Stone Poneys

Early meetings

Linda Ronstadt first met Bob Kimmel in 1960 while performing gigs in and around Tucson, Arizona with her older brother Peter and older sister Susie (under the name "The Three Ronstadts", among others). Kimmel was approximately five years older than Linda and was impressed with the strong voice and enthusiasm of the precocious fourteen year old. He relocated to southern California in 1961 and wrote regularly to cajole Linda into joining him throughout her high school years.^[1] Kimmel had already met and befriended Kenny Edwards shortly before Linda's arrival in L.A., and they had started writing folk-rock songs together.

Formation of the original band

Upon graduation from Tucson's Catalina High School in 1964, and after a semester at the University of Arizona, Linda Ronstadt decided to move to the Los Angeles area to join Bob Kimmel and form a band. Ronstadt described Kimmel's vision of the band: "It was going to be five people. We had an electric autoharp and a girl singer, and we thought we were unique in the world. And it turned out the Jefferson Airplane and the Lovin' Spoonful had beaten us."^[2] The group trimmed down to a trio that called themselves the Stone Poneys. Their misspelled name came from Delta Blues singer Charlie Patton's 1929 song "The Stone Pony Blues" (also known as "Pony Blues").^[3]

The band was discovered by a couple of music industry executives while rehearsing at a soul food restaurant called Olivia's which was located in Ocean Park, a community between Venice Beach and Santa Monica that was famous for its food and clientele, including The Doors.^[2] In 1965, they recorded the Johnny Otis song "So Fine" and a few others; Mike Curb produced the sessions and at that time was working for Mercury. However, the record company wanted them to change the group's name to "The Signets" and sing surf music, which the trio chose not to do.

Instead, The Stone Poneys became a leading attraction on California's folk circuit, with Ronstadt usually performing on stage in a miniskirt and bare feet.^[4] They worked intimate clubs like The Troubadour in Hollywood, where they were opening for such talent as Oscar Brown Jr.;^[2] The Insomniac in Hermosa Beach, where they often appeared with the Chambers Brothers;^[4] and The Bitter End in Greenwich Village.

At The Troubadour one night, the band's (and Ronstadt's) first manager Herb Cohen told Kimmel in front of Ronstadt: "Well, I can get your chick singer recorded, but I don't know about the rest of the group". Linda Ronstadt called this "the beginning of the end",^[5] although this occurred even before they were signed to Capitol. But it was Linda Ronstadt who insisted that she would not record without the band.^[2] The Stone Poneys broke up briefly in this time period, and Cohen tried to connect Ronstadt with Frank Zappa to make a demo, and also with Jack Nitzsche, but nothing ever materialized. (She and Zappa – who were both being managed by Cohen in this time period – would later make a TV commercial together).

Beginning of their recording career

After reforming, Cohen eventually introduced the Stone Poneys to Nick Venet (also known as Nik Venet) – also at the Troubadour – who signed the band for Capitol. Ronstadt recalls of the signing: "Capitol wanted me as a solo, but Nick convinced them I wasn't ready, that I would develop. It was true."^[2] In a late 1966 article in Billboard, Venet discussed the formation of a new record label under Capitol called FolkWorld specifically to promote folk-rock artists. Although the label was never consummated, the Stone Poneys became the lead act in the stable of folk-rock performers that Venet was signing and producing in this time period.^[6]

The three albums by the Stone Poneys were produced by Nick Venet. The first album, simply called The Stone Poneys was more folk than rock and featured relatively few lead vocals by Ronstadt; it received little notice. The band again broke up briefly between the first two albums; but, as related by Kenny Edwards, Nick Venet told the band: "'We can make another record, we can make this happen. If we're going to do anything with this, we gotta make something that sounds commercial and get on the radio."^[6]

Hit Song and Further Stresses

For the second album, Evergreen, Volume 2, the songs were in more of a rock vein; and Linda was moved firmly into the lead vocalist position, with only occasional harmony vocals. The album includes the band's only hit song, "Different Drum". The original recording by the Stone Poneys of "Different Drum" was quite similar to the recorded version by the Greenbriar Boys from their 1966 album Better Late than Never!; but as Kenny Edwards recalls: "That's when Nik Venet sort of took an executive position and went, 'This could be a hit song, and we need to sort of have an arranger arrange it.' So none of us actually played on the record version of that."^[6] (A live performance of "Different Drum" in the earlier style survives though).

