Film Review: ‘Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice’

I only saw Linda Ronstadt once in her roughly 40-plus career as a singer, and though it was still at a relatively early stage, the impression she made at the Garden State Arts Center on that night in 1976 still lingers: a petite, dark-eyed singer caught out by a single spotlight, her voice filling the amphitheater until it had engaged every heart with songs of longing, joy and loss.

I did not know until watching Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice that this queen of rock ‘n’ roll doubted her ability so much that, if she saw one audience member talking to another, she might assume they were conversing about the bad show she was putting on.

How wrong she was. The documentary, in general release for several weeks now, reminded me that this voice created an indelible portion in the soundtrack of my youth in the mid-to-late Seventies, and I’m sure many Baby Boomers feel similarly. She was inescapable on the radio and in the print outlets that made rock ‘n’ roll so enormously essential back then—not just a Time Magazine cover but glamorous Rolling Stone photos by Annie Liebowitz. 

All of this was not without struggle. The film painstakingly sets out two challenges she faced in her career, particularly starting out in the late Sixties and Seventies: being taken seriously by the male-dominated community of musicians, and convincing record executives to permit her to try new artistic challenges, especially when they did not seem initially to be commercially viable.

To tackle the first challenge, Ronstadt became instrumental in creating a de factor musical sorority consisting of Bonnie Raitt, Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, and singer-songwriter Karla Bonoff. 

Perhaps not coincidentally, these artists shared her broad musical tastes. Throughout the Seventies and Eighties, Ronstadt displayed an almost unmatched versatility with different musical genres. 

Already having displayed her facility with country, folk, R&B, pop, and New Wave, she became even more adventurous as she entered middle age, trying her hand at Gilbert and Sullivan (Pirates of Penzance), the Great American Songbook (three LPs in collaboration with producer Nelson Riddle), and Mexican ranchera. 

As the documentary makes clear, she imbibed her eclectic tastes at an early stage from her immediate family. Canciones de mi Padre (“Songs of my Father”), the biggest selling non-English language album in American recording history, paid tribute to her German-Mexican father, who, the singer remembers, was gifted with a rich baritone that reminded her of Frank Sinatra. Ronstadt’s mother bequeathed to her an appreciation for Gilbert and Sullivan. Her siblings fed her interest in country (Hank Williams was a great favorite), pop and folk.

Without dwelling on it, the documentary takes note of her offstage private life (California Gov. Jerry Brown and singer-songwriter J.D. Souther were, for a time, romantic interests, and in the Seventies speed and diet pills were her principal forms of self-medication). 

But it is more interested in aspects of her life that rock ‘n’ roll’s patriarchy, for one, did not take as seriously as it should have until her career was effectively over: her abundant talent and significant influence in the music industry.

Fond reminiscences and high praise for her skill are offered in interviews conducted especially for the film with friends and associates such as critic-turned-filmmaker Cameron Crowe and performers Raitt, Parton, Harris, Bonoff, Souther, Don Henley, and Jackson Browne.

In one of the interviews, Browne—whose early song “Rock Me on the Water” was covered by Ronstadt—labeled the singer “an auteur” who could make a song her own, even if she didn’t write it herself. In the most compelling segments of the film, abundant footage of her concerts and TV guest spots demonstrates not only her feel for lyrics but her magnetic stage command, even dating back to her first appearances at L.A. music meccas like the Whiskey A-Go-Go.

Ronstadt last performed in concert in 2009, as she realized that Parkinson’s Disease was undermining her vocal range. But her CDs confirm the beauty and purity of her voice when she was healthy.

Directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman might have asked more bluntly why it took male-dominated electors nearly 20 years after her eligibility to enshrine her in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But they do underscore her continual role in widening the vistas of the music industry. She leaped over genre barriers even as she helped pry the doors open to emerging singer-songwriters and female artists.

At long last, we can now reckon how much we are in her debt, more than we could ever have imagined at the time.

Quote of the Day (Linda Ronstadt, on Kermit the Frog)

“I was warned severely not to let my lipstick touch his green felt lips, or it would stain, and the Creature Shop would have to construct a new body.”----Linda Ronstadt, on her most unusual beau, Kermit the Frog, in Simple Dreams: A Musical Memoir (2013)

Quote of the Day (Linda Ronstadt, on ‘Why People Sing’)

“Someone once asked me why people sing. I answered that they sing for many of the same reasons the birds sing. They sing for a mate, to claim their territory, or simply to give voice to the delight of being alive in the midst of a beautiful day”—Linda Ronstadt, Simple Dreams (2013)

Quote of the Day (Linda Ronstadt, on Music as ‘Dreaming in Sound’)

“The dream world of sleep and the dream world of music are not far apart. I often catch glimpses of one as I pass through a door to the other, like encountering a neighbor in the hallway going into the apartment next to one’s own. In the recording studio, I would often lie down to nap and wake up with harmony parts fully formed in my mind, ready to be recorded. I think of music as dreaming in sound.”—Linda Ronstadt, Simple Dreams (2013)

Congratulations to Linda Ronstadt on her long-delayed—but well-merited—election to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. (Also, please see my prior post following her announcement that she now has Parkinson’s Disease.)

