07/09/2022
ON THIS DATE (45 YEARS AGO)
September 6, 1977 - Linda Ronstadt: Simple Dreams is released.
# ALL THINGS MUSIC PLUS+ 5/5
# Allmusic 4.5/5
# Rolling Stone (see original review below)
Simple Dreams is an album by Linda Ronstadt, released on September 6, 1977. It went to #1 on both the Billboard 200 Top LP's and Top Country Albums charts. The album was such a success that Ronstadt became the first female artist ever – and the first act overall since The Beatles – to have two singles in the Top Five at the same time: the Platinum-certified "Blue Bayou" (peaked at #2 Pop as well as #3 Adult Contemporary and #2 Country) and "It's So Easy" (peaked at #5 Pop). "Blue Bayou" was nominated for the Record Of The Year Grammy award in early 1978. It also earned Ronstadt a Grammy nomination for Best Pop Vocal Performance Female, alongside Barbra Streisand, Dolly Parton, Carly Simon and Debby Boone.
This was the fourth in a series of hit albums Linda Ronstadt made in the mid-seventies, starting with Heart Like a Wheel. Like its predecessors, Simple Dreams is a rich collection of pensive folk ballads, pop with country leanings, and good old rock & roll. Her skill in navigating this rootsy terrain is exemplary, taking her from the swagger of her cover of The Rolling Stones' "Tumbling Dice" to the sweet whisperings of the acoustic "Maybe I'm Right." This record also features some of her most enduringly popular hits, such as "Blue Bayou" and "Poor Poor Pitiful Me."
The rousing opening track, Buddy Holly's "It's So Easy" featuring her trademark growl, along with "Tumbling Dice" and the playful "Poor Poor Pititul Me," give the record moments of electrifying energy. It's the ballads, however, that comprise the majority of the tunes. Included are two traditional songs, "I Never Will Marry" (featuring Dolly Parton) and "Old Paint," both given simple but lovely arrangements by Ronstadt herself. The melodramatic "Sorrow Lives Here" is almost a hint of what is to come in the form of her collaborations with Nelson Riddle. Her artistry is perhaps best demonstrated in "Blue Bayou;" the shift from the quiet and husky verse to the yearning wail that is the chorus is nothing short of breathtaking.
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COVER
Originally, the front cover would have had Linda dressed in a provocative and revealing mini-slip seated in front of multiple mirrors; instead, she put on a robe, and the photograph was made artificially grainy. A re-touched outtake photo from the original photo sessions was belatedly included on the sleeve for her Greatest Hits, Volume 2 album in 1980. At the 20th Grammy Awards John Kosh won the Grammy Award for Best Recording Package for Simple Dreams.
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RECORD WORLD, September 10, 1977 – HITS OF THE WEEK
LINDA RONSTADT, "SIMPLE DREAMS." From the album artwork to the record contained within, this is Ronstadt's finest achievement to date. She is in classic form with Roy Orbison's "Blue Bayou," Buddy Holly's "It's So Eeasy" and the Stones' "Tumbling Dice" while the ballads reflect an introspective side with a sparse arrangement underpinning her voice. Asylum 6E-104 (7.98).
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ORIGINAL ROLLING STONE REVIEW
The thing about Linda Ronstadt is that she keeps getting better, and we keep expecting more and more of her. She's always possessed that big, magnanimous voice, but it wasn't Heart like a Wheel that her interpretive and arranging skills (the latter, and perhaps both, due to the felicitous pairing with producer Peter Asher) fully emerged.
With Hasten Down the Wind, Ronstadt shed some long-lived inhibitions. Given Karla Bonoff's red-hot, baldly emotional material ("Someone to Lay Down beside Me," "Lose Again," "If He's Ever Near"), she responded with her most personal -- even visceral -- singing. It doesn't quite make sense to call her highly charged performances relaxed, but certainly she was a lot less stiff than before. Ronstadt had, quite simply, become rock's supreme torch singer.
