Post by the Scribe on Jun 21, 2021 1:00:24 GMT
Book Excerpt: When Linda Ronstadt Found Her Voice
gregmitchell.substack.com/p/book-excerpt-when-linda-ronstadt
Exclusive today from acclaimed new book by Ron Brownstein, longtime political writer now at The Atlantic--plus five vintage Ronstadt songs in concert.
Greg Mitchell
May 8
We’ve been running guest posts on the weekends from time to time and today here’s a real treat—with this narrative by Ronald Brownstein on how Ronstadt became a mega-star with the release of a chart-busting album near the end of 1974. It comes from his fine new book of cultural history, Rock Me on the Water: 1974—The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television, and Politics (Harper). Of course, we covered Linda widely and favorably at Crawdaddy during that period. Enjoy, but first, the usual cartoon. Then comment, share or subscribe (it’s still free).
www.amazon.com/Rock-Water-1974-Transformed-Television/dp/006289921X/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1ZRESAMA51VIB&dchild=1&keywords=ron+brownstein&qid=1620441717&sprefix=ron+brownstein%2Caps%2C160&sr=8-1
Subscribe--it's free!
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Ronstadt Breaks Through
by Ronald Brownstein
Linda Ronstadt hoped for a fresh start when she left Capitol for David Geffen’s Asylum Records in 1972. But old problems followed her to the new label. Working again with producer (and former boyfriend) John Boylan, Ronstadt started recording the album that became Don’t Cry Now. She completed the two tracks that became the album’s first singles, the ballad “Love Has No Pride” and “Silver Threads and Golden Needles,” the Dusty Springfield song she had also included on her first solo album. But before long, Ronstadt and Boylan were clashing over her direction.
“We argued a lot, we competed enormously in the studio,” she recalled a few years later. “I just didn’t trust him, I didn’t trust anyone then, and I was always afraid that something was going to get pulled over me. I was punch-drunk from producers.”
Boylan developed an idea to break the rut. Ronstadt, with James Taylor, had contributed background vocals a few months earlier to Neil Young’s breakout single “Heart of Gold.” Now a mega-star, Young was beginning a tour that would carry him to arenas across America through early 1973. Boylan saw it as an opportunity to place Ronstadt before much larger audiences than she had ever attracted. “I said, ‘the album’s not finished, but this tour is great, let’s do this tour,’ Boylan remembered. He lobbied Elliot Roberts, Young’s long-time manager (and Geffen’s partner), to put Ronstadt on the tour as the opening act. [Below, “Love Has No Pride” and “Silver Threads and Golden Needles” live.]
Initially, Roberts refused because Young wanted to perform alone. But after a few weeks Young complained that was too tiring, and Roberts called Boylan offering to add Ronstadt as an opening act. Then Ronstadt hesitated. She had played mostly small clubs to that point and was afraid she could not command arena-sized audiences, especially those impatiently waiting for the headliner. “She didn’t really want to do it,” Boylan recalled. “She was scared.”
Boylan enlisted Geffen, who persuaded Ronstadt that the exposure of appearing with Young was worth the stress. She jumped into the deep end of the pool. With only a few days notice, Ronstadt flew east to open for Young at Madison Square Garden, the world’s most famous arena, on January 23, 1973. Ronstadt picked a propitious show to join the tour: that was the night Secretary of State Henry Kissinger reached the agreement in Paris officially ending American participation in the Vietnam War. (The formal documents were signed four days later.) Handed a notice during his set, Young, characteristically terse, simply declared “The war is over” to raucous applause.
That was a rare moment of celebration for Ronstadt. For the next few months, she found herself playing the nation’s largest arenas with a band, that as she often said, wasn’t “as loud as the air conditioning….It was one of those things where if you want to play with the big boys you’d better get your game up and my game wasn’t up very high,” she said looking back. “I was a club act. I got shoveled onto stage at Madison Square Garden…and it was pretty shocking. My naivete, I didn’t realize how different it was going to be on one of those big stages. It’s like jumping from a puddle into a huge lake where you are a mile from shore and it’s like 300 feet below you.”
Ronstadt liked Young and found him respectful when they interacted. But the dynamics of opening for such a huge star could not have been more perfectly designed to trigger her insecurity. On the road there was a clear caste system. “Everybody in Neil’s band had priority over everybody [in mine] in the sound check,” she remembered. “And you know you had to stay in your place. There was a pecking order and everybody obeyed it.” [Below, “You’re No Good” live.]
