The one singer Linda Ronstadt said was never that good
Whenever Linda Ronstadt sang one of her classics, it was always about whether or not she could deliver every single word she sang.
Since she didn’t write most of her songs, a lot of her best moments came from her being a sonic actor of sorts, usually making the song her own by bringing her own experience to a song like ‘Heart Like A Wheel’ or ‘Poor Poor Pitiful Me’. But considering her status as one of the queens of country rock, Ronstadt figured that most people didn’t need to have the greatest voice to be one of the best stage presences to ever touch a stage.
I mean, just look at the likes of Bob Dylan. Everyone would be happy to be within an inch of ‘his royal Bobness’, but when you look through a lot of his best work, he’s honestly not doing the best job behind the microphone. Anyone with a minor knowledge of what keys were would have asked Dylan to take vocal lessons, but it doesn’t matter so long as he’s selling the song to the best of his ability when delivering ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’.
The same applies to Ronstadt, but given the texture of her voice, she was almost too clean for traditional rock and roll. She could get a lot of grit in her voice when she was singing a song like ‘You’re No Good’, but even when she managed to transform The Rolling Stones’ ‘Tumbling Dice’ into a masterpiece, Ronstadt admitted that she didn’t need much help trying to recontextualise whatever Mick Jagger was doing every time he sang.
Granted, no one was going to outright insult Jagger’s vocal style by any means. He gets the job done better than almost any rock and roll singer out there this side of Tina Turner, and given the marathon that he runs up and down the stage, it’s hard to imagine the moment where he actually manages to take a breath. But for Ronstadt, it was more about the tone of his voice than accuracy of hitting the notes.
In her books, Jagger could certainly make everything work with Keith Richards next to him, but she wasn’t about to call him one of the best singers that she ever heard, saying, “A guy like Mick Jagger doesn’t need such a generous melody, because who cares what his voice sounds like? He’s a great communicator. He’s not a particularly good singer; he’s not a particularly good dancer, guitar player or musician; but he’s a sum of the parts, a dream maker.”
And in some respects, being that perfect package is almost better than having the perfect voice. Because if you look at someone like Roy Orbison, he wasn’t going to be dancing his way through all of his songs while boasting that golden voice of his. He was happy just to sing the songs, but Jagger was the one willing to give everyone their money’s worth whenever they turned up for a show.
Some of the best stage productions that the band ever had usually came from him putting his all into it, and while Richards usually stays at the back and pumps out the riffs, Jagger almost has enough charisma for both of them combined. Which is probably why even when knowing ‘Tumbling Dice’ from back to front, Ronstadt knew to be on her toes whenever she started singing with The Stones on the rare occasion.
There’s a lot of time and energy that goes into learning a song from back to front, but Jagger has mastered that sixth sense that comes with being one of the greatest frontmen on Earth. He could have easily spatted out gibberish on some of his greatest songs, but the fact that he could remember every single line and still strut around the stage at this point in his career is a modern miracle.
