Post by the Scribe on Jan 6, 2022 8:57:24 GMT
Linda Ronstadt: From Tucson to Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, her lifetime love affair with music
www.azcentral.com/story/entertainment/music/2018/03/09/linda-ronstadt-music-simple-dreams-memoir/408779002/
Ed Masley
The Republic | azcentral.com
Linda Ronstadt poses in New York to promote the release of her memoir "Simple Dreams" on Sept. 17, 2013.
There's a scene in Linda Ronstadt's memoir, "Simple Dreams," where her sister is playing piano in the family's Tucson home while her brother, the soprano, sings.
As she writes in the book, "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."
That affirmation would only increase on the path to becoming the most successful female singer of her generation, selling out "stupid" arenas, as she calls them, thanks to hits as huge as "You're No Good" and "When Will I Be Loved."
Linda Ronstadt's music and memoir
She's won lifetime achievement awards from both the Grammys and the Latin Grammys. Although she prefers singing standards and Mexican folk songs to Elvis Costello, she took her place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2014.
By the time of that induction, Ronstadt had retired. Diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in late 2012, she's unable to sing.
But she's bringing a tour called "A Conversation with Linda" to Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts on April 26.
Linda Ronstadt, a Tucson native, attended University of Arizona before she recorded her chart-topping songs "You're No Good" and "Blue Bayou."
The multimedia production features Ronstadt's personal recounting of her life in music, assisted by videos, rare personal photos and what she calls "found things."
There a tape, for instance, of the night J.D. Souther and Jackson Browne came by the house and taught her two songs that went on to be among her greatest hits — “Poor Poor Pitiful Me” and “Blue Bayou.”
The show is "just really about my musical process," she says.
"When I wrote the book, I thought about what I did that was different. There were a lot of better singers, I think. Or certainly just as good. What I did that was different was a lot of different kinds of music."
When the star checks in from San Francisco, where she's lived for seven years, she's as charming as ever, laughing often and downplaying talk of her obvious vocal abilities with modesty that doesn't seem the least bit false.
She's so gracious that before she hangs up, she says, "If you need anything else, you know where to find us."
Question: What inspired you to want to write a memoir?
Answer: Well, a publisher called. And I thought, “Well, I’ve never written anything; I don’t even keep a diary.” But I thought, “I could do that — just tell my musical process from the beginning, from early childhood and write it about that instead of anything else.”
And I just sat down and wrote. I think anybody can write about themselves to a degree. It’s harder to write about other things. Everybody can tell their own story.
President Barack Obama helps singer Linda Ronstadt off stage in the East Room of the White House in Washington, Monday, July 28, 2014, during a ceremony where he presented her with a 2013 National Medal of Arts.
Q: Were you surprised at how well you could write?
A: Well, I’m a reader. I read all the time. If you’re a reader, you can put a halfway-literate sentence together. I don’t know if I’m a good writer. But I think I’m a clear writer.
Q: What was the process like for you, getting your memories down on paper?
A: It was a lot of calling friends and trying to figure out if that really happened (laughs). It’s amazing how people remember things differently. But I checked everything with as many people as I could to make sure I had the facts right.
And then I had somebody helping me with the timeline because sometimes I got the dates mixed up — like, I had Jackson Browne getting married after he had already lost his wife. That was a mistake (laughs).
Q: You open the book with a chapter titled "Tucson." And I know you haven’t lived in Arizona in a little while. Do you still feel a strong connection to this area?
A: Well, I lived there for 10 years rather recently. I’ve lived back in San Francisco for about seven years now. But I kept the house in Tucson for a long time. I only sold it last year. It’s too hard for me to go back and forth now that I have Parkinson’s disease.
But yeah, I feel very connected. I have a lot of good friends and family still there. And I can find my way around town (laughs). It’s on a grid, so it’s easy. I can orient myself by the mountains. Here, I have to be able to see the Bay to know which way I’m going.
Q: Could you talk a little bit about how growing up in Arizona shaped you?
A: It’s a lot of things I took for granted. Everybody I knew had a horse or cattle or a farm.
When I went back to Tucson with my small children and they said, “Does anybody know somebody with a farm? We’d like to take the children on a field trip to a farm,” I thought, “Of course.” And then I didn’t know a single person with a farm.
