The superstars of rock music inhabit a looking-glass world made up of equal parts of glamour and innocence--plus roistering, perpetual motion. For this week's cover story, Los Angeles Correspondent Jean Vallely plunged through the looking glass to spend eight nonstop days with Superstar Linda Ronstadt. She trailed the singer from Washington, D.C., to New York City, where she shared her hotel suite, and then back to the West Coast to visit the star on home ground in her Malibu beach house. "Rock stars don't know what the sun looks like," says Vallely, who would stay up with Linda until dawn, going to clubs and rock concerts or simply rapping in the hotel room, and would then catch a few hours sleep before stumbling to her typewriter the next day to file her story. Vallely is no stranger to the pop music world. She has been a Ronstadt fan since 1970, helped research a cover story on Rock Idol Bruce Springsteen (TIME, Oct. 27, 1975), and reports on entertainment from the Los Angeles bureau. Says Vallely of our cover subject: "Linda is the most unstarlike of any star I've run across. Rock singers are royally indulged, surrounded by yes men. It's pretty hard for them to keep their humanity, but if anyone does, it will be Linda. Last month she sang for Jimmy Carter in Washington and shared a dressing room with Joanne Woodward, her favorite actress. She was utterly star-struck herself."

The same bright innocence struck TIME Contributor John Skow, who flew in to New York to spend four days with Ronstadt before writing the cover story. It was his first total immersion in the frenetic ambience of rock. An ex-TIME staffer--he wrote our cover story on J.D. Salinger (TIME, Sept. 15, 1961)--Skow lives sequestered with his family in a New Hampshire country house that he heats entirely by wood. Says he: "My main occupation is splitting billets of maple and birch." Being in good shape helped on his first interview with Ronstadt, when he suddenly found himself jogging up Fifth Avenue at 10 p.m.--she in Frye boots and lynx coat, he in jacket and tie.

While Skow and Vallely were struggling to keep up with Ronstadt in New York, Los Angeles Correspondent Edward J. Boyer was talking with her fellow musicians and record company executives on the West Coast, and David DeVoss submitted a file that distilled the essence of the Los Angeles rock scene.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.