The rock stars Linda Ronstadt said no singer could copy: “A waste of my time”
It was always important for singers like Linda Ronstadt to know their limitations.
She was able to take her music in a thousand different directions, but if there was an idea that transparently didn’t work, it’s not like she was going to try her best until her audience eventually came around on her latest experiment. The phrase ‘give the people what they want’ exists for a reason, and even when making her classics, Ronstadt felt that a handful of tunes didn’t necessarily need her voice plastered on top of them.
Then again, Ronstadt was always one of the greatest voices to ever come out of California. She was far from the most operatic voice in the world when she started, but compared to every other folkie that was populating the Los Angeles bar scene at the time, there was a power in her voice that fit somewhere in between the beauty of Joni Mitchell’s voice, the sincerity of Carole King’s, and the raw power of Janis Joplin.
Even if she didn’t claim to have the best rock and roll voice in the world, she always felt right at home when playing off the Eagles before they actually formed. She knew that there was room for her to make rock for a little while, but if she was going in a singer-songwriter direction, she knew that she needed to have the perfect song behind her before she even thought about getting in front of the microphone.
Because as much as Ronstadt is a singer, one of the biggest parts of any vocalist is to be a sonic actor in many ways. An artist like Bob Dylan doesn’t necessarily need to have the most show-stopping voice that Broadway has ever heard as long as he is singing songs that suit his voice, and while old-school rock and roll worked for Ronstadt, not everything had the same kind of punch she was looking for.
A lot of tunes like ‘When Will I Be Loved’ by the Everly Brothers and her covers of artists like Randy Newman and Warren Zevon suited her fine, but the main pattern here was that she wasn’t exactly belting in the same way that most rock idols were doing. The closer she got to ballads, the better off she was, and even by the standards of rockabilly, her version of ‘Back in the USA’ was not the reason why she got into singing.
Make no mistake, the melody was perfect for Berry, but for someone known to stretch her vocals all the time, ‘the Father of Rock and Roll’ was beyond her reach, saying, “For me to sing a song like ‘Back in the USA’ is just a waste of my time. As interesting and innovative as that material and Chuck Berry were, it was written by a guitar player to give him something to do while he was waiting to take his guitar solo and do a duckwalk across the stage. There’s nothing for a singer to do. Ditto for Buddy Holly.”
It’s not like Berry and Holly are doing anything different with their voices, but it also comes down to the spectacle that came with them playing. Holly could really make a band jump when he was playing guitar, and even if Ronstadt could sing the hell out of Berry’s material, there was no way that she was going to use a guitar as a prop and channel her inner Marty McFly whenever singing one of his tunes.
Because, really, Ronstadt was a sonic actor in many respects, and she knew the parts that worked best for her weren’t always the most rock and roll picks. But even if audiences expected a bit more, Ronstadt was more comfortable giving fans her best material than upsetting them with a lacklustre tune.