For all the stress, the tour served Boylan’s purpose. Performing for the huge crowds that gathered for Young greatly raised Ronstadt’s visibility. “It was tough for her, but she knocked them dead,” remembered Boylan. “She thought she was not powerful enough to be on the stage with these people…like Neil Young. In fact, she was. It took her a while to figure that out.”
After years mostly circling in place, the Young tour gave Ronstadt a burst of momentum. Another change in 1973 had an even greater effect. Ronstadt finally cemented her relationship with the man who would change her life, Peter Asher. An elfin, understated Englishman, Asher was a former child actor who had had pop success in the duo Peter and Gordon during the mid-1960s. After the band broke up, Asher worked for the Beatles as a producer and then as an executive at their Apple Records.
He briefly took a position at MGM records in New York to fund his move to America. That job didn’t last long and Asher relocated to Los Angeles to manage and produce James Taylor, who he had signed (at the recommendation of the guitarist Danny Kortchmar) at Apple.
When Ronstadt, at Boylan’s suggestion, first approached Asher about managing her around 1971, he was initially enthusiastic. “I first heard her at the Bitter End in New York,” Asher remembered. “Somebody told me, you have to go and see this girl, she’s an amazing singer, she’s incredible looking, sings barefoot and wears short shorts, and she is really hot and sings like an angel. All of which is true. Then I met her and discovered her to be one of the most remarkably articulate and clever, amazing women I ever met.” [Below, “When Will I Be Loved” live.]
Within a few weeks, though, Asher backed out because he decided that taking on Ronstadt could create a conflict with his other client, Kate Taylor, James’ sister. Ronstadt remained in contact with Asher, sometimes attending the cozy dinner parties he threw for the rock elite with his wife Betsy. The door to a wider relationship opened while Ronstadt was touring in 1973. Kate Taylor came backstage at one of her shows and confided that she no longer wanted to pursue a touring career in music. That freed Asher from his commitment to her. Ronstadt approached Asher to manage her again and this time he agreed.
Asher ‘s first job was to help her finish Don’t Cry Now. After clashing with Boylan, Ronstadt first brought in J.D. Souther, her boyfriend at the time, to produce a few more tracks. But they predictably argued in the studio as well. With Geffen growing impatient over the lengthening delay, Ronstadt finally turned to Asher to complete the record. The process of recording the album, Asher recalled with characteristic British reserve, “was in a bit of a muddle.”
Asher was different than Ronstadt’s earlier producers. For one thing, in contrast to Boylan and Souther, he was not sleeping with her. Whatever temptations arose, their relationship was strictly business. Asher was also much less volatile than most people she had worked with, and for that matter, most people in the music business anywhere. For Ronstadt, finding the steady, professional Asher was like reaching a placid bay after crossing a rolling sea. “Peter was an intelligent person I could talk to and he would talk back to me like a person, not like somebody he wanted to ball, or somebody he thought was silly and could push around,” she said at the time.
With Asher’s help, Don’t Cry Now was released in September 1973. With Geffen’s promotional heft behind it, Don’t Cry Now sold considerably more records than its predecessors. But it remained short of a breakout hit. It peaked only at number 45 on the Billboard charts. Artistically Don’t Cry Now was another frustrating product, mixing her powerful voice with odd song choices. Though it contained some moving moments (including an inspired cover of the Eagles’ “Desperado” more compelling than the original), the best thing about Don’t Cry Now was completing it. With Asher now in her camp, Ronstadt looked forward with new optimism. “Let’s face it,” said Boylan looking back. “Peter was at the top of his game.”
Asher didn’t start with an answer to the question that so many people in LA were asking: Why hadn’t Ronstadt, with all her gifts, achieved more success? “I didn’t have a master plan in my head,” he recalled. But he knew that part of the answer was providing more space for her to express her own eclectic musical ideas. “A lot of it was no one was listening to Linda,” he said. “She had this reputation of being difficult which was completely unjustified, and some of this is now cliché but—if you’re a really good-looking woman people don’t take you seriously. I do think one of the things I did do that nobody was doing was sit down seriously and ask Linda ‘what do you think, what should we be doing?’” [Below, “Heart Like a Wheel.”]
