Music, Memories Soar at Larson Tribute

During much of her pop rise two decades ago, the late Nicolette Larson exhibited the humility and innocence of someone who joked about how her success might just be a wonderful dream.

The petite 5-foot-2 vocalist, whose lilting recording of Neil Young’s “Lotta Love” was a Top 10 single that contributed to her being named the best female singer of the year in 1978 by Rolling Stone magazine, used to talk about her stardom in ways that made you sense that she didn’t feel she belonged on the same stage as such personal heroes as Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris.

So, it was touching Friday at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium to find so many of her contemporaries from the ‘70s joining in a concert in Larson’s memory. By the time of her death in December, these artists--and the others on hand for the concert--had gone from being heroes to being friends.

“I’ve never been to a high school reunion, but that’s what this feels like,” Dan Fogelberg said early in the four-hour program. The image nicely defined Friday’s affair (which was repeated Saturday), though “family reunion” would have been even better.

That image captures the warmth of a program that featured Larson’s husband, Russ Kunkel, on drums much of the night with the Section band, and vocals by Ronstadt, the godmother of the couple’s 8-year-old daughter, Elsie.

Though the ‘70s are commonly portrayed in movies, from “Boogie Nights” to “Saturday Night Fever,” as the disco decade, it was also the era of the singer-songwriter, a largely Southern California-based movement whose generally comforting, introspective tone served as a necessary period of reflection for a generation that had come through the turmoil and rebellion of the ‘60s.

Friday’s concert featured many of the most celebrated performers of that time, coming together in a memorial to Larson, who died of a cerebral edema at age 45, and to raise funds for UCLA Children’s Hospital.

The men--who included Crosby, Stills & Nash, Jackson Browne, Joe Walsh, members of Little Feat and Fogelberg--were all received warmly by the capacity audience, especially Browne for his version of his eloquent “For a Dancer” and CSN for a wobbly but heartfelt rendition of the Beatles’ “In My Life.”

But it was the women who left the most lingering impressions, including rare performances by Ronstadt and Carole King.

Bonnie Raitt stirred things up early in the show with some blistering guitar licks during Little Feat’s raucous “Dixie Chicken,” but it was her acoustic rendition of Eric Kaz and Libby Titus’ “Love Has No Pride” that was more affecting.

Rather than reflect the torch song’s familiar theme of wounded love, she transformed it beautifully into a statement of longing for her old friend. Thus the song’s key line--”I’d do anything to see you again”--was not so much a surrender, but a prayer.

King, whose hugely influential “Tapestry” album helped popularize the singer-songwriter movement in the early ‘70s, did four songs, including “Up on the Roof,” the song she and Gerry Goffin wrote for the Drifters.

The surprisingly energetic King, however, best underscored the evening’s sense of community and family when she sang one of her early compositions, “Child of Mine,” to her daughter, Sherry, who in turn sang the song to her own daughter.

Ronstadt, whose pop profile has been low during the ‘90s, personalized the evening by reminiscing about the times she and Larson were roommates.

But it was her music that was most moving as she sang a version of Roy Orbison and Joe Melson’s haunting “Blue Bayou” with such beauty and control that it reminded you Ronstadt has one of the truly great voices of the modern pop era. And, like Raitt with “Love Has No Pride,” she warmly turned the song, which expresses romantic longing, into a statement about missing Larson.

In too short an appearance, Emmylou Harris, another of the great voices of modern pop, saluted the sisterhood of singers and life on the road with an exquisite rendering of Rodney Crowell’s “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.”

For the encore, the whole cast returned to the stage for a sing-along version of “You’ve Got a Friend,” featuring King, Ronstadt and Raitt on lead vocals.

In the end, the weekend memorial was a testimony to both friendship and the comforting ways of music. As such, it showed how Larson, through her inspiration as a performer and a person, did belong in the company of the artists she once only saw as heroes.