams, opera to the Everly Brothers. From the sun-kissed country-rock splendour of 1974’s Heart Like A Wheel to the punchy new wave sass of 1980’s Mad Love, the elegant Great American Songbook craftsmanship of ’83’s What’s New, to her Spanish album, ’87’s Grammy-winning Canciones De Mi Padre, Ronstadt’s widescreen musical education played a significant role in inspiring and shaping her career choices. In 1967, the 21-year-old Tucson, Arizona native came to the public’s attention in The Stone Poneys, who hit with Different Drum, penned by Michael Nesmith. Going solo two years later with the album Hand Sown… Home Grown, Ronstadt’s career kicked into top gear. Multi-platinum albums, a raft of hit singles, sold-out concerts; Ronstadt wrote her own ticket, essaying a wide swath of musical styles, including country, pop, rock, R&B, jazz, new wave, American songbook standards and mariachi. The one common thread was her peerless interpretative skills, fearless versatility and hard-fought integrity.
Now retired from recording and touring after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, which has robbed her of her singing voice – she released her last album in 2006 and performed her last show in 2009 – at 67, Ronstadt is content in her family life – she has two children. Her spectacular and rich voice is always on the airwaves, and her new autobiography, Simple Dreams, chronicles her remarkable life.
Ronstadt, who authored the book without a ghost writer, writes: “Someone once asked me why people sing. I answered that they sing for many of the same reasons the birds sing. They sing for a mate, to claim their territory, or simply to give voice to the delight of being alive in the midst of a beautiful day.”
RC: What did you learn about yourself writing the book?
Not to procrastinate. I used to be a procrastinator and this changed all that. I wrote every word, for better or worse!
I learned I have a terrible memory and that events are condensed and dates are very fuzzy to me. I’d remember someone dying five years before she did. They say they have been able to create false memories in mice… I remember clearly somebody showing me that You’re No Good was No 1 on Billboard’s pop chart, country chart and rhythm and blues chart. It turned out it didn’t happen and I’ve corrected it in the book. I remembered it so clearly and I think it probably happened but I don’t think it was Billboard. I also remember thinking, what good does this do having this kind of success? Because I didn’t care for the way I sang You’re No Good. I didn’t think the vocal was any good. The success of You’re No Good was not something I was proud about but something I was so disappointed in. I’m not inclined to brag, as you may have noticed after reading the book. I know certain things are important to readers that you need to touch upon, like when you’re struggling and then you have to describe how you came to succeed.
In your book you state: “Our parents sang to us from the time we were babies.”
Everybody sang in my family. They weren’t doing it on a professional level and weren’t as good as Richard and Linda Thompson’s kids or the McGarrigles, but we sang in tune and in time, and we sang the things we loved. I think it’s really important for people to do their own music. People are very eager to delegate artistic endeavours and experiences to professionals, like we don’t do our own drawing and painting. We don’t do our own dancing. Unless you live in New Orleans, no one in this country dances! It’s a shame. It’s fine to have heroes. It’s good to have people like Adele or Pink or whoever’s a good singer, but you need your own thing too.
Did it take you a while to find your own voice?
About 10 years. I started sounding like myself in the late 70s. It wasn’t until I went to Broadway and came back that I really landed on my voice, and oddly enough it was with the Nelson Riddle stuff. I can sing rock’n’roll and I had a successful career doing it but I wasn’t as personally invested in that as I was singing standards. Those songs are exquisite works of art; they’re beautifully crafted for singers. And also, the person that I was and the way that I was raised didn’t make me part of that rough and tumble world. Was I there? Yes. Did I try drugs? Of course. Did I like it? Not particularly. It just wasn’t who I was. You go to where you need to go to get music. I always made sure I had a musical reason to be hanging around and I always made sure I had a ride home. Those were the two essentials! And you get good songs that way.
Singing in private is one thing, putting yourself out there to sing in public is another…
I wanted to be able to do music all the time. So if I had a job at a bank or had a job driving a cab, or teaching English, or at nursery school I wouldn’t have very much time to do music. From an early age, I was able to get paid singing – not a lot of money, but enough to eat. I wasn’t fussy, I played in pizza parlours and beatnik dives and all kinds of strange places. Playing a place like The Troubadour in Hollywood was a really big deal. We probably would have paid to have played there. Now you have to pay to play clubs but not back then; we certainly couldn’t have afforded it in those days. They paid us starvation wages but we somehow got by.
