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David Bromberg interviews Linda Ronstadt
DAVID BROMBERG, SPECIAL TO THE NEWS JOURNAL12:13 p.m. EDT May 8, 2015
When The News Journal asked David Bromberg if he’d be interested in interviewing longtime friend Linda Ronstadt before the singer’s Wednesday night Smart Talk appearance, he happily agreed.
Then he called back, asking for suggestions for questions. No, no, no, I said. We wanted them to be his questions. Well, he said in that thoughtful way he has, if you give me questions, that will help spark my own questions, like a jumping off point.
So I sent him questions. A few weeks later, he sent back a 50-minute audiotape, which taught me a lesson: I should have said, would you like to interview Linda Ronstadt and then write it up for the paper?
But then I would have missed the fun of listening to him diss my questions (knowing darn well I was going to be listening to this) at the start of the interview, as well as Bromberg and Ronstadt walking all over each other while talking like old friends do, and some amazing exchanges about Ronstadt coping with Parkinson’s Disease, his own illness, raising children, old friends, political issues, the music business and aging, among other topics.
They met decades ago when they were starting out in New York. Since then, they have performed together several times, including in Wilmington, and she’s produced a song for him on one of his recent albums, “Use Me.” Now he’s 68 and she’s 67.
Here is an edited version of the conversation.
– Betsy Price
Bromberg: With your illness, how can manage a tour like this SmartTalk series?
Ronstadt: Everything is harder, because of the movement. Everything that involves movement is a problem. Also I’m starting to forget names and words. I have to struggle with that sometimes, but other than that, I enjoy it. I enjoy the back and forth with the audience. I miss singing with an audience, but I also miss sitting in the living room with somebody like you trading songs back and forth.
Bromberg: I’ve discovered that it feels good to sing, and I’m sure you have, too.
Ronstadt: Oh my god. Oh my god. I can’t even begin to tell you.
Bromberg: She does ask, ‘You adopted two children way before other actresses or celebrities went on to do that. Do you look around and feel like a trailblazer today? Do you ever think, wow, I wish I had a partner for this and the kids had two parents’ and ‘What do you think parenthood added to your life,’ which is sort of legit, I guess.
Ronstadt: I usually deflect talking about this, but I’ll talk about ‘em. I don’t care. It’s hard to raise children on your own.
Bromberg: It’s hard to raise children, period.
Linda: I had a lot of good help. I had a good team working to help. I was lucky. I think it’s better to raise them single than have a parent, a partner, that you don’t agree with. That can be a tremendous advantage. My kids used to ask for a dad and now they are so glad I didn’t move some stranger into the house. They say that to me all the time. They hear horror stories from other kids, you know, about wicked stepfathers. They had a lot of fairy godmothers and no wicked stepfathers.
Bromberg: ‘What do you think parenthood added to your life?’ Is that just one of those questions you just can’t answer?.
Ronstadt: No, I can answer that. It’s easy. It teaches you how childhood kicks you into adulthood and that’s a wonderful thing. And it got me off the hot seat. I didn’t ever have to be the center of the universe any more. The children are the center of the unverse.
Bromberg: That’s good. Let’s see. ‘You explored a lot of musical genres. What musical genres interest you today.
Ronstadt: The ones on Youtube. I find it to be a vast wonderland and can get lost in it. I compare 97 versions of (arias from operas) and listen to, you know, 100 years of different sopranos whacking at it. it’s really fun to compare them.
Bromberg: I don’t think you ever sung grand opera, did you?
Ronstadt: I did. I sang ‘La Boheme,’ but not succesfflly. I was hired as a pop singer to sing it in a pop style, which is impossible. I did my best to learn it the way Puccini wrote it, and there was a precedent for it. Italian opera was written as pop, it was the popular music of its time. But you really have to know how to sing Italian opera in order to sing something by Puccini. However, I had a great time doing it. I just enjoyed myself to death, and I loved the fact that I got to intimately know that opera because it increases my ability to listen to it enormously and appreciate it when I got to see it. Now I feel like I’m greeting old friends. She goes on to talk about how she also listens to Bulgarian musicians, such as Yanka Rupkina, who she calls a ‘trancendent singer who makes the rest of us look like drooling slobs’ and talks about how hard it was to sing with her because of timing and other issues. It turns out that Bromberg also loves the Bulgarian State Orchestra and its music.
Ronstadt: Somebody told me she was in a plane crash and they hauled her off to the morgue saying she was dead. She sat up in the morgue and surprised everybody. She went off to her place in the mountains and came back with no scars, and she had been burned over some huge percentage of her body. They all said, ‘Yanka, what did you do to get better.’ And she said, “I sang and sang.” And the way she sings, I think you could cure things. Once you’re in that category, there’s no competition.