This was not the only instance of the male band members being pushed out of the recording studio. Ironically, one of the few songs on the second album to feature harmony vocals, "Back on the Street Again" was a duet by Linda Ronstadt and songwriter Steve Gillette (though Linda's voice was clearly on top); Gillette remembers from the session: "[T]here was a scuffle and some noise just outside the door. When we opened it, there was a sad and for some, tearful scene in which it became clear that Kenny [Edwards] and Bobby [Kimmel] had not been notified of the session, and had heard about it indirectly and showed up full of anger at the betrayal. Capitol really did try to break the group up".^[6]

The very success of "Different Drum" spelled the effective end of Stone Poneys as a band: Almost immediately, they started to become known as "Linda Ronstadt and the Stone Poneys". Also, unlike the other 45's, which had been released solely under the name of the band, the "Different Drum" single also included in small letters: "Featuring Linda Ronstadt". As Edwards recalls: "From the record company's point of view, immediately they wanted to push Linda as a solo artist. And frankly, Linda's taste in songs was really growing away from what Bobby was writing.... So there was a spontaneous growth toward her being a solo artist."^[6]

A four-month tour to support the second album (before "Different Drum" became a hit) was the final straw. Ronstadt remembers opening for the Paul Butterfield Blues Band at the Cafe Au Go Go in Greenwich Village as one of her worst experiences with the band: "Here we were rejected by the hippest element in New York as lame. We broke up right after that. We couldn't bear to look at each other."^[2]

Reluctant emergence of a star

Before work began on the band's third album, Kenny Edwards had already departed for India. After "Different Drum" hit the charts, Bob Kimmel and Linda Ronstadt rounded up some more musicians, and the reformed Stone Poneys began touring with the Doors.^[7] Doors frontman Jim Morrison didn't endear himself to Ronstadt; she recalled: "We thought they were a good band, but we didn't like the singer".^[7] After this tour, Kimmel too exited the band.

Linda Ronstadt gamely moved forward and, effectively a solo artist already, started taking control of her career. She gathered more sophisticated material for the new album, including three songs by Tim Buckley that would become standout cuts on that album. "Tim used to live in a house that I lived in too, and we both used to move in and out ... that is, we stayed there alternately. It was the house he wrote about in 'Morning Glory,' which I call 'The Hobo'. That was the 'fleeting house.'"^[3] Buckley was among those in the group photograph that appeared on the back cover of the third album.

Although their final album still appears to be in the name of the band, the album name, Linda Ronstadt, Stone Poneys and Friends, Vol. III was purposefully vague, without a specific artist's name. Even the two singles from the album were released under different names, though Linda Ronstadt now had the burden of the Capitol recording contract: "See, the [Stone] Poneys were taken off the books after the second album. Since it was a hit, they made royalties off it. But I didn't. I paid all by myself for the third album, which was expensive, and it put me severely in the red by the time I started recording my first solo album."^[2]

Later incarnations of the Stone Poneys

By late 1967, Linda Ronstadt began recruiting musicians to assist in the studio and also on the road. One of the first was an old friend from Tucson, Shep Cooke. He had already turned down Ronstadt's invitation to join Stone Poneys twice (in 1966 and also in early 1967); when she asked him again in late 1967: "Something told me I'd better not decline a third time. 'Different Drum' was creeping up the charts, and I couldn't refuse. So I joined the Stone Poneys in November 1967."^[8] Another latter-day member of Stone Poneys was Kit Alderson, who would later help train Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon in the guitar and autoharp, respectively, for their work in the 2005 Johnny Cash/June Carter Cash biopic film Walk the Line. By November 1968, a different group of musicians was billing themselves as the Stone Poneys; besides Ronstadt, they were guitarist John Forsha – who was also a session player on the band's first two albums – drummer John Ware, bassist John Keski, steel guitarist Herb Steiner, and pianist Bill Martin.^[3]

Purists might contend that these Stone Poneys are not the real band, but only backing musicians for Linda Ronstadt; however, they were still being billed as Stone Poneys, and many of the musicians still view themselves as "ex-Stone Poneys". Shep Cooke fondly remembers his time with the band: "We rehearsed like crazy, finished the third Stone Poney album, toured the entire country for 2½ months, played on Joey Bishop's and Johnny Carson's TV shows, went crazy for lack of sleep, and parted company (after the last gig in May 1968) reasonably good friends but a little disillusioned about 'the big time'."^[8]

Post break-up

Despite the lack of big hits, Linda Ronstadt was becoming increasingly well-known following the success of "Different Drum", and in 1969 she officially went solo with her album Hand Sown...Home Grown. However, beginning in the mid-1970s, Kenny Edwards recorded and toured with Linda for about 10 years. In 2007, Linda Ronstadt reconnected with Bob Kimmel in Tucson and sang harmony vocals on one of Kimmel's songs, "Into the Arms of Love" that was included on a CD released that year by his new band BK Special.

Albums and singles

Official Capitol releases

On the first two albums, most of the songs were written by Bob Kimmel and Kenny Edwards. Under the guidance of producer Nik Venet and Capitol, the group recorded their first album in the fall of 1966, The Stone Poneys, which was released in January 1967. The album is notable for its precise strong-voiced harmony vocals. The disc's one and only single release "Sweet Summer Blue And Gold" received no airplay and failed to chart anywhere. (The first album is now mainly known by the name of the 1975 reissue, The Stone Poneys Featuring Linda Ronstadt).

The second album, Evergreen, Volume 2 was released in June 1967; on this album, Linda Ronstadt sang lead vocals on almost all songs. The exception was the title track, which has a psychedelic rock feel; Kenny Edwards was the vocalist on "Part One", while "Part Two" was an instrumental that featured fine sitar work (also by Edwards).