Speaking of The Troubadour, in the late 60s you were part of that musical nexus which spawned so many artists.
The Troubadour was probably a less sophisticated version of café society. It wasn’t that unsophisticated; there were plenty of sophisticated people there. It was a café in the true sense of the word where there were a lot of artists coming and going. You’d get something to eat, get a drink, hear a story, and have a soft shoulder to cry on, whatever. People really influenced each other in that place. That was a little microcosm where people could see performers in a small place that was sympathetic to music. After everybody got to be such big stars, we just didn’t influence each other as much.
All the musicians were surprisingly supportive. I think it shows a lot in the work of the Eagles and Jackson Browne and JD Souther; I knew all of them very well. They really did help and encourage each other. They wrote together and really tried to get the best out of each other and that was impressive because they could have just sliced each other down. I’ve been around situations where everybody was trying to be hipper than thou and pull all of the hip people into one corner of the room and laugh at the people that weren’t hip. There was a lot of that in the 60s, around Bob Dylan and a lot of those English bands. I never bought into that. It was so competitive and all about looking down at other people and trying to make them look bad. Everybody’s in there at some level just to learn and it gets down finally to, “Can you pull your weight? Can you do the job at hand? Can you make up that harmony or that lead lick or figure out that arrangement?” That’s what counts, not who’s hipper. Rolling Stone magazine encouraged that attitude. It was kind of Puritanism and I never liked it.
Tell us how you found the Mike Nesmith song Different Drum, your first major hit with The Stone Poneys.
I had records by the early bluegrass guys and there were these New York musicians who loved that music and tried to emulate it, like the Greenbriar Boys who used to travel with Joan Baez. They were wonderful. Their lead singer was John Harold; a good singer. I first heard Different Drum by the Greenbriar Boys and I didn’t know Mike Nesmith had written it. I knew Mike and knew he was a very talented guy but didn’t realise it was his song until I’d learned it and fallen in love with it. That song had something I wanted to proclaim for myself, which is how I pick all the songs I sing.
The Stone Poneys were into folk rock and I was trying to make sure the song had a little bit more than just a traditional approach to it. Different Drum wasn’t even a traditional song but already they’d [Capitol Records] taken it and made a synthesis. I wanted to make it a little bit more mine and more of that California thing. Our producer, Nik Venet, hired this arranger, Jimmy Bond who’s a darling man, a good jazz musician and a good arranger. But I was just shocked by the treatment they gave Different Drum. I hadn’t evolved that arrangement in an organic way, which was the manner in which I usually approach music. I hadn’t done it with the group but had chosen it as a song for myself and I thought it was a hit. I wanted to recut it but Nik wouldn’t go for it.
We’d cut it first with just guitar, a mandolin and acoustic bass. I didn’t think that version was strong enough but then we recut it with the orchestra, which was shocking to me. Two takes, that was it. We used players from the Wrecking Crew – Don Randi on harpsichord, Jimmy Gordon on drums. When you had expensive musicians on the clock you didn’t keep them long. Those players in the Wrecking Crew were so good you could book half a session and that would be enough time to get what you wanted. We used them on Different Drum because they were the first call studio guys. I didn’t know that world at all; I’d just come from Tucson and I had no clue. I’d played music with the people that I knew; I didn’t know there were people you could hire. I was worried about it. It’s not that they weren’t good players – my God, they were vastly better players than we were, but they hadn’t evolved along our path. They hadn’t absorbed the same musical idiosyncrasies, so I felt that Different Drum didn’t sound like us. And I was right; it didn’t sound anything like us! But Different Drum was a hit and as it turned out, the way The Stone Poneys sounded wasn’t destined for success.
Anyhow, so I found Different Drum and I also found a bunch of Laura Nyro songs that I wish I could have discovered 10 years later when I actually knew how to sing because I would have loved to have had a shot at those songs. I also found a Jimmy Webb song, Where’s The Playground, Susie, and I wanted to change the title to “Where’s The Playground, Baby”. Funnily enough, the girl, Susie, who the song was written about, wound up marrying my cousin Bobby and she now sings in a band with Bobby Kimmel from The Stone Poneys. It’s so funny how all those things come around but I never did get to record that song.
