Kent,
Dion just amazes me ... his voice
was so pure, so smooth, the essence of blue eyed soul. I bought his boxed set a
few years back and was just knocked out by how many great deep cuts the guy had.
Click on youtube and just hit Dion and you'll hear fifty songs that will have
you stompin'.
He is truly a musical genius. Think about it, other than
Presley and, perhaps, Bill Medley, how may vocalists could match the sound of
Dion DiMuccui? Paul? Lennon? Dion remains my consummate rock 'n roll
hero.
Finally, I can't understand why "Ruby Baby' didn't turn up in the top
100.
Chet Coppock
Have you heard
any of his most recent work? His voice has matured in a way that lends itself
PERFECTLY to the blues genre that he's been pursuing of late. Pick up "Tank
Full Of Blues" if you don't already have it ... you'll become a fan all over
again. "Bronx in Blue" is every bit as good.
As for "Ruby
Baby", while it's a great track, again this list was determined by each song's
actually chart performance at the time of its initial release. Author Dann
Isbell compiled a list based on a point system arrived at by each title's weekly
chart status ... in all, he has ranked all 6835 titles to chart in Billboard
during the 1960's. "Ruby Baby" came in at #259 for the decade. Once we
narrowed down the list to those records that charted between 1960 and 1963, we
only got as high as #236 ("The Wah-Watusi"), which means that Dion JUST missed
making the cut. (What else stood between him and the #100 spot? "Moody River"
by Pat Boone, "Poetry In Motion" by Johnny Tillotson, "A Thousand Stars" by
Kathy Young and the Innocents, "Stay" by Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs
(certainly in hindsight one of the biggest hits of the early '60's ... but
mathematically eliminated nonetheless), "Goodbye Cruel World" by James Darren
and "Raindrops" by Dee Clark. That puts "Ruby Baby" at #107 on the 1960 - 1963
List.
You can pick up
a copy of the complete list (via Dann's book) here:
Hi
Kent,
When
you listened to radio during the early 60's it was great because Top 40 played
everything. You might hear Bert Kaempfert's "Wonderland By Night" or Percy
Faith's "Theme From A Summer Place" followed by Roy Orbison, The Orlons, or
Bobby Rydell. If you were looking for variety you got it -- you got everything
on one plate. Today the station formats are so focused, the variety doesn't
feel nearly as diverse without pushing buttons. You may have cleaner sound
today but it still all boils down to talent -- the Auto-tune, pitch-correction,
effects, and pristine digital audio are all for naught if you don't have great
music and great artists -- without the talent it's all homogenized, air-brushed
audio. An Elvis, a Roy Orbison, the Beatles, a Bobby Darin, a Dusty
Springfield, a Little Richard, Aretha, a Fats Domino, or a Brenda Lee still only
come around once in a lifetime. A microphone is a just a piece of metal without
a great songs by talented artists. By the way Kent, I love "The End Of The
World" by Skeeter Davis, too -- and the harmony of the Orlons!
And does it get any better when capturing the early 60's than "He's A
Rebel"? Darlene Love -- what a voice! If these hits you have featured are at
the bottom of the Countdown, I can't imagine the frosting on the
top!
Cheers,
Tim
Kiley
Hola Kent,
A terrific week of memories. I
graduated in '63, we are celebrating our 50th in a few weeks ... it couldn't
have come at a better time! I shared your list with my classmates so maybe you
will pick up some additional 'hits'. ha ha
The Everlies were never the same
when they left for Warner Bros. ):
Thanks for another great
compilation.
CharlieOFD
Proving once again that this music truly WAS "The
Soundtrack Of Our Lives". Thanks for sharing ... you're right ... the timing
couldn't have been better. (Plus it gives you a GREAT batch of tunes to play at
your reunion.) Thanks, Charlie ... have fun! (kk)
Kent,
Various pundits have
written scathing essays about the "awful" music we had in the years leading up
to the British Invasion. While there were a few tracks without much staying
power, this week's FH reminded us that there really were some fabulous acts and
some very fine tracks during that time in R&R History. Thanks for the
reminder. This was a welcome review.
David Lewis
Sadly, radio
ignores the vast majority of this music today ... and I'll agree that a fair
amount of it feels "dated" by today's standards. But I'll betcha in a couple of
hours I could pull together a list of 2000 songs that absolutely, positively
SHOULD be played on the radio that came out between 1955 and 1963 ... even if
featured in an hourly "flashback" piece saluting "The Golden Age Of Rock And
Roll". (A segment like this could also go 90 days without a repeat and then, by
rotating these "chosen few", feature different songs in different hours than
previously aired so that a whole new generation of listeners could discover
them. Yo radio, talk to me ... I'm game if you are!
(kk)
re: RADIO SUCKS:
Or so says more and more folks covering the media ... in one week alone we
received half a dozen new emails chastising radio for its complete lack of
relevance these days. Here are just a couple ...
