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FLASHBACK: Linda Ronstadt Simple Dreams Book Tour - Tempe Arizona - October 6, 2013
Interview: Linda Ronstadt reflects on 'Simple Dreams'
archive.azcentral.com/thingstodo/music/articles/20131012linda-ronstadt-interview-simple-dreams-parkinsons.html
Linda Ronstadt speaks at Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe about her new book "Simple Dreams: A Musical Memoir."
Cheryl Evans/The Arizona Republic
By Ed Masley
The Republic | azcentral .com
Thu Oct 10, 2013 3:39 PM
When Linda Ronstadt first sat down to work on “Simple Dreams,” a memoir that shares its title with a triple-platinum Ronstadt album from the ’70s, the singer turned for inspiration to a book she’d cherished growing up in Tucson.
“I looked at ‘Black Beauty,’ ” she says, “which was an early favorite of mine as a kid, and I think the first chapter is, ‘I am born.’
“I thought, ‘OK, that’s a good place to start. What kind of music was there in our house when I was a little kid, lying around under the sofa or what my brother was playing on his 12-string guitar that we bought in Nogales?’ ”
It’s the final night of Ronstadt’s book tour and the star is fielding questions at Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe when the conversation works its way to recent news that she’s no longer able to sing as a result of Parkinson’s disease.
The icon singer's best 12 singles
Ronstadt casually drops a passing reference to her medical condition into conversation while explaining the enduring appeal of performing a delicate ballad called “Heart Like a Wheel” at her age as opposed to that same album’s rock hits, “You’re No Good” and “When Will I Be Loved.”
“I could sing ‘Heart Like a Wheel’ today,” she says before matter-of-factly adding, “if I could still sing.”
Asked to elaborate on how it feels to know she’ll never sing again, Ronstadt replies, “Oh, it’s frustrating” and then begins to talk about the work she’s been doing with David Hidalgo of Los Lobos at Los Cenzontles Mexican Arts Center in the San Francisco Bay area, where Ronstadt now resides.
“It’s a little cultural center that teaches children how to sing,” Ronstadt says. “It’s traditional Mexican music. And the kids really learn how to play, sing and dance, not necessarily to be performers or professionals, but so they can use it in their social life and to process their feelings. And David records with them.
“And at some point, I decided it would be great to do a record. And it was pretty frustrating to realize that I wasn’t going to be able to do that. I love David’s singing. He’s a wonderful artist and a great songwriter. I’d love to be able to do that, but I just couldn’t. As bad as I wanted to, I just couldn’t.”
Tucson
The first and longest chapter in the singer’s book is titled “Tucson.” The narrative starts with Ronstadt’s father driving badly flooded streets to get her mother to the hospital one rainy summer day in 1946. It’s her “I am born” moment. And from there, she goes on to describe a childhood that found her surrounded by music and people who knew how to make it.
As a young man, her father, who would perform at the Fox Tucson Theatre as Gil Ronstadt and his Star-Spangled Megaphone, was offered a job with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra. But this was during the Depression, so he had to turn it down to help out at the family ranch and the family business, the F. Ronstadt Hardware Co.
Her brother Pete was a featured soloist with the Tucson Arizona Boys Chorus. And it wasn’t long before Ronstadt herself had decided she might like to try her hand at singing. She believes she was 4 at the time and was thrilled when her sister declared her a soprano.
“I wanted to sing when I was little,” Ronstadt says. “That’s what I liked doing. It didn’t occur to me that you became famous or anything like that. I thought it might be nice to have a job singing. I thought I might have to get a job at a department store or whatever I was going to be able to do as a girl in those days.
“But to me a job singing meant you work in a club or something like that and you get paid on a regular basis.”
By her teens, she was performing on the Tucson folk scene, but she realized that could take her only so far.
“There was a s----y audience in Tucson,” the singer recalls, with a laugh. “You’d have some great, great artist from folk music and 10 people would show up at the little local club. So I thought, ‘I need to go someplace where there’s a bigger audience for this stuff I like.’ ”
Having made up her mind to relocate the year she turned 18, she waited until the night she left for California to tell her parents.
“That was tough because I was used to doing what they liked,” she says. “They weren’t unreasonable people. They were kind to me and they were nice. They were smart people. And they were pretty good singers. So I liked them. We had a lot in common, as it turned out. But I really wanted to go. And I knew that if I wanted to play music then I had to go to where the music was.
“They tried to talk me out of it, and when it became apparent that I was going anyway, my father went into his bedroom and he pulled out this guitar that my grandfather had given to him. It was a really lovely instrument, and he gave it to me with the words in Spanish that my grandfather had said when he gave it to him, which translates as, ‘Now that you own a guitar, you will never be hungry.’ ”
California
Having moved into a bungalow in Ocean Park, between the Santa Monica and Venice piers, Ronstadt formed the Stone Poneys and started performing at such legendary LA venues as the Troubadour and the Whisky a Go Go.