I was really shocked that there weren’t many farms around anymore. They’d all been turned into housing developments.
But growing up in Tucson was learning how to play indoors because it was too hot to play outside. And a lot of going out on your own, on horseback, from a very early age.
It wasn’t that our parents were negligent. It’s just the way things were done in those days. It’s a miracle we lived to tell the tale (laughs).
When I was 6 years old, I’d get on a pony and go someplace. It was like having a car when you were 6. And I think the town was only about 100,000 people, 150,000 people. You could always find a parking place. That was good.
Q: Well, you were on a pony anyway.
A: (Laughs) We used to ride them to the market and tie up our little ponies and go inside and have a cherry phosphate, then ride back home.
Q: That’s awesome. It sounds like a great childhood.
A: Well, it was kind of a solitary childhood. I only had one close friend who lived within walking distance. We were pretty isolated out there. And I didn’t make her as a friend until age 5. But we’re still friends. She came down to see me last winter from Canada.
And my best friend from first grade is still my best friend.
Q: Wow. And you were close through all the years?
A: Yep. And we’re godmother to each other’s children.
Q: You write in the book about crossing the border into Mexico with your family for picnics, weddings, baptisms, all sorts of stuff.
A: I still go there every chance I get. We socialized across the border. And everybody did business across the border, lucrative business, back and forth.
People from northern Mexico came up to my father’s hardware store, and they would go to Levy’s and Steinfeld’s, the family-owned department stores, to buy clothes.
There was always commerce across the border. And friendship. We’d go down to the Cavern Café in Nogales and eat lunch, have a bowl of turtle soup and shop in the shopping district.
They had terrific stores. There was a jewelry and a good department store. They were beautiful stores, and we knew the families for generations.
I still spend time in the little town where my grandfather was born. It’s a beautiful, beautiful place on the Sonoran River, about four hours from Tucson.
Linda Ronstadt took home the Grammy Award for Best Mexican-American Performance for 'Canciones de Mi Padre' on Feb. 22, 1989 in Los Angeles.
Q: That sounds nice.
A: I mean, it’s so ridiculous to have that border. It doesn’t keep anybody out. It keeps us in. It’s hard to get across the border. You have to time it.
To go back and forth at the border in Nogales is just impossible now. It’s so clogged up with people looking for drugs and God knows what. But the thing is that people who want to come in, they’ll come by plane, they’ll come by boat.
The idea of a wall is so ridiculous. It’s just preposterous. They’ll spend a lot of money talking about it and building prototypes and local contractors will have graft from the government, but I don’t think it will be built.
And the fence they have is just really a nuisance. It makes it hard for animals to migrate. It’s a terrible thing for everything. It’s a horrible insult to Mexico. It’s terrible for our international relations.
People here don’t realize how much America benefited from NAFTA, not Mexico.
It drove farmers off the land, into the cities and then they migrated here — and they’re punished for it — because the American price for corn and wheat destroyed the markets down there, so people are out of a job.
So they’re not gonna pull NAFTA anytime soon. It would not benefit the United States. But that idiot in the White House keeps talking about it, to people who don’t understand it.
Q: You obviously grew up in a very musical family. What are your earliest musical memories?
A: Singing with my dad. He would play the guitar and sing. My mom would sing at the piano. He had a Victrola in his little den playing Mexican music or flamenco music, maybe Frank Sinatra. But mostly singing with the family.
Q: Do you recall a point at which you started thinking, “This is what I want to do; I want to be a singer?”
A: I didn’t think about celebrity or standing on stage or anything. I just thought, "I want to be a singer." I remember thinking that in first grade. I didn’t do very well in arithmetic because I couldn’t understand it. They didn’t explain it right.
I eventually learned to add and subtract, but it was hard those first two months in first grade. And I thought, "Well, I don’t care. I want to be a singer. I don’t have to do math."
Q: That’s great. And it turned out well. You got to be a singer.
A: (Laughs) Well, I thought I would be a singer. I didn’t know that I would be able to make a living at it. I hoped that I would be able to, but I didn’t think about it in terms of fame or celebrity or anything like that. I just wanted to sing.
