Hasten Down The Wind, released in 1976, was the first Linda Ronstadt album I purchased and the one that turned me into a lifelong fan. To celebrate I am looking back at the recording, release and success of the album. The majority of the text in this article is taken from my e-book Linda Ronstadt-A Life In Music which was published back in 2009 although there is additional/edited text throughout. The illustrations have also been added specially for this article.
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Photograph: Ethan A. Russell |
By 1976 Linda Ronstadt was riding high with two very successful albums, Heart Like A Wheel (Capitol ST11538) which reached #1 on both the Billboard US Top Country Charts and Top 200 Album Charts and Prisoner In Disguise (Asylum 7E-1045) which peaked at #2 on the Country Charts and #4 on the Album Charts. Both albums would go on to achieve platinum status by the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA).
She also had success on the Billboard Singles Charts. From Heart Like A Wheel chart success came with You're No Good (#1 on the Top 40 Singles Chart), When Will I Be Loved (#1 on the Top Country Singles and #2 on the Top 40 Singles Chart), I Can't Help It (If I'm Still In Love With You) (#2 on the Top Country Singles) and It Doesn't Matter Anymore (#54 on the Top Country Singles).
Prisoner In Disguise would give her chart success with Love Is A Rose (#5 on the Top Country Singles), Tracks Of My Tears (#11 on the Top Country Singles and #25 on the Top 40 Singles Chart), The Sweetest Gift (#12 on the Top Country Singles) and Heatwave (#5 on the Top 40 Singles Chart).
Despite her increasing following in the United Kingdom, chart success evaded her with only the single Tracks Of My Tears b/w Prisoner In Disguise (Asylum K13034) charting at a disappointing #42 and neither of her recent albums achieving any chart action, although this would change with her next release.
Meanwhile at the 1975 Grammy Award Ceremony, held at the Hollywood Palladium on 28 February, 1976, more success came her way when she was nominated in the 'Album Of The Year' category for Heart Like A Wheel, 'Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female' for Heart Like A Wheel and walked away with a Grammy award for I Can't Help It (If I'm Still In Love With You) in the 'Best Country Vocal Performance, Female' category. Peter Asher was also nominated for an award in the 'Producer Of The Year' category but was beaten by Arif Mardin.
Her confidence must have been high when she returned to the studio to work on her new album Hasten Down The Wind. Sessions were held between March and June 1976 at The Sound Factory in Los Angeles, produced by Peter Asher and engineered by Val Garay.
Musicians appearing on the album included regulars Andrew Gold (guitars, piano, bass), Kenny Edwards (bass, acoustic guitar, mandolin), Dan Dugmore (guitar), Mike Botts (drums) and Peter Asher (tambourine, cowbell, handclaps) along with Waddy Wachtel (guitars), Russ Kunkel (drums), Clarence McDonald (piano) while the string arrangements were handled by David Campbell. A host of backing vocalists included Peter Asher, Andrew Gold, Kenny Edwards, Karla Bonoff, Wendy Waldman, Don Henley and Herb Pedersen.
Mike Botts, who played drums on the sessions, has good memories
of the recording of Hasten Down The Wind, “It was before drum machines
and samplers so typically the sessions would consist of Linda and a full rhythm
section, bass, drums, keyboard and two guitars."
"She was always active in the arrangement process and
would provide ‘work vocals’ during the basic tracking sessions to help guide us
through the nuances of the arrangement. Once a final take had been chosen, she
would then come in to put on the final vocal along with any instrumental overdubs
that may have been necessary."
The exception to this was That'll Be The Day and Botts
was impressed with how she handled the song in the studio. “She wanted to
record it just the way Buddy did, live with no overdubs! So we rehearsed the
arrangement for a couple of days and then went in to record it,” recalled
Botts. “ It was not only recorded live in the studio but, amazingly, we nailed
it on the first take. Now that’s really rare. It was a wonderfully creative time with some really
talented and gifted artists. I’m quite proud to have been part of it.”
