Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands

Book Preface

THIS BOOK MEANDERED INTO EXISTENCE, taking shape from several long conversations I had with Linda Ronstadt, starting in 2009, first by phone and then in a succession of vehicles, each one, oddly, larger than the last. First a car and then a minivan and finally a bus, a full-sized motorcoach sailing down an Arizona highway, the Sonoran Desert rolling by. We also spoke while stationary: on a park bench in Mexico and a few times at Linda’s home in San Francisco, me with my recorder on a sofa and she holding forth from an adjacent chaise. But mostly these were rambling interviews; they were done while rambling.

We talked about Linda’s family: her mom and dad and grandparents, her sister and two brothers, her two kids and many cousins. We talked about horses and other childhood pets, her family’s hardware store, old boyfriends, Catholic school. We talked about comforting things, like bread-baking, tamale-making, and burrito-folding, and frightening ones, like the wild desert after dark and the way cottonwood trees can murderously drop their limbs and crush things without warning, like the one that flattened Linda’s bedroom when she was a girl. (Luckily, she was elsewhere.)

Once we were riding on a dark desert highway in northern Mexico. We were listening to Linda’s albums, a request from me that she had at first declined, then hesitantly granted, then seemed to enjoy, providing live commentary for each track. “This song’s a bitch to sing,” she said at one point. “It makes me tired just thinking about it.” When we got to her version of “Carmelita,” Warren Zevon’s desolate song about being strung out and suicidal on the outskirts of town, she started laughing. “Am I pretty convincing as a gun-toting heroin addict? Are you buying that?” That trip, in 2013, became an article in the New York Times, “Linda Ronstadt’s Borderland,” which reads now as a dry run for this book.

Those travels flipped my understanding of Linda inside out. It can be surprising to think how much of her work is waterborne, even nautical, summoning ships, swamps, and sea foam. A blue bayou, with those fishing boats with their sails afloat. A shattered heart on a sinking ship out in mid-ocean. Her wary sideways glance toward a shadowy horse hastening down the beach in Malibu. I’d even add pirates, climbing the rigging out in Penzance.

But now I also think of a little girl growing up where the ground got too hot to walk on. Her solution: dipping her bare soles over and over in water and dust until they were caked in clay. In her mud huaraches, she could go anywhere. This was Tucson, which Linda left as a teenager, though she was always able to go home, and home again, because that place and her people gave her a rock-solid identity she never lost.

This is the Linda who in the 1980s made a record of old Mexican songs that became the best-selling non-English-language album ever. The Linda who, in 2010, marched through the streets of Phoenix with her old friend Dolores Huerta and ten thousand immigrant laborers to deplore a sheriff who brutalized Mexicans and other brown people in Arizona. And the Linda who, in 2019, told the United States secretary of state—to his face at a celebratory dinner at the State Department—to stop enabling an immigrant-hating president.

This book aims to show another Linda, to give you another portrait to place on your mental mantle beside the ones of her singing at the Troubadour or hanging with the Eagles or Dolly or Emmylou or Jerry Brown or Kermit. This is Linda before L.A., before stadium rock, before any Grammys, and with real ponies, not Stone ones. This is little Linda, Mexican Linda, cowgirl Linda, desert Linda.

Also sibling Linda. Older brother Peter is in this book, with stories to tell. So are Linda’s late sister and brother, Suzy and Mike. I was lucky to have met Suzy in 2013 at the house Linda still had then in Tucson. Suzy had dropped by to take some garden thing of Linda’s away in her pickup truck. She had long silver hair and a warm laugh. “I miss my sister,” she said to me, speaking in the direction of Linda. Suzy died in 2015. I never met Mike, the youngest sibling, who died in 2016 and was by everyone’s account an all-around lovely guy. He stayed in Tucson, leading a band and raising musical sons and making a ton of good homegrown music.

Talk about rambling: This historical-musical-edible memoir started out as a cookbook, Arizona-themed, that was somehow going to include Sandra Day O’Connor, Barry Goldwater, and Muhammad Ali, whose name is on a Parkinson’s disease research center in Phoenix. Linda’s friend CC Goldwater, Barry’s granddaughter, had the idea. Linda emailed me to ask for help in writing it, since her condition—she has progressive supranuclear palsy, whose symptoms are similar to Parkinson’s—made it hard to type, much less do all the heavy lifting a book requires.

My first answer was, “Yes of course,” and my second was, Say what now? “It could possibly turn into great fun,” Linda wrote. She was right about the fun, though the cookbook idea didn’t gel. Still, the road trips kept happening, because we knew we had something too good not to share. Between all the Linda memories to tell, Ronstadts to meet, songs to hear, places to discover, and things to eat, out there between Tucson and Sonora, there was a book to make.

We are both grateful to Heyday, and to Steve Wasserman, its publisher, who was Linda’s agent for her 2013 memoir, Simple Dreams, and who understood what this book could be. He stuck with us and we worked it out and here we are.

There’s a lot in these pages about how a singer is both born and made, learning by singing and being sung to. Linda’s grandfather Fred was a bandleader, and her dad, Gilbert, also had the Ronstadt gift—he could have sung professionally, like his friend Lalo Guerrero, the Chicano music legend and old Tucsonan. Linda remembers Lalo and her dad serenading her on her birthday, when she was three. She remembers her dad’s singing voice wowing everyone who heard it, even the tableside mariachis in Mexican restaurants.

And speaking of restaurants, Linda also remembers a lot about growing up with beans, tamales, chiles, and melted cheese. Her food memories are exquisite, even carnal, and though she mainly goes for healthful fish and fruits and vegetables these days, when she tells you about butter from a hot Tucson cheese crisp dripping down her chin, or the silken chew of a tortilla made with lard, you will be delighted to meet that Linda, too. Linda is not known for her kitchen work; the most complicated thing she cooks for herself these days is toast, although she used to bake whole-wheat bread in her hippie days, using a recipe she adapted from the Fannie Farmer Cookbook, with wheat gluten and honey and molasses. She made it often enough to know it by heart. She put a photo of a loaf she made on the back cover of her 1995 album, Feels Like Home.

When Linda and I tried to replicate it, we came up with some decent loaves, though they weren’t precisely what she remembered, so she decided not to include the recipe here. What we did re-create here is a Ronstadt road trip, the real deal, led by herself and joined by her family members and dear friends from back in the day. She’s gotten the band together and gone back on the road—without the sex and drugs (sorry) and with corridos, rancheras, and huapangos instead of rock-androll. The guest musicians this time include Mockingbirds, not Eagles, and a lot of Ronstadts. And while I wish there were a way to include a lot more of Ry Cooder and Randy Newman in this story, there isn’t; their place in Linda’s life lies a little outside the Tucson-Sonora penumbra.

Besides Linda’s family, there are her childhood friends like Katya Peterson, who is doing her best to keep Tucson a spirited, welcoming, and decent place. Katya’s late mother, Cele, a fashion designer and entrepreneur who made the most of an incredible century of living, is in this book, too. So is Bob Vint, an architect who is guiding the renovation of the San Xavier del Bac mission outside Tucson, an exquisite living link to the region’s deep history. And the ranchers Deb and Dennis Moroney, who are doing their own kind of historical revitalization, raising vintage Criollo cattle in McNeal.

The people in this book have been in Linda’s life a long time. They are both close to her heart and close to home. If you want to know who Linda is and how she got that way, these are the folks who can tell you, and they are excellent company for the journey ahead. Now let’s talk about where we’re going.