Karla Bonoff is the great lost talent of seventies Los Angeles rock.
She put her first solo record out in 1977, when the commercial peak of laid-back southern California bands and solo artists coincided with the rise of punk rock and the growing attention toward disco. Anyone who hadn't made it big in LA rock by then was not going to get very far, because albums like the Eagles' Hotel California and Jackson Browne's Running On Empty were as big as the genre was going to get at a time when the punks declared war on mainstream rock and roll and the Bee Gees were about to have their biggest success ever with the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack album.
As a result, Karla Bonoff never sold a lot of records. But she still managed to stand out for a time as one of southern California's most accomplished songwriters and performers.
Her self-tiled first album featured there outstanding songs, the piercing, heartbreaking "Someone To Lay Down Beside Me," the country-tinged "Home," and a lighthearted, left-handed tribute to romance, "Isn't It Always Love." Ms. Bonoff soon realized she was more successful at writing songs than singing them, as Linda Ronstadt famously recorded "Someone To Lay Down Beside Me" (plus two other tracks from Karla Bonoff, "If He's Ever Near" and "Lose Again") on her own Hasten Down the Wind album, while Bonnie Raitt covered "Home." But despite backing from LA pros such as Andrew Gold, bassist Lee Sklar, drummer Russ Kunkel, and J.D. Souther, the Eagles' Glenn Frey and Linda Ronstadt herself on backing vocals, Ms. Bonoff's own album did not better than number 52 on the Billboard album chart.
Ms. Bonoff's followup albums, Restless Nights from 1979 and Wild Heart of the Young from 1982, weren't much more successful than her debut, though she gained an honorable reputation for personal, plaintive ballads. She hasn't recorded a solo album since her fourth effort, 1988's New World, only putting out solo material for the odd movie soundtrack once in awhile, but in the mid-nineties she reunited with her old folk-rock group Bryndle, and they put out two new albums. These days, Ms. Bonoff still performs regularly in the United States and elsewhere.
Had Karla Bonoff released her first solo album a few years earlier than she did, more people might know who she is and appreciate her music. But she's still a bona fide member of what rock critics called the Avocado Mafia, the casual association of seventies folk-rock and country-rock singers and songwriters in southern California that began with Crosby, Stills and Nash and later included the Eagles, Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt and J.D. Souther, and she's an unsung heroine of the LA sound's glory days.
Just for the record (no pun intended), I prefer Karla Bonoff's own recording of "Someone To Lay Down Beside Me" to Linda Ronstadt's cover.
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