Unlike many singers, Linda writes few of her own songs, preferring to choose from the multitude of talented singer/songwriters that were around. In the past she had fallen back on the work of people like John David Souther, James Taylor, Lowell George and Neil Young, but with this new release, she turned to a new crop of talented writers including Karla Bonoff, Warren Zevon and Tracy Nelson. However, it wasn’t to the new writers that she turned to for the first single.
For the second time she chose to cover a classic Buddy
Holly rock and roll track from the fifties. Back in 1974 she had recorded and released It Doesn't Matter Any More and in August her cover of That’ll Be The Day was issued with Try Me Again as the b-side (Asylum E-45340). The single just failed to reach the top ten on the Top 40 Singles Chart stalling at #11 while on the Top Country Singles Chart it had a worse fate only reaching #27. Released in the UK with the same b-side (Asylum K13053) it fared even worse spending just one week at #52.
Hasten Down The Wind (Asylum 7E-1072 / Asylum K53045) was released in the USA and UK on 9 August 1976. The cover featured a sexy image of Linda on the beach near her home in Malibu taken by Ethan A. Russell. The album cover was designed by John Kosh who first worked on Prisoner In Disguise and would go on to design many more of her album covers including Simple Dreams, Living In The USA, Mad Love, her Spanish/Mexican albums and her trio of recordings with Nelson Riddle. Despite working with many other artists, including The Beatles Abbey Road album and The Eagles Hotel California, his only Grammy's were for Linda Ronstadt albums... Prisoner In Disguise, Get Closer and Lush Life.
The album was presented in a gatefold sleeve with other images from the photoshoot and included an insert with song lyrics and credits.
The cover of her early album Silk Purse had gone a long way in portraying Linda as a sex symbol and the cover of Hasten Down The Wind, which showed her in a sexually teasing pose wearing a low-cut dress that clearly showed she wasn’t wearing a bra, set against a backdrop of a California sunset, only added to the image.
In an interview she spoke about the cover, “I didn’t have a concept for this album cover, and neither did anyone else. I wanted a picture of me in mid-air, falling. I wanted to look like I was floating.”
They tried several ideas, shooting in a swimming pool and jumping off a ladder but it didn’t look right. They finally settled on the beach scene. The photograph was actually unplanned as photographer Ethan A. Russell recalled, “We were shooting pictures outside Linda’s Malibu home when the horse ran by in the background. Linda said, ‘Don’t shoot, you’ll scare the horse.’ Happily, I ignored her.”
After the shoot was over and she saw the photos there was talk of retouching the image to cover up the fact that she was wearing nothing under the dress but she remarked, “I never looked that good a day in my life anyway.”
They didn’t set out to produce a sexy cover and unfortunately this was counterproductive as people were beginning to see her as more of a sex symbol than a serious recording artist.
Mind you Linda is fully aware of her sexy image as she explained, “I love sex as much as I love music, and I think it’s as hard to do. I don’t know how good a sex symbol I am, but I do think I’m good at being sexy. The sexual aspect of my personality has been played up a lot, and I can’t say it hasn’t been part of my success. But it’s unfair in a way, because I don’t think I look as good as my image.”
Three
of the tracks were written by Karla Bonoff who had worked in a group with
Andrew Gold. Bonoff was born and raised in Southern California and with her
sister Lisa started writing and performing under the name ‘The Daughters of
Chester P’, named after her father.
Despite an audition with Elektra Records,
where they recorded an 11-song demo, she could not get a record deal. She had
many musician friends including Kenny Edwards and Wendy Waldman and along with
Andrew Gold they decided to form Bryndle.
An unreleased album made for A&M
Records, and a single produced by Lou Adler, who also produced the Mamas and
the Papas, failed to help their career and the band split. Then both Edwards
and Gold went to work with Linda.
