The 1974 song Linda Ronstadt fell out of love with: “I just didn’t like it”
It’s hard to imagine trying to match what Linda Ronstadt was doing every single time she sang.
She was one of the queens of country rock when she started out, but the thought of someone trying to match her intensity and passion every time she sang didn’t make much sense when she could come out with some of the best versions of the tunes she was covering. But having that high a standard meant that Ronstadt was overly critical every single time she tried to work on something that didn’t quite fit within her style.
After all, this is someone who decided to quit altogether when she got Parkinson’s disease rather than try to make do with the voice that she had left. Anyone else would have been happy to have seen her still playing gigs and doing her best to deliver her songs to the people, but it’s much more respectable for her to bow out gracefully rather than give the audience a performance that was less than what they deserved. She didn’t want to sell anyone short, and that included herself when working on her classic albums.
Because as much as she was known as one of the biggest names in California music at the time, rock and roll was never where she felt the most comfortable. Her voice was a lot softer than what everyone was used to, and even if she could do a rip-roaring version of The Rolling Stones’ ‘Tumbling Dice’ or Buddy Holly’s ‘It’s So Easy’, there was no sense in her trying to make something that she didn’t believe in.
Her voice fit in much better with the easy listening crowd, and when she got a taste of what she could do with Nelson Riddle, she never wanted to go back to the same bar band-style of rock and roll. That had only been one phase of her career, and she felt that a song like ‘You’re No Good’ wasn’t something that she felt confident about anymore. Hell, even when she recorded the tune, she was already sceptical about even recording it after playing the tune for so long in the bars.
It did show a different side of herself, but Ronstadt could hear that her heart wasn’t in it when she recorded the tune for Heart Like A Wheel, saying, “I was tired and we’d been working on You’re No Good for a long time. I was also a little tired of the song anyway because we’d been doing it on stage. I sang it all day and my voice was all worn out and my rhythm was a little off. I just didn’t like it and didn’t like my phrasing on it.”
And while the song still sounds great, it makes sense why Ronstadt would be a little bit more lenient towards the tune after recording some of her classics. ‘Heart Like A Wheel’ was where her heart was at the moment, and as much as ‘You’re No Good’ went off whenever she played it live, it’s a song that tends to thrive off of the audience interaction rather than being played in the middle of a quiet studio.
Which is probably why Van Halen’s version of the tune works the way that it does. The tune is a lot more moody when it’s played straight, but when you put a bit more power behind the whole thing, you can feel the band jumping in a way that wouldn’t have felt out of place if they were playing in the middle of a sold-out arena. That was all well and good, but that’s not where Ronstadt was interested in playing.
Her songs belonged in the middle of a grand theatre half the time, and even if she couldn’t make the song work to her liking, she could still roll with the punches and make the tunes that she wanted to make. ‘You’re No Good’ had its place in history, but it wasn’t a place where she felt that she could grow as an entertainer. She needed something more than a few bar band songs, but that doesn’t take away from the song being one of her all-time best rockers.
