Simple Dreams ~ A Musical Memoir by Linda Ronstadt

Author:Linda Ronstadt [Ronstadt, Linda]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2013-09-16T16:00:00+00:00

13

Meeting Joe Papp

Photo by Martha Swope.

With Joe Papp backstage at the New York Public Theater during La Bohème.

I PICKED UP THE next available phone and called my pal John Rockwell in New York to whine about my predicament. John wrote about music for The New York Times for more than thirty years and is one of the rare critics who can write with equal authority about both classical music and contemporary pop music. We met in 1973, when he came to my apartment on Beachwood Drive in the Hollywood Hills to interview me. He noticed that I had a book on my shelf called Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s, by Otto Friedrich. (Yes, I lent the book to Jackson Browne, who wrote a good song with the same title. This is done frequently and is legal. The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, the title of a 1966 science-fiction novel by Robert Heinlein, comes immediately to mind. The great songwriter Jimmy Webb loved the title and appropriated it for a song that I later sang on my album Get Closer.) Before the Deluge was about the Weimar Republic in Germany, just as Hitler was coming to power, and all the missed opportunities that might have stopped him. I had become fascinated with the tragedy of this era, as well as the glamour of prewar Berlin, the architectural innovation, the declining importance of virgin brides (no dowries in a bad economy), the gender-bending clothing styles, the hair and makeup styles, and the wonderful music (Kurt Weill, the Comedian Harmonists). David Bowie was beginning to experiment with one exotic image after another, and in the mid-1970s his look seemed eerily similar to that earlier time. I wondered then if we were heading into our own little version of the Weimar Republic here in the United States, to be followed by the harsh realities of fascism and aggressive imperialism.

Rockwell, who lived in Germany as a child, earned his PhD in German cultural history, and wrote his thesis on the Weimar Republic, is a fountain of information, and we bonded. The day I called him to complain so bitterly about my stagnant state of mind and need for angels in the architecture of my place of employment, he suggested that the next time I came to New York, he would like to take me to meet a fellow named Joe Papp. “Who is Joe Papp?” I asked. Joe Papp, intoned Rockwell, was a brilliant theater man who had revolutionized the interpretation of Shakespeare by insisting it be made accessible across cultural, economic, and social lines, using racially diverse casts and presenting it to the public at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park for free. He also was not afraid to bring in people from other areas of show business. Maybe he had some ideas about what to do with me.

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