The Voice: Linda Ronstadt
By Jason C. Klose
So here is my interview with Linda - the audio file of my conversation with her, the link to the published article in the CDT, and the original unedited article which I submitted. Hope you enjoy it!
Linda Ronstadt Still Using Her Voice to Entertain, Encourage, and Inspire
Parkinson’s disease may have stolen Linda Ronstadt’s beautiful singing voice but it hasn’t taken away her ability to entertain audiences. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Grammy Award-winning singer, author, and 2013 National Medal of Arts and Humanities recipient has continued to tour the country, speaking about her legendary career in music and her courageous spirit as she fights her illness.
Although she can no longer sing, the Tucson, Arizona native now performs with a voice that entertains and educates with knowledge, honesty, humor, wit, modesty, and professionalism – the same qualities that have made her one of the most beloved artists for generations of fans. Ronstadt recently spoke with the Centre Daily Times from her home in San Francisco and talked about her career in music, living with Parkinson’s, and what the future holds for her.
CDT: When did you first start to notice the symptoms of Parkinson’s, how did it affect your singing, and what did you do to adapt to the changes in your voice?
Ronstadt: I actually started noticing in the year 2000. It turns out that it shows up in your voice before anything. They have a new way they can diagnose it; the earliest place it shows up is in your voice. I remember when things started to be different. I was making an album with Emmylou Harris and I noticed when I was in the studio that when I’d go to do certain things that it wouldn’t happen. I’d start to sing a note and my vocal cords would just clench up. If I would’ve known more about Parkinson’s disease I probably would’ve figured it out. From then on it was just every day. Then I’d start tripping and falling down, and I couldn’t understand why. I also had terrible fatigue.
I only made one solo album after that in 2004. My voice was very limited and I knew it was. I just had these songs that I had to get out of my system. I had a great band and an offer from Verve to do the record, so I took this shot. Like a painter, I just thought I’d have to think of myself as singing with a limited palette. I just have these colors and I’m going to paint with those. It was frustrating because some of that is pitch control. I had to really work on pitch. But I had these stories and I just thought I was going to have to tell these stories the best way that I could. It wasn’t until I developed a tremor in my left hand that I got a diagnosis. It took a year to confirm the diagnosis.
CDT: It turns out your maternal grandmother had Parkinson’s disease. What do you remember about her?
Ronstadt: I saw my grandmother with end stage Parkinson’s disease. I knew her when I was three years old when she was in the last stages of it, but I couldn’t really understand it very well. But my great aunt on my father’s side had it also, so it looks like it’s on both sides of my family.
CDT: How are you coping with your illness on a daily basis?
Ronstadt: Brushing my teeth, washing my hair, and getting dressed in the morning is such a journey for me. It used to be something that I never thought about. I don’t drive anymore. I feel like I’m solving a really tough problem in arithmetic. Parkinson’s isn’t always the same with everybody. The only hope is that it treats you kindly. I just figure I have today. I can still talk and walk, but not very far, and I can still do things for myself. I just feel like I have to be grateful for that and tomorrow will have to take care of itself.
CDT: How involved have you become in educating yourself about Parkinson’s and what types of treatments have you sought out or experimented with?
Ronstadt: There are pharmaceuticals which have horrible side effects, so I’m trying to avoid as much of that as I can and for as long as I can. I can’t get along without it, so I’m trying to take the mildest and easiest ones. For some reason a low carbohydrate diet is very helpful. I don’t like meat so that makes it hard. I’m mostly a vegetarian. So I’ve learned how to adjust my diet so it doesn’t set off the shaking as badly. Sugars make it so much worse – sugars and dairy are not good. I keep reading that coffee is good for Parkinson’s, and tea also. I’m a long time tea drinker and I’ve never liked coffee. A lot of Parkinson’s sufferers have said to me that they like marijuana and that it helps them a lot. It doesn’t help me, it just makes it worse. It just makes me kind of nervous.
CDT: Throughout your career in music you never wrote much of your own material, but you chose songs from some great songwriters – songs that described what may have been going on in your life at the time, and songs that you could relate to and that you felt you could do authentically.
