It begins with a guitar riff that sounds like a door slamming, and then a voice that has never sounded more sure of itself. “You’re No Good” is a kiss-off, a song about walking away from a lover who treated you badly and feeling nothing but relief about it. When Linda Ronstadt released it in late 1974, it did something no record of hers had ever done: it went to number one. It made her a star, and it became the signature song of one of the great voices of the decade. And the strangest thing about it is that Ronstadt herself never quite believed in it. She called it an afterthought. She thought her own vocal on it was terrible. She had to be talked into the guitar solo that everyone remembers. The biggest hit of her life was, by her own account, almost an accident.
To understand why the song mattered so much, you have to understand where Ronstadt stood in the early 1970s. She was not an unknown. She had first reached the charts in 1967 as the singer of the Stone Poneys, on “Different Drum,” a song written by Michael Nesmith of the Monkees, and by the early seventies she was a respected figure in the Los Angeles country-rock scene. What she did not have, not yet, was a hit single of her own. Her solo albums sold modestly, and her biggest solo hit to that point, “Long, Long Time,” had reached only number 25.
The turning point came with a producer. Peter Asher had been half of the British pop duo Peter and Gordon in the 1960s, and then had worked for the Beatles’ Apple label. He moved to Los Angeles, and around 1970 he first saw Ronstadt sing at the Bitter End in New York. At the suggestion of their mutual friend John Boylan, Ronstadt asked Asher to manage her, and during the making of her 1973 album Don’t Cry Now, Asher stepped in and helped finish the record. The partnership clicked, and when it came time to make her next album, the choice of producer was, as Asher later put it, simply himself.
The album they made was Heart Like a Wheel, recorded in the summer of 1974 at the Sound Factory in Hollywood. Ronstadt and Asher spent three months in the middle of 1974 crafting it, choosing songs the way Ronstadt always had: material by contemporaries like James Taylor and J. D. Souther alongside older tunes like the Everly Brothers’ “When Will I Be Loved.” It was, for the most part, a country-leaning record, and Ronstadt later described her position at the time plainly. She was a club act, she said, playing country songs at the Palomino Club. She was, by her own description, basically a ballad singer. And ballad singers need something else in a live show, which is where “You’re No Good” enters the story.
The song was not new. It had been written by Clint Ballard Jr. and first recorded in 1963 by the soul singer Dee Dee Warwick, the sister of Dionne Warwick, in a version produced by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. Betty Everett had a minor R&B success with it later that same year, and the British group the Swinging Blue Jeans took it into the British charts in 1964. But she had not thought of recording it until her bassist, Kenny Edwards, suggested it during rehearsals in early 1973, when her band was preparing to open for Neil Young. Edwards had a practical reason in mind: a ballad-heavy set needed uptempo songs to open and close the show. “You’re No Good” was, she said, a really good closer. She began singing it at the end of her concerts, and she performed it on television on The Midnight Special in December 1973, in an R&B-flavored arrangement built around a Wurlitzer part played by Boylan, with guitarist Andrew Gold alongside him.
When Ronstadt and Asher sat down to plan Heart Like a Wheel, the song almost did not make the cut. A month into recording, they decided to include it, almost as a change of pace among the ballads. Ronstadt has always been candid about how little she expected of it. “I like to sing ballads,” she said in the 2019 documentary Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice, “but we needed uptempo songs for the record and, as an afterthought, I had this song that we’d used to close the show.” She had doubts. Asher did not. He had loved the song since his days in England, and he went to work on it.
The first attempt, recorded on July 1, 1974, at the Sound Factory, did not work. Asher assembled a mixed rhythm section: Gold and Bob Warford, both guitarists from Ronstadt’s band, alongside the R&B session players Paul Stallworth on bass and Fred White of Earth, Wind & Fire on drums. They played it fast and straight, closer to the way the band did it live, as a rhythm-and-blues number. Ronstadt listened and knew at once that it was wrong. “I was always trying to put together different versions of R&B and country,” she later told Mix magazine. “Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it was just really awful!” This time, she felt, it was the wrong groove. She did not think she knew how to phrase around those players, though she stressed it was no fault of theirs. So they set the song aside, and a few days later they tried again, completely differently.
The version that became the hit was built, not played live. On July 5, Asher decided against another full-band live recording, which he felt had only produced muddle, and suggested building the track piece by piece. The foundation came almost by accident. Touring guitarist Ed Black was fooling around on his Les Paul and came up with a riff, and Kenny Edwards joined in on bass. “Between them, they made that foundation,” Ronstadt recalled. Then came the drummer, who was not a drummer at all but Andrew Gold. The band was having trouble finding a decent drummer, so Gold, who could play everything, sat behind the kit. He borrowed a cheap kit and played a sort of pseudo-Motown thing, simple licks played very well.
On top of that foundation, Gold added two tracks of Wurlitzer electric piano, one an octave higher than the other, essentially the part Boylan had played live, played far better. Asher later said that the Wurlitzer, the bass and the drums were really the essence of the track, and that all the guitars were just decoration. But what decoration it was. The team left a sixteen-bar gap in the middle of the song for a break to be figured out later, and Gold filled it with a three-section guitar solo, played on a black 1962 Fender Stratocaster that Boylan had picked up for Ronstadt at a pawn shop during the Neil Young tour. Gold fell in love with that guitar the moment he picked it up, Ronstadt recalled. Gold worked out three very different, precisely played parts for the three sections of the break, doubling and sometimes tripling his parts, giving the guitars a jangly sound when mixed together.
