We know two versions of Linda Ronstadt.
In one, she successfully manages to navigate the male-centric world of ‘70s rock (not that it has changed that much since then) and becomes one of the more successful female stars of the decade. In the other, she supports the very system that abuses her, avoiding conflict and preaching a certain kind of comfort that belies the trouble she must shovel every day: takin’ it easy, as her one-time backing band the Eagles put it.
Her new book supports both Ronstadts.
The singer specialized in mellifluity, the kind of music that lives entombed in the phrase “adult contemporary.” In her heyday, she sang over simple, melodic arrangements that usually leaned country (via pedal steel, or maybe a fiddle). As she got her start, the L.A. pop scene perfected a musical formula to rule the charts: electric keys, flat drums, harmonized vocals, an immaculate guitar solo. Sound washed cleverly, even complicatedly, but never jarred. No one cared about recording cost; everyone was a pro, serving up high-end musical pleasure.
But Ronstadt had some different ideas about the way pop worked. Despite getting her start in the ‘60s, when rock codified its dogmatic notion of the supremacy of “writing your own songs,” Ronstadt didn’t care about composition. Her greatest hits collection The Very Best Of Linda Ronstadt doesn’t contain a single song she wrote. Instead, she picked material from country, rock, folk and soul, and redid it L.A. style. This could be seen as an abdication of power…or the ultimate assertion of self through emancipation from a dumb system: I don’t give a damn what it is, just let me sing the thing.
In some ways, covers represent a more difficult road to success. The artist has familiarity in her corner, but she also faces pesky previous versions of a song that may already have been grooved into popular consciousness.
Ronstadt attempted to redo great songs from black singers and smooth them out for white audiences (often the way when white singers reinterpret black pop music). She usually got unappealing results. Songs like “Dark End Of The Street” and “Rescue Me” need voices with different powers than hers.
Still, that Ronstadt voice stood out—high, strong, more versatile than the voices of other popular California ladies who came after her, like Stevie Nicks. Ronstadt does a prettier and highly affecting version of Neil Young’s strange vocals when covering his “Birds;” she’s got a distinctive sound like Joni Mitchell, but none of the offbeat vocal inflections that might prevent a song from becoming a hit. A track like “Willin’” (a Little Feat original adapted by Ronstadt for her 1974 album Heart Like A Wheel) shows Ronstadt at her most affecting and indomitable. She might be “warped by the rain/ driven by the snow,” but give the woman weed plus whites and wine, elements be damned.
Ronstadt, born in 1946 in Arizona, always knew she wanted to use her voice. Almost always. “The first thing I remember ever really wanting…was a horse,” she writes. But at “about four [years old], I remember thinking, ‘I’m a singer, that’s what I do.’”
She marvels at the pure power of lifting the voice in song, when “elements of voice and style are braided together like twine…added to…emotions and thoughts that register as various vocal quirks…and a practically limitless assortment of choices.” Adding instruments to the mix further expands the limitlessness, but Ronstadt focuses strictly on singing.
In the city of angels, Ronstadt sang her way into the music biz without much trouble. Most of the bumps in the road involve male jerks, many famous: a TV executive in Nashville, a drunken Jim Morrison of the Doors, a possibly drunker Jack Nitzsche, who played with Neil Young. All mean, all lusty, Ronstadt vs. the man.