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Ronstadt and Dylan, then and now
Ray G. writes from Dearbornistan:
Now I know you’re a big Dylan fan …are you familiar with this song written by him? This is Linda Ronstadt, 1969 on the old late night Playboy tv show. Ronstadt is only about 21 at the time. Today she’s a pretty hardcore Mexican-American reconquista, if you’ve heard any political remarks she’s said lately. Sad. And she’s American born as were her parents—one of German ancestry, one of Mexican ancestry but she identifies herself as Mexican-American. But this is when she was young and fun.
LA replies:
Good performance, fresh and real. Not like what rock has become since then, the same uniform, dead sound in every rock band performance I’ve heard for the last 25 or 30 years.
What a talent Ronstadt had (and maybe still has, I don’t know). I had never listened to her much, then in 1980, just before embarking on a cross-country trip, I bought an album on cassette, “Living in the USA,” and was playing it in my car as I was driving from the East Coast to Colorado. What a beautiful album, beautiful voice. She had both the “belting” sound, and the sweet sound, and went back and forth between them. (I seem to remember a song called “Blue Bayou” on that album, but I don’t see it listed at the linked page.)
I wasn’t aware that Ronstadt had turned into a Mexican-(anti-)American activist, that’s horrendous.
* * *
Jeff in England sent me the link to the YouTube video of the Bob Dylan Cadillac ad. In the ad, we see Dylan driving a Cadillac out in the great open spaces somewhere while he talks in his Dylanesque way about how he feels about driving a Calillac. I wrote back to Jeff:
Could you tell me how a man destroys his speaking (and singing) voice like that? When Ronald Reagan was 66 years old he was a young man with a magnificent voice who was three years away from becoming President. Dylan, who once had such a unique and compelling speaking and singing voice, at 66 sounds like … well, let’s put it this way. If a dead man’s bones were thrown on a fire, and charred black, and they disintegrated into bits, and then these disintegrated bits of charred bones began to speak, they would sound like Dylan’s voice.
- end of initial entry -
Ray G. replies:
How funny. I have Living in the USA and still listen to it occasionally.
Give me a day or two and I’ll find some articles about her open borders rants and Bush as Hitler nonsense and the Michael Moore 911 film as a “truth.” Needless to say, she’s very, very liberal but she’s always been that way.
Anyway, about music, you’re right on the mark. Even though she’s not a songwriter, at least back then, singers like her were pretty talented as singers/interpreters and compared to today’s junk, it’s refreshing to see some honest music/entertainment. She puts Brittany Spears and other manufactured singers of today to shame.
These are all from before she hit it big commercially in 1974. She’s always been good but before stardom, she had a bit more of a raw feel that I think she lost a little over the years.
Enjoy some more. This song has an honest, heart-break quality.
Another Dylan song, “Baby You’ve Been on My Mind,” from her first solo album from ‘69. I like this. It’s from a John Byner (comedian) summer replacement tv show.
Look at this, I believe 1968, with her first band The Stone Poneys (folk). This is an odd version of their hit Different Drum (written by Monkee Michael Nesmith, who really was/is a fine songwriting talent).
Rocking version of the old Hank Williams classic Lovesick Blues. Again Playboy show, this time 1970.
Lastly, from her after she hit stardom, 1974. This concert is in a prison believe it or not. It was with Johnny Cash.
LA replies:
I’m listening to “Baby you’ve been on my mind.” She has a wonderful voice. The combination of romantic sweetness with power and urgency, just fantastic.
And now, you say, she’s a pro-Mexican anti-American.
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LA writes:
I’m watching a very early performance of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” sometime in 1964, before he came out with his electric sound and the “Carnaby Street” look he first adopted on the cover of Bringing It All Back Home, singing it live on an outdoor stage, dressed in a work shirt and work pants, similar to the way he looks on the cover of Another Side of Bob Dylan which came out in 1964, with what looks like Pete Seeger sitting behind him.
And it strikes me. This must be at least six months before he recorded the song for Bringing it All Back Home which came out at the beginning of 1965, yet he’s singing it very much like the way he does on the album. And that is so unusual for him, as he constantly changed the way he would perform a song, almost every time he performed it. Here, he’s singing in a voice he never used before, and maybe never used with any other song, a fuller, richer, deeper, stronger, more mature voice, a voice of someone who’s traveled across the universe and back, who’s seen it all. And he used that same voice on the recorded version of the song.
And he’s all of 23 years old, this skinny kid with this unusual face.
Here’s a nice comment from YouTube:
bob dylan seems nervous he even misses the rythm sometimes but he is excellent anyway and this video is awesome it is very natural, black and white and reflects those times very well. i love the young bob dylan. he is enthusiastic and inspirational. he is making a music from the heart and when i listen to him he makes me feel free.
The comment reminds me of something my late sister said many years ago, some time in the ’70s. She was of an older generation, not at all into the Sixties music and Dylan the way my brother and I were, but then one time she unexpectedly heard “Mr. Tambourine Man,” she was sleeping or resting somewhere and suddenly heard it being played, and she told us about it later and said the sound of Dylan’s voice cut through her soul.
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Ralph P. writes:
These love affairs we have with musical artists from that era will always disappoint. I learned long ago that if I started divesting myself of all the music which goes against my beliefs then I wouldn’t have many albums left. My particular cross to bear is Neil Young. Hearing songs like “Harvest”, “Old Man” or “Sugar Mountain” I recognize a gifted lyricist and a straightforward, heartfelt delivery. Concert footage of him even as an old man himself shows him laying it all out there, like Springsteen (I’m NOT a fan of, um, The Boss). Young looks like he loves to be on stage and that is very much appreciated.
