The era Linda Ronstadt said she took for granted: “It was just friends of friends of friends”
When Linda Ronstadt first embarked on her solo career with her alternative-country collection, 1969’s Hand Sown… Home Grown, she began the tradition of refining her sound while merging the two worlds, placing her at the epicentre of California’s folk and country rock movements.
But, from the beginning, Ronstadt’s career can be viewed as a series of fateful circumstances that allowed her to rise to her rightful stardom. Before she emerged as a solo artist, she joined her friend, Bobby Kimmel, from her home city of Tucson, Arizona, in Los Angeles. This spontaneous trip prompted the young singer to move there permanently and form a band with Kimmel, who had been co-writing folk-rock songs with Kenny Edwards, a guitarist-songwriter.
The newly-formed trio signed to Capitol Records as the Stone Poneys, releasing three albums in a 15-month period between 1967-68; Ronstadt’s solo effort, Hand Sown… Home Grown would debut the following year. Soon after, preparing for a venture into life as a touring artist, Ronstadt would meet a series of musicians who would permanently alter her career, unbeknownst to her.
“I have to say, I took it totally for granted,” Ronstadt reflected, in conversation with Ultimate Classic Rock. “I just figured that everybody in Los Angeles was a pretty good songwriter.” Some figures she met would stay in her life for years, including vocalist Wendy Waldman, who was a backing vocalist for Ronstadt’s live shows and introduced her to songwriter Billy Steinberg. “Well, he’s a really good songwriter; I’ll record some of his songs,” Ronstadt recalls telling Waldman.
This led to the recording of Ronstadat’s 1980 single, ‘How Do I Make You’, from the album Mad Love, one in her long series of top ten hits. Other songs appearing on Mad Love were written by Mark Goldenberg, whom Ronstadt met through her former bandmate, Edwards and songwriter Karla Bonoff. “It was just friends of friends of friends,” she concludes.
An early moment of kismet came when she and her manager, John Boylan, assembled a backing band in 1971. They recruited fledgling musicians Don Henley, Glenn Frey, Bernie Leadon and Randy Meisner; with her encouragement, the four would form the Eagles. Another chance encounter came about with Warren Zevon, before either artist had reached unprecedented levels of stardom.
“Warren and I had mutual friends,” Ronstadt recounts, “And I found out that he was moving out of his apartment on Beachwood up in Hollywood. So, he moved out, and I moved in. We knew each other, just sort of through mutual friends.” Those friends were JD Souther and Jackson Browne, both frequent collaborators who would continually feature in Ronstadt’s discography.
“I learned ‘Hasten Down the Wind’, I think from JD, and recorded it,” she remembers, of the song that would become the title track of her 1976 album. “Then, I started doing as many of his songs as I could figure out how to do.”
Souther, as the “principal architect” of Southern California’s defining sound, would feature Ronstadt in his own work and produce her 1973 album, Don’t Cry Now. Browne would enlist Ronstadt to join him on tours and select shows, from her beginnings in the early 1970s to a 1999 New Year’s Eve celebratory concert, their statures as some of the century’s most significant musicians a footnote in their fruitful collaborative friendship.
Other musicians, including, but not limited to, Neil Young, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Johnny Cash and James Taylor, would be significant relationships in Ronstadt’s life, one that was plentiful with creative influences. As Ronstadt once said best, “Rampant eclecticism is my middle name.”
