Linda Ronstadt – Greatest Hits

Elektra/Asylum/Nonesuch, 1976

Consider Linda Ronstadt. No really, consider her. Country singer turned chart-topper. Latina pop superpower. Roller skate wearer. Rock and roll success in an era where most stars were men.

When I talk about Linda Ronstadt, I often automatically start off by being defensive on her behalf. Maybe it’s because at first glance, to a modern-day kid, she doesn’t seem the most legit: she doesn’t play an instrument, doesn’t write her own songs, and was frequently photographed in less than feminist ways. But in fact, her musical prowess is immense, she has managed to be a commercial success with (mostly) control over her own career since the 70s, and she’s always reckoned with being a sometimes scantily clad woman rock singer in honest and interesting ways, in public.

And that’s all before you hear her sing.

Ronstadt often talked in interviews about preferring to record music that she grew up with. Her early albums display a mix of country music with ranchero-style rhythms. And Ronstadt herself was a lot of the music I grew up to.

There’s an impression in my musical memory: my mom sitting on the front steps, probably grading papers or doing accounting work, singing Ronstadt versions of classic songs to me as I circled our small carport on rollerskates, practicing. The carport was the only cement surface in reach near our house; after its small square of smoothness, our long gravel driveway connected to a potholed, barely paved road. I considered myself well-practiced once I could hit a stray gravel rock without falling, instead stopping and catching myself and immediately starting off again for another go around the miniature rink, skinned knees and all.

Nowadays we would call Ronstadt a cover singer—most of her dozens of hits were songs written, and often made famous, by other people. She didn’t play a guitar onstage. She just stood there, singing. “I Can’t Help it if I’m Still In Love With You” (written by Hank Williams; also iconically performed by Patsy Cline). “When Will I Be Loved” (by The Everly Brothers). Her renditions of songs became the go-to ones for my parents’ generation, booting out the performances of such artists as Betty Everett (“You’re No Good”) and Wanda Jackson (“Silver Threads and Golden Needles”) for more decade-appropriate interpretations.

Before the “alternative” rock era ushered in the need for singers to write their own material and “do” more onstage, Ronstadt would have been called “an interpreter of the Great American Songbook.” Whether or not you agree with the limited concept and scope of a “great” “American” songbook (I think it’s both sort of sentimental and totally exclusive of non-mainstream artists and art), Ronstadt’s role in recording popular American songs from the span of the 20^th century is not that different from revered vocalists like Ella Fitzgerald or even Patsy Cline. It matters. And it’s so, so singable. Seriously. This woman has sung every song. It’s insane.

Say what you will about the seventies being a decade of odd, derivative, yet oddly influential rock music. Ronstadt managed to provide the requisite interpretation of the “songbook” appropriate to her period of ascendance—slow ballads and easy-swinging rock tunes with guys dropping in guitar solos during which she stood silent. She felt the songs, “Desperado” and all. And she did the songs justice. Hers remain good musical choices, even if the fashions and pretentions of the era may not. (And we all know all eras have pretentions, in hindsight.) Her voice is powerful.

There is something about Ronstadt that is indeed truly seventies, despite her career encompassing every decade since the sixties. She’s not a folk or protest singer, and not a groomed offspring of the fifties and sixties. She was a contemporary of Janis Joplin, yet despite her grounded and powerful tone most of the music Ronstadt performs is much less rockin’ than Janis’s music. Poking around the internet for videos to post, I remember how seventies Ronstadt makes me feel, even down to the fact of my existence being a product of that decade. The softness of the rock with the guitar focus. The girl singer acting tough while being sexy and girly. The retrospective gentleness of popular music. The groovy sexual expression, the return to the personal and the focus on emotion and after the political and game-changing foci of 60s popular music. Ronstadt embodied this all, contradictions and all.

She also remains an anomaly as a mega-selling Latina pop star, having always loudly and proudly credited her Mexican heritage as a formative part of her identity, musically and otherwise. She has released several Spanish-language albums. She’s also performed opera, collaborated with classic composers, and I’m sure more that I don’t even know about. Despite the facts that her hands are empty onstage, the woman is a musician.

I wish I had a Stone Poneys record. I don’t. I have one of her many greatest hits comps, one I probably picked up in a dollar bin somewhere. It was released in 1976, the year I was born. And every time I put it on I’m spinning around the carport again, learning the songs of my century through the robust, emotional, smooth, and sweet renditions of a terrific, trailblazing “lady singer.”

Slanted and Enchanted

Matador, 1992

With the most precious ones, the heart-fillingest ones, the favorites, criticism fails. There is only sensation.

These songs summon a boy, who taught me to count between lightning and thunder, get dry beneath buildings, roll loudly down lawns: a western girl in her fifteenth year caught in her first eastern summer afternoons.

I remember every thing about it: the crest of your nose, the sores on your lips, your eyes smaller than they should be. Your father the brain surgeon, the curve of your left-handed script, your hair-dyed-blue hands drenched in teenage come. Sneakers.

Later, mailed mix tapes.

A Summer Babe.