Then I run across a song like this:
Cortez The Killer
He came dancing across the water
With his galleons and guns
Looking for the new world
In that palace in the sun.
On the shore lay Montezuma
With his coca leaves and pearls
In his halls he often wondered
With the secrets of the worlds.
And his subjects gathered ‘round him
Like the leaves around a tree
In their clothes of many colors
For the angry gods to see.
And the women all were beautiful
And the men stood straight and strong
They offered life in sacrifice
So that others could go on.
Hate was just a legend
And war was never known
The people worked together
And they lifted many stones.
They carried them to the flatlands
And they died along the way
But they built up with their bare hands
What we still can’t do today.
And I know she’s living there
And she loves me to this day
I still can’t remember when
Or how I lost my way.
He came dancing across the water
Cortez, Cortez
What a killer.
Thank God that when the feces hit the ventilation device people like this are going to become irrelevant even faster than they are now, talent notwithstanding.
LA replies:
Harvest is my favorite Neil Young album and indeed the only Neil Young album, as an album, that I ever got into. It’s deeply moving. “Old Man” is sad, but a beautiful song.
So this is what becomes of the Sixties/Seventies. Neil Young, artist, sensitive seeker of love, holding up the mass human sacrifice cult of the Aztecs as an ideal to be contrasted with the killer European Christians. Does this idiot really think that the Aztec men “offered life in sacrifice”? He doesn’t know the victims were captives taken in war from other peoples—thousands of them, every year?
For someone like Neil Young to idealize the Aztec cult of human sacrifice epitomizes the tragic—no, evil—delusions of the left.
Ralph P. writes:
Of course “Cortez the Killer” was recorded a long time ago and I don’t know if Neil might have changed by now, but I doubt it. Songs like this epitomize the sheer unthinkingness of the left’s idiots. In fact one of the great accomplishments of cultural Marxism has been to transfer the normal idealizations of young people from their own kind to the “Other.” After all, a kid playing wargames in his backyard does it thoughtlessly, without really knowing what it is his grandpa went through in the war. The difference, of course is that it is entirely age appropriate, whereas in a college age person or older it would be pathetic. Add to that the smug adoption of poorly understood alien cultures and a demonization of your own and we have described a large portion of the upper socio-economic half of the baby-boom generation. “Cortez the Killer” is the product of almost total self involvement. I mean, “Hate was just a legend and war was never known”? Five seconds of reflection should be enough for any sane person to dispel that notion, even without knowing anything about the Aztecs. Only a commited navel-gazer could believe it. It’s actually laughable, until one realizes that the Aztecs are here in our country and wanting to put us on the top of those pyramids (because after all, how is MS-13 any different than Montezuma?), and its precisely those navel-gazers who have gathered real political and cultural power and are stopping us from preventing the neo-Aztecs from doing just that. Infuriating is far too weak a word to describe what I feel about that.
Stephen T. writes:
Like Michael Dukakis, whose sudden discovery of his Greek roots coincided with his need to get the ethnic vote in his campaign for president, Linda Ronstadt became a Hispanic singer just about the time her weight began to get really out of control. But she was cute back in her American days.
Ray G. writes:
It’s a dreary, rainy day here in Michigan, trapped indoors. I used to like her back in the 70’s like millions of teen-aged boys. Lost track of her through the ’80s and 90’s, when she strayed into 1940s/1950s big band and “smaltzy” type lounge songs….then Mexican ranchero music. She made a pretty fine pop/rock album (cd) around 1998 called “We Ran”, with another Dylan tune, Just Like Tom’s Thumb I believe is the title. I’m not familiar with all Dylan tunes but I respect him as perhaps the greatest songwriter of the pop era.
You wouldn’t recognize her today, very overweight, her face is like a balloon, sad to say.
Yes, Baby You’ve Been On My Mind is a fine version and kind of very early “music video,” unpretentous, innocent. It’s from her fine 1969 solo artist debut album “Hand Sown, Home Grown” (hippie reference!). Listening to it now, it’s quite progressive/innovative for 1969, the early country-rock alternative sound, kids would say today.
On the old Johnny Cash show, good tune and listen to their chat and the follow up, slow sad song, she did a fine job keeping up with Cash, when she was only about 20 at the time.
1982 nice up-tempo pop/rock tune.
1976 concert in England BI (Before Islam).
Here’s a link to this relatively new cdition (2006), that includes all of LR’s first four albums. If you scroll down about one quarter of the way, you’ll see a track listing, where you can sample a moments of each song. Her first album not only had Dylan’s Baby You’ve Been On My Mind but I forgot to tell you, I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight, which I think the young Linda does a cool, sultry version of.
Jeff in England writes:
The Dylan song sung by Ronstadt you mean to refer to is MAMA YOU’VE BEEN ON MY MIND (not Baby You’ve Been on My Mind) which is an outtake from the ANOTHER SIDE OF BOB DYLAN album and one which he sometimes performs live. Great song.
Irv P. writes (11/26/07):
I just read the thread about Dylan and Ronstadt.
Someone gave me tickets a few summers back to see her at Jones Beach. She was doing a show showcasing her interpretations of Cole Porter music. It was so bad that my wife and I left after about 40 minutes. It was excruciating!! We NEVER leave a show. This was too much to take.
Everytime she spoke, her liberalism came blaring through. I for one have no desire to revisit her old days. As far as I’m concerned, she never existed.
It’s “nice” of you and some of your readers to look back at her early life and artistically “appreciate” what you see. Me, I just see her as worthless!
Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 17, 2007 04:06 PM | Send
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