Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I can't help but think that the many positive reviews I read here are written by people who have confused their admiration for Linda as a performer and as a person with the quality of her memoir. I am about as enthusiastic Linda Ronstadt fan as you'll find, but this book is frankly awful. The main problem is that it is just shallow and strangely silent about the music during Linda's peak popularity in the mid 1970s. John Lennon once complained that George Harrison wrote a memoir (I Me Mine) that never mentioned him once. This book is like that. It is as though she intentionally ignores the very aspect of her career that made her so successful. Interested in Andrew Gold's collaboration with Linda? Go elsewhere. He is mentioned in passing only a couple of times. How about Linda's recordings of Karla Bonhoff tunes? Nope. She is mentioned once or twice, again only in passing. In fact the book skips from her last Capital record--and the album that made her a star--Heart Like a Wheel to her wanting to work in Pirates of Penzance. Prisoner in Disguise, Hasten Down the Wind, Simple Dreams, Living in the USA, and Mad Love (all platinum, some multiple platinum) are simply ignored as though they never existed. Just look at the (chronological) chapters: 10. Heart Like a Wheel 11. Malibu 12. Getting Restless 13. Meeting Joe Papp Heart Like a Wheel is 3 pages long. Three pages! You'd get more detail in a Rolling Stone article. Malibu is about moving to the beach after having financial security for the first time. Getting Restless (six pages!) is about the boredom she felt on tour playing large venues. That's about all she has to say about the years from 1974-1978. If she wants to write a musical memoir that mostly avoids discussion of her personal life, that's fine with me, but then she really needs to discuss her music in more depth and with more specificity. In but one example of the truly bizarre focus of the book, she spends several pages discussing in detail an incident that occurred while she was touring with Neil Young in which Young's piano player got drunk and became abusive with her. It is an interesting anecdote, but you spend three pages discussing this but say nothing in this "musical memoir" about your collaboration with JD Souther on songs like Faithless Love and Prisoner in Disguise? In fact the really weird thing about this book is that you get a much better sense of who Linda was and is as a person than you do about what she thought about her music. On that front I agree that she comes off as a very likable, down-to-earth person. My mother is likable and down-to-earth, but she has no business writing a book. There are some redeeming qualities. She does a fairly good job of describing the very early days in the Troubadour where so many now-famous artists created music together and essentially invented the Southern California country rock movement. She gives a reasonable amount of attention to Jackson Browne, Glen Frey and Don Henley, Emmylou Harris, Peter Asher, Aaron Neville, and a few others. Unfortunately, she apparently views with distaste that part of her career that made her so appealing for many of us. Edit (06-19-2014): Looking at the spread of reviews on this book, I am struck by how corrupted the Amazon customer review process has become. 67% of the published "customer reviews" give Simple Dreams 4 or 5 stars. It is simply not possible that this represents an honest sampling of customer response to this book. A lot of these people are paid stringers who contribute solely for the purpose of enhancing the book's sales. To sample this hypothesis I commented on one of the 5 star reviews by basically saying that the author must be crazy or didn't read the same book I did. He didn't even respond. Also, among the now 89 people who have responded to my original very negative review of a memoir by a singer I absolutely loved in the 1970s (I still love this music), not a single one has seriously objected to my negative assessment of this dreadful book. Edit (7-16-2016) From a separate review I posted, which I thought was important enough to include in the original. I am taking the unusual step of commenting on my own review. I do this because USA Today had a longish article on and interview with Linda yesterday. The occasion is her upcoming (ironic) induction into the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame and the release of a new compilation album. [...] In it she confirms what I had suspected about her attitudes towards her own music. Quoting from the article, "Ronstadt makes it clear that she doesn't consider most of her early work to be that good." "I'm grateful but it is astounding to me that people like" the early hits such as You're No Good or Blue Bayou, she says." This explains why her memoir reads the way it does. She doesn't think much of her career as one of the founding members of the Southern California country rock movement in the 1970s, so she apparently assumes we don't think much of it either. Whatever other talents Ms Ronstadt possesses, self-awareness is not one of them. She honestly doesn't seem to appreciate the fact that the only reason that she ever got the opportunity to record successful standards with Nelson Riddle or Mexican folk songs is that she was an established popular music star precisely because of songs like You're No Good and Blue Bayou. Absent those, she wouldn't have gotten a book deal for her memoir and USA Today certainly wouldn't be doing a profile of her. Furthermore, I am not even sure she is being entirely honest with us or even maybe herself about this. She was recording rock music as late as the mid-1990s. Feels Like Home is a pretty good album and her cover of Tom Petty's The Waiting is excellent. If she has such disdain for her contributions to rock/pop, why did she continue recording in that genre? Some of what she says in the USA Today article just reads like false modesty. One other interesting and sad take away from the article is that her health is much worse than at least I thought it was. It is not just that she can't sing anymore. She also really can't travel and she spends at least some of her time in a wheelchair. Despite the fact that the universe of Linda Ronstadt fans apparently does not include Linda Ronstadt, here is a good example of the music she thinks so little of now. That woman has very poor taste. [...]