“I wouldn’t”: The one lyric Linda Ronstadt refused to sing
One of the things that first drew Linda Ronstadt to Warren Zevon was that he mustered the kind of purity she sought to replicate in her own work.
As someone whom Bob Dylan once described as “a musician’s musician, a tortured one”, Zevon knew the power of lending witty cynicisms with a mix of styles and genres, bringing his inner turmoil to the surface in ways you couldn’t detect from spending time with him away from his music.
After all, Ronstadt once described him as someone who “hardly lifted his eyes off the floor”. And while the best kinds of musical experiences often centre on hearing all the trials and tribulations the artist goes through in an attempt to get to know themselves better, Zevon’s shyness also gave his music its ambiguities, almost as if the music presented its own thing, separate from Zevon’s real identity.
Funnily enough, Ronstadt had a lot to do with Zevon’s rise in popularity, mostly with the arrival of her 1976 album Hasten Down the Wind. Then, with a host of high-profile names in his roster for his first record, including the likes of Stevie Nicks, Eagles, Carl Wilson, and, of course, Ronstadt with producer Jackson Browne, Zevon entered the game strong, proving the value of sheer honesty even when you’re sceptical about your own vulnerability.
Ronstadt once said she “always” felt “connected” to Zevon, even though she only “knew him by reputation”. Zevon, like Ronstadt, frequented The Troubadour a lot, through which Ronstadt discovered many of his “beautiful” songs. Many of which Ronstadt covered herself, and those she didn’t were ones that still stayed with her long after the opportunity had passed.
One she did cover was Zevon’s sardonic ‘Poor Poor Pitiful Me’, which tackles an abusive experience and especially forlorn psychological state, mainly in the verse in which Zevon says: “I met a girl at the Rainbow Bar / She asked me if I’d beat her / She took me back to the Hyatt House / I don’t want to talk about i.”
When Browne, who produced the track, first took the idea to Ronstadt about the potential to re-record her own version, she was understandably a little reluctant. In fact, as you’d expect, she didn’t feel like it was all that fitting at all, considering not only its subject matter but the fact that it was from a man’s perspective.
“I have a cassette recording of Jackson Browne talking me into singing ‘Pitiful Me’, saying, ‘You could sing this!’ I really wanted to sing it,” she said, explaining that that verse in particular didn’t sit right. “I said, ‘I don’t think I can sing that verse. I’m not into that kind of thing at all. Valentine’s Day, dinner, courtship, I like all that,’” she explained, adding, “I wouldn’t go back to the hotel with him if that’s what he’s into.”
As such, Ronstadt changed the lyric to better suit her voice and artistic expression, replacing Zevon’s original chaos with a boy she met “in the Vieux Carré” who “picked me up and threw me down saying, ‘Please don’t hurt me, Mama!’”
