But after the show she was torn. Sure, she was frightened by the hulk. "He looked so scary. He was just there all of a sudden. He looked like a gorilla. You never know what anyone might do to you. But, boy, I felt bad for him 'cause he was obviously so loaded. And I heard his head, it went crack against that floor..." She shuddered and groaned. "I went, 'Ohh, no...'
"But I also felt I didn't want him up on the stage."
It is not a happy Valentine's Day for Linda Ronstadt. In Hollywood. she had stayed up late with Peter and Betsy Asher making a valentine for Albert Brooks, who was in the studio finishing up a new album. But here in Waikiki, she watched a couple walking in front of her, holding hands, and she pined away for Brooks. "Oh, I don't have anybody to kiss me," she complained. At night's end, she disappeared, alone, into a Sheraton elevator.
LINDA RoNSTADT WAS ALWAYS A LOVER. She learned about the birds and the bees, the boys and the girls, at age 7 from a cousin who was one year older. In junior high in Tucson, Arizona, she started dressing up sexy. "I was trying to be Brigitte Bardot," she said. In rebellion against the nuns at the school-St. Peter and Paul-she went "boy crazy." At Catalina High, she went out with older men, among them a steel guitar enthusiast with whom she left town at age 18. In Los Angeles, she sought a career in music and became the object of attention-the kind that led to too many wrong relationships, too many years of hating her own records and concerts, too many sad songs to sing and, today, to a still uncertain Linda Ronstadt. Welcome to the top of the pops.
OUR S TAY W I T H LINDA began in Berkeley, where she had given a concert. We would hit Davis, near Sacramento, for two shows at the University of California campus there; Bakersfield, three hundred miles away, for one show and Tucson for two hometown concerts. After a few days' rest in L.A., the tour would end in Honolulu.
Linda-and most of her band - are afraid of flying, and most of the tour had been by bus. On the eastern swing, just finished, they had rented Hank Williams, Jr.'s custom vehicle, called "The Cheatin' Heart Special," with nine bunk beds and plenty of room for playing cards. Now the group was making do with the largest mobile home they could find. There was one long seat up front, two bunks built into overhead shelves and two tables, one front, one rear, with a kitchenette between them. There would be little sleeping, but lots of blackjack, with stakes constantly reaching serious proportions. ("Last game," Linda said, "they all owed each other their houses.") Linda would join the table on another trip, but for now she was content to chat and work on a sweater for Albert in cream and jade heather colors.
Linda talked freely, in a bright, winsome manner, and began to reveal herself. Her father, Gilbert, 6 3, of Mexican and German descent (Ronstadt is a German name), is a musician, a guitarist, and a singer who has sung informally with mariachi bands on visits to Mexico. He runs Ronstadt Hardware in downtown Tucson. It was Pop who exposed her to music other than her early sixties staples: folk music and rock, "especially the Beach Boys." Her father, she said, is "into melodies, and he made me listen to Peggy Lee and Billie Holiday..." Her sister kept Hank Williams records on all day long until Linda was hooked. Now, she lists Williams, along with Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Stevie Wonder, and Marvin Gaye, among her favorite male singers. She's also listening now to Sinatra. "Those Nelson Riddle arrangements are so sensitive..." And George Jones and Tammy Wynette, recently split. "I saw him singing 'Grand Tour' on television and I sat there and cried like a housewife," said Linda. "He's one of my heroes."
She talked about love. People commit suicide without it, she offered. "I was reading about a study that showed people did it because they couldn't make an intimate connection with another human being. You need that-or else it's religion or drugs. I could never handle religion. And drugs-there's no way out of that." She resorted to plenty of cocaine, she said, during the Neil Young tour of early 19 7 3, when she had to face fifteen thousand Neil Young freaks as an opening act. "I had to have my nose cauterized twice-I think they shot sodium nitrate up there-I'm okay now. I don't put anything up my nose anymore, except occasionally my finger." She looked at my notebook and winced, disgusted with herself.
On Highway 80, just south of Fairfield, the bus broke down and required a halfhour stop, but Linda wasn't disturbed. She talked about Led Zeppelin. 'Andrew Gold from the band is indoctrinating me," she said. "Their stuff is like insect music to me. I can't listen for a long time without getting a headache, but I'm getting to understand it." A little later she asked a question of no one in particular: "What's Plant look like? That's such a great name for someone who sings like that."
