If you’re a singer or part of a musical ensemble that doesn’t have all of the required parts in it, then you’re going to want to have the best session musicians available to you to join you on your journey. It’s quite understandable why someone like Linda Ronstadt would want to be particular about this sort of thing.
In her career as a solo artist, she was constantly reliant on the talents of those around her to provide a suitable and prominent backing to her vocals, and by the mid-1970s, she had elevated herself to star status, known around the world for hits like ‘You’re No Good’ and ‘When Will I Be Loved’.
For the most part, she was blessed with excellent players, and this became especially apparent the more notable she became for her work. Of course, it would become easier for her to court the best in the business when she herself was at the top of her game, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that those at the bottom of the ladder can’t acquire the services of those who are established performers themselves.
However, she wasn’t always firing on all cylinders, and it took a lot of hard work for her to get herself to this position in the first place, having been active in the music industry for almost a decade by the time that she was topping the charts for the first time in 1975.
Her first project, Stone Poneys, is one that she doesn’t really look back on fondly these days, due to it not having the exact creative direction she had always wished to take, and many of the comments she has made about the band’s material border on disparaging and dismissive. However, her experiences of working with one of the most illustrious groups of musicians during this period came as something of a shock to her system, and she found it impossible to work with them, as she explained during a 2013 interview with Rock Cellar.
“We used some players from the Wrecking Crew on that,” she said, referring to her band’s minor 1967 hit, ‘Different Drum’. “Don Randi was on harpsichord and Jimmy Gordon on drums. When you had expensive musicians on the clock, you didn’t keep them long. Those players in the Wrecking Crew were so good you could book half a session, and that would be enough time to get what you wanted recorded properly.”
Despite having two prominent figures who had played on the hits of acts like The Beach Boys and The Monkees, not to mention that the recording also featured Eagles’ Bernie Leadon and was written by The Monkees’ Mike Nesmith, Ronstadt insists that they were only picked because they were the first available people.
“I didn’t know that world at all,” she continued. “I’d just come from Tucson, and I had no clue. I’d just played music with the people that I knew; I didn’t know there were other people you could hire. I was worried about it. It’s not that they weren’t good players – my God, they were vastly better players than we were, but they hadn’t evolved along our same path.”
It’s perhaps a case of her own inexperience showing, but it’s almost certainly also a valuable one to have had so early on, so she would know exactly what to do later on when she found herself surrounded by some of the biggest names in the industry and on the cusp of international success. From: https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/band-who-ruined-linda-ronstadt-1967-breakthrough/
