In the world of popular music, it would be hard to imagine a crueler twist of fate than the taking away of Linda Ronstadt’s magnificent singing voice by Parkinson’s disease.
That unkind cut was diagnosed in 2013, just after she finished writing “Simple Dreams,” a “musical memoir” that takes us through her four-decade career as one of the most celebrated and successful rock divas of her generation, winning 11 Grammys and selling more than 100 million records.
Her book makes no mention of it, but the woman voted top female pop singer of the 1970s hasn’t been able to squeak out a note in years. Sadly for her and for her legions of fans, Parkinson’s is a degenerative disease that affects motor control, including of the vocal chords.
“Ironically enough, one of the places Parkinson’s shows up first is in the voice,” Ronstadt, who turns 72 on Sunday, explains one recent morning, speaking from her home in San Francisco’s Sea Cliff neighborhood, a picturesque enclave overlooking the Pacific Ocean and the Golden Gate Bridge.
“It was really gradual, like someone moving the fader on the board when you’re recording — a tiny little bit at a time,” she continues in a reassuringly relaxed, clear speaking voice. “As a year went by, I’d notice that something was wrong. I’d say, ‘This isn’t singing. This is yelling.’”
Unsure of what was happening to her, she retired from performing in 2011, and was stunned when doctors gave her the Parkinson’s diagnosis. “I resisted looking up what I had on the Internet to see what I was in for,” she says. “When I did I was a little shocked.”
And then she adds, laughing, “You have to practice radical acceptance.”
RADICAL ACCEPTANCE
Practicing radical acceptance doesn’t mean she’s given up entirely, or has completely lost hope, even as she finds it harder and harder to walk and to do simple personal chores like getting dressed and brushing her teeth.
“There isn’t any cure,” she says. “There are some new drugs that show promise, but they’re so far out you never know if you’re going to get those or not. The good news is that everything that helps Parkinson’s disease seems to help Alzheimer’s, so there’s a lot of research going on, which is what we need.”
These days, what Ronstadt feels most comfortable doing is reclining in her living room, reading book after book (including a current one about Eleanor Roosevelt) and entertaining the occasional visitor — famous friends like Paul Simon, Jackson Browne, Randy Newman and “singing sister” Emmylou Harris.
Her friendship with Harris goes back to the days when neither of them was famous and they would stay up all night singing with Harris’ boyfriend, Gram Parsons.
In 1987, Ronstadt recorded “Trio,” an album with Harris and Dolly Parton that sold 4 million copies and won two Grammys.
“The last time Emmylou was here she came over with a big pile of laundry,” Ronstadt happily recalls. “She didn’t want to wait for the hotel to bring it back, so she did it here while we sat and talked. We used to sing together, but now we’re reduced to laundry. But that was fun, and I got to catch up with her a little bit.”
OUT IN PUBLIC
In the five years since her memoir was published, she’s made it a point to make five or six public appearances a year. She has several upcoming speaking engagements in the Bay Area, including one on Sept. 15 at Dominican University in San Rafael.
“I’ve been doing these all along,” she says. “It’s a chance to sell some books and make people feel happy. Either I can just go to bed and stay there, or I can have my finger on the pulse a little bit. It keeps me in touch with the world.”
During her multimedia evening, “A Conversation with Linda,” she shows videos and rare personal photos, tells stories and takes questions from the audience.
A Huffington Post review of her sold-out show on Long Island last year was effusive, saying, “The event took me by surprise as I didn’t realize how funny Linda is. She was so captivating that I forgot to take notes.”
A ROCK HEARTTHROB
In the 1970s, when she became the first female rock superstar capable of selling out sports arenas, Ronstadt was cast as a rock ‘n’ roll heartthrob. Her glamorous image was splashed on the covers of Time and Newsweek. Rolling Stone had her on its cover a half dozen, including alluring Annie Liebowitz shots of her in a sexy red teddy and a satiny pink slip.
In 2014, when President Obama honored her with a National Medal of Arts, he confessed that, when he was a kid, he had a crush on her.
At the peak of her fame, she was famously linked romantically with young Gov. Jerry Brown and “Star Wars” creator George Lucas.
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| Ronstadt’s fame, she was famously linked romantically with young Gov. Jerry Brown. |
In the 1980s, she lived in San Anselmo, where Lucas has a home, and says she still spends more time in Marin than in the city, crossing the bridge at least every three weeks to get her hair cut.
