Linda Down the Wind

She sings, oh Lord, with a rowdy spin of styles -- country, rhythm and blues, rock, reggae, torchy ballad -- fused by a rare and rambling voice that calls up visions of loss, then jiggles the glands of possibility. The gutty voice drives, lilts, licks slyly at decency, riffs off Ella, transmogrifies Dolly Parton, all the while wailing with the guitars, strong and solid as God's garage floor. A man listens and thinks "Oh my, yes," and a woman thinks, perhaps, "Ah, well . . ."

Linda is 30 now. Her skin is flawed, and her lank dark hair is sketched with gray. She has great wet marmot eyes. She has a quick, sly mouth. She looks like a 17-year-old who has spent three days on a bus. A photographer whose profession calls for him to make cool calibrations of female beauty says her face is ordinary and her body nothing special. In courtly times he would have been skewered. She sings You 're No Good, Desperado or Love Has No Pride, and the eye of the beholder mists over. She is beautiful.

Onstage she seems small and uncertain, a little girl dressed up. She clutches the microphone to her face ("There you go, baby, here am I"). The mike is a sponge-covered apple on a stick ("Well you left me here so I could sit and cry"). Her lips, stretched wide, quiver so close to its surface that if she were to bring her jaws together she would bite circuitry. Will Eve ("Golly, gee, what have you done to me?") bite the apple? ("Well I guess it doesn't matter any more.")

Linda Ronstadt, this high-wattage waif, would be a rarity if all she had done were to survive for twelve years in the shark-infested deeps of rock. In fact, each of her last four albums has "gone platinum" -- sold better than a million copies -- and her last two, Hasten Down the Wind and Linda Ronstadt: Greatest Hits, reached sales of a million in a matter of weeks. Before Christmas she finished a wildly cheered six-month tour of the U.S. and Europe, during which audiences of 15,000 were common.

She is a superstar on the verge of becoming (what lunatic debasement of language will serve?) a Big Superstar. Executives of Elektra/Asylum/Nonesuch, the Los Angeles company for which she records, are shyly trying out a considerable boast: "Right now Linda is the most successful female singer in record history."

This brag may need hedging because, over the long haul, other singers -- Barbra Streisand, to name one, and perhaps Aretha Franklin and Diana Ross -- may have sold more records than Linda. (Carole King sold 13 million of a single LP, Tapestry.) Nevertheless, Ronstadt is the only female performer to have four consecutive albums go platinum (she made over $3 million from record sales alone last year). "Female" is the important qualifier. Rock is the thumping heart of Linda's music, and the rock world is dominated by males. The biggest stars are male, and so are the back-up musicians.

Rock beats are thrustingly phallic, and lyrics are often tauntingly and cruelly masculine. So are the crotch-wrenching, guitar-pumping stage moves of such founding fathers as Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley. Rock seems so hostile that relatively few women master the guitar, its basic instrument.

Recurrent sleazy skirmishes between male musicians and female groupies are sexual battles in which the women always lose, and being around the carnage is uncomfortable. In the movable madhouse of life on the road, the unisex nourishments are drugs and booze. Janis Joplin, the first great white woman rocker, rattled the bars of the madhouse, but she died of mind solvent in 1970.

Male rockers continue to rule. Joni Mitchell (TIME cover, Dec. 16, 1974) is the most stylish of the women singers to appear in the past decade, but her music is too cerebral for her to compete in drawing power with the cockerel crowing of the men. Somewhat to her own surprise, it is Linda Ronstadt who has made herself one of the biggest individual rock draws in the world. Elton John, Stevie Wonder, John Denver, Paul McCartney and Peter Frampton, among others, are bigger. Then comes Linda, the chicklet who shows up onstage wearing peasant blouses, cutoff jeans, subteen knee socks and track shoes to sing Love Is a Rose and That'll Be the Day. She is dead serious about her music, but the superstar nonsense amuses her; once she kidded her Moonbeam McSwine reputation by posing for an album cover in a barnyard with a couple of pigs.

