Linda Down the Wind

She sings, oh Lord, with a rowdy spin of styles — country, rhythm and blues, rock, reggae, torchy ballad — fused by a rare and rambling voice that calls up visions of loss, then jiggles the glands of possibility. The gutty voice drives, lilts, licks slyly at decency, riffs off Ella, transmogrifies Dolly Parton, all the while wailing with the guitars, strong and solid as God's garage floor. A man listens and thinks "Oh my, yes," and a woman thinks, perhaps, "Ah, well . . ."

Linda is 30 now. Her skin is flawed, and her lank dark hair is sketched with gray. She has great wet marmot eyes. She has a quick, sly mouth. She looks like a 17-year-old who has spent three days on a bus. A photographer whose profession calls for him to make cool calibrations of female beauty says her face is ordinary and her body nothing special. In courtly times he would have been skewered. She sings You 're No Good, Desperado or Love Has No Pride, and the eye of the beholder mists over. She is beautiful.

Onstage she seems small and uncertain, a little girl dressed up. She clutches the microphone to her face ("There you go, baby, here am I"). The mike is a sponge-covered apple on a stick ("Well you left me here so I could sit and cry"). Her lips, stretched wide, quiver so close to its surface that if she were to bring her jaws together she would bite circuitry. Will Eve ("Golly, gee, what have you done to me?") bite the apple? ("Well I guess it doesn't matter any more.")

Linda Ronstadt, this high-wattage waif, would be a rarity if all she had done were to survive for twelve years in the shark-infested deeps of rock. In fact, each of her last four albums has "gone platinum" — sold better than a million copies — and her last two, Hasten Down the Wind and Linda Ronstadt: Greatest Hits, reached sales of a million in a matter of weeks. Before Christmas she finished a wildly cheered six-month tour of the U.S. and Europe, during which audiences of 15,000 were common.

She is a superstar on the verge of becoming (what lunatic debasement of language will serve?) a Big Superstar. Executives of Elektra/Asylum/Nonesuch, the Los Angeles company for which she records, are shyly trying out a considerable boast: "Right now Linda is the most successful female singer in record history."

This brag may need hedging because, over the long haul, other singers — Barbra Streisand, to name one, and perhaps Aretha Franklin and Diana Ross — may have sold more records than Linda. (Carole King sold 13 million of a single LP, Tapestry.) Nevertheless, Ronstadt is the only female performer to have four consecutive albums go platinum (she made over $3 million from record sales alone last year). "Female" is the important qualifier. Rock is the thumping heart of Linda's music, and the rock world is dominated by males. The biggest stars are male, and so are the back-up musicians.

Rock beats are thrustingly phallic, and lyrics are often tauntingly and cruelly masculine. So are the crotch-wrenching, guitar-pumping stage moves of such founding fathers as Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley. Rock seems so hostile that relatively few women master the guitar, its basic instrument.