Q: When you started pursuing it seriously, did your parents encourage that decision?
A: Well, they wanted me to finish college. I only did a semester. But music was just playing in my head. I had no choice. I mean, they thought I was leaving home too young. And they were quite right. But they were still nice to me. They didn’t disown me.
They just advised me to have a bit of common sense.
Linda Ronstadt performs at Stokely Athletic Center on Oct. 26, 1975. (University of Tennessee Libraries)
Q: Do you feel like you did?
A: No! (laughs). I left home and went to Los Angeles at age 17. Or 18, however old I was. I didn’t know how hard it was. If I had known, I wouldn’t have gone.
Q: What was the most difficult for you, being there as a teenager?
A: There were so many difficult things, I can’t even tell you. But I was able to make a living, playing little clubs and stuff like that. To me, that was success. You could pay the rent, buy groceries.
Q: What was the music scene in Tucson like before you left for California?
A: It was so small. There was only one little club that played folk music, and it was almost empty all the time. One of the reasons I left is because music always struggled in Tucson. That kind of music struggled.
I wanted to go someplace where there was a bigger musician pool and it was more appreciated.
Q: What do you think drew you to the folk and country side of things when you were starting out?
A: It sounded like the music we sang growing up. We sang a lot of Mexican folk songs. And stuff we heard on the radio. We sang everything we heard. But the stuff I loved the best was the Mexican music that came out of the rural culture, agrarian culture.
Q: I imagine it must have been very rewarding to make albums of that type of music.
A: Well, I wanted to do it all along. When I left home for Los Angeles, I took along a record by Lola Beltran and another record by the Mariachi Vargas. I wanted to learn the songs and figure out how to make them into pop songs, like "La Bamba."
That’s a traditional song. But the guys I was playing with didn’t have any idea how to make that kind of music.
Q: The Stone Poneys guys?
A: Yeah. Or anybody else I met over the years (laughs). They didn’t know how to make traditional Mexican music. The rhythms are very complex. They’re not West African. They’re not blues. They’re indigenous to Mexico.
And if you didn’t grow up hearing them, it’s pretty hard to learn them.
Q: At what point did it feel like your career was taking off to you?
A: When I had my third hit, “You’re No Good.” I was there 10 years before I felt I had a leg to stand on.
Q: Really?!
A: I could always make a living. I could tour and play. But it wasn’t until my third hit that I felt I had been launched.
Q: By the end of the ‘70s, you were as big of a rock star as there was. Was “rock star” a role you were comfortable in?
A: No. I thought it was silly. I really was interested in the music. I didn’t go out to a lot of things (laughs). I went to work, then I came home and took time off. Then I went back to work again. It’s very different now with all the social media and everything like that.
I was lucky then because I could hide. I could live a very quiet life. But now it’s people taking pictures with cellphones all over the place. I would hate that.
Q: What do you think of the musical choices you made in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. Are you happy with those records?
Linda Ronstadt circa 1970. (more like 1977)
A: I don’t like any of my records.
Q: You don’t like ANY of your records?!
A: (Laughs) No, not any of them.
Q: Why?!
A: Because they sound funny to me. They sound so frozen. You know, when I played music, we played it a little bit different every night. It was all a work in progress.
I was still trying to learn the music when we recorded it, and I didn’t know it very well yet until we had been on the road for a couple of weeks. I didn’t really know the songs well enough to sing them properly. It’s called learning on the job.
Q: But you did feel comfortable with the way you sounded live?
A: I don’t know. I’d like a note here and not the next note. But you know, you do your best and the circumstances are good or they’re not.
You can have good sound one night and horrible sound the next night, a good hall one night and, the next night, you’re singing in some stupid arena someplace. Nothing’s ever the same. You just learn to roll with it.
Q: You pulled back a bit from the rock and pop side of things not long after “Mad Love” and did a series of albums with the Nelson Riddle Orchestra.
A: That was really a relief. I felt like I needed to find my authentic voice. I needed to learn about phrasing. And those songs were my teachers.
I found my authentic voice singing them, and I could translate that to rock and roll after I learned to sing standards, and especially after I learned to sing Mexican music. I feel like I didn’t really start singing until 1980.
Linda Ronstadt and Rex Smith from the 1983 musical 'The Pirates of Penzance.'
