The Linda Ronstadt song bubbling with the “purest expression of male vanity”
Linda Ronstadt was the queen of the scene, caught in a male-dominated era. Well, really, any musical era has been male-dominated and still continues to be. But in the 1970s, as folk and rock and roll merged into a new chapter of sound, she was a golden voice amidst a landscape of gruff men and boys in bands, and all of them worshipped her.
If you asked the Eagles, they’d tell you that there would be no band without her. Not only did the members meet while working as her backing musicians, but the band deemed her “the first lady of country rock” and called her their ultimate “muse”.
They weren’t the only ones won over. During her career, Ronstadt wowed the likes of Neil Young, Randy Newman, James Taylor, Paul Simon and many more, including Warren Zevon, in a story that perfectly exemplifies her power.
They loved Ronstadt for the same reason the world did: her gorgeous voice that seemed to bring a whole world more emotion to the country and rock songs she chose to cover. But the singer was also widely respected for her strength and attitude. Her approach to surviving as a woman in their world was to be sharp. No one could mess with her because she always had a quick comeback, or she simply wouldn’t allow it. She could stand up for herself, and she wasn’t afraid to use her voice, even if it was to discipline her peers or point out the problems in what they were doing.
Her decision to cover Zevon’s ‘Poor Poor Pitiful Me’ is a prime example of that, as Ronstadt took the man’s own music, flipped it on him and used it to teach him a lesson.
It’s an odd premise for a song to start with. “I lay my head on the railroad tracks / And wait for the Double E / The railroad don’t run no more / Poor, poor pitiful me”, Zevon sings in the opening verse of this story about a man who is so useless, he can’t even succeed in committing suicide. As the verses and choruses roll on, this is, obviously, all blamed on women and “young girls” who won’t let him be.
At one point in the chorus, he quite literally sings the phrase “woe is me”, which Ronstadt heard, liked the song, but thought the lyrics were utterly pathetic.
“To me, that song seemed like the purest expression of male vanity,” she relayed, “Step on you, be insensitive, be unkind and give you a hard time, saying ‘can’t ya take it, can’t ya take it’. Then, if you tease men in the slightest bit, they’ll just walk off with their feelings hurt, stomp off in a corner and pout.” Pointing out the song’s irony that the track’s protagonist can lay all this blame on women but not even take a second of their teasing, she added, “I mean, that’s the way men are, I swear”.
In her own take, she switched the gender perspective, making it a woman batting off the boys that are bothering her, changing it to a less pathetic tone, and more of an exhausted one, clearly reflective of her own experience surviving in a patriarchal structure.
