The song Linda Ronstadt said was too “bizarre” to release
Linda Ronstadt never wanted to play one style of music for the rest of her life.
She had a lot of different musical influences, and while she started breaking down the barriers for country-rock, it wasn’t out of the question for her to throw caution to the wind whenever working on one of her records. She could go for easy-listening material or even sing in a completely different language, but even when following her muse, there were bound to be a few songs that missed the mark more than others.
Then again, it’s not like Ronstadt was going to make some avant-garde piece out of the blue. She knew what made people’s hearts sing whenever she stepped up to the microphone, and while she did have a knack for making great rock and roll, there were always going to be subtle changes in her sound that made fans scratch their heads and suits tug at their collars a bit more than others.
Because, really, how was anyone supposed to properly sell Ronstadt singing on albums like What’s New? This was one of the most celebrated singers in pop and rock at the time, and hearing her suddenly make an album full of Great American Songbook standards was always going to be a gamble. Lady Gaga hadn’t knocked down that door for pop stars yet, but Ronstadt made the entire transition look easy when she made it work in the 1980s.
But that sense of adventure didn’t come from Ronstadt being a contrarian, either. She knew that the audience could be challenged when they wanted to, but even when she was singing in Spanish on some of her later records, there were always going to be collaborations that were too far off the beaten path for her. Having her duet with Emmylou Harris made perfect sense, but bringing in Frank Zappa may have been one step too far.
Ronstadt at least had a loose concept of what a hit was supposed to be, but Zappa always wanted to find the exact opposite of mainstream music whenever he played. All of his work was extremely innovative and helped everyone else think outside the box, but getting Ronstadt on a tune with him was bound to be a little bit strange.
Although Ronstadt appreciated the challenge of working with Zappa for a commercial for electric razors, she also thought it was far from her wheelhouse, saying, “I was stranded in New York and running out of money and my manager also managed Frank Zappa. Frank had been hired to write a jingle for Remington electric shavers. He wrote me a chromatic scale to sing, which is pretty hard to sing, but I did it. But it was so bizarre that the company never used it.”
And it’s not like Zappa was going to exactly cooperate when it came to making commercial music. Even on his studio records, all of the “commercial” music is played for gags half the time, and despite having a future pop star in the studio with him, having all the singers sing an ascending chromatic scale would have been like if a different agency wanted to use the orchestral orgasm section of The Beatles’ ‘A Day in the Life’ for baked beans.
This was far from Ronstadt’s greatest strength, but when you’re working to find the right gig, you will take whatever job you can find, and Zappa was far from the worst place to go. If anything, working with someone as musically adventurous as Zappa is practically a litmus test for musicians. It’s one thing to become a master of one musical style, but if you can hang with the rest of the Mothers of Invention and hold your own, you’ve ascended to a higher plane of musical excellence.