She and her musical associates agree that she is still learning. In her Hasten Down the Wind album, she waded delightfully into reggae, the Jamaican folk-rock. She has begun, timidly, to write songs. Says Singer and Songwriter John David Souther, a friend and onetime lover: "Her creative capacity is endless. I doubt if she knows the depth of it herself."

Just now, Linda is cooling out in Los Angeles after months of bashing about in planes and buses like a piece of lost Samsonite. Her new puppy Jenny has excavated the garden of her Malibu beach house and needs reasoning with. Her friend, Songwriter Karla Bonoff, is recording her first solo album and needs Linda to sing backup. Her teapot needs to have tea in it. She needs to lie on her beach and let her mind float out to sea. She needs to shop for a dress to wear to the Grammy Awards ceremonies (where she is a solid bet to be named Best Female Pop Vocalist).

Malibu is not real, however, because there is no checkout time. Rock musicians live in baggage-claim areas and hotel suites. Last month she hit Washington as if it were any other one-night stand, sang at Jimmy Carter's Inaugural concert ("I was so nervous. My God, I was awful!") and then, on a whim, freighted on to Manhattan to watch a performance of NBC's Saturday Night show and to hang out with actors and rock friends. New York's Plaza, that swan-bosomed dowager among luxury hotels, has become a favorite roosting place for wealthy rockers (Ringo was there too). To Linda, the Plaza was just one more stop on the road, but it provided a splendid scenic view of the lady rocker rampant.

Consider, for example, her call to room service to send a pack of gum up to the ninth floor. Linda paid the bill (25-c-), added an appropriate tip ($1.25) and, as she is likely to do, went on talking: "I was a real radio kid. I just loved rock 'n' roll. I wanted to be a singer. It was really hot in Tucson in the summer, and we had a cement floor, and I used to lie on the floor because it was cool, with my cheek to the radio. I had grooves on my cheeks. I was about five when I started doing that." Not long ago, she said, she found some old Elvis Presley records. "I knew them by heart. I hadn't heard them for years, but I knew all the little licks."

She is wearing white jeans, a scruffy pink sweater, the merest touch of mascara and Frye boots. "I just love these boots," she says. "I look at my toes and they are so cute." She skips about the room, grabs the knob of a door and does some knee bends. She moans like a lonesome cat: "Aaaoooooooww! I need a date! Why are all the good men married?" She laughs at herself--pretty funny, there, Linda--gives room service another yank and orders a bottle of Tab, then spins around and flops onto a sofa. Talking with a woman, she sits; talking with a man, she reclines.

She is a formidable flirt. "I was boy-crazy in the first grade. Still am." In Tucson, where her father has a large hardware business, she attended a Roman Catholic school. She hated it, and, she says, "the nuns hated me. They hated the way I talked about boys. I was too giggly and wore too much lipstick and dressed too sexy. I came on too strong. I still do. I find myself thinking, 'Oh God, red nail polish--I look like a sleaze,' or I really get into it and put on red nail polish and 500 Ibs. of makeup. I never know how far to go."

She is stirred up. Teen-age rebellion comes boiling out of her. "I am so wicked. We had this young priest in catechism --you had to pass catechism. He had just been ordained, and who knew the problems he was going through? We used to write the answers to the catechism on our legs, up real high. We would slide up our dresses, and he would turn his face away, and we would copy down the answers." Briefly, she is ashamed of this naughtiness. Then the old rebelliousness reasserts itself: "My big fantasy is to seduce a priest."

Her record company has delivered a stereo and a big package of records. One of them is Black Rose, an album by her old friend and sideman John David Souther. She opens it and gives the label a kiss. "My one love," she says with a giggle. She has lived with several men, most of them musicians. She has never been married and does not expect to marry. She has no permanent relationship with a man now, though for a couple of years she has had a close and cozy friendship with California's Governor Jerry Brown (who won Rolling Stone's Groupie of the Year award this month) and, more recently, with the Stones' lead singer, Mick Jagger. As the rock world goes, her appetites are modest. She says she is learning to live alone.

