|
|
Post by sliderocker on Nov 1, 2012 21:38:30 GMT -5
An interesting find on youtube:
Linda Ronstadt and "The Swampwater" on the Mike Douglas Show, 1971.
Linda's also interviewed by Douglas with a few comments by the late comedian George Carlin. Two songs, both performed live. Linda made some interesting comments here, much I agreed with, some I didn't, but how she could take a guy's breath away!
|
|
|
|
Post by erik on Nov 2, 2012 9:38:20 GMT -5
Yes, this is one of those sought-after rarities that we always appreciate seeing, because it is Linda from a pivotal point still relatively early on in her career. And it also gives one an idea of just how bright, intelligent, and sharp she was even back then. She may not always say things that are easy to agree with, but she does display an extremely keen intellect and a keen sense of the world (IMHO).
|
|
|
|
Post by the Scribe on Nov 2, 2012 13:17:43 GMT -5
Forum member lindanicci has this one and others you may be interested in on her website.
|
|
|
|
Post by sliderocker on Nov 2, 2012 15:45:41 GMT -5
Yes, this is one of those sought-after rarities that we always appreciate seeing, because it is Linda from a pivotal point still relatively early on in her career. And it also gives one an idea of just how bright, intelligent, and sharp she was even back then. She may not always say things that are easy to agree with, but she does display an extremely keen intellect and a keen sense of the world (IMHO). What I remember about Linda on the few talk shows she appeared on in the early 70s was that she mostly performed a song (or two) and that was it. No interviews. I think Douglas being a singer himself and being an easy going guy made it easier for other singers to talk with him, even if their music was different from his and from a different generation. Unlike some of his other musical peers, he never put down another musical genre or performer because of his music not ruling the top of the charts. I will say it would've been nice if Douglas could've had Linda on his show as the only guest, just to learn much more about her. She was very open about some things in this clip. I thought she was very open about the fact her album sales around that time were not the greatest. Most performers shied away from talking about their sales, especially if they were low sales. As for her comment about performing for free even though she complained the cost of putting on the free show could exceed $5000 back in those days, I had to wonder how many of her fellow singers and groups agreed with her complaint? People assumed back in those days (and probably still do to this day) that someone on a record label is probably making a lot of bucks, not realizing that if they have poor album sales, they may not even be collecting any royalties and the only money they make (or made) were (or are) from the concerts. And because of low album sales, the concert fees could be much, much lower than one would think. I don't think it was the younger people she seemed to be blaiming in the interview wanting the free concerts. Not the early to mid teens, anyway. I was around 16 or 17 when Linda made that appearance on the Douglas show and I always remember it was the college crowd around that time - people in their very late teens and early 20s - clamoring for the artists and groups to put on a concert for free. I don't know though, maybe some younger people could've been asking her to do a concert or two for free. But, Linda did make it sound like she didn't have a lot of money herself around that time and as expensive as what it cost to put on a free concert, I could understand her angst over doing one.. |
|
|
|
Post by Dianna on Nov 2, 2012 16:49:28 GMT -5
I get the impression she is or was very cautious with her money. lol
|
|
|
|
Post by erik on Nov 2, 2012 17:23:42 GMT -5
I think she has always been cautious with her spending habits; but this was particularly true back then in 1971, because she didn't sell enough records to see any royalties. And given the high quality of the guys she often had for her backing bands at the time (Swampwater included), I don't think the $5,000 cost she talked about is so far off, and it seems like even a lot more when you're not having Top 40 hits and million-selling albums left and right (yet, anyway).
|
|
|
|
Post by Dianna on Nov 2, 2012 17:32:45 GMT -5
well, this is a few years before she became a superstar.. but I doubt she was hurting that badly either.
|
|
|
|
Post by erik on Nov 2, 2012 18:44:52 GMT -5
She clearly wasn't poverty-stricken, but she wasn't drowning in money either. However, she did find enough money to spend a little time during 1971 in England and France, which was likely the first time she had ever set foot outside North America.
