10/7/19

Linda Ronstadt Documentary is Like Falling in Love Again



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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