Talk to me of Mendocino
Closing my eyes, I hear the sea
Must I wait, must I follow?
Won’t you say “Come with me?”
“The first time I heard it I was in my car, and I had to pull over to the side of the road and really boo-hoo,” Linda Ronstadt said. “There are only a few songs that have affected me like that.”
Paying tribute to Kate McGarrigle who died last week, Linda Ronstadt told the LA Times “They were like nothing else.”
“Nobody sounded like that, nobody wrote like that. She was a complete original. . . . She had this kind of bravery to her. She was absolutely unabashed — she made no apologies for the most unbridled sentimentality. But what she wrote was beautifully said, and it had an intelligent and subtle nature to it.”
It was Kate and Anna McGarrigle’s song Heart Like a Wheel
Speak of her introduction to the McGarrigle sisters in the early 70s, Ronstadt said “I was riding in a taxi cab with Jerry Jeff Walker in New York City, and it was just about dawn. The sun was just coming up over the horizon. We were coming back from some place, we’d been out with Gary White, David Bromberg and Keith Sykes… Jerry Jeff and I shared a cab and on the ride he said, ‘You know, there’s this song I heard these two women sing at the Philadelphia Folk Festival,’ … and he sang me the first verse:
Some say the heart is just like a wheel
When you bend it, you can’t mend it
And my love for you is like a sinking ship
And my heart is on that ship out in mid-ocean
“I went, ‘Oh my God,’ I thought it was the most beautiful song I’d ever heard. I begged him to ask them to send me a tape of it, because he was going to see them soon…. I prayed he wouldn’t forget, and sure enough, a couple of weeks later, when I was back home in L.A., I got a tape in the mail of Kate and Anna doing ‘Heart Like a Wheel’ with just piano and cello, and it was so gorgeous.”
“I started making the rounds and I took it to record producer after record producer because I was dying to do this song. But nobody thought I should do it. I finally put it on the shelf. Sometime later I was rehearsing with Andrew Gold, getting ready to play at Carnegie Hall. We were rehearsing some stuff, and he started playing it. I went, ‘Oh my God, you know that song?’ And the next night I sang it at Carnegie Hall.
“Peter Asher had just taken on the job of being my manager, and he was knocked out. That’s why I wanted to work with Peter, because he got the McGarrigle’s.”
“That was my introduction to them. After I recorded it, they invited me to come back to Canada and do some television show and I took Emmylou Harris with me. Emmy and Kate and I got along really well. Then Emmy and I did this record together and we recorded this beautiful song about World War I, and felt it needed a little chanting Greek chorus. We asked them if they might write a descant, for this song about a prostitute in World War I and how she felt about the soldiers, about taking care of them.”
“I thought it would be fun, since it was set in Paris, for them to sing something in French. Instead, they wrote a little prayer in Latin, because of course a French girl in those days would have said a prayer in Latin. I went and got my aunt’s Latin prayer book, and we found a prayer and it fit right into the music. That was the great thing about them, you’d think something was obvious, and they’d do the thing just to the left of what was obvious and it would be perfect.”
“They came to my house in Tucson while they were recording “The McGarrigle Hour
“I got to sing with them with Emmylou several times, and it was just fantastic. Their voices rang in a way that reminded me of the way they describe in fairy tales the sound of a maiden singing from a tower: ‘…she sounding so purely and sweetly.’”
Quotes from Randy Lewis in LA Times
Related story Canadian Folksinger Kate McGarrigle Dead at 63
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