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Post by Guest on Dec 3, 2019 14:48:27 GMT -5
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Post by the Scribe on Dec 3, 2019 16:13:02 GMT -5
Ronstadt’s not a songwriter. Her fans are an afterthought, her fame an annoyance. Singing is the thing. It’s her obsession, her identity, her release. It is her pony and her desert.COULD WE PLEASE CHANGE THE NAME OF THIS FORUM TO: Linda Ronstadt Afterthought Discussion
I am sure Linda liked the money that came along with the fame. Sometimes you have to take the good with the bad although to many the fame is more important than the money. That being said if all one wants to do is sing with no fame and no money they could just join a choir or go to amateur night at the local clubs. Not sure why she never thought of that. |
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Post by LindsFan5 on Dec 3, 2019 16:45:43 GMT -5
Fantastic Article. Absolutely Nailed it. So many great articles lately but this one most accurately “gets her” and is my favorite
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Post by Deleted on Dec 3, 2019 16:58:10 GMT -5
Wonderful article, thanks... I did note that Linda was said to have a 'degenerative disease, similar to Parkinson's'... Does anybody have any more specifics on that?
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Post by Partridge on Dec 3, 2019 17:10:58 GMT -5
COULD WE PLEASE CHANGE THE NAME OF THIS FORUM TO: Linda Ronstadt Afterthought Discussion An afterthought? I have often referred to Linda as being fan-hostile. Yes, I've received emails from folks who Linda pissed off when she was hostile to them- and many of them became lost fans. I think she might have reflected in some recent interviews that there were times when she could have been "more gracious." |
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Post by germancanadian on Dec 3, 2019 17:44:12 GMT -5
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Post by Deleted on Dec 3, 2019 17:55:24 GMT -5
Thanks for the info, an awful disease that Linda is handling with her usual grace and courage.. |
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Post by musedeva on Dec 3, 2019 18:34:20 GMT -5
I think THAT is the BEST one we've had since the book.....the best part? she still sings ALL THE TIME!! we knew she was doing it ...what ...with her cousin when he came over to play guitar...but yeah...she does what she's always done...sing!!
Goddess Bless Her!!!...there are so many alternative, unsung remedies out there for her....hope someone encourages her to try
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Post by RobGNYC on Dec 3, 2019 18:52:01 GMT -5
I think this is the first time I've read that Linda knew during the Nov. 7, 2009, show that it would be her last show.
"Now, picture her onstage for the last time. It was Nov. 7, 2009, in San Antonio. She is in her glory, performing with Mexican dancers and a full mariachi band. As she stood there, 'every show I ever did flashed before my eyes,' she recalls. 'It ran like a movie in front of me.' ”
I don't believe for a minute that she considers her fans an "afterthought." That sounds like the reporter's word. We may not be the main reason that she sang but I think that she values her audience much more highly than that word indicates.
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Post by erik on Dec 3, 2019 20:03:59 GMT -5
Quote by RobGNYC:
I think in the past she may have been, how shall we say, ambivalent about that part of her fan base that frequently shouted "HEAT WAVE!" at her concerts when she was about to do a ballad (usually "Heart Like A Wheel"); and this usually happened when said fans were more loaded than two-dollar pistols. If this is true (and I don't doubt that it is), then one can't blame her for having felt that way. But I think she knows better than to treat fans as a mere afterthought, because she could never have gotten away with many of the excursions she took into opera, American standards, and Mexican rancheras without that fan and peer support that says they believe she knows what she's doing (while the record company execs weren't nearly as sure, at least at the time).
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Post by sliderocker on Dec 3, 2019 20:56:26 GMT -5
Ronstadt’s not a songwriter. Her fans are an afterthought, her fame an annoyance. Singing is the thing. It’s her obsession, her identity, her release. It is her pony and her desert.COULD WE PLEASE CHANGE THE NAME OF THIS FORUM TO: Linda Ronstadt Afterthought Discussion
I am sure Linda liked the money that came along with the fame. Sometimes you have to take the good with the bad although to many the fame is more important than the money. That being said if all one wants to do is sing with no fame and no money they could just join a choir or go to amateur night at the local clubs. Not sure why she never thought of that. I'm in total agreement about Linda liking the money that came with the fame. It's also disheartening that she didn't seem to appreciate her fans who bought all those albums and concert tickets that went along with the fame, and the money that went with it. Without the fans, there wouldn't have been the money. As you say, there were other avenues she could've pursued if all she wanted to do was sing. When I read articles like this, I keep wondering what was left out, what wasn't said? Linda said at the time she was diagnosed with Parkinson's originally that she wasn't always as gracious as she should've been. I didn't get a sense of graciousness or gratitude from Linda at all in this article/interview at all. And I'm hoping that had more to do with the writer of the article than with Linda. |
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Post by sliderocker on Dec 3, 2019 21:12:29 GMT -5
Quote by RobGNYC: I think in the past she may have been, how shall we say, ambivalent about that part of her fan base that frequently shouted " HEAT WAVE!" at her concerts when she was about to do a ballad (usually "Heart Like A Wheel"); and this usually happened when said fans were more loaded than two-dollar pistols. If this is true (and I don't doubt that it is), then one can't blame her for having felt that way. But I think she knows better than to treat fans as a mere afterthought, because she could never have gotten away with many of the excursions she took into opera, American standards, and Mexican rancheras without that fan and peer support that says they believe she knows what she's doing (while the record company execs weren't nearly as sure, at least at the time). I want to believe Linda didn't consider her fans an afterthought as well. That comes across as rather cold and heartless. But, I don't believe it was because the fans were loaded at her concerts, because they wanted to hear her do a rock song when she was getting ready