The song that never worked for Linda Ronstadt: “There wasn’t much for me”
The key behind any great Linda Ronstadt has to come from how well she could sell each of her songs.
As much as people might like to listen to the pure power behind songs like ‘You’re No Good’, the reason why those tunes work so well is that you could feel the pure emotion in her voice even if she wasn’t reaching for those massive high notes. It was more about delivering a performance every time she sang, but even if she had the chops to pull off certain songs, that didn’t mean that she had to sing them every single time she got onstage.
Granted, it would have been hard for anyone to do a fraction of what Ronstadt did throughout her career. Most people would have been able to have at least her role as a country rock and roll superstar, but when listening to her work as a Broadway singer or when she went into full easy listening territory, most modest singers would be shaking in their boots even thinking about what to do if they were in her shoes.
But it’s not like she ever left her rock and roll chops behind. Don Henley had said numerous times that Ronstadt could hold her own next to all the other men on the club circuit when he was playing with her, and while she would guest on albums from Neil Young, you could always hear her soaring above nearly everything else in the mix. Her voice was distinctive, but she also wanted to see what else she could do outside of the country sphere.
Which explains why she eventually went the route of making new wave songs in the early 1980s. Going from country to Blondie was never going to be the smoothest transition, but listening to her take on Elvis Costello’s ‘Alison’ showed that she had a lot more to offer than the average country singer. But given that versatility, it was a lot easier for her to take the stage with people like Mick Jagger and sing her heart out on a song like ‘Tumbling Dice’.
She might not have had the same instrument required to do those massive screams at the end of ‘Gimme Shelter’, but ‘Dice’ fits perfectly within her wheelhouse. Exile on Main St already occupies this strange middle ground between traditional rock and roll, blues and country music, but even after singing the tune on various occasions, Ronstadt felt that she was never the right person for the job when she started to truly find her voice.
There was a lot more for her to explore, and even if she got her start singing rock and roll, ‘Tumbling Dice’ didn’t sit well with her after a while, saying, “It was a real underuse of my ability in terms of what I can do. You know, if you’re Waddy Wachtel, you wanna play ‘Tumbling Dice’ because you can do a lot of posturing with your guitar. As a singer, there wasn’t much for me to do. It’s an interesting song, and I think it’s well written. I think that Mick and Keith are really clever. They’re excellent for that kind of thing, but it’s not a singer’s vehicle.”
That might sound a bit snobby coming from a singer, but you have to remember the kind of music Ronstadt was doing towards the end of her career. Some of her biggest hits were the ones that revolved around songs that demanded a bit more out of a singer than traditional rock and roll, and while The Stones classic was never going anywhere, Ronstadt wasn’t going to roll over and spend the rest of her life singing those songs.
Far too many singers have found themselves stuck in one niche, and her greatest superpower was refusing to rest on her laurels whenever she sang. She wanted to make the best music that she could in any genre that she found herself in, and throughout her entire career, the work that she’s done across every single genre speaks for itself.
