I had tried, four decades earlier, to convince other teenagers on this same campus to reconsider Ronstadt. Would I sound like an old fart if I tried to explain how Linda introduced kids their age to reggae, how her Nelson Riddle trilogy allowed us to admire the Great American Songbook? What could I have told them? I wonder later, driving home while that New Wave album, Mad Love, plays too loudly through my boom-y auto speakers. Rather than explaining about New Wave music, I change the subject. I live in a world where young people - people who are the very age I was when Ronstadt’s records showed me the depth and breadth of popular music history - don’t know who Linda Ronstadt is. Elvis Costello called the album ‘a waste of vinyl.’” She was singing New Wave music and it just didn’t seem right, somehow. “But it’s true I didn’t like the album very much, at least at the time. I start to explain that Ronstadt has Parkinson’s disease, a nervous system disorder that prevents her from singing. “Is that because of your review of her record?” Mushroom Hair asks. “She was a singer,” their teacher provides helpfully from nearby. The students exchange nervous glances, sly grins. “It was a review of the latest Linda Ronstadt album.” What, he wants to know, was the very first thing I ever had published? “Why, it was right here in your student newspaper,” I reply, suddenly aware (because I begin sentences with old-timey exclamations like “Why!”) that I am old enough to be this boy’s grandfather. A slender young man with a beautiful mushroom-colored ponytail raises his hand. I am speaking to the journalism students at the high school I attended 40 years ago. Souther and Karla Bonoff? If you were a 15-year-old longing for music that meant something, the way Ronstadt made love to Kaz’s “Sorrow Lives Here,” or how she sounded harmonizing with Souther on his “Silver Blue” were an invitation to go find out. Ronstadt’s liner notes were a Cliffs Notes of the about-to-be singer/songwriter movement. While other girl singers (imagine using that phrase today to describe a female vocalist) showed swagger hollering over a Pignose amp, Ronstadt did it by covering Motown, barely a decade after “Tracks of My Tears” and “Heat Wave” were still called “race records.” Between each of its Top 40 hits, each album was grooved with musical education.įor those of us raised on the pabulum of Top 40 radio, a Hank Williams song could be revelatory an update of Oscar Hammerstein’s “When I Grow Too Old to Dream” could open our minds better than any dime bag. ![]() But if “Blue Bayou” and “When Will I Be Loved” convinced us to buy Ronstadt LPs, we found something there other than filler. The ’70s soundtrack of suburban America was scored with jangly three-note sing-alongs squeaked through AM airwaves, designed to sell long-players crammed with filler. ![]() But only because I don’t want you to think I’m insane. I’ll stop short of telling you what I once paid for “Everybody Has Their Own Ideas,” the very first Linda recording, released on a teeny indie label back when she was still with the Stone Poneys. I know all the words to “She’s a Very Lovely Woman,” a stinkbomb of a single Ronstadt recorded in 1969. I can tell you the catalog number of Prisoner in Disguise, the very best Ronstadt album ever recorded, and the chart positions of each of the three hits released from it. If forced to, I could list for you each of her singles in the order of their release. Where Linda Ronstadt is concerned, I am that guy. ![]() I played that album again yesterday, for perhaps the thousandth time, straining to hear something new. I was standing outside Cheap Records that morning, clutching a $5 bill, when the store opened its doors. Let me put it another way: Ronstadt’s Hasten Down the Wind album was released on August 1, 1976. Do I want my social media cadre to know how habitually I listen to Linda Ronstadt records? Often, let’s just say. I worry that someone will nominate me for one of those “10 albums that haven’t left my turntable” things on Facebook.
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