This led to Linda hearing a demo of Lose
Again. Bonoff recalled her saying “Hey, you know that's real good. What else
have you got?” Bonoff also provided both Someone To Lay Down Beside Me and If He's Ever Near to the new album. It was Lose Again that opened the album and it is a great song with its emotional opening lines, 'Save me, Free me, From my heart this time.'
Linda described Someone To Lay Down Beside Me as a song 'about a prostitute' and the melody is full of dramatic moments. The song closes the album and is a strong performance by Linda on a song with great lyrics.
The album’s title track was a Warren
Zevon composition. Zevon, who was born in Chicago in 1947, began his
professional music career in the mid-1960s as part of a boy/girl folk-singing
act called Lyme and Cybelle. His own version of the song was still unreleased when Linda recorded her own take on the song. Don Henley joins her for the vocal harmony and the result is another beautiful performance.
Linda had already
dabbled with the Jamaican music style of reggae, with some success, on her
previous album, covering Jimmy Cliff’s Many Rivers To Cross and continued
this trend with John and Johanna Hall’s Give One Heart which includes an a cappella prelude
of Rivers Of Babylon. John Hall was a member of the group Orleans and the
song had appeared on their 1975 album Let There Be Music.
Along with
Johanna, his lyrical partner, he has written songs recorded by artists including Janis Joplin, Bonnie Raitt, James Brown, Steve Wariner, The Doobie Brothers, James
Taylor, Linda Ronstadt and many others.
Although the album leaned heavily towards less well-known
material, it did contain two covers. As well as That’ll Be The Day, a firm
concert favourite for years to come, she also covered the Patsy Cline hit Crazy. Written by Willie Nelson it became a number one for Cline in 1961 and was one of her biggest hits.
She would return again to the Holly catalogue for her
next album and the reason for her desire to record his songs can be traced back
to her early days in Arizona where she probably heard a lot of his songs on the
radio.
Furthermore, Hasten Down The Wind was the first
album to showcase her song-writing skills. Try Me Again, a story of cheating
and confession, was co-written with Andrew Gold. Featuring another confident vocal from Linda that demonstrates the power and drama in her performance.
In an interview he remembered
her first attempt at song-writing. “She was kind of shy and she was telling
Peter and I that she’d written this little melody with a few words and it
wasn’t finished and maybe she could sing it but she was just too shy. It’s
funny now because she’s not shy at all."
"So, anyway she finally said, ‘I’ll sing
it for Andrew’ so I went up to her room, closed the door and she sat on one bed
and I in the other and she just sang it. I had a guitar and tried to put some
chords to it. It was so funny because we opened up the door and it was like one
of those cartoons where all these people fell. It was Peter and the band just
dying to know what this song was.” Gold made a few suggestions, additional chords
and music for the bridge, but Try Me Again was mainly Linda’s song.
The Spanish Lo
Siento Mi Vida was a joint effort with Kenny Edwards and Linda’s father
Gilbert. With its simple backing of just acoustic guitar, pedal steel, bass and
drum, it is a beautiful performance by both band and singer and is one of the
best foreign language recordings she ever made, pre-dating her Spanish/Mexican
albums by at least ten years.
In the sleeve-notes to her 2004 compilation Jardin
Azul/Las Canciones Favourites Linda talked about the writing and recording of
the song. “My oldest musical compatriot, Kenny Edwards, was enamoured of a
beautiful girl who was a Spanish major and played great blues guitar. Lo
Siento Mi Vida was a phrase that stuck from that romance and one that he
always loved, so he came up with a snatch of a melody for it, a few chords—and nothing
else.”
Linda’s grasp of Spanish was not great and she called her dad to help with the lyrics as she went on to describe: “The three of us came up with some lyrics and worked and worked on them. I decided we’d write the bridge in English, because it was too hard to get my dad on the phone again.”
Edwards recalled how the song came together: “I was on the road with Linda and we had a day off in some god-forsaken town and so we were killing time at the motel. I had been playing with a melody that had a kind of Tex-Mex vibe to it and Linda responded, suggesting we write it. I think we came up with the title then and planned to finish it sometime."