The break also got an accidental gift from a broken machine: a rare EMT delay unit whose warped disc gave the signal a warbly sound Gold loved. “We heard it, and went, ‘Oooooh, can we have that? We like that. It’s broken. That’s great!'” he recalled. The result of all this handiwork was, as Gold cheerfully admitted, decidedly Beatles-esque, and that is where the trouble started. After an overnight, fifteen-hour marathon session working on the break, Asher and Gold proudly played the result for Ronstadt. She was not pleased. Comedian Albert Brooks happened to be in the studio, and when he heard the solo he said it sounded pretty good, but he was just wondering why, in the middle of the song, it suddenly turned into a Beatles record. Gold, Ronstadt later said, was completely busted, because sounding like the Beatles was exactly what his intention had been. Ronstadt asked Edwards to play a blues take on the section instead. But after a break and a second listen, Ronstadt came around: frankly, it was really good. The Gold break stayed.
Ronstadt was just as hard on herself as she had been on the solo. Her lead vocal, recorded live during tracking with a Neumann U 67 tube microphone, was one she judged harshly for years afterward. “It’s a live vocal, and it’s a terrible vocal,” she said. “I was so tired. It was about getting the phrasing. I just felt like I had rushed the timing, and didn’t just lay back in the groove.” Listeners, of course, have never agreed with her verdict. What she hears as rushed, the rest of the world hears as urgency, a woman singing a kiss-off as if she means every word of it, and cannot wait to get the words out. The finishing touches came far from Hollywood: the string arrangement, written by Gregory Rose, was recorded at AIR London studios in late August, and the song ends on a strong, long-held string note that Asher himself conceived.
Released in November 1974 as the first single from Heart Like a Wheel, “You’re No Good” was an immediate smash. Ronstadt remembered hearing it on the radio for the first time and knowing at once: “That sucker’s a hit. I just knew it. It’s really a well-constructed record. I have to give Peter and Andrew credit.” The record reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 on February 15, 1975, where it stayed for one week. It was Ronstadt’s first number one, and it would prove to be her only one. The album followed the single to the top of the Billboard album chart as well, and eventually went double platinum. Gold, too, felt the change at once, having to pull his car off the road when a disc jockey named him on air as the song’s guitar player.
The success changed everything for Ronstadt. Heart Like a Wheel was followed by a run of hit singles, including “When Will I Be Loved,” the album’s second single, and a string of platinum albums that made her one of the most successful female singers of the second half of the 1970s, a performer who moved effortlessly between rock, country and pop. She would go on to a decades-long career across genres. But “You’re No Good” remained the foundation, the record that proved a singer famous for ballads could snarl, and that a song first recorded in 1963 could sound utterly of its moment in 1975. Later artists kept returning to it, from Van Halen’s version on their 1979 album Van Halen II to its use in the 2022 film Minions: The Rise of Gru.
There is a final irony that Ronstadt herself would probably appreciate. The singer who thought her vocal was terrible, who thought the song was an afterthought, who worried that the guitar break sounded too much like the Beatles, made the definitive version of a song that at least three other artists had already tried. She did it by recognizing something in it that the earlier versions had missed: the toughness underneath the heartbreak. The narrator of “You’re No Good” is not weeping over her lost lover. She is telling him, clearly and without regret, that she is better off without him, and that she knew it all along. Ronstadt sang it that way because, for once, she let the band push her out of her ballad-singer comfort zone and into a groove she did not fully trust until she heard it back. The result still sounds like a door slamming, fifty years later, and like a door opening at the same time.
Watch the video below and listen for the guitar break in the middle. It is the sound of a band that built a hit one layer at a time, and of a singer who, despite her own doubts, knew a hit the moment she heard it on the radio.
Sources:
MixOnline, “Classic Track: ‘You’re No Good,’ Linda Ronstadt” — https://www.mixonline.com/recording/classic-track-you-re-no-good-linda-ronstadt-387624
Stereogum, “The Number Ones: Linda Ronstadt’s ‘You’re No Good'” — https://stereogum.com/2049309/the-number-ones-linda-ronstadts-youre-no-good/columns/the-number-ones
American Songwriter, “The No. 1 Hit That Left Linda Ronstadt Truly Unsatisfied, Claiming It Had ‘Terrible’ Vocals” — https://americansongwriter.com/the-no-1-hit-that-left-linda-ronstadt-truly-unsatisfied-claiming-it-had-terrible-vocals/
Grunge, “The Top 10 Hit That Gave Linda Ronstadt Her First No. 1 Was Actually A Cover” — https://www.grunge.com/2218891/top-10-hit-linda-ronstadt-first-no-1-cover/
Parade, “1963 R&B Classic, Reinvented by a Rock Icon, Became a No. 1 Heartbreak Anthem Years Later” — https://parade.com/entertainment/1963-rb-classic-reinvented-by-a-rock-icon-became-a-no-1-heartbreak-anthem-years-later
Rock Reflections, “Linda Ronstadt – You’re No Good” — https://rock-reflections.com/blogs/videos-lyrics-facts/linda-ronstadt-youre-no-good