The album that Linda Ronstadt apologised for making: “It almost made me go crazy”
Linda Ronstadt was far from the rock and roller that most people claimed she was back in the day.
She could crank out a great tune whenever she played the bar circuit in her early days, but looking through her greatest work, it was always better for her to sing the lower tunes rather than try to match what Janis Joplin was doing years before. Her voice was a lot softer than everyone else, but that didn’t mean that she didn’t have her fair share of problems getting the mellow tunes off the ground, either.
You have to remember that what Ronstadt was doing at the time was far from the career that she imagined herself having. She never thought she would be sharing a stage with people like Mick Jagger or Neil Young, and yet here she was making tunes like ‘You’re No Good’ when she would have much rather been taking care of her voice to sing other genres.
Even when looking back on her greatest works, Ronstadt rarely let herself off the hook. She knew that the success of ‘Different Drum’ was a fluke in many respects, and even when she started making masterpieces, she admitted that her version of the classic song ‘Desperado’ was nothing compared to what Eagles could do with the track once Don Henley wrapped his voice around it.
But if there’s one album that will set her name in stone as one of the greatest to ever do it, it’s Heart Like A Wheel. Every one of her musical sidequests were equal labours of love, but anyone that wanted to truly understand what Ronstadt was all about could find at least one song to love across its 10 tracks. There’s the rockers like ‘You’re No Good’, the ballads like the title track, and even the countrified rockers like ‘When Will I Be Loved’.
It all felt like a victory lap for Ronstadt in many respects, but fame can be a funny thing once people start to realise what they made. There are countless artists who feel that their most successful album was the moment everything clicked, but as far as Ronstadt could tell, she still had a lot of work to do before she even started to complement her work on Heart Like A Wheel.
According to her, her vocal performances on the record were poor enough for her to publicly critique them when promoting the record, saying, “When Heart Like a Wheel went to number one, I just walked around apologizing every single day. I could see that my supposed friends resented me. I went around going, ‘I’m not that good of a singer. . . .’ And I got so self-conscious that when I went onstage, I couldn’t sing at all. It almost made me go crazy. I mean I needed a lot of help.”
Is the album perfect from back to front? No, but that’s part of the charm behind it as well. The record is far from the Sgt Peppers of its time by any means, but whereas Ronstadt sees a few half-formed performances, everyone else is bound to see a singer with potential to become so much more once she has her bearings about her. And judging by her stints on Broadway and working on American standards on What’s New, it’s not like she didn’t eventually live up to the expectations she set for herself.
It might be a bit harder for her to revisit a record like Heart Like A Wheel because of what she would do later, but her magnum opus is a record that earns its iconic status because of its inadequacies as well. A flawed album, yes, but one where no song could be removed from the track listing, either.
