Rock Mamas

...Should it sell, she will probably continue in the same direction...

...They include such talents as Toni Brown and Terry Garthwaite of the Joy of Cooking, singer-songwriter Wendy Waldman, Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane, Nicoel Barclay, Claudia Lennear, Carly Simon, Alice Stuart, and four more whose work I'd like to discuss in some detail in the space remaining...

...It Takes a Train to Cry," a countryfied "After the Fire Is Gone" and her own beautiful song, "Down So Low," which she first recorded years ago with Mother Earth...

...Muldaur certainly has femininity: The big hit from her new album, Waitress in a Donut Shop (Reprise MS 2194), is the old Peggy Lee number, "I'm a Woman" (written by two men, naturally...

...Streetlights, with its strings and background vocals, also seems overproduced and overarranged...

...She has been working wonders since her old days with the Stone Poneys, and if you're not a latecomer to Linda, you know how completely she has been shaped by the country and western sounds she grew up on in Arizona...

...No, a rock 'n' roll woman is a female who lives the same tough life as any male performer on the circuit, a female who has her own ideas about music and does what she can to get them across...

...They have collaborated on a couple of albums, and their latest, Breakaway, on his label (Monument X698), is as good as their first, which hit the top of the country charts...

...The interviewer in her Introduction, and the subjects in their responses, make it altogether clear that in the world of rock, women are strictly second-class citizens...

...No doubt about it—women in rock 'n' roll have had a hard time getting their due...

...Yet repeated listenings have persuaded me that, although she is pleasant to hear, her work lacks that crucial bit of grit...

...Not only can she play like some dark angel off Beale Street, but she sings with good control, an economy of effect and a profound sense of what will work where...

...These four then—Maria Muldaur, Rita Coolidge, Bonnie Raitt, and Linda Ronstadt—complete Katherine Orloff's honor roll of rock women...

...The third of the four, Bonnie Raitt, knows just what she is about: Maybe there is some special significance to the fact that the performer deepest into the feminist movement is also the best woman musician...

...They try not to listen when Nicoel Barclay, of the all-girl group Fanny, lays down her funky piano licks...

...Kris Kristofferson...

...Style, voice, feeling, and intuition come together in her like a miracle of nature...

...Linda Ronstadt, for instance, says: "The reason that Maria is my favorite is that she's the only girl I can think of who doesn't ever sacrifice an ounce of femininity for what she does...

...Even male musicians seem to harbor the notion that the females among them have gotten where they are on something other than talent...

...There is a lovely art-lessness to her renditions of songs like "Desperados Waiting for the Train," "I Feel Like Going Home" and "Mama Lou" that makes you feel you are discovering her each time you listen...

...Remarkably, however, the tone of the book is upbeat, optimistic...

...Nor is she a nonperforming recording star like Carole King, "a housewife who writes songs...

...N A. No rock V roll woman around today has everything so firmly in place as Linda Ronstadt...

...Grit—a certain authenticity, a certain unforced emotional intensity—is the quality that characterizes the singing of Rita Coolidge from first to last...

...Even others in the book single her out for praise...

...Her latest album, Streetlights (Warner Brothers BS 2818), is an LP of very high quality...

...Is she a star, fronting a band herself...

...Coolidge is, as even an occasional reader of Rolling Stone knows, Mrs...

...None of the people here is an injustice collector, demanding retribution in blood from the male half of the human race...

...Except for one serious omission, Orloff's rock 'n' roll women are mine, too...

...They pretend not to know that Bonnie Raitt can play most guitarists this side of Dicky Betts under the table...

...What, according to Katherine Orloff, is a rock 'n' roll woman...

...Listen to her latest solo album, Fall Into Spring (A&M SP 3627), and I think you'll understand what I mean...

...That in itself may be a source of some difficulty for them, for nothing threatens a man more than to encounter a woman whom he perceives to be freer than he is...