Within a few months, the answer produced the album that established her as a superstar: Heart Like a Wheel. For years, Ronstadt had been frustrated by her inability to capture on vinyl the musical fusion she heard in her head. With Heart, she did something that none of the LA country rockers—not even the high-flying Eagles—had accomplished: produced a record that reached number one on both the country and pop charts, and almost simultaneously at that. Ronstadt looked at the success more as relief than validation. “I was happy it was a hit and I wanted to make another record,” she said. “I didn’t think ‘I told you so.’”
From Rock Me on the Water: 1974—The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television, and Politics by Ronald Brownstein. www.amazon.com/Rock-Water-1974-Transformed-Television/dp/006289921X/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1ZRESAMA51VIB&dchild=1&keywords=ron+brownstein&qid=1620441717&sprefix=ron+brownstein%2Caps%2C160&sr=8-1
Also: See interview with Ronstadt from early 1974 by my Crawdaddy colleague Peter Knobler.
www.ronstadt-linda.com/artcrw74.htm
Share
Leave a comment
Subscribe--it's free!
“Essential daily newsletter.” — Charles P. Pierce, Esquire
“Incisive and enjoyable every day.” — Ron Brownstein, The Atlantic
“Always worth reading.” — Frank Rich, New York magazine, Veep and Succession
Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books, including the bestseller The Tunnels (on escapes under the Berlin Wall), the current The Beginning or the End (on MGM’s wild atomic bomb movie), and The Campaign of the Century (on Upton Sinclair’s left-wing race for governor of California), which was recently picked by the Wall St. Journal as one of five greatest books ever about an election. His new film, Atomic Cover-up, just had its world premiere and is drawing extraordinary acclaim. For nearly all of the 1970s he was the #2 editor at the legendary Crawdaddy. Later he served as longtime editor of Editor & Publisher magazine. He recently co-produced a film, Following the Ninth, about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01B0KA6SO
www.amazon.com/Beginning-End-Hollywood-Learned-Worrying/dp/1620975734
www.amazon.com/gp/product/B006IYBXL2
gregmitch.medium.com/atomic-cover-up-premieres-68a685b9bb5
gregmitchell.substack.com/
gregmitchell.substack.com/p/book-excerpt-when-linda-ronstadt
Exclusive today from acclaimed new book by Ron Brownstein, longtime political writer now at The Atlantic--plus five vintage Ronstadt songs in concert.
Greg Mitchell
May 8
We’ve been running guest posts on the weekends from time to time and today here’s a real treat—with this narrative by Ronald Brownstein on how Ronstadt became a mega-star with the release of a chart-busting album near the end of 1974. It comes from his fine new book of cultural history, Rock Me on the Water: 1974—The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television, and Politics (Harper). Of course, we covered Linda widely and favorably at Crawdaddy during that period. Enjoy, but first, the usual cartoon. Then comment, share or subscribe (it’s still free).
www.amazon.com/Rock-Water-1974-Transformed-Television/dp/006289921X/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1ZRESAMA51VIB&dchild=1&keywords=ron+brownstein&qid=1620441717&sprefix=ron+brownstein%2Caps%2C160&sr=8-1
Subscribe--it's free!
gregmitchell.substack.com/
Share
Ronstadt Breaks Through
by Ronald Brownstein
Linda Ronstadt hoped for a fresh start when she left Capitol for David Geffen’s Asylum Records in 1972. But old problems followed her to the new label. Working again with producer (and former boyfriend) John Boylan, Ronstadt started recording the album that became Don’t Cry Now. She completed the two tracks that became the album’s first singles, the ballad “Love Has No Pride” and “Silver Threads and Golden Needles,” the Dusty Springfield song she had also included on her first solo album. But before long, Ronstadt and Boylan were clashing over her direction.
“We argued a lot, we competed enormously in the studio,” she recalled a few years later. “I just didn’t trust him, I didn’t trust anyone then, and I was always afraid that something was going to get pulled over me. I was punch-drunk from producers.”
