Linda Ronstadt – Just One Look
The Honky-Tonk Piano, The Cowbell, And Peter Asher On Backing Vocals
Released as a single on January 23, 1979, from her ninth studio album Living in the USA, Linda Ronstadt’s cover of “Just One Look” peaked at number 44 on the Billboard Hot 100 but reached number five on the Adult Contemporary chart. The song appeared on an album that spent five consecutive weeks at number one on the Billboard 200 and became Ronstadt’s third and final chart-topping album. For a cover of Doris Troy’s 1963 R&B hit that The Hollies had already made famous in Britain, Ronstadt’s version transformed the passive hopefulness of the original into something predatory and powerful, though critics noted she sometimes sang at the song rather than from inside it, treating it as a technical exercise with a target to hit.
The single was backed by Elvis Presley’s “Love Me Tender” and arrived as the third single from the Living in the USA album, following Chuck Berry’s “Back in the U.S.A.” which reached number 16, and Smokey Robinson’s “Ooh Baby Baby” which peaked at number seven. The album sold over three million copies worldwide by 1980 and earned double platinum certification from the RIAA on March 15, 1980, for shipments of two million units in the United States. It spent 32 weeks on the Billboard 200 and ranked number 27 on the magazine’s year-end albums chart for 1978. Ronstadt was at her commercial peak, having just come off the massive success of 1977’s Simple Dreams, though some critics were growing tired of her interpretive aggrandizement and calling her a platinum lightweight.
Doris Troy co-wrote the original with Gregory Carroll in 1963 while working at the Apollo Theater. Her demo for Atlantic Records became the actual single release, reaching number 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number three on the R&B chart. The Hollies took their uptempo version to number two in the UK in 1964, though it only reached number 98 in America. By the time Ronstadt recorded it in 1978, dozens of artists had covered the song. Ronstadt discovered it through Peter Asher, her producer and manager, who believed she could bring new energy to the familiar material. She changed the narrator’s gender, recasting Troy’s passive longing into aggressive pursuit. Where Troy sang with cigarette-smoke world-weariness, Ronstadt belted with arena-rock power.
Producer Peter Asher recorded the track during 1978 sessions for Living in the USA, with engineers Val Garay and the team at various Los Angeles studios. The arrangement opens and closes with honky-tonk piano played by Don Grolnick, with a prominent cowbell appearing in the middle section. Waddy Wachtel and Dan Dugmore handled electric guitar duties, Kenny Edwards played bass, and Russ Kunkel provided drums. Pat Henderson, Sherlie Matthews, and Ronstadt herself sang backing vocals. Peter Asher added percussion including tambourine and cowbell while also contributing backing vocals, one of the few times he appeared as a performer on Ronstadt’s records. The production followed Doris Troy’s original arrangement closely, maintaining the stop-and-start rhythm and call-and-response structure.
The song appeared on Living in the USA, an album consisting primarily of cover versions spanning rock, pop, R&B, and country material from the 1950s through the 1970s. Ronstadt tackled Chuck Berry, Elvis Costello, Elvis Presley, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Warren Zevon, and J.D. Souther across the ten tracks. Critics offered mixed reviews, with some praising her vocal performances and others criticizing the production as overpolished and her interpretations as lacking emotional authenticity. Greil Marcus wrote that except in rare moments, she didn’t sing from inside the song but rather at it, pulling out all technical stops to batter the target and the listener to bits. Rolling Stone called her version of “Alison” totally convincing while dismissing most of the album as formally executed but emotionally empty.
In 1980, Ronstadt performed the song during an HBO television special recorded on April 24 at Television Center Studios in Hollywood with a stellar backing band including Kenny Edwards, Danny Kortchmar, Russ Kunkel, Bob Glaub, Billy Payne, Dan Dugmore, and Wendy Waldman. That performance remained unreleased until 2019 when John Boylan produced Live in Hollywood, Ronstadt’s first official live album. The master tapes had been lost for decades until a chance conversation between Boylan and a Warner Brothers engineer at their sons’ hockey practice led to their recovery. The live version captures the energy missing from some studio recordings, with Ronstadt and her band locked in tight during the honky-tonk piano intro and that distinctive cowbell section.
Sometimes covers reveal more about the artist than the song. Ronstadt took Doris Troy’s intimate longing and turned it into something bigger and bolder, replacing vulnerability with confidence. That shift defined her entire approach to interpretation during this period. She wasn’t interested in inhabiting other people’s emotions. She wanted to prove she could sing anything louder and more technically impressive than anyone else. Critics complained she was all voice and no soul, but millions of fans disagreed, sending her albums to number one and her singles into the top ten throughout the late 1970s. The honky-tonk piano and cowbell became her signature touches, country-rock flourishes added to R&B and pop classics. That was Linda Ronstadt in 1979, powerful and polished, singing at songs instead of from inside them, and nobody could deny she had one hell of a voice.