Blackballed?

There is a point in Tavis Smiley’s recent, outstanding 2-part interview with Linda Ronstadt on PBS that he asks her to talk about her experience as a Catholic school girl, and Linda replies:

Well, we had a really tough time. I’ve got to say, in compassion for those women, they were very, very unfairly trained. They were trained to not have any emotional support. They weren’t allowed to make friends, even within the order. 

They’ve changed the way they train them now, but those poor women were very, very disturbed in that there were – in the eight years that I was in that school, I think three of them had nervous breakdowns, complete nervous breakdowns. One of them right in front of the class – we watched her come unglued 

They were wearing these black wool habits. They were made out of black wool serge. Do you know how hot it is in Tucson? It’s so hot, and you’d get in the full sun and it’s like being – it’s like wearing a solar collector. Those black habits are like solar collectors. 

Meantime now the priests were wearing cotton shirts, short-sleeved shirts, and they could smoke and drink and do whatever they want. Not the nuns. They wouldn’t let them change their habits, even for white ones. 

So they were just – they must have been miserable, and it was hard. They were taught to be very disciplined, be strict disciplinarians with us. There were large class sizes, and they were beating the children. 

They really would have gone to jail for some of the things that they did to us. It was very frightening. So I was sorry, but there are a lot of nuns right now, like the nuns on the bus, the Liberation Theology nuns, they’re my heroes.

One guesses that if Linda were asked to comment on the cabal of rock “critics” who have successfully excluded her from her rightful place in The Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame since she became eligible almost 20 years ago, her response would be just equanimous and graceful. That is who she is. As Chris Willman wrote in a review of her new memoir, "Simple Dreams is nothing if not gracious. Ronstadt was too classy to ever fully embrace the role of rocker chick….”And that refusal probably more than anything has put her at the top of the list of egregious oversights that has turned one of Cleveland’s few genuine claims to fame into yet another “mistake by the lake.” Dedicated Ronstadt fans, among whom I proudly count myself, have been both mystified and infuriated for years as the elective body of the hall chose to ignore the qualifications of one of rock’s most accomplished women. David Speranza, writing at Popshifter, effectively lays out the case for Ronstadt’s inclusion in the rock hall. But the Linda agnostics have their rebuttals on boilerplate. Mention Linda's enormous commercial success in record sales and concert appearances and they'll say, "Yeah, if commercial appeal mattered, David Cassidy would be in the hall of fame." Mention the wonderful new songwriters, like Warren Zevon and Karla Bonhoff, she introduced to her mass audience and they'll say, "Yeah, because she couldn't write her own material." Mention that she also introduced a generation of classic rockers--Buddy Holly, the Everly Brothers, Roy Orbison--to a new generation, and they'll snarl back at you, "Buddy Holly didn't need no stinkin' girl singer." Mention that she made The Eagles and all of country rock possible and her hipper that thou critics will smugly proclaim, "We rest our case."For some time, I've been a member of the Linda Ronstadt Should be in The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Facebook page. But now I'm beginning to wonder. It's not that the naysayers have gotten to me...at least not in that way. But I'm really beginning to wonder if The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is worthy of Linda Ronstadt. Judging from her words and demeanor in the Tavis Smiley interview, Linda doesn’t seem as exercised by the outrageous R ‘n R hall snub as I and millions of her fans are. Because of her Parkinson’s disease, she would now never have that moment to sing on stage with Emmylou Harris, Jackson Browne, The Eagles, and her other musical compatriots in celebration of her induction even in the unlikely event it happened. I don’t think it would bother her anywhere near as much as it bothers her to go home and not be able to sing with her family. But, still, as a detective story, why has her election become so unlikely? Inspired by the Smiley interview, I went time traveling through the Internet for the answer, and I think I found it. John Rockwell, who was the New York Times pop music critic during Linda’s rock heyday, wrote a deft, exhaustive essay for an anthology entitled Stranded—Rock and Roll for a Desert Island in 1978. Even though the date was 14 years before Ronstadt was even eligible for the hall, Rockwell’s piece seems to foretell the difficulty she would encounter with his peers in the world of music criticism. The thrust of the essay was actually directed at them and their failure to appreciate her exquisite talents. Before embarking on his penetrating brief for her, Rockwell writes:

“…her reputation among rock critics is not very grand. In Britain especially, she is widely regarded as a mindless puppet in the hands of her producer, Peter Asher…. A typical passing crack about Ronstadt in the British rock press comes from a recent Melody Maker, in which Michael Oldfield grumbles that ‘it's ridiculous that the most successful female rock singer is Linda Ronstadt, whose voice is nothing special, but who has made it through ruining other people's songs.’ And the British attitude, or at least something approaching it, is shared by many of the best-known American rock critics….”  

