Once a Rock Star, Now a Matriarch of Mariachi
By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN
NYT
SAN FRANCISCO
EVEN now, lounging around her apartment at the age of 62, wearing Mephisto slippers and a far-from-revealing hoodie, Linda Ronstadt is thinking back to a summer in Guadalajara when she was 12, and a light-haired Mexican boy named Mario.
“I would flirt with him,” she recalls wryly, her come-hither eyes and heart-shaped lips still echoing the days when she was decreed “Rock’s Venus” by Rolling Stone. “One night I heard music and ran to the window. I peeked through the curtain, and there was Mario with two taxis full of mariachis serenading me with firecrackers.”
To Ms. Ronstadt, whose roots are deeply embedded in Mexican soil, it was the ultimate seduction. “These are big-voiced songs, filled with the exuberance of nature, the fertility of the earth, love and romance,” she says of mariachi music, the focus of much of her artistic passion since she abdicated the throne of rock Venus-dom in the early ’80s. “They’re about growing the land, and romance blooming in that context. The songs are more complex sexually, I think, than the romantic love we grew up on.”
A mistress of self-reinvention who likens her resolve to “a Mexican crossed with a Sherman tank,” Ms. Ronstadt’s post-“Heart Like a Wheel” career has included pop standards with Nelson Riddle, Gilbert & Sullivan’s “Pirates of Penzance” onstage for Joseph Papp (she was nominated for a Tony), twangy Appalachia (with Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris), French Cajun (her recent “Adieu False Heart” with Ann Savoy) and of course, with “Canciones de Mi Padre,” mariachi — which reconnected her to her Tucson childhood as the granddaughter of a German-Mexican mining engineer and rancher whose mariachi band serenaded the populace from a now-defunct bandstand in the city’s central plaza.
(Continued here.)
NYT
SAN FRANCISCO
EVEN now, lounging around her apartment at the age of 62, wearing Mephisto slippers and a far-from-revealing hoodie, Linda Ronstadt is thinking back to a summer in Guadalajara when she was 12, and a light-haired Mexican boy named Mario.
“I would flirt with him,” she recalls wryly, her come-hither eyes and heart-shaped lips still echoing the days when she was decreed “Rock’s Venus” by Rolling Stone. “One night I heard music and ran to the window. I peeked through the curtain, and there was Mario with two taxis full of mariachis serenading me with firecrackers.”
To Ms. Ronstadt, whose roots are deeply embedded in Mexican soil, it was the ultimate seduction. “These are big-voiced songs, filled with the exuberance of nature, the fertility of the earth, love and romance,” she says of mariachi music, the focus of much of her artistic passion since she abdicated the throne of rock Venus-dom in the early ’80s. “They’re about growing the land, and romance blooming in that context. The songs are more complex sexually, I think, than the romantic love we grew up on.”
A mistress of self-reinvention who likens her resolve to “a Mexican crossed with a Sherman tank,” Ms. Ronstadt’s post-“Heart Like a Wheel” career has included pop standards with Nelson Riddle, Gilbert & Sullivan’s “Pirates of Penzance” onstage for Joseph Papp (she was nominated for a Tony), twangy Appalachia (with Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris), French Cajun (her recent “Adieu False Heart” with Ann Savoy) and of course, with “Canciones de Mi Padre,” mariachi — which reconnected her to her Tucson childhood as the granddaughter of a German-Mexican mining engineer and rancher whose mariachi band serenaded the populace from a now-defunct bandstand in the city’s central plaza.
(Continued here.)
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