to do a ballad. I recall a Linda interview in the 70s where she complained about fans coming up to her in restaurants and asking her for autographs. And she was annoyed as hell by that. And I can't say I'd have blamed her for that, but on the other side of that coin, she probably would've begrudged signing autographs at her concerts or if someone saw her shopping. And the question has to be asked, would she have been upset if the fans had ignored her presence or didn't ask for autographs? As Rob said, if money and fame wasn't that important, and the fans were an afterthought, there were other avenues she could've pursued as a singer. Singing in the choir, singing on amateur nights. She could've had her own vanity record label, recorded the songs she wanted and released albums that way. And we'd never heard of her. But, I can't believe she regarded the fans as an afterthought and that whatever rewards she had in life was because of the fans. And as I said in my reply to Rob, I want to believe there was something not said or left out in this article by the writer. And as such, it paints a false and unflattering picture of Linda. |
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Post by sliderocker on Dec 3, 2019 21:35:59 GMT -5
Wonderful article, thanks... I did note that Linda was said to have a 'degenerative disease, similar to Parkinson's'... Does anybody have any more specifics on that? I looked it up when I read about it in another article on Linda. I didn't like what I read with regard to someone's life expectancy, which was something like three to five years after diagnosis. That's scary, because it means if Linda was diagnosed incorrectly as having Parkinson's when she was 66, but she had progressive supranuclear palsy instead, it means she has already lived longer than most patients with the illness. Which means Linda could go at any time. Many of the risks which could've killed Linda because of her having Parkinson's are also possible with the progressive supranuclear palsy, such as pneumonia, choking on food or drink, falling, et al. And I think I also read she could possibly suffer a stroke. Progressive supranuclear palsy is similar to Parkinson's but it sounds like it's a more aggressive form of the Parkinson's illness, but not exactly Parkinson's. When it comes to Linda, I can get mad at her for some of the things she has said (like what's in this article), but the love I have for her outweighs all that. Also, I don't like thinking about Linda and her inevitable end. I'm prepared for that eventuality, but I'd still like it to be some time off in the far distant future. After reading about progressive supranuclear palsy, I'm more afraid the eventuality is closer than we think. |
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Post by erik on Dec 3, 2019 22:31:38 GMT -5
Quote by sliderocker:
With respect to fans coming up to her in restaurants asking her for an autograph at the height of her fame in the late 1970s, I can totally understand how she might feel the way she did. At the same time, however, Linda at some point must have come to realize and understand how she could sometimes come across as rather snobby and, in her words, "ungracious", especially when it comes to certain members of the press who simply don't like her either as a person or as a hugely successful figure of her field. Arguably, that could also be true in this article/interview, because I think it is standard-issue behavior for the press to tear any entertainer down for whatever reason is handy at the moment, whether it is true or not. Having re-read the article/interview again, I'm not sure that it doesn't come across as something of a hit job, coming so close to the Kennedy Center Honors, which is why it is incumbent on us as fans not to read more into this than there actually is (IMHO).
At the end of the day, I think Linda realizes that the vast majority of her fans (which would include her peers) are very respectful of her as a person while being in awe of her achievements and her abilities over the last 50+ years, even if her own natural modesty doesn't somehow "permit" her to show it. This is what I think we as fans can hopefully take away from all the great things that have happened for her this year, be it the CBS interview in February; the release of the Live In Hollywood album in February; or THE SOUND OF MY VOICE.
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Post by musedeva on Dec 3, 2019 22:49:05 GMT -5
making an issue that she didn't appreciate her fans.....at this stage ......is just opportunities for naysayers and female bashing imho......i have no memory of her being not appreciative of fans...and the few times i saw her...she was genuinely appreciative of her fans in being thankful on the stage itself....intuitively.....I think any "objections" she may have had "back in the day" was probably attempts to protect herself from the media oversexualization of her persona.........now....obviously in her pain and physical condition...to come forward at this stage with her infirmaties ()sp? is a very brave selfless gift to nothing but ....the fans
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Post by erik on Dec 4, 2019 0:21:37 GMT -5
Quote by musedeva:
All true. I saw Linda three times in concert, all in Los Angeles (in May 1995; July 2004; and July 2006); and on all three occasions, she was extremely happy and chatty with the audience, not to mention still very full of vocal dexterity. And I knew that Linda had reason to fear that the "sexual" image she had had always been overemphasized at the expense of her voice.
I agree it also took a lot for her to come out and say that it was a horrific disease, now identified as Progressive Supranuclear Palsy, that stopped her doing what had been her life's work. Whether it was that or the much more well-known Parkinson's, it is still a tragedy that her voice was stilled at a time when vocalists of her caliber and ability are now so few and far between. But she clearly has made it her mission to continue doing as much with what remains with her life as she can. And I think she knows she has the support of fans and peers alike.
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Post by the Scribe on Dec 4, 2019 0:27:39 GMT -5
Well, this subject has come up several times and long before her diagnosis...and in different interviews by different interviewers so it isn't an anomaly to this particular interviewer. Linda definitely has an interesting "disconnect" when it comes to fame, fortune, fans and the gift she was given and how it was used. If someone just wants to sing they really don't need a recording contract to do that. That implies wanting much more. Not sure how it can be rationalized any other way.
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Post by Dianna on Dec 4, 2019 1:05:34 GMT -5
I'm not subscribed unable to read it.
