I was just thinking of Linda Ronstadt earlier this week, seeing her name on a list of authors who will be in town for the National Book Festival next month. Turns out she has an autobiography “Simple Dreams: A Musical Memoir” coming out on Simon & Schuster Sept. 13.
But she trumped any of its stories this week by telling AARP magazine that she has Parkinson’s Disease and as a result “can’t sing a note.” It’s sad news, though Ronstadt had announced her retirement from the music business two years ago.
Parkinson’s is a debilitating disease suffered by millions, with no known cure. Some, such as my mother, do not survive it; others find a way to persevere, such as the actor Michael J. Fox, who returns to series TV this fall with his own comedy about a man who is making his own return to TV despite having Parkinson’s. It may well go a long way to familiarize many with the disease.
I’m hoping for Ronstadt the same determination to fight it and sing again. I was a fan back to the earliest days of the Stone Poneys and the clear, stark declaration of her voice on the Michael Nesmith song “Different Drum.” Then came her startling debut with “Long, Long Time.”
For some reason I had pulled out her self-titled third album earlier this year and kept it playing with its versions of Jackson Browne’s “Rock Me on the Water” to Neil Young’s “Birds” and country standards like “I Fall to Pieces,” “Crazy Arms” and Johnny Cash’s “I Still Miss Someone” and Woody Guthrie’s “Ramblin’ Round.” Wonderful stuff.
She went on to become a big superstar with “Heart Like a Wheel” and its follow ups, showing her to be a great interpreter of great old rock by the Everly Brothers, Roy Orbison and Buddy Holly as well as someone with a great ear for new songwriters, particularly Warren Zevon. She went on to dabble in new wave songwriting by Elvis Costello and others, then did Gilbert & Sullivan, traditional Mexican music, standards and jazz.
Ronstadt was less enamored with the rock chick touring life and went off the road for years, though she maintained loyal listeners to her recordings.
“I hate to perform,” Ronstadt told me the last time I talked to her, in 1999. “I hate to be on the road. I will not have any secrets from you: I just hate it like poison.
“I haven’t really wanted to tour since I finished doing the Mexican show, which I loved,” she said. Her `”Canciones de Mi Padre'” album, which went platinum, came out in 1987, the same year as the first “Trio” album with Harris and Dolly Parton.
“I would have quit touring when I was 40. I was really willing to give it up then,” Ronstadt said. “But the Mexican thing exploded on me, and I couldn’t give it up for a while.”
She was back on the road then for her duet album with Harris, “Western Wall: The Tucson Sessions,” and the parts she liked about the tour were the parts she said she always liked.
“I like to rehearse. And I love to sing with Emmy. And I love to sit in the living room and fool around on guitar with Emmy,” she said. “And then you have people like Bernie hanging around; it’s great. It’s just musical. It’s the music that’s always held interest for me.”
The Bernie she was referring to was Bernie Leadon of the Eagles, who was part of the stellar touring band also used on the album that also included Buddy Miller, Paul “Wix” Wickens, Greg Leisz and Ethan Johns.
The recording in her hometown of Tucson also suited Ronstadt “because I didn’t have to go anywhere, and I got all these wonderful musicians to come,” she said. “So that was the fun in it. And this is the payment. This is what I have to pay to do this.”
Staying home in Arizona allowed Ronstadt to be close to home, where raising her two children, then aged 5 and 8, took precedence. “To me, it’s just as important to sing some little song with my daughter in the car as whatever I do professionally.”
For that album, she sang from writers as varied as Sinead O’Connor, Jackson Browne, Leonard Cohen, Rosanne Cash, Bruce Springsteen and Patty Scialfa,with most of the songs were suggested by Harris, free of commercial considerations.
“You can call it self-indulgence, or you can call it: `Yahoo! I’ve paid my dues. I recorded those dopey songs that I didn’t want to record,”’ and now she can do what she wants.
It was something of a shock to hear her brand as “dopey” the most successful of her 35 Top 40 singles from 1967 through 1990 — things like “You’re No Good,” “When Will I Be Loved” and “Blue Bayou.”
“It’s not that I didn’t want to record them,” Ronstadt said of those hits, all cover songs. “It’s just that they were afterthoughts that became hits — that I was stuck singing [for the rest of my career]. That was annoying to me.”
By then, she said she didn’t have to worry about “the record company saying, ‘I don’t hear a single on this.’
“We’re not playing to 13-year-olds, so we don’t have to have a single on it. And that was just great. That was one of things that we decided: We only wanted to do grown-up music on this record. It was a grown-up record.
“People are starving to death for well-written popular music,” Ronstadt said. “What I think people are really starving to death for is poetry, which has gone right out of our culture. And the American popular song got to be the replacement for poetry in terms of having something to help us identify our feelings and how to process our experiences.”
Ronstadt, whose career included a trilogy of popular albums of American standards orchestrated by Nelson Riddle, says those writers fit the bill.
“It’s an interesting thing. People want poetry. And the American standard song is so finely crafted. Those guys, Rodgers and Hart and Gershwin and Johnny Mercer, they wrote such beautifully crafted songs, and timeless. They’re songs for the age of courtship. But they’re also songs for looking back and seeing your life as a cumulative experience.
“As a 53-year-old woman, I’m just not going to sing things appropriate for a 14-year-old girl,” she told me. “It’s not authentic. It’s not my experience that I need to process right now. Those songs work as well for a 15-year-old as they do for an 80-year old. And I like that kind of music better.”