Linda Ronstadt - 1978 press - part 18

[Partridge]

Billboard, June 24, 1978
I Never Will Marry moves into Billboard Top 10






Billboard, June 24, 1978
Tumbling Dice drops to #37






CashBox, June 24, 1978
I Never Will Marry up 4 to #13






CashBox, June 24, 1978







Radio and Records, June 30, 1978
graph of radio acceptance I Never Will Marry on Pop Easy Listening stations

[LindaFan5]

I bought every single Linda record the day it came out from Hasten on forward. I would always buy the first single or two as 45s but by the time the 3rd and 4th singles would come out I already had the LP. If Tumbling Dice was the first single it would have been top ten is my guess. If a single 45 had a picture sleeve I’d buy that. So I bought “I Knew You When” as a single after I already had the LP for that reason.

[erik]

As much as people might be disappointed by the fact that neither "Tumbling Dice" nor "Poor, Poor, Pitiful Me" made it into the Top 30, it has to be said that it's remarkable that this one album, Simple Dreams, could spawn this many Top 40 hits--four in all. And, dare I say it, I don't think any album by any female artist beforehand had managed to accomplish such a feat (not even Carole King, with Tapestry, which is saying a lot [IMHO]).

I would also argue that Linda, from Heart Like A Wheel onwards, was the first female artist of any musical genre whose career was defined as much by complete albums as by the hit singles that came from those albums, if not indeed more so.

[eddiejinnj]

Erik, you are right, Linda was definitely an album artist. Also, the fact that she had a 3rd and 4th single did probably keep them from being top 10 because people were just buying the album as they realized how good it was and how many singles it spawned. eddiejinnj

[RobGNYC]

Before Linda, Aretha had several albums with multiple hit singles. For example, "Young, Gifted and Black" (1972) had four Top 40 hits:

"Border Song (Holy Moses)" #37
"Rock Steady" #9
"All the King's Horses" #26 
"Day Dreaming" #5
"Oh Me Oh My (I'm A Fool For You Baby)" #73

But it was different. Aretha included recent hit singles on the album ("Rock Steady"/"Oh Me Oh My" from 1971), then pulled more singles from it. Linda put the albums out, then pulled singles from them (or released the first single so close to the album release date, like "Blue Bayou," that it couldn't really be considered a hit yet). So even though Aretha and Linda both had four Top 40 hits from one album, I would give Linda the advantage.  After Whitney and Janet, multiple hit singles from one album doesn't seem like such a major accomplishment but in the 1970s, it was.

[erik]

It also wouldn't hurt to add that both "Blue Bayou" and "It's So Easy" were climbing the charts in the last three months of 1977 simultaneously, partly because Asylum was a bit nervous about "Blue Bayou"'s chances. Both of those songs managed to get into the Top 5 of the Hot 100 at the same time, which no female artist (not even Lady Soul) had done before, and which nobody had managed to pull off since April 1964, when the Beatles (natch!!) owned the Top Five.

For the record, this is what Simple Dreams and its attendant songs did, at least according to Billboard Magazine:

Simple Dreams: #1 Top 200 Album Chart (5 weeks); #1 C&W Album Chart (one week)

"Blue Bayou" (#3 pop, #2 C&W, #3 Adult Contemporary)
"It's So Easy" (#5 pop, #37 Adult Contemporary, #81 C&W)
"Poor, Poor, Pitiful Me" (#31 pop, #27 Adult Contemporary, #46 C&W)
"Tumbling Dice" (#32 pop, #30 Adult Contemporary [as flip side to "I Never Will Marry"])
"I Never Will Marry" (#8 C&W, #30 Adult Cotemporary)

Combine this with the enormous success she had with "Lago Azul", the Spanish version of "Blue Bayou", on Latin music stations here in America, and in Mexico, and it's clear that Linda was showing her unbelievable "eclecticmania" even before Pirates, the Nelson Riddle collaborations, and Canciones De Mi Padre.