John Boylan, who manages the singer to this day, recalls the first time he saw her perform at the Whisky, having previously heard her voice on “Different Drum,” a 1967 hit for the Stone Poneys.
“The first time I heard her,” Boylan says, “I flat fell down, because let’s face it, that’s an iconic voice that comes along only once in a very great while. I had heard ‘Different Drum’ on the radio. And it’s a fair representation of the power of her voice. But the first time I saw her live, she really did blow me away.”
By that point, the prevailing wisdom on the LA circuit was that Ronstadt stood a better chance of garnering attention as a solo act. So the Stone Poneys broke up, and Boylan helped Ronstadt assemble a backing band with which to launch her own career.
Her first top 40 hit, the aching country ballad “Long Long Time,” hit No. 25 in 1970. She was 24 at the time.But Ronstadt really hit the mainstream five years later when she topped the charts with “You’re No Good.” More huge, career-defining singles followed — “When Will I Be Loved,” “Heat Wave,” “Blue Bayou,” “It’s So Easy” and “Ooh Baby Baby” chief among them.
Cashbox magazine gave her a special award as the biggest-selling female artist of the ’70s. And the hits kept coming in the early ’80s with the New Wave-flavored “Mad Love” album. But by then, the star was growing weary of the rock world.
Getting restless
There’s a chapter in the book called “Getting Restless” and that definitely sums up how the singer felt about the prospects of doing more hit-filled arena-rock shows.
“I got tired of singing the same songs over and over again in those icky arenas,” she says. “I wanted to be in a real theater with a stage with a curtain and a proscenium.
“I was great friends with a guy named John Rockwell, who was the editor of the weekend arts and leisure section for the New York Times and he said, ‘Well, there’s this guy named Joe Papp, and he’s got this theater called the New York Public Theater.’ ”
Ronstadt ended up working with Papp on Broadway in “The Pirates of Penzance,” for which she earned a Tony nomination in 1981. Two years later, the singer returned with “What’s New,” the first installment in a trilogy of jazz albums arranged by Nelson Riddle. And she followed those three albums with a Grammy-winning 1987 album of traditional Mexican mariachi music, “Canciones de Mi Padre.” There have been other pop releases since then, one of which produced her final Top 10 single, “Don’t Know Much,” a 1989 duet with Aaron Neville. She’s also recorded more Mexican music and jazz, in addition to a pair of “Trio” albums with Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris. Released in 2004, her final solo effort, “Hummin’ to Myself,” was another collection of jazz standards, co-produced by Boylan with a small band rather than the big orchestral sound of those albums with Riddle.
“People say, ‘Oh, she’s always reinventing herself’ like it was a career choice,” Ronstadt says. “It wasn’t. I’m just kind of seized by this desire of rampant eclecticism. The music that I chose during my life, it wasn’t arbitrary. It was all in my family home when I was growing up. I never tried to record anything I hadn’t heard before the age of 10. Otherwise, I couldn’t do it authentically.”
Losing her voice
Ronstadt and Boylan had been planning an acoustic roots album closer in spirit to the sort of music she was doing in the early ’70s. But that can’t happen now.
Boylan, who calls her “not only a jack of all trades but a master of every damn one of them,” sounds nothing less than devastated when he talks about the loss of Ronstadt’s singing voice. He started noticing her struggling to perform the way she used to as far back as 2007, but it wasn’t until earlier this year that she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, which has also left her hands too weak to play guitar.
“It’s a tragedy,” Boylan says. “A damn shame. I did an album with her in ’04, a jazz album. She’d always wanted to do a standards album but not with a big orchestra. So we did it. We got great jazz players and her interpretations of things. There’s a wisdom there. There’s a life experience in what she was doing. And just when she has really got that life experience, she lost the instrument.”
It’s not that Ronstadt can’t sing. It’s that when she does, as Boylan explains, “It’s not Linda.”
Ronstadt likens the experience to getting on an elevator, hitting the button for 12th floor and finding yourself on 7. That’s how little control she has over the process.”
“I’m sure it’s very disconcerting for her,” Boylan says. “And I don’t think she wants to try because it’s just so disappointing when it happens. Her friend Ann Savoy, who she did a duet album with, came up to San Francisco about 18 months ago and they went over to a little demo studio on the East Bay just to fiddle around and do some stuff. And she said, ‘I left after about an hour. It was too upsetting.’ ”
Ronstadt is a woman, after all, whose life has been devoted to refining her abilities and constantly improving what she does. It’s also how she’s seen herself from the time she was 4.
“She’s never identified herself as anything else,” Boylan says, “not as an entertainer, not as a performer or a celebrity. She’s a singer.”