Q: Wow. When you started working with Nelson?
A: After I did “Pirates (of Penzance).” I feel like another part of my voice came in and it was something that I could apply immediately to standards.
The songs are such high quality, you know? Those are the best pop songs that ever came out of the United States, the ones by George Gershwin and Rodgers and Hart. They were master craftsmen of popular song.
Q: And you were exposed to a lot of that music growing up as well.
A: Yeah, I never tried to do any kind of music I didn’t hear before I was 9. Or 8. I never tried anything if I hadn’t heard it growing up.
Q: Not even in your rock years?
A: Well, I heard rock and roll when I was 6.
Q: Right. I mean, around the time of “Mad Love,” it seems like there’s a bit of a New Wave influence on that album.
A: Those are the songs I was getting. That’s what was being written.
Q: Did you like those songs?
A: Not as much as Rodgers and Hart and George Gershwin (laughs). I mean, there’s no comparison. They’re OK. I prefer to sing ballads.
Q: You followed the standards albums with “Trio,” recording with Emmylou Harris and Dolly Parton. What do you recall of that experience?
A: Oh, that was wonderful for me. We had a great time singing with each other. I think we sounded really good together. I did a lot of singing with other people — like Neil Young — and I did a lot of woodshedding with Jackson and JD.
But Emmylou, Dolly and I singing together was remarkable.
Q: Those are beautiful records. I would imagine the experience of singing with a guy like Neil Young is a lot different than singing with those two.
A: I love singing with him. He’s such a great songwriter. He’s one of the best, I think, that came out of rock and roll. He and Tom Petty are my favorites, I think. I love Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, but I love Tom Petty equally.
Q: That was so sad when he died.
A: It was awful. He had probably a lot of good songs left to write.
Q: He never stopped making great records.
A: He never did.
▶ Remembering Tom Petty: A voice that will be missed
www.azcentral.com/story/entertainment/music/2017/10/02/tom-petty-dead-obituary/724825001/
Q: One of your later albums was recorded with the Heartbreakers, wasn’t it?
A: Two of them, Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench. They’re such good players. I was lucky to get them.
Q: When you look back on your career, is there an era that you are particularly fond of?
A: There are minutes in all of it (laughs). Or days. I think in the ‘60s, it was a time of wonder and gee-whiz. And that was fun. And then the ‘70s, that was sort of gee-whiz. Then I went to Broadway and that was real gee-whiz.
Then I did the standards and got to play with an orchestra, and I was really happy. In the ‘90s, I did my best singing. That was when I could sort of do whatever I wanted to do. I could make my voice do it.
Q: You said you were never the greatest singer. A lot of people would probably not agree with that. Who were the singers you looked at and thought, “If I only I could sing like THAT.”
A: Any number of them (laughs). I think Bonnie Raitt is always gonna be a better singer. Jennifer Warnes is a really good singer. Annie Lennox, she wasn’t my generation, but she was really good. There were a lot of good girl singers. Phoebe Snow.
I mean, I didn’t want to sing like them, but I admired them as singers.
Q: What do you think it was that drove you to try so many different styles as your career progressed?
A: The music I loved as a child and just loved it so much that I couldn’t not sing it.
Q: What do you find is the best part of doing these speaking tours now?
Singer Linda Ronstadt was born in Tucson and has moved to and from the city several times. Photo from Changing Hands Bookstore, Tempe Az (the Scribe was there conservatism.freeforums.net/thread/6575/flashback-simple-dreams-tempe-october )
A: Well, it gets me out of the house and around the country a little bit. I get a little sampling of what’s going on. And I get to tell my side of the story. My story was mostly told by journalists or scandal magazines or whatever.
So I get to tell my side of the story and I like that. That’s really why I wrote the book.
Q: So you think there are things that have been misunderstood about you that you were able to set straight in the book?
A: Sometimes. But that’s not the point. The point is that nobody, no matter how benign their intent, is ever gonna tell it like you know it. (laughs).
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Reach the reporter at ed.masley@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-4495. Twitter.com/EdMasley
A Conversation with Linda Ronstadt
When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday, April 26.
Where: Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts, 7380 E. Second St.
Admission: $45-$90.
