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Post by the Scribe on Sept 11, 2016 1:49:45 GMT -5
RONSTADT Interview 1982 DOREEN ONUSKI
This is a very good interview of what it was like to be Linda Ronstadt in 1982.
Living In The USA Promo
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Post by memac62 on Sept 11, 2016 14:13:09 GMT -5
Is there a part 2?
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Post by the Scribe on Sept 12, 2016 16:01:35 GMT -5
I looked but I couldn't find one.
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Post by the Scribe on Sept 21, 2016 2:13:09 GMT -5
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Post by the Scribe on Sept 21, 2016 19:04:40 GMT -5
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Post by the Scribe on Oct 26, 2016 3:21:45 GMT -5
an oft looked over interview: MIX ONLINE www.mixonline.com/news/profiles/linda-ronstadt/365380 Linda RonstadtGOTTA SING! Author: DAN DALEY GOTTA SING!It is the hottest day of the summer so far in Nashville - 102 degrees - and Linda Ronstadt is in town working on her Christmas album (A Merry Little Christmas). But contrasts have characterized her entire career. Though she was a major influence in defining country-rock music, putting songs by Hank Williams and Holland/Dozier/Holland on the same recordings was the norm for her. This day, she is working with her longtime engineer/producer and Nashville resident George Massenburg and John Boylan, a producer who worked with Ronstadt at the very beginning of her solo career and again in its more recent and mature iterations. Ronstadt's never been one to sit still for long, stylistically. From her first chart success with her L.A. bar band the Stone Poneys, through her Peter Asher-produced mega-hits of the '70s, which found her interpreting country, Motown, rock `n' roll and the creme de la creme of SoCal (and other) singer/songwriters, to her fascinating explorations of classic pop vocal music (the albums with the Nelson Riddle Orchestra), light opera (The Pirates of Penzance), opera (La Boheme), Mexican folk music (Canciones De Mi Padre and Mas Canciones), trio singing with Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris, children's music and more, Ronstadt has touched a lot of bases. What runs through it all is her passion for singing and intelligent arrangement and a certain integrity she brings to every project. Ronstadt left her mark on more than the record business; her devotion to the craft of singing influenced many audio professionals. Massenburg, who first worked with her in 1974 recording "Keep Me From Blowing Away" at a studio in Silver Springs, Md., observes, "Working with Linda has been the most important artistic relationship of my life. This is the woman from whom I learned what singing is - the power and the charm and the importance of the story." Up close, Ronstadt is intensely knowledgeable about the mechanics of singing and the cultural contexts of every genre she passes through and is laissez-faire about the success part. For her, judgments are not made by RIAA-awarded Platinum trophies but by an internal meter she alone reads. "I know when I've done something well, and when I've done something not so well," she states. Her knowledge of the motor effects of native language on vocalization and the history of Latin and classical music is extensive. A conversation with Ronstadt is like a journey planned by a mischievous travel agent - unscripted, landing in unexpected ports of call at unexpected moments. But it is invariably a fascinating itinerary. What are your earliest studio memories? Was it with the Stone Poneys? Earlier than that. There was Lee Furr, who was associated with George Massenburg in the early days in Baltimore. There was a studio called Copper State Recording Company in Tucson owned by Foster Cayce where Lee worked as an engineer. We recorded there with my brother Peter and my sister Suzy. We were a folk group called the New Union Ramblers. There was a lot of seminal stuff happening there, but I was very dedicated to traditional music - most of us in my family [were], because we did a lot of traditional Mexican music in the family. I never had a real fondness for mainstream music. Even when I was kid, I didn't like "How Much Is That Doggie in the Window." I knew there was something better. And I liked the Mexican music that I heard. It made you feel like you knew where you lived. That kind of regional music is almost gone now; radio has really destroyed it. But radio also gave me a taste for bluegrass music and a wish to emulate it. Because I heard it so early, I can sing around that kind of music, but I don't have that kind of authenticity that Emmylou or Dolly has. They were raised in the South; I was raised in the Southwest. You certainly sound comfortable in the country and bluegrass idioms. I really have a whole theory about languages and what they develop in the musculature of the larynx, and the language that you grow up speaking determines what will be all the colorations of your voice. There's something about Scottish Gaelic and Irish Gaelic and Welsh that puts you way up on the top of your voice that makes trills very accessible. Same way with the kind of singing that they do in New Orleans, which comes from French Baroque opera. Because the Creoles all sent their children to be educated in Europe, they came back speaking and singing French. In French Baroque opera, the men go right into the falsetto. The idea of belting the high notes was more from the Italian opera around the turn of the century. So the kind of music that Aaron Neville sings is not like the rest of R&B throughout the South; it is Catholic, it's French Baroque, and when he goes up high he goes into falsetto and does the trills. In opera in the 18th century, you were expected to bring your own embellishments. You read the text, but you were also expected to embellish freely. So in a sense, opera was like jazz; it was improvisational. So when you hear someone who comes from the Protestant side of R&B, like Wilson Pickett, they were belters. And someone like Aaron sings like a choirboy. That's the 18th-century singing technique. I sing from a Mexican point of view. Dolly sings from generations of people that spoke Scottish or Irish Gaelic. It was preserved there. The pronunciation of English is still affected by the history of that language. Why did you and Emmy and Dolly work so well together vocally? It was completely from sound. When Dolly and I and Emmy sang, it was a beautiful and different sound I've never heard before. I analyzed it years later. Dolly's voice has a real horn-like quality on the top. My voice is thicker and bigger - it's like lead on the bottom. That was the key to it - the three voices were so different. On the Trio records, how did you record the vocals - ensemble or individually? We did them as individual parts, because we didn't have the luxury of spending a lot of time together on a tour bus, and we never performed together. So knowing how each other's moves are going to go takes years. But we all sing totally differently with totally different instincts in terms of phrasing. With a woman's voice, it's whether you're on the edge of falsetto or on the edge of chest. So Emmy will sing from the chest, but the falsetto keeps mixing in all the time. That's what makes her have that crystalline quality in her voice - it sounds like cracked crystal sometimes. The crystal parts are incredibly clear. We'd work the parts out together. I did most of the harmony arranging, and Emmy helped a lot with the instrumental arranging. That way we could see exactly where each of us went into falsetto. Were you involved in choosing microphones? I know nothing about technical stuff. It mutates faster than a virus. That's why I have someone like George [Massenburg]. If you don't have the ability to think intuitively and musically, then you can get bogged down in that. There are people who are going to make music regardless of how technical they are. But there are a lot of people who get bogged down in it. I don't care two beans about it. I know what the machines can do, I know what the different echo units sound like, I know what they can give me. But I don't like to learn their names. It's like alphabet soup with a handful of numbers thrown in. I always rename them, like "Fluffy" or "Spot." I don't have a computer, a TV, I don't have a microwave, a dishwasher - anything that blinked in my house, I threw it out. Where was Different Drum recorded? At Capitol Studios [in L.A.]. I wanted to make a bluegrass record. I was attached to traditional music, and here's this orchestrated thing, and I didn't like it... So you were dragged kicking and screaming into the music business? How kicking and screaming can you be when you don't have any money, and you don't have a [record] deal? So you do what you're told. I was very surprised when it was a hit. I was staggered, because I didn't think it was very good. I think we did maybe three takes of it, and maybe the record was take two. But at least we had ambient rooms. See, as much as I'm a Luddite, I'm a haranguer for room ambience. I love room ambience. And the worst thing that happened to us in the '70s was that everybody went into these little tiny rooms that were so ungratifying. The carpeting alone was enough to kill you if you were allergic to it. I left a studio in L.A., because they put in carpeting, Val Garay's Studio. So how did you reconcile your musical instincts with the pop music business? I remember The Byrds were happening and doing folk-rock, and I thought, there you go. So I went to the Troubador. I grew up singing Mexican music, and that's based on indigenous Mexican rhythms. Mexican music also has an overlay of West African music, based on huapango drums, and it's kind of like a 6/8 [time signature], but it really is a very syncopated 6/8. And that's how I attack vocals. Rock `n' roll comes from black music, and I came from Mexican music. But when you sang country, like "I Can't Help It if I'm Still in Love With You," it sounded like an homage. But when you sang R&B, like "Heat Wave," it didn't sound like Motown at all. I didn't know how to phrase it. The only reason I sang "Heat Wave" was because we had a club act, and when you have a club band you have to have fast stuff. I was a ballad singer. I would have been happy for the rest of my life singing "Heart Like a Wheel." But in the clubs you needed stuff like "Heat Wave" and "When Will I Be Loved." Peter Asher did a great job with the track on "You're No Good," but the vocal's terrible. I just didn't know how to sing it. I think the track really helped to sell it. Speaking of Peter Asher, what was it like to find producers that you could work with? The reason I started to work with Peter Asher, when I showed him "Heart Like a Wheel," which I'd taken to a couple of other producers who thought it was too corny, it won't be a hit, he thought it was charming, and he loved it. And he understood why I wanted to record it and understood why I wanted a cello on it. He understood the McGarrigle Sisters [writers of the song] - if people don't get the McGarrigle Sisters, I don't get them. I've had people say they sound like they've been eating goat meat, but they have an eccentric, beautiful sound. As soon as I started working with John Boylan, I started co-producing myself. I was always a part of my productions. But I always needed a producer who would carry out my whims. Producers work in a lot of different ways. They either work autonomously or work as a collaborator. When I worked with John and Peter, they did that. They also brought some balance. I'm not very organized. Sometimes I asked for things that weren't realistic, or too expensive, or that were so flat-out, non-commercial that had we done a record with that we wouldn't have made another one. Left to my own devices, I would have just become an opera singer. What was the studio environment in the '70s with Peter Asher? A lot of camaraderie. We rehearsed with the same band that we recorded with and went on the road with. It was sort of a seamless unit. We were also one of the first artists to give points to the band. I think Jackson [Browne] and I were the only artists besides Elvis Presley that were giving points to the band. What that did is it made it more of a collaboration. One of the skills of a good producer or the savvy of an artist is figuring out how to cast the music with the players you hire. And once you get those players, you want to hang on to them. Our stage versions sounded exactly like the records. You were recording much of the material live in the studio in those days, weren't you? I didn't learn how to overdub vocals until I met George Massenburg. George Massenburg taught me and Peter Asher how to overdub vocals. He's a genius at it. And Peter has learned it seamlessly. One of the things that I like about Peter is that he's not afraid to learn something. He's not a know-it-all. By the time Heart Like a Wheel came out, the studio band had really coalesced. How did the band evolve in the studio from making country-rock records to rock records? All I did was try to do things I admired. Of course, they didn't come out sounding anything like that, but that was me. People don't realize how much George Jones copied Hank Williams, or how much Ray Charles copied Nat Cole when they were starting out. I tried to copy anything I heard - Judy Collins or Bill Monroe. I didn't care much for female country singers 'til Dolly Parton and Emmy, 'cause they just sound so twangy. So I always tried to sing like the men. And I wound up sounding twangy anyway. [Laughs.] Those are real guitar-oriented records... And I hate guitars! Took me years and years to deal with that. But those records were characterized by the triple guitar harmony parts... Those were all my ideas. The arrangement for "That'll Be the Day" was all mine from beginning to end, including the rhythm guitar parts. The only guitar I like is Ry Cooder. And David Lindley, I would think. I'd rather hear him play some other instrument. I just don't like guitars. [Laughs.] You were working in the studio with some very brilliant and assertive talents, like Asher, Andrew Gold, J.D. Souther. Was there a hierarchy in the studio for those records? We needed someone to keep order, and Peter was very good at that. The band would put ideas on the table, and we'd try them. I usually came in with the songs and the direction I wanted to go in. I also came up with the arrangement ideas. Like "When Will I Be Loved" - I had ideas for the rhythm parts and the solo. I took ideas from a lot of places, and we'd try things. If I brought in an R&B song, the more country I'd try to do it; put a pedal steel guitar and dobro and bluegrass