A few other men's names popped up: Governor Jerry Brown, Steve Martin, Little Feat's Lowell George, songwriter Tom Campbell. They've all been boyfriends-excepting the new governor of California. "We just went out a couple of times," she said. "There was no romance. I met him at Lucy's in L.A.-they have the greatest enchiladas-he was Secretary of State and thinking about campaigning. And then he called me later and asked for me to help in his campaign. I said, look, I don't know anything; I'm the worst. I don't watch TV; I just read what I want to read about." Did she vote for him? "I didn't vote last election 'cause I was at the fat farm." She is betting Andrew Gold $200 that she can beat him to a fifteen-pound weight loss inside of two months. Gold appears trim, but Linda knows better. "You should see him with his clothes off," she said. "He looks like a 12-year-old around the shoulders, and about 40 years old with his belly." Anyway, she will begin her diet in earnest today. But her first stop, on arrival at the hotel in Davis, was the coffee shop, where she watched pies revolving in a display case.
After the sound check, she returned to the hotel and placed a call to Brown, who invited her to breakfast and a tour of the old governor's mansion the next morning. But the group's schedule would not allow the visit.
The first show in Davis went well, but she called for another quick soundcheck and some unhappiness with the monitors was quickly taken care of. Backstage. Linda shared her upstairs dressing room with the band, and the music of Roger McGuinn and his band was barely audible. Nostalgia... and a sense of irony... pervaded the group. There were quick nods and tributes from the band members-several of whom are on their first tour of any substance-to the man who introduced them all to folk rock.. .who tonight was their opening act. But they didn't dwell on rock and roll's roller coaster. In fact, after a round of "Many Rivers to Cross," most of the attention in the room was given to yo-yos.
Don Francisco, the drummer. had invited a buddy from his hometown, Pensacola, Florida, to the Davis shows, and the friend, a jaunty, chubby, curly-haired 3 3-year-old named Paul Lybrand, happened to be the Duncan Yo-Yo champion of America. He brought along a brown paper sack full of yo-yos. Linda had watched him spin through a series of neat tricks in front of the food table and decided to let him do a spot during her own set. Now, in the dressing room, the band and road managers and crew members were throwing the yo-yos in all directions while Linda sat and knitted.
At the five-minute cue to go backstage, Linda called out, "Ten more stitches," completed them and moved easily to the mirror, where she knotted her blouse at the navel-"Not to make me look sexier," she said. "I want to look thinner"-and put on some light makeup.
The show was, again, smooth. During the Dolly Parton number, "I Will Always Love You," a nervous Paul Lybrand, in his red championship blazer, rehearsed furiously backstage, Walking the Dog, bending down to let the yo-yo do the Creeper, snapping the string to form the Man on the Flying Trapeze. Onstage, he came through with a tight, five-trick set that lasted only fifty seconds, with Gold and Francisco offering support on piano and drums. The crowd had greeted him with freak-show laughter, but wound up whooping and hollering. Lybrand did Duncan proud.
The show ended with Linda soothing the audience with the ballad, "Heart like a Wheel," accompanied only by Gold on the piano. Up near the stage, the audience looked like an assembly of kids getting a light scolding: moustache-fingering thoughtful, as if listening to a eulogy. Linda Ronstadt is no l
onger just a slice of country pie.
In the mobile home on the way back to the hotel, the entire band was up front, playing around with a scat sing of the instrumental parts of Led Zeppelin's "Dancing Days." Ed Black, a blond, baby-faced guitarist, stood by the screen door, and Ronstadt looked up from her knitting bag, pleased. "This is just like a family in a house," she said.
The band is Andrew Gold on piano, guitar, and vocals; Kenny Edwards, a former Stone Poney along with Linda, on bass and vocals: Dan Dugmore on pedal steel and rhythm guitars; Ed Black on pedal and lead guitar and occasional piano, and Don Francisco on drums. It is a friendly, tour-tightened unit, one of Linda's best. Edwards, an affable sort, a kind of cross between Elliott Gould and Fred MacMurray, is not at all uneasy about his return to the Ronstadt fold. When he split from the Stone Poneys, it was because he wanted to rock, while the Poneys' leader, Bob Kimmel, wrote mostly folkie, Pentangled material. Francisco is a former history and geography teacher and barker at a topless joint in San Francisco. He was hired for the band late last year, just before the tour. Dan Dugmore is also a recent addition, joining after a tour with John Stewart. Ed Black, a former guitar teacher, met Linda almost four years ago on the road, when he was with Goose Creek Symphony.