I think we have to concede that she was still well ahead of her audience with the mix of C&W and rock that she was doing, but that audience was catching up to her, slowly but surely.
|
|
|
|
Post by Dianna on Nov 2, 2012 19:22:36 GMT -5
I also think, and because Linda's thought process goes so fast, she lost good ole mike when she was explaining how things go out after a few months, or music.. how it changes.. he just kind of stood there.. then george (that was carlin, right?) sums it up. and mike responds to him. lol She sure is sharp and even back then at such a young age. To be fair I also think she lost Johnny Carson too during her 80's standards interview. That's our Linda. and very blunt too.. I didn't realize the audience was filled with college kids.
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Nov 2, 2012 19:57:01 GMT -5
Interesting that she was doing that down and dirty country growl.. enough to make poseurs like Gretchen Wilson duck for cover...
|
|
|
|
Post by erik on Nov 2, 2012 20:04:22 GMT -5
Quote by dianna re. college audience:
It was an episode of Mike Douglas' show that was done on the campus of United States International University in San Diego on April 15, 1971, and so Linda did attract that kind of collegiate crowd.
|
|
|
|
Post by sliderocker on Nov 2, 2012 20:36:05 GMT -5
She clearly wasn't poverty-stricken, but she wasn't drowning in money either. However, she did find enough money to spend a little time during 1971 in England and France, which was likely the first time she had ever set foot outside North America.
I think it possible Capitol or the European label she was on (probably EMI) or a concert promoter (if concerts were involved) could've sponsored her time in England and France, which could've meant they ultimately paid her expenses. I don't know if it was any more profitable for artists in Europe than in the US, but it always did seem to me that European audiences were far more receptive and friendly towards artists regardless of their hitmaking status. And certain artists from the US were far more successful in Europe than what they ever were in the US.
I think we have to concede that she was still well ahead of her audience with the mix of C&W and rock that she was doing, but that audience was catching up to her, slowly but surely.
I wouldn't say it was her audience so much as it was the public at large that had to play catch up to Linda. I wondered if she could've felt some frustration pre-1973 because you had people like Neil Young, James Taylor, Jackson Browne and the Eagles coming into favor with the public with their country-rock sound? A sound which had started with Linda and a few others but for which the ones new to the game were wrongly being lauded as being the genesis of a new sound. It didn't exactly start with Linda either as there were others before her who were blending the two musical genres. I'm not sure I'd refer to Browne or Taylor as country-rock performers. They were more folk-rock than country-rock.
With Linda, I think one of the reasons it took the public so long to catch up with her was in finding the right material. Since she didn't write and her management and record labels didn't appear to be directing any previously unheard songs her way, that left her at a big disadvantage. It's odd because when she was at Capitol, they still had an A&R department whose job it was supposed to be finding songs for the artists to record. Of course, I guess it's possible that with so many artists and groups writing ttheir own material, there was less of a need for the A&R department to be looking for songs, even though the record labels still had hundreds of artists who didn't write their own songs. When Linda was at Asylum, I don't know if they directed any of the songs her way that she did for that label, or if she got them through other means, including being friends with the songwriters. It would've been more to her advantage to have had publishing companies set up at the beginning of her solo career as that would've meant having more new songs (even if she didn't write them) and not having to record quite so many cover songs.
|
|
|
|
Post by Dianna on Nov 4, 2012 9:50:14 GMT -5
and also what she said about college or even high school, it seems she did regret not going, although her first 4-5 yrs being on the road gave her an equally good education .. I look at a lot of these ivy league types they have on tv these days.. (cough cough) and I don't hear anything but a bunch of hot air.. Linda is clearly more intelligent without an ivy league education or any at all.
|
|
|
|
Post by sliderocker on Nov 4, 2012 10:32:20 GMT -5
and also what she said about college or even high school, it seems she did regret not going, although her first 4-5 yrs being on the road gave her an equally good education .. I look at a lot of these ivy league types they have on tv these days.. (cough cough) and I don't hear anything but a bunch of hot air.. Linda is clearly more intelligent without an ivy league education or any at all. Linda not finishing high school was something I didn't know about her until just a few years ago. I thought I had read in the 70s that after high school, Linda traveled west to California to not only form the Stone Poneys with Bobby and Kenny, but also to attend college. But, I thought the road gave her a very good education and she put what she learned to good use. The problem with college is that it's more by the book learning while life is the real learning experience. Had Linda been a college graduate, she might have taken a different path career wise or she might never have been as successful as a singer. So many possibilities of what could have been. |
|
|
|
Post by Dianna on Nov 4, 2012 10:46:31 GMT -5
slide, didn't she drop out then attended a semester at arizona university? which I don't get because you need high school credits and a decent gpa.. or even a diploma for that matter.. so I'm not sure about that story.
