From an unwilling sex symbol to an outspoken political activist,
Linda Ronstadt made plenty of waves throughout her long career — and not only because of
her music. Here's how the icon of 70s rock always managed to keep things interesting.
Thanks to Linda, the Ronstadt name is known all over the world — but in her home state of Arizona,
it was well-known before she was born. This is because her great-grandfather,
Federico Jose Maria "Fred" Ronstadt, was a guy who saw a lot of potential
in the place when it was still just a territory of the United States.
According to a piece by Fred's son Edward and published by the University of Arizona,
Fred arrived in Tucson in 1882 at the age of 14. In his early 20s, he began a family and
started the business that would eventually become the F. Ronstadt Hardware Company,
which would become a Tucson fixture and remain in business until 1985.
In addition to that successful venture, the Ronstadts are also known for their contributions
to bringing pharmacies to the dusty plains of Arizona, and also for being a very musical
brood. The University of Arizona maintains an archive dedicated to "Tucson's Ronstadt
Family," which contains only a few brief mentions of its most famous member in the "Music" section.
Gilbert Ronstadt, hardware store manager and the father of Linda,
is probably responsible for a lot more awesome music than most people who claim that profession.
According to a 1975 Rolling Stone piece on Linda Ronstadt, he was a guitarist who
played informally with mariachi bands during a period in which he lived in Mexico. It was he,
Linda said, who made sure that she grew up on a steady diet of killer melodies and harmonies,
exposing her to the likes of the Beach Boys, Peggy Lee, and Billie Holiday.
"I loved singing with my family."
With that kind of musical education, it's little wonder that as a high-schooler,
Linda formed a musical trio with her brother and sister. While performing
with them at Catalina High School, Ronstadt met Bob Kimmel, a folk musician who was just
as impressed with her voice as everyone else. The two struck up a friendship,
but Kimmel moved shortly thereafter to Los Angeles to pursue his musical ambitions.
While Ronstadt finished up high school, he continually pestered her to come on
out and start a band with him — and after graduating and completing a single semester
at the University of Arizona, she did. Their band, the Stone Poneys, released a few albums,
scoring one modest hit: "Different Drum," which peaked at No. 13 on Billboard's pop chart in 1967
After three LPs, Linda Ronstadt cut the Poneys loose. According to her 2014 memoir, Simple
Dreams: A Musical Memoir, while cycling through different supporting musicians in the early '70s,
Ronstadt hired a couple of guys that would go on to a somewhat notable degree of success. Her
manager, John Boylan, had recently fielded a demo from a guy named Don Henley, who had
written a couple of songs he thought Ronstadt might like to record. She wrote in her memoir:
"They didn't turn out to be good songs for me at the time, but I heard him play the drums when I
was walking through the room at the Troubadour and I thought he was such a good drummer."
So, she enlisted Henley and one of his acquaintances, whom she knew from the
local scene: guitarist Glenn Frey. The pair bunked together while touring with Ronstadt,
and quickly figured out they had some pretty good chemistry. They told Ronstadt of their
intention to start their own band, and then, magic happened. Ronstadt wrote in Simple Dreams:
"I suggested they get Bernie Leadon to play guitar, 'cause I liked Bernie,
and John suggested that they get Randy Meisner, and that's how the Eagles were formed."
The new band rehearsed at Ronstadt's house, and almost immediately,
their extreme awesomeness was apparent. Ronstadt recalled in Simple Dreams:
"I remember coming home one day and they had rehearsed 'Witchy Woman' and they
had all the harmonies worked out. It was fantastic. I knew it was gonna be a hit."
Linda Ronstadt and the Eagles went their separate ways, only to both go on to completely dominate
rock in the '70s. According to a 1980 Playboy piece on Ronstadt, she had a reasonable degree
of success with her first three solo albums, even earning a Grammy nomination for "Long,
Long, Time" from 1970's Silk Purse. Her fourth record, Don't Cry Now, earned Ronstadt her first
gold platter, and her fifth, 1974's Heart Like a Wheel, went double-platinum and scored the singer
her first No. 1 tune — a swaggering version of Clint Ballard, Jr.'s "You're No Good."
Ronstadt followed up that success with 1975's Prisoner In Disguise, 1976's Hasten Down the Wind,
1977's Simple Dreams, and 1978's Living In the U.S.A. — all of which went platinum or better.
Playboy also noted her insane ability to sell out arenas during this period,
and in 1980, she was named by Cashbox as the most successful female artist of the entire decade.
"Linda was the queen. She was like what Beyonce is now."
During the heady decade of the 1970s, sexual objectification was practically par for the course
among famous women, and Linda Ronstadt certainly didn't escape this phenomenon. In her 1980 Playboy
interview, she was asked relentlessly about her sex symbol status. Ronstadt told the outlet:
"I didn't set out to become a sex symbol. I set out to be a singer. I've never tried
to keep sexuality out of my personality or my singing. It's fun that people think I'm sexy."
What wasn't so fun, though, was Ronstadt's treatment by Rolling Stone a few years earlier,
when legendary photographer Annie Leibovitz fleshed out
a piece on Ronstadt with a series of borderline-softcore pictures
which the singer did not approve of. Ronstadt would later tell the New Times:
"Annie saw [the photo shoot] as an exposé of my personality. She was right. But I
wouldn't choose to show a picture like that to anybody who didn't know me personally,
because only friends could get the other sides of me in balance."
