The 1978 song Linda Ronstadt thought could have outdone: “A great opportunity I missed”
Linda Ronstadt didn’t ever want to see music as any sense of competition.
Her goal was to make the best rock and roll songs that she could while she had her voice, and while it didn’t take her long to move on to other genres, she was still willing to do everything she could to make sure that her songs sounded immaculate whenever she wrapped her voice around them. But there were more than a few tunes that got away that she felt could have been electrifying in her hands.
Because when you think about it, there was no one else who could even hope to compete with Ronstadt whenever she performed in her prime. Even when Eagles were backing her up, there was no one in any venue that was listening out for anything else but her when she kicked into tunes like ‘You’re No Good’, but Ronstadt always had a much better range than the kinds of songs that she was singing.
Country rock was a big part of her life, but the lion’s share of his best work often came from working outside of the pop landscape. Her easy listening records were where she felt the most comfortable, but even she got the chance to work with the same colleagues that Frank Sinatra worked with, nothing could replace the magic of a great song in her mind whenever the right writer came around.
She could certainly appreciate what people like Annie Lennox brought to the table in Eurythmics, but the magic behind all of her songs was about picking tunes that she could relate to. Jackson Browne and JD Souther were crafting some of the finest tunes she could have ever hoped for, but when she first met Warren Zevon, the idea of her making the song ‘Accidentally Like a Martyr’ was always going to be one of her regrets.
Zevon was already a master songwriter in his own right, but a lot of what he was doing felt right coming out of Ronstadt’s mouth. ‘Poor Poor Pitiful Me’ is still one of her finest country tunes, but when she first got the idea to work on ‘Martyr’, the fact that it fell through the cracks during that period was about more than Ronstadt not doing justice to the song. She felt that Zevon had whipped it into decent shape, but she knew she could take it further.
A lot of people may try to bring their own perspective to those songs, but Ronstadt knew that there was unfinished business with Zevon’s version, saying, “I’ve always wished I’d recorded ‘Accidentally Like A Martyr’; I just feel like it was a great opportunity I missed. I was intimidated by it at the time, and I loved the way he’d recorded it and I didn’t think I could beat it, but I think I could’ve if I’d worked at it.”
That’s a bold statement coming from someone who didn’t write the tune, but Ronstadt is one of the few singers who could have managed to outdo one of the classics. Her version of ‘Desperado’ was already light-years better than the Eagles’ version for pop fans, so it wasn’t out of the question for her to do the same thing when she was presented with someone else’s tune.
For now, it will always be the one that got away in many regards, but that doesn’t mean that Ronstadt missed the mark by any stretch. She didn’t push herself in this one instant, but there were a million more chances for her to knock it out of the park on more sophisticated songs later down the line.