The Stone Poneys opened shows for The Doors and you got to know Jim Morrison…
Jim was very soft spoken, quiet and very moody. When he was not drunk he seemed nice enough, but as soon as he began to drink he got very wild quickly. I’d never been around that kind of heavy drinking and seeing someone like Jim who had such a personality change when he drank… I was very young and it frightened me. I used to watch The Doors play every night. I thought they were fabulous. I didn’t much care for Morrison’s singing even before we toured with them. The first time I saw them play live was at the Whiskey A Go Go and they had just recorded Light My Fire and it hadn’t become a big hit yet. I was very impressed with the group and said, “They’re gonna be a big hit band!” But to be frank, I thought if they’d gotten a better singer they’d be a much better group!
In the book, you said you were uncomfortable moving from The Stone Poneys to a solo career.
I never wanted to be a solo artist. I was always trying to get back in a group. That’s why I sang with Dolly [Parton] and Emmylou [Harris] and Aaron [Neville]. I love singing with other people. I can do things with my voice with other people that I could never do by myself. Because whatever the colours and the textures are in someone’s voice, you try to reflect them, you try to mesh ’em, embellish them and augment them. Those all become things you wouldn’t come upon on your own. It’s very intuitive. Art is like water; you’re just kind of reflecting everything around you. So somebody comes in with sky, somebody comes in with the earth, somebody comes in with the flower and you’re just reflecting all those different things. You’re not thinking about it. It’s not a conscious process; it’s a collaborative process. So when I sing with Emmy I make sounds with my voice that I’d never make with anyone else or on my own. Same with Aaron. My God, Aaron got stuff out of me vocally that I thought I could never do!
Your first big solo hit was Long, Long Time from Silk Purse, nominated for a Grammy for Best Contemporary Vocal Performance.
In those days I chose whatever songs I wanted to do, the label paid the bill and I sang it. If your records weren’t a hit, they didn’t pay the bill next time. I couldn’t get into that way of thinking. I was very happy I got a hit with Long, Long Time so I could keep recording, but I never picked stuff solely because I thought it was a hit. I picked that particular song because it hit me right between the eyes. I thought it was one of those amazingly true songs. Ironically, I ran into the woman that song was written about at the hairdresser here in Marin County! I really like Long, Long Time but I’m not proud of my vocal on that song. But I later learned to sing it better live. Back then I was doing a funny kind of vibrato thing with my voice; it was kind of like a billy goat vibrato and I didn’t like that so much. I listen to songs from back then and go, “Why was I doing that?” I don’t think there’s anybody who does music that doesn’t do that. You look back at what you’ve done and think, “That sounds so weird.” I think of the best Jackson Browne song I’ve ever heard and when I tell him, he goes, “I shouldn’t have written that line that way, I can write better songs now.” Who knows whether it’s better then or now, but Jackson is one of those people who wrote really great songs when he was 16. He wrote These Days at that age; that’s amazing.
Have you always been hard on yourself as a singer?
I’ve never liked any of my records. I hear the vocals and they make me shudder. Three elements go into music: story, voice and musicianship. Some people are stronger in one area than another. I was strong on story and voice but not as strong on musicianship, but I learned. I thought I couldn’t learn because I didn’t “have it”. I didn’t realise people spend years in conservatories honing these skills! I never did any of that. I couldn’t read music and wasn’t very proficient at an instrument; a huge mistake because I could have been. I can pick up the guitar and play it but I never worked at it because there were so many good guitar players around. I mean, why bother? That was a big mistake.
As an interpreter, what were the defining criteria that compelled you to say, “I want to record that song”?
It has to have a line in it, at least one line, that just made me go, “That’s exactly how I feel about my life,” and sometimes it could be about the way a chord is voiced in the rhythm pattern. Sometimes it wouldn’t even be about the lyrics, sometimes it could just be the chords. Jimmy Webb is so good at voicing chords in a way that just rips your stomach open. I’d be listening to Jimmy, who I love so much, and think I’ve heard him play so many times and say, “I’m not gonna cry this time because I’ve heard his music, I’m kind of immune to it now.” About four seconds later there’ll be something he’ll weave into a chord and I’ll start crying. I’m not a crier; if someone broke my leg I’d probably spit in their eye but I wouldn’t cry. But if Jimmy plays one of those voicings or one of those ways that he turns a phrase, I just burst into tears.
Jimmy Webb penned Easy For You To Say, which you recorded for Get Closer.