Progress? This speaks volumes!
Chris Astle
The March of the Robots. I can't communicate with
robots. Herman King
Think radio stinks? You're not alone.
It doesn’t take a team of researchers to tell you that
radio has gotten worse. You already know that.
Two independent studies released this week confirmed
that listeners aren’t as happy as they used to be with what they’re hearing on
AM and FM. In an online survey of nearly 1,000
adults between the ages of 18 and 64, 53 percent agreed with the statement:
“Radio isn’t as good as it used to be.”
Radio has lost its way. Competition and creativity were
replaced by cost-cutting and voice-tracking. Too many commercials and not enough
local talent. It’s all on the cheap.
Another survey of more than 3,000
listeners, commissioned by Pandora, Spotify and TuneIn, and released this week
by Edison Research, showed that for the first time in history, Internet radio is
used by a majority of online Americans — 53 percent. “The data clearly shows that Internet radio is not only a
mainstream activity for the majority of online Americans, it’s also essentially
expanding the pie for audio media,” said Larry Rosin, president of Edison
Research. “The advent of mobile listening, and the proliferation of choices for
the types of Internet audio have transformed the medium from niche activity to
major media channel in under ten years.”
Terrestrial radio dinosaurs, are you
listening?
Robert Feder
Read more here: Click
here: Think radio stinks? You're not alone | Robert Feder
Here's CBS-FM's attempt to stay creative:
Click
here: 20 Fun Facts From September #1s In The Hall Of Fame « WCBS-FM 101.1
Earlier this week FH Reader David Lewis mentioned hearing an interview with Chicago Radio Legend Dick Biondi, talking about being the first deejay in America to play a Beatles record on the air. Well, our FH Buddy Larz has a link up on his Chicagoland Radio and Media website that will allow you to hear the whole thing.
Biondi also speaks openly about the current state of radio today ... and this guy should know ... he's been broadcasting since the beginning of time. I'll never forget the first time he signed on the air ... Dick manned the mike while Ben Franklin flew the kite with a ring full of keys, trying to pump up the signal up to 50,000 watts ... and soon Biondi could be heard from coast to coast ... BEFORE the days of the Internet!!!
Definitely worth a listen ... there's a lot of truth in his years of wisdom ... of course the guys that matter aren't listening ... and therein lies the BIGGEST problem in radio today. They have no FEEL for what the medium can and should be doing ... and have blinders on to the history that won over listeners in the first place. (kk)
Chicago radio legend Dick Biondi gave an interview to NPR's "Weekend Edition" host Scott Simon recently. In it, Biondi talks about his early days in radio, being the first to play The Beatles' "Please Please Me," and much more about his amazing career. He also talks about the industry today, saying if radio was once considered "show business" that "today's radio forgot the first word and only worries about the second word." Regarding retirement, the 81-year-old icon said "I don't want to retire, because as my Dad told me when I was just a young kid, when you retire, you start to rust. And I don't want to rust." The entire interview can be heard HERE.
Nope ... not at all like the good old days ...
Kent,
I have been out of town for a week and am just getting
caught up on old FH postings. I really enjoyed newbie Mike Long's remembrances
of Chicago radio. It was funny how he used first names to convey his memories
of the jocks. BTW, if I remember correctly, FH member, Bob Stroud grew up in
Kalamazoo.
>>>I recently moved from the east
side of Michigan over to the Holland area and I've started listening to FM 100.9
out of Kalamazoo as they play oldies and I heard the song and it got me
thinking. I grew up in the
South West suburbs of Chicago (LTHS '65, same class as Barb Biondi) and I really
got into listening to WLS (and WCFL) between early 1965 and late 1967, when I
enlisted in the US Air Force. I remember when this song hit the airwaves, and I
will tell you, I'm thinking, 'ok, wow! they are actually playing this song on
the air?' I caught the windshield wiper allusion immediately. (Mike Long)
WLS and WCFL both charted Lou's "Lightning
Strikes" at #1, but because of the lyric, WLS did not chart or air the
follow-up, "Rhapsody," choosing instead to play and chart the old CO&CE
cash-in 45 follow-up, "Outside the Gates of Heaven." How convenient to have a
choice! That song went up the WLS chart while "Rhapsody" spent many weeks on
WCFL and "Heaven" never reached the CFL top 20.
>>>Not paying attention to the politics of the time
(except for 'They're Coming To Take Me Away', which I'll mention later), I think
I remember this song disappearing quickly from the airwaves. Maybe WCFL played
it as I was switching over from Clark and Bernie and Dex and Ron and Art and Don
(yeah, I'd also listen for a minute at most to Don McNeill from 'High Atop the
Hotel Allerton', to Larry and Jim, Barney, and the rest about that time. (Mike
Long)
I have told this story many times. My brother called me to the
tape recorder one day in early 66 to play what he recorded as the number one
request on Art Roberts' show the night before. He just said "Listen to this!"
