The songwriter Linda Ronstadt said everyone in country-rock adored: “They wish they had the guts”
There aren’t too many in the unwieldy country and pop canon that enjoy such a glowing, unabashed fandom within their work as much as Linda Ronstadt.
It’s an infectious part of her appeal. Since first orbiting the Californian folk rock explosion over 60 years ago, her eclectic songbook that darts across soul, Latin flavours, rock numbers, and even operettas, never pangs with any doubt that the artists she chooses to cover are anchored in an evident love for their work.
All artists wear their influences on their sleeves, some more overt than others, but Ronstadt laces her repertoire of renditions and reinterpretations with enthusiasm that shines across her myriad body of work with a distinct charm.
She’s also got their back. Shortly after the release of 1989’s pop-leaning Cry Like a Rainstorm, Howl Like the Wind, four pieces written by songsmith Jimmy Webb, as well as his featuring his piano contributions and orchestral arrangements, prompted a defence of the Grammy award-winning composer after an arguably unfair perception in the music world of ebbing music cred.
“His stuff consistently has been recorded by good artists,” Ronstadt stated to CD Review. “Certainly, you can’t get a higher compliment than having someone like Ray Charles recording your work. But Jimmy has been overlooked. I think it’s that ‘hip’ thing, that glib Rolling Stone reductionist attitude that’s done no good to pop music. In fact, it’s done a great deal of harm in terms of making people self-conscious about their music and about other people’s opinions, because [Rolling Stone‘s critics] write from such an insecure vantage point. It’s that kind of attitude that tends to discount the things Jimmy’s done, which aren’t very trendy.”
It’s easy to forget how powerful the rockist press was during the countercultural bloom. In the crusade against perceived chart contaminants of the inauthentic, much of the world of bubblegum pop or general radio-friendly rock would face excoriation from puritanical journos declaring war on the artists deemed to sit squarely in the middle of the road. Penning massive numbers for the likes of The 5th Dimension and Glen Campbell with ‘Up, Up and Away’ and ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’ respectively, inevitably Webb found himself pigeonholed in the easy-listening box.
“He’s real sensitive because he took a lot of battering in the 1960s, when that hipper-than-thou thing was going on,” Ronstadt furthered. “Meanwhile, all these artists were admiring Jimmy’s music. Get Don Henley, JD Souther, and Jackson Browne in the corner of the El Adobe Café, and they’d be talking about what a great songwriter Jimmy Webb is and how they wish they had the guts to write a song that rhymes ‘adios’, ‘morose’, and ‘grandiose’.”
The song in question was Webb’s ‘Adios’, first recorded and featured on Cry Like a Rainstorm, Howl Like the Wind, before the writer himself recorded his own version four years later on Suspending Disbelief. It’s a small but significant piece of appraisal, enjoying an easy and pleasing rhyming blast without worrying what the critics will make of it, a populist writer gunning for a direct relationship with the fans over approval of the musical gatekeepers.
Rolling Stone would come around anyhow. Once the rockism had dulled a bit in the early 1970s, the magazine would praise his prior LP efforts, if swerving past the ‘MacArthur Park’ single with actor Richard Harris, and by the 2010s, would hail the Oklahoma songsmith as one of the finest songwriters of all time.