Quote of the Day (Linda Ronstadt, on the ‘Rare Artist’ of Song)

“The essential elements of singing are voice, musicianship, and story. It is the rare artist that has all three in abundance.”—Linda Ronstadt, Simple Dreams: A Musical Memoir (forthcoming)

In her heyday in the Seventies and Eighties, millions recognized Linda Ronstadt as that “rare artist.” All the more heartbreaking, then, the news that she has Parkinson’s Disease and, she acknowledges, she will never sing another note.

At the height of her career, Ronstadt was not only the bestselling solo female artist of the Seventies, but also, with her talent, looks, and participation in the fast-lane lifestyle of Southern California rock, a representative of the Dionysian exhilaration of baby boomers. 

But now, as we age, we discover that our icons—and we ourselves—are subject to the same processes of decay, disease and death as the parents we could never see ourselves resembling.

It was all so different when I saw her back in August 1976, at the Garden State Arts Center (now PNC Bank Arts Center) in Holmdel, NJ. Still early in a remarkable seven-LP run starting with Heart Like a Wheel, she stood at the microphone, this brunette waif commanding at first with a girlish, almost shy presence, until her voice carried to the limits of those on the grass just outside the amphitheater.

And though she would belt and growl and bring listeners to their feet with the likes of “Heat Wave” and other hits of the rock ‘n’ roll era, what haunted the memory was the way her silvery soprano transformed lyrics of longing and heartbreak into rock arias. 

It was Karla Bonoff who wrote “Save me, free me, from my heart this time,” but it was Ronstadt’s exquisite artistry that made “Lose Again” her song, and ours. (To understand what I’m talking about, see this YouTube excerpt of her in concert, only a few months after her New Jersey appearance.) It’s why Time Magazine, in a cover story from 1977, hailed her style of “Torchy Rock.”

At this point, it would be a shame if it took Ronstadt’s terrible disease to rectify two longstanding, interrelated injustices: exclusion from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and refusal by Rolling Stone and other major outlets of critical opinion to take her work seriously.  I write “interrelated” because the magazine’s founder, Jann Wenner, is not only co-founder of the foundation that created the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame but also plays an inordinately heavy-handed role in selecting inductees.

One result of the latter malign influence is the blatant sexism of Hall choices. An Evelyn McDonnell article for Salon in December 2011 noted that only 40 out of 296 inductees to that point were women. If one criterion for inclusion in the Hall is an artist’s impact on those who came after, as its defenders claim, then why did it take so long for Joni Mitchell and Laura Nyro to be inducted?

As for Wenner’s magazine: How could it dare to leave off Ronstadt its list of the “100 Greatest Singers” in rock and roll history, while including in the ranking Karen Carpenter (who only made one album in the genre) and Madonna (who not only was a pop rather than a rock ‘n’ roll star, but whose tinny voice couldn’t hold a candle to Ronstadt’s—or, indeed, virtually anyone else on or off the list)?

New York Times critic John Rockwell made the clearest, most passionate (if half-apologetic, on account of their friendship) case for the singer in 1979, noting that she had “the strongest, most clearly focused, flexible, and simply beautiful voice in popular music.” Then, going on to forecast the highly eclectic path she was about to take in the next decade, he noted that the voice, “as a physical instrument…is capable of authoritative usage in almost any kind of popular music, and with a bit of technical work, could encompass almost any classical style, as well.”

While Rockwell made an excellent argument about the purity of her instrument, Ronstadt’s value extends far beyond that. Aside from Elvis Costello, how many other rock ‘n’ roll artists have been so breathtakingly versatile? 

Throughout her four-decade career, she has explored, in addition to rock ‘n’ roll, folk, country, rhythm and blues, new wave, Mexican mariachi, Gilbert and Sullivan (The Pirates of Penzance), and the Great American Songbook, through her 1980s collaborations with Nelson Riddle.  

(That musical adventurousness, by the way, amply refutes the silly notion that she mindlessly went along with the choices of producer Peter Asher, since she insisted on the Riddle LPs despite Asher’s strong initial doubts about the project.)

The advent of the singer-songwriter has made Rolling Stone—and, indeed, much of the rock ‘n’ roll critical establishment—dubious about artists who do not write their own songs (or, in Ronstadt’s case, only a handful of them). But again, if influence is an important consideration of an artist’s ultimate value, few can doubt the boost that Ronstadt provided by interpreting songs by the likes of J.D. Souther, Warren Zevon, Karla Bonoff, Elvis Costello, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Jackson Browne, Dolly Parton, and the Cretones. (She also co-produced a seminal CD by songwriting great Jimmy Webb, Suspending Disbelief).

Over the last decade or so, Ronstadt’s public appearances have grown fewer and fewer, as she raised two children in her native Arizona as a single mom, far away from the L.A. music scene, and coped with other health issues (notably, she acknowledged to Australian journalist Debbie Kruger in a 1998 interview, an auto-immune thyroid disease). 

Still, there was always the hope that she might emerge from semi-retirement for appearances onstage or on songs by others, as she did three years ago for a Jimmy Webb tribute album. Her newest health disclosure ends those prospects. Now, the next time we hear from her will be with the publication next month of her memoir, Simple Dreams.

And yet, though no new work will ever come from her again, that marvelous voice has not and will not be stilled. Listen to any of her work on CDs, or seek her out on YouTube, where you’ll find plenty of examples of her joy in communicating passion through song (such as this 1979 “It’s in His Kiss” duet from Saturday Night Live with another sterling voice, Phoebe Snow).