Now she wants to go running. Whoosh! Out of the hotel, across 59th Street and up Fifth Avenue along Central Park, bashing through the slush in her boots.

She has had problems with drugs, and she still uses uppers--legal ones when possible, she says--when she is on the road. "You have to face 20,000 people, and you can't just write off St. Louis because you're feeling low." But in the past year, running has become her cure-all and her calm-down.

She is wearing a lynx jacket, for which (as she chugs sturdily toward 72nd Street) she apologizes. Her environmentalist friends have scolded her, she says.

Along Madison Avenue she starts to slow down. She loves the small, poky stores, and she window-shops, running in place. "Look!" A set of dishes. "Look!" A stuffed leather elephant.

Linda is sweating lightly, looking fine.

She has the reputation of being a precarious person, a victim, a lovable mess. This seems exaggerated. Back at the Plaza, calm now, she is glad to be 30. During her twenties, she says, "I felt like a submarine with depth charges going off all around me." The heartbreak in her songs ("I've been cheated, been mistreated/ When will I be loved?") was real enough.

And mostly her fault, she admits. "Live with a man who's not a musician, and he gets the 5% of your life that's not music."

Live with a musician, and the tension and jealousies become a web too complicated to negotiate. And for a rocker it's always easy to check out--poof!--and travel on to the next town.

"I'm still on the edge," she says, "but I think I'm bringing things under control." She talks too openly about insecurities, she thinks. It's not that interviewers lie, "but for instance you tell them that you have felt suicidal--who hasn't? --that you had the idea of wading into the ocean in North Carolina and swimming to New York. Then that comes out in a magazine, and it becomes a permanent fact about you, when really it's just momentary." All of this becomes heavy to carry around, and so does the slightly frowzy sexpot image evoked by a couple of injudicious photos, notably a rumpy shot in Rolling Stone of Linda in a wrinkled red slip. "So now everyone thinks I'm a piece of cheese," she says.

She pops to the telephone. Room service again? No, she calls the Plaza's elegant Edwardian Room, an oasis that cossets the wealthy with candles and linen napkins. "Oh, hi," says Linda. "Listen, is it O.K. if I come to dinner in jeans?" It has not occurred to her to identify herself. She has a total and startling lack of arrogance. Also, just now, a lack of success with the Edwardian Room. Sputtering is heard. No jeans. "Well, thanks," says Linda.

She hates--absolutely cannot bring herself to purchase --what other pretty, rich young women think of as "clothes." Clothes are for grownup ladies, and Linda still sticks her tongue out at grownups. During the Inaugural celebrations, Nancy Kissinger gave a tea party at the State Department and invited Shirley MacLaine, Clamma Dale, Linda and other women entertainers. Linda attended in jeans.

At dinner, in a restaurant somewhat funkier than the Edwardian Room, Linda speaks again of her childhood. Her memories, except for those of school, seem to be solid and good. The family was prosperous. She had a pony and later a horse. Her mother is a strong, intelligent woman with a gift for science (Linda's maternal grandfather was Lloyd Copeman, a successful inventor who devised an electric stove and an early form of microwave oven).

Her father, who comes from a German-Mexican family, is a guitarist who sang Mexican songs to his four children when they were little. (Gilbert Ronstadt's name appears with Linda's and that of her friend Bass Player Kenny Edwards as co-author of Lo Siento Mi Vida on the album Hasten Down the Wind.)

For a while, Linda continued to do what was expected of her. She put in a season as a debutante in Tucson and a semester at the University of Arizona. "The big goals with the girls I grew up with were going into a convent or getting married," she says. "I never wanted either one. I just wanted to go on the road." When she was 18, she left home and headed for Los Angeles to crash in the same house as a guitar player named Bob Kimmel.

The two hooked up with Kenny Edwards and formed a group called the Stone Poneys. "We were pretty crude, although we didn't know it," says Linda.

The Poneys were fumbling for a style, but they were doing it in the right city. The center of the rock world was about to shift from San Francisco south to Los Angeles, where the conviction hung in the sulfurous air that rock was power. The idea keeps turning up in Linda's conversation today that the raw energy of rock must make a statement, whether it is Jagger's statement of nihilistic mockery, her own lady-bereft keening, or the songs raging against the war that began to come out of Southern California in the late '60s.