harmonies. And if I brought in a country song, the more rock `n' roll we'd try to do it. How would you characterize your working relationship with Peter Asher? Peter was very good, because he was very organized. He did what he could to try to help me fulfill what I was trying to do. At the same time, he had his eye on the charts. And that's a tight line to walk. I don't walk that line well. And often I think we fell more onto the commercial side of the line, and I didn't like them very much. It wasn't his fault. It was my fault. Maybe I should have been more...There's just so much pressure on you to succeed, and making a successful record means you get to do another record. So there were certain things that I protected that I had to have a certain way, and the other things I allowed them to be as they needed commercially. There's nothing wrong with being manipulated, as long as you know who you are and everyone's in agreement about it. And I think that's what Peter does well. George Massenburg is a recurring character in your career. Get Closer [1982] was the first record I made all the way through with George. I'd been trying to work with George for years. I had met him in the early '70s. He had cut one of the tracks, "Keep Me From Blowing Away," on Heart Like a Wheel. I got sick, and I stayed in Washington, and we decided to go into a studio there. John Starling introduced me to George, and he was wonderful in the studio. He moved out to L.A., and I told Peter about him and wanted to work with him, but when you've been with a person for a long time, like we were with [engineer] Val Garay, you don't want to change. So it took awhile. Did you have a microphone that you especially liked to use for your vocals? There was one that we loved that the capsule was damaged in some way. We used it on everything, but it broke while we were doing one of the Nelson Riddle records. It broke in the middle of the session. The capsule just screamed and melted. [Massenburg knew the microphone immediately - a Neumann U67, which he had purchased years before from Deane Jensen. "It was in the middle of a Nelson Riddle session," he recalls. "It made a squeal, a pop and it was dead. The capsule was very beaten up, and it touched the backplate and shorted out. It was one of those 0.7-micron capsules that cost as much as a car." And both confirm that the microphone itself is bequeathed to Ronstadt in Massenburg's will.] What studios were you fond of in L.A.? I didn't care particularly, as long as it had an ambient room. We worked out of Sunset Sound for a long time. I didn't record at Gold Star, but I remember walking into a session that Phil Spector was producing, and there were three rhythm guitars stacked up and three different-sized tambourines and maracas and castanets, all stacked up on the backbeat. That's what gave it that wall of sound. They were orchestrated records; they put strings on them, but that wasn't part of the effect - it was really how he stacked the backbeat. And for my whole life, I wanted to do that. You had big drum sounds on your records. All big drums do is knock the vocal out. Those records, the way they were stacked, there was room to put the vocals in. The stuff was stacked above and below, and Phil Spector knew how to record women's voices. The problem with rock `n' roll, if you take a Neil Young song that was written in the right key for his voice, when you change the key you lose the voicings. But he sang in a falsetto, so it was easy for me to cover, because there was room for the vocal to fit. That's why for me to sing a song like "Back in the U.S.A." is just a waste of my time. As interesting and innovative as that material and Chuck Berry were, it was written by a guitar player to give him something to do while he was waiting to take his guitar solo and do a duckwalk across the stage. There's nothing for a singer to do. Ditto for Buddy Holly. So why did you do those songs? Because we didn't have enough songs. I'd come into the studio with five ballads, like "Heart Like a Wheel." And we needed uptempo material to fill out the records. And how did you feel about the fact that those were the ones that became such big hits? I was so sad that those were hits. I always hoped that something like "Heart Like a Wheel" would be the hit. Then I got stuck singing them year after year, until I decided to stop singing them. Was your dissatisfaction with that situation part of what drew you to such a radical shift in focus toward the big band material? That came about because I was sick of what I was singing, and I knew there was better material. All of pop music written in the first 50 years of this century was better than all of the songs written in the second 50 years. I wanted those songs. I don't like to take material out of its period, which I had done with country-rock, but all of a sudden I wanted to seat it firmly in its period. See, it's not fair to those songs [to sing them] without a context. And I'd always been the queen of eclectic mania, with R&B and country and Motown on the same record. But the standards were meant to be supported a certain way. If you put an orchestra on three chords, it's just a waste of the orchestra, because there's just not enough musical complexity for the orchestra to speak. But things that were written by Gershwin had a lot for the orchestra to get its teeth in. All of those passing tones and incredibly complex chords that came out of the New Modernism of the turn of the 20th century. Charles Ives was the first one, and Gershwin took it up with a vengeance and made it accessible. Why Nelson was so important was that he took jazz and combined it with the orchestra and compromised neither genre. Both of them flourished under his approach. With Winter Light, We Ran and your records of the 1990s, you finally chose to credit yourself as producer. Around the same time, you also produced records for other artists for the first time, including David Lindley's Very Greasy (1988, co-produced with Edd Kolakowski), Jimmy Webb's Suspending Disbelief (1993, with George Massenburg) and Aaron Neville's Warm Your Heart (1991, also with Massenburg). What led you into production? The reason I produced Aaron and David's records, they both had played as sidemen on my records, they saw how I worked and saw how much input I had on the records, and they asked me to produce them. And the reason I really wanted to do David's record was I had heard him live and wanted to make a record that sounded like it was onstage. For me, recording is always working from memory. I have to have heard something, and it plays in my head like a jukebox. And because I'm a technophobe, you have to have a good working relationship with a good engineer who understands how you speak in metaphor, and you have to have enough of a common bibliography of records. So I can turn to George and say, "Remember how the guitars sounded on that record?" With Jimmy's record, we stretched the budget so we could get the orchestration on it that we wanted. I think he, along with Brian Wilson, are the songwriters in the second half of the century that really can write for singers. And there's no one else but Jimmy who can write for the orchestra, as well. His songs are so range-y that few people could actually sing them. Whereas Gershwin could write for the sweet spot of the singer, Jimmy will send his own vocals off the edge - he takes incredible chances. Maybe a lot of your pop career in the 1970s was, in a sense, building up a kind of capital to allow you to do what you wanted later. Yeah! And I did! [Laughs.] [The record label] said, "We don't think you should work with Nelson Riddle - it's going to be the end of your career." And I just looked at them like they had four heads. I thought, this isn't a joke, or a choice. When I open my mouth, that's what's going to come out. It was the same way with Mexican music. It wasn't a choice. I opened my mouth, and everything came out in Spanish. It had just been waiting in line, backed up like cattle in the chute in my brain, all waiting to come out. Has George Massenburg been your main technical translator? There's no one like George. One time I had Russ Kunkel playing on "Don't Talk" [from Winter Light]. I told Russ I wanted a cymbal swell. I said I wanted it to sound like a bubble coming up from a lava lamp, and he got it right away. I relate sounds to real things. When I was a kid growing up, all the B-29 [bombers] came back from the war to Tucson, where the aircraft graveyard is. Every B-29 that went to the war flew over my house on its way home. And the sound of it is like the cellos and double basses that I've put on my arrangements. It's a low grind, the way those engines would [resonate] with each other. It's on "After the Goldrush" we did on Trio. They're stacked under the vocal, and it's the same way the engines would tune against each other. And on Winter Light, I tried to make everything understated, like it was just a halo or a shadow of what the parts were. Very different from the big hits days when everything was loud and brash. That was the style in those days. And who's to say what's better? I don't like any records. I don't ever listen to records at home. I don't like recorded sound, because I'm used to hearing it live. I hate CDs, because, more than anything else, they destroyed my interest and my ability to enjoy recorded music. Also, CDs are small. You needed a space in your home to play vinyl - the records were big and the equipment you played was big. You didn't just bring it up to the bathroom. I don't like to listen to music as background. I like it live, but I won't go to an arena. I don't like it in a huge hall. And I prefer it acoustic. Once it goes through electronics, it's never going to be the same. Medieval churches - those places were sound machines. They were wonder machines. The architecture stimulates different hemispheres in the brain. So who wants to go into the Staples Center [in L.A.] and try to play music? It's a dramatically hideous place from the outside and the inside. When things shifted from the Troubador era to the arena era, people stopped going to see each other play. When I would see Joni Mitchell at the Troubador, I would stay for every song and hear it all. Same with Jackson and Neil Young. You just don't do that with arenas. You can't hear the nuance in the music. It's changed the way that we play music. Then television finished music off. It was the deathblow. It used to be that people would go to hear gifted musicians who were in their area. Recordings tend to invalidate local productions. And the recording industry's most damaging aspect has been that people don't do their own singing anymore. We delegate singing to professionals. We put it on a disc. In the 18th century, there were volumes of music that were written for various stages of intimacy. It was a way to identify and process your feelings. You could sing out your broken heart all alone or use it to express your feelings to another person. We've taken away from people the ability to do it themselves. I think everyone should sing, and everyone should dance.
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Post by the Scribe on May 27, 2017 9:01:49 GMT -5
Linda Ronstadt: The Best Singers and Songs
radioopensource.org/linda-ronstadt-riffing-on-the-best-ever-singers-and-songs/#
When I bend my ear to a singer’s performance, I often try to track who it was that influenced him or her. For instance, I can hear Nat “King” Cole in early Ray Charles, Lefty Frizzell in early Merle Haggard, Rosa Ponsell in Maria Callas, Fats Domino in Randy Newman. In a recent duet with Tony Bennett, the late Amy Winehouse was channeling Dinah Washington and Billie Holiday to great effect, yet she still sounded like Amy Winehouse… Linda Ronstadt in Simple Dreams: A Musical Memoir.
This is fun. Linda Ronstadt, the multi-platinum queen of crossover singing — country and folk rock to Puccini’s “La Boheme” to Gilbert & Sullivan on Broadway to flamenco to Mexican wedding songs to the Great American Songbook and duets with Sinatra — throws out the line in her memoir Simple Dreams that the American popular song is the greatest gift this country ever presented to the world. So for a Coolidge Corner movie house packed with loving boomers, we’re just riffing here about singers and songs — the personal favorites, the masterpieces, the ones we called “pop” and “love songs” that may last as long as Schubert and Brahms.
It is touching to hear this modest star say that she was never competitive, didn’t chase hits, but realized at midlife that she’d always aspired to raise the best material she could find to the distinction of “art songs.” So, doubtless, did Frank Sinatra, Smokey Robinson, Rosemary Clooney, Marvin Gaye, Frank Loesser, Sarah Vaughan… Judgment takes a while, even among the principals — as in Ira Gershwin’s famous line that “we never knew how good our songs were until I heard Ella Fitzgerald sing them.”
But Linda Ronstadt was a sport when I asked: could we close with a fast baker’s dozen of pearls in the pop music of our times — songs we could send to Mars to show what’s possible.
13. Someone to Watch over Me, from the Gershwins, Ella Fitzgerald and Nelson Riddle. 12. Little Girl Blue, from Rodgers and Hart, Janis Joplin and Nina Simone. 11. Billy Strayhorn’s Lush Life, the song Sinatra couldn’t handle but Johnny Hartman and John Coltrane immortalized. 10. What’s New? by Bob Haggart and Johnny Burke. This is the Linda Ronstadt version with Nelson Riddle. And then there’s Coltrane. 9. The Londonderry Air, the melody of “Danny Boy,” which my mother sang every day of our young lives to the words: “Would God I Were the Tender Apple Blossom.” “The most beautiful melody ever,” as Linda said, but it’s Irish! at least till Ben Webster found it and wouldn’t let it go. 8. George and Ira Gershwin’s “Embraceable You,” the Sarah Vaughan version with Clifford Brown and Roy Haynes. 7. A Frank Loesser threesome: Marlon Brando singing “I’ll Know When My Love Comes Along” in the movie Guys and Dolls. “Never never will I marry,” a Linda choice. Betty Carter and Ray Charles singing “Baby It’s Cold Outside,” my pick, and “one of my favorites of all time ever, ever, ever,” Linda said. 6. Al Hibbler singing Duke Ellington’s “Do Nothing till you hear from Me.” 5. “Famous Blue Raincoat,” Jennifer Warnes singing Leonard Cohen’s song. 4. Estrella Morente, singing “En el alto del cerro de palomares.” 3. Lola Bertran singing Paloma Negra. 2. Trio Calavera, singing “almost anything.” 1. Marvin Gaye singing “What’s going On?” “O my God, I kissed Marvin Gaye one night… He was vocalist extraordinaire,” Linda said, at the crossroads of jazz, R’n’B and pop. “And he was a good kisser. No question, this is an art song!”