My first thought (upon hearing the opening drudge drum beat) was "WHY is Bob
Dylan's months old "Rainy Day Women" the number one request on Art's show?"
Then I was amazed at what I heard. I loved it. In two weeks it was top 10 on
both WLS and CFL and then it was gone due to pressure from outside.
>>>Radio was a blast in those days. I remember the Top
Three requests at 10 PM (WLS or CFL?) when Napoleon 14th's song was #3 the first
night it was available in Chicago and then was #1 for the next several weeks
until it was banned. I met several of the dj's of that era, including Bob
Hale. (Mike Long)
I supposedly met Bob Hale in a similar story. This
guy was selling records at a record show in Denver about 20 years ago and I
chatted with him about his WLS days and all. THEN, with the internet, I
connected with the REAL Bob Hale once and he said it could NOT have been him
that I talked to! Judging by Mike's visit with a fake Art Roberts, I guess WLS
knock-offs are out there!! I'm sure they must have been influenced by Mother
Weber's eldest son, when he started issuing his fake money ("Weber Moolah") back
in the early 60's. I still have one of those bills, which today has probably
increased in value by thousands!
WLSClark
When the radio ratings came out this week, columnist Rob Feder ran a special segment on V103, who has led the pack here in Chi-Town for 17 of the last 18 ranking periods.
You may be amazed by some of their programming philosophies ... who would have EVER thought that a radio station giving their listeners what they want to hear could wind up on top ... 17 times!!! Read on for the highlights:
On the eve of its 25th anniversary as Chicago’s pioneering urban adult-contemporary radio station, WVAZ FM 102.7 has more to celebrate than its groundbreaking format and illustrious history.
Ratings released Monday by Nielsen Audio (previously known as Arbitron) show V103 leading the market with a commanding 6.2 percent share of all listeners and a cumulative weekly audience of 1,128,600.
And that’s no fluke: The Clear Channel station has been No. 1 overall in 17 of the last 18 books.
The station’s ratings dominance is even more remarkable considering how the radio landscape has changed. While most other formats declined when Portable People Meter technology replaced the old diary measurement method five years ago, V103 flourished.
“We took the new measurement system seriously,” said Derrick Brown, director of urban programming for Clear Channel Chicago and program director of V103. “We studied a lot and took the time to understand how the new methodology could affect us as a radio station. It took quite a bit of tweaking, but it’s worked out well for us.”
The secret to the station’s success, Brown said, is listening: “We are absolutely focused on the likes and dislikes of our listening audience, and we do our level best to meet the expectations. What we’ve seen over the years in this industry when you violate expectations, it damages your brand. I think that’s why our brand is so strong — because we listen.”
V103 targets African-American adults between 25 and 54 with a format that combines rhythm-and-blues, Motown and dusties music in a laid-back presentation more typical of adult-contemporary stations. Billed as “The Best Variety of Hits and Dusties — and No Rap,” the station banned anything resembling hip hop in those days.
Despite the defection of younger listeners, the new V103 was an immediate and huge success. Overnight it jumped to No. 1 among all adult listeners in the market.
“I think the key to V103’s success then and now is that we’re in a constant state of evolution,” Brown said. “You can’t stay in place because that’s not what our audience is doing. They’re getting new musical tastes. They’re being attracted to new and different technologies. We can’t be the station that we were then. We have to shift and pivot along with our audience.”
Brown describes his station’s “musical recipe” today as a mix of everything from R&B ballads to classic and adult-oriented hip hop, instrumentals and local steppers music, along with a large serving of dusties on weekends. “We encompass everything,” he said. “I think that’s the nature of the urban adult format. That’s what makes it so rich and vibrant.”
To kick off its celebration, V103 will present a 25th anniversary concert, starring Charlie Wilson, Chaka Khan, Robin Thicke and Bell Biv Devoe, Saturday at Allstate Arena. This Saturday also marks the 85th birthday of Radio Hall of Famer Herb Kent, still going strong and spinning dusties every Saturday and Sunday on V103.
-- Robert Feder
Imagine that ... a radio station that LISTENS to its listeners! Man, what a concept! Then again I wonder how many times a day they must hear "Gee, I wish you'd play more John Mellencamp, Steve Miller and Boston every hour." (kk)
re: NEW STUFF:
Forgotten Hits folks should know about the new
documentary Muscle Shoals. I got to see a preview of it and it is one of the
best movies about music. Rick Hall of Fame Records has quite a story. There is
amazing footage of early recording sessions and many stars of rock and soul take
center stage to talk about this magical recording place: Fame and Muscle Shoals
Sound in Alabama. Opening in limited release soon and will be available on
demand.
