Linda Ronstadt: The Sound
of My Voice (2019)
Directed by Rob Epstein and Jerry
Friedman
Greenwich Entertainment, PG-13, 95
minutes
★★★★★
Legions of heterosexual
male Baby Boomers once had serious fantasy crushes on three women: Joni
Mitchell, Grace Slick, and Linda Ronstadt. Between them they could fill a
good-sized hall with Grammy Awards and platinum records. Each was the mistress
of her craft and were drop-dead gorgeous. But just one also racked up two Country
Music Association Awards, an Emmy, a Tony, the largest–selling Spanish language
album of all time, recorded with Rubin Blades, scored with a crossover R &
B record with Aaron Neville, sang jazz standards with the Nelson Riddle
Orchestra, and made a trio album with Emmylou Harris and Dolly Parton: Linda Ronstadt. She has recorded with
everyone from Frank Zappa and Philip Glass to Neil Young, Earl Scruggs, and
Johnny Cash. About the only thing she never did was write songs, but few have
ever interpreted them with such aplomb.
The Sound of My Voice documents Ronstadt’s remarkable life and
career. Don’t let the last name fool you; Linda Mare Ronstadt was born into a
Mexican-American household in Tucson, the third child of the former Ruth Mary
Copeman (1914-82), a homemaker, and Gilbert Ronstadt (1911-95), a merchant and
a fine singer in his own right except–as Linda joked–when he tried to use his
baritone voice to sing the tenor parts to live broadcasts of the Metropolitan
Opera. If you’re wondering about the surname, chalk it up to several
generations of colonialism and immigration. Gilbert taught Linda scores of
Mexican corridos, canciones, and mariachi standards.
Ronstadt lit
out for Los Angeles at age 18 in 1964 and never looked back. To the best of my
knowledge she never recorded “How Can I Keep From Singing?” but if I had to
pick a song title to describe her, this would be it. As directors Rob Epstein
and Jerry Friedman show, making music was never a career choice per se; it was hard-wired
into Ronstadt’s DNA. She cared nothing for genres; if a song moved her, she
sang it. Man, did she ever sing it! It’s not quite true, but you could come
away from this film thinking Linda Ronstadt invented the power ballad. The film
contains superb early footage of Ronstadt with The Stone Poneys, her first LA
band, and it was apparent from the start she was special. In 1967, she covered
a Michael Naismith song, “Different Drum,” which had already been a hit for the
Greenbriar Boys. Or should I say, she inhabited it? Who today even remembers
any other version of the song? We see Ronstadt’s trademark style already in
place: open with a gentle, vulnerable touch and explode into the mix.
Footage such as
this makes the documentary sparkle. Because there is film to color each
transition, there is no need for a static Ken Burns-like approach that mixes stills
backed with voiceovers and just as much original music as copyright law allows.
Instead we hear Ronstadt singing and narrating in her own voice. Although she
did not do formal sit-down interviews with the directors–she now suffers from
Parkinson’s Disease–the film has a tight arc and immediacy that far surpasses
the sort of retrospective one might see on MTV or VH-1.
Ronstadt also
dazzles because she was to music what Lucille Ball was to television: a rare
woman in the male-dominated entertainment world that dictated her own terms. The
pop industry is both fickle and inherently conservative. Make a hit and
industry heads want more in the same vein until the vessels are bloodless. We
watch as time and again Ronstadt floated projects she was told would ruin her
career. Each time she plowed ahead and each time she was right.
A short list of Ronstadt pop hits includes:
“Blue Bayou,” “It’s So Easy,” “When Will I Be Loved,” “That’ll Be the Day,”
“Heart Like a Wheel,” “Crazy,” and “You’re No Good.” She was far and away the
biggest-selling female artist of the 1970s and early 1980s. You can imagine how
moguls must have torn out their hair to see her dressed in Mexican garb
fronting rope-twirling gauchos, plucking songs from the Great American Songbook, prancing about a Broadway stage in Pirates of Penzance, making films, and
telling anyone who listened that her favorite duet was with Kermit the Frog!
She also mentored such young talent as Karla Bonoff, Emmylou Harris, Don
Henley, J. D. Souther, and scores of others. Ronstadt comes across as both
generous and guileless–one quicker to praise the talents of others than to blow
her own horn.
In 2011,
Parkinson’s silenced Ronstadt. We watch her struggle to control her shaking as
she sits in a room with two musical nephews singing a classic Mexican song. She
doesn’t want to sing along but, as she puts it, “It’s family so what can you
do?” We know instantly that she could still sing if she could forced herself to
stay within her limitations. But how can she be at ease when the “sound of my
own voice” is different from what is in her head? Call it a bittersweet
footnote to a sterling career and a remarkable film. The latter is surely a
highlight of 2019, a year in which documentaries thus far have outshined
feature films.
Rob Weir
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