Details: 480-499-8587, scottsdaleperformingarts.org.
www.azcentral.com/story/entertainment/music/2018/03/09/linda-ronstadt-music-simple-dreams-memoir/408779002/
Ed Masley
The Republic | azcentral.com
Linda Ronstadt poses in New York to promote the release of her memoir "Simple Dreams" on Sept. 17, 2013.
There's a scene in Linda Ronstadt's memoir, "Simple Dreams," where her sister is playing piano in the family's Tucson home while her brother, the soprano, sings.
As she writes in the book, "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."
That affirmation would only increase on the path to becoming the most successful female singer of her generation, selling out "stupid" arenas, as she calls them, thanks to hits as huge as "You're No Good" and "When Will I Be Loved."
Linda Ronstadt's music and memoir
She's won lifetime achievement awards from both the Grammys and the Latin Grammys. Although she prefers singing standards and Mexican folk songs to Elvis Costello, she took her place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2014.
By the time of that induction, Ronstadt had retired. Diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in late 2012, she's unable to sing.
But she's bringing a tour called "A Conversation with Linda" to Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts on April 26.
Linda Ronstadt, a Tucson native, attended University of Arizona before she recorded her chart-topping songs "You're No Good" and "Blue Bayou."
The multimedia production features Ronstadt's personal recounting of her life in music, assisted by videos, rare personal photos and what she calls "found things."
There a tape, for instance, of the night J.D. Souther and Jackson Browne came by the house and taught her two songs that went on to be among her greatest hits — “Poor Poor Pitiful Me” and “Blue Bayou.”
The show is "just really about my musical process," she says.
"When I wrote the book, I thought about what I did that was different. There were a lot of better singers, I think. Or certainly just as good. What I did that was different was a lot of different kinds of music."
When the star checks in from San Francisco, where she's lived for seven years, she's as charming as ever, laughing often and downplaying talk of her obvious vocal abilities with modesty that doesn't seem the least bit false.
She's so gracious that before she hangs up, she says, "If you need anything else, you know where to find us."
Question: What inspired you to want to write a memoir?
Answer: Well, a publisher called. And I thought, “Well, I’ve never written anything; I don’t even keep a diary.” But I thought, “I could do that — just tell my musical process from the beginning, from early childhood and write it about that instead of anything else.”
And I just sat down and wrote. I think anybody can write about themselves to a degree. It’s harder to write about other things. Everybody can tell their own story.
President Barack Obama helps singer Linda Ronstadt off stage in the East Room of the White House in Washington, Monday, July 28, 2014, during a ceremony where he presented her with a 2013 National Medal of Arts.
Q: Were you surprised at how well you could write?
A: Well, I’m a reader. I read all the time. If you’re a reader, you can put a halfway-literate sentence together. I don’t know if I’m a good writer. But I think I’m a clear writer.
Q: What was the process like for you, getting your memories down on paper?
A: It was a lot of calling friends and trying to figure out if that really happened (laughs). It’s amazing how people remember things differently. But I checked everything with as many people as I could to make sure I had the facts right.
And then I had somebody helping me with the timeline because sometimes I got the dates mixed up — like, I had Jackson Browne getting married after he had already lost his wife. That was a mistake (laughs).
Q: You open the book with a chapter titled "Tucson." And I know you haven’t lived in Arizona in a little while. Do you still feel a strong connection to this area?
A: Well, I lived there for 10 years rather recently. I’ve lived back in San Francisco for about seven years now. But I kept the house in Tucson for a long time. I only sold it last year. It’s too hard for me to go back and forth now that I have Parkinson’s disease.
But yeah, I feel very connected. I have a lot of good friends and family still there. And I can find my way around town (laughs). It’s on a grid, so it’s easy. I can orient myself by the mountains. Here, I have to be able to see the Bay to know which way I’m going.
Q: Could you talk a little bit about how growing up in Arizona shaped you?
A: It’s a lot of things I took for granted. Everybody I knew had a horse or cattle or a farm.
When I went back to Tucson with my small children and they said, “Does anybody know somebody with a farm? We’d like to take the children on a field trip to a farm,” I thought, “Of course.” And then I didn’t know a single person with a farm.
