The only arena rock artist Linda Ronstadt bothered to stick around and watch: “I just loved it”
Sometimes when you’re so invested in your craft, it can be hard to pay attention to all of the other major movements in music that are happening around you, and for Linda Ronstadt, she was certainly not paying attention to a fair few of the big names of her era.
Ronstadt would have been in her busiest period throughout the 1970s and ‘80s, and that led her to collaborate with some of the biggest contemporary artists of these decades as well, with her winding up working alongside the likes of Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris and Paul Simon, among others. This is, of course, a rather impressive list of figures that she can claim to have worked with, but they all have one significant thing in common with one another.
Like Ronstadt, all of the aforementioned artists were significant names in the world of pop and had achieved a sense of mainstream success in the charts. At the same time, all of the biggest rock bands, while embarking on extravagant tours around the world, were reluctant to release singles and were solely focused on releasing albums that were designed to be listened to as a whole.
Artists like Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd would have been selling out stadiums during this period and gaining plenty of traction on both sides of the Atlantic, but that doesn’t necessarily mean Ronstadt had any reason to have a sense of what was going on in the world of rock, or indeed that she ought to have been paying close attention to their activities.
Neither of these ticked the boxes for her as far as personal taste was concerned, and she didn’t seem to want to pay any attention to what was being produced by these gargantuan names, despite the fact that they had a similar knack for attracting large numbers of fans to their shows.
One artist, however, did manage to sneak into her consciousness despite having predominantly operated in the rock world, and she was willing to open her ears to what this legendary act had to offer.
Neil Young was probably at the peak of his powers during this same period, and she was blown away by what he was able to produce not just on his standout records, but in his live performances, which she was fortunate to have witnessed a large amount of during the 1970s.
“I watched all of Neil Young’s shows when I toured with him,” Ronstadt explained during a 1998 interview. “I always stayed and watched all of the show, I just loved it, and I watched it from the back and I couldn’t hear it but I loved it. I still sing with him, because I learned his music, but he’s the only arena artist I really learned ‘cause I was on tour with him. The other ones I didn’t go and park in that sea of people or go into those big arenas and listen to crappy sound, it just wasn’t my piece of cake.”
It’s fair enough that the rest of the crowd wasn’t to her taste, but it’s clear that Young was doing something different to the rest of his contemporaries that helped him cross over and become appreciated in this world, and it was certainly enough to pique the interest of the otherwise rock-ambivalent Ronstadt.
