“She could play better”: Linda Ronstadt on the most threatening artist in California
For all of the fun that goes on during award shows and concerts, people often forget how cutthroat the music industry can be. No one is in the business to become friends with everyone they meet because there’s a good chance that someone’s coming along right after you that’s going to want to suck you dry of everything and become the next major pin-up star. Although Linda Ronstadt always had a friendly tone whenever she worked with her band, she wasn’t safe from being a bit insecure around her competition.
Then again, was there anyone really getting in the way of Ronstadt’s voice whenever she took the mic? Her voice may have been one of the strongest that country rock has to offer, and when anyone was trying their hand at singing in the Troubadour bar, they may as well have packed up and gone home the minute that Ronstadt busted out songs like ‘You’re No Good’ or ‘When Will I Be Loved’.
Even her band had some of the best in the scene. If there’s one voice that’s better than the rest, it only takes a little while for someone to want to piggyback off of it, and while Don Henley and Glenn Frey came and went in Ronstadt’s band, it was clear that they had their own musical visions they needed to make into a reality.
However, for as much as rock and roll could be dominated by men more often than not, the singer-songwriter scene at the time was far more concerned with the song rather than the singer. There were always going to be legends like Gram Parsons and Jackson Browne, but everyone from Laura Nyro to Joan Baez to Emmylou Harris was also highly-revered by every single artist in that scene, either paying tribute to them through covers or asking them to write a song together.
“She could just do it all.”
Linda Ronstadt
Even by that high standard, though, no one was more shell-shocked when Joni Mitchell started singing. Mitchell was already a genius before she arrived in Los Angeles, but it was always a quiet form of brilliance, usually showing off her magnificent range but keeping every one of her melodies complicated enough to keep people coming back, whether that’s the freewheeling energy of ‘California’ or the cheeky optimism behind a song as depressing as ‘Big Yellow Taxi’.
Although Ronstadt had her singing covered most of the time, even she had to admit that most people had their guard up whenever trying to match what Mitchell was doing, saying, “I have to say that when I look at my whole career, overall, what counted the most was whether you showed up and played the music. I saw it happen with Emmylou [Harris], and I saw it happen with Joni Mitchell. Joni Mitchell was threatening to everybody. She could play better. She could sing better. She looked better. She could just do it all.”
And no matter how many times the chauvinist side of rock and roll reared its ugly head, anyone battling against Mitchell was really fighting a losing battle. Anyone can try to quote their heart, but every time some joker with a guitar thought they painted a masterpiece, songs like ‘River’ and ‘The Circle Game’ made theirs look like it had been drawn on with crayons.
That’s because Mitchell wasn’t simply an artist in the sense of having brilliant lyrics. She was a true student of all kinds of music beyond rock and roll, and while people like Ronstadt could recognise that power in a second, it took a little bit longer for the rest of the world to catch up to what she was doing.
