The first guitarist who “humbled” Linda Ronstadt
As one of the most diverse songwriters and performers to have ever emerged from the US, Linda Ronstadt isn’t the sort of person you’d imagine ever being intimidated by the skills of another musician. Having been awarded 11 Grammys, a Tony Award and an induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as only a handful of her achievements, Ronstadt is one of the most celebrated and rightfully decorated artists who seemingly had it all in terms of talent.
Her career began as a teenager in Tucson, Arizona, where she would perform alongside her siblings Peter and Gretchen in a folk trio, alternately known as The Union City Ramblers, The New Union Ramblers and The Three Ronstadts. Playing in small local venues, she got an early taste of life on the stage and would soon see this desire grow into wanting to pursue a career as a musician.
Having enrolled at the University of Arizona at the age of 18, she would only last one semester there due to an impromptu visit to Los Angeles to see an old friend, Bobby Kimmel, eventually leading her to abandon her studies and move to form a band with Kimmel and Kenny Edwards. As the Stone Poneys, the folk-rock trio released three albums in quick succession in 1967 and ‘68, and achieved notable chart success with their cover of the Mike Nesmith-penned ‘Different Drum’.
It would seem that Ronstadt had managed to settle into life in a new city exceptionally well for a youngster, and found her feet as a performer much quicker than most would be able to. However, moving to a new city always presents new challenges, no matter what your chosen career path is, and Ronstadt would have to acclimatise to many different things that she wouldn’t have been used to back home in Arizona.
A rising feature of LA’s music scene in the mid-1960s was the emergence of counterculture, with the California city being regarded as the centre of hippie culture. Ronstadt herself would admit that finding ways to get to grips with this new way of life was a little overwhelming at times, and in a 2022 interview with Route Magazine, she revealed that everything felt “new” to her. “It was a new world. There were a lot of art films that we went to see. We went to hear a lot of other music groups. We were kind of brown hippies. Country hippies. We got to tour that world a little bit. There was a lot of stuff, there were psychedelics and a lot of new things to embrace. I fell in love with Japanese movies.”
While these may have been exciting things for her to delve into, the music that was being played was another thing that she had to get used to. Speaking of her first time visiting the iconic Ash Grove venue, she was blown away by her experience seeing the folk-rock band Rising Sons. “The Ash Grove was where all the good folk music was,” Ronstadt explained, “and I was just dying to go because I had heard about it. We went down to the Ash Grove and there was Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder playing in a band together. And I just said, ‘Man, they’ve got some great guitar players here!’ I felt humbled by it and wanted to be around it and learn it.”
Even though she would evidently go on to forge a fantastic career for herself not long after this occasion, seeing a guitar legend like Cooder would ultimately prove to be an incredibly formative experience for Ronstadt, and perhaps the moment where she became fully aware of what she needed to do to fully immerse herself in the Los Angeles music scene.