Germ-Free Adolescents

Art-i-ficial, 1978 (fascimile)

Poly Styrene died today.

When I heard X-Ray Spex for the first time, my mind was entirely blown. By that time I was pretty familiar with 1970s punkk music. But this was something else. X-Ray Spex made punk music that was mature beyond its genre. They combined art with artifice with amps, and they blew most dude-fronted rock bands out of the water. Poly Styrene’s singing and performing contained the sonic genesis of every riot grrl band I ever loved in the ’90s, except this was in the ’70s, when even punkers didn’t sound like this. Bands like the Buzzcocks were a pop factory compared to the gutteral growls of the Spex; and they backed up those growls with downright avant garde arrangements. A fucking saxaphone in a punk band. Their outfits were rad, too.

The other night, I was talking about this record project with my friend Peter and he gave me a great compliment. He said that he likes it because I don’t write about music the way a lot of critics write about music, which is to say in a way that makes him want to kill them. (Thanks, Peter!) That’s not an accident. I believe that music connects with an undefinable cross-section of many non-critical aspects of humanity and personality and experience and time. So do most critics. But somehow, at least in a lot of contemporary criticism, this macho, collector-dude, completist ego thing gets in the way and a lot of critics have to spend time talking like they know more than anyone else about music. Which makes us hate them, because that’s annoying.

I’m probably as annoying as the next music writer; the point of this story isn’t to prove my ego is less than that of some guy who’s invested his entire life in knowing about music. Sure, I probably know more than some people about certain musics. Of course I say things like “avant garde arrangements,” just like other critics.

But the point is, we all know about music. If we love even just one song, whether a pop teenage hit or an epic symphony of old, we know enough about music to talk about it with each other. We may not have all the context, and we still like to hear from people who do have that context, but when it comes to popular culture we are our own best experts. You can feel it in the way your feet won’t sit still to certain songs, in that universal and enduring human need to lip sync into a hairbrush, and in the chill that whispers across my arm hair when Poly Styrene screams.

Sometimes I feel made tired by writing about music. Sometimes it’s nice to just listen to it. So today, listen to some X-Ray Specs with me, and think about their context and influence and all that stuff if that’s what the record makes you think about. But mostly just listen. Do you like it? Why? Why not? What does it make you feel?

Later, you’ll remember this.

In The Aeroplane Over The Sea

Merge, 1998

Near the end of last century, I was sitting in Daniel and Jens’ apartment somewhere in Brooklyn. Bushwick? A warehousey place, I had never been there before despite our years of friendship. I think it was off a train whose letters I never knew well – the J/Z or the Q  or the B when it used to not really be a line. It was hot in Manhattan, I remember that, and in their place it was not.

I was there to record some songs, which we never really did. Maybe we still should. I  would sing a little and hit some fuzzy bar chords and Jens would hit record and we’d try to make something gritty with four tracks and “realistic” background noises, which meant Travis walking in and out of the living room. I couldn’t sing well, couldn’t find my ear, which happens to me sometimes in front of microphones. We kept trying new things. The boys had a soundproof bathroom and crystalline eyes. It was dreamy, these friends, making noise as a way to hang out, just some California kids deep in the New Yorkness of it all.

We took a break. Smoked a joint. Put on a record. Neutral Milk Hotel, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.

Jens and I listened close in an effort to hear the tape being pushed to “record” – to hear the actual click on the track. I felt like New York could never be less than any other place, even though I’d already decided to leave. Daniel came home from work at some point and joined us, said something poetic and superlative like he usually does, about how this record is a masterwork of production and love and spirituality. Click. Push the ceiling levels all the way and keep playing. Sit back. Catch a later train in the alphabet.

The thing about this album, I explained recently to a slightly younger friend, is that it just happened to define a generation—my exact generation—of musical aesthetic. And that it’s really fucking good. Both those things, equally.

Four tracks, probably, a lyrical narrative through-line that is almost indecipherable when it comes to “plot” but narrative nonetheless, the beautiful emotions of a young man laid bare, layers of noise and fuzz without overload. Optimism in the face of historical dismalness. Drawings instead of photographs. Acoustic guitar and distortion, together at last.

Somehow in this album, a ramshackle group of music-crazy friends living in the South managed to make a generational icon that reverberated through Brooklyn and beyond. They found it, they had it, they laid it down: the innocent, raw non-urbanity that all urban art kids strive to replicate in some way. And skilled. This isn’t riot grrl raw, of barely knowing how to play your instrument but rocking it anyway with a fuck-you to the man. This is raw but tight, punk but planned, the man doesn’t even know where you live, messy low tech executed with the technical improvisational confidence of a bedroom knob-twiddler, with love. A secret genius.

If you love this album, it means things to you. To me, it mostly means the wave of love that can hit me when I encounter the synchronicitous combination of friends and art, life and time. Whether it’s Jens and Daniel and me in their loftlike living room on couches found on the street, eyes upward, trying to understand how to be that pure; or Brooke and me in her room riffing on the concept of the “Communist daughter” and diving into the rumored allusions to Anne Frank in the narrative; or my friend Jeannie, counting off “1, 2, uh-1, 2, 3, 4,” in perfect time before the fuzz kicks in, bopping her ponytail in the driver’s seat of the pickup truck as we barrel through the impossible greens of suburban Oregon.

