In 1967, a twenty-one-year-old singer from Tucson, Arizona, stood in a Los Angeles studio without her bandmates and sang a gentle goodbye written by a Monkee. The record took almost no time to make, it made nearly everyone involved uncomfortable, and it climbed to number thirteen on the Billboard Hot 100. Different Drum was Linda Ronstadt’s first hit, and in a sense everything in her long career — the country-rock triumphs, the rock superstardom, the standards albums, the mariachi records, the duets — flows downstream from the three minutes in which she politely, devastatingly, told a lover she could not stay.
A Monkee’s Song, Given Away Twice
Mike Nesmith wrote Different Drum in 1965, before the wool hat and before the television fame, when he was still a struggling Texas-born songwriter in Los Angeles. The lyric is a small masterpiece of restraint: two people who care for each other but want different lives, and the one who needs freedom explaining, without cruelty, that there is no villain in the story — only a mismatch. The title itself reaches back to Thoreau’s famous remark about the man who hears “a different drummer” and steps to his own music. In Nesmith’s hands it became the whole philosophy of the song in a single line: you and I travel to the beat of a different drum.
Nesmith had no luck placing the song where he most wanted it. He offered it to the producers of The Monkees, the television show that made him famous in 1966, but they would not allow the group to record it as a serious performance. The closest it ever came to the show was a comedy bit in the episode “Too Many Girls,” first aired on December 19, 1966, in which Nesmith — playing a hayseed character named Billy Roy Hodstetter — races through the song as a throwaway joke, a country singer in too much of a hurry to mean it. Television had made him a star, but it would not take his songwriting seriously.
The song’s first real recording went elsewhere entirely. Nesmith passed it to John Herald of the northern bluegrass band the Greenbriar Boys, who cut it for their 1966 album Better Late than Never! It was a good version, delivered in a bluegrass setting, and almost nobody heard it. The song might easily have stayed in that obscurity — a songwriter’s favorite, traded among folk musicians — if a young singer from Arizona had not been looking for material in Los Angeles.
From Tucson to the Folk Circuit
Ronstadt had grown up inside music. Her family in Tucson was steeped in it: her father sang and played guitar, and the household repertoire ran from Mexican canciones to Gilbert and Sullivan to the pop standards on the radio. She formed the Stone Poneys in Los Angeles with guitarists Bobby Kimmel and Kenny Edwards, both drawn from the same folk scene that was about to give American rock its country inflection. The trio signed with Capitol Records and worked with producer Nik Venet, releasing a debut album, The Stone Poneys, in January 1967, built largely on songs by Kimmel and Edwards with Ronstadt’s voice out front.
The album established her as a singer of unusual clarity and control, but it sold modestly, and its one single went nowhere. For the second album Capitol wanted something that could cross over to pop radio. Venet, who had a producer’s ear for the gap between folk credibility and AM gold, remembered the Nesmith song. It had a folk pedigree, a hummable chorus, and a lyric with just enough independence in it to suit the moment. What nobody foresaw was how the recording would be made — or what it would do to the group.
The Session Where the Band Didn’t Play
The Stone Poneys first approached Different Drum the way they had intended: as an acoustic ballad, the three of them playing together. Venet rejected that approach outright. He wanted a record, not a folk performance, and he built one out of Los Angeles session professionals — an arrangement by Jimmy Bond, who also played bass, with guitarist Al Viola, drummer Jim Gordon, a string section led by Sid Sharp, and, most memorably, Don Randi at the harpsichord, playing in a baroque style and improvising much of what ended up on the finished track. The result was a folk-rock single with a chamber-music spine, unlike anything else on the radio that autumn: harpsichord filigree and strings wrapped around a twenty-one-year-old’s unadorned voice.
It came at a cost. Ronstadt was the only member of the Stone Poneys who actually performed on the recording; her bandmates’ group’s breakthrough was made without them. Ronstadt herself was not entirely comfortable either — she had imagined something earthier and more traditional, and the polished, orchestrated treatment was Venet’s conception, not hers. The session itself was startlingly brief: the song was cut live in the studio, effectively in a couple of takes, with the released performance drawn from the second take and no overdubs added afterward. The record that would define her early career was, by the standards of Los Angeles studio craft, almost an accident.
One change, though, was hers. Nesmith had written the song from a man’s point of view, and Ronstadt flipped the gender references, so that it became a woman telling a man she would not be tied down. In 1967 that reversal was quietly radical. The pop charts were crowded with women waiting, pleading, and promising to follow; here was a young woman’s voice, clear and unhurried, explaining that she heard a different drum and intended to follow it — not defiant, exactly, but serene. The performance announced the interpretive gift that would carry her whole career: she almost never wrote her own material, but she inhabited other writers’ songs so completely that they became indistinguishable from autobiography.
Seventeen Weeks on the Chart
Capitol released Different Drum as a single in September 1967, taken from the second Stone Poneys album, Evergreen, Volume 2. It entered the Billboard Hot 100 on November 11, 1967, stayed for seventeen weeks, and peaked at number thirteen. It reached number twelve on the Cash Box survey, number sixteen in Record World, and number one in the Los Angeles market; overseas it climbed into the top ten in both Australia and New Zealand. The parent album reached number one hundred on the Billboard chart and held on for fifteen weeks — respectable for a folk trio in the year of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
The hit proved something important about its singer: her voice could carry a song across every format boundary at once. Folk audiences heard sincerity, pop audiences heard a hook, and the harpsichord gave disc jockeys something to talk about. The song has never really left the repertoire. It remains one of Ronstadt’s most beloved recordings, it surfaced in the soundtrack of the 2012 film Seven Psychopaths, and when Nesmith finally recorded his own complete version in 1972 for the album And the Hits Just Keep on Comin’, he restored a fourth verse the Stone Poneys recording had dropped — the songwriter reclaiming, five years late, a song the world already knew in someone else’s voice.
The record also pointed forward to a sound that did not quite exist yet. Its blend of folk intimacy, country instrumentation, and pop polish anticipated the Los Angeles country-rock that would dominate the coming decade — a movement Ronstadt herself would lead, fronting a touring band in 1971 whose members (Glenn Frey, Don Henley, Bernie Leadon, and Randy Meisner) went off to form the Eagles. Even the session band carried the future in it: drummer Jim Gordon would soon be a founding figure of Derek and the Dominos, and the record’s gleaming studio craft was the Los Angeles session scene at its most assured. Different Drum sits at the exact hinge between the folk revival and country-rock, which is part of why it has dated so gracefully.
The Hit That Ended the Band
Success finished what the session had started. Capitol’s promotion increasingly presented the Stone Poneys as a vehicle for their singer, and the third album arrived in April 1968 under the telling title Linda Ronstadt, Stone Poneys and Friends, Vol. III. Within the year the group was finished, and Ronstadt was a solo artist. Kenny Edwards eventually returned to her side as a central member of her solo band, but the Poneys themselves became a footnote of rock history: a band immortalized by a hit record on which two of its three members did not play.
That is the quiet irony at the center of Different Drum. A song about two people parting without bitterness, because they want different things from life, ended up enacting exactly that story on the people who recorded it. Venet got his hit. Ronstadt got a career. Kimmel and Edwards got a permanent, peculiar asterisk. And the performance their singer had initially found too polished became her calling card — the first demonstration that Linda Ronstadt could take a song the industry had mishandled, miscast, and given away, and hear, instantly, what it was meant to be. She would spend the next two decades doing the same thing to songs by Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison, Warren Zevon, and the Rolling Stones. This is where it started: three minutes, a harpsichord, and a goodbye with no villain in it.