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Post by jhar26 on Apr 9, 2012 14:04:22 GMT -5
Is she now 'officially retired' or can we still expect new recordings? Her last album "Humming to Myself" is almost eight years old by now. Linda Ronstadt when we were all a little younger (some of us probably still unborn in fact .
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Post by erik on Apr 10, 2012 9:30:20 GMT -5
Most of what she is doing now is related to her Mexican-American heritage, including fighting a hugely oppressive law being passed by far right-wing forces in her home state of Arizona which forces law enforcement officers to pull over and arrest anyone they suspect of being in America illegally (i.e./to wit, Hispanics). She has made cameo appearances on albums by friends like legendary songwriter Jimmy Webb, multi-instrumental virtuoso David Bromberg, and bluegrass favorite Laurie Lewis. And her 2006 album with Ann Savoy, Adieu False Heart, was highly acclaimed as well.
But, yes, I think that is all she wrote as far as recording and touring are concerned. The career accolades are starting to come in now, but primarily from the Mexican-American circle. She still hasn't gotten any love from either the Country Music Hall of Fame, nor (and this is especially galling) the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
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Post by jhar26 on Apr 10, 2012 12:36:38 GMT -5
I saw a Ronstadt concert cd on Amazon the other day, but it looked to me kinda bootleg-ish. It's from that 1980 television concert from the 'Mad Love' era.
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Post by erik on Apr 10, 2012 12:58:00 GMT -5
I wouldn't be surprised. But when it's a bootlegged video, high quality isn't something you can expect (IMHO). Just as a sidebar, besides the unofficial Linda Ronstadt website and its attendant message forum, there is a very fine Ronstadt-related blog that has a lot of stuff to it, and is more than worth seeing. There is a lot of audio excerpts there that not everyone has exactly been privy to, and plenty of rare photographs of Linda as well: simplylindaronstadt.tumblr.com/
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Post by jhar26 on Apr 10, 2012 13:45:39 GMT -5
Interesting looking blog. I will check it out.
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Post by jhar26 on Apr 11, 2012 3:25:04 GMT -5
She still hasn't gotten any love from either the Country Music Hall of Fame, nor (and this is especially galling) the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Well, Ronstadt hasn't made that many pure country albums, except for a few poor-ish earlier ones and those she did with Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris. Other than that the country songs were part of a bigger whole dominated by Californian rock, singer/songwriter type of ballads and covers of 60's classics. I know nothing about the Country Music Hall of Fame, but it could be that the purists object to her inclusion. The same could be true where the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is concerned - the fact that only a small percentage of her recorded material actually IS rock. But we could say the same about many of those that were inducted of course. In fact, many in there never sang a rock song in their life, which makes it more a Popular Music HOF than a Rock HOF, which in my opinion is what it should be to begin with. Maybe Ronstadt's non-inclusion also has something to do with what Ron once said in the past - it's not so much that LR isn't a songwriter but the fact that many of her most famous recordings, the hits, were covers of songs that were already established classics by other artists.
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Post by erik on Apr 11, 2012 9:24:01 GMT -5
Quote by jhar26:
Couldn't the same thing be said for a lot of others who are in there then? Besides, we're really talking about the influence she has had on others, which is much larger in reality than the taste makers who run that joint make it out to be.
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Post by jhar26 on Apr 11, 2012 12:14:13 GMT -5
Couldn't the same thing be said for a lot of others who are in there then? I don't know. Perhaps. But I'm not defending them not including LR. I only try to understand their reasoning behind it.
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Post by erik on Apr 11, 2012 12:54:57 GMT -5
The issue I and many LR fans have is that the same people who sit in judgment on the RRHOF nominating committee are either friends or employees (sometimes both) of Rolling Stone magazine and its publisher Jann Wenner. For whatever reason, probably an East Coast hangup against West Coast artists for starters, they have acted like Linda no longer exists, let alone still matters. Dave Marsh, one of those who sits on the nominating committee, in particular, has never liked her at all, largely because of her Motown covers (his implied reasoning, that she's too "white" to be covering "black music" is, as far as I'm concerned, reverse racism), but he genuflects at the altar of Springsteen unapologetically, even though the Boss has had a few clunkers in his day.
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