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Linda Ronstadt Turns 70: A Look Back At Her Amazing Career Before Parkinson’s Silenced Her

By Victoria Miller
Published on: 11:21 PST, Jul 15, 2016

Linda Ronstadt turned 70 years old on July 15. The onetime queen of rock received birthday greetings from fans and friends on social media, including longtime pal Aaron Neville.

Some of Linda’s most famous collaborations have been with Neville, as well as Emmylou Harris and Dolly Parton. But Linda, who has sold over 100 million albums in her career, once even performed her signature song “Blue Bayou,” with the Muppets.

Linda Ronstadt also made headlines in the 1970s for her high-profile romance with California Governor Jerry Brown, who remains a good friend. Even President Obama confessed he had a major crush on her back in the day.

Linda Ronstadt’s iconic career started in the mid-1960s when she headed for Hollywood with $30 in her pocket and joined a folk-rock group that would later become the Stone Poneys. She quit after a few years and went solo, later telling Billboard she hired a pre-Eagles Don Henley to play drums for her band, and then brought on Glenn Frey, who was a musical partner of her then-boyfriend J.D. Souther.

Ronstadt recorded Top 10 hit songs including “You’re No Good,” “When Will I Be Loved,” and “It’s So Easy,” and by 1974, her album Heart Like a Wheel made her a superstar. But Linda didn’t feel like she deserved the success after years of battling sexism in the music industry.

“When Heart Like a Wheel went to Number One, I just walked around apologizing every single day,” Linda told Rolling Stone in 1976. “I could see that my supposed friends resented me. I went around going, ‘I’m not that good of a singer…’ And I got so self-conscious that when I went onstage, I couldn’t sing at all. It almost made me go crazy… I mean I needed a lot of help, you know.”

Ronstadt also talked about the loneliness of being on the road, saying it was far from glamorous.

“Believe me, things are not hunky-dory,” Linda said at the time. “They haven’t invented a word for that loneliness that everybody goes through on the road. The world is tearing by you, real fast, and all these people are looking at you like you’re people in stars’ suits. People see me in my ‘girl-singer’ suit and think I’m famous and act like fools… it’s very dehumanizing.”

Still, Linda Ronstadt always marched to the beat of her own drum. Ronstadt famously snubbed the Best Female Vocalist award she won on Don Kirshner’s Rock Music Awards show, no-showing for the gala and later saying she’d rather someone show her the money than give her a “who cares” award.

“My attitude is, ‘Don’t give me an award, send me money,'” Linda said. “I know how good or bad I am. An award won’t convince me that a record that I didn’t think was good is good.”

Ronstadt had a similar attitude a few year ago regarding the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Ronstadt told the Los Angeles Times she “doesn’t care” about the honor at all.

“It’s not anything I’ve ever given a second thought to,” Ronstadt said. “I never thought of myself as a rock ‘n’ roll singer. I’ve thought of myself as a singer who sang rock ‘n’ roll, who sang this, who sang that. I don’t care if I ever get inducted.”

While she was the female rock voice of the ’70s, Linda Ronstadt’s voice was taken from her when she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease several years ago. Linda knew something was wrong well before her diagnosis. Ronstadt wasn’t diagnosed until she was in her late 60s, but she told Vanity Fair she thinks the disease may have started when she was only 51 years old because that’s when her singing changed.

“They have a new way of diagnosing Parkinson’s; it’s with an algorithm and they record your voice and compare it to an algorithm. That’s a way they can get an early diagnosis, but it’s not in general use yet,” Ronstadt explained. “I know somebody that has access to the research, so since my voice has been recorded over the years I might be able to pinpoint when it actually developed, and I think it’s been going on for a long time.”

Before her diagnosis, Linda blamed some of her other aches and pains on getting older.

“I was sick for a long time, but as you get older you do develop aches and pains, and it’s harder to walk and stand up and you get stiff. You know, my hands were shaking and I thought, ‘Oh, I’m old’,” Ronstadt said. “It didn’t occur to me to go to a neurologist. I just went to my regular doctor, my chiropractor and said, just, my back hurts.”

Ronstadt told CBS San Francisco that Parkinson’s has made it hard for her to do simple things like wash her hair and brush her teeth. Her singing voice is completely gone.

“I can’t get to the note,” Linda said in 2014. “I can’t make any quality sound. I can’t arrange pitch. I might aim for a note and hit another one. It sounds like shouting.”

“I can’t sing,” Linda said. “I wish I could…I don’t miss performing particularly, but I miss singing.”

Take a look at the video below to see Linda Ronstadt performing live 40 years ago.

[Photo by P. Floyd/Daily Express/Getty Images]

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