Midweek Music Break: Linda Ronstadt, “Long, Long Time”

In an issue of Esquire Magazine, back in the 1980s, I read a piece by Ron Rosenbaum called “Melancholy Baby,” which opened by talking about the saddest songs ever: great heartbreak songs. (At left is, I believe, the photo which opened the article.)

Eventually, as it turned out, the article was a wonderful, more general report of an interview over dinner with Linda Ronstadt. (Be still, my then 30-something-years-old heart… another reason why I never forgot that article.) But it began with a discussion of this song in specific, as maybe the saddest-of-the-sad.

Ronstadt herself remembered the recording session:

I can remember the day I recorded “Long, Long Time”… It was 10:30 in the morning, but I was really into this kind of achy feeling, because the music — it’s in these chords. I think my phrasing was horrible, I think I kind of butchered it, but it is definitely in those chords. And it happened to the musicians, who are jaded session players. As soon as the fiddle player and Weldon Myrick, who’s the steel guitar, began to play those chords, they got real into that and became personally involved.

(It wasn’t in that article, as I thought I remembered, but I think I once read another detail of the session: that Ronstadt had a cold, or a respiratory infection — something like that, maybe with a fever — and just felt 100% incapable physically of recording anything.)

Here’s what Rosenbaum himself said of the song:

Do you remember “Long, Long Time”? If you haven’t heard it, you’re lucky. Because from the opening weeping steel-guitar hook, the song is paralyzingly sad. By the time she reaches the final refrain… it has managed to reopen every aching wound of romantic loss you’ve ever experienced, and some you haven’t yet. A legendary classic killer sad song.

There’s almost a kind of superstitious cult around the lethal tear-jerking power of this song. Like the one that grew up in previous generations around “Gloomy Sunday.” People would talk about that song in hushed and superstitious tones and refer to rumors that because it was the cause of so many suicides, it had been banned from the airwaves; it was just too lethally sad. I knew several women who swore they’d worn the grooves thin in “Long, Long Time” jags, playing it over and over again addictively to exorcise their hearts of sorrow.

I don’t have much to add to his comments. I will say, though, that if I ever wrote a book of Great Moments in Ronstadt History, “Long, Long Time” would have a chapter all its own.

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Reading back through the above, I’m struck by the “saddest song” claim. Not specifically in reference to “Long, Long Time” (which may very well be the saddest song; you won’t hear me dissenting), but more generally — in terms of what I might call Young Man’s Hubris.

It wasn’t just my hubris, nor certainly Ron Rosenbaum’s. It was Boomer hubris: the conviction that what we’d lived through, surely, passed the test of time, as they say — the best years not just of our lives, but of, really, no kidding, like the history of civilization, man. Our thinking about music in particular suffered this illusion. Radio stations would set aside entire holiday weekends (often Labor Day weekend) to broadcast Top-X countdowns (the value of X varied, but it might be 500 or a thousand) of what they called “the greatest music ever.” Phrases like that weren’t watered down with mincing qualifiers — no “ever recorded,” no “greatest of our lives.” No, the hits of the Forties didn’t count — the music calling to lovers and spouses across entire continents. Forget the Great Depression ballads. Jazz? Pfft. Classical? It is to laugh. Our music was The Greatest…

I don’t think I ever knew or thought to ask exactly how these radio stations arrived at their rankings; maybe they used a simple metric like record sales. But the lists would bring up some jarring juxtapositions. I can’t think of a specific example, but you might hear something like “Yesterday” cozying up to, say, Rosie and the Originals’ “Angel Baby.”

At the time he interviewed Ronstadt, Ron Rosenbaum — an early Boomer — hadn’t quite crossed the line into his 40s. I wonder if in retrospect he’d recognize his hyperbolic self. (I suspect not, any more than I recognize my own willingness back then to accept the same logic.)