from my experience the college degree is one thing.. only allows you to kind of get your foot in the door...I actually prefer school over working.. work is a lot more stressful and there's more pressure.. and the slackers, butt kisser's /snakes .. middle mgmnt and their self important non productive meetings.. you deal with out in the real world I have no patience for.
|
|
|
|
Post by sliderocker on Nov 4, 2012 12:24:32 GMT -5
slide, didn't she drop out then attended a semester at arizona university? which I don't get because you need high school credits and a decent gpa.. or even a diploma for that matter.. so I'm not sure about that story.
It may have been Arizona University, yet that kind of conflicts with the story of her leaving home after school at 18 for California. I've read another variation of that story which said she was 17. I'm not sure I'd believe the variation as why would someone's parents allow an underage daughter to move to California to start a group with a man who was a few years older than she was? Most parents are superprotective of their kids, especially daughters.
Going to college if you're a high school dropout...it's not a problem if you have a GED but generally, one could not get their GED before their classmates had graduated from high school. Maybe Linda's college semester was to finish high school?
from my experience the college degree is one thing.. only allows you to kind of get your foot in the door...I actually prefer school over working.. work is a lot more stressful and there's more pressure.. and the slackers, butt kisser's /snakes .. middle mgmnt and their self important non productive meetings.. you deal with out in the real world I have no patience for.
Work is definitely more stressful and a lot of pressure and a college degree does give a person an advantage, but the degree still doesn't prepare someone for the real world quite like it should. I knew people who were in middle management who came to their jobs full of preconceptions and misconceptions about the business, who stuck to those preconceptions and misconceptions even when they weren't working. What they were taught had to work..had to, but when it didn't, the problem was never the with the models they were taught to use but with the employees who failed to follow the procedures. It didn't occur to them that they and their models were full of sh*t and not applicable to or workable in the real world. And that when something wasn't working, you didn't stick to the tried and proven ways when it didn't work, you made changes. If you didn't make change, there was a good chance you'd go belly up.
The funny thing about all this is I trained people at one job I worked, including people with college degrees. And without exception, everyone of those people with the college degree fell back on their degrees and what they learned in college rather than what they learned from the business they were working for. All were convinced that what they learned in college would lead to the business being more profitable. They impressed upper management with their BS degrees but the company changed owners about every two years during the sixteen years I was there. They lost money every year I was there and blamed the employees for not helping the company make a profit. Part of the problem was they wanted a 5-1 return on every dollar spent. If they made a fifty cent profit on a dollar spent, they considered that a failure. It wasn't good enough. It had to be a minimum of five dollars back for every dollar spent. And that just didn't happen.
|
|
|
|
Post by erik on Nov 4, 2012 14:04:34 GMT -5
Quote by sliderocker:
She seems to like to say that she was 17 when she left Tucson for L.A., for the purposes of the Jimmy Webb song "Adios" that she recorded in 1989 (opening lyrics: "Ran away from home when I was 17"), but I think she attended the University of Arizona for all of ten weeks in late 1964, after she had turned 18, and then upped for the City of Angels.
But even as she left home, her father gave her a dollar bill with an edge torn off, and gave her one piece of advice, which I think she stuck to incredibly well: "Never let anyone take your picture with your clothes off."
|
|
|
|
Post by Dianna on Nov 4, 2012 14:26:00 GMT -5
going to a jr college might not be as big an issue but a university is another story.. you need to have the grades.
|
|
|
|
Post by erik on Nov 4, 2012 14:39:56 GMT -5
Like a lot of other things, perhaps we'll find out the real story when her memoir comes out in 2013. In any case, I think it can be said that she is almost certainly the most famous drop-out student that the University of Arizona has ever had in its history. But she has also shown herself to be, and this is according to practically anyone she has ever associated with in her profession, extremely bright, well-read, and knowledgeable about a ton of things in the world.