Ronstadt: If everybody tends to write their own songs and sing them you wind up with a lot of mediocre songwriters, because there are only a few really good ones. It’s like it used to be in the old days with the standards, where you would get a great singer like Ella Fitzgerald singing a song that was written by George Gershwin – that’s a pretty good combination there. Then Sarah Vaughan comes along and sings a Gershwin song and sings it in a totally different way. Then Billie Holiday sings it probably better than anybody. Then Frank Sinatra comes along and does it too. So you get a lot of incredible interpretations of very good songwriting. And then there are the singer-songwriters like Jackson Browne and Randy Newman, and a lot of great girl singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell and Wendy Waldman. I knew so many good writers.
Ronstadt: It started with Glenn Frey, who was the former singing partner of my boyfriend at the time, who was J.D. Souther. I knew Glenn through J.D. and was very fond of him. He was a really good guitar player, but I didn’t realize what a good writer he was. I asked him to go on the road with me because Bernie Leadon was in the Flying Burrito Brothers and he couldn’t go with me on this tour. Glenn had never been on the road before. Then I met this drummer Don Henley at the Troubadour. I heard him play a song with his band Shiloh that I had recorded. He already knew the arrangement, so we offered him the job and he said yes. So when the two of them met each other that was the start of it – it was their talent combined. Each realized the other was a really good songwriter, and Glenn found out what a good singer Don was. He used to call him the secret weapon because he was always sitting behind the drums. When they said they wanted to form a band, John Boylan and I suggested the other two members. I suggested Bernie and he suggested Randy Meisner. So between the two of us, we had something to do with forming the band, but it was their talent and the pieces that came together that consolidated into what the Eagles became. And all of their subsequent musical developments and the different people that they added and brought in made the band better and better.
But music is a cooperative endeavor. There’s no room for competition really. You should compete with your own self and try to do your best. Competing with others never gets you anywhere, and trying to hold others back doesn’t either. I always thought they should have their dream, and whatever they were trying to do, I wasn’t going to hold them back from that. But I could benefit from it because that meant I got to have a band for about a year while they were getting themselves together, and they got to do what they did. So it worked out.
Ronstadt: It’s a good thing, but I was happiest when I got to work on the standards because I finally had something to do with my voice. I felt like I was holding myself in a strange limbo when I was trying to sing rock and roll because I never felt fully invested in the attitude. When I started working with Nelson Riddle I felt like I could really find who I was and find a real unlimited expression for my voice.
CDT: When you starred in Joseph Papp’s production of “The Pirates of Penzance” in 1980, how did that experience prepare you for your later work, particularly the American standards you recorded with Nelson Riddle, and the albums of traditional Mexican songs?
Ronstadt: It gave me a fuller, richer voice because I started working in my upper register which I had sorely neglected trying to belt rock and roll. I had that upper register, and working on that exclusively for a year then gave me the ability to sort of pull it down and marry it to my chest voice, and it gave me a complete voice for standards. It was so liberating because I finally felt like I had gotten out of a box that I was in my whole musical life and could finally get out of it.
And Nelson Riddle had no clue who I was. That was great; I thought that was fine. That meant that he didn’t have any preconceived ideas either. We met as fresh individuals to each other, and we could see where emotionally, socially, culturally, and artistically we fit together. It was just a good fit, and we became good friends and confidants.
CDT: Since you are no longer able to sing, what have you done to keep yourself involved in the music world?
Ronstadt: There’s a cultural center here that I’ve been very involved with for about 20 years called Los Cenzontles. It’s a Mexican cultural center in a little strip mall over in a really hard scrabble neighborhood in the East Bay in Richmond, California. They do brilliant work, as good as any place I’ve ever seen in terms of arts education. They teach singing, dancing, instruments, and visual art, and they just do a fabulous job with these kids that have been dislocated from their own cultures in Mexico. They come up here and they’re dealing with all the rigors and strains and sorrows of immigration, trying to fit their families in and trying to fit their culture in. They give them an incredible grounding in their own culture and a way to validate where they came from and who they are to start with. They really teach them to sing, play and dance, but they don’t have to do it for performing necessarily. They grow up to be much more confident, much better-rounded people, they have a much better chance of staying in school, and there are fewer high school dropouts and fewer teenage pregnancies. They learn how to use art to express their sorrows and their joys and to socialize. They can get together and dance, and they can do these folk dances that have really complex rhythms that come out of indigenous traditions in Mexico. They can really sing and dance and play so they can communicate with each other. It’s my other musical family besides my own.
