Linda Ronstadt Booed off Stage at Vegas

Somehow or other I'm getting the impression Michael fat-drunk-and-stupid-is-no-way-to-go-through-life Moore isn't playing too well out there in Pioeria or other parts of heartland America.

My my, haven't we become staid and stiff over the years.

Yes we have. It comes with getting old. Ronstadt, as someone who makes a very nice living off the desire of her audience to be entertained, should appreciate this. A gig at a second tier casino in Las Vegas ain't Woodstock or Monterey.

We grow up going to rock concerts where the performers are understood to be stoned, we smoke at the concerts like it is a constitutional right and thirty years later we decry one of those performers for taking a moment to give her honest opinion of a moviemaker.

Oh, so you are including yourself in the group "decrying" her act, or is that an ironic "we" you're employing?

A lot of us, not all of us, did grow up getting stoned at rock concerts. My bet is that 30 years later most of us no longer do so. We also had sex in the back of VW Beetles, worked at dead end factory jobs to get cash for our dope, marched in Washington, and thought Gene McCarthy could change the world. It was fun, but we're not kids anymore. Perhaps the major flaw of the Baby Boomer Generation is it's mad desire to remain young and cool.

Ronstadt came out of the sixties during the time when rock groups were understood to be against Viet Nam. Why is anyone so shocked she is against Iraq?

Maybe because she is 58 years old and, supposedly, a professional performer? Remember, this the rock hellcat who was singing "Mr Sandman" with the Nelson Riddle Orchestra decades ago. I liked it as I liked her album of mexican songs, but she's hardly someone who has been inseperably welded to the 60's. Someone attending a Ronstadt concert in 1971 would be foolish, and probably disappointed, in expecting a completely non-political performance. Not so with Ronstadt in 2004 at the Alladin. If they had lived, it's reasonable to imagine that John Lennon, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix would have not sought to cash in on a middle aged audience in Las Vegas, but Linda Ronstadt ceded her place in that rare group (if she ever had one) long ago.

Maybe the hotel ought to think more about the people going overboard and destroying their property than a singer praising a movie.

They did. They were paying her. The patrons were paying them. They could have called in the police and rousted paying customers or booted her off the stage. Seems like they made the appropriate business descision. I assure you, Bill Graham wasn't producing this show in Vegas, and I'm not sure he wouldn't have made the same decision.

If the Vegas hotel wants to boot her, let them go ahead. It's their damn hotel. But what if they invite some country guy next week who sings about how much we have to support our boys over there because they are doing a job that has to be done. Will HE be considered controversial?

Depends upon the audience. If it's a convention of pot bellied, grey haired, hippie Green Party activists, it probably will be, but than I doubt such a group is going to show up for a Toby Keith concert. If it's the same Ronstadt audience, the chance are it won't be. What's your point? The Hotel didn't make a political judgment, they made a business decision. Considering Ronstadt's career over the last 20 years, the audience had a reasonable expectation that she would not go Whoopie Goldberg. Maybe she was trying to recapture her lost youth. Who knows? We do know her audience didn't like it, and the customer is always right.

Take a guess.

You are implying that the Hotel as part of The Establishment (Man!) would never consider a performer with a conservative slant to be contraversial. Assuming you truly are one of "we" who smoked dope and chanted "Hell No We Won't Go!" you seem to have a serious case of arrested development. If a redneck country performer pissed of a paying crowd, he and not the crowd would get the boot...and rightly so.

... Perhaps not in Las Vegas.

The biggest excitement of the night, by a long shot, came when Ronstadt then dedicated her encore of "Desperado" to filmmaker Michael Moore, kick-starting a boo-cheer competition throughout the venue that drowned out her singing and left grown-ups in tuxes and evening gowns yelling at each other on their way to the parking lot.

I think that was unprofessional of Linda Ronstadt. People did not pay to hear her political views, no matter how well founded they might be.

I think that was unprofessional of Linda Ronstadt. People did not pay to hear her political views, no matter how well founded they might be.

Man, that's seriously ugly. She might want to consider a radio career...

Before singing "Desperado" for an encore Saturday night, the 58-year-old rocker called Moore a "great American patriot" and "someone who is spreading the truth." She also encouraged everybody to see the documentary about President Bush (search).

Ronstadt's comments drew loud boos and some of the 4,500 people in attendance stormed out of the theater. People also tore down concert posters and tossed cocktails into the air.

"It was a very ugly scene," Aladdin President Bill Timmins told The Associated Press. "She praised him and all of a sudden all bedlam broke loose."