With its strikingly lurid pink-and-black punk graphics showing the star glowering like a hopped-up minx, Mad Love is a splashy tribute by Linda Ronstadt and producer Peter Asher to the current rock & roll revival. At the creative helm is a fresh Los Angeles whiz kid, writer-guitarist-arranger Mark Goldenberg of the Cretones, who composed three of the tunes here. Another California rocker, Billy Steinberg, contributed the Buddy Holly-like "How Do I Make You," in which Ronstadt frankly imitates Deborah Harry. Juxtaposed with these L.A. power-pop products are three Elvis Costello songs: "Party Girl," "Girls Talk" and "Talking in the Dark." Cover versions of Little Anthony and the Imperials'
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"Hurt So Bad" and the Hollies' "I Can't Let Go," both vintage 1965, suggest connections with Costello and Goldenberg on the one hand, and the British Invasion and Brill Building pop on the other.
As its title indicates, Mad Love's theme is passion – not the reflective, yearning romanticism that's infused most of Ronstadt's best work, but brutal, nervous, teenage sexuality. Linda Ronstadt doesn't really try to embody an Eighties high-school rock & roller; she's too knowing and refined a singer for that. Instead, she strikes a pose somewhere between her personality (and public image) and the characters in the songs, who are generally younger men and women. Vocally, she exaggerates the punchy, abbreviated diction she used in "Tumbling Dice," "Living in the U.S.A." and her impersonations of Warren Zevon's roustabouts. That this pose comes from the head, not the heart, will undoubtedly alienate New Wave purists, since the essence of punk is furious spontaneity, and Ronstadt's "spontaneity" is calculated down to the smallest phrase and tiniest breath. No matter how tough she acts, she can't help sounding pretty. Indeed, all through Mad Love, the tension between Ronstadt's sweet romanticism and the bluntness of the material creates a number of problems that have more to do with the artist contradicting her natural inclinations than with the interpretations themselves.
The arrangements strike the same attitude as the singing. Utilizing one or two guitars with lots of fuzz tone, organ-dominated keyboards, bass, drums, very few backup vocals and no sweetening, the settings are bleak, spare and downright hermetic. What little drive Mad Love has is muted and mechanistic: every take sounds like the 200th. Such studio meticulousness lends the music a desolate ethereality that's as unreal as Ronstadt's vocal punkiness. It's hard to imagine these performances live because the "crudeness" here is so high-tech chic.
Elvis Costello's compositions are probably the worst casualties of this salon approach. Costello's songs boast some of the snappiest melodies in all of rock & roll, but as Ronstadt demonstrates, their lyrics aren't easily penetrable. Battle-grounds of rage, frustration and fearful longing, they demand an unpret