I was really shocked that there weren’t many farms around anymore. They’d all been turned into housing developments.
But growing up in Tucson was learning how to play indoors because it was too hot to play outside. And a lot of going out on your own, on horseback, from a very early age.
It wasn’t that our parents were negligent. It’s just the way things were done in those days. It’s a miracle we lived to tell the tale (laughs).
When I was 6 years old, I’d get on a pony and go someplace. It was like having a car when you were 6. And I think the town was only about 100,000 people, 150,000 people. You could always find a parking place. That was good.
Q: Well, you were on a pony anyway.
A: (Laughs) We used to ride them to the market and tie up our little ponies and go inside and have a cherry phosphate, then ride back home.
Q: That’s awesome. It sounds like a great childhood.
A: Well, it was kind of a solitary childhood. I only had one close friend who lived within walking distance. We were pretty isolated out there. And I didn’t make her as a friend until age 5. But we’re still friends. She came down to see me last winter from Canada.
And my best friend from first grade is still my best friend.
Q: Wow. And you were close through all the years?
A: Yep. And we’re godmother to each other’s children.
Q: You write in the book about crossing the border into Mexico with your family for picnics, weddings, baptisms, all sorts of stuff.
A: I still go there every chance I get. We socialized across the border. And everybody did business across the border, lucrative business, back and forth.
People from northern Mexico came up to my father’s hardware store, and they would go to Levy’s and Steinfeld’s, the family-owned department stores, to buy clothes.
There was always commerce across the border. And friendship. We’d go down to the Cavern Café in Nogales and eat lunch, have a bowl of turtle soup and shop in the shopping district.
They had terrific stores. There was a jewelry and a good department store. They were beautiful stores, and we knew the families for generations.
I still spend time in the little town where my grandfather was born. It’s a beautiful, beautiful place on the Sonoran River, about four hours from Tucson.
Linda Ronstadt took home the Grammy Award for Best Mexican-American Performance for 'Canciones de Mi Padre' on Feb. 22, 1989 in Los Angeles.
Q: That sounds nice.
A: I mean, it’s so ridiculous to have that border. It doesn’t keep anybody out. It keeps us in. It’s hard to get across the border. You have to time it.
To go back and forth at the border in Nogales is just impossible now. It’s so clogged up with people looking for drugs and God knows what. But the thing is that people who want to come in, they’ll come by plane, they’ll come by boat.
The idea of a wall is so ridiculous. It’s just preposterous. They’ll spend a lot of money talking about it and building prototypes and local contractors will have graft from the government, but I don’t think it will be built.
And the fence they have is just really a nuisance. It makes it hard for animals to migrate. It’s a terrible thing for everything. It’s a horrible insult to Mexico. It’s terrible for our international relations.
People here don’t realize how much America benefited from NAFTA, not Mexico.
It drove farmers off the land, into the cities and then they migrated here — and they’re punished for it — because the American price for corn and wheat destroyed the markets down there, so people are out of a job.
So they’re not gonna pull NAFTA anytime soon. It would not benefit the United States. But that idiot in the White House keeps talking about it, to people who don’t understand it.
Q: You obviously grew up in a very musical family. What are your earliest musical memories?
A: Singing with my dad. He would play the guitar and sing. My mom would sing at the piano. He had a Victrola in his little den playing Mexican music or flamenco music, maybe Frank Sinatra. But mostly singing with the family.
Q: Do you recall a point at which you started thinking, “This is what I want to do; I want to be a singer?”
A: I didn’t think about celebrity or standing on stage or anything. I just thought, "I want to be a singer." I remember thinking that in first grade. I didn’t do very well in arithmetic because I couldn’t understand it. They didn’t explain it right.
I eventually learned to add and subtract, but it was hard those first two months in first grade. And I thought, "Well, I don’t care. I want to be a singer. I don’t have to do math."
Q: That’s great. And it turned out well. You got to be a singer.
A: (Laughs) Well, I thought I would be a singer. I didn’t know that I would be able to make a living at it. I hoped that I would be able to, but I didn’t think about it in terms of fame or celebrity or anything like that. I just wanted to sing.
Q: When you started pursuing it seriously, did your parents encourage that decision?
