Silenced: Singer hits wrong note in polarised US

By ANDREW GUMBEL in Los Angeles

The scene was the Aladdin Theatre in Las Vegas last Saturday night. Linda Ronstadt, the 50-something folk-rocker, was just coming to the end of a concert backed by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and the crowd gave her a standing ovation.

Then she offered one last song, the old Eagles hit Desperado, and dedicated it to Michael Moore, the rabble-rousing film-maker whose Bush-bashing documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 has polarised the country like no other cultural event of the summer.

Suddenly, all hell broke loose. Depending who you believe, either the audience ran out of control or the Aladdin's management did. Either way, Ronstadt was hustled out of the building and told she would not be welcome back - ever.

She was not even allowed to return to her hotel room to pack. Hotel employees checked out for her instead.

"We needed her off the property," said hotel spokeswoman Tyri Squyres. "She wanted to incite the audience, and she incited them to the point where they were very upset."

Hard though it is to imagine a diminutive, middle-aged woman with a bob haircut and a honey-sweet voice starting a riot in America's very own Sin City, the Ronstadt Affair seems destined to go down as the latest surreal episode to mark this contentious, jumpily hostile election season.

Ronstadt's fellow liberal entertainers were quick to cry foul about suppression of free speech and what they see as a climate of fear fostered by the Bush Administration. (Ronstadt herself has chosen not to comment.)

The blowhard opinion-makers on the other side, meanwhile, were equally quick to accuse her of woefully misreading her audience and turning what was meant to be a pleasant musical entertainment into a wholly inappropriate piece of political grandstanding.

Amid the furore, it was almost impossible to discern what actually happened.

According to the Aladdin's president, Bill Timmins, Ronstadt's dedication to Moore - and her urging everyone who has not yet seen the film to do so - pushed the audience into a frenzy of indignation. They threw cups at the stage, stormed out of the auditorium, and ripped down posters as they stomped to the box-office to demand their money back.

"It was a very ugly scene," said Timmins, who was in the audience. Ronstadt, he charged, "spoiled a wonderful evening for our guests and we had to do something about it".

It was his decision to call security and have the singer escorted out of the building. She was scheduled to play just the one night, so she did not lose any performances, but Timmins made it clear she could forget any future dates at his establishment.

But not everyone present agreed with Timmins' account. Paula Francis, a television newswoman, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal her experience was quite different.

"I was so stunned to read in the newspaper that anyone had a negative reaction," she said. "Everyone who was leaving when I was leaving was just thrilled. They thought it was a good concert."

At the moment of the Moore dedication, she said, "there were loud boos and there was quite a bit of applause. But everyone calmed down right away and seemed to enjoy the rest of the encore."

Whatever the truth of the matter, it is clear that the atmosphere surrounding performers and celebrities who express their political views - particularly, though not exclusively, when those views are hostile to President George W. Bush - has deteriorated significantly in recent weeks.

A similar spasm of tension and partisan hostility surrounded the entertainment business in the run-up to the Iraq war at the beginning of last year, when radio stations organised a boycott of country trio the Dixie Chicks, and a conservative internet group entitled Citizens Against Celebrity Pundits, led by a North Carolina housewife, organised letter-writing campaigns to have prominent Hollywood liberals booted out of their jobs and off the airwaves.

The latest round was almost certainly kicked off by the huge wave of publicity surrounding the release of Fahrenheit 9/11.

Despite his protestations to the contrary, Moore's own free speech rights have not suffered one jot and his film has to date taken in $153 million at the US box-office - five times as much as his previous record-breaking documentary Bowling for Columbine.

But his gleeful needling of the President, both in the film and in the surrounding publicity campaign, has infuriated Bush loyalists and set the scene for a cultural, as well as a political, stand-off in the run-up to the November 2 presidential election.

This month, comedian and actor Whoopi Goldberg became a target for Republican Party operatives after she made genitalia jokes about the President's name at a celebrity-studded fundraiser for Democratic candidate John Kerry.

The Republicans denounce the whole affair at New York's Radio City Music Hall as a "hate-fest" revealing the true colours of both Kerry and the Hollywood establishment.

Goldberg also lost her job as a pitchwoman for the diet-food company Slimfast, which isbased in the electorally sensitivestate of Florida, where Bush's brother Jeb is the Governor.

The issue has been further stirred up by Sir Elton John, who said in an interview with New York magazine this month that he saw an "atmosphere of fear" in the US like nothing else since the McCarthy red-baiting era of the early 1950s.

Sir Elton's remarks could probably do with a little careful parsing. Although the attacks on performers do indeed raise questions about freedom of speech, they have also been used and abused by people on both sides of the argument to further their own agendas.

That has been particularly true of Moore, who expertly manufactured a controversy over the release of Fahrenheit 9/11 to generate invaluable advance publicity - accusing Disney of censorship because the company wanted nothing to do with him and told him to find a distribution deal elsewhere, which he did.

This week, Moore leaped on the Ronstadt Affair and somehow managed to make it all his own. On his website he posted the cover of Ronstadt's album Living in the USA and added the slogan: "Thank you Linda Ronstadt!"

He also posted an open letter to Timmins of the Aladdin, taking him to task for gross over-reaction.

"What country do you live in?" Moore wrote. "Last time I checked, Las Vegas is still in the United States. And in the United States, we have something called the First Amendment. This constitutional right gives everyone here the right to say whatever they want to say ...

"For you to throw Linda Ronstadt off the premises because she dared to say a few words in support of me and my film, is simply stupid and un-American."

The Aladdin quickly sought to deny that it was suppressing anybody's rights.

"It did not come down to the statements she had said, per se," a spokeswoman said. "It's about using our venue for political commentary versus being an entertainer. She was hired to entertain, not to preach."

That explanation, in turn, seems a little disingenuous since Ronstadt has been dedicating Desperado to Moore throughout her current tour and announced the fact in an interview with the Las Vegas Review-Journal published the day before her concert.

"They say the country is evenly divided, and boy is that true," she said. "One half of the audience cheers and the other half boos.

"I don't understand this country sometimes and I really fear for it. The Government is making everybody in the world hate us, including the people that used to be our friends."

Besides her music, Ronstadt's political views are probably the best-known thing about her. In the 1970s she had a much-publicised romance with Jerry Brown, the liberal Governor of California who went on to make two runs for the presidency.

Her dedication to Moore - which she clearly has no intention of dropping - divided her audience but caused no undue ructions, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune.

As Ronstadt's experience shows, the atmosphere in the US is not one of systematic censorship so much as extreme volatility: there is no knowing when a political statement is going to cause an adverse reaction.

- INDEPENDENT