Linda Ronstadt is seated in her manager`s office in Los Angeles, rummaging through her large, seemingly bottomless purse looking for throat lozenges. ”What gets me are these viruses that are going around,” she said smiling, finding what she was after. ”I have two nephews that go to kindergarten and every time I kiss them, I get some kindergarten disease. It`s amazing.”
While Ronstadt, 43, complains of a sore throat, it doesn`t dampen her enthusiasm for her recently released new album, ”Cry Like a Rainstorm, Howl Like the Wind,” her first pop project in nearly eight years.
After appearing in the Broadway production and film version of ”The Pirates of Penzance,” tackling three big-band collaborations with Nelson Riddle, performing in the opera ”La Boheme,” immersing herself in the Mexican folk music of the ”Canciones De Mi Padre” album and tour, and traditional country with Emmylou Harris and Dolly Parton on the ”Trio” LP, the Tucson-born singer with the crystalline voice is back to basics.
”Rainstorm,” which includes four vocal collaborations with celebrated New Orleans R&B singer Aaron Neville, is the first album to put her on mainstream radio since ”Get Closer” in 1982.
But the tracks on the lush ”Rainstorm” are far from straightforward rock songs such as ”When Will I Be Loved” and ”How Do I Make You,” which previously had composed a large share of her pop playlist.
Recorded at George Lucas` Skywalker Ranch in Marin County with a 61-piece orchestra, the 80-voice Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir, the Tower of Power horn section, and one vocal arrangement from Brian Wilson, ”Rainstorm” puts the emphasis on soaring, wide-screen ballads such as ”I Keep It Hid,”
”Shattered,” ”Goodbye My Friend,” ”All My Life,” ”Don`t Know Much”
and ”Adios.”
”A lot of the stuff I`d been wanting to do for a long time,” she explained. ” `Shattered` came to me around the time I was doing `Pirates.`
When I heard (these songs), I`d always wanted to do them with an orchestra and, when I was in New York, I got involved with the Nelson Riddle material. Learning to work with an orchestra gave me the foundation to put those songs together right and to express them. And working with mariachis, which is a folk orchestra, gave me a much more intimate awareness of how strings and horns can be used to suit me as a singer. I got very spoiled working with orchestras.”
Initially, the element with which she was the most uncomfortable was her collaborator, Aaron Neville, a performer she has admired for years. She first sang with him in 1984 by chance during his appearance at the World`s Fair in New Orleans. ”He asked me to come up and sing, and I was just astonished,”
she said. ”I never do that. I don`t like to get up and jam; it makes me nervous. I went up like a sleepwalker, and we did some doo-wop song, `Earth Angel` or something, and I was just bowled over. But when we were singing, up in the higher register, I thought our voices sounded good together. I thought about that for a long time and, lo and behold, Aaron calls me several months later and says they`re doing a benefit for the homeless down there and would I come and sing some songs with him. I ran down there, I was so excited.”
The benefit appearance went so well that Ronstadt finally decided to propose a recording project.
”I was working on my nerve and we went out to dinner,” recalled Ronstadt, who then imitated a rushed, nervous voice. ” `So, Aaron, it would be really nice if we could make a record together.` He said, `Sure.` All the time I was working on `Trio` and the Mexican stuff, we`d be on the phone.”
While ”Rainstorm” only hints at rock `n` roll, Ronstadt says that was intentional. ”My records have always been very, very heavy on ballads,” she said. ”I`m very comfortable singing them. I like them. They`re hard, harder than those other songs, but I like them. They give you a lot of room. I have had a lot of experiences in my life. I need some room to put it in there.”
She said with a grin, ”Short notes just don`t give me enough room.”
While Ronstadt has taken some criticism for being a dilettante, shuttling from style to style, she maintains that each phase represents a different part of her life experience. If the staging of ”Canciones” came when there is growing appreciation of various world musics, Ronstadt says her fascination began a long time ago.
”Musically, everything that I`ve done was in the living room when I was 5 years old. It was either on the radio, my mother was playing the piano, or my father was singing and playing the guitar,” she said.
Born of Mexican-German-Dutch ancestry, Ronstadt was exposed to Mexican folk music, country and big band music early. Her father, a hardware dealer, was a musician, while her grandfather staged ”The Pirates of Penzance” at his Tucson Club Filharmonico in the late 1800s. Her aunt, singer Luisa Ronstadt, titled her Mexican songbook ”Canciones De Mi Padre.”
