Last night at 6 p.m. I watched a fascinating CNN documentary on the singer Linda Ronstadt: Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice. Ronstadt was one of those singers I respected more than I really loved: I admired her versatility and her fearlessness (particulary the multiple genres she performed and recorded in: she started out as a folk singer but soon branched into rock and then did albums of 1930’s and 1940’s standards, the Mexican songs she’d learned from her family, and a Joseph Papp production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance that required her to learn to sing coloratura — which she did surprisingly capably — and, though not represented here, a short-running performance of a full-fledged opera, Puccini’s La Bohème) but I never really cared for the laid-back 1970’s Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter style in which Ronstadt made her original commercial mark. One thing I hadn’t known about Ronstadt is how she got her German-sounding name when her background was Mexican: I’d always assumed she was the product of a mixed marriage between a Mexican mother and a German-American father, but she was actually the descendant of a line of Ronstadts founded by a man who emigrated from Germany to Mexico in the 1840’s. She learned to sing at home — her father was an accomplished singer (there’s a snippet of a home recording of his voice, and he’s quite good) and her siblings all sang before brother Peter went into law enforcement and ultimately became police chief of Tucson, Arizona, where Linda grew up.
In the 1970’s she hooked up with two family members, founded a band that played small gigs in what there was of a folk scene in Tucson, then decided to try her luck in L.A. She, Bobby Kimmel and Kenny Edwards formed a folk group called the Stone Poneys that got signed to Capitol Records on the strength of a song called “Different Drum” that was actually written by Mike Nesmith of the Monkees. But when Ronstadt came to the Capitol studio to record “Different Drum,” she found a large orchestra, including a string section, there to back her. She initially wanted to walk out of the session but finally decided to stay — and the version of “Different Drum” she recorded then became her first hit. (This film, directed and written by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, plays excerpts from the Stone Poneys’ original demo of “Different Drum” and intercuts them with the final record — and for once the “suits” at a label were right: the final version, which moved the song from folk to pop and gave it an appealing bounce in tune with the tastes of the time, is much better.)
Ronstadt was originally managed by Frank Zappa’s business partner, Herb Cohen, until she and her producer John Boylan got arrested at the airport on a flight to Honolulu and charged with receiving stolen property; it turned out Cohen had bought their plane tickets from a thief because they were cheap. Boylan took over as her manager and, according to Geoffrey Stokes’ book Star-Making Machinery, her lover — though according to this film her real romantic interest at this time was singer John David Souther. Boylan also produced her solo records for Capitol and got her a gig doing a tour opening for Neil Young — and at least as presented here she rivaled him in terms of audience appeal. But Ronstadt’s career really took off in 1974, when Peter Asher — one-half of Peter and Gordon, brother of Paul McCartney’s 1960’s girlfriend Jane Asher and former head of the Beatles’ Apple Records label — stepped in to help Ronstadt and Boylan finish her album Don’t Cry Now and then took over as producer for her next record, Heart Like a Wheel. This, her final album for Capitol, broke wide open, sold millions and jumped Ronstadt from minor star to superstar. Though the title track was a folk song by Kate and Anna McGarrigle, the album also included Ronstadt’s cover of Betty Everett’s late-1950’s soul record “You’re No Good” — and that became Ronstadt’s biggest hit to that time. (I remember hearing the Everett record and being absolutely flabbergasted at how much better it was — not only because Everett was a full-voiced soul singer but she’d had Ike Turner’s band backing her — with a young Tina Turner as one of her backup singers.)
After completing her Capitol contract with Heart Like a Wheel (which must have pissed off a lot of Capitol executives big-time — here was a singer they had nurtured and kept recording through a series of artistically and commercially disappointing releases, and then right after she makes the record that makes her a superstar, she leaves!) Ronstadt signed with David Geffen’s Asylum Records, also the home of a lot of talents she had nurtured by recoding their songs and giving them career boosts: The Eagles (who had begun as Ronstadt’s backup band — though they only played one gig together, in Disneyland of all places, Don Henley and Glenn Frey had both worked with her and indeed had met on one of Ronstadt’s projects), John David Souther, Jackson Browne and (unmentioned here) Warren Zevon (who was always my favorite Asylum artist because he wrote songs like “Desperadoes Under the Eaves” that skewered the pretensions of his Asylum label-mates). Through the 1970’s and into the 1980’s, Ronstadt continued to make pop-rock albums with Asher as her producer, cleverly adjusting her style to stay on top of whatever sound was trending then — including the punk-new wave style of the late 1970’s — and she also stayed in the news for non-musical reasons, including her affair with California Governor Jerry Brown in the mid-1970’s which landed the two of them on the cover of Newsweek. There have been a lot of rumors about this alleged affair over the years, including one that Brown was really Gay and was using Ronstadt as a “beard” and also a way to appeal to younger voters as he sought the Democratic Presidential nomination three times, but this film presents it as a bona fide relationship which ended on friendly terms due to the clash between their careers: Brown wanted to do politics and governance full-time and needed a partner who was part of that world. (When Brown finally married late in life it was to a member of his political staff, Anne Gust.)