Boylan developed an idea to break the rut. Ronstadt, with James Taylor, had contributed background vocals a few months earlier to Neil Young’s breakout single “Heart of Gold.” Now a mega-star, Young was beginning a tour that would carry him to arenas across America through early 1973. Boylan saw it as an opportunity to place Ronstadt before much larger audiences than she had ever attracted. “I said, ‘the album’s not finished, but this tour is great, let’s do this tour,’ Boylan remembered. He lobbied Elliot Roberts, Young’s long-time manager (and Geffen’s partner), to put Ronstadt on the tour as the opening act. [Below, “Love Has No Pride” and “Silver Threads and Golden Needles” live.]
Initially, Roberts refused because Young wanted to perform alone. But after a few weeks Young complained that was too tiring, and Roberts called Boylan offering to add Ronstadt as an opening act. Then Ronstadt hesitated. She had played mostly small clubs to that point and was afraid she could not command arena-sized audiences, especially those impatiently waiting for the headliner. “She didn’t really want to do it,” Boylan recalled. “She was scared.”
Boylan enlisted Geffen, who persuaded Ronstadt that the exposure of appearing with Young was worth the stress. She jumped into the deep end of the pool. With only a few days notice, Ronstadt flew east to open for Young at Madison Square Garden, the world’s most famous arena, on January 23, 1973. Ronstadt picked a propitious show to join the tour: that was the night Secretary of State Henry Kissinger reached the agreement in Paris officially ending American participation in the Vietnam War. (The formal documents were signed four days later.) Handed a notice during his set, Young, characteristically terse, simply declared “The war is over” to raucous applause.
That was a rare moment of celebration for Ronstadt. For the next few months, she found herself playing the nation’s largest arenas with a band, that as she often said, wasn’t “as loud as the air conditioning….It was one of those things where if you want to play with the big boys you’d better get your game up and my game wasn’t up very high,” she said looking back. “I was a club act. I got shoveled onto stage at Madison Square Garden…and it was pretty shocking. My naivete, I didn’t realize how different it was going to be on one of those big stages. It’s like jumping from a puddle into a huge lake where you are a mile from shore and it’s like 300 feet below you.”
Ronstadt liked Young and found him respectful when they interacted. But the dynamics of opening for such a huge star could not have been more perfectly designed to trigger her insecurity. On the road there was a clear caste system. “Everybody in Neil’s band had priority over everybody [in mine] in the sound check,” she remembered. “And you know you had to stay in your place. There was a pecking order and everybody obeyed it.” [Below, “You’re No Good” live.]
For all the stress, the tour served Boylan’s purpose. Performing for the huge crowds that gathered for Young greatly raised Ronstadt’s visibility. “It was tough for her, but she knocked them dead,” remembered Boylan. “She thought she was not powerful enough to be on the stage with these people…like Neil Young. In fact, she was. It took her a while to figure that out.”
After years mostly circling in place, the Young tour gave Ronstadt a burst of momentum. Another change in 1973 had an even greater effect. Ronstadt finally cemented her relationship with the man who would change her life, Peter Asher. An elfin, understated Englishman, Asher was a former child actor who had had pop success in the duo Peter and Gordon during the mid-1960s. After the band broke up, Asher worked for the Beatles as a producer and then as an executive at their Apple Records.
He briefly took a position at MGM records in New York to fund his move to America. That job didn’t last long and Asher relocated to Los Angeles to manage and produce James Taylor, who he had signed (at the recommendation of the guitarist Danny Kortchmar) at Apple.
When Ronstadt, at Boylan’s suggestion, first approached Asher about managing her around 1971, he was initially enthusiastic. “I first heard her at the Bitter End in New York,” Asher remembered. “Somebody told me, you have to go and see this girl, she’s an amazing singer, she’s incredible looking, sings barefoot and wears short shorts, and she is really hot and sings like an angel. All of which is true. Then I met her and discovered her to be one of the most remarkably articulate and clever, amazing women I ever met.” [Below, “When Will I Be Loved” live.]
Within a few weeks, though, Asher backed out because he decided that taking on Ronstadt could create a conflict with his other client, Kate Taylor, James’ sister. Ronstadt remained in contact with Asher, sometimes attending the cozy dinner parties he threw for the rock elite with his wife Betsy. The door to a wider relationship opened while Ronstadt was touring in 1973. Kate Taylor came backstage at one of her shows and confided that she no longer wanted to pursue a touring career in music. That freed Asher from his commitment to her. Ronstadt approached Asher to manage her again and this time he agreed.
