How Could She Doubt It?

Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice a film by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman.  With Bonnie Raitt, Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, Jackson Browne.  ****

I missed much of the music of my generation.  I was still in touch with mainstream culture through my college years (1966-70), and continued to listen to the radio while I was commuting and had a teaching job, through 1976.  But early on, way early on—back in the early sixties—I became obsessed with Ray Charles and listened mostly to him and where his music led me, which of course was all over the place, the blues, R&B, jazz, big bands, country western, standard vocalists.  I had weird eclectic tastes, listened to Leadbelly and Louis Armstrong when everybody else was following the current bands.  For me rock and roll largely ended with the Beatles and Rolling Stones, and I go as far as Marvin Gaye in R&B, but not much further.  I mostly listened to music by myself, wasn’t part of the concert scene even in college.  Music meant too much to me.

So I was shocked at how many of the Linda Ronstadt songs I knew and liked, when I sat down and watched this documentary.  They had seeped into my consciousness when I wasn’t paying attention.  My first wife had the Stone Poneys album, before Ronstadt was known as a solo.  The first Ronstadt I bought was her collection of standards, with the arrangements of Nelson Riddle.  But the music of hers that I most love, and that I think demonstrates her talents the best, is the Mexican music, which I’ve played to death.  There are so many beautiful songs that I can’t go into detail.  But if you want to be stunned by the range of her voice, listen to “El Crucifio de Piedra.”

Her life—as told in Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice—was steeped in music.  Her father’s family was originally German but had settled in Mexico, eventually migrated to Arizona, where they had a business.  Linda said somewhere that her father had the most beautiful voice in the family, which I find hard to believe.  Her mother loved Gilbert and Sullivan, also the standard vocalists of her day, like Sinatra, and apparently the whole family sang constantly.  The first group Linda formed was with her brother and sister, but soon her sister was having babies, and her brother went into a less precarious line of work.  Linda headed to LA to become a singer.

This movie makes it sound as if it was smooth sailing the whole way, local notoriety followed by a solo act and international stardom (she does speak of a period where she had a beachfront house in Malibu that rented for $80.00, and three people were splitting it).  It’s hard to believe it was all so easy, but as soon as this waiflike woman opened her mouth, a hell of a voice emerged.  This documentary is aptly named.  She went through various incarnations and different sidemen, but she was the major attraction.  You were coming to see Linda Ronstadt.

I hadn’t thought about what that involved, a female more or less occupying the place of Mick Jagger when everybody around her was male.  There is a short piece of this movie—I wish they had expanded it, if there was more—where she is walking on the beach talking to an interviewer who is unnamed and out of the picture, about the fact that the world of rock and roll is overwhelmingly male, that it has a certain anti-female bias, that the biggest stars get isolated and surrounded by flunkies, the women they see are often groupies they just makes use of.  That was the world Ronstadt inhabited.  Her sidemen weren’t necessarily any better.  The movie speaks of the difficulties of the road, and coming down from performances in the wee hours of the morning, which many musicians do by using drugs.  Linda’s problem was apparently diet pills, which kept her thin and energized, but also strung her out.  The movie doesn’t dwell on that.

It is bizarre to hear that, of all things, Ronstadt wasn’t sure of her voice.  She had strong opinions about what she wanted to do and how she wanted to do it, but was never sure of her abilities.  Eventually—she had a run of five straight platinum albums—she had no worlds left to conquer.  To her credit, she didn’t keep going out and singing “You’re No Good” again and again (though she did plenty of that, mentions how wearing it was), but went back to her family influences and sang what she wanted.  She appeared in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta in New York; there’s footage of it!  She did several albums of standards, some of the greatest recordings of those songs.  Finally she sang the beautiful Mexican songs that were the bedrock of her youth (she says somewhere that as a girl she thought people spoke in English and sang in Spanish).  In some of those recordings her brother sings the harmony.  Those albums are magnificent.

The good news about this documentary is that, in addition to all the talking heads, which are like a Who’s Who of popular music, the movie focuses on performance footage, which is what I was hoping for.  The other fascinating bit of talking Ronstadt did was when she defended the fact that she performed in South Africa.  She said that if she avoided places that were politically compromised, she couldn’t have sung anywhere.   “Boston is one of the most racist places in the world,” was one comment in her diatribe.  She was brainy and informed and articulate.  I would like to have heard more.

Sadly, like her mother, she has come down with Parkinson’s in what people used to call old age, but now doesn’t seem old to me; she is 73, and was diagnosed about ten years ago.  She apparently realized she was ill because her voice could no longer do what it once had, and she doesn’t sing at all anymore, though she harmonizes with some family members at the very end of the film, and sounds okay (we realize that what most of us think of as singing has nothing to do with what Ronstadt did in her prime).  Fortunately we have all her recorded music, and this marvelous documentary.  It can rightfully be accused of skimming over controversy.  But when the woman has a voice this great, we’d rather hear the music.