Linda Ronstadt never enjoyed working with The Stone Poneys: “It was a painful experience”
There’s a good chance that Linda Ronstadt could have worked with anybody as long as she had the right song.
Her voice might not have been the grittiest in rock and roll by any stretch, but there was no doubt that she was in firm control of nearly every song that she wrapped her voice around when she first started playing clubs like the Troubadour back in the day. That voice was enough to level a small city if she had the right tools at her disposal, but it wasn’t like she was making all of those fantastic records all on her own, either.
It took a small army to even make a good record back in the day, but Ronstadt wasn’t going to settle for any other band when she started working. After all, she had Eagles at her disposal when she first started cutting her greatest tunes, and even if Don Henley and Glenn Frey had to fly on to bigger and better things on their own, she was in good hands when working with Peter Asher on getting the right songs.
Asher was the perfect foil to Ronstadt whenever working in the studio, but even when she began stepping outside of her comfort zone, no one was going to be able to match what Nelson Riddle did on her easy listening records. This is the same guy who helped helm the greatest orchestral tracks for people like Frank Sinatra, and while Ronstadt embracing her inner Rosemary Clooney was always going to be a bit of a gamble, you could tell that she was in her element every step of the way.
With all those partners, you’d think that Ronstadt would have had a spotless discography, but her early years were always going to be rough around the edges. Every single rock artist has had horror stories about their first records not coming together as they should have, but even when working in the Stone Poneys, the black sheep of her catalogue has less to do with her and more to do with the players behind her.
That’s not to say that The Stone Poneys were terrible for what they were. In fact, they were a fairly decent country-rock outfit that wouldn’t have felt out of place next to the Flyin’ Burrito Brothers, but since the higher-ups felt that Ronstadt would have worked better as a solo artist, she remembered feeling mortified listening to all the session musicians working on the album Silk Purse.
Sure, they were playing all of the notes correctly and making the most professional record they could, but in Ronstadt’s mind, a lot of the mojo was gone before she even started singing, saying, “It was a painful experience because they didn’t seem to understand what I wanted there, and I thought it was a bad record. And there was a hit song from that album, ‘Long Long Time’, which meant that a lot of people heard the album. I still didn’t know how to sing properly then. I really thought I had no business making a record, and that I should have been home practising.”
If this is what Ronstadt sounds like when she’s unsure of herself, though, that’s not necessarily a bad thing at all. The cover is definitely a bit ill-advised, showing her stuck in a pig pen, but her renditions of tunes like Carole King’s ‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow’ and ‘Lovesick Blues’ are still fantastic tunes that would only get better when she had people like Glenn Frey playing with her on the road.
But her hatred for songs like ‘Long Long Time’ only served as a reminder of how Ronstadt worked. She was a brilliant vocalist with a microphone in her hand, but since she was born to play music onstage, she was always going to have problems when listening back to the takes that ended up on record.