Colonies of rock musicians were forming in the Los Angeles subdivisions of Laurel Canyon, Echo Park and Venice. Glenn Frey drifted in from Royal Oak, Mich. Don Henley was a North Texas State English major before he decided to move west. They eventually formed the supergroup the Eagles.

Before long, everyone knew Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt, who had grown up around L.A. Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Stephen Stills lived near the top of Laurel Canyon, Frank Zappa in an old Tom Mix house a short walk away. Browne and Frey and Henley had Echo Park apartments. Linda was in Ocean Park. Jim Morrison of the Doors was the most successful musician of the crew, and the hardest to locate, since he often slept on the beach near Venice.

"We were all learning about drugs, philosophy and music," says Linda. "Everything was exciting."

The center of the rock swarm was the Troubadour, a dank Santa Monica Boulevard bar that offered newcomers three-song auditions on Monday nights. Fast talkers who knew they needed only ballpoint pens and promising new groups to become record company executives jostled in the Troub's murk with finger snappers who knew they needed only luck and chord books to become rock musicians. The Poneys wangled a gig at the Troubadour. They had hit the small time, but they were rock musicians.

By 1967 the Poneys had recorded a hit single called Different Drum, but unequal vectors of talent and circumstance were splitting the group. Linda, with her big, untrained voice, her instinct for musical phrasing, her looks and not much else, found herself as a solo singer with the Poneys' Capitol Records contract to fulfill.

Rockers make it or break it on the road, and on the road is where Linda went. It is a dangerous place to be. "I know when I'm on the road for a long time I adopt male attitudes, real rock-'n'-roll attitudes," she says. "I come back home talking like a trucker. I'm not as nice to people."

Then, as now, she traveled with her band, usually as the only woman. Always there are sexual problems. She tries, not entirely successfully, to stay clear of sexual entanglements with her sidemen ("Though if there's another act traveling with us, it can get real interesting").

Always there are talent problems. "If you find a band that can play rock 'n' roll, they can't play a country shuffle to save their lives. I swear to God, if I could find a drummer who could play all that shit, I would marry him."

There are lady-boss problems. Most male rockers don't want to work for a woman, and a couple of years ago, Linda was saying that her only communication with her own band was through her manager-producer, Peter Asher. Her most recent tour was chummier, and at mid-point the principal complaint was that she had won most of the bandsmen's per-diem money playing poker with them on bus trips.

The biggest difficulties, however, lie with Linda herself.

"I learn from the road. It keeps my music alive. It feeds me information. But the physical beating is awful." She eats too much on tour. "All of the women singers do," she says. "Food is the only constant, consistent entertainment." Then she strays from the slim 111 Ibs. she likes to be and is now.

When she is fat, or thinks she is fat, she stands frozen onstage. Strutting about the barnyard is a big part of live rock, and Linda is not good at it even when she is skinny. So she hides behind the microphone in her off-the-shoulder blouse, her shorts, funny socks and sneakers, looking vulnerable. What's a poor girl to do? Smash guitars? Strangle dolls?

She stands there and sings. She lets the rambling voice loose in terrain that seems to be well known. She finds new secrets. She goes up against the memory of Patsy Cline's recording of Willie Nelson's Crazy. Cline's version was said to be definitive. It pales next to Ronstadt's. Sweetly, without arrogance, she improves on Smokey Robinson's The Tracks of My Tears.

Linda is not really a country singer. Her voice takes on a faint nasality when she does a country number, but there is no whine and no biscuits-sopped-in-gravy sentimentality. She has used the relative softness of country music as a way into the lean, mean strutway of rock.

Is she an authentic rock singer? Of course, though as rock progresses through its scale of hardness, her performances become less convincing. She knows this and has cut the rock shouter Heat Wave from her repertory.