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Post by the Scribe on Dec 4, 2019 1:18:09 GMT -5
Linda Ronstadt never stopped singing “I like to do whatever I want,” says Ronstadt, pictured here outside her home in San Francisco. “Within reason.” (Jessica Chou for The Washington Post)
By Ellen McCarthy
Dec. 3, 2019 at 9:00 a.m. MST
www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/linda-ronstadt-never-stopped-singing/2019/12/02/57d6ad7c-0f9d-11ea-b0fc-62cc38411ebb_story.html
SAN FRANCISCO — Try telling Linda Ronstadt where she can’t go, what she can’t do. Go ahead.
But before you try, picture her at age 4, not yet in kindergarten, riding a pony fast and free through the Sonoran Desert of Arizona, evading rattlesnakes and adult supervision.
Picture her as a teenager, giving her parents only a couple hours’ notice before riding off to Los Angeles to be a singer. Picture her performing for stadium crowds, a megastar with big brown eyes and short shorts, the dream girl of a generation, taking on folk, rock, pop, country, Latin music and American standards.
Picture her doing anything other than watching her own induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, let alone attending the ceremony. Picture her showing up to the White House to receive the National Medal of Arts from Barack Obama, then picture that medal collecting dust under her bed.
Which is probably where the Kennedy Center Honors she’ll receive this month will also be stashed (she at least plans to “suffer through” that ceremony in person), because all of that — the reverence, the recognition — isn’t important to her. The only important thing to Linda Ronstadt, ever, has been the part you can’t picture: the experience of singing. Singing what she wants, when she wants, in relentless pursuit of perfection.
“It tells what I am,” she said in an interview last month at her home in San Francisco.
Ronstadt’s not a songwriter. Her fans are an afterthought, her fame an annoyance. Singing is the thing. It’s her obsession, her identity, her release. It is her pony and her desert.
Is. Was.
Picture her now, at 73, confined in a body that mostly just shuffles haltingly through the house. A degenerative disease, similar to Parkinson’s, has stolen her voice, along with her abilities to ride and run and strum a guitar.
That theft marked an obvious loss for the musical world, and, it would seem, an incalculable one for her. Because as far as anyone can tell, Linda Ronstadt can’t sing anymore.
But try telling her that. Go ahead.
Linda Ronstadt with her pony, Murphy, at her childhood home in Tucson in 1949 or 1950. (Family photo)
Ronstadt lifts her legs onto a settee in her whitewashed living room a few blocks from the Bay. From here she can look out the French doors to a garden still blooming with hydrangeas. Everything is just as she prefers. Bookshelves overflowing. Black-and-white photos of her parents on the grand piano. An original print from Disney’s “Snow White” front and center on the mantel.
“I like to do whatever I want,” she shrugs. “Within reason.”
What she doesn’t want to do is drink the water her longtime assistant puts next to her, though she knows she should. Her appetite is diminished, along with her mobility. But she also doesn’t want to spend time feeling sorry for herself, she doesn’t want to listen to her old albums, and she certainly doesn’t want to talk about her reign as the Queen of Rock.
“I thought I did pretty well,” she says, “But I didn’t think I was the greatest at anything.”
Rolling Stone deemed Ronstadt “America’s best-known female rock singer” in 1978. By then she’d put out hit recordings of Clint Ballard Jr.’s “You’re No Good,” Roy Orbison and Joe Melson’s “Blue Bayou,” and Warren Zevon’s “Poor Poor Pitiful Me.” But as far as Ronstadt is concerned, she “didn’t really start singing until about 1980.” Meaning, she didn’t start singing to her own satisfaction until then.
Ronstadt’s fans are far less critical. Between 1969 and 2009, she released more than 30 albums, won 10 Grammys, had 21 Top 40 hits. For four decades, she was ubiquitous.
And then she was gone. Because if she couldn’t sing to her own satisfaction, she’d rather not sing at all.
Even if it meant giving up a lifelong vocation, one she felt was sealed in her genes before birth. Ronstadt’s paternal grandfather, a Mexican immigrant who ran a hardware store, was the conductor of a brass band. Her father was a baritone crooner who played venues around Tucson. Her brother was a soloist with the Tucson Arizona Boys Chorus. Ronstadt was 4 years old when she decided she was a singer, after joining her older siblings in a song around their piano and hearing her older sister remark, “Think we got a soprano here.”
“I remember thinking, ‘I’m a singer, that’s what I do,’ ” Ronstadt wrote in her memoir, “Simple Dreams.” “It was like I had become validated somehow, my existence affirmed.”
She spent endless childhood hours by the radio, listening to American folk songs and Mexican ballads. If there were musicians on the street or a concert in town, she was drawn like a supercharged magnet. “I wanted to learn everything I could learn,” she explains, brushing away a strand of lavender hair dyed to match the color of her soft sweater.
As a teenager, she performed with her brother and sister around Tucson, but she always preferred singing at home, without a microphone. To Ronstadt, singing was a verb, maybe even a calling — not a ticket to fame or fortune. “I didn’t think about it in terms of being on the stage,” she says. “I just thought about singing.”
In 1965, Ronstadt dropped out of college after one semester, broke the news to her parents — who were devastated but handed her $30 so she wouldn’t starve — and headed to the West Coast. She moved into a beachside bungalow in Santa Monica and started playing coffee shops with two buddies, who together called themselves the Stone Poneys. The group had a breakout hit, “Different Drum,” that got airtime on the radio as they toured through what Ronstadt remembers mostly as “roach parlors” around the country. Ronstadt, with a crystalline voice and lungs that seemed to elevate every note to the heavens, attracted industry attention almost immediately.