A: Well, they wanted me to finish college. I only did a semester. But music was just playing in my head. I had no choice. I mean, they thought I was leaving home too young. And they were quite right. But they were still nice to me. They didn’t disown me.
They just advised me to have a bit of common sense.
Linda Ronstadt performs at Stokely Athletic Center on Oct. 26, 1975. (University of Tennessee Libraries)
Q: Do you feel like you did?
A: No! (laughs). I left home and went to Los Angeles at age 17. Or 18, however old I was. I didn’t know how hard it was. If I had known, I wouldn’t have gone.
Q: What was the most difficult for you, being there as a teenager?
A: There were so many difficult things, I can’t even tell you. But I was able to make a living, playing little clubs and stuff like that. To me, that was success. You could pay the rent, buy groceries.
Q: What was the music scene in Tucson like before you left for California?
A: It was so small. There was only one little club that played folk music, and it was almost empty all the time. One of the reasons I left is because music always struggled in Tucson. That kind of music struggled.
I wanted to go someplace where there was a bigger musician pool and it was more appreciated.
Q: What do you think drew you to the folk and country side of things when you were starting out?
A: It sounded like the music we sang growing up. We sang a lot of Mexican folk songs. And stuff we heard on the radio. We sang everything we heard. But the stuff I loved the best was the Mexican music that came out of the rural culture, agrarian culture.
Q: I imagine it must have been very rewarding to make albums of that type of music.
A: Well, I wanted to do it all along. When I left home for Los Angeles, I took along a record by Lola Beltran and another record by the Mariachi Vargas. I wanted to learn the songs and figure out how to make them into pop songs, like "La Bamba."
That’s a traditional song. But the guys I was playing with didn’t have any idea how to make that kind of music.
Q: The Stone Poneys guys?
A: Yeah. Or anybody else I met over the years (laughs). They didn’t know how to make traditional Mexican music. The rhythms are very complex. They’re not West African. They’re not blues. They’re indigenous to Mexico.
And if you didn’t grow up hearing them, it’s pretty hard to learn them.
Q: At what point did it feel like your career was taking off to you?
A: When I had my third hit, “You’re No Good.” I was there 10 years before I felt I had a leg to stand on.
Q: Really?!
A: I could always make a living. I could tour and play. But it wasn’t until my third hit that I felt I had been launched.
Q: By the end of the ‘70s, you were as big of a rock star as there was. Was “rock star” a role you were comfortable in?
A: No. I thought it was silly. I really was interested in the music. I didn’t go out to a lot of things (laughs). I went to work, then I came home and took time off. Then I went back to work again. It’s very different now with all the social media and everything like that.
I was lucky then because I could hide. I could live a very quiet life. But now it’s people taking pictures with cellphones all over the place. I would hate that.
Q: What do you think of the musical choices you made in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. Are you happy with those records?
Linda Ronstadt circa 1970. (more like 1977)
A: I don’t like any of my records.
Q: You don’t like ANY of your records?!
A: (Laughs) No, not any of them.
Q: Why?!
A: Because they sound funny to me. They sound so frozen. You know, when I played music, we played it a little bit different every night. It was all a work in progress.
I was still trying to learn the music when we recorded it, and I didn’t know it very well yet until we had been on the road for a couple of weeks. I didn’t really know the songs well enough to sing them properly. It’s called learning on the job.
Q: But you did feel comfortable with the way you sounded live?
A: I don’t know. I’d like a note here and not the next note. But you know, you do your best and the circumstances are good or they’re not.
You can have good sound one night and horrible sound the next night, a good hall one night and, the next night, you’re singing in some stupid arena someplace. Nothing’s ever the same. You just learn to roll with it.
Q: You pulled back a bit from the rock and pop side of things not long after “Mad Love” and did a series of albums with the Nelson Riddle Orchestra.
A: That was really a relief. I felt like I needed to find my authentic voice. I needed to learn about phrasing. And those songs were my teachers.
I found my authentic voice singing them, and I could translate that to rock and roll after I learned to sing standards, and especially after I learned to sing Mexican music. I feel like I didn’t really start singing until 1980.
Linda Ronstadt and Rex Smith from the 1983 musical 'The Pirates of Penzance.'
Q: Wow. When you started working with Nelson?