Asher ‘s first job was to help her finish Don’t Cry Now. After clashing with Boylan, Ronstadt first brought in J.D. Souther, her boyfriend at the time, to produce a few more tracks. But they predictably argued in the studio as well. With Geffen growing impatient over the lengthening delay, Ronstadt finally turned to Asher to complete the record. The process of recording the album, Asher recalled with characteristic British reserve, “was in a bit of a muddle.”
Asher was different than Ronstadt’s earlier producers. For one thing, in contrast to Boylan and Souther, he was not sleeping with her. Whatever temptations arose, their relationship was strictly business. Asher was also much less volatile than most people she had worked with, and for that matter, most people in the music business anywhere. For Ronstadt, finding the steady, professional Asher was like reaching a placid bay after crossing a rolling sea. “Peter was an intelligent person I could talk to and he would talk back to me like a person, not like somebody he wanted to ball, or somebody he thought was silly and could push around,” she said at the time.
With Asher’s help, Don’t Cry Now was released in September 1973. With Geffen’s promotional heft behind it, Don’t Cry Now sold considerably more records than its predecessors. But it remained short of a breakout hit. It peaked only at number 45 on the Billboard charts. Artistically Don’t Cry Now was another frustrating product, mixing her powerful voice with odd song choices. Though it contained some moving moments (including an inspired cover of the Eagles’ “Desperado” more compelling than the original), the best thing about Don’t Cry Now was completing it. With Asher now in her camp, Ronstadt looked forward with new optimism. “Let’s face it,” said Boylan looking back. “Peter was at the top of his game.”
Asher didn’t start with an answer to the question that so many people in LA were asking: Why hadn’t Ronstadt, with all her gifts, achieved more success? “I didn’t have a master plan in my head,” he recalled. But he knew that part of the answer was providing more space for her to express her own eclectic musical ideas. “A lot of it was no one was listening to Linda,” he said. “She had this reputation of being difficult which was completely unjustified, and some of this is now cliché but—if you’re a really good-looking woman people don’t take you seriously. I do think one of the things I did do that nobody was doing was sit down seriously and ask Linda ‘what do you think, what should we be doing?’” [Below, “Heart Like a Wheel.”]
Within a few months, the answer produced the album that established her as a superstar: Heart Like a Wheel. For years, Ronstadt had been frustrated by her inability to capture on vinyl the musical fusion she heard in her head. With Heart, she did something that none of the LA country rockers—not even the high-flying Eagles—had accomplished: produced a record that reached number one on both the country and pop charts, and almost simultaneously at that. Ronstadt looked at the success more as relief than validation. “I was happy it was a hit and I wanted to make another record,” she said. “I didn’t think ‘I told you so.’”
From Rock Me on the Water: 1974—The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television, and Politics by Ronald Brownstein. www.amazon.com/Rock-Water-1974-Transformed-Television/dp/006289921X/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1ZRESAMA51VIB&dchild=1&keywords=ron+brownstein&qid=1620441717&sprefix=ron+brownstein%2Caps%2C160&sr=8-1
Also: See interview with Ronstadt from early 1974 by my Crawdaddy colleague Peter Knobler.
www.ronstadt-linda.com/artcrw74.htm
Share
Leave a comment
Subscribe--it's free!
“Essential daily newsletter.” — Charles P. Pierce, Esquire
“Incisive and enjoyable every day.” — Ron Brownstein, The Atlantic
“Always worth reading.” — Frank Rich, New York magazine, Veep and Succession
Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books, including the bestseller The Tunnels (on escapes under the Berlin Wall), the current The Beginning or the End (on MGM’s wild atomic bomb movie), and The Campaign of the Century (on Upton Sinclair’s left-wing race for governor of California), which was recently picked by the Wall St. Journal as one of five greatest books ever about an election. His new film, Atomic Cover-up, just had its world premiere and is drawing extraordinary acclaim. For nearly all of the 1970s he was the #2 editor at the legendary Crawdaddy. Later he served as longtime editor of Editor & Publisher magazine. He recently co-produced a film, Following the Ninth, about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01B0KA6SO
www.amazon.com/Beginning-End-Hollywood-Learned-Worrying/dp/1620975734
www.amazon.com/gp/product/B006IYBXL2
gregmitch.medium.com/atomic-cover-up-premieres-68a685b9bb5
gregmitchell.substack.com/