“Somebody recommended to me that I go to the Bitter End to hear this extraordinary woman sing,” recalls Peter Asher, a producer who worked for the Beatles’ record label and was managing James Taylor’s career. “And everything they told me was true. That she was extraordinarily beautiful and she was an amazing singer. She sang barefoot in these really short shorts. And that everything about her was spectacularly exciting in every way.”
Another young talent in her position might have been vulnerable to the pressures of industry executives with opinions about what she should be singing, but Ronstadt had her own ideas. Choosing songs was as much a part of her talent as singing them. Ronstadt didn’t write her own material, but was an exacting interpreter — more Yo-Yo Ma than Bob Dylan, with an instrument that just happened to be lodged in her throat. If a line in a song spoke to her life, she’d work it through ceaselessly until she had refit it for her own voice.
In her memoir, Rondstadt recalls the moment a friend sang her a few lines from a song called “Heart Like a Wheel” by a Canadian songwriter, Anna McGarrigle.
And my love for you is like a sinking ship
And my heart is on that ship out in mid-ocean
“I felt like a bomb had exploded in my head,” she wrote. Ronstadt ingested the song, recorded it and released it into our collective consciousness.
“I remember thinking, ‘I’m a singer, that’s what I do,’ ” Ronstadt wrote in her memoir. “It was like I had become validated somehow, my existence affirmed.” (Kirk West/Getty Images)
That was the part she loved. The rest of it — the fans, the money, the acclaim — was beside the point.
“It wasn’t what I was after,” she says. “I just sort of did music regardless of the audience. I didn’t think about my fans.”
This apathy toward the supposed rewards of fame protected Ronstadt from many of its pitfalls. A staffer on “The Johnny Cash Show” knocked on her hotel room late one night, demanded to be let in and then proceeded to take off all his clothes, she says. He told her he could opendoors for her professionally, help her land more television appearances. Ronstadt, then in her early 20s, just laughed. “I said, ‘I hate singing on television!’ ” she recalls. “He didn’t have anything he could hold over me.”
Ronstadt soon got a reputation for being difficult. Asher, who eventually signed on to be both her producer and manager, blames sexism as much as anything. “In that era, there was a ‘Don’t you worry your pretty little head’ factor,” he says. “She couldn’t actually be super-intelligent and well-read and interesting if she’s that beautiful. . . . But she happens to be both.”
But it’s true that she was uncompromising. In 1980, at the height of her hitmaking power — after she’d toured with the Doors, had the members of the Eagles as her backup band and became the first woman to sell out stadiums — she left Los Angeles to join the Broadway production of “The Pirates of Penzance.” Advisers and friends, worried it would be a career-killer, warned against it. She did it anyway. Afterward, she wanted to record an album of old standards by George Gershwin, Irving Berlin and the like. She heard repeatedly that audiences would balk. She did it anyway. When she decided to make a record of Mexican music, she was told it would flop. It was released in 1987, went double platinum and became the highest-selling non-English album in American history.
That was the happiest chapter of her career. Because she was in full control, both of the music and her ability to sing it.
Then, in 2000, as she was recording a song with Emmylou Harris, she detected something wrong in her voice. “It was like something had grabbed my vocal cords and stopped them,” she says. “Like a hand had just grabbed it and was squeezing.”
For years, no one believed her. They blamed her perfectionism. As time went on, her pitch started to go and her voice lost its range. Doctors could offer no explanation. But she wasn’t willing to put out albums that weren’t up to her standards.
Now, picture her onstage for the last time. It was Nov. 7, 2009, in San Antonio. She is in her glory, performing with Mexican dancers and a full mariachi band. As she stood there, “every show I ever did flashed before my eyes,” she recalls. “It ran like a movie in front of me.”
When she was done, she went home and burned her stage clothes.
“I haven’t been bored,” Ronstadt says now, 10 years into her retirement, “and I haven’t been depressed.” (Jessica Chou for The Washington Post)
“The cat goes outside,” Ronstadt says as the fog rolls in and her fireplace crackles. “He tells me what’s going on out there.”
It is 10 years to the day since her last show. Now, she says, she’ll go 10 days at a stretch without leaving the house. She can still walk, though gingerly, and even add a log to the fire when it gets low. But her hands tremble, and even sitting upright becomes painful after a while.
“But I haven’t been bored, and I haven’t been depressed,” she says. “As long as I have a good book, I’m not bored.”
There are people around, much of the time. In her early 40s, Ronstadt adopted two children who are now young adults living in San Francisco. Ronstadt’s beloved assistant, Janet Stark, is with her five days a week. And every Sunday, a professional chef cooks brunch for whoever is around. Sometimes Bonnie Raitt comes over for tea. “We discuss what it was like to be girl singers on the road.” When Emmylou Harris is in town, she brings over her laundry. It’s fun, Ronstadt says, but “not as much fun as singing together.”
Ronstadt had several high-profile romances — including with politician Jerry Brown and filmmaker George Lucas — but she never married. “I have no talent for it,” she explains. “Not a shred. I don’t like to compromise. If I want a pink sofa and somebody doesn’t want a pink sofa, I’m not going to go for that. I want the pink sofa.” (She got the pink sofa, and it still sits in her living room, though today it wears a white slipcover.)
Compromising with illness has been a challenge. It was more than a decade of frustration from the time Ronstadt noticed her instrument beginning to fail her to the time she was diagnosed, in 2012. (Doctors thought it was Parkinson’s at first, but Ronstadt recently got a diagnosis of progressive supranuclear palsy.) She has tried to adopt an attitude of “radical acceptance” about her condition, but what she misses most — besides knitting — is singing with her friends and family.
Which is not to say she isn’t singing at all. She is. Almost incessantly. Sometimes involuntarily. She sings as she putters around the house. As she strokes the cat. As she talks to friends.
