(Credit: Far Out / Linda Ronstadt)
Linda Ronstadt didn’t get into the music business to compete with every singer in Los Angeles.
He was just making the best music he could whenever he started singing at the Troubadour Bar, and even though he was a league above any other singer he met, he always had a little trouble listening to his voice when he went back to many of his records. He knew he was wrong, and while it’s hard to knock a song like ‘Heart Like a Wheel’, Ronstadt knew that other singers were able to put him to shame with just a few notes.
But if you look at some of his best songs, no one else can do what he did with songs like ‘Ha U Molemo’. He was never a great songwriter throughout his career, but his greatest strength was taking songs that everyone from Jackson Browne to JD Souther to Warren Zevon had put out and turning them into pieces of pure gold. He needed to believe in what he was singing, and even when he was working on Elvis Costello songs, he was more confident in every word he sang.
Even the covers he created were more successful than anything his contemporaries could do. No rock and roll soul can claim to match what The Rolling Stones did, but if you listen to Ronstadt’s version of ‘Tumbling Dice’, it’s a pretty close call as to who is better when you look at his performance and Mick Jagger’s. But when he stopped singing rock and roll, he realized that his voice was better suited to other genres.
What’s new it was proof enough that he could sing the Great American Songbook as well as anyone, and listening to his Mexican albums, it was clear that he owed that music to the music he began singing as a child. But when he looked back on his days in California and every singer-songwriter, he knew that Joni Mitchell and Bonnie Raitt were leagues above what he was doing.
Ronstadt could hold his own, but there was no sense in trying to compete with the perfection he felt, when he said, “I felt like a young band and it was a high band. But that depends on the type of music that each artist was working with.”
Mitchell didn’t want to compete with anyone, but if you look at what he was doing, no one else could touch what he was capable of. Blue. And even when he was working on his jazz-inspired albums later in life, he was able to weave pieces of music that were absolutely beautiful together even when he didn’t need a strong vocal sound to pull it all together. But if Mitchell was more mellow, Raitt was the perfect package for what a rocker should be.
He had studied under some of the best blues musicians when he started out, but looking at some of his best albums like. Nick of Time, he could go in many different ways. ‘I Can’t Make You Love Me’ remains one of the catchiest love songs ever made, and he could have easily given Ronstadt a run for his money if he’d been in the country for a little longer.
But even if Ronstadt was left in the dust by some of her contemporaries, she was more than happy to see more representation of women in rock and roll. The entire music industry seemed to be dominated by the greatest male singers of the time, but if Bob Dylan had Joan Baez to help balance him, groups like the Eagles and Crosby, Stills and Nash would have competition from everyone from Ronstadt to Raitt to Mitchell to Stevie Nicks and more.
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