It’s all these things, my friends. It’s how you built a tower tumbling through the trees— even though they tried to fuck you up too much to see the sky.

We’ll never be there again.

Keep building.

Repo Man

San Andreas Records, 1984

Remember when I was talking about Joan Didion and  Tom Waits, and saying that perhaps I’d rather be from his California than from hers? I’d like to add to that by saying that this is also the California I’m from.

Repo Man is a cult film made in 1984 by Alex Cox. It’s about a guy, a car, capitalism, drugs, the possible end of the world, LA, some unseen powers, and a lot of punk rock songs. I’m sure it’s about some other stuff—it’s been forever since I saw it—but in my teenage memory, those are the things that stick. I had friends who were absolutely obsessed with this movie. I loved it, saw it many times, but I never knew all the lines like some guys did.

“Ordinary fuckin’ people. I hate ‘em.” –Bud, Repo Man

Pretty much anyone I knew in high school that was obsessed with this movie hung out across the street. You know what across the street is in high school, right?  It’s the steps of that big old wooden house with the big gate and the shading vines that provide a nice cover for lighting joints. It’s the small alley around the corner whose curbs cradle you when you’re making out or coming down or just having a break from the constant barrage of authority known as the high school experience. In some schools, it’s the parking lot, or behind the church, or under the bleachers. It exists in every teenage world: the place in high school where kids who are a little bit outside hang out.

I liked to move around in high school — I hung out across the street, and I also didn’t. But some of my favorite people were usually there. People who weren’t from perfect one-story craftsman family homes on the West Side but instead grew up in the mountains, by the beach, in ramshackle family situations, in unheated garage bedrooms, a little closer to the edge than other people liked to acknowledge.

In high school I didn’t do drugs, didn’t even smoke cigarettes, was fairly tame in my sexuality. I was from a comparatively sane family, I did theater, I worked hard, and I wore interesting clothes. But I had friends who were far more adventurous than I was. And I loved them, and I hung out with them. Across the street.

Get outta line, next neck on the block –Circle Jerks, Coup D’Etat

Once my high school principal actually tried to talk to me about hanging out across the street. I was in his office for something unrelated, and he mentioned that it seemed like I was hanging out “over there” with “the wrong element.” My parents worked at the university. I used to be friends with (actually, date) his own son. I was a bright girl with a bright future and I wouldn’t want to, well, you know… I stared at him, at first honestly not sure what he was implying. Then I told him I didn’t know what he was talking about, and my friends were some of the smartest people I knew, and I walked outside. And across the street.

People who have had to fight for their identities—and especially people who have had to do this as children and teens—guard them with a mixture of unwavering pride and a sense of underlying vulnerability that never goes away, no matter how black your clothes or scratched your arms or loud your culture. If you are a teenager and someone puts you down, hits you, ignores you, or even just doesn’t really notice you – or if you feel in some other way (culturally, sexually) disenfranchised, it shows.  If you can find something that somehow, with its mix of intelligence and fuck-you-ness and bitter humor, speaks to your feelings, you memorize it. It’s punk for a lot of people, or movies like Repo Man, or theater or video games or whatever culture catches you in that moment of vulnerability and allows you in.

I’m not crazy / you’re the one who’s crazy / you’re driving me crazy –Suicidal Tendencies, Institutionalized

Listening back, this music sounds much mellower than I thought it was at the time. Punk. It is so angry and so about rebellion. But it is also just, really, rock ‘n’ roll, no? Sometimes faster, sometimes yelling-er , but always about a guitar and a kid who wants to be heard. I must have heard these songs when I first saw the film – probably in junior high, considering the fact that I had an older brother. I know that I loved Suicidal Tendencies and their dirty lack of tact or melody. I loved The Circle Jerks even though I wasn’t even really sure what their name meant. Black Flag was a presence that invoked Cool even if I never got super into them – channeling disaffected teenagers everywhere with we’ve got nothing better to do than watch tv and have a couple of brews, dude. And just today I realize that this soundtrack album contains the first version of “Pablo Picasso” I ever heard, long before I knew who the Modern Lovers or Jonathan Richman are.

I’m glad to have listened to this music young. I’m glad to have identified, even tangentially, with the cultural place this record represents. This place of rebellion and humor all at once, this cult Hollywood outsider status of whatever was happening in the 80s and 90s in California that left such an impression. And I’m glad people listened to me when I was a kid. I wish they’d listened to more of my friends.

Because this record is about them. Kids. About the way it sounded to be a teenager in this place, dreaming of access to a car or money, avoiding the crush of pressures large and small, feeling acutely aware of our impending-apocalyptic era, the hot California pavement shaking beneath our skin every day, trying to understand and accept and get the hell out of and fall in love with where we were from. Across the street, in a cul de sac, or on the open radioactive road. This is California, too.