I love that song. It sounds really simple and it’s a very simple vocal. That’s the first record I worked on with George Massenburg and he taught me his method for overdubbing vocals. That’s one of the first vocals I recorded that wasn’t a live vocal. With that song I was given a chance to really work on it a little bit. The vocal on Easy For You To Say is all about texture and I could texture my voice to get a really full sound. I was thinking about the sound Steely Dan got on their records – I’m not comparing myself to Steely Dan, they’re much better than me – but I was going for that smooth, uptown sound. By getting to sing it more than once and experimenting with it, I found different textures that I wouldn’t have found just by standing in front of the mic and opening up. So George and I considered Easy For You To Say our first vocal we really did together.
In the new Eagles documentary, there’s great footage of Glenn Frey and Don Henley playing in your band.
It was hard to find musicians. Nobody had money in those days so we couldn’t pay them a lot, so you couldn’t hire really good studio players to go on tour. And again, because those session players hadn’t come up on our road, they weren’t necessarily appropriate to our music. So I was always looking for a drummer that wouldn’t just roll over me, that wouldn’t just play right on through the feeling and dynamics. My singing has a lot to do with dynamics and I like more delicate music sometimes ’cos I’m a girl!
At any rate, I was looking for a drummer and a whole band to go on the road. We walked through The Troubadour one night and there was this band on stage playing Silver Threads And Golden Needles – my version, and playing it so well! I went, “Let’s just get them, they already know our music.” That’s how we met Don (Henley) and we hired their guitar player, Richard Bowden. At some point I hired Michael Bowden on bass, Richard’s cousin. He was a really sweet guy and also worked for Emmylou. We used to call him “Ro-Tel”, which was a brand of tomatoes, because he had a red face. John Boylan and I found Don at the same time. He had already spoken to Don because he’d approached him with songs that he wanted me to record. I didn’t hear a song for me, but I liked his playing.
Glenn Frey was my friend. He was the singing partner of JD Souther who was my boyfriend – I was living with JD. I used to play with Bernie Leadon who was a really good country rock player but he wasn’t available on the road because he was with The Flying Burrito Brothers. So I asked Glenn if he’d play in my band; it was like, if I can’t get Bernie, let me ask Glenn. I didn’t think Glenn was necessarily the right guy but I knew he’d make it more rock’n’roll. So I introduced Glenn to Don and they started working together. When they wanted to form a band, John Boylan suggested Randy Meisner and I suggested Bernie Leadon. We said, “If you want to form a band, work for me while you’re putting it together and you’ll have gigs. When you’re ready to sign a contract you can be your own band.” That’s what happened and The Eagles were formed.
Don Henley said your version of Desperado was the definitive one.
Oh no, Don sang that better than I did. My recording of it was awful! Oh my God, the arrangement was horrible. But again I learned how to sing that better on stage: I did it with just a piano and it worked a lot better.
Take us back to hanging out with Gram Parsons and Keith Richards when the song Wild Horses was being born. Gram got to it first with The Flying Burrito Brothers, even before The Stones…
Keith had just written Wild Horses and he’d played it for Gram. He played it that night we were all hanging out together. Gram had already asked if he could record it and Keith said, “Well, I’m not so sure. I don’t know if we’re gonna record it but we’ve gotta keep our songs for ourselves.” That night Gram said, “Oh, I really want that song, man. You’ve got so many songs, let me have that one!” I said to myself, he’s never gonna get that song. I wanted that song too but I wasn’t gonna ask for it. I knew better! As it turned out, Gram cut it first; he was persistent!
In your book you state, “Being the Queen of Rock in the 70s made me uneasy – I never felt defined by rock’n’roll.”
Well, it was one of the things I did but it wasn’t what I did. When I felt I’d really come home was when I started working with Nelson Riddle and the Mexican band. Those were the two things I thought I did with the most authenticity – that and the work with Emmylou. We were beating the same bushes and really knew how to sing with each other. Emmy makes anybody she sings with sound better. She gives everybody she sings with that incredibly prayerful quality. She has something completely her own. I can tend to disappear more into somebody else because I really blend with them. But Emmy creates a whole new wing of the building. She doesn’t compete with the singer or outdo them. She doesn’t try to take it away; she adds something. That’s essential.
In the book you say you were best suited to melodic ballads but had to compromise with rockers like Heatwave, Lies, Back In The USA and It’s So Easy. But listening to those songs, it sounds like your heart was in singing them.
