“It all happened so fast”: why Linda Ronstadt eventually hated her hit song ‘Different Drum’
It’s not uncommon for an artist to take a virtually unknown song by another songwriter and propel it into the spotlight with a far more refined and attention-grabbing version or for a band to have other people writing their songs for them. The Monkees are a group that would know all about both sides of this, having been manufactured and put together to perform the songs of others and given little creative freedom of their own, despite member Mike Nesmith having been an accomplished songwriter and musician before being inducted into the group.
In the years before the Monkees, Nesmith was penning hit songs for others, and one of his best efforts was a number called ‘Different Drum’ that he had shared with a bluegrass group called The Greenbriar Boys. While the song didn’t become a hit in this incarnation, it would be heard by a young Linda Ronstadt, who took the track to her group at the time, the Stone Poneys, and recorded what is perhaps the best-known cover of the song in 1967.
While Ronstadt had to dramatically alter the song lyrically to make sense, with the genders reversed and stylistically to suit her folk-pop group, it instantly became more catchy and uptempo when performed by the Stone Poneys. However, despite being one of the most successful songs of the band’s career and the first hit single Ronstadt was a part of, she was never pleased with how things came out on the recording.
Ronstadt was still only finding her feet as a vocalist, and tried many things to find what worked for her as she continued to develop as an artist. While much of the album that ‘Different Drum’ was taken from sees Ronstadt adopt a softer vocal style, the hit in question has her belting out her vocals for the majority of the song, and this was something that in retrospect she grew to loathe.
Due to how the band were struggling for success, the song was recorded in a rush, with most parts of the song being laid down in just an afternoon. According to accounts from the studio sessions, Ronstadt herself had just one run-through of the song before recording the second and final take. Frustrated by how she wasn’t given enough time to refine her own sound on the song, Ronstadt shared years later in the 2016 book Anatomy of a Song that she even struggles to listen to the song now.
“Today I will break my finger trying to get that record off when it’s on,” she said about ‘Different Drum’ in the book. “Everyone hears something in that song – a breakup, the antiwar movement, women’s lib. I hear a fear and a lack of confidence on my part. It all happened so fast that day.”
In actual fact, there’s little wrong with the sound of her vocals and the eventual outcome of the recordings, but it’s not uncommon for artists to be their own worst critics and pick up on the most minute errors in their own work. In the case of ‘Different Drum’, Ronstadt seems almost resentful of the fact that it remains beloved by many, but at least she was able to redeem herself by soaring to greater heights with other songs after separating from the Stone Poneys, such as her 1975 cover of ‘You’re No Good’ which saw her reach number one in the US charts.