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Post by the Scribe on Jun 8, 2017 9:44:16 GMT -5
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Post by the Scribe on Jul 13, 2017 18:27:02 GMT -5
Linda Ronstadt on the Tucson Mariachi Conference and her mariachi recordsPublished on Mar 16, 2015 The Tucson International Mariachi Conference becomes the site where singer Linda Ronstadt fulfills a childhood dream, and in turn inspires a generation of young mariachi students. Linda Ronstadt shares her story, along with commentary from Becky Montano and Richard Carranza.Linda Ronstadt at Los Cenzontles Linda Ronstadt talks skipping class, career highs and music legends at Tucson's Sunday Evening Forum Published on Oct 5, 2014 Tucson's sweetheart, Linda Ronstadt, came back to the Old Pueblo to take part in the acclaimed Sunday Evening Forum at the Fox Theater. Only KGUN9 captured her candid conversation.more interviews here:www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUMq4sB5dsC91Z_OfAY3PVOSL6XhhTegv
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Post by the Scribe on Aug 25, 2017 7:46:00 GMT -5
This is an amazing podcast. Very in-depth. The written transcript below is just a portion of the interview. If you have the time listen!The stories behind the legendary singer. Excerpted from “Linda Ronstadt,” January 24, 2014.
podcast:
www.commonwealthclub.org/events/archive/podcast/linda-ronstadt-12414 www.commonwealthclub.org/events/archive/transcript/linda-ronstadtLINDA RONSTADT, Grammy Award-winning Musician; Author, Simple Dreams: A Musical Memoir
In conversation with BARBARA MARSHMAN, Editorial Pages Editor, San Jose Mercury News
BARBARA MARSHMAN: You had some difficult times; your mother was ill for a long time. [But in many ways your childhood] just sounds idyllic, growing up in a musical family.
LINDA RONSTADT: I always say, “Tucson: Where spring is not a promise, it’s a threat.” Everything stings you and there’s thorns and everything bites you. But if you’re desert-born, there’s something that happens to your soul. You get very into that terrible discomfort [laughter] and I still go back.
MARSHMAN: Since you mention the desert, one of my favorite characters in the book, and one of the best drawn, is Murphy the pony. The astonishing thing was that you would go out with a girlfriend in the desert all day, and sometimes Murphy would throw you, and so on. You were five years old.
RONSTADT: Oh, Murphy was so cute! It would sound like child abuse, but in those days that was the way it was; you got up in the morning, you got your clothes on, you went out, you found the gang – if there was a gang, because we lived pretty far from other people. I was really just so grateful to have a friend at the age of five. She was seven and she could do everything that I could do, but way better. So I thought that I couldn’t do anything at all well. I just followed her around. She had a really nice pony. Her pony didn’t buck, but mine did. I spent a lot of time on the ground. [Laughter.] Our parents cared about us. They fed us and everything like that, but they just didn’t hover over us. I’m a very opposite kind of parent. I’m one of those [that say] “Oh be careful, you’re going to get hurt!”
MARSHMAN: So you didn’t let your kids ride their ponies across the desert by themselves at five?
RONSTADT: We had a pony for about five minutes. I moved back to Tucson, and nobody had a pony anymore because everything had been developed. All the places where ponies were going to live had grown houses. But we had a weird little pony that I brought to my house and kept in the back yard. But there were military planes flying over and it scared him. He wasn’t very friendly; he would rear up and try to hit us with its front hooves, so I sent him back to “Ponyville.”
MARSHMAN: I wondered if the freedom of being able to do something like that as a child was part of nurturing your creativity almost as much as your musical family [was].
RONSTADT: Maybe it’s part of [why I] couldn’t stay anyplace for five minutes. I couldn’t stay with any kind of music. I would just move to the next place. I was very restless. I put together a compilation of duets recently that they’re going to release in some form or other. I put that together, and it was from this time to that time, and there was nothing that was like the one before. They were so wildly different. I thought, “This is the craziest career anybody could possibly have. Who is this person?” It was me. [Laughter.] It was rampant eclecticism. It was like a different voice. It was like watching a chameleon change colors. No wonder my audience got confused; I confused myself. I was only doing one thing at a time, so it seemed like I was doing it for a really long time, but then I would listen back to earlier things and say, “Oh, I really had to move on from that. I didn’t want to stay there.”
MARSHMAN: You sang a great deal as a child with your family. Your father had a tremendous voice, didn’t he?
RONSTADT: He had a beautiful voice, probably the best voice in the family. And everybody loved it when he sang. He wouldn’t stand up and say, “Listen to me sing!” It would just happen. We’d be driving in the car, and he’d start singing something and I’d sing in harmony and somebody else would start singing a third part. We’d be at the dinner table, and my father would just start singing. We weren’t allowed to read at the dinner table, but we were allowed to sing. Couldn’t bring a magazine, but you could sing all you wanted. My father would call me up on the phone, and he’d start singing something and I’d sing with him. Somebody might just hear me singing this harmony to nothing. The other person that I do that with a lot is Emmylou Harris. She and I sing stuff together – McGarrigle Sisters songs, which we love wildly. She’ll say, “I heard the new McGarrigle record is out and it goes like this.” And I’d start singing the harmony because I already had the record. It’s so nice to have a friend like that who understands that you need to sing over the phone together. That’s a good friend.
MARSHMAN: After one semester of college you packed up and –
RONSTADT: That’s all they could stand of me. I would get up in the morning after working at some club the night before. I’d stay out till all godly hours, then I’d go to sleep for about five minutes. I had this 7:40 anthropology class that was taught by this teaching assistant. There were 1,500 people in there; it was in the dark and he would be droning on and on. It was just awful. It was like abuse. I’d have to get up at 5:50 in the morning, and I was always too tired. I’d get up at the last minute and put my coat on over my flannel nightgown, because it’s cold in the desert, and I’d get there and I’d fall asleep in the 7:40 class because the guy was up there droning on and on. Then I would go out and I would forget where I’d parked the car because I was so sleepy. By that time, the sun was up in the desert, so it would go from 38 degrees to 78 degrees. So I’d be in my hot, sweaty nightgown afraid to take my coat off because there I’d be in my nightgown, and I couldn’t find the car anywhere. So I just figured I wasn’t cut out for college. [Laughter.] I like reading, so I just read a lot of books, but I didn’t go to the class.
MARSHMAN: So [one day] you announced to your parents that you were moving to LA and left.
RONSTADT: They were sad. My mother cried and my father said, “You’re making a big mistake.” And I said, “Well, I just have to go. There aren’t enough good clubs in Tucson to play in.” Tucson had a great music history in the early days before there was a radio. There was a good musical community there. My grandfather was the conductor of the oompah band that played all the military affairs and played serenades. Whatever you wanted music for, you had to call my grandfather. He was a rancher, but he conducted the band – taught everyone how to play their instruments. And my aunt Luisa was a big star in the ’20s. She was a very well known singer. She went to Spain and collected a lot of traditional Spanish folk songs and dances, and she also went to northern Mexico and collected a lot of stuff from the Altar Valley. She became a scholar of that musical history. She sent this letter home to my grandfather saying – this was in the ’20s – she had met this guitar player and he was such a good guitar player that he could hold the audience when she went off to change her costume. She really wanted to bring him to the United States because she was sure he’d be a hit. And it was Andres Segovia. He was her Eagles. [Laughter.] It’s a Ronstadt tradition. You hire someone to be your backup person who’s going to become a way bigger star than you’ll ever dream of being.
MARSHMAN: That early time in Los Angeles and all of the folks who came together there, that must have been an astonishing community.
RONSTADT: We didn’t know that. We were just looking around, just trying to get that song, trying to write that song, or learn that song, or get somebody else who wrote that song to let you record it before they did. That’s what I mainly was doing. We were just together all the time, hanging out, playing; we didn’t think of it in terms of, “Oh there’s Jackson Browne, he’s a star!” Jackson Browne was a 16-year-old kid I met when I was 17. I thought he wrote really good songs, for instance, better than the people that I heard writing songs in Tucson. “Oh, they write some pretty good songs over here in California.” The next person I met was Ry Cooder, and I said, “They’ve got some pretty good guitar players here.” Ry was 18 and he was playing like a demon, like fire would come out of his fingers. He and Taj Mahal had a band called The Rising Sons. I went and heard them and thought, “Oh, they’ve got some good players here.” So I stayed. I could learn.
MARSHMAN: What is there to learning the music of a song?
RONSTADT: What usually attracts me about a song will be something in the chords. The way the chords are voiced can just reach in and grab your heart and rip on one of the ventricles, so that it causes really severe pain and you have to go to the emergency room. It’s like that: “Ow, that really hurt. Play it again.” [Laughter.] And it really disturbs me. It gives me a stomach ache. Jimmy Webb’s songs infallibly give me a stomach ache. They upset my stomach. I have to listen to them some more, so that I get really sick and throw up because I like them so much. It seems perverse, but it just is. There’s something in the chord, and then there’s something in the words, a phrase, and I think, “I’ve felt like that. That’s exactly the way I felt, but I couldn’t quite say it,” or, “I didn’t realize I felt like that. I didn’t realize I was quite so sad about that situation.” So you sing it for a while and you learn it. And three or four years later you’re singing it on stage and that situation is gone. Then you [think instead], “It was too bad that I went to the market today looking for bread and butter pickles and they didn’t have any, and I really feel bad because I wanted to make a pickle and cheese sandwich and there were no bread and butter pickles.” That’s what it becomes about while you’re on stage. It just changes. [You might think I’m] standing on stage remembering that guy that broke my heart in 1968, but I forgot about him forever ago. I can’t even remember his name or care.
MARSHMAN: How many songs did you actually write?
RONSTADT: Not very many. I only recorded two. I wrote a song called “Try Me Again,” which I gave Andrew Gold half credit for, but he didn’t write it. And I wrote half of “Winter Light” with Eric Kaz.
MARSHMAN: At the time, you were a little unusual in that most of the people who were prominent were writing and singing their own material.
RONSTADT: I just used the ones they didn’t use up. There were plenty left over and I was happy to have them.
MARSHMAN: Of course you also had a voice. [For example] Bob Dylan did not have a voice.
RONSTADT: Oh, no. Bob Dylan, please. Forget it! He’s a great singer. He has plenty of voice. He has a very wonderful, resonant voice with lots of rich story and lots of tones. He’s a really fine musician. He’s an excellent singer. He’s very in tune. He’s just a completely original-sounding singer. That’s hard to do. [Applause.] I’ve had this argument with myself about Bob Dylan. He didn’t sing “as good” as Otis Redding. Well, guess what, he was Bob Dylan. Why should he sing like Otis Redding?
The ‘70s was a phenomenon of the singer-songwriter. But what would happen was you’d get somebody who would spend his whole life having experiences and writing 12 songs that he could then record. Then that was it. Then he’d have to wait another lifetime to get another collection of songs. But Ella Fitzgerald never worried if she wrote a song. Billie Holiday could have cared less. She wrote a good song. She wrote “Strange Fruit.” I had to think about just exactly how to ask J.D. [Souther] or Jackson or one of those guys, “Can I please record that song?” I found a tape of me and Jackson Browne having this conversation where I was trying to get one of his songs, and he gave me one of Warren Zevon’s songs instead. It was “Poor Pitiful Me,” so that worked out pretty well. That same night, I was trying to talk J.D. into giving me this song called “Last In Love” and he said, “Why don’t you sing this song, ‘Blue Bayou’?” I’ve got all this on tape. I’ll have to put it on somebody’s website.
MARSHMAN: The industry is so different today from when you started. You had to deal with record companies and things like that. But you also got a lot of things done for you.
RONSTADT: It’s unrecognizable. They were gatekeepers. It’s just like the news. What do we do if we don’t have The New York Times to be fact checkers? We used to have the local papers that had their own fact checkers. All the news shouldn’t come out of New York.
American pop music is a little saggy these days, because there aren’t these gatekeepers. It’s kind of great that anybody can make a record. [If] you’ve got a laptop and you know how to work Pro Tools, you can kind of figure it out. But everybody can make a record. There’s such a huge amount of stuff out there. I think you do the same thing you always do. You find a way to get in front of an audience and you start singing about stuff and it either resonates with people or it doesn’t. But it’s harder. Art is not about competition. It’s about cooperation. Art is a conspiracy. The word conspirus is a Latin word meaning “to breathe together.” So when you’re singing together in a choir, or singing a duet, you’re forming a conspiracy to commit beauty, to commit understanding and commit revelation, commit magic. That’s what you do with music.
MARSHMAN: What has been your most challenging project and why?
RONSTADT: There were the ones I failed at utterly. You didn’t get to hear a lot of those. I didn’t do so well singing real true opera. I didn’t have the training for it. I went and sang “La Bohème.” I sang Mimi in “La Bohème,” and it was great for me because I got to learn it in a way that you don’t learn it unless you sing it. It’s a very intimate relationship that you have with music that you’ve learned. But I just didn’t do it well enough. So I sang it for a while, and then I came home. Now I hear somebody else sing it and I know this girl Mimi really well and the other people who come on the stage are like old friends. It was a great experience for me, but I don’t know that it was so good for the audience. [Laughter.]
MARSHMAN: So tell us about that was an extremely challenging success.