It’s just not audible to anyone but her.
She wakes up most mornings to the sound of the “Missouri Waltz” played by clarinets on the jukebox in her head. She hates it. “I don’t like the lyrics. I don’t like the tune. And I don’t like it with clarinets,” Ronstadt fumes. “But that’s what it plays.”
To drive it out, she’ll learn a new song.
“I can still sing in my brain,” she says. “I have to keep the seed alive.”
Go ahead, try telling her she can’t — not really.
Then picture her alone in her home, on her pink sofa with the white slipcover, deep in focus. Picture her working out the phrasing, the rhythm and harmonies just as she always did; and then singing it, in perfect silence, to the only listener who ever mattered.
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Post by Dianna on Dec 4, 2019 2:02:56 GMT -5
THANK YOU ROB!!!!!!
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Post by Dianna on Dec 4, 2019 3:33:02 GMT -5
Really good article. Thank You.. I think this is the first time I've read Linda described as difficult, even early in her career.. and because she didn't take any crap from some creepy industry men. I can imagine the sexism in those days.
I also think the "fans are an afterthought," comment was of the opinion of the reporter and misinterpreted..
From many years of listening to Linda and reading her interviews, I feel, like many here on the forum, understand her a little bit.. I believe in the beginning, Linda never set out to famous, she wanted to make a nice living doing what she loved and knew... singing.. she knew this from the time she was 4 years old and at a very young age (I'm quoting her) singing was her calling,had become validated and her existence affirmed.
Most Entertainers I know of have a deep outward appreciation for their fans, and they show it, and many, most likely started out like Linda, knew their calling.. Many love the attention and love.. it's almost as important to them as the actual singing/performing itself, or more..lol
Linda has always been critical of her own singing and early on up until she was a household name was apologetic for her success which IMO was kind of odd, considering she has one of the, if not the most gorgeous voices on the planet.. just seemed silly to me. It was almost like she felt a little embarrassed people liked her music and her.. and I don't think it was a case of false modesty ..
One thing for sure and from what I understand, when Linda sang with Mariachi's, she really found her home in the stage style.
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Post by PoP80 on Dec 4, 2019 8:49:04 GMT -5
What resonates with me is that Linda was her own person from the outset and music was the powerful driving force. She wasn't particularly interested in money and fame, but had an innate necessity to sing. The fans were secondary, not in a dismissive way, but we were not on her radar regarding the musical choices she made. Also, Linda is very shy and I think it was difficult at times to engage with her fans face-to-face. Speaking of faces, she looks lovely in the photos for this article! Although it's upsetting to know that the Parkinson's is progressive, she has made peace with it. We can all learn from the steadfast resilience and contentment she has found in this less than ideal reality.
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Post by eddiejinnj on Dec 4, 2019 9:49:17 GMT -5
She overly garnished the article with "She'll do what she wants no matter what" to the point it became distasteful for me. IMO, the interviewer's mindset affected the article's integrity!!!! Thumbs down, lol!!! eddiejinnj
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Post by erik on Dec 4, 2019 10:09:39 GMT -5
Well,. truth be told, she did largely do what she wanted, fully aware that she was taking risks with her own popularity and arguably scaring the life out of not only her handlers but also even some of her fans. But I think the interviewer mistakenly assumed that Linda made the kind of music she did, particularly when inside the American standard and Mexican ranchera fields, without regard for the intelligence of the audience. Those albums would never have sold anything at all if she had been so openly contemptuous.
Insofar as fame goes, when she started out in the mid-1960s, I think Linda felt that being able to make $30-$40 a month was a fine deal all around; and all she was really looking for was the kind of quiet, modest career that Judy Collins was making for herself. Linda really didn't dare to dream big; to her, it might have seemed dangerous, and she might not have felt able to handle it. As it was, when the reality more than exceeded even the wildest dreams she had in 1975, it took time for her to adjust to the reality that, to paraphrase Al Franken, she was good enough, she was smart enough, and doggone it, people liked her.
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Post by RobGNYC on Dec 4, 2019 12:00:01 GMT -5
From an earlier thread, "Q&A With Linda Ronstadt circa 1998"--I think she said it pretty well here regarding her audience: "I told the record company I wanted to make an album all in Spanish," she recalled, " and they said, 'Joan Baez did it and it didn't sell. Can't you just do a few Spanish songs?' I really wanted to do traditional songs, but I knew that they really wouldn't fit in the middle of a bunch of American pop songs." Even her long-time producer Peter Asher tried to talk her out of it, but she was immovable in her determination. "The only negative comment I've heard is that it's not a good career move. I couldn't give two hoots about career moves at this point," she exclaimed.
"As usual," Linda continued, "I had absolutely no consideration for the audience. I mean, I never do. It's actually less selfish in a way to do it that way, because I only consider myself and I only want it to be what I think is good. I do these songs because I think they're beautiful and because I love them, and I want to hear them done correctly. And, if I please myself first and the audience seems pleased as a result of it -- I'm delighted."
ronstadt.proboards.com/thread/148/linda-ronstadt-circa-1998#ixzz679ruvgbD |
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Post by mused on Dec 4, 2019 15:54:08 GMT -5
"As usual," Linda continued, "I had absolutely no consideration for the audience. I mean, I never do. It's actually less selfish in a way to do it that way, because I only consider myself and I only want it to be what I think is good. I do these songs because I think they're beautiful and because I love them, and I want to hear them done correctly. And, if I please myself first and the audience seems pleased as a result of it -- I'm delighted."
