The shows Linda Ronstadt said she wasn’t good enough to play: “We did our best”
There was no greater critic of Linda Ronstadt’s music than Linda Ronstadt.
Even though anyone else would have killed for a voice like hers when she was singing anything and everything she could get her hands on, it was a lot more difficult for her to go back to those moments when she was making her first hits and not cringe a little bit after getting proper vocal training. She wanted the chance to wow people in a different way, and even at her height, she felt that some pieces of her work weren’t exactly perfect.
Because when you look at where she ended up, country rock wasn’t exactly the first thing that she wanted to do. She related to those songs in a far more natural way than what the rest of the world was talking about, but when you’ve sung some of the greatest songs that the Great American Songbook has to offer, who would ever want to go back to listening to tracks like ‘You’re No Good’ or old Hank Williams tunes?
That felt like another lifetime ago by the time she officially retired, but it’s not like she couldn’t sell a ton of records with her “weaker” voice. She was a damn powerhouse when working alongside Eagles, and even when she was a backup singer for people like Randy Newman, you couldn’t ignore the little bit of fairy dust that she was able to sprinkle on every single one of those songs when she stepped into the studio.
But her outlook in the studio was both a blessing and a curse, depending on how you look at it. She was never one to focus on overdubbing and putting together some massive production spectacle like Brian Wilson, and that rough-around-the-edges approach to production was practically Neil Young’s wheelhouse when he came out. What you saw was what you got with him, and Ronstadt was only too happy to work with him on tracks like ‘Heart of Gold’.
If recording with him was a blast, though, Ronstadt felt that she wasn’t ready for the massive shows that she would be playing with him once she hit the road with him, saying, “As a club act, we weren’t really ready for Madison Square Garden, but we did our best. They did a pretty good job of trying to make it all work. But in those hard, huge cavernous spaces, it’s hard to do really, really quiet, subtle music. You need a small theater for that.”
And it’s not hard to see why she tired of that kind of music relatively quickly. It’s one thing to be up there having fun when Mick Jagger asked you to duet with him on ‘Tumbling Dice’, but since half of her setlists were all about earnest ballads, there’s no way to make everything work when half of the song is echoing off the other side of the arena. She needed something much more streamlined, which probably explains why it made more sense for her to go towards easy listening.
Unless your name is Frank Sinatra or Barbara Streisand, the best place for any crooner to be is in a theatre environment, and until she officially retired, Ronstadt probably felt more comfortable giving her music to her audience directly. Her descendants could make it work when they paid tribute to her at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but it makes sense why Carrie Underwood could transform one of her songs into a stadium rocker a lot easier than she could.
Because as much as Ronstadt was a force to be reckoned with whenever she played, it made more sense for her to play with the kind of artists that suited her style a lot better. There’s no doubt that she counts her lucky stars for being able to play with someone like Young in the first place, but it’s not shocking when some people realise what they’ve signed up for with a stadium tour and realise it’s not for them.
