Remember the events called "be-ins"?

I mentioned in a comment to Travel David yesterday that I had taken the Citroën on a nice drive out in the beautiful Touraine countryside. I wanted to test out the car's new radio by listening to some 1970s Linda Ronstadt songs. One album I played was Don't Cry Now, released in 1973. I had copied MP3 files of the songs that I have in iTunes onto an SD card. The radio's MP3 player worked great.

The first time I ever heard Linda Ronstadt sing live and in person was in the spring of 1969. Anyway, the venue was the Sarah P. Duke gardens at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, where I was an undergraduate student. It was a warm, sunny April afternoon. The concert turned into what was called a "be-in" that day. Do you remember those? It was all very counter-cultural. People took off their clothes and swam around in a pond (or was it a fountain?) in the garden while Linda and the Stone Poneys performed.

Years later, when Walt and I were living in Washington DC, we went to a Ronstadt concert in a big indoor stadium out in Maryland somewhere. I remember that Linda was singing Blue Bayou then, among other songs. That must have been in the early 1980s. A year or two later we learned that Ronstadt was going to do a performance of old ballads that were on her What's New album, recorded with arranger/composer Nelson Riddle. The venue was Radio City Music Hall. We immediately bought tickets and went to spend a weekend in New York City and really enjoyed the concert. I remember that Linda's encore that night was her hit song Desperado, that had been written, composed, and recorded by The Eagles.

Skip forward to the year 2000. One annual event in San Francisco in those days was a set of performances by Kate and Anna McGarrigle, the Canadian sisters who recorded a lot of French-language as well as English-language songs. I had first heard them on the radio in Paris years earlier, when they released the songs La Complainte pour Sainte-Catherine and Entre Lajeunesse et la Sagesse. We went to a McGarrigles concert in a small theater at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco that year, and Kate McGarrigle (mother of Rufus Wainright) announced that as an encore she and her sister had asked Linda Ronstadt, a San Francisco resident, to perform one of their most famous songs, Heart Like a Wheel, which had been a major hit for Ronstadt earlier. She was in the audience that night. And there she was, sitting in the row right behind us. We hadn't realized she was there. We didn't speak to her, though I wish I could have.

One other performance by Ronstadt that we were happy to get tickets for took place at the Warfield theater in San Francisco that also featured the singer/songwriter Emmylou Harris. Harris had worked with Ronstadt and the McGarrigles for years, and we were big fans.

I was very sad when I learned a few years ago that Linda Ronstadt had ended her singing career for health reasons.