The 1974 Linda Ronstadt song that was completely erased: “We had to go back”
It was usually hard work for Linda Ronstadt to be anywhere close to satisfied with her work.
No one was a harsher critic of her voice than she was, and she was going to go the extra mile if it meant that she got the take that she wanted every single time that she walked into the studio. Her songs needed to be among the finest vocal performances that she could give, but sometimes she was at the mercy of some producers that didn’t exactly have steady hands when making her records.
She was already critical that a song like ‘Different Drum’ didn’t sound like what she had heard in her head, and even when working on some of her later records, it took a long time before she was fully happy with what she was making. Heart Like a Wheel was the first time she felt like she was creating magic in the studio, but to get to that level, that meant she had to struggle through making an album like Silk Purse.
A lot of those transitional albums were when she was finding her true voice, but ‘Heart Like a Wheel’ is the kind of song that she seemed born to sing. Despite being one of the greatest singers in country rock, her strong suit was always in singing ballads, but that didn’t mean that she couldn’t find time to make her own barnburning version of tunes like The Rolling Stones’ ‘Tumbling Dice’, either.
Her version of The Stones classic is good enough to compete with the original, but ‘You’re No Good’ is forever going to be her greatest rock and roll tune. She wasn’t the same kind of singer that could belt in the same way that Janis Joplin might have, but she had the right amount of gusto to turn that tune inside out when she recorded it. It’s too bad we’ll never know what they early take would have sounded like, though.
Because as much as Ronstadt was proud of getting a great version of the tune, she remembered that one of the engineers managed to delete everything that she sang, saying, “I went out to dinner with my boyfriend. When I came back, they had this amazing guitar solo on it. They spent hours doing it and I was blown away by it. The engineer [Val Garay] accidentally pushed the wrong button and erased it all. [Laughs] We had to go back and re-do it! It took them all night. But they did a great job.”
Then again, maybe that little bit of elbow grease was what they needed. Some of the greatest rock songs of all time are never supposed to be easy to sing, and there are plenty of moments in Ronstadt’s career where she took a deep dive playing a song that she didn’t know was going to work, only to make it sound absolutely perfect. But it is a bit of shame that all that work was done for a song that she never identified with, either.
She still considered herself as outside of the world of rock and roll, and a tune like ‘You’re No Good’ was an example of her making the kind of song that didn’t fit her voice. That didn’t stop the rest of the world from loving it, though, especially when bands like Van Halen ended up doing their own version of the tune whenever they started hitting the club scene a few years after Ronstadt became a star.
She didn’t think of herself as the person that was supposed to bring this kind of tune to the masses, but sometimes that’s not a choice that an artist gets to make. Ronstadt was simply the one singing the songs, and if she managed to do a great job on one of them, it didn’t take long for the rest of the world to take notice.