|
|
|
|
Post by Dianna on Nov 4, 2012 15:08:39 GMT -5
I'm not disputing her intelligence, Erik, Linda is very smart and I've given her tons of credit , that isn't my point.. just odd and something isn't right here. Like I said before a college degree can help you obtain a better job, esp these days or help to expand your knowledge in your current field.. doesn't give you any common sense .. some people I know with degree's have very little common sense
|
|
|
|
Post by erik on Nov 4, 2012 15:13:12 GMT -5
Of course, she's not the first star to have fudged details about that period of her life (Spielberg himself made up tall tales of how he broke through the security gates at Universal Studios in 1964 when he was 17 going on 18). As I said, we'll know more (or less) when that memoir of Linda's comes out.
|
|
|
|
Post by sliderocker on Nov 4, 2012 16:21:24 GMT -5
Of course, she's not the first star to have fudged details about that period of her life (Spielberg himself made up tall tales of how he broke through the security gates at Universal Studios in 1964 when he was 17 going on 18). As I said, we'll know more (or less) when that memoir of Linda's comes out. I don't think it could've been a PR-fabricated story yet the record companies and movie studios and tv studios have always engaged in tall tales about celebrities, although I think they tended to stay away from anything which could be checked out and verified or discounted. If you worked in PR, you didn't want anything coming back to haunt the celebrity. My guess would be that in 1964, Linda somehow managed to get her high school equivalency without it being necessary for her class to have graduated. Maybe it wasn't necessary back in those days? And then she applied for college, was accepted but then decided she wanted to try for a music career. Had things worked out differently, she could've returned to college but that turned out to be an option that was never needed. |
|
|
|
Post by the Scribe on Nov 5, 2012 9:09:29 GMT -5
Hopefully she will clear some of that stuff up in her memoir but she may not feel it all that important comparatively speaking and we will never know.
|
|
|
|
Post by linda2006nicci on Nov 6, 2012 9:59:44 GMT -5
This is one of the most interesting rarities that I found in Tokyo.
Ronstadtfanaz, thank you for your comment.
I am not "she", but "he".
|
|
|
|
Post by eddiejinnj on Nov 6, 2012 13:05:57 GMT -5
i always found the timing at that point of her life for lack of a better way to put it "tight". she dropped out of hs at 17 then somehow did a semester at college then went to la and was still bout 17 or 18. i heard linda mention going to college even briefly so maybe she got in quick like was discussed in previous post, attended classes briefly then left without finishing that semester. was it a summer semester class or the fall after hs or the spring session while she was still in hs and had quit. the timeline i always thought funny myself. eddiejinnj
|
|
|
|
Post by eddiejinnj on Nov 6, 2012 13:17:56 GMT -5
maybe "ran away from home when i was 17" was more dramatic and an achievement than saying 18 if in fact she was. i am not in any way disputing linda or saying she has said an untruth. am just theorizing the timeline. eddiejinnj
|
|
|
|
Post by Dianna on Nov 6, 2012 14:17:30 GMT -5
Glad to see you are okay Eddie!!!!  |
|
|
|
Post by sliderocker on Nov 7, 2012 14:45:53 GMT -5
maybe "ran away from home when i was 17" was more dramatic and an achievement than saying 18 if in fact she was. i am not in any way disputing linda or saying she has said an untruth. am just theorizing the timeline. eddiejinnj Or maybe she wasn't born in 1946? Just kidding here, of course, but when I first saw photos of Linda (with the Stone Poneys) in 1967, I thought she was only about 17 or 18 and not 20 or 21. She did look that young. Curiously, I didn't recall seeing any mention of her age until sometime around 1969 or 1970. And even then, some of the accounts got it wrong. I recall when Linda had a hit with "Long, Long Time," one magazine article informed readers Linda was 25 when she recorded and released the song, when in fact she was still 23 when she recorded the song and 24 when the song became a hit. I can't recall any other news article that had Linda's age wrong nor can I recall any article which said Linda was born earlier (or later) than 1946 unlike a handful of other performers (both male and female) whose year of birth always seemed to vary depending on the source. |
|
|
|
Post by musicaamator on Dec 11, 2012 15:08:45 GMT -5
OMG, can she be anymore hotter? I've seen the 1969 Mike Douglas performance, but never this one. Thanks for the link!
|
|