Page and Plant,,,cover artists themselves to a degree....really drove this home to me at least...eons ago..its basically "the way of the artist" "road less traveled".....Linda hit a measure where she really could call her own shots and did it....obviously early on she couldnt
the fact she wasn't doing purely her own songs...just compounded it all....i cannot do any originals without sounding different, different tones, inflections etc....that's just because I havent heard anyone else do it.....and i cannot do a cover without bending my vocal to the original recording
THAT is the difference with Linda! she could re arrange something and totally make it her own
....which,,,quite frankly....is a whole lot easier covering opposite sex songs...which is primarily what she did,,,,,even alot of the standards were Frank's first,,,right?,,,i.e. Riddle
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Post by eddiejinnj on Dec 4, 2019 17:34:47 GMT -5
I was commenting on the author's verve in this matter. Yes, especially I would say later in her career she did basically what she wanted insofar as musically but she also has commented that at times she had to consider her label etc. The just try stuff the author wrote was a little much. I was hoping more time would be spent on the movie. Other than that am pretty benign about the article. eddiejinnj
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Post by Dianna on Dec 4, 2019 19:16:30 GMT -5
From an earlier thread, "Q&A With Linda Ronstadt circa 1998"--I think she said it pretty well here regarding her audience: "I told the record company I wanted to make an album all in Spanish," she recalled, " and they said, 'Joan Baez did it and it didn't sell. Can't you just do a few Spanish songs?' I really wanted to do traditional songs, but I knew that they really wouldn't fit in the middle of a bunch of American pop songs." Even her long-time producer Peter Asher tried to talk her out of it, but she was immovable in her determination. "The only negative comment I've heard is that it's not a good career move. I couldn't give two hoots about career moves at this point," she exclaimed.
"As usual," Linda continued, "I had absolutely no consideration for the audience. I mean, I never do. It's actually less selfish in a way to do it that way, because I only consider myself and I only want it to be what I think is good. I do these songs because I think they're beautiful and because I love them, and I want to hear them done correctly. And, if I please myself first and the audience seems pleased as a result of it -- I'm delighted."
ronstadt.proboards.com/thread/148/linda-ronstadt-circa-1998#ixzz679ruvgbDAlso.. The Sunday Morning Interview in 2004 when promoting "Hummin' to my self." When asked, "How does it make you feel knowing you can connect with people like that." She replied, " I don't think about it, I'm busy trying to think of my own silly story. I'm that self centered." |
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Post by rumba on Dec 4, 2019 20:36:36 GMT -5
Linda Ronstadt never stopped singing“I like to do whatever I want,” says Ronstadt, pictured here outside her home in San Francisco. “Within reason.” (Jessica Chou for The Washington Post)
By Ellen McCarthy
Dec. 3, 2019 at 9:00 a.m. MST
www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/linda-ronstadt-never-stopped-singing/2019/12/02/57d6ad7c-0f9d-11ea-b0fc-62cc38411ebb_story.html
SAN FRANCISCO — Try telling Linda Ronstadt where she can’t go, what she can’t do. Go ahead.
But before you try, picture her at age 4, not yet in kindergarten, riding a pony fast and free through the Sonoran Desert of Arizona, evading rattlesnakes and adult supervision.
Picture her as a teenager, giving her parents only a couple hours’ notice before riding off to Los Angeles to be a singer. Picture her performing for stadium crowds, a megastar with big brown eyes and short shorts, the dream girl of a generation, taking on folk, rock, pop, country, Latin music and American standards.
Picture her doing anything other than watching her own induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, let alone attending the ceremony. Picture her showing up to the White House to receive the National Medal of Arts from Barack Obama, then picture that medal collecting dust under her bed.
Which is probably where the Kennedy Center Honors she’ll receive this month will also be stashed (she at least plans to “suffer through” that ceremony in person), because all of that — the reverence, the recognition — isn’t important to her. The only important thing to Linda Ronstadt, ever, has been the part you can’t picture: the experience of singing. Singing what she wants, when she wants, in relentless pursuit of perfection.
“It tells what I am,” she said in an interview last month at her home in San Francisco.
Ronstadt’s not a songwriter. Her fans are an afterthought, her fame an annoyance. Singing is the thing. It’s her obsession, her identity, her release. It is her pony and her desert.
Is. Was.
Picture her now, at 73, confined in a body that mostly just shuffles haltingly through the house. A degenerative disease, similar to Parkinson’s, has stolen her voice, along with her abilities to ride and run and strum a guitar.
That theft marked an obvious loss for the musical world, and, it would seem, an incalculable one for her. Because as far as anyone can tell, Linda Ronstadt can’t sing anymore.
But try telling her that. Go ahead.
Linda Ronstadt with her pony, Murphy, at her childhood home in Tucson in 1949 or 1950. (Family photo)
Ronstadt lifts her legs onto a settee in her whitewashed living room a few blocks from the Bay. From here she can look out the French doors to a garden still blooming with hydrangeas. Everything is just as she prefers. Bookshelves overflowing. Black-and-white photos of her parents on the grand piano. An original print from Disney’s “Snow White” front and center on the mantel.
“I like to do whatever I want,” she shrugs. “Within reason.”
What she doesn’t want to do is drink the water her longtime assistant puts next to her, though she knows she should. Her appetite is diminished, along with her mobility. But she also doesn’t want to spend time feeling sorry for herself, she doesn’t want to listen to her old albums, and she certainly doesn’t want to talk about her reign as the Queen of Rock.
“I thought I did pretty well,” she says, “But I didn’t think I was the greatest at anything.”
