“Like no other”: The one band Linda Ronstadt called her favourite
Linda Ronstadt always had a strange approach to rock and roll. When she was at full-blast, there was no one else who could touch her in her field, and yet she was the one that could turn the grit off on her voice and sing something as gentle as ‘Heart Like A Wheel’ or pull off going to Broadway and holding her own next to every single seasoned professional on that stage with her. But in terms of her own taste in rock and roll, she preferred music that was a bit left-field compared to everyone else.
After all, she had started making music in the farthest place from rock and roll when she began listening to Mexican music. That was always a part of her musical upbringing, but by the time she landed in the middle of Los Angeles, she was given an education as to what the singer-songwriter genre could be, with a new lesson to be learned every time someone new came to the Troubadour to play a set.
People like Neil Young and Joni Mitchell had been cutting their teeth there, but something always drew Ronstadt back to country music. Many of her songs have become pieces of Americana at this stage, and whether she had Eagles backing her or not, there was no one else who commanded a room like she could, always finding the right song that would leave everyone absolutely delirious when she was finished.
But music wasn’t only about a couple of chords and a lovely melody to her. Things could get a bit more complicated when they wanted to, and when she eventually decided to cut an album of nothing but American standards, she never saw it as any big departure. This was merely the next step in her journey, and it wasn’t all that different from what the titans of rock and roll had been doing.
Led Zeppelin had gone in different directions across all of their albums and gotten away with it, so couldn’t she make such a dramatic pivot into something different? There were never meant to be any rules in music, and when it came to rock and roll, Little Feat exemplified everything Ronstadt was looking for in rock and roll by deliberately going against the grain whenever they made a record.
Nothing they did was ready for the pop market, but that hardly mattered to Ronstadt when she first heard them, saying, “We went to see them after our show, and when we walked in, tey were standing onstage playing ‘Dixie Chicken’. Little Feat, to this day my favourite rock and roll band, sounded like no other. It had layers of syncopated New Orleans parade beats, with Bill Payne pounding out a keyboard part that conjured the spirits of Professor Longhair, Louis Gottschalk, and Claude Debussy.”
While the band was adventurous enough to also get Jimmy Page’s attention, they have always been on the outskirts of stardom whenever people talk about the 1970s. There are occasionally albums like Sailin’ Shoes that get major traction among underground rock and roll fans, but they have always been slightly left-of-centre compared to the Lynyrd Skynyrds of the world.
But since when was rock and roll always about the raw sales of the records? It was always about making good music at the end of the day, and no matter how many times Little Feat tried and failed to get on the charts, Ronstadt knew that there was nothing better than hearing all of the different influences that they could put together for one of their records.
