Word: desperado
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Perhaps Ronstadt's strength, because of the power her voice can deliver, lies in the driving rockers. She is sweet in her quietest moments, but even her best slow ballads, like "Desperado" and "Blue Bayou" derive their beauty from the brassy crescendoes which bolster the tunes. On Living in the U.S.A., a song like "Just One Look," one of the weaker compositions before Ronstadt's touches, comes off fairly well because it gives Ronstadt a chance to belt out the lyrics. And that energetic vocal thrust, hardly what you'd expect from a shy, playful, innocent-looking singer who stands...
...year-old who has spent three days on a bus. A photographer whose profession calls for him to make cool calibrations of female beauty says her face is ordinary and her body nothing special. In courtly times he would have been skewered. She sings You 're No Good, Desperado or Love Has No Pride, and the eye of the beholder mists over. She is beautiful...
Some psychologists think that hijackers cash in on widespread hostility to authority. Once the air passenger believes he will not be killed, says Dr. Hubbard, he can view his captor as a dashing desperado lashing out against the Establishment. Also, victims sometimes see the hijacking as a free ticket to adventure and personal publicity. Says Hubbard: "Passengers know that the game, correctly played, will make them celebrities among their circle of friends. For a moment, too, they can run away from wives, mortgages, the Internal Revenue Service and the church appeal...
Selling Catsup. The outlaw-desperado theme pervades L.A. rock. Even in a city with dozens of thriving clubs and recording studios, rock's musical desperados can be hard pressed to scratch out a living. The Chicago-born Zevon did a stint at a Los Angeles advertising agency, composing a jingle for Camaro cars as well as ditties for Boone's Farm Wines. "They wanted folky, Gordon Lightfoot commercials," he remembers. "It was immensely profitable (up to $3,000 per ad) but selling catsup and cheap wine is truly abrasive to the soul...
...most responsible for creating this monster is Jerry Jeff Walker, though God knows he probably didn't mean to. He's also changed a lot since then. He's no longer the grubby, lean desperado, looking like he'd like to hop the next train to Juarez. He's had a couple of successful albums, as many playing dates as he wants--even in places as distant and mysterious as Cambridge, Massachusetts--and everyone in the country music industry knows who he is. If he gets less attention than some of the latecomers, he still gets a lot, especially back...