CDT: Your modesty throughout your career has been well-documented. For you, it has always been about the music, and awards and praises have always been secondary. But being recognized for your achievements and the outpouring of love from fans that you received after your diagnosis has to make you feel appreciated and respected.
Ronstadt: I know the range of ability and what people did out there. I think I was a pretty good singer, but I don’t consider myself among the greatest. There’s always going to be somebody better than you, but it’s just fine. You just keep doing what you’re doing.
But people have generous hearts and it’s always nice to see that. The best thing is I have really good family support and really good support from my friends, and that’s what gets you through in the end.
CDT: In April 2014, the CD “Duets” was released, a compilation of duets you have recorded with many different artists throughout your career, including Emmylou Harris, Dolly Parton, J.D. Souther, James Taylor, James Ingram, Aaron Neville, and Ann Savoy. Do you have any future plans to release any more compilations of your work or perhaps any previously unreleased tracks?
Ronstadt: Different record companies always come up with something. There is something in the works, but I’m not quite sure what it is exactly. I’m sure they’ll be squeezing things out of the bottom of the toothpaste tube as the years go by (laughs). I’d like to put out a collection of just Jimmy Webb songs. I think he’s one of the most important songwriters in pop music of the 20th century. His songs always make me cry. He knows how to voice chords so they just stab you right in the heart. That’s the mark of a great songwriter. The voicings of the intro are always so beautiful. He’s so not limited, he’s so extraordinary, and he has such range and ability.
CDT: Talk a little about the process of writing your memoir. Having not written very many songs yourself, and never seeing yourself as a writer, taking on such a task had to be a very unique and rather daunting experience for you.
Ronstadt: I never considered myself a writer and I never kept a journal or anything like that. I just wrote the occasional thank you note (laughs). It was kind of a challenge, but I just started writing it and it just came out. I was surprised that it did. When I turned it in, I didn’t know if they would try to change it or not. They hardly touched my manuscript, so I was really happy about that. The publisher Simon and Schuster gave me the best deal. They were interested in a book about the music, and that was the only thing that piqued my interest.
CDT: How much do you follow music today, and who are some of your favorite artists?
Ronstadt: I like Sam Smith. When I heard him sing I thought ‘well that guy really knows what he’s doing.’ He’s got a really unusual vocal technique, a lot like Joni Mitchell in certain ways. The way he uses his falsetto and bounces back down into his chest. He does some things that I’ve never heard before and I thought that was good. There are a lot of talented people out there. I don’t always resonate to it because I’m from a different generation. But I liked what I heard from him. I also loved Amy Winehouse; I thought she was wonderful until she fell apart. What a voice she had; and her musicianship was really impressive until that came apart too. I thought she was the one that got away.
CDT: In a February 2013 interview, you spoke about the power of music, and how essential it is in our daily lives. Talk about the different ways in which music is so beneficial to us and how important it has been for you personally.
Ronstadt: It’s been everything for me. I was so obsessed with music from the time I was two. It was just all I thought about really. We’re so focused on celebrity in our culture that we assign all musicians to performance and then expect them to be celebrities. But that’s just a tiny part of the story of what music does. I think music has tremendous healing value. Even just different sounds. I think the Greeks know a lot about it. They have different scales that get you into different moods and different worlds. I think we’ve lost the ability and I think we’ve lost touch with a lot of it.
Ronstadt: I wouldn’t know where to start because I really don’t know the business anymore. What we get on the radio today is such a narrow view of it. There’s a lot of music that’s just for solitude, and for working out your problems all by yourself. There’s a lot of music that you can do that you can share with other people, and there’s music like choral singing. I think the only thing you can do is to just get on stage and get in front of people. All I ever tell anybody is just plant your feet and tell the truth. That’s what you can do in music, that’s what you can do in visual art, and that’s what you can do in dancing. The most important thing about art is ‘What are you saying? What is it you’re trying to say? Can you make it clear?’ Sometimes you can and sometimes you can’t. But you have to do it with whatever tools you have available.
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