The one song Linda Ronstadt needed to change: “I can’t sing that”
It didn’t take much for Linda Ronstadt to find the right song when she made her records.
She didn’t want to settle for any pop fluff whenever she got in front of the microphone, but if she found a decent enough song that she could sell right, that was more than enough for her to include it on an album. She was looking for the kind of music that told the right kinds of stories, but when looking through some of her greatest hits, Ronstadt remembered having to be talked into making a few of her masterpieces.
Granted, it’s not like Ronstadt was ever completely comfortable with making her biggest rock and roll songs. She never completely identified with being a rock singer, even when she was making the best country rock that anyone had ever heard, and it’s easy to see the moments where she was still trying to settle into a groove. ‘You’re No Good’ is a classic song, but chances are that she never wanted to sing it again after she started working in other genres.
Because when you have made records straight out of the Great American Songbook and worked on Broadway, it’s kind of hard to go back to singing the same boozy rockers that everyone else was doing. But even on her greatest rock and roll records, Ronstadt had those few writers that she knew she could count on to give her some of the best material that they could behind the scenes.
You have to remember that Ronstadt was never a songwriter by any stretch, but by working with songs by Jackson Browne and JD Souther, she had the kind of material that felt a lot closer to the bone for her. These songs told stories that she could picture in real time whenever she sang those songs, but when a young kid like Warren Zevon started coming around with songs like ‘Poor Poor Pitiful Me’, Ronstadt did have a few questions before diving into cutting the song herself.
The hook is absolutely perfect for her voice, but it’s not like she was ever going to relate to the masochistic side of the song. The whole track is all about someone who is going through one of the rougher patches in their life, and while that’s all well and good when looking at her version, there were a few lines in Zevon’s first draft that she felt needed to be amended before she walked into the studio.
Ronstadt wasn’t going to talk about S&M and a guy that ends up beating his girlfriend, and after a few talks with Browne, she felt that it was better to take a hatchet to those lyrics, saying, “I met a girl at the Rainbow Bar, she asked me if I’d beat her. She took me back to the Hyatt House — which is the rock ‘n’ roll hotel on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles — and then he goes, I don’t want to talk about it! Jackson was trying to talk me into singing that. I kept saying, ‘Jackson I can’t sing that verse. I’m not into S&M.’ He said, ‘Well it doesn’t say that you want, it says that she wants it.’ I said, ‘Well that wouldn’t be me’, so I didn’t include that verse.”
While Ronstadt did have certain standards for herself, it did make sense that she would have been given this kind of song. All country music does have a fair amount of heartache and pain in some form or another, and considering that a country artist like Terri Clark managed to turn the song into her own decades after the fact was proof enough that there was still more than enough room for someone to sing this kind of tune.
But if Ronstadt was ever going to make a new record, it was going to be on her terms, and some of the biggest songs of her career didn’t come together because she was told to sing them. She dictated what was going on her record, and even if she could be persuaded by the right people, the fact that she managed to cut some of the fat off of this song showed everyone the heartbroken side of the song a lot better.