RONSTADT: The standards were really hard. The thing about the standards is they’ve got to sound easy. And they’re so hard. There’s no room for forgiveness. You can’t be an inch out of tune. Your voice is completely exposed. You’ve got to be able to hold that note. There’s no vibrato. You’ve just got to have precision singing. I used to think of myself on an elevator going right up to that note. I’d get out at that floor. It was really hard, but it was worth it when I got to when I was singing and I wasn’t thinking at all. I was just swimming. I used to say it felt like I was swimming in cream. The first time I ever started singing with Nelson Riddle and the Orchestra, I just thought, “This is heaven. This is as good as it gets.”
And the Mexican stuff was very difficult to learn, to be at a professional level. I’d sung it with my family and I’d remember the first [line]; I couldn’t remember the rest of the verse, but somebody else would. A cousin would put it in. But you can’t do that when you’re up on the stage professionally. You have to know all the words. For the first show I did, it was so hard to learn all that stuff in Spanish that I was really nervous. When you’re nervous, your mind just goes blank. We didn’t have those monitors yet with the lyrics. There were a couple songs I didn’t know and I had a really nice costume with a fan. I put the words on the fan, but I can’t see without my glasses. [Laughter.] It was hopeless.
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Post by the Scribe on Apr 12, 2018 1:45:43 GMT -5
Linda Ronstadt Interview 02-14-2018
Wake Up Tucson
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Post by the Scribe on Nov 4, 2018 4:28:36 GMT -5
Stone Poneys feat. Linda Ronstadt - Interview plus New hard times 1967
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Post by Guest PA on Nov 5, 2018 11:14:01 GMT -5
That MIX interview is super. Thanks for posting. Should be highlighted.
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Post by the Scribe on Nov 8, 2018 4:20:22 GMT -5
Linda Ronstadt interview
jeremiah johnson Published on Oct 19, 2018 Bargain Deals Here!: bit.ly/JJdeals Linda Ronstadt interviewThis is a newly recorded version of the soundtrack to Cinderella, with Linda Ronstadt singing "A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes" (in English and in Spanish), Take 6 singing "The Work Song," Bobby McFerrin singing "Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo (The Magic Song)," and James Ingram singing "So This Is Love," plus the orchestral score, which takes up half the album. (Jazz instrumentalists David Benoit and David Sanborn are also named on the album cover and shown in photographs, and though their specific contributions are not noted, they are heard on a "Cinderella Medley.") The singers are good, especially Ronstadt, who is typically warm, and McFerrin, who has lots of fun duetting with himself, though it's not clear why it was necessary to add new lyrics to some of the songs. The score remains an appealing 1940s effort. All Music Review Disney Greatest Hits - (Linda Ronstadt - A Dream Is A Wish Your Heart Makes)Un Precioso Sueno .. a walk to Cinderella's Castle**********************************************************************************From a Disney special: When You Wish Upon A Star (Linda Ronstadt)
DISNEY CLASSIC - SOMEDAY MY PRINCE WILL COME - LINDA RONSTADT
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Post by the Scribe on Nov 8, 2018 4:33:00 GMT -5
Ronstadt
AP Archive Published on Aug 14, 2018 (24 Aug 1993) STORY Linda Ronstadt
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Post by the Scribe on Nov 8, 2018 4:49:46 GMT -5
mbroders Published on May 10, 2009 Dolly, Linda and Emmylou from an interview given to Swedish Television around their 2'nd album.
Trio - Interview and live songs part 1/3
Trio - Interview and live songs part 2/3
Trio - Interview and live songs part 3/3
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Post by the Scribe on Nov 8, 2018 6:22:48 GMT -5
You have probably seen parts of this interview in other contexts, but this is a fuller interview of Linda from her apex in the 1970s. I have no idea what program this is, so anyone who does know, please enlighten: Rare Linda Ronstadt 1970s interview talks about The Eagles
70sTVchannel Published on Oct 23, 2018 Full Dvd available at 70s-tv.com. Title is Linda Ronstadt: Rare TV Appearances. Packed with long forgotten footage of her in her prime....and get a hold of this, because you never know, it might get yanked.
According to the information available this is the May 23, 1975-Old Grey whistle test interview. The Youtube page for this video states: The Linda Ronstadt Rare TV appearances DVD contents are: December 17, 1969-Mike Douglas 1. Silver threads and golden needles 2. Break my mind October 1970-Darin Invasion 1. Long, long time 1970-Something Else 1. Baby you've been on my mind November 3, 1973-In Concert 1. Love has no pride 2. Fill my eyes 3. First cut is the deepest November 20, 1974-Don Kirshner's Rock concert(upgrade) 1. It doesn't matter anymore 2. When will I be loved 3. Heart like a wheel 4. You're no good 5. You can close your eyes 6. Faithless Love 7. Silver threads and golden needles December 31, 1974-Rockin' New Year's Eve 1. Love has no pride 2. You're no good May 23, 1975-Old Grey whistle test Amazing 12 minute interviewDecember 6, 1975-Capitol Theatre, NJ 1. When will I be loved November 28, 1976-Hits a GoGo 1. Lo Siento Mi Vida 2. That'll be the day June 18, 1980-Studio 3 1. Mad Love January 8, 1983-Champs Elysees 1. Lies February 2, 1983-Plantine 45 1. Lies The only interview listed on the DVD is the May 23, 1975-Old Grey whistle test interview. The interview is 10.38 long as opposed to the stated 12 minutes.
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Post by fabtastique on Nov 9, 2018 6:59:32 GMT -5
Linda looks so cute in that interview about When You Wish Upon A Star !
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Post by the Scribe on Nov 10, 2018 1:24:05 GMT -5
Linda looks so cute in that interview about When You Wish Upon A Star !
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Post by the Scribe on Nov 28, 2018 4:13:16 GMT -5
Tara on TMA: Alanna Nash's Linda Ronstadt Interview
Ted Tatman Published on Sep 1, 2013 August 29, 2013: WTMA, Charleston morning radio host Tara Servatius talks to noted author Alanna Nash about Nash's recent AARP.org Q&A feature with singer Linda Ronstadt. (Nash's interview with Ronstadt was largely responsible for the world finding out about Ronstadt's Parkinson's disease diagnosis.)
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Post by the Scribe on Feb 1, 2019 23:57:55 GMT -5
Linda Ronstadt: 'I'm not afraid of dying'Linda Ronstadt talks to 'CBS Sunday Morning' about her life, career and music. (CBS Sunday Morning) Hal Boedeker Hal BoedekerContact Reporter Orlando Sentinel
Linda Ronstadt, one of the country’s most influential singers, is giving an interview on her life and career to “CBS Sunday Morning.”
Ronstadt played her last show in 2009 and was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2013. She tells Tracy Smith about her hopes for a cure.
“I’m sure they’ll find something eventually,” Ronstadt says. “They’re learning so much more about it every day. If not, I mean, I’m 72. We’re all going to die. So, they say people usually die with Parkinson’s. They don’t always die of it because it’s so slow-moving. So, I’ll figure I’ll die of something. And I’ve watched people die, so I’m not afraid of dying. I’m afraid of suffering, but I’m not afraid of dying.”
“CBS Sunday Morning” airs at 9 a.m. Sunday on WKMG-Channel 6.
Ronstadt’s greatest hits include “You’re No Good,” “It’s So Easy,” “Blue Bayou” and “Somewhere Out There” (with James Ingram, who just died).
She was a Tony nominee in 1981 for “The Pirates of Penzance.” She brought new attention to standards through her albums with Nelson Riddle, starting with “What’s New” in 1983.
Her work ranges from her celebrations of Mexican traditional Mariachi music to her popular country albums with friends Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris.
Ronstadt is releasing “Live in Hollywood,” her first live album. It features 12 songs from a 1980 concert shot for an HBO special.
Ronstadt, who has sold more than 100 million records, no longer sings.
“I can’t even sing in the shower,” Ronstadt tells Smith.
She talks about her outlook these days.
“When you’ve been able to do certain things all your life, like put your shoes on and brush your teeth or whatever — when you can’t do that, you sort of go, ‘What’s this?’” she says. “You know, what’s happening here? Come help me with this. And then you have to learn to ask people to help, and that — that took a little doing. But I do that now, because I need the help.”
I end with a fan’s plea: Here’s hoping the Kennedy Center Honors people are watching. Rarely has one performer done so much for American music on so many fronts.
Email Hal at hboedeker@orlandosentinel.com. Follow him on Twitter: @tvguyhal. Instagram: TVGuyHal
www.orlandosentinel.com/entertainment/tv/tv-guy/os-et-linda-ronstadt-not-afraid-of-dying-20190201-story.html
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Post by the Scribe on Feb 2, 2019 0:09:06 GMT -5
Linda Ronstadt Gets Candid About Living With Parkinson’s Disease, Says She ‘Can’t Even Sing In The Shower’ Alyssa Croezen 10 hrs ago
Linda Ronstadt et al. posing for the camera: Photo: Getty Photo: Getty
Music icon Linda Ronstadt is opening up about living with Parkinson's disease, revealing how it has affected her illustrious career.
RELATED: Alan Alda Reveals He Was Diagnosed With Parkinson’s Disease Three Years Ago etcanada.com/news/352800/alan-alda-reveals-he-was-diagnosed-with-parkinsons-disease-three-years-ago/
In an interview with CBS' Tracy Smith, the "You're No Good" singer gets candid about the loss of her singing voice after being diagnosed with Parkinson's in 2013. "I can’t even sing in the shower," Ronstadt explains.
However, the 72-year-old says that she feels like she has no reason to get angry about her situation.
"When you’ve been able to do certain things all your life, like put your shoes on and brush your teeth or whatever, when you can’t do that, you sort of go, 'What’s this?'" the singer-songwriter explains. "You know, what’s happening here? Come help me with this. And then you have to learn to ask people to help, and that - that took a little doing. But I do that now because I need the help."
RELATED: Neil Diamond Fans Donate Tour Refunds To Parkinson’s Research Following Retirement Announcement etcanada.com/news/292781/neil-diamond-fans-donate-tour-refunds-to-parkinsons-research-following-retirement-announcement/
Despite not being able to sing anymore, Ronstadt's releasing her first-ever live album later this month. Live In Hollywood is set to include 12 songs pulled from a 1980 concert originally shot for an HBO special.
Ronstadt also shares with Smith that she's hopeful that "they'll find something eventually" to cure Parkinson's.
"They’re learning so much more about it every day," she says. "We’re all going to die. So, they say people usually die with Parkinson’s. They don’t always die of it because it’s so slow-moving. So, I’ll figure I’ll die of something. And I’ve watched people die, so I’m not afraid of dying. I’m afraid of suffering, but I’m not afraid of dying."
RELATED: Neil Diamond Announces Retirement From Touring, Reveals Parkinson’s Diagnosis etcanada.com/news/292041/neil-diamond-announces-retirement-from-touring-reveals-parkinsons-diagnosis/
Ronstadt's full interview with CBS is set to air Sunday, Feb. 3.
www.msn.com/en-ca/news/other/linda-ronstadt-gets-candid-about-living-with-parkinsons-disease-says-she-cant-even-sing-in-the-shower/ar-BBT3yBa
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Post by the Scribe on Feb 3, 2019 3:26:59 GMT -5
Linda Ronstadt can no longer sing. But there is still so much music left in her life.BY HOWARD COHEN FEBRUARY 02, 2019 04:30 PM, UPDATED 2 HOURS 47 MINUTES AGO
In some notable ways, singer Linda Ronstadt’s life has come full circle.
In the coming weeks, Ronstadt, 72, is about to embark on a cultural exchange program in which she’ll take a group of 20 young Mexican-American students to northern Mexico to study traditional music, instruments, singing and dancing, and visual arts, she said in a telephone interview from her San Francisco home.
This is where Ronstadt, as a little girl born and raised in Arizona, learned to sing, tapping into her family background.
Dad was Gilbert Ronstadt, a prosperous rancher with a fine singing voice who was of Mexican, German and English ancestry. He introduced Ronstadt and her three siblings to the rancheras, huapangos and mariachi forms of Mexican folkloric music. Mom, Ruth Mary, of German, English and Dutch ancestry, introduced Ronstadt to the standards.
Her maternal grandfather, Lloyd Copeman, invented the early toaster, the first electric stove and the rubber ice tray, for which he made millions. Her paternal grandparents hailed from the same small town in Mexico Ronstadt plans to take the kids.
At 10, the same age as these kids, she started singing those songs.
At 72, she can no longer sing. The woman who had one of the purest pitches and among the most powerful voices in popular music history, and who inspired generations of female pop and country stars, has Parkinson’s. She gave her last concert in 2009, when she wondered why her instrument wasn’t doing what had come naturally for so long.