What Ronstadt's blossoming skills suggest is a kind of latter-day Billie Holiday, a woman whose singing constitutes an almost otherworldly triumph over the worst kind of chronic pain. Throughout Simple Dreams (in which Ronstadt and Asher wisely have scaled down the production), the singer evokes a bittersweet world of disappointments, fantasies and cheerfully brazen assertions. What she lacks is the sense of humor and ironic self-effacement that made Holiday such an extraordinarily subtle and intelligent performer.
That flaw, which was most obvious in Ronstadt's sober reading of Randy Newman's outlandish "Sail Away," is evident here on Warren Zevon's darkly ironic "Carmelita." When Ronstadt, going to meet a dealer, sings, "He hangs out down on Alvarado Street/At the Pioneer Chicken stand" without even a smirk, it sounds as if she doesn't know that a joke, however black, is being made.
And all the way through Simple Dreams' first side (which, except for the rousing opener, "It's So Easy," is made up of ballads), Ronstadt fails to step back and take a look at herself. She's just a little too blue for comfort. But that's a piddling complaint because it's a fine side. Ronstadt sings J.D. Souther's modestly self-pitying "Simple Man/Simple Dream" with a thorough sympathy for and understanding of Souther's message -- that the lover of simple truths is easily ridiculed. She gets Eric Kaz' complex "Sorrow Lives Here" (Kaz, it seems, is getting ready to challenge Leonard Cohen as the world's most morose songwriter) just right. The lines "Everything seems to spin all around/But I can't see/Whether it happens/With or without me" unite emotional and philosophical confusion dramatically, and Ronstadt sings them as if she wrote them. "I Never Will Marry," the great traditional tune to which Dolly Parton's backwoods harmonies add a gorgeous dignity, should become her signature: it frames her independence and loneliness with enormous restraint and power.
Simple Dreams' second side is better paced and begins with the song, "Blue Bayou," that caused me to compare Ronstadt to Billie Holiday. The transition she makes from the introduction to the chorus ("I'm going back someday, come what may to Blue Bayou") is simply electrifying. What starts out as an ordinary love song becomes a passionate cry for escape that completely transcends the song. Like Holiday, Ronstadt has developed an ability to invest her material with far more than it brings to her -- the wonderful jump to falsetto with which she ends "Blue Bayou" is a great deal more than merely wistful.
Simple Dreams could have used more rockers like the second side's "Tumbling Dice" and Zevon's "Poor Poor Pitiful Me." Both are strongly male, and Ronstadt's substitution of a female presence (something that occurs throughout the LP and serves as a sort of sub-theme) is a joyous "anything you can do" statement. She moves through Zevon's role reversals convincingly, substituting a nicely assonant verse for a more graphic one that she might not have gotten away with.
Ronstadt's well-placed grittiness on "Tumbling Dice" (whose brilliant, highly salty lyrics are finally intelligible) matches the song's sense of risk and its keenly expressed bawdiness. "Tumbling Dice" might seem a strange choice of material for Ronstadt, but what she's telling us, I think, is that she can live on the edge with the best of them. And she's damned convincing.
~ Peter Herbst (October 20, 1977)
TRACKS:
Side 1
"It's So Easy" (Buddy Holly, Norman Petty) - 2:27
"Carmelita" (Warren Zevon) - 3:07
"Simple Man, Simple Dream" (J.D. Souther) - 3:12
"Sorrow Lives Here" (Eric Kaz) - 2:57
"I Never Will Marry" (Traditional) - 3:12
Side 2
"Blue Bayou" (Roy Orbison, Joe Melson) - 3:57
"Poor Poor Pitiful Me" (Warren Zevon) - 3:42
"Maybe I'm Right" (Waddy Wachtel) - 3:05
"Tumbling Dice" (Keith Richards, Mick Jagger) - 3:05
"Old Paint" (Traditional) - 3:05
