I loved Bob Dylan. And I tried to copy what I could. When I heard the Byrds doing folk rock, I thought that was what I wanted to do. It was a song I found on a Greenbriar Boys record, and I thought it was a strong piece of material.
I just liked the song. But the record company recognized that the song was strong, too, so they had me come back and record it with their musicians and their arrangement. And I was pretty shocked. But it turned out to be a hit.
We were on our way to a meeting at Capitol Records, in an old Dodge or something, and I was jammed in the back with our guitars. Then the engine froze, and the car made this horrible metal-on-metal shriek. We had to push it to the nearest gas station, half a block away. Nobody was anything particular at the time.
We were all aspiring musicians. The Dillards were there. The Byrds hung out there. And then it started to be people like Joni Mitchell, James Taylor. Carole King would play there. When Joni Mitchell played, she played two weeks. I think I saw every single night. In your book, you talk about being with Janis Joplin there and trying to figure out what to wear onstage. Oh, I never could figure out what to wear. When I got my Cub Scout outfit, that was a real change for me.
Roles were being redefined. There were a lot of earth-mama hippie girls who knew how to do that stuff. They got involved with drugs because they felt isolated. Stardom is isolating. I was lucky. Mine was not. I had no issue with that. I just took them when I needed them.
What do you remember about that summer? When Woodstock happened, I was in New York. Overflowing toilets and no food is not my idea of a fun time. I was playing some club—probably the Bitter End.
When the Manson family came through, they managed to murder my next-door neighbor, Gary Hinman. I lived in Topanga Canyon at the time, and they would hitchhike, and they would talk about this guy Charlie at the Spahn Ranch.
We knew it was kind of a bad scene. But, when we found out how bad of a scene it was, we were horrified. Oh, everybody was freaked out. The music of that era was so intertwined with politics. How do you feel that compares with popular music these days? Is music addressing political upheaval? Oh, I think so. Especially hip-hop. But I wish there was a little bit more political activism.
All of German intellectual history—Goethe and Beethoven—was subverted by the Nazis. It happened in a thirty-year span and brought German culture to its knees. They want all the power for themselves, and I think that suits Donald Trump right now. You also take shots at Ronald Reagan and Rupert Murdoch. As a popular performer, was there a cost to speaking out?
I never talked onstage for about fifteen years. But there were certain causes that we as a musical community united against, and one of them was nuclear power. If somebody asked, I was perfectly happy to give my opinion. Do you remember what upset you so much? Well, first of all, I never heard Howard Stern on the radio. I had no idea who he was. Over the past 30 years, Ronstadt has been working with a cultural center in Richmond, California, called Los Cenzotles — meaning "the mockingbirds" in Nahuatl, an indigenous language from Mexico — to help Mexican American children connect with their heritage through music, dance and other forms of art.
Ronstadt and Los Cenzotles will be featured in a documentary coming out this month documenting their trip to Mexico to reconnect with their roots. And then if they want to, if they want to become professional musicians later on and they want to break the rules, they know how to break them," Ronstadt said. Ronstadt, like many Americans, is spending more time reading at home as a consequence of the coronavirus pandemic.
Amid a national racial reckoning triggered by nationwide protests over George Floyd's death and presidential election , Ronstadt has been "reading everything I can about the current situation," as well as revisiting the history of Black people in the U. She has also been reading about the Weimar Republic — the German government before Hitler's Nazi regime.
The exercise, she said, has allowed her to see many parallels between the past and the present. Back then, they blamed it on the Jews. In , Ronstadt revealed that she could no longer sing because of the effects of Parkinson's disease.
She also published her memoir Simple Dreams that year. Singer Linda Ronstadt was born on July 15, , in Tucson, Arizona, and grew up surrounded by music. One of Ronstadt's early musical influences was the Mexican songs her father taught her and her siblings. Her mother played the ukulele and her father played the guitar. Following in her father's footsteps, she learned to play guitar and performed with her brother and sister as a trio.
A few years her senior, Kimmel moved to Los Angeles to pursue his music career, and tried to convince Ronstadt to do the same. She stayed put and enrolled at the University of Arizona in Tucson, but soon left school to join Kimmel in L. Ronstadt and Kimmel teamed up with Kenny Edwards to form the Stone Poneys, and the folk trio released their first album in The group enjoyed modest success with their second album, Evergreen Vol.
By the end of the s, Ronstadt had become a solo act. She put out several albums with a series of backing bands, one of them the nucleus of the group that would become the Eagles. Her early efforts were not particularly successful, though she earned a Grammy Award nomination in for the ballad "Long, Long Time.
It may have seemed like a detour, but it was really Ronstadt returning to her roots: Her paternal grandfather wrote an instrumental arrangement for "Pirates" in Ronstadt had known country superstars Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris center and right for years by the time the three decided to release the album "Trio. By the late s, Ronstadt had tackled folk, rock, pop, country and even light opera - and the musical style that was calling her next was one that reminded her of home.
Drawing on her Mexican heritage and the songs of her childhood, Ronstadt released a Spanish-language album called "Canciones de Mi Padre" despite resistance from her record company. It was a risk, but Ronstadt's convictions were rewarded as the album went double platinum. Called "Hummin' to Myself," it was a collection of standard songs recorded with a small jazz ensemble, Ronstadt writes in her memoir. In a interview with AARP magazine , Ronstadt said she suspected Parkinson's disease had already begun to alter her voice for at least seven or eight years prior to her diagnosis.
Ronstadt performed her last concert in Two years later, the same year she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Latin Recording Academy pictured , Ronstadt formally announced her retirement. In , Ronstadt revealed that she could no longer sing because of Parkinson's disease. And I was made most aware of it by having it banished.
I can still sing in my mind, but I can't do it physically. Former President Barack Obama likely spoke for many when he admitted to Ronstadt during the National Medal of Arts ceremony that he had a crush on her "back in the day. While she sometimes still appears in the spotlight -- as she did earlier this year, when she and Emmylou Harris left presented Dolly Parton with the MusiCares Person of the Year award -- she mostly sticks close to home, she told the Times. It's going to get worse every day," Ronstadt said of her diagnosis.
Sometimes I fall down. But that's the new normal.
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