Ronstadt — who was extensively interviewed for this film even though it’s only at the end, singing with a few members of her family, that she’s actually shown in her present state — said that the reason she largely dropped out of the rock world in the 1980’s was she saw how sick and tired other stars were of having to do the same star-making hits night after night after night, so she decided to broaden her musical horizons. She made What’s New?, an album of 1930’s and 1940’s standards arranged and conducted by Nelson Riddle (who had largely masterminded Frank Sinatra’s comeback in the 1950’s) — there’s an amusing bit in this film in which Peter Asher recalls Ronstadt telling him she wanted to do an album of standards and wanted “someone like Nelson Riddle” to arrange it, and Asher said, “Why don’t we just get Nelson Riddle?” Ronstadt was amazed that Riddle was still alive, but she agreed, and the result was a succession of three albums that not only revitalized both Ronstadt’s and Riddle’s careers but (along with Willie Nelson’s contemporaneous forays into the standards repertoire) revived interest in the great Broadway and Hollywood musical songs of the 1930’s and 1940’s that had been considered hopelessly retro when Ronstadt was starting out in the 1960’s and 1970’s.
Ronstadt also branched out into playing the female lead in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance for Joseph Papp’s New York Public Theatre — a production that was later filmed — and she made an album of Mexican songs called Canciones de Mi Padre (“Songs for My Father”) that turned out to be the best-selling Spanish-language record of all time. The Ronstadt documentary then leaps ahead to the early 2000’s and her discovery that she was losing her voice over time — which ultimately was due to Parkinson’s disease, from which her grandmother had already suffered and died. Between Ronstadt’s decision to retire just as the effects of the disease were starting to ravage her voice — she gave her last concert in 2009 — and Julie Andrews’ loss of her voice due to a botched throat operation, one faces the bizarre irony that two of the greatest voices of the 20th century have been silenced forever even though their owners are still alive. The final scenes of Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice show her and several family members doing a sing-along on some traditional Mexican songs — and from the bits of her we hear it’s clear she still has something of a voice.
Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice has some of the usual flaws of music documentaries — including bits of what I call “first-itis,” the tendency of biographers in all media to assume that the person they’re biographing was the first person ever to do something even though other, earlier examples exist. I was particularly ticked at the assertion that Ronstadt was “the first female rock star” — even by the narrowest definition of what constitutes a “rock star” I would say Janis Joplin qualified, and if she hadn’t died so young and had been able to keep her voice intact (even while Janis was still alive I worried about how long she’d be able to sustain her career given what she was doing to her voice) Janis might have had the kind of career Ronstadt did.[1] (I would say the “first female rock star” title goes back even further, to Wanda Jackson in the mid- to late-1950’s: I remember the time Charles and I met her at one of the Adams Avenue music festivals and someone in her autograph line asked her, “Did you really open for Elvis?” “No,” she said; “he opened for me!”) It also suffered from another typical flaw of music documentaries — not presenting a full song start-to-finish — though at least Epstein and Friedman let their excerpts run long enough that you could tell just what made Linda Ronstadt special.
Personally, I’ve always liked her best as a country singer (Emmylou Harris and Dolly Parton, with whom she recorded at least two albums, are both interviewed here); Ronstadt could sing uptempo rock and soul songs credibly but she couldn’t sing a Black song (or a Black-influenced white song like the Rolling Stones’ “Tumbling Dice”) with the intensity of the original artists, and while her standards recordings are quite beautiful they’re hardly in the same league as Billie Holiday or Ella Fitzgerald. There are also a few Ronstadt experiments unmentioned here, including not only her performances of La Bohème but her guest appearance on the avant-garde jazz album Escalator Over the Hill, recorded and released independently by Carla Bley and her then-partner Michael Mantler between 1968 and 1971. Still, Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice is a quite engaging musical documentary on a performer who managed to stay ahead of the curve and, through a combination of native talent and acute intelligence, have a long, prosperous and healthy (at least until the genetic time bomb of Parkinson’s went off inside her and ended it) career.
[1] — Ronstadt briefly discusses the rampant drug use in
the rock scene of the 1960’s and 1970’s and acknowledges that she got hooked on
diet pills — until she and her lead guitarist, Waddy Wachtel, both decided on
their own to quit before it became a problem. Another interesting subtext to
the film is her discussion of what it was like being a woman bandleader in a
very male-centric musical form and the machismo antics of some of her band members, which were their
reaction to the shame they felt of having to take orders from a woman.