A: After I did “Pirates (of Penzance).” I feel like another part of my voice came in and it was something that I could apply immediately to standards.
The songs are such high quality, you know? Those are the best pop songs that ever came out of the United States, the ones by George Gershwin and Rodgers and Hart. They were master craftsmen of popular song.
Q: And you were exposed to a lot of that music growing up as well.
A: Yeah, I never tried to do any kind of music I didn’t hear before I was 9. Or 8. I never tried anything if I hadn’t heard it growing up.
Q: Not even in your rock years?
A: Well, I heard rock and roll when I was 6.
Q: Right. I mean, around the time of “Mad Love,” it seems like there’s a bit of a New Wave influence on that album.
A: Those are the songs I was getting. That’s what was being written.
Q: Did you like those songs?
A: Not as much as Rodgers and Hart and George Gershwin (laughs). I mean, there’s no comparison. They’re OK. I prefer to sing ballads.
Q: You followed the standards albums with “Trio,” recording with Emmylou Harris and Dolly Parton. What do you recall of that experience?
A: Oh, that was wonderful for me. We had a great time singing with each other. I think we sounded really good together. I did a lot of singing with other people — like Neil Young — and I did a lot of woodshedding with Jackson and JD.
But Emmylou, Dolly and I singing together was remarkable.
Q: Those are beautiful records. I would imagine the experience of singing with a guy like Neil Young is a lot different than singing with those two.
A: I love singing with him. He’s such a great songwriter. He’s one of the best, I think, that came out of rock and roll. He and Tom Petty are my favorites, I think. I love Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, but I love Tom Petty equally.
Q: That was so sad when he died.
A: It was awful. He had probably a lot of good songs left to write.
Q: He never stopped making great records.
A: He never did.
▶ Remembering Tom Petty: A voice that will be missed
www.azcentral.com/story/entertainment/music/2017/10/02/tom-petty-dead-obituary/724825001/
Q: One of your later albums was recorded with the Heartbreakers, wasn’t it?
A: Two of them, Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench. They’re such good players. I was lucky to get them.
Q: When you look back on your career, is there an era that you are particularly fond of?
A: There are minutes in all of it (laughs). Or days. I think in the ‘60s, it was a time of wonder and gee-whiz. And that was fun. And then the ‘70s, that was sort of gee-whiz. Then I went to Broadway and that was real gee-whiz.
Then I did the standards and got to play with an orchestra, and I was really happy. In the ‘90s, I did my best singing. That was when I could sort of do whatever I wanted to do. I could make my voice do it.
Q: You said you were never the greatest singer. A lot of people would probably not agree with that. Who were the singers you looked at and thought, “If I only I could sing like THAT.”
A: Any number of them (laughs). I think Bonnie Raitt is always gonna be a better singer. Jennifer Warnes is a really good singer. Annie Lennox, she wasn’t my generation, but she was really good. There were a lot of good girl singers. Phoebe Snow.
I mean, I didn’t want to sing like them, but I admired them as singers.
Q: What do you think it was that drove you to try so many different styles as your career progressed?
A: The music I loved as a child and just loved it so much that I couldn’t not sing it.
Q: What do you find is the best part of doing these speaking tours now?
Singer Linda Ronstadt was born in Tucson and has moved to and from the city several times. Photo from Changing Hands Bookstore, Tempe Az (the Scribe was there conservatism.freeforums.net/thread/6575/flashback-simple-dreams-tempe-october )
A: Well, it gets me out of the house and around the country a little bit. I get a little sampling of what’s going on. And I get to tell my side of the story. My story was mostly told by journalists or scandal magazines or whatever.
So I get to tell my side of the story and I like that. That’s really why I wrote the book.
Q: So you think there are things that have been misunderstood about you that you were able to set straight in the book?
A: Sometimes. But that’s not the point. The point is that nobody, no matter how benign their intent, is ever gonna tell it like you know it. (laughs).
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Reach the reporter at ed.masley@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-4495. Twitter.com/EdMasley
A Conversation with Linda Ronstadt
When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday, April 26.
Where: Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts, 7380 E. Second St.
Admission: $45-$90.
Details: 480-499-8587, scottsdaleperformingarts.org.