The band Linda Ronstadt could never match: “They’re much better than me”
Rock and roll wasn’t meant to be a competition for Linda Ronstadt.
She only wanted to make the music that excited her whenever she stepped behind the microphone, and when listening to all of the other female singers rising to prominence in the early 1970s, it’s not like there was any competition between Ronstadt and anyone else that came onstage. Her voice was unmistakable from the moment that she began singing, but she could acknowledge when there were a few other musicians who could wipe the floor with her.
Because Ronstadt was far from a strictly rock and roll singer. She had a broad range of influences, and some of her greatest idols didn’t necessarily play rock every single time they made music. She idolised people like Neil Young, but people like Nelson Riddle were even more important to her when she started to ditch the rock and roll scene to make easy listening music in the 1980s.
That might have been considered insane at the time, but did she care? Hell no. She wanted to try out whatever music struck her fancy, and even if the songs weren’t exactly the same thing that was popular at the time, she would rather go into the studio doing what she loved than finding herself making a bunch of tunes that were agreed upon by a committee.
A lot of her tastes were far more complicated than the average pop song of today, but in the late 1970s, that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing at all. Some of the biggest names in music at the time were people like Joni Mitchell, and while she had songs that could pierce through anyone’s heart when they heard them, chances are no one was thinking up all those weird tunings or trying to work with the biggest names in the world of jazz like Charles Mingus and Jaco Pastorius on their records.
But even by the standards of fusion, there were few bands that could have tried to match what Steely Dan had done. While their records sound as good today as they did when they were first released, a lot of the performances on those songs are among the best that rock and roll has ever seen. Donald Fagen and Walter Becker wanted to use musicians as different tonal colours whenever they made records, and while that did lead to them preferring the studio, Ronstadt felt that what they were doing was second to none.
There was only one band that could play like that, and even Ronstadt tried to use them as a reference when working on Jimmy Webb songs in the 1980s, she didn’t have a shot at matching them, saying, “I was thinking about the sound Steely Dan got on their records – I’m not comparing myself to Steely Dan, they’re much better than me – but I was going for that smooth, uptown sound.”
Granted, pulling from albums like Aja and Gaucho is far from a bad place to start when looking at some of the greatest performances in music history, but when listening to Ronstadt’s later work, it’s easy to see what she was going for. There were still those handful of country tunes that ran throughout the record, but Ronstadt wanted to refine her tunes a little bit more, whether that meant getting the right guitarist on the record or making sure that her vocals sounded absolutely perfect when she walked out of the booth.
She may not have played that many instruments on the record, but Ronstadt’s attention to detail wasn’t all that dissimilar to the way that Fagen and Becker worked. It was about being a puppeteer of their own work, and Ronstadt wasn’t going to rest until she had the sound that she wanted on record.