Bromberg: Two more of her questions I want to ask. ‘If you could pick a band today and put it together, who would be in that band?’
Ronstadt: Well, it would be my Mexican band, Los Comperos. Their names wouldn’t mean anything to anybody; it would mean a lot to me.
Bromberg: Are there any artists out there who fascinate you now?
Ronstadt: She names Teddy Thompson, son of Linda and Richard Thompson, and Martha Wainwright, the daughter of Loudon Wainwright III and singer-songwriter Kate McGarrigle, particularly when she sings in French.
Bromberg: Now my questions: You have worked with a lot of songwriters and some of them are quite famous. I want to ask you about the ones that are a little less famous. You did that that Doc Pomus tune, and a lot of people don’t know who Doc Pomus is.
Ronstadt: Oh, doc and I used to have long conversations. He used to call me from the East Coast when he couldn’t sleep. He was ill and in a wheelchair for the last years of his life. He’d call me in the middle of the night, and we would talk for hours. They go on to talk about a few other singer-songwriters. She names Little George, Jimmy Webb, Jamie Souther, Jackson Browne, among others.
Bromberg: I wanted to ask you what you’re reading now.
Ronstadt: I just read a book called “How We Got to Now.” You ought to read it.Bromberg says he has it, but hasn’t read it. You gotta read it, man. It makes your head explode with ideas. And I just read a Doris Kearns Goodwin book about the Roosevelts in World War II. That’s really a good book.
David: I’ve been reading reading a lot of stuff about the same period. I finished William Manchester’s three volumes on Churchill and now I’m reading another William Manchester book and in between I read ‘The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.’ She says she’s never read any of it. It’s very relevatory. I learned things that I never suspected or just didn’t quite digest properly.
Ronstadt: It makes you thinnk of Rush Limbaugh, I bet. She laughs. No, Bromberg says, puzzled. He uses the same tactics.
Bromberg: Yeah, but if you’re taking about that, so does what’s his name, the turtle in the Senate. You can hear Bromberg’s wife, Nancy, in the background repeating ‘McConnell.’ Mitch McConnell (a Republican from Tennessee).
Ronstadt: I hate him. Howdy Doody. He looks like Howdy Doody. But we won’t go there. I don’t want to go into name calling during our interview.
Bromberg: I never thanked you for mentioning me at all and for the sweet way you mentioned me in your book.
Ronstadt: Well, you did me a really good turn. I was dingy. I never knew how close I came to utterly flopping because at that time in my career, I thought I was doing fine because I was supporting myself. It didn’t occur to me that I would need hit after hit. But that time when I was just about ready to go under, you provided me with that song(’Long Long Time’) and it was a huge hit for me and it really saved my career for me for another several years until I got to ‘You’re No Good.’
Bromberg: Well, Gary White provided you with that song. I just introduced you to Gary, and made you listen to him. She goes on to tell him that she’s been in touch recently, and Bromberg is thrilled.
Bromberg: I was going to ask you about regrets or mistakes. You mentioned you didn’t get to sing with David Hildalgo.
Ronstadt: That’s a big one. Little Joe of La Familia. He’s been on the same path. I wish I could have followed him around for a couple of years and sung in his band ... I don’t like to listen to my own recordings. I always hope they are better than I remember them, but they usually aren’t. If I stumble onto one and have to hear it, it’s usually not as good, and I remember is as not being good enough. It’s just hard to judge your own work.
Bromberg: Well, you always remember the things you could’ve done better ... and nobody else is aware of them.
Ronstadt: Really. It did improve by having it on the road and having it on the stage. You always get better with stuff.
Bromberg: I wanted to ask you what you’re going to do next.
Ronstadt: David, I can’t do much. I have to lie in a recliner most of the time because I can’t sit up for more than six minutes without my back killing me, and I can’t stand up for more than three minutes without looking for some place to lie down.
Bromberg: Holy cow! How are you going to do this talk?
Ronstadt: Well, I’m going to be sitting there. Hopefully, it’s only 35 minutes. I should be okay. I’m looking for a place to lie down immediately afterward. When I’m upright, I’m just looking for a place to lie down. So I don’t have any particular plans. I stay in touch with this little group called Los Cenzontles. It’s a cultural enrichment program in a strip mall over in Oakland. She talks about how it teaches traditional Mexican singing, dancing and visual arts to children so they can use it to express themselves. It’s slow educaton. It’s not learning something fast. But they get that foundation in that deep training and they have a better sense of who they are and they have a better chance of graduation from high school and college. The other thing that I do is that I try to help the groups at the border that are dealing with the peoplel at the border, migrants who get smuggled and they get caught, and the families that are arrested, the little children who get put into prison with their mothers. It’s just beyond scandalous. Those are my two great areas of concern, and I try to help when I can.