Ronstadt has used the driving energy of rock and the melancholy of country music to transport herself and her audiences into a region of night town rarely explored by a mainstream singer in the past two decades. What is astonishing is that she has the neural-overload generation, the hard cases who grew up on yeah-yeah animal acts and Why Don't We Do It in the Road? screaming for a kind of music that their circuits have never been programmed to handle. It goes back to the cabaret singing of Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday and Peggy Lee. Linda has made the Stones' people listen to a torch singer. Try a new name: torch rock.

Linda muses about the old rock power. Mick Jagger has so much of it. "He's so strong, frighteningly bright. He has lines out everywhere." Jagger helped her make her way through London last fall, when she was touring there, she says. "But he is so dangerous; feints within feints, the poison with the gift. He's as bad as they say, and as good."

It is death for someone at the periphery of rock to move too close to a star like Jagger. "You're sucked into his orbit. And then he moves away, and you're left going like this" --with her body she mimics a small planet, wobbling wildly, ready to shatter into cosmic shrapnel. She was lucky, she says, or cautious; during her long slog upward, she avoided the red giants and black holes of the rock constellations.

Now she is well clear of such temptations. The decision in late 1975 to buy property marked Linda's readiness to draw at least a few boundaries for herself. She did not pick just any old place. The resplendent Governor's palace, which Ronald Reagan built and Linda's pal Jerry Brown won't use, may be the most exclusive address in California, since nobody lives there. But an absurdly expensive beach rookery up the coast from Los Angeles called the Malibu colony must run a strong second. That is where Linda settled, in a modest $325,000 white clapboard house. Hesitantly, not really sure of herself, she has bought good china and silverware, "the kind of things other people get for wedding presents."

She has a couple of Mercedes autos, the people's car of Sunset Boulevard, and some municipal bonds. Her jewelry seems to consist of a jangle of silver bracelets and a ring with a tiny heart, made of yellow mystery metal, which cost $6 at a children's store. Otherwise, the Malibu house appears to be her single extravagance. There she gives tea parties. A neighbor girl, five years old, comes often and admires a teapot with feet and socks. Buckminster Fuller also came once, trailing acolytes, and lectured unstoppably.

Those are the day people, "my straight friends." The beat picks up when the sun goes down. "At 8," she says, "the 8 o'clock musicians arrive and hang out till 12. Then the 12 o'clock musicians arrive and hang out till 4. And then the 4 o'clock musicians come and hang out till 7." Linda crashes for a few hours, and the dreamy circle revolves again.

In addition to settling down on her chunk of Pacific oceanfront, Linda acquired a stable manager, red-haired Englishman Peter Asher. He is widely credited for the huge improvement in her music that began in the fall of 1974 with the album Heart Like a Wheel. Asher was a second-magnitude star for a while; then his vogue faded. He is detached and analytical about the rock business, quick and inventive about rock music. "Linda is brilliant musically," he says. "Her voice is qualitatively exceptional. Sometimes, with the band, she gives up command too readily and appears flaky."

Linda says one of the reasons her relationship with Asher works so well is that it is not a "relationship." He is the first manager she has not had an affair with. "And that is always a bad idea. First there is business, then business and sex, then the business goes sour, and then there is no sex."

Asher, smiling, says he has no idea where she is going. "I think she will write more. She will continue to do her stuff, get better and better" and, he says, laughing, "steal good licks wherever she can find them."

"I'm feeling around," Linda says. "The band and I can't go much farther in the direction we've been taking." Next week she will begin recording an all-country album. She's interested in Third World music. Bulgarian ballads. Reggae. Hanging out.

Now it is her power that unbalances, however. It is harder for her to hang out in the old loose way. At JP's, a Manhattan rock joint, Linda swings in at 2 a.m. Everyone snaps to attention and tries to sell something to her--tries to hustle a song, hustle a bass player. Those who aren't hustling stay so pridefully cool their eyeballs wrinkle from not blinking.

"I'd take three giant steps toward an early death if I could find one good song," she says. "And the only way to do it is to drag through the bars." She is lying on the floor of her Plaza suite, doing leg lifts as she speaks. "But it's not as much fun as it was ..."

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