THE PARKINSON’S DIAGNOSIS
A few years later, when she was about 67, doctors confirmed she had Parkinson’s disease — more specifically, she says, progressive supernuclear palsy. The brain cells disorder affects movement, which means walking and balance, speech, swallowing, vision, and controlling the muscles that let singers sing, can be compromised.
But she’s still involved in music. It’s just a bit different from the 1970s when, in 1978, The New York Times proclaimed Ronstadt, Joni Mitchell, Stevie Nicks and Carly Simon the “Queens of Rock.” A time when she sold so many records through No. 1 albums like “Heart Like a Wheel,” “Simple Dreams” and “Living in the USA,” her label, Asylum, practically came to rely on Ronstadt and her former backing band, the Eagles, to keep the company a mega corporation.
IMG_linda_ronstadt.jpg_2_1_4G2130RG_L47649767.JPG Linda Ronstadt in the mid-1970s when albums like “Heart Like a Wheel” in 1974 and “Simple Dreams” in 1977 made her one of the decade’s best-selling artists. Courtesy Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
“The record business has changed so much it’s really amazing. I’m involved with music now more as as a mentor,” she said of her work with the children.
It’s a mutual learning experience, says Ronstadt, who recorded two albums of Mexican music — “Canciones de mi padre” in 1987, the most commercially successful non-English language record in U.S. music history, according to the RIAA, and its 1991 sequel, “Mas canciones.”
“I go to the original sources. If someone says, ‘I like your music,’ I say listen to Lola Beltrán, the singers I learned from. It was really hard to sing. I heard it as a child and the rhythms are very complex. What I learn from these kids is I get to hear these complicated rhythms and they are better than I am and they are 10-years-old.”
SHE’S SELF-CRITICAL
Ronstadt, of course, has always been self-critical. She’s no fan of “Linda Ronstadt.” When she finished making an album that ended her interest in ever playing it.
Don’t play one of her old hits around her — not “Blue Bayou,” “You’re No Good” or even her 1983 standards album, “What’s New,” which, following Willie Nelson’s “Stardust” and Carly Simon’s “Torch,” helped popularize the pop stars doing World War II era standards trend.
“I would run out of the room,” she laughs. “I’ve heard the song before.”
And even as her life has come full circle musically, she’s reliving a part of her middle life.
Linda Ronstadt, in concert in 1980, on her Mad Love Tour. The singer recorded a concert from Television Center Studios in Hollywood on April 24, 1980, for an HBO concert. Her band included Danny Kortchmar, Kenny Edwards, Russ Kunkel, Bob Glaub, Billy Payne, Dan Dugmore and backing vocalist Wendy Waldman. Jim Shea
LIVE IN HOLLYWOOD
With Friday’s release of “Live in Hollywood,” Ronstadt and the releasing label, Rhino, are celebrating a landmark: her first-ever live album.
“Live in Hollywood” was recorded on April 24, 1980, on a sweltering stage at Television Center Studios. “I feel like a chicken-fried steak,” she cracks on a track before introducing her band mates — the cream of L.A. session musicians: Danny Kortchmar, Russ Kunkel, Kenny Edwards, Bob Glaub — for an HBO special during her tour for the “Mad Love” album.
The year, 1980, coincidentally is the year when Ronstadt, whose “Different Drum” with the Stone Poneys became her first pop hit in 1967, believes she really “started to sing.” That’s when she’d absorbed all of her influences, learned how to wield her prodigious vocal instrument, and started to yearn to stretch into opera, Broadway, standards and Latin music — genres she tackled beginning in the early 1980s, which also included the Afro-Cuban “Frenesí” album in 1992. (In 2008, Ronstadt was presented the ALMA Trailblazer Award by American Latino Media Arts.)
Ronstadt curated 12 selections from the 20-song setlist for “Live in Hollywood.” She picked “What was the least embarrassing, that’s the truth. Some we had to leave on there because they were hits. I picked the 12 least embarrassing ones that we could get away with.”
Linda Ronstadt’s “Live in Hollywood” was released Feb. 1, 2019 by Rhino.
So fans will relish finally having live renditions of “How Do I Make You,” Little Feat’s “Willin’” and the Eagles’ “Desperado.” They won’t get Elvis Costello’s “Party Girl,” the Cretones’ “Mad Love” or her 1969 country-rock staple, “Silver Threads and Golden Needles,” which had figured on that cooking concert stage.
She cut them because, “it’s excruciating. Why didn’t I sing this note or do that?”
That’s always been Ronstadt’s way. Second guessing. Sometimes it worked to her advantage. “We perform them better live than in the studio because on the road I knew the song better.”
Conversely, in the studio you get to do a redo.
“Sometimes you get a good bridge on a Thursday. Then you do a better job on the chorus on Friday,” she said.
“Live in Hollywood” posed its own challenges for Ronstadt and producer John Boylan, who worked with her in 1971 on her eponymous album that featured Don Henley, Glenn Frey and Bernie Leadon as her band before they were the Eagles.
The album almost didn’t happen because HBO, Ronstadt, and Rhino’s parent label, Warner Bros., could not find the master tapes. Ronstadt initially says she wasn’t even aware these existed — perhaps one reason it wasn’t released in the Christmas record-selling window of 1980.
A hockey rink-side conversation Boylan had with a Warner Bros. audio engineer at their sons’ hockey practice finally lead him to the missing tapes, Rhino said.
In the vinyl LP and CD version’s liner notes, Boylan writes: “I have no way of calculating the odds of finding the lost tapes through a chance encounter at a hockey practice, but they must be astronomical — like winning the lottery. And in this case of remarkable serendipity, every Linda Ronstadt fan is a lottery winner.”
AUDIO FIDELITY
Sound was another issue. Though “Live in Hollywood” packs a sonic punch and fullness — Kunkel’s drumming on “Hurt So Bad” drives the beat much harder than its studio counterpart on 1980’s New Wave-inspired California rock album, “Mad Love,” the primitive mono sound of television in that era is apparent.
“You can’t turn up what’s not on the tape,” Ronstadt said. “It’s so dispiriting, the sound quality. It’s so bad, Some registers have been dialed out. The guitars are gone.”
Kortchmar, Ronstadt said, played her favorite guitar solo on one of her records on the original studio recording of “Hurt So Bad.” It’s there on “Live in Hollywood,” too, but the clarity isn’t audiophile.
This applies to how most of us listen to music today — digitally compressed on cell phones, Ronstadt included. She champions vinyl’s superior fidelity, but like most, listens to music via her phone. She doesn’t have a turntable at home. She likes to go to the opera, when she can.
Of current contemporaries, she likes the music of Sia. Can’t stand modern country, “suburban mall music,” she calls it, the aural equivalent of shopping at big box stores.
Of her contemporaries, she loved Paul Simon’s “In the Blue Light,” an album he released in September of re-imagined versions of some of his more obscure LP cuts, like “How the Heart Approaches What It Yearns,” a song she says she wishes she could sing now.
Simon’s music, Ronstadt says, “sings so deliciously. You want to sing and chew on the words, they are great for your mouth. I think he’s the best songwriter of the 20th century. Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan and Jimmy Webb, too. And Brian Wilson. He inherited what Gershwin would write. If you could make the range it was the best ride you ever had. Same with Gershwin. They wrote with singers in mind. Those writers knew how to do that.”
MANAGING PARKINSON’S
But now, that Parkinson’s. That damned disease.
Ronstadt’s speaking voice still carries delightful traces of its youthful timbre but it’s a bit more hesitant than even a few years ago when she first gave interviews about having Parkinson’s and its impact on her daily life.
“Life is more horizontal than vertical now, but I’ve spent my whole life wishing I didn’t have to go to the next town and now I don’t have to.”
She’s on medications to manage the symptoms but there are “really not magic herbs,” Ronstadt said. “I take a drug that helps me deal with the shaking and the weakness.”
She’s given up the “Conversations with Linda Ronstadt” Power Point-type presentations she toured before audiences in recent years. “That required leaving the house. I decided not to do that anymore.” Traveling by cars, trains and planes has become too difficult.
“I have a lot of good friends that come over,” she says, chuckling that she must have done something right because “my friends are still speaking to me.”
And there’s music, always music, even if it’s being sung by others.
“Follow the music,” Ronstadt said. “The music always told me where to go for better or worse and made my decisions for me.”
This Sept. 17, 2013 photo shows singer Linda Ronstadt poses in New York to promote the release of her memoir “Simple Dreams.” On Feb. 1, 2019, Rhino released “Live in Hollywood,” a concert recording for an HBO special from April 24, 1980, featuring 12 songs curated by Ronstadt and producer John Boylan.AMY SUSSMANAP GALLERY
HOWARD COHEN
305-376-3619 Miami Herald Real Time/Breaking News reporter Howard Cohen, a 2017 Media Excellence Awards winner, has covered pop music, theater, health and fitness, obituaries, municipal government and general assignment. He started his career in the Features department at the Miami Herald in 1991.
www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/article225392925.html
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Post by the Scribe on Feb 3, 2019 14:21:15 GMT -5
Linda Ronstadt speaks
CBS Sunday Morning Published on Feb 3, 2019 In a revealing interview, the legendary singer-songwriter Linda Ronstadt opens up to Tracy Smith about her career, the loss of her singing voice, and living with Parkinson's. She also talks about the release of her first-ever live album, "Linda Ronstadt Live in Hollywood," which presents previously-unreleased recordings from her celebrated 1980 HBO special, recorded at Television Center Studios in Hollywood. Linda Ronstadt: A voice from the pastwww.cbsnews.com/news/linda-ronstadt-a-voice-from-the-past/
Linda Ronstadt quit performing years ago – her Parkinson's disease makes singing impossible. But last fall, she spoke to a sellout crowd at The Theatre at Ace Hotelin Los Angeles, who came to see her in person, and listen to her talk about what has been a magical life.
"The great thing about having a hit is that means people like you," Ronstadt told the audience.
"But the bad thing about it is, it means you have to sing that song over and over and over again, night after and night after night, 'til it starts sounding like your washing machine."
Linda Ronstadt, with John Boylan, appeared on stage at "A Conversation With Linda Ronstadt" in Los Angeles last October. CBS NEWS
The crowd basked in Ronstadt's tales of her life and career, such as when she toured for four months as the opening act of The Doors: "It was pretty tough to play with The Doors. It was kinda like a double bill of 'Bambi' and 'Deep Throat'!"
Correspondent Tracy Smith asked Ronstadt, "What's it like to get that kind of warmth when you're just talking?"
"I was just astounded. I mean, it made me feel good, but I was glad they didn't boo, or start yelling for 'Heat Wave'!"
And you know she's heard that before.
In case you need a reminder, Ronstadt was a musical force of nature who sold 100 million records, had four consecutive platinum albums, and won an armful of Grammys for songs in wildly different music styles, like country, Latin and pop.
For much of her career, she practically lived on the road. But these days, her world is a bit smaller:
She mostly keeps to a San Francisco neighborhood close to the famous bridge, and a house on a quiet street where it seems she has now become the world's most famous couch potato.
These days she spends much of her time reading. "I can't do a lot of things that are active," she said. "I can't spend very much time on my feet, or even very much time sitting up. I have to kind of lounge around. But I'm lazy, so it's a good thing that I lounge!
"So, I'm glad to have the leisure time. I have a huge stack of books that I need to read."
Smith asked, "When you think about those songs, in your mind, can you still sing?"
"Oh, I can sing in my brain; I sing in my brain all the time. But it's not quite the same as doing it physically. You know, there's a physical feeling in singing that's just like skiing down a hill, except better, 'cause I'm not a very good skier!"
But she was a very good singer:
For more than four decades it seemed there was nothing Linda Ronstadt couldn't do, until she sensed that her voice was beginning to fail her.
Smith asked, "When did you start noticing there was something wrong with your voice?"
"2000," she replied. "I'd start to sing and then it would just clamp up. It was, like, a cramp. My voice would freeze. And I said, 'There's something wrong with my voice.' And people would say, 'Oh, you're just a perfectionist.' I go, 'No, there's really something systemically wrong.'
"And it's very slow-moving, this disease, so it took a long time to really finally manifest."
She played her last show in 2009, but it wasn't until 2013 that she revealed she'd been diagnosed with Parkinson's.
She'd retired before she knew what was happening: "Oh yeah. I was just yelling. Instead of singing, I was just kind of yelling. I didn't want to charge people for that." "Do you think other people heard it, too, really?" asked Smith.