“I do everything over there because there are no parking places in San Francisco,” she says with a light laugh. “There are about three parking places in Marin and we usually hope to get one of them. When I used to live there, it impressed me as being disturbingly white. It’s not quite that much now. There’s a little bit of brown from people there. I’d like to be more in touch with them.”
She stays very much in touch with Gov. Brown, who’s just finishing his final term.
“Jerry was here last Thanksgiving with his wife, Anne (Gust), who’s just delicious,” she says. “I really love her. She’s a really nice person — funny and smart. She has a great sense of humor with him. That a good marriage, I think. Jerry’s a lot better off with her. She makes him stronger.”
About Lucas, all she says is, “We’re friends.”
BORED WITH POP
As a singer, Ronstadt has never been satisfied with conventional rock stardom. When she was helping pioneer Southern California country rock in the ’60s and ’70s, she toured with Neil Young and the Doors, lived with songwriter J.D. Souther and once employed the Eagles as her backup band. She roared up the charts with glossy singles like “Different Drum,” “Heat Wave,” “Just One Look,” “You’re No Good” and “Blue Bayou,” among many others.
But she became bored with pop music, preferring to sing ballads like “Heart Like a Wheel.” She recorded a Great American Songbook album with Nelson Riddle, starred in “The Pirates of Penzance” on Broadway and even took a stab at opera, singing the role of Mimi in a New York Shakespeare production of Puccini’s “La Boheme.”
Even though she’s no longer touring the world and has time on her hands, she never listens to her old records.
“The music feels frozen in time to me,” she explains. “And I’d evolved over the years. So, I’d question myself, saying, ‘Why did I sing that? That’s stupid. Later on, I sang something better.”
Ronstadt credits her childhood in Tucson, Arizona, as the source of all her musical inspiration. She grew up in a pioneering ranching family of German, Dutch and Mexican ancestry that made music a centerpiece of its home life. In 1987, she celebrated the Mexican side of her heritage with “Canciones de Mi Padre (Songs of My Father),” an album of traditional Mexican music that sold 2½ million copies, making it the biggest non-English-speaking record of all time.
“My God, traditional Mexican music is so rich,” she says. “It goes on and on. You move five blocks and you have a totally different culture. I listened to all that growing up, so I had a toehold by the time I started doing it professionally.”
Tucson is just 60 miles north of the Mexican border, and Ronstadt has long been involved with activists supporting immigrant rights. She’s volunteered with an organization called the Green Valley/Sahuarita Samaritans, co-founded by her friend Shura Wallin.
“When I was getting ready to retire from singing, we’d go down to the border and find people in terrible shape with their feet full of cactus thorns,” she recalls. “We’d wash their feet and bandage them. Once you’ve washed somebody’s feet, you have a totally different relationship with them.”
As you might suspect, she’s horrified by the Trump administration’s zero tolerance policy — the tearing away of immigrant children from their parents and families.
“They’ve been putting children in jail and threatening to steal them for a long time, and now they’re doing it as a matter of policy,” she says. “Those poor children are suffering permanent harm. It’s an outrage to keep human beings penned up like animals.”
NO SEQUEL
Ronstadt sold her house in Tucson, finding it too difficult to travel back and forth and to maintain two homes. She now lives exclusively in San Francisco.
“I love it here,” she says. “It’s always cold.”
She never married, but has two adopted children, Mary and Carlos, now grown. Her daughter comes over for brunch every Sunday and her son, who works in an Apple store Genius Bar, recently moved back in with her after breaking up with his girlfriend.
Although her story isn’t over, she has no plans to write a sequel to “Simple Dreams” that picks up after her Parkinson’s diagnosis.
“Writing is hard on me because I can’t type anymore,” she explains. “When I wrote ‘Simple Dreams,’ I could still type, but I can’t do that now. My fingers tremble so I hit the keys too many times. I can barely sign my name.”
Asked about her plans for the future, she sighs and says, “It depends on how much strength I wind up with and how fast this disease goes. I can’t really make a plan. I’ve just got to take what comes every day.”
Contact Paul Liberatore at p.liberatore@comcast.net
IF YOU GO
What: “A Conversation with Linda Ronstadt”
When: 7:30 p.m. Sept. 15
Where: Donimican University’s Angelico Hall, 20 Olive Ave., San Rafael
Admission: $45 to $85
http://www.marinij.com/arts-and-entertainment/20180712/linda-ronstadt-returns-to-marin-to-talk-about-her-career-parkinsons
