The one guitarist Linda Ronstadt called the greatest: “They don’t come any better than that”
Any great Linda Ronstadt record always came back to the songs she was singing.
Her voice could do a lot of different things whenever she made a record, but it made a lot more sense for her to make songs she believed in than spin her wheels with whatever was popular at the time. But before she was a singer, she was a bandleader before anything else, and that meant keeping her ears open whenever she heard someone who could make the guitar sing throughout the Laurel Canyon scene.
After all, the guitar is practically the second voice of most rock and roll bands, and the best artists in the world usually know how to treat it as such. Jimi Hendrix’s guitar was an extension of his body half the time he sang, and whenever listening to Jeff Beck, every single line was so well-crafted that you would swear that he had an intimate relationship whenever he wrapped his hands behind the fretboard. And the same could be said of a lot of Ronstadt’s friends in Los Angeles at the time.
While she rubbed elbows with everyone from Eagles to Neil Young, every one of her peers were focused on using the guitar in an unconventional way. Don Felder and Bernie Leadon did brilliant things for Eagles whenever they took solos, and while Young’s style of playing is one of the most unorthodox in rock and roll history, you can often hear his personality every single time he plays, whether that’s him trying to strangle the instrument when he played or working on a jam packed with as much soul as possible.
That was only rock, though, and Ronstadt was interested in music far beyond the Rolling Stones of the world. She had grown up listening to everything from easy listening to Mexican standards, but when she first landed in Los Angeles, the order of the day was country music. And while Gram Parsons helped introduce the scene to what rock and roll and Hank Williams could sound like if played together, Ry Cooder was the one putting the tears in everyone’s eyes when playing on those heartache songs.
Even though she had just arrived in town, Ronstadt already knew that she was looking at a guitarist who could level anyone in his way, saying, “The first guitar player I met was Ry Cooder. They don’t come any better than that. He’s in that great master category and he was very young then and played his ass off. He played like a demon. So it was a real experience going from Tucson, and now it was this other level of professionalism.”
While a lot of that was probably trial by fire for a lot of wannabe rockers, Ronstadt took to it like a fish in water half the time. Her voice soared above nearly everything she sang, and while she never had the highest opinion of her own performances, the fact that she could sound so natural playing next to technicians like Glenn Frey and later with Nelson Riddle arrangements around her was proof enough that people were dealing with a legend.
But Ronstadt also knew that she was only as good as the people that she worked with half the time. There was no way for her to reach the same level that Cooder did with her voice, but whether she was working with Young or helping bring Eagles to life, she was always listening to what was happening next and applying it to whatever her next musical adventure was going to be.
She may not have had the pure musical muscle that Cooder had whenever she performed, but any artists worth their salt should know better than to try and outmatch a singular talent in their field. The country rock scene may have had its own isolated part of LA, but even if Cooder was working with the true greats, chances are he could have held his own when going up against Eric Clapton.
