The punk band Linda Ronstadt only saw as copycats: “Sort of limited”
As someone who built her career largely on a foundation of performing covers of other artists’ music, you’d think that Linda Ronstadt would be a little more generous towards artists who operate in similar lanes.
Of course, the singer was still able to develop her own style, which is a large part of why she was so revered. Still, for many listeners, it can often be a turnoff to listen to artists who are so uncomfortable with the idea of performing their own original material. It can lead to some scathing remarks being levelled at those who opt to do this.
Again, it also takes a lot of skill to be able to choose the right songs to perform, and it’s not like all of these are straightforward tracks that take little effort to be able to make. For this reason, Ronstadt ought to be celebrated more for how she took lesser-known tracks and injected life and her own personality into them, rather than criticised for not possessing any of her own creative flair.
Yes, she’s also been her own worst critic at times, and that makes it understandable why she would have high standards when it comes to judging the music of others. That doesn’t mean that others should feel like they have the right to hurl disparaging remarks about her artistry at her, but nor should it give her the right to do the same in return for showing a supposed lack of originality.
Around the same time that she was enjoying the heights of her success, there was a movement happening that felt a million miles away from the domain that she was settling into, and while her thoughts on the genre as a whole aren’t widely known, there was one act who seemed to strike a nerve with the singer.
You wouldn’t expect Ronstadt to be the sort of person to comment on punk rock in a way that felt like it was coming from a balanced critical perspective, but she decided to lash out at the Ramones for being what she perceived as a copycat band.
During a 1978 interview with Rolling Stone, she spoke about the Queens icons as though they were guilty of having ripped off other bands who she saw as being far more worthy of praise. “It seemed to me, when I saw the Ramones, for instance, that they had taken one facet of what Mick Jagger does, which is a kind of stance, maybe one move and maybe one little chip off of an emotional statement, and it was sort of limited to that,” she argued, clearly expressing the opinion that The Rolling Stones were the superior act.
She continued, further praising the latter while plunging the knife further into the revered punk act. “Mick Jagger has such a tremendous overview that is so many-faceted that it makes it sound so much more,” she added, “but if you just take a chunk of it, it doesn’t glimmer as much.”
It may come as a surprise that she was so vehemently opposed to what they were doing, considering how there was a certain throwback to early pop and rock and roll aesthetics in what the Ramones were doing, but to her, it felt styleless. Her hatred wasn’t as a result of them being stylistically in opposition to what she was doing as an artist, but more that they’d piggybacked off the success and talent of an act she admired greatly, which she didn’t take kindly to.