"Yeah, yeah. But I mean, it wouldn't have mattered. I could hear it. It wasn't any fun anymore. You know, singing is … there are really a lot of things you can do with your voice; you can slide on all different sorts of textures and things. And if you're not doing that, it's not interesting."
And she always tried to keep it interesting. Besides her solo work, she teamed up with some of the greatest voices in the business.
To watch Linda Ronstadt perform with Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris on "The Late Show with David Letterman," click on the video player below:
"No record company wanted to touch that," Ronstadt said. "Called us the 'Queenston Trio.'
"It's an amazing thing, when you sing with somebody. It's a very intimate relationship. It's almost like sex. It's as intimate as sex, but it's not sex. It's different. It's that intimate. It's like a great love affair."
Her own love affair with music started when she was a kid growing up in Arizona in a musical family, learning to sing and play the guitar.
She was, and is, an independent spirit, from her career choices to her relationships, like her much-publicized romance with former California Governor Jerry Brown.
She says she still talks with Brown. "Yeah, he was here for Thanksgiving."
"It seems like you've managed to maintain relationships with people who were in your life," Smith said.
"I don't know why they're still speaking to me, but they are!"
"Why didn't you ever get married?"
"I was not cut out for marriage," Ronstadt replied. "I used to dream that I was gonna get married, and I'd go, 'I'm too young to get married.' And this was when I was, like, 45, you know? And I'd go, 'I can't get married. I'm too young.' So I guess that means I'm just really immature! I'm not good at compromising."
"You know this about yourself?"
"Oh boy, do I ever!"
The Stone Poneys, featuring Linda Ronstadt, performs "Different Drum":
But her refusal to compromise helped her reach the heights of artistic achievement, and take home countless awards, including the National Medal of Arts in 2014, presented by an admittedly smitten president.
Smith said, "President Obama confessed, or admitted, to having a crush on you."
"Oh, he was being nice to a 70-year-old woman in a wheelchair," Ronstadt said.
"How about that medal? Do accolades like that mean something to you?"
"Well, it's kinda big! I didn't know what to do with that. I put it under the bed. It's under my bed, with my crowbar that I have for in case there's an earthquake and I have to pry the roof off myself. I have a crowbar and medal under the bed!
"I mean, it's nice to be acknowledged, nice for your work to be acknowledged. But it's not what you do it for. You do it for the work. And if you're doing it for prizes, you're in big trouble."
And who knows, there could be even more awards on the way: Last week she came out with a new live album – her first ever – made from newly-uncovered tapes of a made-for-TV concert in 1980, when she was at the height of her vocal powers.
To watch Linda Ronstadt perform "You're No Good," from her new album, "Linda Ronstadt Live in Hollywood," click on the video player:
Now, she says, she can't even sing in the shower.
Smith asked, "Do you try?"
"Yeah, but it doesn't, I can't make sound," Ronstadt replied.
"They've talked over the years about various treatments that could make singing come back."
"I'm sure they'll find something eventually, you know? They're learning so much more about it every day.
RHINO RECORDS
"I mean, I'm 72. We're all gonna die. They say people usually die with Parkinson's. They don't always die of it, because it's so slow-moving, so I figure I'll die of something. And I've watched people die, so I'm not as afraid of dying. I'm afraid of suffering, but I'm not afraid of dying."
And ever the performer, she says she'd like to go out singing.
"That's the way I'd like to die, is right in the middle of a note!" she said.
As of right now, there are no more "Conversations With Linda Ronstadt" on the books. But at 72, she's learned never to say never. And at the end of her appearance in L.A., as she started to leave the stage, she hesitated for just a moment. Maybe that's because, like her millions of fans, Linda Ronstadt is not quite ready to say goodbye. For more info:
"Linda Ronstadt Live in Hollywood" (Rhino Records), available on CD (Amazon, Barnes & Noble), Vinyl (Amazon, Barnes & Noble), Digital Download (Google Play, iTunes), and Streaming (Spotify) Story produced by John D'Amelio.
www.cbsnews.com/news/linda-ronstadt-a-voice-from-the-past/
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Post by the Scribe on Feb 4, 2019 18:02:09 GMT -5
Thanks to Rick for finding this: ronstadt.proboards.com/thread/5914/billboard-interview-2-4-19 Linda Ronstadt Talks Her First-Ever Live Album - And Life After Singing2/4/2019 by Gary Graff
Jim Shea Linda Ronstadt
It doesn't bother Linda Ronstadt that it's taken this long into her Rock and Roll Hall of Fame-lauded career to release a live album.
"It always seemed to me the best place you can record is in the studio, so you can fix things if you make a mistake," Ronstadt, who's been sidelined from singing by Parkinson's disease, tells Billboard about the just-released Live in Hollywood, a 13-track set from an April 1980 performance at Television Center Studios in Hollywood for HBO. She was backed by a crack band that included Danny Kortchmar and Kenny Edwards on guitar, Bob Glaub on bass, Little Feat's Bill Payne on keyboards, Dan Dugmore on pedal steel, Wendy Waldman on backing vocals and Ronstadt producer and concert executive producer Peter Asher on percussion and backing vocals. Ronstadt recalls that the concert "was insufferably hot. It was a small studio and we had an audience, so it heated the room up quite a lot. And then they had really hot, really big lights on us.
"It's something that should've been considered, but we were brave little soldiers and pushed through it. But it was really too hot to make music."
Dolly Parton and Linda Perry READ MORE www.billboard.com/articles/news/pride/8496238/linda-perry-talks-gender-disparity-dolly-parton Linda Perry Talks Gender Disparity in the Music Industry, Shares the Best Advice Dolly Parton Gave Her
Ronstadt herself "didn't know that this recording existed" until longtime producer John Boylan discovered the master tape last year. And even now she has ambivalent emotions about Live in Hollywood seeing the light of day.
"It was recorded for television, which is unfortunate because television compresses things so much," she explains. "So it didn't turn out to be a really hi-fi record. It turned out to be a television record." Ronstadt adds that she "just kind of smiled through it" when she heard the tapes. "I don't like to listen to stuff I've recorded," she says. "It's just another time, and it's a frozen in time kind of thing. I always think, 'Why did I sing that note like that? Why did I phrase it like that? Why wasn't it faster? Why wasn't it slower?' I always see things I would've corrected in the studio, so (listening to the recordings) is a fool's errand for me."
For fans, Live in Hollywood does capture Ronstadt at the end of the first phase of her pop music career. Shortly after the concert and her then-current Mad Love album, Ronstadt pivoted to the theater stage for an appearance in Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta The Pirates of Penzance, eventually hitting Broadway, and shortly after that moved on to albums of pop standards and then indigenous Mexican music. "I was looking for something new to do," Ronstadt recalls. "I liked pop music, but I had a lot of album-tour, album-tour, album-tour. I enjoyed making those records, but I was sort of done with it at that point. I was really excited about the idea of going to Broadway and singing operetta... and it was a long time before I came back to pop music with any enthusiasm."
Ronstadt isn't sure what else her vaults may yield in the future, either. "I'm away from the machinations of the record company dealings, so I don't know," she says. "They unearth stuff I don't even remember doing. I always shudder when I think about them bringing something out of the vault because it's something we rejected for some good reason back then. I don't have a lot of say in it, really."
Ronstadt, who performed her last concert during 2009 after noticing she was having problems with her voice, was diagnosed with Parkinson's in 2013 and now cannot sing at all -- not even in the shower, she recently told CBS Sunday Morning. "I'm not afraid of dying. I'm afraid of suffering," Ronstadt told the show. She said she's learned to accept help from other people, and she busies herself now with watching operatic performances on YouTube and working with the Los Cenzontles Mexican Arts Center in San Pablo, Calif., which helps teach Latin American youth about their culture; She'll be leading a trip to Mexico with the group later this month.
Roy Orbison photographed at the Chicago Theater on June 25, 1987. READ MORE www.billboard.com/articles/columns/rock/8495963/roy-orbison-mystery-girl-album Roy Orbison's 'Mystery Girl' at 30: Alex Orbison Reflects on His Father's Last Album
Ronstadt is also working with two others on a writing project about the Sonoran Desert, which straddles the U.S.-Mexico border in the southwest.
"These (projects) tend to come up naturally and in sort of an organic fashion. I don't go looking for them," Ronstadt says, adding that she tries not to bemoan the loss of her music career. "It just seems so long ago, it was another person," she notes. "I don't have the same life now. I tried my best. I like to think that I gave it an earnest shot but, y'know, you can never be completely satisfied. It's always what would you do the next time -- you can improve this, you can improve that. But I can't create new (music) anymore, so I think about other things. And to be honest I have more home life now, and I like that better."
www.yahoo.com/finance/news/available-jobs-us-143220860.html
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Post by the Scribe on Feb 8, 2019 4:23:40 GMT -5
Linda Ronstadt Talks Illness, ‘Trio’ Album in Candid ‘CBS Sunday Morning’ InterviewNow retired from singing, legendary performer offers observations on several points of her remarkable career
By STEPHEN L. BETTS
In a touching, funny and inspirational conversation with CBS Sunday Morning’s Tracy Smith, Linda Ronstadt opened up about her battle with Parkinson’s, the disease that robbed fans of Ronstadt’s remarkable singing voice.
From the classic rock hits “(Love Is Like a) Heat Wave” and “You’re No Good,” to the acoustic country of “Telling Me Lies” and “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” performed with her Trio partners Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris, Ronstadt’s range as an interpreter and vocal powerhouse earned her membership in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2014. Now 72, with streaks of purple in her light brown hair, Ronstadt revealed that although she can no longer physically sing the songs for which she is well-known, she does have one way to hear herself perform them (it’s not on her million-selling records — she never listens to those).
“I can sing in my brain,” she says. “I sing in my brain all the time. It’s not quite the same as doing it physically. There’s a physical feeling in singing that’s just like skiing down a hill. Except better, because I’m not a very good skier.”
Although Ronstadt’s humor shines through in the interview, there’s also the poignant revelation that by 2009 she retired from singing because, by that time, what she heard herself doing mostly onstage was “yelling” as her voice faltered.
These days, Ronstadt spends much of her time at home reading, a pursuit that has deepened her interest in political affairs. In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Ronstadt endorsed Michael Lewis’ bestseller The Fifth Risk. “It’s a great little civics lesson, to start with. It’s a real education in how the Cabinet works and what happens when it does its function, which it’s not doing now,” she said. “The ‘fifth risk’ is incompetence. For instance, the Secretary of Energy was a nuclear scientist, and Trump put in somebody who wasn’t even interested in the reports they prepared to hand over to the new administration. They didn’t even come in for a briefing. The Department of Energy, which I didn’t know before, takes care of all the nuclear weapons. Our nuclear arsenal is in the hands of the Department of Energy.”
www.rollingstone.com/music/music-country/linda-ronstadt-cbs-sunday-morning-interview-789524/
RELATED Linda Ronstadt See Linda Ronstadt’s Commanding ‘You’re No Good’ From New ‘Live in Hollywood’ www.rollingstone.com/music/music-country/linda-ronstadt-youre-no-good-live-in-hollywood-786419/ Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, Linda Ronstadt Earn Hollywood Walk of Fame Star www.rollingstone.com/music/music-country/dolly-parton-emmylou-harris-linda-ronstadt-earn-hollywood-walk-of-fame-star-666959/ Ronstadt’s first-ever live album, Live in Hollywood, taped for a 1980 HBO special, was issued last week. The LP collects 12 of the 20 songs performed in the special, many of which have been unreleased in any form until now.
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Post by the Scribe on Feb 9, 2019 1:33:34 GMT -5
Linda Ronstadt on New Live Album, Life With Parkinson’s and Modern Country MusicRolling Stone Stephen L. Betts Rolling StoneFebruary 7, 2019 www.yahoo.com/entertainment/linda-ronstadt-live-album-life-143353491.html
“I feel if I were to organize it correctly I would try to sing like a Mexican and think like a German. You know what I mean? I get it mixed up,” Linda Ronstadt joked to Rolling Stone in 1978. The quip was a comical reference to her Mexican-German heritage but also, in retrospect, a reflection of Ronstadt’s many musical influences and interests, along with the self-deprecating humor she has employed throughout more than five decades of music stardom. Born in July 1946 in Tucson, Arizona, where her father, Gilbert, the son of a German-born rancher who served in the Mexican army, ran a hardware store, Ronstadt would join her brother Peter and sister Suzy in a folk trio called the New Union Ramblers in 1963. While she was a senior in high school, Ronstadt signed a recording contract with her siblings, but by 1966, she had taken off for Los Angeles, singing with the Stone Poneys, a trio that also included Tucsonan Bob Kimmel and guitarist Kenny Edwards, who would serve as her longtime guitarist when she embarked on a solo career. With the Stone Poneys, Ronstadt notched her first Top 20 pop hit, “Different Drum,” written by the Monkees’ Michael Nesmith.
