Ronstadt reflects
Legendary vocalist sings Sunday at MerleFest

By Tim Bullard

Warbling like a songbird, her voice trips across words with a stylized sweetness, breathy sensuality, a timeless, light melody always in control, transcended through passionate weightlessness and impeccable phrasing.

Linda Ronstadt talked recently about her trip to Washington and how things went trying to convince legislators to fund $200 million to the National Endowment of the Arts, which includes Lee Greenwood and Charleston writer and editor Bret Lott, an English professor at the College of Charleston.

Ronstadt was accompanied to Capitol Hill by singer Josh Groban and musician Wynton Marsalis. She will perform Sunday, April 26, at MerleFest 2009 (April 23-26) in Wilkes County.

“We spoke to a congressional subcommittee,” she said. “We tried to convince them to spend money toward education. I think it’s essential for any civilization. We always have art. There are studies everywhere that are longstanding that show all subjects improve when the arts are included in the curriculum. They don’t just learn art or music. They learn science better. They learn math better. They learn English better. It’s an essential part of the human experience. It’s really a scandal that it’s cut out of the curriculum like it is.

“Of course they are cutting all education budgets. People spend a lot of money on their hairdressers, but they don’t spend a lot of money on their teachers.”

Quincy Jones has a petition for a cabinet-level Secretary of Culture, and Ronstadt said it’s a good idea and that Marsalis would be a great pick.

“I would nominate Wynton Marsalis,” she said. “There is a very interesting thing going on in Venezuela right now. It’s been going on for 35 years and has survived 35 years of every different kind of administration of the government in Venezuela. It’s called El Sistema. It’s generally considered to be the best music program in the world.

“With the youth orchestras down there, they’ve got 250,000 people in these orchestras getting music education. Any child who wants to learn an instrument will be provided an instrument and lessons, any child, no matter where they are. They have youth orchestras, and sometimes the first chair violinist may be an eight-year-old. They play better than orchestras do up here.

“I mean the kids play brilliantly. If you see a youth orchestra here, they can’t even match pitch. It’s so sad. The kids are trying as hard as they can, but they start them so late, and they start them so poorly. They can’t sing in tune. There is an active and passive component for learning music. You have to hear it, and you have to do it.

“But if you don’t do both those things, you don’t learn it. Kids are not actively singing and playing. So they listen to these iPods, and they listen to their laptops, and they think music comes out of their computer screen or TV screen. They don’t realize it comes out of people.”

She doesn’t have an iPod, but she uses and iPhone, and not for music.

Before dying of lung cancer, Warren Zevon wrote a lot of songs she recorded, like “Hasten Down the Wind,” which had a sweet album cover photograph of her on the beach, “Poor, Poor, Pitiful Me,” “Carmelita” and others.

“Oh my God, he was incredible,” she said. “I liked him very much. He was a reader. He was a serious reader and a really smart guy, a very good writer. Putting music into education with yourself and putting education back in music, guys like Warren who read wisely, everything they read informs everything that they play and every note that they sing. He took the stuff he read about, and he had some quirky interests.”

She said he read Soldier of Fortune magazine and Jane’s Defense.

“He wrote about elements of the Cold War and elements of espionage, and he wrote about it in a thoughtful and interesting way, I think,” she said. “It was back to the same things, lawyers, guns and money, you know, and the problems on the border being fueled by our incredibly inane attitudes toward gun control. Mexicans are coming up here and buying huge amounts of assault rifles, smuggling them across the border and then smuggling back drugs to be devoured by our voracious appetite for drugs in the United States. We are importing a drug war that is completely the demand of the United States. It’s really sad.”
Born in Tuscon, Ariz., July 15, 1946, Ronstadt has won many Grammy Awards with gold, platinum and multi-platinum albums.

She met Doc and Merle Watson once at an L.A. club. Did the Aladdin Theatre for the Performing Arts in Vegas ask her to leave after a performance July 17, 2004? She laughed.