Over the course of her solo career, Linda Ronstadt has been understandably wary about her backup groups. For one thing, she felt inadequate-she didn't know how to talk in musical terms, she said, and couldn't give effective orders. For another: "Backing up a girl wasn't cool at all. They didn't want to do that. They wanted to be rock and rollers and have this sexual identity they get by being up onstage with their guitars."
The extreme example occurred in 1972, when she hired Glenn Frey and Don Henley, now Eagles. "I knew Glenn was a temporary thing," she said. "I knew he was going to be a star the minute I met him, he was such a hot shot. I loved him. When Glenn met Don, they wanted to form a band right away."
The current backup men also have aspirations, but they seem to have a sense of duty. Francisco, before his audition, got a tip that Ronstadt liked more than anything, a good back beat with emphasis on the high hat, the snare, and the bass. `And that's exactly what I play."
"She doesn't like complicated licks," said Black. Dugmore completed the thought: "It's understandable. You're trying to showcase the song and the singer, not the band."
On the road to Bakersfield, Ronstadt talked some more about drugs. She has taken just about every drug around, she said in answer to a question. But she's given up almost every one. Grass once made her hands swell, she said. Cocaine made her "feel terrible."
`And I also can't take opiates." Nor can she drink. A steady diet of gin, she said, made her dizzy, and she thought she had vertigo. Other drinks gave her skin rashes. She tried heroin "once or twice, but it's not for me." She can take speed and declared Methedrine her only remaining vice. "But it makes me sneeze too much. But the fat farm [actually the Ashram, in Los Angeles, affiliated with Ronstadt's now defunct health club] taught me that running does the same thing speed does, and it doesn't make you feel bad, so now I run whenever I can."
Linda turned to a man-on-the-street-question feature from the San Francisco Chronicle. The question was, "Do you like hairy girls?" Ronstadt: "Jackson [Browne] and J.D. [Souther] aren't hairy. I like furry men. Albert's hairy." She brightened. "You can cling to him and slide all around. He's just like a human teddy bear."
The next day, the day of the Bakersfield concert, the Los Angeles Times' review of Linda's concert at the Music Center was out; it was a rave, headlined: `A Triumph for Linda Ronstadt." The show had ended with Maria Muldaur joining in on "Heart like a Wheel." Linda slowly read the review and looked up at Asher with only one comment: "Hmm, he didn't say anything about Maria."
Bakersfield was where Ronstadt lost her temper, something her friends say she has learned to keep in check in recent years. Onstage, she is easily distracted by exploding flashbulbs. At Bakersfield Civic Auditorium, the stage is only a foot or two high, and the front row is only the width of an aisle away from the edge of the stage. After the opener, "Colorado," Linda asked that all flash pictures be taken during the second song, "That'll Be the Day." But one man in the front row either didn't hear or didn't want to hear Ronstadt's request, and he kept shooting away. On the instrumental break of "Silver Threads and Golden Needles," she gestured for him to quit-and he didn't.
She completed "Silver Threads" and hurled her tambourine, Frisbee style, at the flasher. "That was for the asshole who keeps taking flash pictures," she said. After the concert, she packed up her knitting case quickly, joked with the band, and talked with Asher and crew members about the sound system. As for the tambourine incident, she was sorry-not about having thrown the instrument, but about her poor aim. "I hit some girl in the shin," she said, and made a face that said something between "Oops" and "Yikes."
But the show was over, and Linda was coming home.
LINDA MARIA R o N s TA D T comes from singing stock. At age 3 she was listening to music on the radio and begging her mother to play the ukelele. "I remember doing it in baby talk," she said. Linda was serenaded on birthdays with a family favorite, "Las Mananitas." Her parents frequently hosted dinner parties, and invariably her father would pick up a guitar around 10:30 and family and friends would gather around for a group sing that would last till two or three in the morning. And the kids were allowed to stay up. "We'd be lying on the floor trying to hold our eyelids up," said Linda, "but they'd let us sing along, without trying to make us perform." Linda learned much of her music from the records of Lola Beltran, a master of the falsetto-studded, rancheros style of singing.