Charlie Miller
Sounds awesome ... will have to watch for this one! (kk)
re: RONNIE DOVE:
After running copies of some Canadian Top 40 Charts last week, we got this from long-time FH Reader Tom Diehl:
I'm even more shocked to see Sweeter Than Sugar by
Ronnie Dove charting on CHNS. This was his debut single for Diamond Records,
issued on Apex in Canada (and if anyone out there has a Canadian pressing on
Apex, please send me an email to Tomd1685@hotmail.com. It is the only Canadian 45 by Ronnie I am missing). It did
absolutely nothing when released in America even though there was a trade
magazine ad putting Ronnie "in the ring" against the Beatles. The record did
also chart on CKLW in Windsor, Ontario and WDGY in Minneapolis - St Paul, MN.
Speaking of Ronnie Dove, Ronnie has announced his retirement after nearly
60 years in the entertainment business (he had started with his group the Ronnie
Dove Quartette in 1954). Ronnie has had some ongoing health issues due to
asbestos in his lungs, due to the time he spent in the air force changing out
asbestos on ship pipes. Ronnie's final concert will be held on December 1, 2013,
at the Moose Lodge in Glen Burnie, Maryland. More info can be found at www.ronniedove.com and I
encourage fans of Ronnie's music to also check out his new website, www.ronniedovemusic.com,
which includes a few newly discovered old songs of Ronnie's that he has not put
out on cd elsewhere (and there will be even more added to the site very soon,
where the total number of songs on the site is already over 200).
I'm also
looking for any old Ronnie Dove pictures people might have, plus any live
recordings they might have (or perhaps by any luck, any other unreleased
recordings), as well as foreign pressings of Ronnie's singles, so if anyone has
anything that they think can help contribute to the Ronnie Dove archives, please
contact me.
-- Tom Diehl
Tom has helped us out here in Forgotten Hits more times than I could ever
possibly count so I would really like to be able to offer some kind of "payback"
here should any of our readers have any Ronnie Dove material of interest to
share. (Tom's email is stated in the piece above.)
re: TOMMY ROE:
Pop Rock Legendary Songwriter, Recording
Artist
TOMMY ROE ... Greatest Hits and
SOMETHING NEW!!
Dizzy, Sheila, Everybody, Sweetpea, Jam Up and
Jelly Tight ... and many more
**************************************************************************
Headlining THE SURF BALLROOM >> WINTER
DANCE PARTY
CLEAR LAKE, IA *** JANUARY 30,
2014
Headlining BEATLE WEEK >> THE CAVERN
CLUB
LIVERPOOL, UK *** AUGUST 26,
2014
What more needs be said ... what a
legend!
23 BILLBOARD chart singles ... 11 TOP 40, (15 TOP 40 in CANADA) ... 6 top 10,
4 GOLD, 2 International #1 Hits
AVAILABLE ALL YEAR FOR
CONCERTS, FESTIVALS, PACS, CASINOS, ETC.
Dizzy LIVE at EPCOT MAY, 2013
EVENING W TOMMY ROE TRAILER
RICK LEVY manager/bandleader: 904 - 806 -
0817
re: LINDA
RONSTADT:
Here's more on Linda Ronstadt, courtesy of FH
Reader Dave Barry, who sent in these two independant articles written by Steven Winn and Chris Willman ...
Linda Ronstadt rolled her fingers
into a fist, forming a pinhole at the center. She held this improvised telescope
up to her eye and trained it on a seascape by Eugène Isabey, on view in the
"Impressionists on the Water" exhibition at the Legion of Honor.
"I love to
do this," she said, squinting into the painting's deep space. "Look at the way
the water glitters. And those men on the boat. There's a world in there. This
makes it really sharp and bright."
Ronstadt, who lives near the Legion in
San Francisco's Richmond District, has been doing a lot of close looking
recently, and not only at this Impressionism show she loves so much she's been
back to see it seven times. In a new book to be published Tuesday, Ronstadt
revisits, with a mixture of fine-grained insight and personal modesty, one of
the most remarkable and wide-ranging singing careers in the last century of
American popular music.
"Simple Dreams: A Musical Memoir" (Simon &
Schuster; $26) covers everything from Ronstadt's early folk-rock days with the
Stone Poneys to a megawatt solo career that earned her the 1970s "Queen of Rock"
label. It winds through startling swerves into Gilbert and Sullivan's "The
Pirates of Penzance" on Broadway and lushly orchestrated American standards, and
ultimately a return to her family roots with the 1987 Mexican album "Canciones
de mi Padre."
Along the way Ronstadt earned 11 Grammy Awards, appeared on
the covers of Time, Newsweek and Rolling Stone (the latter six times), and
collaborated with Neil Young, Jackson Browne, Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris,
Nelson Riddle, Kevin Kline and many others.
As her career retrospective
arrives in bookstores, Ronstadt at 67 is peering forward into a life
dramatically altered by the diagnosis of Parkinson's disease she received nine
months ago and made public in an interview last month. "I can't sing a note,"
she said.
