Linda Ronstadt announced her retirement from music on August 23, 2013. Her health had been complicated for quite some time and she said she was unable to sing another note.
She attributed the general deterioration to a tick bite and the trembling of her hands to a poorly treated shoulder operation.
She thought it was something muscular, mechanical, so it took her eight years to go to the neurologist.
“Not in a million years” would she have imagined that the diagnosis would point to Parkinson's, a disorder later specified as progressive supranuclear palsy.
“And no matter how hard you try,” said the matriarch of American popular music with four decades of hits behind her and more than one hundred million records sold, “no one can sing with that disease.”
However, although her mezzo soprano voice can only delight us in the form of past recordings, her legacy and history are far from stopping her impact on pop culture.
Proof of this is that, just a few days ago, Selena Gomez confirmed on her Instagram account that she was going to star in the first film biopic about Ronstadt, which shares with her her journey as a singer and of Mexican descent.
Director David O. Russell (
The Bright Side of Things
) will take charge of directing a project about which no further details are known.
Linda Ronstadt performing in Amsterdam in 1976.Gijsbert Hanekroot (Redferns)
What is certain is that the challenge that the star of
Only Murders in the Building
will face is enormous.
Encapsulating in just a couple of hours of footage the brilliant history of the eclectic 77-year-old artist, winner of eleven Grammy Awards and the only woman to achieve five consecutive platinum albums, seems almost as difficult as trying to synthesize the force interpretation of someone who shone by transforming and making all types of genres and styles his own.
From rock to opera, from country to jazz and even Broadway.
The performer of hits like
Blue Bayou,
You're No Good or Long Long Time
(recently viral after its inclusion in the soundtrack of the series
The Last of Us
) knew from childhood that she did not want to be a nurse, the position that most of her friends in Tucson, Arizona, aspired to, but rather a singer.
And when they asked her about the reasons for her early vocation, she established a simple analogy: “People sing for many of the same reasons that birds sing.
They sing to find a mate, to claim their territory or simply to express with their voices the joy of being alive on a beautiful day.
They sing so that future generations will not forget what the current generation endured, dreamed of or enjoyed.”
She is the perfect example of the struggles, desires and joys of an entire generation.
Raised in a very music-loving family, with her father as a great musical inspiration and frustrated singer, the first songs she learned from her were the ones he sang in the hardware store they ran.
Although many decades later she would reap one of her greatest professional triumphs with the covers album Canciones de mi padre, at that time little Ronstadt was punished at school if she uttered a word of Spanish out of her mouth.
The racism of Arizona at the time reached the point that some of her friends, also of Latin origin, were banned from entering the public pool because of the tan of her skin.
“But I think racism has gotten worse,” she told
The New York Times.
That experience would mark her forever, making her one of the most vocal activists for social rights of the last half century in the United States, with special sensitivity for the migrant cause.
She has taken on the most reactionary faction in the country without fear of the repercussions her ideals could have on her career.
So much so that her animosity for Donald J. Trump made her refer to him on several occasions only as 'the 45th president of the United States'.
“I don't say his name because he shouldn't be named.
He is like the bad guy in Harry Potter, Voldemort,” she confirmed.
Linda Ronstadt and Mick Jagger.Lynn Goldsmith (Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)
Linda always went against the grain.
At only 12 years old, she already had to reject a marriage proposal from a young Mexican named Mario, five years older than her.
Linda had other plans and, at only fourteen years old, she formed a group with her siblings Peter and Gretchen with which they entertained different cafes in the city.
Four years later, and after dropping out of college after the first trimester, the young woman left for Los Angeles to pursue her dream.
She arrived there with just $25 a week for room and board;
Today she has a fortune of around 130 million dollars.
After making a name for herself in the folk scene with the band The Stone Poneys, the singer launched a stellar career as a solo artist.
She didn't like living on the road, but no woman sold more records, filled more stadiums or made more money than her in the sixties.
The need to tell her stories was her only remedy to overcome stage fright and a chronic insecurity that made her pray that “a bus would hit her so she wouldn't have to go out and perform.”
The world of rock & roll in those years was a nightmare for any woman who wanted to have a serious and independent career.
In her memoirs she has recounted countless episodes of sexual harassment (such as the one carried out by “a drunk and wild” Jim Morrison when she was opening act for The Doors) and blackmail by executives who conditioned support for her career on receiving sexual favors. .
Her character, forged in the desert, made her survive all that: “There are always predators around you, and you have to keep an eye on them.”
Linda Ronstadt.
Mark Kauffman (Getty Images)
She was an icon and a sex symbol, posing in red lingerie for Annie Leibovitz's lens for Rolling Stone magazine in 1976. The cover was published against the wishes of the singer, who has always renounced that label and dehumanization. of the artist inherent to such media fame as his: “For me it was difficult to go beyond Levi's jeans and a baggy sweater.
“It always seems like I'm dressed to clean someone's house.”
She never married, but her love history includes such well-known names as California Governor Jerry Brown, Mick Jagger, Robert Plant or movie stars such as Bill Murray, Jim Carrey and George Lucas, to whom she was once engaged. .
After the end of their relationship in the late 1980s, Ronstadt adopted her first child, Mary Clementine, followed four years later by her second child, Carlos.
Her role as her mother, and the deterioration of her voice, made her progressively withdraw from the stage at the beginning of this century.
Although her last recording dates back to 2010, she is known as the 'first lady of rock' and continues to sing.
This is how she evoked it in one of her last public appearances, in 2022: “It's not the same… but I can sing with my mind.”