It was, especially with a song like How Do I Make You. I got to do something a little bit more original for myself with that, as opposed to just trying to copy someone else as I did with Heatwave and It’s So Easy. Don’t get me wrong, they were fun to do. But what I really luxuriated in, in terms of being able to find interesting textures in my voice and finding interesting melodies and beautiful harmonic atmospheres, were the standards. When I started singing those, I went into another world. It was fabulous. I felt like I’d been let out of a box. I’d felt there was something more I could do with my voice. I didn’t know what it was but it was always there whispering and saying, “There’s something you’re missing.” And when I started singing that stuff I went, “Oh my God, there it is; the rest of my voice, it’s all there.”
You have a long history with Neil Young. Share the experience of singing backgrounds with James Taylor on Heart Of Gold and Old Man.
Those were the really early days when we were young and strong. We worked for two days on a Johnny Cash television show filmed in the Ryman Auditorium; everybody was at their best. I think I sang Long, Long Time. James performed new songs, and Neil sang Old Man. When we weren’t on stage we were watching each other. Those were all brand new songs we hadn’t heard before. Neil said to James and I, “Come over and let’s record. Will you come and sing some harmonies?” And I said, “Sure, you bet!” Never mind we’d done two full days of filming with early calls to the set. That’s really hard for musicians to come in at nine o’clock in the morning and work long into the night. After we finished filming we were still ready to go so we went into the studio with Neil and sang until dawn. It was winter and there was this beautiful snowstorm when we came out. We were all sweaty from the studio. We were exhausted but so exhilarated ’cos the music was beautiful. You can work for a long time on music you like. I can’t work for five minutes on music I don’t like, I just collapse. I just can’t do it. My voice just won’t do it. I have to go home and lie down!
Let’s talk about 1980’s Mad Love, which found you dipping into the new wave zeitgeist.
I wasn’t trying to do new wave songs; I was doing songs available to me. There were two new writers, Mark Goldenberg and Billy Steinberg, introduced to me by Wendy Waldman from Bryndle. Mark wrote a few songs for the album, including Justine, Mad Love and Cost Of Love. Billy wrote How Do I Make You. They were younger guys writing songs that I thought were good. I didn’t think in terms of new wave or being trendy.
I recorded them with my band, except we added Kooch – Danny Kortchmar from James Taylor’s band. He played fabulously on that album. Danny’s solo on Hurts So Bad is one of my favourite things on any of my recordings. He gave that record a shape and a sound and an energy that was absolutely new for us. I finally learned how to sing by the time we did Mad Love. I was really starting to get it. Something was starting to click for me. I don’t know if it was that successful of a record but it was when I started stepping out as a singer.
Mad Love showcases a wonderful array of songs such as three by Elvis Costello, Party Girl, Talking In The Dark, and Girls Talk. You’d also recorded Alison on your Living In The USA album.
I saw Elvis Costello play at one of those Hollywood clubs in the 70s… I think it was The Roxy. I particularly liked Alison because I had a girlfriend who had just gotten married and was on a rocky path. She’s a really dear friend and I sang that for her. Then I did a few more Elvis Costello songs for Mad Love. I really loved Party Girl. I’m sure to this day people have an impression of me as someone who’s frivolous [recites lyrics], “They say I’m nothing but a party girl.” That song really struck me. I used to sing it until I’d be practically hallucinating. The notes at the end are so high, “I can give you anything but time”, I’d get oxygen deprivation and start to see strange things during that ending! It would take me a while to recover; I’d almost fall over.
You covers of Elvis Costello’s songs ignited a controversy when he trashed your versions in the press.
He didn’t like it. I heard later that he changed his mind. I think it’s hard for some artists who have a certain image of who they are and where they fit in the musical hierarchy. When you write a song you have to let that go because it assumes a life of its own and starts growing legs and arms. I think Elvis felt that any changes in those songs would be threatening to who he was and how he was perceived. I was very mainstream so it’s that party girl thing; people think I was frivolous, so maybe Elvis thought I was. My musicianship was pretty suspicious for a long time… he’s a really fine musician and I think that point did not escape him. Hey, I’d have agreed with him! I have great respect for Elvis Costello as a musician. I’m really sad that I never got a chance to record a song that he wrote with Burt Bacharach called I Still Have That Other Girl because I lost my voice. I have Parkinson’s disease. I found out about it nine months ago. I’ve had it for about 12 years. Parkinson’s took my voice, that’s where it showed up first. I was singing and struggling for years, not knowing I had Parkinson’s disease. At the height of my ability, I think I could have sung I Still Have That Other Girl really well. I’d recorded Anyone Who Had A Heart and got a really nice letter from Burt saying he loved the way I sang it. It was really sweet.