Back in LA we got together to do so and found we didn't
know enough Spanish to get through the lyrics unaided so we called Linda’s dad
on the phone and it was like, ‘…so how do you say blah, blah...?’ And he would
tell us and we’d plug it into the song.”
It was a song that would cause
problems for Andrew Gold when Linda performed it in concert. He couldn’t speak Spanish
so learnt it phonetically and never really knew what he was singing.
Gold had
also offered other songs to her, “we tried on at least two occasions to record
my song Love Hurts. I was always offering her songs but, alas, she didn’t do
any. She liked them though, especially Lonely Boy.”
The Tattler is a blues/gospel song that dates from the 1920s and written by Washington Phillips. The song was covered by Ry Cooder on his 1974 Paradise And Lunch album and Linda follows a similar arrangement.
Tracy Nelson was an American country and blues singer whose career started in the mid-1960s with the release of her debut album, Deep Are The Roots. She moved to San Francisco in 1966 and became a part of the local music scene. It was during this period that she wrote and recorded Down So Low which appeared on her Living With The Animals album. It was a song that she would re-record on a number of occasions. Nelson has spoken about the inspiration for the song... her broken heart in the aftermath of her break-up with the musician Steve Miller. It was a perfect song for Linda to cover and is often cited as the best cover version of the song.
The album had a very depressive feel, as Linda said herself. “It was a very down album. I was very depressed then.” The entire album was full of sadness and heartbreak and although there was a heavy quality to the music her voice was, at times soulful and at times beautiful. This was something that many reviewers would pick up on.
Press coverage for the
album was mixed. Circus magazine in their review in November 1976 by Ken
Tucker felt that she had not released one consistently good album and that she
should record an upbeat album with fast country, fast rock and roll and fast
rock. The album was criticised for having too many maudlin songs although
Tucker did praise both That’ll Be The Day and her version of Crazy. Talking
about Karla Bonoff he joked that: “The only thing interesting about Ms Bonoff
is that her name, at a quick glance, looks like an acronym for Boris Karloff.”
David McGee, writing in Rolling Stone in September was more impressed
feeling that the album was “…a fine album that begs closer inspection.” In particular he picked out her cover of That's Be The Day saying, "I've always appreciated Ronstadt's good-natured approach to her remakes of rock 'n' roll oldies. The version of That'll Be The Day included here neither alters my feelings for nor threatens the Buddy Holly original. Her reading could be tougher, but the music behind it - particularly the solo sparring between guitarists Andrew Gold and Waddy Wachtel - has enough bite to overcome vocal shortcomings." He also felt her other cover, Crazy, was an inspired choice.
"Hasten Down The Wind is not the easiest Linda Ronstadt album to 'get' the first time one hears it, but it may be the classiest and longest-lived one she has done so far", wrote Noel Coppage in the November issue of Stereo Review. He went on to praise many of the tracks and ended the review by saying, "It's the kind of album I don't listen to one cut at a time anyway - It's the kind I listen to a whole lot. The thing has hardly been off the turntable since it got here. It's there now, and I'm anxious to get back to it for what must be the hundredth time in the last few days. That's the kind of judgement about an album I trust most."
Billboard rated That'll Be The Day, Lose Again, Give One Heart, Try Me Again and Rivers Of Babylon as the best cuts on the album and had nothing but praise for the album. They wrote, "That Queen of Lost Ladies whose golden heart is always broken by unfeeling men is back again with another unique delivery of country/pop/rock-oldies laments and defiant good-time pledges. Ronstadt's highly effective stage image of the romantic female loser leads the listener smoothly through a wide variety of music by a staggering variety of songwriters." They went on to say, "It took Ronstadt a long and determined time to get to the top of the heap, but if she can keep up the quality of albums like this, she'll be on top even longer." They also gave credit to Peter Asher for his remarkable production.