“I did my show,” she said. “I dedicated the encore, the final song, to Michael Moore and called him a patriot. I mean look, Michael Moore did the movie ‘Roger and Me’ about GM and the auto industry and where it was headed, and look what happened. He was absolutely right. Those guys who ran it were taking all the profits themselves, the CEOs getting $30 million a year and the executives getting millions and millions of dollars a year in salaries.

“So they exported all the jobs, and they kept the profits for themselves. They destroyed the city of Flint, and they destroyed the American car industry which was thriving and healthy and the envy of the world. At that point he had come out with a movie about the Iraq War that was completely right which turned out to be true and was about how incompetent the Bush administration was and how dangerous it was for us in the country to have those people running policy.

“What happened later was some woman came up to me afterward and said, ‘The president of the casino wants to talk to you.’ I said, ‘I’m sorry, I’m leaving.’ Then she said, ‘Well I can’t let you leave.’ She told me, ‘My orders are to keep you here.’ I said, ‘Well are you going to read me my Miranda Rights?’ I thought she was a fan who was a little bit mentally unstable. So I left and found out there was trouble three days later on television. That’s really how it happened.”

What is Brain Fitness?

“Brain Fitness is a program by Michael Merzenich, who is one of the main researchers of brain plasticity. It’s a series of mental exercises you can do for neurons in your brain and build a new brain map for things like memory. It turns out that pitch is one way that we process and store information.”

You start to lose the process as you get older, she said.

Whether or not you call it Latin music, Mexican music, Tropicana or Cuban music or Spanish music, this woman can sing it.

“Hispanic is a big, big title. That would include Spain and Cuba. I sing traditional Mexican music,” she said. That is the music she will sing at MerleFest with Los Camperos de Nati Cano.

“I think I have a particular fondness for agrarian music to start with. I don’t love an urban lifestyle. I live it. I come from an agrarian background. My grandfather was a cattle rancher. My family on my father’s side were Mexicans, so my grandfather was born in Mexico. It’s just been part of who I am authentically as a person, as part of my cultural identity.”

There are religious overtones in some of the music.

“The Lady of Guadalupe stuff is very not Christian. The Lady of Guadalupe was an Aztec goddess. She was the Goddess of the Earth and Sky. She made the corn grow. When the Europeans invaded and brought Christianity, they suppressed the Mexicans in such an evil way. They brought cattle, and the cattle were allowed to run through their cornfields, and people starved to death by the millions.

“They sent an emissary to the Pope saying they had seen this vision, this virgin. It’s a way of synchronizing religion. You layer one over the other,” she said. “The Virgin Guadalupe was my particular favorite sort of layered religion and they smuggled her in as a Christian goddess. The Mexicans will tell you, the Mexican clergy in Mexico will tell you that the people in Mexico are not papists, but they are Guadalupists. They are 100 percent Guadalupists.

“She became the symbol for the revolution between the Mexican and the Spanish. It was her inspiration that caused them to win the revolution against Spain, and then they became an independent nation.”

What does she think about the new president of the United States?

“Well I think he’s trying really hard,” she said. “I wish he would seize the banks. I’m for Paul Klugman. I don’t think he’s spending too much money. I don’t think he’s spending enough money. I think we need to spend more money. I think he’s trying really hard, and I think he’s an honorable guy, and I think at least he’s intelligent. I think we had an imbecile running the government, an anti-intellectual, ignorant, it was devastating to this country, and we may never recover from it. But at least with Obama, you feel like you may go down in good company.”

What does she think of First Lady Michelle Obama?

“I think she’s wonderful. When I was in Washington, she was visiting all the schools in Washington. I think she’s really going to make a difference. The fact that she put in an organic vegetable garden is huge. People go, ‘Ooh! She’s gardening!’ Nobody’s focusing at all on our food production and how it is done in this country and how it is vulnerable to all kinds of things and how it is grown with chemicals in a very centralized way. It threatens our future food supply. She is starting to educate people in a very wonderful way, just by doing, by example. That’s a huge thing.”