Reach the reporter at ed.masley@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-4495. Twitter.com/EdMasley.
Interview: Linda Ronstadt reflects on 'Simple Dreams'
archive.azcentral.com/thingstodo/music/articles/20131012linda-ronstadt-interview-simple-dreams-parkinsons.html
Linda Ronstadt speaks at Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe about her new book "Simple Dreams: A Musical Memoir."
Cheryl Evans/The Arizona Republic
By Ed Masley
The Republic | azcentral .com
Thu Oct 10, 2013 3:39 PM
When Linda Ronstadt first sat down to work on “Simple Dreams,” a memoir that shares its title with a triple-platinum Ronstadt album from the ’70s, the singer turned for inspiration to a book she’d cherished growing up in Tucson.
“I looked at ‘Black Beauty,’ ” she says, “which was an early favorite of mine as a kid, and I think the first chapter is, ‘I am born.’
“I thought, ‘OK, that’s a good place to start. What kind of music was there in our house when I was a little kid, lying around under the sofa or what my brother was playing on his 12-string guitar that we bought in Nogales?’ ”
It’s the final night of Ronstadt’s book tour and the star is fielding questions at Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe when the conversation works its way to recent news that she’s no longer able to sing as a result of Parkinson’s disease.
The icon singer's best 12 singles
Ronstadt casually drops a passing reference to her medical condition into conversation while explaining the enduring appeal of performing a delicate ballad called “Heart Like a Wheel” at her age as opposed to that same album’s rock hits, “You’re No Good” and “When Will I Be Loved.”
“I could sing ‘Heart Like a Wheel’ today,” she says before matter-of-factly adding, “if I could still sing.”
Asked to elaborate on how it feels to know she’ll never sing again, Ronstadt replies, “Oh, it’s frustrating” and then begins to talk about the work she’s been doing with David Hidalgo of Los Lobos at Los Cenzontles Mexican Arts Center in the San Francisco Bay area, where Ronstadt now resides.
“It’s a little cultural center that teaches children how to sing,” Ronstadt says. “It’s traditional Mexican music. And the kids really learn how to play, sing and dance, not necessarily to be performers or professionals, but so they can use it in their social life and to process their feelings. And David records with them.
“And at some point, I decided it would be great to do a record. And it was pretty frustrating to realize that I wasn’t going to be able to do that. I love David’s singing. He’s a wonderful artist and a great songwriter. I’d love to be able to do that, but I just couldn’t. As bad as I wanted to, I just couldn’t.”
Tucson
The first and longest chapter in the singer’s book is titled “Tucson.” The narrative starts with Ronstadt’s father driving badly flooded streets to get her mother to the hospital one rainy summer day in 1946. It’s her “I am born” moment. And from there, she goes on to describe a childhood that found her surrounded by music and people who knew how to make it.
As a young man, her father, who would perform at the Fox Tucson Theatre as Gil Ronstadt and his Star-Spangled Megaphone, was offered a job with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra. But this was during the Depression, so he had to turn it down to help out at the family ranch and the family business, the F. Ronstadt Hardware Co.
Her brother Pete was a featured soloist with the Tucson Arizona Boys Chorus. And it wasn’t long before Ronstadt herself had decided she might like to try her hand at singing. She believes she was 4 at the time and was thrilled when her sister declared her a soprano.
“I wanted to sing when I was little,” Ronstadt says. “That’s what I liked doing. It didn’t occur to me that you became famous or anything like that. I thought it might be nice to have a job singing. I thought I might have to get a job at a department store or whatever I was going to be able to do as a girl in those days.
“But to me a job singing meant you work in a club or something like that and you get paid on a regular basis.”
By her teens, she was performing on the Tucson folk scene, but she realized that could take her only so far.
“There was a s----y audience in Tucson,” the singer recalls, with a laugh. “You’d have some great, great artist from folk music and 10 people would show up at the little local club. So I thought, ‘I need to go someplace where there’s a bigger audience for this stuff I like.’ ”
Having made up her mind to relocate the year she turned 18, she waited until the night she left for California to tell her parents.
“That was tough because I was used to doing what they liked,” she says. “They weren’t unreasonable people. They were kind to me and they were nice. They were smart people. And they were pretty good singers. So I liked them. We had a lot in common, as it turned out. But I really wanted to go. And I knew that if I wanted to play music then I had to go to where the music was.
“They tried to talk me out of it, and when it became apparent that I was going anyway, my father went into his bedroom and he pulled out this guitar that my grandfather had given to him. It was a really lovely instrument, and he gave it to me with the words in Spanish that my grandfather had said when he gave it to him, which translates as, ‘Now that you own a guitar, you will never be hungry.’ ”
California
Having moved into a bungalow in Ocean Park, between the Santa Monica and Venice piers, Ronstadt formed the Stone Poneys and started performing at such legendary LA venues as the Troubadour and the Whisky a Go Go.