The announcement, though not a surprise to friends, stunned the
large and devoted legion of fans for whom "Different Drum," "Heart Like a
Wheel," "Blue Bayou," "When Will I Be Loved," "Cry Like a Rainstorm" and
numerous other hits cut a treasured groove in their memories. The singer's
lustrous and brilliantly controlled tone, which married vibrant power and
open-hearted vulnerability, remains, for many, a signal voice of their
generation.
Ronstadt began noticing problems with her voice almost a decade
ago. Doctors told her there was nothing wrong with her physically. One
specialist said she had "the healthiest larynx of any singer who had the kind of
career I did." But Ronstadt, a self-scrutinizing perfectionist, knew better.
"My voice cracked," she said matter-of-factly, "at the height of my ability.
I couldn't make it do what it had always done." Ronstadt sensed it was more than
age or normal wear on her vocal cords. She sang her last concert in November
2009 in San Antonio. "Toward the end I was just shouting." She was devastated
but not entirely surprised by the Parkinson's diagnosis. Her vocal difficulties,
she now believes, were the early signs of the muscle failures associated with
the onset of the disease.
"Holy s- ," she recalled thinking, when her fears
were confirmed, "this is not the disease I want to have." Her dark eyes widened
for a moment at the memory, and then she moved on.
Friends think Ronstadt
will ride out whatever lies ahead with her characteristic high spirits, fierce
attention to detail and inner calm. "I've never seen her in a state of despair
about anything, including this," said John Rockwell, the former New York Times
music critic who has been a friend for close to 40 years. "I know she misses
singing. It's been the center of her life. But there is a certain kind of
personality that has a cheerful attitude no matter what. That's
Linda."
Dressed in a hooded pink sweatshirt, light blue jeans and white
running shoes, Ronstadt made her way through the museum apparently unrecognized
and undisturbed. She used a pair of stability poles for balance. "I used to go
bench to bench. These are better," she said of the poles. She looked at every
painting in the show, zeroing in at one point on a sky that reminded her of the
Tucson desert where she grew up. Ronstadt fell into one of her spontaneous
reveries.
"Oh God," she said, with a luxuriant sigh, "this is fabulous. It
moves me completely that someone could sit down and look so closely at something
and come up with this."
Back at her house, Ronstadt stretched out on a plush
white settee near a fireplace that's steadily in use when she's home. Even on an
overcast summer day, the room looked bright and airy. French doors framed a
garden brimming with red, blue and yellow blossoms.
"I love everything
soft," she said - "cashmere and down. I don't like anything scratchy. My parents
were not into comfort."
While the stark Tucson landscape and stiff Indian
blankets on her bed formed a rough backdrop, Ronstadt remembers her childhood
with a warm glow. The memories are keen - the smell of floor wax and diesel oil
in her Mexican-German grandfather's hardware store; a particular cotton print
dress her mother wore; the sweet mesquite beans she fed her Shetland pony,
Murphy.
Her deepest roots are musical. Ronstadt's paternal grandfather was a
brass-band leader. Her father, a baritone, played her 78-rpm records of Grieg's
"Peer Gynt" and the flamenco singer Pastora Pavón and took her to one of the few
movies she saw as a child, Verdi's opera "Aida."
Her brother Peter was a boy
soprano. Family singing, in a house with no TV until Ronstadt was in fifth
grade, was the most readily available source of entertainment. It may also be
the wellspring of her celebrated gift for harmonizing, exquisitely realized
decades later in her three-part singing with Emmylou Harris and Dolly Parton and
duets with the Cajun singer Ann Savoy.
The strict Catholic school she
attended turned Ronstadt off formal education. A natural autodidact, she became
a voluminous reader, with interests that range from Victorian novels to
architecture to politics. Even as she enrolled at the University of Arizona,
Ronstadt knew it wasn't for long. She dropped out after a semester and headed
for Los Angeles at 18 to seek her musical fortune.
Ronstadt moved from the
Stone Poneys to an alt-country and rock solo career that bloomed, albeit
gradually, before she was really ready. "It took me 10 years to really learn how
to sing," she said. By then, in the mid-1970s, she was already a huge star,
playing large arenas at a time when women, aside from Grace Slick and the
hard-driving Janis Joplin, didn't reach that level of stardom and
fame.
Ronstadt was in some ways an unlikely superstar. Afflicted with stage
fright throughout her career, she didn't speak to the audience from the stage
for years or write her own songs. "Most of my days I was under the covers, then
brushing my teeth, then out onstage looking at the tops of my shoes and the
reflection from the microphone stand," she recalled.
"I used to think, 'My
God, this show must look so boring' because I was always looking at my feet."
Ronstadt giggled and shook her short ruff of dark brown hair.
