Post by the Scribe on Aug 6, 2021 8:32:56 GMT
“Someone to Lay Down Beside Me” (1976, “Hasten Down the Wind” album)
Once upon a time, kids, there were these gods and demigods that walked among us and gifted us with their songs. They came from all over the land to the City of Angels, met each other in adobe cantinas, courted and lived in canyons, deserts and beaches. And when they were in love, you knew it; their passions scorched like a heat wave. They kissed and danced and switched partners in bed and backstage. And when fortune and riches came their way, they settled together in colonies, such as the magical Malibu, and some fell prey to potions, poisons and betrayals. And oh, when their hearts broke — how they broke! Disillusionment chilled the air, and separate trails followed.
And children, if you want to know what all that sounded like in the 1970s, listen to “Someone to Lay Down Beside Me”, a ballad by Karla Bonoff (a wonderful singer-songwriter) but sung here by Linda Ronstadt as though she was making it up after closing the door of a lover’s penthouse. This song about the shadow side of sexual liberation starts with plaintive minor notes on a tentative solo piano, much like the object of seduction might pause to reconsider, and then settles into a hypnotic, carousel-like melody following a woman walking through the concrete and bleary neon corridors of a city. Guitar chords crunch in; the energy is suddenly assertive and domineering, but not exactly erotic.
Ronstadt’s voice rises to sing to this woman, perhaps singing to herself, that the coolness of dawn always arrives, and “the sun will soon share all the cost/of a world that can be sort of heartless/not like love that I feel in my heart.” The sex didn’t solve the loneliness, and the voice struggles with eternal questions and inner pleas: “Someone to lay down beside me/you just can’t ask for more.” Throw a question mark behind that last statement, and the meaning changes, becomes more of a feminist cri de couer that makes you consider the song is less concerned about being cynical about callow young men and more concerned with sisterly advice: Why shouldn’t you be able to ask for more?
To get the fullness of this song, take a long look at the album cover. Then come to LA, head out to Pacific Coast Highway and play it loud while driving towards Malibu; it’s a soundtrack of a time and a place no longer there, though still perhaps whispered by a shimmering dusk and which stands in Southern California legend as much as anything by The Eagles (Ronstadt’s former backing band, by the way) or any male musician from the time. Like Ronstad’s well-known version of “Desperado”, it deserves to be considered as a West Coast rock anthem. It’s quintessential Seventies, it’s quintessential late-night tequila balladry, it’s quintessential Santa-Ana-winds-blowing-through-your-hair-in-a-convertible, and in its surgeon-like and compassionately precise exploration of a dispirited anima, it’s quintessential Linda Ronstadt. All hail this Queen of Broken Hearts, who raised so many legions of hearts on her lovely bare shoulders and offered them healing.
tomcendejas.medium.com/20-deep-cuts-from-linda-ronstadt-that-reveal-her-artistry-65a9470c7ee2