...There was no brighter star than Janis Joplin, yet she punished her voice, drove herself to an emotional frenzy, drank herself sick, and finally died of drugs—all because she had no idea, really, who she was or what she was doing...

...tasteful is the appropriate adjective...

...She has a wild, abandoned, straight-ahead quality on her Insane Asylum (Capitol ST-11224) that few can match...

...Bad management, maybe, or no management at all...

...Then there is Linda Ronstadt's sweet-singing friend Emmy Lou Harris, who has been working in clubs around the country and should have a record coming out soon...

...Or perhaps she just stayed too long with that commune-cum-rock group, Mother Earth...

...The one she left out, it seems to me, is Tracy Nelson, whose low, powerful alto voice is one of the best in rock and always has been...

...Whenever I draw up a list of people who should have made it but never did, the women always outnumber the men...

...Essentially, Maria Muldaur is an imitator, one with a keen sense of parody, who can adapt to a variety of styles...

...In spite of what they have been through—and some of them, like Claudia Lennear and Rita Coolidge, have been through quite a lot—they remain free spirits...

...Her range may not be much, and her pitch may not always be quite right, but somehow she gets the music to come out just the way that girl at the truckstop would sing if that girl at the truckstop could sing...

...Sometimes even success doesn't help...

...But it does seem that way...

...In this album, as in her last, she takes us from jazz ("Squeeze Me") through blues ("If You Haven't Any") to ballad ("Oh Papa...

...I think of singers like Joanne Vent, Genya Ravan of Ten Wheel Drive, Anya Cohen of Street, and a lady with one of the most powerful rock voices ever, Brenda Patterson...

...I'm talking about Bonnie Bramlett, formerly of Delaney and Bonnie, the rock 'n' roll mother of them all...

...I hate to be rooting against her...

...It's a fine collection, her best to date...

...In fact, her whole manner is rather unthreatening, unassertive and accommodating...

...Maybe the men who run the business don't treat female performers any more ruthlessly than they do male musicians...

...Kathi McDonald is one...

...It is hard to say why she has not gotten the recognition she should have...

...But whatever the reason, she's back with us on a new label, Atlantic, and on her first LP under her own name, Tracy Nelson (SD 7310...

...With Paul Butterfield on harmonica, she gives a spirited performance, but the accomplishments she boasts in it—washing, cooking, sewing, loving—are not the kind to cause any man discomfort...

...Finally, one of the great rock 'n' roll women of all time—that's about 20 years, isn't it?—has a comeback album due any minute on the Capricorn label...

...Her approach to her music has been absolutely consistent from the start—no sudden shifts in direction, no experimentation—and she has been getting better and better with each new record...

...Now, with cuts like "You're No Good," "Faithless Love" and "The Dark End of the Street" on her most recent album, Heart Like A Wheel (Capitol ST-11358), she has achieved a kind of perfection...

...I suspect Bonnie Raitt looks upon it as an experiment...

...Rainy Day Man" and "Angel from Montgomery," for example, are the equal of anything she has ever recorded...

...Of all Orloff's interviewees, the hottest at the moment—and with only two LP's to her credit at that —is Maria Muldaur...

...To cite Tracy Nelson as the single serious omission does not mean there aren't others around who deserve to be better known...

...These thoughts are occasioned by a good book of interviews I have just read, Rock 'n' Roll Woman, by Katherine Orloff (Nash, 195 pp., $6.95...

...Still, I missed the blues she did on her excellent first two releases, as well as their more informal, easy jam-style...

...Indeed, one of the cuts on it, "Dakota," is as good as anything either of them has done solo...

...Then she must be making it with some big producer or possibly the head of the record company...

...Well, pardon me," she once told her biographer Myra Friedman before a performance, "I have to go upstairs now and put Janis Joplin on...

...It's a fine set, filled with good things like Bob Dylan's "It Takes a Lot to Laugh...

...Well, she's not a "showgirl"—Orloff's designation for the Vicki Carrs and Cher Bonos of this world, who are most at home in front of television cameras or Las Vegas audiences...