Ronstadt`s first hit, ”Different Drum” in 1967, introduced her as a bright, new voice on the Los Angeles pop music landscape. In the `70s, she became a major attraction as part of the burgeoning country-rock and singer-songwriter scene, which included the Eagles and Jackson Browne. She racked up big hit singles with ”You`re No Good,” ”Blue Bayou,” ”Heat Wave,” and ”It`s So Easy” and radio-prone albums such as ”Heart Like a Wheel,”
”Hasten Down the Wind,” and ”Living in the USA.” But the success, which forced her to play large arenas, proved to be one reason she forsook pop in the `80s to work with different styles of music.
Ronstadt remembers the Los Angeles scene of the `70s: ”It was a golden age in the sense that there were a lot of developing musical styles. When the music went out in those big halls, it was better for your pocketbook, but it wasn`t so good for the music. There were a lot of us who were disappointed by that. I can remember having a conversation with (Little Feat`s) Lowell George before he died (in 1979) and he was going on about how it wasn`t the same. It was real fun to see Little Feat in some club someplace.
”I went to New York for (theatrical producer) Joe Papp because I didn`t like playing those coliseums. It`s exhilarating to play for 40,000 people, but it`s not a human space. I purposely took `Canciones` to 8,000- to 10,000-seaters-and we wound up playing 30,000-seat venues sometimes-but I enjoyed it the most in the smaller halls.”
But if Ronstadt became known for her hits in the `70s, she also became a non-musical media celebrity, being seen out with then-California Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. and breaking the music industry boycott of South Africa by performing six shows in 1983 at the Sun City Casino`s Sun Bowl, located in the homeland of Bophuthatswana, the major venue for international performers. She also duetted with Paul Simon on his controversial ”Graceland” project, partly recorded in Johannesburg.
”I went to South Africa and sang, and that`s something that can still be disputed,” she said. ”I personally feel that art should never, never be boycotted. I would sing in China. I would sing in Chile. I don`t think the policies of our government are particularly admirable in some respects. I don`t stop singing in Boston because there`s racism, where it`s horrendous.
”If rock `n` roll had been circulating freely through there (South Africa) from the `60s on, I think there would have been even more of a change by now. Look what happened over here. There was a revolution in the `60s-some of it for the good, a lot of it not so good-but much of it for the good, and that was propelled by pop music.
Ronstadt doesn`t buy the argument from anti-apartheid activists that a boycott on all fronts will make middle- and upper-class South Africans uncomfortable and force them to agitate for change. ”Who are you punishing?” she said. ”The government is not the people. The governments are the oppressors, all governments are monsters.” She noted the irony of the segregated homelands set up by the South African governments being able to set up their own ”TV and radio stations . . . which can broadcast anything they please. It`s backfiring in the (South African government`s) face.
”Would I play Israel? You bet. Would I play one of the Arab countries?
Of course. We are directly interfering with people`s lives in Central America and, as a Latin, how can I be a member of this country, play concerts here, give aid and comfort to people who-through their tax dollars-are allowing people to be massacred and tortured? Once you start thinking like that, you have to be responsible for everything, and you can`t be that way.”
She won`t return to play in South Africa, but it`s not for political reasons.
”You can`t make any money doing it because it costs too much money to get down there and, for my own personal tastes, I don`t care for casinos. I don`t care for Las Vegas, I don`t care for Atlantic City, and I don`t care for Sun City.”
She is less voluble on the other media event, her dates with Jerry Brown. ”I don`t think that`s anyone`s business,” she said. ”The public doesn`t deserve anything but a good show. If they want to know who I`m dating, I`m just not going to tell them.”
Although Ronstadt is temporarily back in the pop fold, her next projects promise to be as diverse as her recent adventures. She plans to tour with Neville, record a pop album with Brian Wilson as well as a second Spanish-language acoustic album, and help organize the annual benefit for La Frontera, a Tucson, Ariz., bilingual mental health clinic. In fact, she doesn`t really care about what`s going on in pop music anymore.
”I`ve become very out of touch with what`s played on the radio these days,” she conceded. ”Honest to God, I don`t have a clue except that I hear things from friends, like Prince and the odd pop record that I admire. The fact that I`ve made records for the last five years that haven`t been played on the radio that have sold hugely proves there`s a discrepancy somewhere that should be addressed.”
Two things she won`t be doing are writing many of her own songs (”It`s not my gift,” she said) or returning to acting soon.