If there's one thing that comes through in the Smiley interviews it is that this woman is hardly mindless and was never anyone's puppet. If I had to distill the main anti-Ronstadt arguments that Rockwell’s 16,000 words address, these would be the bullet points:Her voice was too pure, and rock critics disdain vocal purity as contrary to their notions of what rock ‘n roll should be.The production values on her albums likewise were too close to the perfectionist standards of classical records rather than the rough and raw ideal of the most revered classic rock.Her approach to most of her material, especially black music, was too uptight and exposed her more as a musical dilettante than a gifted interpreter.That she overtly used her looks to sell her music, most evident in her airbrushed album covers.That she didn’t comprehend the songs she sang, especially the more complex ones.Rockwell patiently and pointedly makes his case against each of these arguments, conceding where they have some validity along the way. But it’s against the last charge that he’s most persuasive. He directly takes on a gang of critics who expressed contempt for Linda’s handling of Warren Zevon’s Mohammed’s Radio. Like a pop Clarence Darrow, he rises to present a mighty defense of Ronstadt’s version:

Some critics find hints of a mordant irony on Zevon's part in "Mohammed's Radio" that make the passionate directness of Ronstadt's performance seem misconceived--above all his very use of the word "alas." For me, though, whatever irony Zevon may possibly have intended seems decidedly secondary, and in any event is in no way denied by Linda's interpretation. Besides, Zevon's voice and singing style, while effective enough for emphatic rockers, are far too limited to suggest much subtlety…
The real secret to the song lies in contemplating the words in conjunction with the music, and not in the abstract, as I think too many rock critics are prone to do. The music here is not rock and roll in the ordinary sense, even with the refrain of "Don't it make you want to rock and roll/All night long." Instead it's a dirgelike anthem, a rolling, inexorable attestation to the darker, more passionate side of life. It is this passion, power, and even rage Linda and her band capture so perfectly…It is a performance in which the vocalism illuminates the material, transforming it in a way that its creator could never himself achieve. As such it reaffirms the place of interpretation in contemporary popular music, and provides an experience of enormous emotional import for any listener able to open up and respond to the glory of great singing.

Alas, Rockwell’s brilliant treatise on Ronstadt’s brilliance was not enough to redeem her in the eyes of the critics who rejected her way back then and continue to reject her with every shameful round of hall of fame votes. And her fate with them was probably sealed for good with a Rolling Stone article published in 1983, entitled Snow White in South Africa. In the article, Linda is pretty thoroughly trashed for appearing in concert at Sun City, the make-believe showcase of racial harmony created by the South African government to deflect international condemnation of its racist apartheid policies. Oddly, the writer of the article, Aaron Latham, attended the same high school as Linda back about the same time, but that didn’t stop him from portraying her as a dithering airhead on the subject of racial injustice. He pivots off Linda’s casual remark that she would one day like to play Snow White to paint her as cuteness corrupted by the poison apple of apartheid money. And if the Snow White metaphor seems too opaque, he takes it one step further when he writes: 

A black cook in a white uniform and a great billowing white chef's hat knelt over a campfire, frying up eggs and sausages, and bacon. A platoon of black waiters in livery conveyed the hot dishes to the table. And poured fresh coffee. And generally hovered. I realized that Margaret Mitchell was wrong. The way of life she immortalized had not gone with the wind. It lives on in South Africa. And today, Linda Ronstadt, with blacks handing her food and pouring her drink, was cast as Scarlett.

The piece is filled with so many cheap shots like that I'm surprised Latham didn't bag a rhino on the safari he went on with Linda. Critics might with age get a little shaky on their aesthetic judgments, especially as maturity and experience reveal to them how much they really don't get about the artists they judge. But give them a righteous political issue to bite into and they have a dog chew for life. There were other artists who ignored the UN ban against artists performing in Sun City and that has not prevented them from getting voted into The Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame—Tina Turner, Rod Stewart, Paul Simon (twice!). But none of those artists ever called out the frat house ethos that dominated rock the way way Linda did. And a hardcore of rock insiders have never forgiven for her for speaking a simple but uncomfortable truth about them: Boys will be boys. To bring things here full circle, there’s another line from Latham’s article that bears quoting. It’s from Linda herself. When Latham asked her about her Catholic school days, she replied, “These nuns were ignorant. Nuns are the worst fascists."It’s not at all the charitable tone she took when Tavis Smiley asked her a similar question just the other night. And there’s a good reason for that. Linda Ronstadt, unlike her critics, grew up.