The hit song Linda Ronstadt struggled to record: “I had no idea there would be all these musicians”
Linda Ronstadt was the darling of the folk-rock scene; ask anyone who was there. Glenn Frey once dubbed her “the first lady of country rock”, calling her the Eagles’ “muse”, and they were merely one in the long list of artists and acts that were desperate to have Ronstadt around. She seemed to have a golden touch, making every artist’s track a hit when she covered it and making that artist love her, except in one case, when she struggled to get into the song.
Ronstadt built a career out of taking someone else’s song, applying her stunning voice to it, and making it a hit. She covered tracks from a huge array of artists, including Buddy Holly, Hank Williams, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and more. This led to her collaborating with many of these heroes, too, bringing her to work with even more big names like Dolly Parton, Frank Zappa, Paul Simon, Randy Newman, and the list goes on.
She was simply one of those names and voices that everyone seemed to love, so quickly she had artists knocking on her door requesting that she cover their work. But sometimes that was easier than others. Ronstadt found it easy to translate more classic folk and rock songs into her own style, but when presented with something more left-field, it was a challenge that she almost gave up on.
The song in question was ‘Different Drum’, the track that would become her breakthrough moment with her early band, The Stone Poneys. Ronstadt was so young at the time and was still only just getting to grips with the music world and its workings. She obviously knew how to sing well, but when it came to getting in the studio and facing up to the moving parts of putting a song on tape, she was thrown off, especially when this track seemed to keep on changing.
The way they’d rehearsed it wasn’t the way they recorded it. In the studio, it was tweaked to a different arrangement, and so the singer was lost. But really, it was changed to be closer to Michael Nesmith’s original track. He said, “Well, that was how I wrote the song — how it is on Hits. It’s got the twang, and it’s got the balance, and it’s got all that stuff. That’s a real kind of mountain music.”
Ronstadt wanted it different, though, and wanted to sing it in a “folky way.” But when she got to the studio, that’s not what was happening. “They said, ‘well, we want to do it again, but we’re going to get a different arrangement.’ I had no idea there would be all these musicians,” she explained said, “It turns out they were all good players. Don Randi was playing. Jimmy Gordon was the drummer. Don Randi was playing the harpsichord. He played piano. I was just shocked.”
But she got through it, made it work, and the product was The Stone Poney’s big hit. “I didn’t want them to use it because I felt like I was struggling with the singing. And I thought that showed, you know, so clearly. So when they put it out, it was lucky they didn’t listen to me,” she said, admitting that she almost ruined their shot at that success.
