“I never tired of them”: the shows Linda Ronstadt called the best she ever played
The mark of any good musician is how well they fare in a live setting. Anyone can spend their time tinkering away at a song until they think it’s reached its purest form, but if you don’t roadtest it in front of an audience, it’s hard to get a gauge on whether they like it or not. And while Linda Ronstadt has graced many stages and taken on tunes by some of the greatest songwriters alive, she knew that there were a handful of tours where she never felt happier to be singing for a living.
Before Ronstadt even hit the big time, she had already had serious chops from playing night after night. She had been playing at places like The Troubadour and The Whisky A-Go-Go back when Glenn Frey and Don Henley were her bandmates, so it was never that hard for her to go from some of the heartbreaking tunes of all time to barn burners like ‘You’re No Good’ within the span of a few songs.
But after a while, any singer would get tired of playing the same music whenever they start their set. After all, Trio would have been considered the apex for any country rocker of Ronstadt’s calibre, so once you hit the ceiling like that, it’s only natural to want to find something new that’s outside of your wheelhouse, and the next phase of her career saw her going back to the classics.
After spending time on Broadway, Ronstadt felt that she would be much happier singing standards like her idols like Rosemary Clooney, but even then, channelling her inner crooner wasn’t the best showcase for her voice. She had to go back to her roots, and when she came back with the album Canciones de mi Padre, fans weren’t exactly prepared to hear her singing in Spanish.
“The Mexican shows were my favourites of my entire career.”
Linda Ronstadt
This was the face of country rock for many people, so hearing her bring in the sounds of her childhood was a bit strange for her fans. But Ronstadt wasn’t about to be apologetic for following her heart, and when she got out on the road to start working the crowds with her take on mariachi music, she wouldn’t have traded it for the world.
Compared to every sweaty club she played in or even the headlining tours, Ronstadt felt that few things were better than playing off her new band of Mexican musicians, saying, “The Mexican shows were my favourites of my entire career. I would sing two or three songs at a time, change costumes, and be back in time to watch the dancers. I never tired of them. The musicians were stellar and included a number of powerful singers. I learned from them every night.”
And this wasn’t a passing love affair with non-English music, either. Ronstadt always kept those tours close to her heart, and even before making a full album, she had already started making Spanish translations of songs like ‘Blue Bayou’ even when she was at the height of her career in the 1970s.
Whenever someone does these kinds of foreign-language albums, it would be easy for it to seem like a cash grab, but that wasn’t how Ronstadt thought about her work. She was always genuine about her love for all kinds of music, and if some people were confused about it, that was their problem.