At Tuscon International Airport Linda was greeted by brother Pete. 3 3, a policeman, his wife, Jackie, and two kids, Phil and Mindy. At home, Linda was greeted by her mother at the door; they had seen each other a couple of weeks ago, when Mrs. Ronstadt, known to friends as "La," accompanied the tour through several Eastern cities, sleeping on "The Cheatin' Heart Special" and winking at the funny-smelling smoke. "I had so much fun I forgot I was 60," she said. Linda's father, a fair-sized man with expansive, Xavier Cugat facial features, embraced his daughter inside, patting her three times on the ass, and gave her a gift: a gold heart on a setting of wood. Sister Suzi, 35, a housewife, brother Mike, 21, bearded and hoping to be a singer himself, and an assortment of in-laws, nephews, nieces, and friends dropped by. In a quiet moment, everyone sitting around waiting for someone to talk, Mom asked: "How does it feel to be Number One, Number One, and Number One?" Linda made a dunno face. "I'm not crying," she shrugged, and sat down on the carpet to listen to Phil's singing, on tape, of "Snoopy and the Red Baron."
On the way in from the airport, Linda had casually told Pete: "We're not doing `Silver Threads' and 'I Can't Help It' too well. You wanna sing with us?" And Pete, who'd effectively killed the family act when he decided to join the force, casually replied: "Sure. In fact, we've worked up some la-las for `Keep Me from Blowing Away."'
At the house, the three, plus Mike, worked out parts for the Hank Williams classic. At the sound check at the Tucson Music Center, the band seemed happy to step back and make way for the family. The harmonies, onstage that evening, were difficult to hear-the sister is a little mike shy, and all three were unaccustomed to electric backing. But what was audible was pleasant, as it was at the house.
It was late by the end of two shows, but the Ronstadts had planned a party for the band, the family, and a few friends, featuring Mom's Mexican cooking. The first little scene at the party was Peter Asher's entrance. As soon as the timid-looking manager was pointed out to Mr. Ronstadt, Linda's father went over, hugged him, and whisked him away for a little talk. Later, everyone fed, Mr. Ronstadt accepted a guitar from Mike and began to sing a lilting Spanish song. Linda joined in on the chorus, in high harmony. On another number, with Pete taking over on guitar, Mr. Ronstadt reached out and held his younger daughter's hand for a fleeting moment. Guests looked at each other with soft smiles.
Back
in Los Angeles, on the eve of Hawaii, we were in Albert Brooks' house, in the Hollywood Hills: nice place, white walls, lots of recording equipment. Linda moved in last Christmas but has hardly been there; her cartons are still in one room, unopened. If she and Albert stay together, they'd want another house, she said. And if they split, she'd rather not go through another packing job. Life, as always, is unsettled.
I asked about her parents' response to her success. "They're proud of me. I left home at 18 and they didn't stand in my way. They thought I was too young, but they knew I wanted to sing. My father gave me $ 30 and he gave me this advice..." Linda started to titter... "which was, basically, `Don't let anyone take your picture with your clothes off."' She laughed. 'And he gave me a two-dollar bill with a corner torn off, which I still have."
Linda went to Los Angeles, at the behest of Bob Kimmel, the first beatnik Linda ever ran across in Tucson. Kimmel moved to L.A. when Linda was still a senior at Catalina High. He wrote her about the L.A. music scene and invited her out. She tried a weekend during the Easter break of 1964 and sang with Kimmel at the Insomniac, a small club in Hermosa Beach. By the time she was out of high school, Kimmel had met Ken Edwards, who hung out at the Ash Grove. Later that year, Linda made the split from home, and in L.A. she heard Kimmel's plans for a group. "It was going to be five people. We had an electric autoharp and a girl singer, and we thought we were unique in the world. And it turned out the Jefferson Airplane and the Lovin' Spoonful had beaten us." The dream was trimmed-to a trio, and one night, doing their wash and minding their business, they got discovered.
"There was a place called Olivia's, which was an amazing soul food place down in Ocean Park [between Venice and Santa Monica]. Everybody ate there. The Doors were getting together then and they ate there. We used to do our laundry across the street, and these two guys-they were sort of would-be managers-were eating lunch, and they heard us rehearsing all the way across the street, through the traffic and the dryers. They came over and-you know-'We're going to make you stars.' They took us down to see Mike Curb, who was working for Mercury, and we thought, 'Wow, this is it!'
Not Fade Away: A Backstage Pass to 20 Years of Rock & Roll Page 34