Rolling Stone deemed Ronstadt “America’s best-known female rock singer” in 1978. By then she’d put out hit recordings of Clint Ballard Jr.’s “You’re No Good,” Roy Orbison and Joe Melson’s “Blue Bayou,” and Warren Zevon’s “Poor Poor Pitiful Me.” But as far as Ronstadt is concerned, she “didn’t really start singing until about 1980.” Meaning, she didn’t start singing to her own satisfaction until then.
Ronstadt’s fans are far less critical. Between 1969 and 2009, she released more than 30 albums, won 10 Grammys, had 21 Top 40 hits. For four decades, she was ubiquitous.
And then she was gone. Because if she couldn’t sing to her own satisfaction, she’d rather not sing at all.
Even if it meant giving up a lifelong vocation, one she felt was sealed in her genes before birth. Ronstadt’s paternal grandfather, a Mexican immigrant who ran a hardware store, was the conductor of a brass band. Her father was a baritone crooner who played venues around Tucson. Her brother was a soloist with the Tucson Arizona Boys Chorus. Ronstadt was 4 years old when she decided she was a singer, after joining her older siblings in a song around their piano and hearing her older sister remark, “Think we got a soprano here.”
“I remember thinking, ‘I’m a singer, that’s what I do,’ ” Ronstadt wrote in her memoir, “Simple Dreams.” “It was like I had become validated somehow, my existence affirmed.”
She spent endless childhood hours by the radio, listening to American folk songs and Mexican ballads. If there were musicians on the street or a concert in town, she was drawn like a supercharged magnet. “I wanted to learn everything I could learn,” she explains, brushing away a strand of lavender hair dyed to match the color of her soft sweater.
As a teenager, she performed with her brother and sister around Tucson, but she always preferred singing at home, without a microphone. To Ronstadt, singing was a verb, maybe even a calling — not a ticket to fame or fortune. “I didn’t think about it in terms of being on the stage,” she says. “I just thought about singing.”
In 1965, Ronstadt dropped out of college after one semester, broke the news to her parents — who were devastated but handed her $30 so she wouldn’t starve — and headed to the West Coast. She moved into a beachside bungalow in Santa Monica and started playing coffee shops with two buddies, who together called themselves the Stone Poneys. The group had a breakout hit, “Different Drum,” that got airtime on the radio as they toured through what Ronstadt remembers mostly as “roach parlors” around the country. Ronstadt, with a crystalline voice and lungs that seemed to elevate every note to the heavens, attracted industry attention almost immediately.
“Somebody recommended to me that I go to the Bitter End to hear this extraordinary woman sing,” recalls Peter Asher, a producer who worked for the Beatles’ record label and was managing James Taylor’s career. “And everything they told me was true. That she was extraordinarily beautiful and she was an amazing singer. She sang barefoot in these really short shorts. And that everything about her was spectacularly exciting in every way.”
Another young talent in her position might have been vulnerable to the pressures of industry executives with opinions about what she should be singing, but Ronstadt had her own ideas. Choosing songs was as much a part of her talent as singing them. Ronstadt didn’t write her own material, but was an exacting interpreter — more Yo-Yo Ma than Bob Dylan, with an instrument that just happened to be lodged in her throat. If a line in a song spoke to her life, she’d work it through ceaselessly until she had refit it for her own voice.
In her memoir, Rondstadt recalls the moment a friend sang her a few lines from a song called “Heart Like a Wheel” by a Canadian songwriter, Anna McGarrigle.
And my love for you is like a sinking ship
And my heart is on that ship out in mid-ocean
“I felt like a bomb had exploded in my head,” she wrote. Ronstadt ingested the song, recorded it and released it into our collective consciousness.
“I remember thinking, ‘I’m a singer, that’s what I do,’ ” Ronstadt wrote in her memoir. “It was like I had become validated somehow, my existence affirmed.” (Kirk West/Getty Images)
That was the part she loved. The rest of it — the fans, the money, the acclaim — was beside the point.
“It wasn’t what I was after,” she says. “I just sort of did music regardless of the audience. I didn’t think about my fans.”
This apathy toward the supposed rewards of fame protected Ronstadt from many of its pitfalls. A staffer on “The Johnny Cash Show” knocked on her hotel room late one night, demanded to be let in and then proceeded to take off all his clothes, she says. He told her he could opendoors for her professionally, help her land more television appearances. Ronstadt, then in her early 20s, just laughed. “I said, ‘I hate singing on television!’ ” she recalls. “He didn’t have anything he could hold over me.”
Ronstadt soon got a reputation for being difficult. Asher, who eventually signed on to be both her producer and manager, blames sexism as much as anything. “In that era, there was a ‘Don’t you worry your pretty little head’ factor,” he says. “She couldn’t actually be super-intelligent and well-read and interesting if she’s that beautiful. . . . But she happens to be both.”
But it’s true that she was uncompromising. In 1980, at the height of her hitmaking power — after she’d toured with the Doors, had the members of the Eagles as her backup band and became the first woman to sell out stadiums — she left Los Angeles to join the Broadway production of “The Pirates of Penzance.” Advisers and friends, worried it would be a career-killer, warned against it. She did it anyway. Afterward, she wanted to record an album of old standards by George Gershwin, Irving Berlin and the like. She heard repeatedly that audiences would balk. She did it anyway. When she decided to make a record of Mexican music, she was told it would flop. It was released in 1987, went double platinum and became the highest-selling non-English album in American history.
That was the happiest chapter of her career. Because she was in full control, both of the music and her ability to sing it.
Then, in 2000, as she was recording a song with Emmylou Harris, she detected something wrong in her voice. “It was like something had grabbed my vocal cords and stopped them,” she says. “Like a hand had just grabbed it and was squeezing.”
