Do you remember what upset you so much? Well, first of all, I never heard Howard Stern on the radio. I had no idea who he was. But it had just been on the news that day, what he had said about—oh, the girl singer. Selena, yeah. And it just offended me. It was best when I forgot about everything and just thought about the music, but it took me a long time to get there.
We were encouraged in the sixties to think of us and them. The hippies started that whole tribal thing, and it was the straights against the hippies. It was unhealthy. Your relationship with Jerry Brown is covered in the documentary and in your book, but not your relationships with some other prominent people, like Jim Carrey and George Lucas.
Is there a reason for that? I was writing about the music. Water in California. He said when he retires he wants to study trees and California Indians.
The press always made such a big deal about the fact that you never got married. But I never needed to get married. I had my own life. I had a crush on Kermit, so it was a problem because of Miss Piggy. He was her property. But we had a really good time on that show. I loved watching them. They let me help them with the story and the songs. This crush that I had on Kermit, they developed into a little storyline where Miss Piggy and I have a confrontation.
I was just ambushed by that song. They sang a really good song. You should hear it. The manager I had at the time said it was too corny. Somebody said it would never be a hit. I sang it all the way through my career. Were you surprised by the songs from that album that became hits? I was surprised anything of mine was successful, because it always seemed so hodge-podge.
We needed to have an uptempo song to close the show with, and that was a song I knew from the radio. Not having the ability to observe other people, because people are observing you. I had to keep my head down all the time. It was kind of excruciating. I still feel that way. Also, relationships were hard, because I was always on the bus. In the media, women are built up with sex as a weapon and men are threatened by it as much as they are drawn to it, and they retaliate as hard as they can.
I have to say that when I look at my whole career, over all, what counted the most was whether you showed up and played the music. I saw it happen with Emmylou, and I saw it happen with Joni Mitchell. Joni Mitchell was threatening to everybody. She could play better. She could sing better. She looked better. She could just do it all. Did you find that there were things that were harder for you as a woman than for your male contemporaries?
Well, I had to do makeup and hair. Guys just shower and put on any old clothes. And then there were high heels. I have extra ankle bones in each foot, and high heels were agonizing.
I used to wear them onstage, kick them off, hide my feet behind the monitors, and find my shoes again before I had to leave the stage. At the height of your rock-and-roll fame, you decided to do Gilbert and Sullivan. What drew you to that? My mother had a book of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas on piano, and somehow I learned the songs. I heard my sister practicing them. Part of me was very tired of it. I liked the idea of a proscenium stage. I think a proscenium has a lot to do with focussing your attention.
A theatre is a machine built to focus your attention and allow you to dream. Throughout the eighties, you experimented wildly with genre, everything from Puccini to the Great American Songbook to Mexican canciones.
And I realized, all of a sudden, people might not show up. They really might hate it. I was ordering matzo-ball soup from the Carnegie Deli next door, and it gave me the shakes so bad that I could barely stand when I got onstage. I was holding hands with Nelson Riddle in the wings—he was nervous, too.
He wrote beautiful charts for me. I was really lucky to have him. I went back to my apartment that night and just smiled, because we had gotten away with an evening of American standard songs.
When I see something now like Lady Gaga recording a standards album with Tony Bennett, it seems like she owes you a debt. Well, she owes me nothing. But, up until then, attempts by female pop artists to go back and do standards had not been successful. It depends on what the audience is expecting of you. When I did Mexican songs, I brought in a whole new audience. I played the same venues, but it was grandmothers and grandchildren. People brought their kids.
Ronstadt's childhood home was always filled with music, and vocal talent seemed her birthright. Her father "had a beautiful baritone singing voice," she says in her book, and her grandfather conducted a brass band in the late 19th century.
Meanwhile, her aunt was a performer who specialized in traditional music from parts of Mexico and Spain.
By the time she reached her teens, Ronstadt and her siblings had formed a band and would play at local clubs. Commercial folk music intrigued them the most, Ronstadt writes; they would learn songs by Peter, Paul and Mary and then rearrange them to fit their own voices. Ronstadt briefly enrolled at the University of Arizona in but dropped out to pursue a singing career in California.
Bobby Kimmel, a musician who played bass in her siblings' band, introduced her to a guitarist named Kenny Edwards. The trio formed the folk group the Stone Poneys and began booking gigs after playing an open mic night at L. The Stone Poneys released their first and second albums in , and soon after had their first hit with a version of "Different Drum," a bluegrass track by The Greenbriar Boys.
With their song playing on Top 40 radio, the band got an even bigger gig opening for The Doors on tour. Yet at the end of their jaunt, the other two members of the Stone Poneys began to pursue other passions, and Ronstadt -- seen here on "The Johnny Cash Show" in -- became a solo act.
Jerry Brown, whom Ronstadt famously dated. Ronstadt released four solo albums between and , but it wasn't until 's "Heart Like A Wheel" that the singer collected her first Grammy Award, along with two No. Ronstadt, seen here with Ringo Starr left and Paul Williams, picked up a second golden gramaphone for her album "Hasten Down the Wind.
The photos that ran with the profile were taken by Annie Leibovitz, including this iconic shot of Ronstadt in red. Building on the success of songs like "Blue Bayou" and "Heat Wave," Ronstadt -- seen here with a mother and baby camel during her African safari in Nairobi, Kenya in -- became a mega-star performing in sold-out arenas.
As the story goes, Ronstadt had just finished singing the National Anthem at a World Series game when she stepped into an L. She was seated next to California Gov. Jerry Brown and the rest, as they say, was romantic history. He likes passionate music, passionate women," Ronstadt says of her years-long relationship with Brown in the CNN Films documentary. At the dawn of the s, Ronstadt was at the top of her game.
Ronstadt continued to rack up Grammy wins and nominations throughout the s, including two nods for her album "Get Closer. But at the same time, Ronstadt says she began to long for something different. It may have seemed like a detour, but it was really Ronstadt returning to her roots: Her paternal grandfather wrote an instrumental arrangement for "Pirates" in Ronstadt had known country superstars Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris center and right for years by the time the three decided to release the album "Trio.
By the late s, Ronstadt had tackled folk, rock, pop, country and even light opera - and the musical style that was calling her next was one that reminded her of home.
Drawing on her Mexican heritage and the songs of her childhood, Ronstadt released a Spanish-language album called "Canciones de Mi Padre" despite resistance from her record company.
But, all along, the Trump administration has been encouraging resentment of people from Mexico. As a prime example, she cites a horrific incident that occurred the other week in which the trumpet player for the Mavericks, Lorenzo Molina Ruiz, and his friend Orlando Morales, were allegedly violently attacked in a restaurant in Cool Springs, Tennessee, for speaking Spanish. Morales reportedly suffered a broken nose, internal bleeding and a concussion. Ronstadt blames the incident on the atmosphere fanned by the current administration.
The result has greatly exacerbated feelings of alienation and internalized shame that have long affected Mexican Americans, according to Los Cenzontles founder Eugene Rodriguez. For Ronstadt, Mexican culture has always been a source of pride. She believes she managed to escape the scourge of internalized prejudice because of her light skin and German surname.
Ronstadt grew up in a household in Arizona where her extended family always sang Mexican songs. She always yearned to record them but her record company nixed the idea. Still, she bided her time. After the singer had giant hits with albums covering American standards in the early 80s, years before it became a significant trend for contemporary singers to do so, she told her record company her plans to cut an all-Mexican work. But I had to sing those songs or I was going to die.
The resulting collection wound up becoming the biggest-selling non-English language album in history.
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