Life on the
road was often lonely. "The smell of the carpet in a hotel room is the same
everywhere," she said, with a slight shudder. "My stomach turns over, and I just
want to go home." When her daughter, Mary, wanted to hang up a picture of her
mother performing, Ronstadt asked her not to. "I don't like pictures of me
working." She saved few mementoes of her career.
However self-doubting or
isolated she felt, Ronstadt formed powerful and enduring bonds with fellow
musicians and managers. John Boylan, who worked with her in the early 1970s,
remembers the first time he heard her voice. "Her pitch was absolute, and she
could do it without vibrato. As a record producer, I got beyond excited." Boylan
continued, "She was always highly self-critical, with the humility to improve
herself."
Songwriter J.D. Souther, who wrote her hit "Faithless Love,"
remembers falling for Ronstadt when he asked her to cook him dinner. "She made
me a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich," he laughed. Their romance was
short-lived, but they've remained close. "We made a lot of music together, some
of the very best after we had broken up. Most our relationship was listening to
great music together. She's changed very little since I met her. I still love
her dearly."
Ronstadt's romantic life was a source of incessant fascination
and speculation when she was in the spotlight. Reports linking her with then-
and current California Gov. Jerry Brown and filmmaker George Lucas were
accurate. As to the various reported beaux, "some of the others were men I never
met," she said drily.
She couldn't avoid addressing some of the stories
about her private life in press interviews. As Rockwell writes in an insightful
1978 essay, Ronstadt acknowledged that she was involved with many of her musical
collaborators. He described someone who was not a "stubborn holdout for Total
Womanhood in an age of guerrilla feminism," but an enlivening "tension of
opposites." She was, he wrote, "sensual and clever, sweet and irrational,
vulnerable and strong." It's a description that still very much
applies.
Marriage, she said, "was never anything I set out to do." Crisply
affirming her commitment to "serial monogamy - it's what the culture supports,"
Ronstadt displayed no ambivalence about her choice not to marry. "It just wasn't
necessary for me."
For the most part, Ronstadt has drawn a veil over her
private life. "Simple Dreams" is the polar opposite of the pop music tell-all
book. She writes lightly and even decorously of her romantic past. "I was
keeping company with then governor Jerry Brown," goes a typical line. Asked
about her not mentioning Lucas in the book, she said simply, "He had nothing to
do with the music." She did offer one affectionately impish joke about Brown,
with whom she's still friendly:
"People worry about Jerry spending money in
the government. Don't worry about that. He's a tightwad. There's no chance of
him spending any money, certainly not his own." Her face went into a
mock-innocent deadpan, then beamed open in a smile.
The word "authentic"
came up in several of her friends' and colleagues' accounts of Ronstadt's
personality. The perception by others who didn't know her that she was
"frivolous" bothered her, she said, then promptly complicated the issue:
"Sometimes I was frivolous. Did you have some frivolous years? I had to live
mine out in public."
In addition to the gossip about her love life, there
were the inevitable stories about other recreations. Ronstadt readily
acknowledges her past cocaine use, but said she rarely drank. "I'm completely
allergic to it. Two glasses of wine, and they had to carry me home."
Quick
as she may have been to register her own shortcomings, Ronstadt was singularly
decisive about her career choices. When she first heard Anna McGarrigle's "Heart
Like a Wheel," she felt like "a bomb had exploded in my head" and spent years
persuading someone to record the song she would transform into a pop classic.
She ignored advice not to perform in the New York Shakespeare Festival's
production of "The Pirates of Penzance," a role that earned her a Tony
nomination. Her decision to record traditional Mexican mariachi music drew
similar doubts. She proved the experts wrong every time. And as she's eager to
point out now, all the very different types of music she performed were things
she'd heard at home by the time she was 10.
Ronstadt moved to San Francisco
from Los Angeles in the late 1980s and has gone back to a home in Tucson for
periods since then. She's owned a number of homes in San Francisco, driven in
part by serial homemaking monogamy. She falls in love with one place, then hears
the call of a new location.
Her explanation for the move from
image-conscious Los Angeles has the kind of pithy, intuitive logic that her
friends are used to. "When I moved here I didn't have to have that conversation
I got so tired of in L.A.: 'Where did you get your shoes?' " She now gets almost
all her sensible, discreetly stylish footwear at Crosswalk Shoes on Fillmore
Street.
Even as her career matured and moved in new directions, something
was missing. "I feel like I didn't grow up until I had children," said Ronstadt,
who adopted Mary, now 22, and Carlos, 19, when she was in her 40s.
"Before
that I was like a child wandering in the woods. I followed my own whims, most of
them musical. I was very focused on my career, on whatever the next project was.
Having children makes you see the world in a completely different way. When
you're responsible for those little lives, you can't slough it off or forget
about it until later."
Mary lives in a cottage across the garden, in back of
Ronstadt's house. Carlos recently moved out to live with his girlfriend south of
San Francisco. "I stood in the doorway and watched him go," his mother said,
"and wasn't sure what to say. I told him to be kind and try hard."