The
mixed reaction didn’t affect sales with the album reaching #1 on the US Country Charts and #3 on the Top 100 Album Chart. Despite only reaching #32, it did give Linda
her first chart album in the UK and went on to receive a silver disc from the British Phonographic Institute (BPI). If further proof of the album’s success were needed, gold and platinum
awards from the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) within a month of its release should have been enough to silence
even the harshest critics.
Another Grammy Award came Linda's way at the 1976 Grammy Award Ceremony, held at the Hollywood Palladium on 19 February, 1977, when Hasten Down The Wind won the 'Best Vocal Performance, Female' category.
In support of the album, Linda embarked on a lengthy US
tour in early August with sell-out concerts across the USA. A concert review appeared in the December 1976 issue of Playboy where they said, "A few days after Linda Ronstadt released Hasten Down The Wind, we caught the country singer in concert. During the next few hours, she moved through old favourites and introduced the audience to the songs on her new album. The verdict was unanimous: Ronstadt is stronger and more confident than ever before, and with good reason - the new material is equal, if not superior, to the best of her standards." They also praised her band, who they felt were one of the strongest in the business.
In November her fans in the United Kingdom finally had the opportunity to see her in concert when she undertook a short tour of the UK and Europe. There were dates in London at The New Victoria Theatre, the Odeon Theatre in Birmingham, Apollo in Glasgow, the Rai Congrescentrum in Amsterdam and Musikhalle in Hamburg. There were three shows in London with the final show an Old Grey Whistle Test Special, introduced by 'Whispering' Bob Harris.
During the concerts Linda would perform several songs from Hasten Down The Wind including, Lose Again, That'll Be The Day, The Tattler, Crazy, Lo Siento Mi Vida and the title track. She also turned to earlier material with When Will I Be Loved, Silver Threads And Golden Needles, Love Is A Rose and Tracks Of My Tears.
Backing her on the tour were Andrew Gold (keyboards, guitar and backing vocals), Kenny Edwards (bass, harmonica, backing vocals), Waddy Wachtel (guitars, backing vocals), Dan Dugmore (guitar, steel guitar, backing vocals) and Mike Botts (drums). Andrew Gold was also the supporting act on the tour.
In November a second single (Asylum E-45361) was issued, Someone To Lay Down
Beside Me which stalled at #42 on the Pop Charts, although it was the other side, Crazy, that became a #6 country
hit. Its success was probably down to the popularity of the song as many were
aware of the Patsy Cline original and, although nobody could ever match that,
Linda’s version was certainly an excellent performance. Released in the UK a few months later (Asylum K-13071) it failed to create much interest chart wise.
Unfortunately a third
single (Asylum 45402), pairing Lose Again with Lo Siento Mi Vida, released in May 1977, could not create any
interest and disappeared without trace. It was the same fate in the UK where the single (Asylum K-13065) failed to chart. It was issued in the UK in October 1976 with a picture sleeve featuring a lovely portrait of Linda and on the reverse were the upcoming tour dates.
The chart positions were by no means a reflection of the quality of the material and could be put down to the fact that Linda was becoming more of an album artist at this stage of her career.
Hasten Down The Wind shows the maturity in her voice and
demonstrates how much further she had come as a vocalist. The music is emotional
and moving, very soulful and for those raised on her earlier work it may have
been a difficult album to come to terms with.
However, it was becoming obvious with Hasten Down The Wind,
her tenth album, that Linda was getting restless with performing the same old
country and country-rock material and wanted to stretch herself by moving into
far more complex musical areas. This would become more evident with the release
of future albums like Simple Dreams, Living In The USA and Mad
Love.
Next year Hasten Down The Wind celebrates its fiftieth anniversary and time for an expanded and remastered edition with, if available, bonus tracks that could include alternate or early versions, demos, songs recorded but not used along with a detailed booklet with comprehensive liner notes, photos and memorabilia. To be honest all her catalogue is way overdue for re-issue. I can always hope.