The “murky” genre that made Linda Ronstadt hate rock: “It just wrecked the music”
Linda Ronstadt didn’t want to consider herself a snob when it came to all kinds of music.
There was nothing off the table for her whenever she made one of her records, and she loved the idea of keeping the audience guessing whenever she made one of her artistic pivots. It was all about trying to make music that had a bigger punch than normal, and that involved her trying to sample anything and everything, even if it meant her hating the genre when she was finished listening.
But there was never a chance that Ronstadt was going to cut off entire genres from her repertoire, either. She gravitated towards the biggest names in pop, jazz, and even classical music, and when looking at some of her own personal favourites, she was showing her audience new genres that they wouldn’t have tried out before, when she started singing entirely in Spanish on some of her tunes.
It was never a case of her trying to be completely different for the sake of it, though. She genuinely loved this kind of music and was going to do every single thing she could to make the sounds that she heard in her head. But the rest of the rock and roll world was a lot more comfortable trying to break out the Marshall amplifiers and blow people’s ears out whenever they heard any number of their favourite songs.
The Who had already been tearing down what rock and roll was supposed to sound like whenever they performed, and no matter how much the country rock genre was spreading, there were people like Black Sabbath willing to give everyone the fright of their lives. This was music that was a lot more gritty, and while that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, it wasn’t a road that Ronstadt was willing to go down.
She had spent her entire life trying to sound as perfect as possible, and she wasn’t about to dumb down her sound to try and get on the radio or anything, saying, “The guitar got an amplifier and then everybody heard Chuck Berry and went ooh, we like that, we gotta do more of that, so they got a bigger amplifier, and then they got greedy and they wanted to get into bigger spaces for concerts and we went into those arenas and the only thing you could hear was the guitar, and it was very mushy. It just wrecked the music. The music got huge, rock and roll turned into ROCK, it became big, and it’s not pleasing to listen to. …And it wasn’t any fun any more.”
That’s not to say that she couldn’t adapt to what everyone else was doing. Mad Love at least saw her trying out new songwriters like Elvis Costello whenever she decided to do her rendition on other people’s material, but when looking at her later career, she was looking to move as far away from that genre as possible when she started working with people like Nelson Riddle on her projects.
She pined for the days when pop music was more sophisticated, and there was no reason for her to think that she was going to perform with a band like AC/DC. That style of singing was completely alien to her, and while she was more than happy to try out new things, she knew that there was no chance in hell of her ever trying to compete with the screamers of the rock and roll world anymore.
The genre had grown up a little bit, and it wasn’t a genre that she particularly cared for anymore. She was never all that interested in being a typical rock and roll star to begin with, and once the volume got turned up, that was practically her signal to start looking for other means to express herself.
