The stories behind the legendary singer. Excerpted from “Linda Ronstadt,” January 24, 2014.

LINDA 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. [I just thought,] “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 [a project] 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.