It was the summer of 1975, and Linda Ronstadt made something that felt inevitable — a record called Prisoner in Disguise, recorded between February and June 1975 at The Sound Factory in Hollywood, produced by Peter Asher, and released that September. On it, she ranged freely across Motown, country, rock, and gospel, as if the entire map of American popular music belonged to her.
The album climbed to number four on the Billboard chart and went platinum. And somewhere buried on the B-side of its first single was a song no one expected to care about.
That song was “Heat Wave.” Nobody planned it as a hit. The A-side was supposed to be Neil Young’s “Love Is a Rose.” Ronstadt’s band had been sneaking “Heat Wave” into live sets only recently, and not by design. Sideman Andrew Gold later told Rolling Stone that the song entered their set by accident: one night at a Long Island club called My Father’s Place, after six encores had burned through their entire repertoire, someone from the band shouted “Heat Wave in D” into the dark and they launched into it — messy, improvised, barely rehearsed, held together by instinct. The crowd went wild. So they kept it.
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A Detroit Song in California Hands
The song itself had history written all through it. “Heat Wave” was written by the Holland-Dozier-Holland songwriting team and first recorded by Martha and the Vandellas, released on July 10, 1963, on Motown’s Gordy subsidiary. That original hit number four on the Billboard Hot 100 and number one on the R&B chart, where it stayed for four weeks. It earned Martha and the Vandellas a Grammy nomination for Best Rhythm and Blues Recording — the first Grammy nomination Motown had ever received.
The song was Detroit summer: the snap of the snare, the breathless momentum, the horns arriving like weather, Martha Reeves singing as if the temperature were something personal. Love described not as tenderness or longing but as a fever the body runs without permission. It was physical, involuntary, brilliant.
When Ronstadt brought the song into The Sound Factory, she was not attempting to recreate any of that. Peter Asher’s perfectionism — what one account describes as leading to “many, many hours of work” on the recording, a process that would have amused the Motown musicians who cut the original in a fraction of the time — produced something with different weather entirely.
Andrew Gold played guitars, drums, piano, ARP strings, congas, and handclaps. Kenny Edwards played bass. The result was harder, fuller, more guitar-driven — a California rock record that kept the song’s sense of urgency but rehoused it entirely. Where the Vandellas’ version felt like a live wire, Ronstadt’s felt like a controlled detonation. The ecstasy was the same; the architecture was different.
The B-Side That Took Over
What happened next says everything about how hits actually work. Asylum had placed “Heat Wave” on the B-side and sent “Love Is a Rose” to radio. Pop disc jockeys, apparently indifferent to the intended hierarchy, began playing the B-side instead. The song spread across stations before the label could stop it.
Asylum pulled the single entirely, reissued it with “Heat Wave” on top, and watched it climb to number five on the Billboard Hot 100 — while “Love Is a Rose,” for its part, quietly reached number five on the country chart. The same record achieved two separate Top Five finishes on two different charts simultaneously. It was, in its way, the fullest demonstration yet of what Ronstadt was: not an artist who belonged to one genre, but an artist who could walk into any room and make it hers.
Ronstadt herself, writing fifty years later in a letter for a reissue of Prisoner in Disguise, described the album as a gathering of songs from songwriters and friends she loved — Neil Young, Dolly Parton, Lowell George, Jimmy Cliff, and the “Motown trio of Holland, Dozier, and Holland.” In that context, “Heat Wave” was not an act of commercial calculation.
It was an act of affection. She brought it in because her band loved playing it, because a crowd in Long Island had responded to it like a homecoming, because something in that song — in the idea of love as a weather system too large to reason with — told the truth in a way that still felt new.
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