Linda Ronstadt’s career in music has taken many twists and turns. She began in country rock with the Stone Poneys and had the hit song “Different Drum.” She then earned the nickname “The First Lady of Rock” with 1970s early ’80s hits like “You’re No Good,” “When Will I Be Loved,” “Heat Wave,” “Blue Bayou,” “It’s So Easy” and “Hurt So Bad.”
She also had notable success with her Trio recordings with Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris, was nominated for a Tony award for her Broadway performance of The Pirates of Penzance and recorded traditional pop standards with Nelson Riddle and hit duets with James Ingram (“Somewhere Out There”) and Aaron Neville (“Don’t Know Much”).
Mixed in were acclaimed recordings of the Mexican music that she grew up listening to.
It’s probably safe to say that Ronstadt had one of the most diverse singing careers of all time, and certainly one of the most successful.
Ronstadt was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in December 2012, making it impossible for her to sing, but her voice carries on in a lifetime of recordings.
She will be at the Lobero Theatre Thursday, April 21, for “A Conversation with Linda Ronstadt.” Tickets are available here.
Linda told Noozhawk about the upcoming event, and reflected on her musical career.
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Jeff Moehlis: What can we look forward to at the event at the Lobero Theatre?
Linda Ronstadt: It’s based on the memoirs that I put out, the book that I wrote. It’s what the book is about — my musical choices and why I made them the way that I did. I don’t think that I was the greatest singer in the world, but what made me different from a lot of singers is I did a wide range of things.
The idea of doing the book was to show how all those different musical influences were in place in my life, before the age of 10 where I was growing up.
I grew up close to the border and I had a lot of musical influences — from my grandparents and from different radio stations, and stuff like that — so it talks about that and my musical journey, how I got to this and got to that.
JM: In your memoirs there was a picture of you in Santa Barbara with Nelson Riddle.
LR: Oh yeah, that’s right!
JM: Could you share your memories of performing in Santa Barbara?
LR: Well, what was really nice is the audience showed up all dressed up. They weren’t wearing T-shirts. It was really nice, because we were sort of dressed up on the stage, so when they panned the audience, it looked like the ’30s or something — everybody looked so glamorous.
It was a beautiful theater. I love a real theater instead of a sporting arena, with a real proscenium stage and a real lobby. I think a theater is there to provide you with an experience of magical reality.
And the way that those old-fashioned theaters are structured, they do a lot of the work before you even get to your seat, and the proscenium stage helps focus your attention on the performer, so it really helps. It makes a big difference.
In a sporting arena, people are going all over the place, and you can’t concentrate, and the audience can’t concentrate. I don’t like them. Anything that says multi-purpose doesn’t have a good purpose for anything.
JM: What theater was that performance at?
LR: I think it was at The Arlington Theatre.
JM: We’re blessed with many good theaters in Santa Barbara.
LR: You’re lucky. The architecture’s beautiful. Santa Barbara has a lot of great buildings.
JM: Staying on the topic of Santa Barbara, Kenny Edwards lived here for a long time before he passed away, and Karla Bonoff has lived here for a couple of decades.
LR: Yeah, she figured it out early on. I wish I’d bought the house next door to her.
JM: What did Kenny and Karla bring to your music and your career?
LR: Well, a lot of great songs. I mean, they were a great musical influence on each other, and then I got to have the benefit of a lot of that collaboration.
You know, I had Kenny in my band, and I got to record a lot of Karla’s songs. She’s a really good songwriter. And Kenny really made a lot of contributions in the way the chords were voiced in the bass. He was a big influence on her music, I think.
Some stuff they wrote together, for some stuff he was kind of around and his sensibility helped shape it, and then a lot of it was just Karla by herself, with her blazing talent. She’s really a talented writer.
JM: How did you choose which songs to record?
LR: It would be a song that urgently told some part of my story right then or something that I remembered really vividly. It might be just a couple of lines, and then the next line you just sort of sing through, and then you get to the next line and it tells about something that happened last week.
It’s hard to say, but I’d feel a sense of urgency that I’d have to sing the song, or if I didn’t sing it I’d die [laughs]. It had to be that strong, or else I didn’t want to sing it.
JM: What, to you, was the good, the bad and the ugly about the 1970s music world?
LR: Well, there was a lot of good music in the ’70s. There was a lot of crap, too. One of the things that I notice now is that these girl singers, or any recording artist, put out an album every two or three years.
We had to come up with one every year, with twelve songs. It’s a lot of pressure on you to fill up the album, and I think you make a lot of crap because of that. I used to always wish we could just make EPs or put out a single every once in a while.
JM: Is there anything that you want to set the record straight on, about your music career or your life?
LR: Well, it’s just that the choices I made weren’t arbitrary. I wasn’t trying to reinvent myself or any of those kinds of buzzwords that people come up with.
I just had heard a certain amount of songs and music as a child, growing up, listening to Mexican music, listening to opera, listening to Gilbert & Sullivan and American jazz standards that my father would play on the piano or on the record player. I loved them all, and when I got into pop music I thought there was no reason I shouldn’t incorporate some of that stuff into what I was doing.
In the case of Mexican music, it had to be more specific than that. I didn’t want to do Mexican-flavored rock ’n’ roll. I wanted to do Mexican traditional music, of certain different regions.
I mean, there’s so many different kinds of traditional musics in Mexico. Mexico, if you go four blocks the cuisine changes, the clothes change, the music changes. It’s just completely different. Such a diverse country.
For the full interview with Linda Ronstadt, click here.
— Jeff Moehlis is a Noozhawk contributing writer and a professor of mechanical engineering at UC Santa Barbara. Upcoming show recommendations, advice from musicians, interviews and more are available on his web site, music-illuminati.com. The opinions expressed are his own.