After conquering the popular music world in the '70s, Linda Ronstadt decided to stretch out a bit,
and venture into a couple of worlds where few pop singers dare to tread. The first:
Broadway, where she held down a starring role in a 1981 production of the classic
Gilbert and Sullivan musical "The Pirates of Penzance." The show started out off-Broadway
before moving to the Great White Way, where the general critical
consensus was that she crushed it in the service of a somewhat lacking production.
In 1984, Ronstadt took on La Bohème, the Puccini opera that she'd dreamt of starring in for years,
according to Newsweek. Unfortunately, it didn't go quite as well, and The
New York Times was particularly savage, if oddly forgiving. Its reviewer wrote:
"Miss Ronstadt seems tentative and shaky, and the panic rarely subsides thereafter. [...] One
can tell at a glance that Miss Ronstadt herself knows that she's not at home with Puccini — and
one can only admire the bravery that allows her to forge ahead anyway, reason be damned."
In the early '80s, one of the hottest venues on the planet had an appropriate name:
Sun City Resort and Casino, where some of the world's most popular music acts plied
their trade to the adoring throngs. Unfortunately, the place was located smack dab in South Africa,
which at the time was something approaching an international pariah due to its forced racial
segregation policies, commonly known as apartheid. Because of this, many more of the world's most
popular acts refused to play there — but not Linda Ronstadt. According to Africa Is a Country,
Ronstadt played a 1983 gig there in violation of the music industry's informal boycott,
joining such megastars as Barry Manilow, Rod Stewart, and one of her idols, Dolly Parton.
Ronstadt received understandable backlash, against which she pushed back with a jaw-dropping yet
completely reasonable rebuttal. Speaking with journalist Don Lane on his TV show, she said,
"If you disagree with the policies of the government,
which I do very definitely disagree with the policies of the South African government,
I don't think that's enough of a reason not to go and play music there [...] If I
decided that I wasn't going to play where attitudes of racism prevailed I certainly
couldn't play in Australia, or England, or lots of places in the United States."
"As far as I was concerned it was just a gig."
In 1985, the protest song "Sun City," spearheaded by
E Street Band guitarist Steven Van Zandt, brought further attention to the issue.
In later years, Linda Ronstadt put her money where her mouth was in terms of her politics. In 2004,
while playing the Aladdin in Las Vegas, she dedicate her cover of the Eagles' "Desperado"
to filmmaker Michael Moore, whose incendiary documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 had recently won the
coveted Palme D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. In response, Aladdin president Bill Timmins took the
ridiculous step of throwing Ronstadt out of the hotel, and banning her from playing there again.
One might get the idea that Ronstadt was not a fan of President George W. Bush,
and one would be correct. In 2006, she referenced the Dixie Chicks' infamous
calling-out of Bush with a strongly worded defense of the band, and a
blistering condemnation of the then-president. Ronstadt said, according to Contact Music:
"The Dixie Chicks said they were embarrassed he was from Texas. I'm
embarrassed George Bush is from the United States. He's an idiot. He's
enormously incompetent on both the domestic and international scenes."
Ronstadt has also been staunch in her support
of the gay community. Speaking with Gay.net in 2009, she said,
"[One] of the strongest [communities] that we know in this country is in the gay community,
because they've had to band together to survive emotionally. I'm not so
sure this country understands or values that."
Linda Ronstadt enjoyed a long association with a couple of other absolute musical powerhouses:
Emmylou Harris and Dolly Parton. According to The Boot, the three had been longtime friends, and in
1987, they came together to release a long-awaited collaboration album, the aptly-titled Trio.
The project was gestating for years beforehand, with the busy schedules
of all three delaying its eventual fruition — but when it finally happened, it did not
disappoint. It shot to No. 1 on the Billboard country albums chart, scored a Grammy Award,
and produced a No. 1 country single with the Phil Spector-penned "To Know Him Is To Love
Him." The three friends would reunite to record a follow-up, Trio II, which was released in 1999.
According to Sounds Like Nashville, it was right around 2000 when Linda Ronstadt began
having trouble with her once-powerful voice. By 2009, she could no longer paper over those
problems when performing live — and in 2013, it was reported by USA Today that the singer
had been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. In an interview with AARP, Ronstandt revealed:
"I think I've had it for seven or eight years already, because of the symptoms that I've
had. No one can sing with Parkinson's disease, no matter how hard you try."
Several years later, though, she received a new diagnosis:
not Parkinson's, but a rare brain disorder called supranuclear palsy. In a 2020 interview with CNN,
Ronstadt described her struggle with the disorder:
"I couldn't hear the top end of my voice. I couldn't hear the part that I used to
get in tune. My throat would clutch up. It would just be like I had a cramp or
something [...] Literally my entire career flashed in front of my eyes."
"I've watched people die so I'm not as afraid of dying. I'm afraid of suffering."
Unfortunately, she's simply no longer capable of producing those astounding
tones that sold millions of records and drew tens of thousands to hear
her perform in her heyday — but it's not as if her legacy isn't secure. In 2014,
she became a first-ballot Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, and as far as her millions
of fans are concerned, she'll always be one of the greatest vocalists ever, in any genre.