Ronstadt
loves staying home and reading and seeing friends. Ann Savoy, her former
collaborator and dear friend, paid a visit recently. The two went to Baker Beach
and haunted antique and vintage clothing stores.
"She's a character and a
half," said Savoy of her old friend. "She has more on her mind than anyone I
know, with that intensity of hers and that sparkle in her black eyes." Ronstadt
has "never been one to go out and socialize," Savoy added. "She has this rich
inner life and a group of close friends who come to her."
Ronstadt loves the
San Francisco Ballet and San Francisco Symphony. "Every time he raises his
baton," she said of Symphony Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas, "I should be
there. It's ridiculous that I don't go more."
She stays in touch, mostly by
phone, with a wide range of friends from her musical career. They include the
singers Jackson Browne and Aaron Neville, songwriter Jimmy Webb and her longtime
recording engineer, George Massenburg. "There's a certain kind of intimacy that
happens when you spend so much time polishing a phrase or a harmony part with
someone," she reflected, "that never goes away. I feel a special kind of kinship
that's different from my other friends, even if it doesn't necessarily move into
your daily life. They may be living somewhere else and you hardly ever see them.
But you can just pick up right where you left off. It's almost like love. No, it
is love."
When her old singing partners Browne and Emmylou Harris joined
Joan Baez in a benefit concert in San Jose in July, Ronstadt attended. She went
to visit them, somewhat reluctantly, after the concert. "I never like to be
backstage," she explained. "I just remember that it was hard to see people out
of context. You're on a different wavelength."
One of Ronstadt's favorite
paintings in the Legion's "Impressionists on the Water" is "Woman Rowing" by
Eugène Delâtre. The figure is draped in shadow as she pulls toward a distant
shoreline. "She could be wondering what happened to someone she knows," Ronstadt
mused, "or working on her grocery list. When she gets home it's going to be dark
in her house. I hope she find a nice warm supper waiting and the lamps already
lit for her."
In her only Bay Area book event, Linda Ronstadt will appear in
conversation with Roy Eisenhardt at City Arts & Lectures, Sept. 26 at 7:30
p.m. Nourse Theater, 275 Hayes St., San Francisco. (415) 392-4400,
www.cityarts.net.
Steven Winn is a San Francisco freelance writer. E-mail:
datebookletters@sfchronicle.com
Simple Dreams
A Musical Memoir
By Linda Ronstadt
(Simon & Schuster; 242 pages; $26)
As recent
news stories about her condition pointed out, Linda Ronstadt doesn't mention
having Parkinson's disease in her new memoir, "Simple Dreams," because it went
to press before she was diagnosed in June. But there's no certainty she'd have
written about it even if she'd known earlier, since Ronstadt guards her privacy
just as effectively within the book's pages as she always has without. Readers
hoping for a lot of long-delayed insight into any of her nonmusical dreams - or
setbacks - might as well hasten down the wind. There may be no more amusingly
illustrative passage than the one in which she goes to a Little Feat show in the
early '70s and can't wait to meet band leader Lowell George afterward.
"Backstage, Lowell walked up to me, opened his fist to reveal a large pill,
blinked at me several times, and said 'Hi, want a Quaalude?' No, I didn't want a
Quaalude," Ronstadt writes.
"I wanted to know the open tuning to a song of
his, about a truck driver, that he had sung in the show. He called it "Willin'."
There follows a paragraph and a half about how they agreed that Ronstadt should
sing the country-rock classic in an open E tuning instead of his original key of
G.
Do drug-related '70s rock anecdotes get any more lurid?
Well,
actually, they do, just barely, a couple of times in "Simple Dreams," as
Ronstadt reveals how a smack-addled Gram Parsons passed out after teaching Keith
Richards "Wild Horses" in Laurel Canyon, rather than give her a ride home in
Hollywood as promised. And she's sexually harassed by a producer on "The Johnny
Cash Show" and put in a drunken headlock by the abusive sideman Jack Nitzsche,
but that's as far as the book delves into sex or drugs.
As for rock 'n'
roll? Ronstadt reveals, unsurprisingly, "another reason I approached standards
with such fervor" in the '80s: "I never felt that rock and roll defined me.
There was an unyielding attitude that came with the music that involved being
confrontational, dismissive, and aggressive - or, as my mother would say,
ungracious. ... I didn't wear the attitude well."
"Simple Dreams" is nothing
if not gracious. Ronstadt was too classy to ever fully embrace the role of
rocker chick, a miscasting that was nonetheless to the delight of millions of
lads who had her posters on their walls during her '70s heyday. When she gets
around to working with orchestrator Nelson Riddle, theatrical legend Joe Papp
and the leading lights of Mexican music in the '80s, these have the effect of
providing rescue moments in the narrative, even if she's too - you know -
gracious to ever completely write off her tenure as the Queen of Rock.
