I have place memories for a lot of songs, many of them involving the first time I ever heard them, but I don’t have one for “Long Long Time” by Linda Ronstadt. At some point by the mid-‘70s, it was just a song that I knew. I think I knew it before late 1974, but it certainly was a song that many radio stations had gone back to play after Ronstadt broke through with “You’re No Good.”
“Long Long Time” was a No. 25 single in 1970. It was a top 10 record at some big stations, including KHJ Los Angeles, WRKO Boston, and CHUM Toronto, but I don’t know if it ever got to WPGC Washington, D.C., where I would have been most likely to hear it. Once Ronstadt was a star, I remember it as a regular AC record for a while, but not quite a staple—more as a secret weapon that a certain type of music director would have prided himself or herself on finding.
During that time in the late ‘70s, Ronstadt was clearly a superstar artist at radio, particularly after fall ’77. Ronstadt’s “Blue Bayou” was already climbing the charts when the Simple Dreams album came out. Radio immediately seized on her version of “It’s So Easy.” Rather than switching singles, Elektra/Asylum successfully worked both, a rare occurrence in a pre-Bieber/Grande/Sheeran world. The closest recent comparison is SZA, whose “Nobody Gets Me” was already ascendant when “Kill Bill” exploded.
“Long Long Time” is the No. 4 single in the iTunes Music Store this morning. Since its appearance in The Last of Us last weekend, it has been the subject of stories in Billboard and Variety, but also in the Los Angeles Times, and on CNN and Today. “Long Long Time” is now being discussed in the same terms as last year’s comeback for Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill.” After reports that it was over 20 million streams, Radiocrunch’s Anthony Acampora went for a loftier comparison, wondering if it was the next “Unchained Melody.”
There has been a lot on social media this week about how it’s nice to see Ronstadt receiving so much attention again. I saw similar comments after the 2019 documentary The Sound of My Voice. The spotlight on Ronstadt has been made more poignant by her battle with a Parkison’s Disease-like disorder that halted her singing career.
But if “Long Long Time” is the next “Unchained Melody,” radio is reacting slowly. As of Thursday morning, with three days of airplay since the show’s airing, “Long Long Time” has gotten 14 radio spins, according to Mediabase. Three of those are on KOAI (The Wow Factor) Phoenix, which to PD John Sebastian’s credit had already given the song 300 spins over the last few years. The rest have been single spins, including AC WMJX (Magic 106.7) Boston and several non-comms (WXPN Philadelphia, KEXP Seattle, WNXP Nashville). “You’re No Good” got 68 spins over the last seven days.
By comparison, Depeche Mode’s “Never Let Me Down Again,” another The Last of Us sync, is up to 159 Mediabase spins for the previous seven days. That includes iHeart Alternative outlets WWDC (DC101) Washington, where it has gotten 23 spins, WRFF (Alt 104.5) Philadelphia’s 19 spins, and KYSR (Alt 98.7) Los Angeles with 14 spins. The song is also on rival KROQ with 5 spins. The difference shows that it’s easier for radio to acknowledge an ‘80s song—from Classic Hits radio’s core era—than to go back to the ‘60s or ‘70s. (The Beatles’ “Glass Onion,” another song with a sync-driven pop culture rebound, got 10 spins last week.)
I also went back and looked at the “Lost Factor” calculations for Ronstadt’s hits—my determination of how big radio hits of the time endure now at radio. Although a regular hitmaker between 1974-80, Ronstadt had only nine songs that made the Billboard Top 100 singles of their respective years. Songs that didn’t make the year-end include “Long Long Time,” but also the No. 5 “Heatwave.” Other remakes like “Tracks of my Tears” and “That’ll Be The Day” weren’t top 10 hits, and thus not on the year’s Top 100, but I remember them as bigger than they were, in part because of the combination of familiar song and hot artist.
Of those nine songs, six have Lost Factors between a 1.0 and a 2.0, including “You’re No Good” (1.06), “Blue Bayou” (1.66), and the Aaron Neville comeback duet, “Don’t Know Much” (1.65). “When Will I Be Loved” and “It’s So Easy” have LFs of less than 1.0. They’re not heavily played songs now, but they do barely receive airplay proportionate to their year-end numbers.
Because she didn’t have as many potential entries, Ronstadt isn’t as heavily represented in the Lost Factor as Olivia Newton-John, Barbra Streisand, or Sheena Easton—other artists more notably affected by a lack of airplay for female pop hitmakers of the ‘70s and ‘80s. The big exception is “How Do I Make You,” the No. 3 Lost Factor song of 1980. That song was LF 33.
“How Do I Make You” and the Mad Love album from which it came have an interesting parallel with Billy Joel’s Glass Houses, which came out around the same time in winter 1980. Both were soft rock artists—then of similar stature in the pop stratosphere–acknowledging new wave. Both albums had three hits. Both had songs that received considerable airplay, but were passed over by the label in favor of more traditional choices. Columbia went with “Don’t Ask Me Why” for Joel and held “Sometime a Fantasy” until its airplay had tapered off. Asylum chose two remakes over Ronstadt’s “Girls Talk.”
Both Ronstadt and Joel had disappointing 1982 follow-up projects. The next year, Joel came back with An Innocent Man, earning himself a place on AC and Classic Hits today with “Uptown Girl.” Ronstadt had a career breakthrough, too, but with the What’s New album of pre-rock standards, she took herself out of pop contention during Top 40 radio’s dominant mid-‘80s period, also meaning that Joel’s gold was heard more at radio during the ‘80s whereas Ronstadt was never in CHR libraries. Ronstadt’s 1987-89 comeback was during another period that endures less at AC and Classic Hits now.
So is “Long Long Time” the next “Unchained Melody”? Or is it “Pass the Dutchie” by Musical Youth (another briefly resurgent Stranger Things sync) or “Goo Goo Muck” by the Cramps, made much bigger by Wednesday than it was at the time, but not propelled back on to radio in a significant way? By this weekend, radio will likely have another The Last of Us sync to ponder. There will be more reminders to radio to react faster to pop culture moments. There will be more reminders to radio to give flowers to living artists who sometimesl loom larger in listeners’ memories than any single hit of theirs.