Being diagnosed with Parkinson’s prompted your retirement?
Yeah, I had to stop. I couldn’t sing at all. It was like being a water skier: your skis are at the surface of the water and you’re floating along above. But after I got Parkinson’s disease it was like I was skiing and my skis were still at the top of the water but I was underwater. I couldn’t steer anything. I couldn’t control pitch, and I couldn’t control texture. There’s a huge amount of things [your body does] when you sing. The way your larynx makes sounds has to do with repetitive muscular movements. That’s what you can’t do with Parkinson’s. It’s like I can start to walk and my legs will go the first couple of steps but then they don’t want to do it again. It’s like brushing your teeth; your hands will go up and down a couple of times, then stop. That’s would happen with my voice. My voice would start to make sounds, then stop.
I knew there was something wrong and I kept going to the doctor. I saw the doctor who later saw Adele when she had her voice problem. He told me, “There’s nothing wrong with your larynx.” In fact, he said I had the best larynx he’d seen on a singer that had been using it as much as I had. I knew the cause of my not being able to sing wasn’t emotional. So it had to be physical, but I didn’t know I had Parkinson’s. It didn’t occur to me to go to a neurologist.
Can you strengthen your voice?
No. I did plenty of voice exercises. I just can’t do the exercises to strengthen my voice. There’s just no neurological “juice”. With Parkinson’s disease the brain cells that make dopamine are destroyed. So you can’t make dopamine, so you don’t get the neurological impulse to make the muscle move. It’s a drag. I’m glad I can still talk, but I can’t be as expressive when speaking. I’m trying to record the audio version of my book and it’s really hard. I’m missing the whole top end of my speaking voice just like I was missing the top of my singing voice. But I can get my point across.
What makes a great singer?
Something extra. An extra clarity. There’s an extra insistence and an extra sense of desperation and emergency that comes out of what they sing. It’s like the difference between a siren and a car horn. A siren is a whole other thing: you’ve just got to get this guy to the hospital before he dies of a heart attack. A car horn is “Please get out my way, I’m gonna turn left.” I think great singers are sirens. They have an insistence and urgency.
Is there a song you regret not cutting; “the one that got away”?
I would’ve liked to have been able to record I’ve Still Got That Other Girl. There’s also a song by Kate and Anna McGarrigle called Tell My Sister that I know I could have sung well. When I hear that song I go, “Oh man, why didn’t I record that?”
For a woman with “simple dreams”, your life turned out much grander and richer than you imagined.
I never thought I’d have such a great life. It never occurred to me. My little motto has always been “shoemaker stick to your last”. A shoemaker makes a shoe using a device called a last; I stuck to my last. I was lucky that I had hits, which was surprising to me! I loved to sing and I tried to play music that reflected and told my story and made me feel passionate. That was my main ambition.
Simple Dreams is published by Simon & Schuster on November 21. For information on Parkinson’s disease, go to Parkinson’s UK: www.parkinsons.org.uk |
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Post by the Scribe on Dec 24, 2022 9:43:34 GMT
Linda Ronstadt Talks About Her Career and New Memoir
Simon & Schuster Books
5,242 views Sep 18, 2013
Learn more about Simple Dreams at books.simonandschuster.com/Sim...
Linda Ronstadt on her deep love for singing, her advice to new artists, and being present for the birth of Southern California rock.
Linda Ronstadt Interview (2014)
John Broughton
4,958 views Aug 24, 2018
Here's an interview with the legendary Linda Ronstadt recorded for my radio program Retrospectives in 2014 on Casey Radio in Melbourne, Australia. |
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Post by chronologer on Jan 30, 2024 23:51:01 GMT
Simple Dreams: A Musical Memoir by Linda Ronstadt · Audiobook previewGoogle Play Books 31 Jan 2024 #lindaronstadt #simpledreamsamusicalmemoir PURCHASE ON GOOGLE PLAY BOOKS ►► g.co/booksYT/AQAAAECcEzlTtMSimple Dreams: A Musical Memoir Authored by Linda Ronstadt Narrated by Kathe Mazur
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