In a
book devoted almost exclusively to her professional, not personal life, it's
maybe a bit surprising that she all but completely leaps over her commercial
peak years, as if they were Bad Dreams. Albums like "Prisoner in Disguise,"
"Hasten Down the Wind," "Living in the USA," and even the one that provides the
book its title go unmentioned or turn up only parenthetically.
Rather than
whine about having been a big star, though, she mostly chalks up the
nightmarishness of her peak period to bad sound. Singing in arenas and
amphitheaters "was kind of like being in a flushing toilet with the lid down,"
she writes. "There was so much evil slapback ricocheting off the walls and
ringing in the rafters, I'd swear I could still hear the lead guitar solo from
the band that had played the week before. Those places were filled with zombie
sound that simply refused to die."
You can hardly blame anyone with a
sensitive set of ears for being driven by the Fabulous Forum and Oakland
Coliseum straight into the arms of the Great American Songbook, right?
But
not a sentence is expended on how Ronstadt felt about being objectivized as a
sex symbol. We kind of know from the historical record that she didn't care much
for it, and you think you're going to get some dishiness on the sexism of the
period when she quotes fellow artist Judy Henske approaching her at the
Troubadour to say: "Honey, I am going to tell you something. In this town there
are four sexes: men, women, homosexuals, and girl singers."
But if she has
any lingering thoughts about having been almost the sole chick in a world
dominated by Eagles, perhaps she thinks it would be unduly ungrateful to share
them.
Cataloging the list of seemingly important developments that go
unmentioned could take up an entire review. Ronstadt mentions admiring pal
Rosanne Cash's recent autobiography, and maybe she took inspiration in the way
Cash dealt with her divorce from Rodney Crowell in literally half a sentence.
One-time fiance George Lucas? Unmentioned. Jerry Brown and Pete Hamill at least
get nods as fellows she was "keeping company with."
She spends a long, long
time living with J.D. Souther, but whether it was platonic or not is not our
beeswax. Cousins and nephews get mentioned by name, but her two adopted children
don't. Did the woman who sang "I Never Will Marry" in the '70s and "Never Will I
Marry" in the '90s have any thoughts in-between about ... marrying? Never will
we find out. (Her well-known politics get even shorter shift than her personal
life.)
"Simple Dreams" deserves attention for more than just its glaring
gaps, though, at least if you're a major fan of the brand of inclusive Americana
she breathed life into as the counterculture was breathing its last. Whether
she's hanging with neighbor Jackson Browne or leaving the about-to-be Eagles in
her living room so they can write "Witchy Woman," she's the comely Zelig of
early country-rock, and an affectionate witness to the "silverback posturing"
that occurred among the males of the SoCal singer/songwriter species. Some good
stories come from slightly outside of that bubble, too, as when she goes on a
date with tourmate Jim Morrison ... and cheerfully locks the inebriated lizard
king out of her apartment just as he's expecting to get lucky.
More than
just telling tales of the days when giants walked the Troubadour, Ronstadt also
gives a sense of the thoughts that go into being a singer's singer, without ever
being immodest about her gifts. (And she knows her limitations, being candid
about her unsuitability for the lead role in Puccini's "Boheme," which bombed on
Broadway.)
She sums up her vocal philosophy: "If one is singing a sad song,
it is better to tell the story as clearly and simply - even as journalistically
- as one can. It will have a stronger effect on the listener and seem more
emotional than a teary, overwrought delivery."
The rock critics who
dismissed her as overly technical over the years may beg to differ, but Ronstadt
indeed served to prove that flawlessness is not synonymous with bloodlessness -
notwithstanding her influence on perfect but soulless youngsters like Carrie
Underwood.
If only that simple, not overtly emotional approach worked as
well in this memoir as it did on her best records. If she's not going to shed
tears onto the pages, she could at least allude to having tear ducts. But the
book's early chapters tell us that, growing up in the tough Arizona desert, she
learned that "cowgirls don't cry," a lesson that stuck. Now, as ever, you'll
have to look away from her face or the page and deep into the key of E to hear
the slightest sob.
Chris Willman has been a frequent contributor to TV
Guide, New York magazine, Rolling Stone and other publications. E-mail:
books@sfchronicle.com
Wow ... I've never seen a review that so easily
convinced me not to bother with a title I've been looking forward to reading!
It sounds like there absolutely NOTHING here that any fan would care about ...
which makes me wonder how she got a book deal at all. Guess I'll just enjoy the
fabulous music instead. (kk)
re: COMING UP IN FORGOTTEN HITS:
We've got two more special countdowns to feature during our special salute to the '60's ... we'll let you know when they're running.
And, starting tomorrow, reviews of the Burton Cummings / Zombies concert last Friday Night ... one of the best shows we've ever seen ... so stay tuned! (kk)