The band hit pay dirt with Mike Nesmith's "Different Drum" (written prior to his joining The Monkees), the second 45 (following "One for One") from the new album. The band's version of "Different Drum" hit the Billboard Pop Chart on November 11, 1967 and stayed in the Hot 100 for 17 weeks, getting as high as #13; the song also reached #12 on the Cash Box survey. The song has been a staple on oldies radio ever since and remains one of Linda Ronstadt's most popular recordings.^[9] Its parent record slid up Billboard's main album chart to #100 and lasted for a respectable 15 weeks on that chart.

Their third album was titled Linda Ronstadt, Stone Poneys and Friends, Vol. III (released in April 1968); at this point, Capitol was promoting Linda Ronstadt rather than the band, and only Linda's picture was on the cover. Like its predecessor, the album had two singles: "Up To My Neck In High Muddy Water" b/w "Carnival Bear" (released under the name Linda Ronstadt and the Stone Poneys) which stalled at #93 on the Hot 100; and "Some of Shelly's Blues" b/w "Hobo" (released under the name Stone Poneys, Featuring Linda Ronstadt) which, like the album, did not chart. "Some of Shelly's Blues" was another Mike Nesmith song; and the album ended with the Laura Nyro song, "Stoney End", which turned out to have been aptly named (although the song was not written for the Stone Poneys).

"So Fine" single

After "Different Drum" became a hit, Mike Curb pulled out two of the recordings he had produced back in 1965, "So Fine" and "Everybody Has His Own Ideas", and decided to release them in 1968 as a 45 on his label Sidewalk, which was a Capitol subsidiary. The single was put out without the knowledge of Capitol – or Mercury either, for that matter, who had paid for the recording session. Capitol record company executives were understandably furious, and the single was immediately pulled from the market.^[10] Thus, this disk has become one of the rarest Linda Ronstadt collectables, bringing as much as $144 (in a 2007 eBay auction).^[11]

Reissues

In 1970, the Pickwick record label licensed nine Stone Poneys tracks from their Capitol albums and released Stoney End under the name Linda Ronstadt & the Stone Poneys. The album featured "Different Drum", "One for One" and "Some of Shelly's Blues", as well as their recording of the 1960's classic "Let's Get Together". (The album was released on the heels of the successful reissue of the version by the Youngbloods in 1969).

In 1974, prior to the release of Heart Like A Wheel, Capitol issued a Linda Ronstadt compilation titled Different Drum, which featured five Stone Poney tracks and five songs from Ronstadt's first three solo albums. Aside from the title track, the four Stone Poneys tracks were remixed tracks from the third Stone Poneys' album, all feature Ronstadt solo: "Hobo," "Up To My Neck In High Muddy Water," "Some Of Shelly's Blues," and "Stoney End."

Eight years after the release of the band's first album (in March 1975), it was reissued by Capitol under the name The Stone Poneys Featuring Linda Ronstadt, as a result of the multi-platinum success Linda Ronstadt had in 1974-75 as a solo artist with the #1 album Heart Like A Wheel. The song listing in the reissue highlighted Ronstadt's three solo performances (she also sang solo on one verse in a fourth song that was not so identified). As a result, the largely unknown first album by the Stone Poneys was more widely available in the 1970's and 1980's than the subsequent albums that featured the band's more familiar songs.

In 1995, Capitol briefly issued the three Stone Poneys albums on individual CD releases. These releases were removed from the catalog within a few years.

In 2008, the Australian label Raven released The Stone Poneys, a 27-track "two-fer" CD featuring the first two Stone Poneys albums plus four tracks from their third album. This was the first widely available appearance on CD for most of these songs.

Linda Ronstadt has claimed dissatifaction with the arrangements of the three Stone Poneys albums many times over the years, but Capitol has continually made money through reissues of the early material in numerous configurations. In 1995, for example, Capitol released all three albums as individual CD's. Also, in addition to their hit song "Different Drum", several of the other Stone Poneys tracks have been featured in many of Linda Ronstadt's compilation albums over the years, such as "Hobo", "Up to My Neck in High Muddy Water", "Some of Shelly's Blues", "Back on the Street Again", "Stoney End", "One for One", and others.

Unreleased material

While the The Linda Ronstadt Box Set included the intital CD release of "Everybody Has His Own Ideas," the only Stone Poneys music made available has been the songs on the original three albums, which has left many songs such as "Carnival Bear," from a 1968 single that never appeared on any of the albums, without any available issue. Even the three song "fragments" that open the third album – which total barely 1½ minutes – have never been reissued as full songs.

Stone Pony Nightclub

The legendary nightclub that helped launch the careers of Southside Johnny, Jon Bon Jovi, and others – The Stone Pony in Asbury Park, New Jersey – was founded in February 1974, nine months before Linda Ronstadt's major breakthrough album Heart Like A Wheel was released. Although this was many years after the Stone Poneys hit "Different Drum" was on the charts, Ronstadt's Top 20 hit version of "Silver Threads and Golden Needles" was released in the same time period. Whether or not the naming of the nightclub is related to this band is uncertain; the history of the nightclub as related on their website states that the name came to one of the founding owners in a dream.^[12]