Bromberg: Who did you work with that you really just adored working with?
LInda: Aaron Neveil and Brian Wilson. The two mariachi bands, Mariachi Vargas and Los Comperos. Those two groups just taught me huge amounts. And Nelson Riddle. Joe Papp. That was such a shallow thing, dipping my toe into theater, but it was such a great opportunity to work with Joe Papp.
Bromberg: What have you learned of importance and when did you learn it?
Ronstadt: There were lots of things I didn’t learn until I was a parent. But what I learned after I was a parent was to be more gracious to everybody because you always hope people will give your kid an even break, and I wish I had given everybody else’s kid an even break. You know, graciousness and good manners can get you a long way in this world, and there was a shortage of that kind of thing in the ‘60s, ‘early 70s hot music thing. We kind of prided ourselves on being dismissive and I’m not proud of that.
Bromberg: You made a lot of transitions in your career from one genre to another, standards with Nelson Riddle, light opera, Mexican. Was that difficult for you to accomplish?
Ronstadt: One thing prepared me for another. What I know from listening to my early recordings is that I had not landed in my authentic voice. I was trying too hard to copy whatever else was around and not doing it successfully. When i was kind of trapped in rock and roll, I didn’t improve my high voice, my upper process and it’s where a lot of my feelings are located. So when I went and sang ‘Pirates of Penzance,’ I was working my upper voice exclusively. That gave me that extra range that I could use for standards. The standards gave me such a rooting of what my authentic voice was that it gave me the opportunity to go back earlier to childhood and find the Mexican stuff and connect that up. It all became digging deeper and deeper into authenticity. When I left home in the 60s, it was all Beatlemania and the Rolling Stones. I liked it, but it had not very much to do with me. It took me a long time to find out who I was authentically as a singer.
Bromberg: What or who dlo you miss now that you’re not performing?
Ronstadt: What I miss the most is when my family comes over. I have two nephews who are really musicians and my brother is still performing with my two nephews. They start singing and I just know I could put on a great harmony, and I can’t do it. Or if Emmy (Lou Harris) comes over. I mean, Emmy and I used to finish each other’s sentences, you know, musically and socially. And I can’t sing with her any more and that breaks my heart. But there’s nothing for it, you know. When you have something like that, you’ve just got to accept it and figure out what else I can do.
Bromberg: I know what you’re talking about, because I have this tremor. When I start playing with people, if they start playing past a certain speed, which never used to be difficult for me, it’s just absolutely no go, and I get so frustrated it nearly brings me to tears.
Ronstadt: An essential tremor?
Bromberg: yeah.
Ronstadt: That’s what I was hoping I had. But I didn’t .... Time is a thief, you know. You just have to accept it, and look for something useful to do.
Bromberg: How do you spend your time when you’re not going on book or lecture tours?
Ronstadt: Well, I spend a lot of it lying on the chaise looking out at the garden, reading. I do a tremendous amount of reading. I just read and read and read. Because I love it. I stay curoius about stuff. Friends come by and visit. That’s what my life is. Sometimes I go to ..... and hear what they’re doing. That’s my major musica outlet. I can’t go hear really good live music and still have a recliner to lie on. It’s really hard for me to go to the theater. I go to the ballet. I splurge to get a box seat so I can get my feet up on the other chair, but I can’t do very much of that. It’s hard to get in and out of the theater. I’s even hard to get in and out of a movie theater. I love the movies, and I like to see them in a theater. I never got the TV habit.
Bromberg: What pisses you off?
Ronstadt: The Republican inability to budge against Obama. I’m terrified the prisons are being privatized and there’s now quotas in all the states about how many people have to be arrested because they are for supplying those private prisons. It’s like the old prison farms in the South. I think that pisses me off more than anything. It’s really dangerous.
Bromberg: What would you tell your younger self, which I think is too amorphous, so what would you tell yourself being between 1 and 10?
Ronstadt: Learn how to play the piano.
Bromberg: 10 and 20.
Ronstadt: Be kind and generous to everybody and mind your manners.
Bromberg: 20 and 30.
Ronstadt: Oh, that’s a slippery age. Probably be kind and gracious and mind your manners. Don’t get overconfident.
Bromberg: 30 and 40.
Ronstadt: Now you see why you should have been kind and gracious and minded your manners.
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