The 1960s band Linda Ronstadt thought never sounded right: “They hadn’t evolved”
Trying to find a bad Linda Ronstadt performance is like fighting an unwinnable battle.
There are hardly any tunes that she ever released where she sounded any less than perfect, and even if she started to get a little bit rough towards the end, it’s hard to look at any of her records and not feel like she did the best version of the song that she could. She knew what every one of her tunes needed to become legendary, and that included finding the right person for the job whenever she worked on some of her classics.
Making a classic album isn’t something that Ronstadt ever wanted to do alone, and her superpower was being able to find the right songs to suit her voice every single time she sang. JD Souther and Jackson Browne made the best kinds of songs for her to sing, and even if she was doing her own rendition of a classic rock and roll tune, ‘Tumbling Dice’ has taken on a separate life thanks to what she did with The Stones’ classic.
But even if she were to become one of the biggest singers in the world with the most impressive range of all time, it took her a while before she was comfortable being a singer. She never felt like she truly understood singing until working on Broadway, and even if she already had records like Heart Like A Wheel under her belt, Ronstadt felt that the songs did get more than a little bit cringy the further back you go in the timeline.
She wasn’t outright ashamed of any of her records, but there are definitely moments where her voice sounded a little more naive than before. It took a while before she landed on songs like ‘You’re No Good’, but when she was still working with The Stone Poneys, she was still finding out what made a good recording. She lived to perform live over everything else, and even if ‘Different Drum’ had the right hook to become a massive hit, she was pissed to find out that the record company didn’t like the band she was working with.
The Stone Poneys were like family to her, and while the song would eventually be re-recorded with a bunch of session players, Ronstadt felt that the whole thing was bound to be a huge mistake, saying, “We used some players from the Wrecking Crew on that. We used them on ‘Different Drum’ because they were the first call studio guys. They were vastly better players than we were but they hadn’t evolved along our same path. They hadn’t absorbed the same musical idiosyncrasies that we had so I felt the recording of ‘Different Drum’ didn’t sound like us.”
But it’s hard to really argue when you have members of the greatest session band in the world on hand. These are the same people who helped turn Pet Sounds into a masterpiece, and even if the rest of the band had a certain mojo about them, there’s no way that any of Ronstadt’s bandmates could have pulled off the same performances that ended up on the record.
And while it took a long time for Ronstadt to come around on that version, it’s not like she was ever afraid to work with other studio musicians later in her career. What’s New had some of the finest musicians that any singer could have asked for, and even when working in her country-rock days, having the then-nameless members of the Eagles playing backup for her was proof that she could work with virtually anybody.
She had to eat a little bit of humble pie by letting her Stone Poneys bandmates fall by the wayside, but that’s the important lesson that all artists have to learn at one point or another. They can be in love with what they’ve created and sound fantastic in their own mind, but sometimes it takes the right kind of production touches to elevate a song from being pretty good to a masterpiece.