John Boylan, who manages the singer to this day, recalls the first time he saw her perform at the Whisky, having previously heard her voice on “Different Drum,” a 1967 hit for the Stone Poneys.
“The first time I heard her,” Boylan says, “I flat fell down, because let’s face it, that’s an iconic voice that comes along only once in a very great while. I had heard ‘Different Drum’ on the radio. And it’s a fair representation of the power of her voice. But the first time I saw her live, she really did blow me away.”
By that point, the prevailing wisdom on the LA circuit was that Ronstadt stood a better chance of garnering attention as a solo act. So the Stone Poneys broke up, and Boylan helped Ronstadt assemble a backing band with which to launch her own career.
Her first top 40 hit, the aching country ballad “Long Long Time,” hit No. 25 in 1970. She was 24 at the time.But Ronstadt really hit the mainstream five years later when she topped the charts with “You’re No Good.” More huge, career-defining singles followed — “When Will I Be Loved,” “Heat Wave,” “Blue Bayou,” “It’s So Easy” and “Ooh Baby Baby” chief among them.
Cashbox magazine gave her a special award as the biggest-selling female artist of the ’70s. And the hits kept coming in the early ’80s with the New Wave-flavored “Mad Love” album. But by then, the star was growing weary of the rock world.
Getting restless
There’s a chapter in the book called “Getting Restless” and that definitely sums up how the singer felt about the prospects of doing more hit-filled arena-rock shows.
“I got tired of singing the same songs over and over again in those icky arenas,” she says. “I wanted to be in a real theater with a stage with a curtain and a proscenium.
“I was great friends with a guy named John Rockwell, who was the editor of the weekend arts and leisure section for the New York Times and he said, ‘Well, there’s this guy named Joe Papp, and he’s got this theater called the New York Public Theater.’ ”
Ronstadt ended up working with Papp on Broadway in “The Pirates of Penzance,” for which she earned a Tony nomination in 1981. Two years later, the singer returned with “What’s New,” the first installment in a trilogy of jazz albums arranged by Nelson Riddle. And she followed those three albums with a Grammy-winning 1987 album of traditional Mexican mariachi music, “Canciones de Mi Padre.” There have been other pop releases since then, one of which produced her final Top 10 single, “Don’t Know Much,” a 1989 duet with Aaron Neville. She’s also recorded more Mexican music and jazz, in addition to a pair of “Trio” albums with Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris. Released in 2004, her final solo effort, “Hummin’ to Myself,” was another collection of jazz standards, co-produced by Boylan with a small band rather than the big orchestral sound of those albums with Riddle.
“People say, ‘Oh, she’s always reinventing herself’ like it was a career choice,” Ronstadt says. “It wasn’t. I’m just kind of seized by this desire of rampant eclecticism. The music that I chose during my life, it wasn’t arbitrary. It was all in my family home when I was growing up. I never tried to record anything I hadn’t heard before the age of 10. Otherwise, I couldn’t do it authentically.”
Losing her voice
Ronstadt and Boylan had been planning an acoustic roots album closer in spirit to the sort of music she was doing in the early ’70s. But that can’t happen now.
Boylan, who calls her “not only a jack of all trades but a master of every damn one of them,” sounds nothing less than devastated when he talks about the loss of Ronstadt’s singing voice. He started noticing her struggling to perform the way she used to as far back as 2007, but it wasn’t until earlier this year that she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, which has also left her hands too weak to play guitar.
“It’s a tragedy,” Boylan says. “A damn shame. I did an album with her in ’04, a jazz album. She’d always wanted to do a standards album but not with a big orchestra. So we did it. We got great jazz players and her interpretations of things. There’s a wisdom there. There’s a life experience in what she was doing. And just when she has really got that life experience, she lost the instrument.”
It’s not that Ronstadt can’t sing. It’s that when she does, as Boylan explains, “It’s not Linda.”
Ronstadt likens the experience to getting on an elevator, hitting the button for 12th floor and finding yourself on 7. That’s how little control she has over the process.”
“I’m sure it’s very disconcerting for her,” Boylan says. “And I don’t think she wants to try because it’s just so disappointing when it happens. Her friend Ann Savoy, who she did a duet album with, came up to San Francisco about 18 months ago and they went over to a little demo studio on the East Bay just to fiddle around and do some stuff. And she said, ‘I left after about an hour. It was too upsetting.’ ”
Ronstadt is a woman, after all, whose life has been devoted to refining her abilities and constantly improving what she does. It’s also how she’s seen herself from the time she was 4.
“She’s never identified herself as anything else,” Boylan says, “not as an entertainer, not as a performer or a celebrity. She’s a singer.”
Reach the reporter at ed.masley@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-4495. Twitter.com/EdMasley.