For years, no one believed her. They blamed her perfectionism. As time went on, her pitch started to go and her voice lost its range. Doctors could offer no explanation. But she wasn’t willing to put out albums that weren’t up to her standards.
Now, picture her onstage for the last time. It was Nov. 7, 2009, in San Antonio. She is in her glory, performing with Mexican dancers and a full mariachi band. As she stood there, “every show I ever did flashed before my eyes,” she recalls. “It ran like a movie in front of me.”
When she was done, she went home and burned her stage clothes.
“I haven’t been bored,” Ronstadt says now, 10 years into her retirement, “and I haven’t been depressed.” (Jessica Chou for The Washington Post)
“The cat goes outside,” Ronstadt says as the fog rolls in and her fireplace crackles. “He tells me what’s going on out there.”
It is 10 years to the day since her last show. Now, she says, she’ll go 10 days at a stretch without leaving the house. She can still walk, though gingerly, and even add a log to the fire when it gets low. But her hands tremble, and even sitting upright becomes painful after a while.
“But I haven’t been bored, and I haven’t been depressed,” she says. “As long as I have a good book, I’m not bored.”
There are people around, much of the time. In her early 40s, Ronstadt adopted two children who are now young adults living in San Francisco. Ronstadt’s beloved assistant, Janet Stark, is with her five days a week. And every Sunday, a professional chef cooks brunch for whoever is around. Sometimes Bonnie Raitt comes over for tea. “We discuss what it was like to be girl singers on the road.” When Emmylou Harris is in town, she brings over her laundry. It’s fun, Ronstadt says, but “not as much fun as singing together.”
Ronstadt had several high-profile romances — including with politician Jerry Brown and filmmaker George Lucas — but she never married. “I have no talent for it,” she explains. “Not a shred. I don’t like to compromise. If I want a pink sofa and somebody doesn’t want a pink sofa, I’m not going to go for that. I want the pink sofa.” (She got the pink sofa, and it still sits in her living room, though today it wears a white slipcover.)
Compromising with illness has been a challenge. It was more than a decade of frustration from the time Ronstadt noticed her instrument beginning to fail her to the time she was diagnosed, in 2012. (Doctors thought it was Parkinson’s at first, but Ronstadt recently got a diagnosis of progressive supranuclear palsy.) She has tried to adopt an attitude of “radical acceptance” about her condition, but what she misses most — besides knitting — is singing with her friends and family.
Which is not to say she isn’t singing at all. She is. Almost incessantly. Sometimes involuntarily. She sings as she putters around the house. As she strokes the cat. As she talks to friends.
It’s just not audible to anyone but her.
She wakes up most mornings to the sound of the “Missouri Waltz” played by clarinets on the jukebox in her head. She hates it. “I don’t like the lyrics. I don’t like the tune. And I don’t like it with clarinets,” Ronstadt fumes. “But that’s what it plays.”
To drive it out, she’ll learn a new song.
“I can still sing in my brain,” she says. “I have to keep the seed alive.”
Go ahead, try telling her she can’t — not really.
Then picture her alone in her home, on her pink sofa with the white slipcover, deep in focus. Picture her working out the phrasing, the rhythm and harmonies just as she always did; and then singing it, in perfect silence, to the only listener who ever mattered. That’s pretty much her in a nutshell. |
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Post by sliderocker on Dec 4, 2019 22:05:38 GMT -5
With respect to fans coming up to her in restaurants asking her for an autograph at the height of her fame in the late 1970s, I can totally understand how she might feel the way she did. At the same time, however, Linda at some point must have come to realize and understand how she could sometimes come across as rather snobby and, in her words, "ungracious", especially when it comes to certain members of the press who simply don't like her either as a person or as a hugely successful figure of her field. Arguably, that could also be true in this article/interview, because I think it is standard-issue behavior for the press to tear any entertainer down for whatever reason is handy at the moment, whether it is true or not. Having re-read the article/interview again, I'm not sure that it doesn't come across as something of a hit job, coming so close to the Kennedy Center Honors, which is why it is incumbent on us as fans not to read more into this than there actually is (IMHO)
What I remember about the tale of fans going up to Linda in a restaurant to ask her for her autograph was that she grudgingly gave them what they wanted, though she was still annoyed. Could there have another way she could've accommodated any fan wanting her autograph, like asking the fan to allow her to eat in peace and then she would get with them afterwards and sign autographs? It was an imposition on her time but quite frankly, I don't believe there was any way fans could meet Linda outside of a concert venue that she could've given the fans a few minutes of her time.
Unfortunately, rock music has never had the equivalent of country music's Meet and Greet festival where every year fans could meet their favorite country stars, get autographs, photographs taken with the celebrities and maybe even get a kiss. I don't know that Linda would've gone for that if there had been a rock equivalent. Dawn Wells, from "Gilligan's Island," still going strong in her 80s and still a vision of loveliness, does several meet and greets on her own, signing autographs for hours and taking photographs with fans. But, Linda being a very shy and private person makes me believe she wouldn't have been comfortable with meeting the fans for hours and signing autographs and taking photos with the fans.
At the end of the day, I think Linda realizes that the vast majority of her fans (which would include her peers) are very respectful of her as a person while being in awe of her achievements and her abilities over the last 50+ years, even if her own natural modesty doesn't somehow "permit" her to show it. This is what I think we as fans can hopefully take away from all the great things that have happened for her this year, be it the CBS interview in February; the release of the Live In Hollywood album in February; or THE SOUND OF MY VOICE.
Totally agree.
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