In 1979, after a string of Rolling Stone cover stories, sold-out tours, multi-platinum-selling albums and massive crossover hits including the pop Number One “You’re No Good” and country chart-topper “When Will Be Loved,” Ronstadt took a bold step with Mad Love, with half the tracks coming from English rocker Elvis Costello and Mark Goldenberg, guitarist of American power-pop band the Cretones. With its assault of heavy synth and electric guitar on several tracks, the album represented departure-by-design for Ronstadt and in many ways freed her creatively to explore the Nelson Riddle-orchestrated pop standards of What’s New, the traditional Mexican fare from Canciones de Mi Padre and her onstage appearances in The Pirates of Penzance and La Bohème.
Ronstadt, who played her last show in 2009 after experiencing issues with her voice, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2013. Unable to sing at all now, the hopes for anything new from the once-powerful vocalist have been forever dashed. But with the recent discovery of audiotapes from a concert filmed for HBO in April 1980, Rhino Entertainment has released Live in Hollywood. The album documents, for the first time, Ronstadt’s thrilling live show, as she tears through full-throttle versions of Mad Love cuts as well as classic hits like “It’s So Easy,” “Back in the U.S.A.” and a blistering “You’re No Good,” backed by a band that includes ace guitarists Edwards (who died in 2010) and Danny Kortchmar.
In a thoughtful and humor-laced conversation with Rolling Stone, Linda Ronstadt provides a snapshot of her life at home in San Francisco, explains why Mad Love proved a pivotal moment in her professional life, and recalls a particular album that turned out to be a rarity — a record of hers she actually wanted to listen to.
This is your first-ever live album. Why did it take so long? It didn’t take so long; it just never occurred to me to put one out. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to put this one out either, because it was recorded for television, so the sound got mushed a little bit. But, you know, record companies have their own ideas about that. [Laughs]
What do you remember about filming in the TV studio for the concert that this album documents? I just remember it was really, really hot. It was too hot for humans. It was probably 110 degrees on stage. I grew up in the desert, so I know heat. We were suffering from that. We had to keep stopping to cool off. And there was a great audience. The audience didn’t have as much heat, because they didn’t have the lights on them. But they were pretty warm, too. But they were very good-natured. You know, you make the best of it.
You had quite a band on this record. What were some of the memorable things these particular players contributed to your records and live shows? Danny Kortchmar’s solo on “Hurts So Bad” is my favorite electric guitar solo on any of my records ever. Not that I ever listen to that record, but I just remember it being particularly good. He’s a really fine guitar player. Especially when he has some structure to play around. And I had Billy Payne from Little Feat on keyboards, Dan Dugmore, Wendy Waldman. Wendy’s such a good singer. I go on YouTube all the time and just listen to her stuff. She was a true prodigy. When she was 17, she was writing songs like “Waiting for the Rain” and “Mad, Mad Me.” I just thought she was tremendous. She continues to write good songs and hits, too.
“You’re No Good” gets an extended treatment on this record, showcasing the band really well. What do you remember about recording that song? Kenny came up with that bass riff. He’d been playing it some onstage, but it was an amorphous arrangement, so when we went in the studio with Peter [Asher, Ronstadt’s producer and manager at the time], Ed Black, who was the steel player at the time and also played six-string guitar, reinforced the bass riff with the guitar. Then Andrew and Peter got together and put a lot of guitar parts on. I was a part of the beginning, and I was a part of the end but I wasn’t part of the middle. I went out to dinner with my boyfriend. When I came back, they had this amazing guitar solo on it. They spent hours doing it and I was blown away by it. The engineer [Val Garay] accidentally pushed the wrong button and erased it all. [Laughs] We had to go back and re-do it! It took them all night. But they did a great job.
The Heart Like a Wheel album is now considered a classic in the realm of country-rock, but at the time did you see it that way? No! I was just trying to scrape enough songs together to make an album. Artists now make a record every two years. I made a record every nine months, and there was incredible pressure to do that. I mean, I always chose good songs, I think, but the songs didn’t always like me as much. There were a lot of swings and misses in those days, I thought.
What was your mindset during the making of the Mad Love album and then after making it? Did it feel like a turning point? It sort of caused me to turn away. [Laughs] I liked that record… I think. I don’t know, I have not heard that record since I did it. I really was longing to do something different. I wanted to do something where I could use my high voice. I wanted to expand my musical horizons in the worst way. I didn’t want to do album, tour, album, tour… After that record I went to Broadway and sang operetta, I did American standards, Mexican music. It was a long time before I came back to pop music. Before going to those others, I didn’t feel like I really started to sing until 1980. And after 1980, after I did Pirates of Penzance and the standards and the Mexican songs, especially, I could come back to pop music with a lot of confidence, and that’s when I did the record with Aaron Neville.
In making the Trio albums with Emmylou Harris and Dolly Parton, what did you learn from both of them? The thing I’ve always thought about music is that it’s not competitive, it’s cooperative. I thought that was a really good example. We chose the songs because all three of us loved them so much we were afraid we’d get sick if we didn’t record them. Then we’d choose the arrangement by who was going to sing lead, by who sounded best. We’d try it in different configurations — like me on the top sometimes, Emmylou on the bottom sometimes, sometimes I’d sing lead, sometimes not. I liked it best when Emmy sang lead and I sang underneath her, and Dolly came in on top. But we could sing in duets or trios and sound good. That was a really unusual thing for me, to be able to make a record that I actually wanted to listen to [Laughs].
“What they call country music now is what I call Midwest mall-crawler music.”
Did you listen to this live record before it was released? I tried [Laughs]. I don’t like to listen to myself! I think of it as something frozen in time. It was the best we could do at the time. It’s like looking at old pictures of your old life. You know you’re related to it, but you’re a different person now. There’s been so much music since then. But it speaks for itself. I can’t really speak for it because it’s so long ago and I’m a different person now.
Your influence on singers in rock, pop, country and other genres is substantial. What do you think they’re hearing in you and responding to that has influenced them? I have no idea. I would hope that it’s a sense of urgency and a sense of an earnest attempt. But that’s all that I can think of. I don’t listen to modern country music. I don’t care for it particularly. I like old country music, when it still came out of the country. What they call country music now is what I call Midwest mall-crawler music. You go into big-box stores and come out with huge pushcarts of things. It’s not an agrarian form anymore. When it comes out of the country, it’s not farmers or woodsmen, or whatever. It doesn’t make much sense. It’s just suburban music.
What do you do with your days now that you’re retired? I’m mostly horizontal. I don’t like getting vertical very much. My vertical time is marked in seconds. [Laughs] Fortunately, I’m lazy, I love to read, so it suits me. I thought I was going to be doing more sewing and knitting and gardening, but that’s off the menu. But I can see the [Golden Gate] Bridge and the neck of the Bay on the top floor. It’s not a really wide, sweeping beautiful view, but I can see the water, which I like. I like to be able to look out and see if anybody’s sneaking up on me.
In 1978, you told Rolling Stone, “Probably the greatest thing you can aspire to, the highest state of being, is domestic bliss and tranquility…” I still think that!
Considering the challenges you’ve faced, what do you think the secret is to achieving that state? Well, you’ve got to work at it all the time. I think being Martha Stewart would help. I like my house that I live in. It’s small. I’ve really downsized. I like the city that I live in. I like the view. And I like my kids. They come over for Sunday brunch and I look forward to that every Sunday.
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Post by the Scribe on Feb 9, 2019 2:16:21 GMT -5
February 8, 2019Linda Ronstadt Calls Modern Country “Mall-Crawler Music” Trigger News 29 Comments
Linda Ronstadt may not be able to sing anymore due to a Parkinson’s Disease diagnosis in 2013. But she can still talk and speak her mind, and that exactly what she did in a recent interview with Rolling Stone when prompted to discuss her influence on pop, rock, and country music—all of which she dabbled with in her time as a performer.
Though not asked to comment on today’s country specifically, Linda Ronstadt said anyway, “I don’t listen to modern country music. I don’t care for it particularly. I like old country music, when it still came out of the country. What they call country music now is what I call Midwest mall-crawler music. You go into big-box stores and come out with huge pushcarts of things. It’s not an agrarian form anymore. When it comes out of the country, it’s not farmers or woodsmen, or whatever. It doesn’t make much sense. It’s just suburban music.”
Of course it could be easy to criticize Linda Ronstadt herself for being a country artist who eventually crossed over into pop and rock. But few paid their dues as much as Linda did early in her career, including her years in the Stone Poneys, her debut solo album in 1969, Hand Sown…Home Grown, 1970’s Silk Purse that included cover songs of “Lovesick Blues” and “Mental Revenge,” and her 1972 self-titled album where she recorded “Crazy Arms” and “I Fall To Pieces.” Even when she achieved her breakout pop rock success, she was always honest about the genre and approach of her music, and then returned to country in the groundbreaking “Trio” project with Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris.
Linda Ronstadt is currently out promoting the release of Live in Hollywood from Rhino, which contains recently-discovered audio recordings from a special Ronstadt shot for HBO in 1980. It includes live renditions of many of her biggest hits, including her country material such as her twangy rendition of Buddy Holly’s “It’s So Easy,” and “Blue Bayou.” It gives Linda Ronstadt fans something new from the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, since health has left her unable to record or perform for many years now.
Linda Ronstadt came from a time when regardless what genre you plyed your craft in, you respected the roots of the music. Half German and half Mexican, Ronstadt also recorded an album of traditional mariachi music called Canciones De Mi Padre in 1987.
www.savingcountrymusic.com/linda-ronstadt-calls-modern-country-mall-crawler-music/
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Post by the Scribe on Dec 30, 2019 4:49:26 GMT -5
This is one of the more important and revealing interviews into Linda's psyche and thinking. She has always had a unique common sense way of looking at things which I have assimilated as far back as my teen years much to my (conservative) mother's chagrin. Linda gets to the meat of any issue and has such a good sense of right and wrong. She cuts through the media filters with ease.Sunday, Oct 6, 2013 05:00 PM -0700 Linda Ronstadt: “There are always predators around, and you have to keep an eye out for them” www.salon.com/2013/10/07/linda_ronstadt_there_are_always_predators_around_and_you_have_to_keep_an_eye_out_for_them/In a Salon exclusive, Linda Ronstadt talks politics, immigration and the sexual dangers facing women artists Stephen Deusner
In 1969, Linda Ronstadt — then still the frontwoman for the Stone Poneys — flew from Los Angeles to Nashville for an appearance on “The Johnny Cash Show,” where she was booked to duet with the Man in Black himself. Arriving a few days early, she checked into her hotel and spent most of the evening singing and jamming with some like-minded musicians, including Kris Kristofferson and Mickey Newbury. After returning to her hotel room, she received a call from one of the show’s producers, who said he needed to come to her room to go over some notes with her. Initially suspicious, Ronstadt reluctantly allowed him into her room.
“I should have followed my first instinct,” she writes in her new memoir, “Simple Dreams,” “because as soon as he entered my room and closed the door, he removed every stitch of clothing he was wearing.” The producer assumed that since she was from Los Angeles she was a hippie, and that since she was a hippie she believed in free love. When she threatened to call security, “he said no one would believe me because of the way I looked and dressed (jeans, long, straight hair, and no bra in the panty-girdle, big-hair South).”
Fortunately, Ronstadt managed to escape to the lobby unharmed and unmolested, albeit incredibly shaken. But that is only one of several harrowing reminiscences in “Simple Dreams,” in which she paints the rock ‘n’ roll world of the 1960s and 1970s as a nightmare for young women serious about their music, yet subject to the come-ons and hangups of some of their male counterparts. When the Stone Poneys toured with the Doors, Ronstadt was harassed by a drunken, belligerent Jim Morrison. Later, when she opened for Neil Young, she writes that his keyboard player spent weeks emotionally abusing her with persistent brutality.
As a result, “Simple Dreams” reads like a story of escape. Ronstadt may have been one of the most successful female artists of the post-hippie era, thanks to hits like “You’re No Good” and “Blue Bayou,” but the form offered more artistic restrictions than opportunities. “I never felt that rock and roll defined me,” she writes. “Being considered, for a period in the ’70s, as the Queen of Rock made me uneasy, as my musical devotions often lay elsewhere.”
Ronstadt’s first step toward independence was playing Mabel in a 1980 production of “Pirates of Penzance,” and she spent the remainder of that decade expanding her musical range dramatically: first with a pair of albums of American standards with the Nelson Riddle Orchestra, then two country albums with Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris. She made a record with Aaron Neville and several albums of Mexican-American tunes passed down to her from her parents and grandparents.
Ronstadt writes only briefly about her early career in order to focus much of the book on her later accomplishments. The formation of the Eagles, who were briefly her backing band, is allotted only three pages. “Pirates,” by contrast, takes up several chapters. This may prove unsatisfying for fans more interested in “Heart Like a Wheel” than in “La Boheme,” but it shows where Ronstadt’s musical devotions lie. Her career was driven by her personal obsessions with the music she heard growing up, and by chasing those obsessions rather than bending to the will of the music industry, she grew into an ambitious artist with great range and interpretive ability.
The sad postscript to Ronstadt’s career — one so recent it’s not even mentioned in “Simple Dreams” — is her diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease, which has robbed her of her voice, not to mention her mobility. Even so, she remains fiercely outspoken about her music and her politics. While she and longtime manager John Boylan were driving from New York to Boston, she spoke to Salon about immigration, the new Dust Bowl, stem cell research and YouTube discoveries.
The descriptions of your childhood in Tucson are very poignant, but also very melancholy in the way the desert has changed culturally, geographically and especially politically.
When you’re desert born, you love the desert. It’s a harsh environment. People ask me why I don’t go where there are trees and streams and mountains. But when there are too many trees around me, I can’t see and I think somebody is going to sneak up on me. It makes me nervous. And I love the desert. I love those big, wide, sweeping vistas. During the time I was gone, developers came in and scraped it all away with bulldozers. They put up the ugliest tract houses you’ve ever seen, which aren’t built to last. They’ll be tomorrow’s slums because people won’t be able to live in those houses very long. They’re starting another Dust Bowl era by scraping away the topsoil. People don’t realize how serious that is. The Dust Bowl was the biggest natural cataclysm of the 20th century, and it’s starting again and no one’s taking an interest in it. They just continue to scrape off the topsoil and turn the desert into a wasteland.
Is there anything that can be done?
They have to stop scraping up topsoil. We lose in topsoil the equivalent of the size of Texas every single year. Without topsoil you can’t even grow any food. But people are making money and they’re greedy. There’s no regulation because the Republicans who control those areas don’t want any regulation on anything. They want developers to be allowed to operate in a completely unbridled manner and make as much money as they can — even if that means taking it from other people. That’s wrong. If we’re going to have capitalism, we have to carefully regulate it.
That sounds very similar to the fracking controversy in Appalachia, where they continue to use this technique despite its horrible consequences.
They’re going to do fracking in the Central Valley in California, and there won’t be any regulation. The pollution will get into the water and destroy the farmland. It’s a terrible thing to do, but people are only thinking in the short term and the Republicans are full of climate change deniers and science deniers. They don’t want to deal with inconvenient facts.
Early in “Simple Dreams,” you write very briefly about the immigration controversy in Arizona, comparing the border to the Berlin Wall.
What’s going on on the border is a disgrace. It’s just pure racism. They put the fence up as an affront to a country of incredibly rich cultural tradition. They didn’t put one up on the northern border. There’s no fence between the United States and Canada. So it’s just based on skin color. It’s racism.
One thing that comes through in the book is how both of those cultures — American and Mexican — inform not only your identity but your craft. In that context, an album like “Canciones de mi Padre” plays like both a musical exercise and a very political act.
It wasn’t the reason that I made that album. I did it because that’s who I was as a child and that was who I was as an adult. But I wasn’t getting to express that in my art. I feel very passionately about the politics of being a bicultural person. Real people are getting caught up in these issues and suffering terribly. Families are being destroyed. Nursing mothers are being taken away from their babies. Nothing good happens from treating people like that. I held a woman who was picked up in a raid. She was working a fast-food restaurant in Seattle, and she had two children — a 2-year-old and a 6-year-old. They put her in jail, kept her there for three months, and then deported her. She didn’t have any way to get back and make arrangements for her children. She was taken across the border, but she kept trying to get back to her children, like any good mother would. I know another man who was arrested on the street simply because he looked Mexican. It turned out he was undocumented, so they deported him. His wife had a nervous breakdown. His children were given up for adoption. Little children! He was never able to get back to them. I wound up arranging for his son to go down and visit him. The man was living on the streets in Nogales. His life was destroyed. Can you imagine having someone take your children away from you? It’s a terrible thing. This country is moralistic, but not moral.
You worked on “Simple Dreams” without a ghostwriter. What was it like recounting some of these memories?
The hardest thing to write about was the music. It takes 10 years to learn how to do anything well, so for that first 10 years of my career it was really a painful struggle trying to figure out what I was trying to do and how to do it. I just knew I wasn’t doing it well enough. But I just kept trying and trying, and after about 10 years I got to where when I wanted to go into the studio, I could pretty much direct things in the way that I wanted to do it. When I was writing about those early years, I was just depressed. It was very depressing. But then I thought: Well, everybody starts somewhere. So I gave myself a little slack. The truth is that I wasn’t very good when I started. The good thing is that I got better. I didn’t turn into the best singer that ever lived and I wasn’t the most important pop singer that ever was, but I was diverse. And so that was what made me different. That’s why I decided to base my story in the book on my diverse musical journey.
One of the major turning points was your decision to star in “Pirates of Penzance.” Was that a freeing experience?
That was so liberating. I didn’t have to keep screaming the same old song in those sporting arenas for the rest of my life. And I didn’t have to ever be tired of those songs. When I went back and sang those rock songs, I was glad to see them; I wasn’t sick of them.
Did you consider that an escape? “Simple Dreams” depicts rock in the 1970s as a pretty treacherous world for a woman. I’m thinking of those exchanges with Jack Nietzsche, which were a little harrowing to read.
There wasn’t a lot of that, but it did exist. That was one of the more brutal experiences. Jack Nietzsche was a musician who I admired. He was a really good arranger and composer, and he put his spin into making a lot of wonderful records, particularly with Phil Spector. He seemed so powerful at the time, and I was sort of cowed by him. But I didn’t want to be cowed by anybody. I didn’t need to have Jack Nietzsche’s approval to have a good opinion of myself. I knew what I was trying to do, and I knew I wasn’t there yet. I was working on it, and I didn’t need him to get in my way. That was an experience that made me stronger. I learned from it. I developed a sense of compassion for him and for the struggles he was going through. He just looked so sad, and I thought he was suffering. I ultimately felt sorry for him. He missed out on an opportunity to have a good friend. We had a lot of similar musical interests, and we could have shared some good listening together.
A lot of that changes once you got out of rock ‘n’ roll and started working in other styles.
There are always predators around, and you have to keep an eye out for them. But again, the guys I traveled with were pretty refined and intelligent. Guys like John Boylan — who traveled with me for years and is in fact traveling with me right now — really helped me put my bands together and really helped me with my records. It’s not like there were a bunch of oafs out there having orgies all the time. That just wasn’t my world. The other thing about musicians is that really good musicians don’t care whether you’re male or female, whether you’re a goat or a donkey or a camel. They care if you can get into the groove and get into the spirit and play really well. If you can’t play well, they don’t want you around. If you can, you’re always welcome. That’s the nice thing about music. That’s why music has always broken racial barriers and gender stereotypes. Music has always been one of the great things that conquers all.
As a musician, you’d have to have a lot of confidence in yourself to operate on a level where you can accept anybody based on their musicality. Yet, there are passages in the book where you talk about not having that confidence in your instrument.
I saw everything as an opportunity to learn. Nothing makes me happier than being in a room where everybody’s smarter than I am. If they’re better than I am, then I can learn from them. But for years I compensated for my fears by just singing loud and singing harder. Sometimes I can hear that in my early singing. I can hear that fear and realize that I didn’t have enough air underneath my voice. Later on, I learned to put air under my voice and I could sing with true confidence. After I went to Broadway — I’d say from 1979 on — I was singing very strong. I knew what I was doing. I think I did my best singing on Broadway, on “What’s New” and the Mexican records. I don’t know if they were the biggest successes, but they were certainly the best singing that I did. And I made a record when I was desperately struggling with my voice, before I even knew I had Parkinson’s. It was with Ann Savoy and was called “Adieu False Heart.” I’m really proud of that record because I was able to paint with the limited palette that I had. I just thought, I’m a painter with sepia and charcoal. I had to paint with just that, but I still managed to find a way to tell the story. I never listen to my own records, but when that one comes up, I can listen and be proud of it.
Your diagnosis with Parkinson’s was so recent it didn’t even make it into the book. You’ve said that it has taken your voice. How else has it affected your day-to-day life?
I’m now experiencing life as a disabled person. It’s quite a shock. The hardest thing is that I just can’t get things done without depending on other people to help me. It’s hard to ask, and I feel like I’m always imposing. But I really am limited. Falling and choking are big danger for people with Parkinson’s. I’ve already had a couple of spills, and I don’t want to have any more. It’s not easy moving. You try to turn around, and you’ll fall down. So going through airports and just living in hotel rooms is difficult. When I came out on this press junket, I didn’t know how I was going to survive it, but it turns out I can do a little more than I thought I could. I won’t be doing it very much in the future. There is no cure. I don’t expect them to find a cure either, unless we get the Republicans the hell out of Congress so they stop holding up stem cell research. That’s what’s most promising in terms of finding a cure for diabetes, for Parkinson’s, for MS, for all kinds of things. It’s a shame to have to suffer from something that we don’t have to suffer from.
In “Simple Dreams,” listening to music is such a major activity between you and your colleagues, almost as much as playing. What is your listening life like now?
I gave my vinyl collection away in the ‘80s. It was a stupid thing to do. I could get it back, I guess, if I wanted, but I don’t have anything to play music on. I rarely listen to recorded music. I hate the way MP3s sound, and I don’t like listening on a computer. I do make an exception for YouTube, where I find a lot of stuff that I just love. I was looking for Pastora Pavón, the flamenco singer I first head when I was 12, and I discovered Estrella Morente, who is incredible. She’s a huge star in Spain and sings most traditional flamenco music, although she pushes herself to sing other things. So YouTube is fun. But if I want to hear music, I tend to have somebody come to my house and play in my living room. I still have a lot of musician friends, and they play for me. Occasionally I go to the symphony orchestra. I hate whenever Michael Tilson Thomas raises his baton and I’m not there to hear it. It’s a shame I can’t be there every night, but it’s hard to sit in those seats now that I’m a Parkinson’s person. It’s harder to get there, but I have to make more of an effort.
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Post by the Scribe on Jan 1, 2020 3:38:26 GMT -5
Singer Linda Ronstadt Tells CNN’s Anderson Cooper That Trump is ‘Like Hitler’ and ‘The Mexicans Are The New Jews’ By Caleb HoweDec 31st, 2019, 4:51 pm
Speaking with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, musical legend Linda Ronstadt compared President Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler, America under his administration to Nazi Germany, and said that “the Mexicans are the new Jews,” in a clip that aired on Monday.
CNN’s new documentary “Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice” airs at 9pm on New Year’s Day, and the interview with Cooper is part of the promotion ahead of that premier. The topic of politics came up as Ronstadt was discussing her relationship with Republican members of her family, whom she said she gets along with and that she “won’t let [Trump] take my family relationships away.”
Cooper prompted her on the topic, saying “I’ve read that you’ve read a lot about the Weimar Republic in Germany, and you sort of see parallels between then and now.”
“Well great parallels,” emphasized Ronstadt. I mean the intelligentsia of Berlin, and the literati and all the artists were just busy doing their thing. And there were a lot of chances, as Hitler rose to power there were a lot of chances to stop him and they didn’t speak out.”
“And the industrial complex thought that they could control him once they got him in office and, of course, he was not controllable,” she continued. “And by the time he got established, he put his own people in place and he, you know, stacked the courts and did what he had to do to consolidate his power.”
“I think a lot of people, though, would be surprised to hear comparisons between what happened then and now,” said Cooper.
“If you read the history you won’t be surprised, it’s exactly the same,” Ronstadt replied. “You find a common enemy for everybody to hate–When–I was sure that Trump was gonna get elected the day he announced. And I said it’s gonna be like Hitler, and the Mexicans are the new Jews. And sure enough, that’s what he delivered.”
Watch the clip above, via CNN.
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