by David Yaffe
Thomas Dolby regarded Joni as his hero. Blue was the first album he bought with his own money, and it was his dream to follow in the footsteps of her collaborations with Tom Scott and Jaco Pastorius. But this Joni was not the Joni of the ’70s. The times had changed and so had she. “She felt that the guitar twang was not the right way to frame what she was feeling about the times,” Dolby told me. “She needed to use the tools of the times to throw it back in their faces. I think that’s why she was looking for somebody that could curate the technology for her. That was the principle behind it.” The guitar twang was certainly front and center when she performed her new songs at the Farm Aid and Amnesty International benefits. Then again, people did not seem to be listening. Would the tools of the times do the trick for the album?
Many of Joni’s contemporaries were facing this problem. Linda Ronstadt met failure when she tried to go New Wave, then collaborated with Nelson Riddle on a Great American Songbook album and the money rolled in. Paul Simon failed with Hearts and Bones before succeeding, counterintuitively, with Graceland. James Taylor and Jackson Browne had a couple of hits but otherwise vanished. Dylan found critical success with Oh Mercy (1989), but he would have to wait until the ’90s for a full-on comeback. Like Dylan, the Rolling Stones, McCartney, and Harrison were too big to fail. Joni didn’t fail, but her sales and her reviews were not good. An era would have to come to Joni Mitchell, not the other way around.
Yet forward was the only way to go. As the ’70s had progressed, the level of musicianship kept getting deeper and more complex on Joni’s albums. What made a hit with the L.A. Express brought her to a smaller but still devoted audience for The Hissing of Summer Lawns, Hejira, Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, and, to a lesser extent, Mingus. And while Jaco Pastorius’s presence is missed on Wild Things Run Fast, the album, as commercial as it aspired to be, still had John Guerin’s drums, Wayne Shorter’s saxophone, and the inimitable, unfiltered presence of Joni. Dog Eat Dog would be different.
Wayne Shorter, no stranger to synthesizers, was still on board, but they were now on the synthetic side of the street. “We did a lot of talking from before the album started through the recording of the album, and it was clear to me that Joni was very angry about the times,” Dolby recalled. “She was angry about far-right conservatism and the hypocrisy of evangelism. She was amazed by all the channels on the television where you could surf between them, going from one evangelist to another, which obviously inspired the Rod Steiger speeches on the album.” With her own personal troubles and discontent with the way the world was changing, Joni was taking the ’80s personally. “She was Joni against the world, really,” said Dolby. “We had a little oasis in the studio for a few months, and I think she was searching for new ways to express this.”
The album is bookended with a song about friendship, “Good Friends,” about the Israeli sculptor and her SoHo landlord Nathan Joseph (with a vocal by the Doobie Brother Michael McDonald, whose voice was ubiquitous on ’80s records), and a song about love, “Lucky Girl,” which could have fit on an earlier album substituting John Guerin for the synth percussion. In between were harsh social critiques, created in deliberately unsettling timbres. It was the most expensive album Joni would ever make. Rather than let Thomas Dolby sequence on his own time, as he was willing to do, she wanted to be present for every moment of creation, as studio time went by at hundreds of dollars per hour. Even though Dolby was there as a collaborator, it was clear that she wanted to do things her way.
“It was her choice to bring me in,” Dolby told me. “It’s not like I was thrust on her by the record company. We went into it believing we could create something new and make two plus two equal five. That also reflects my memory of what it was like working with her. Part of the issue on musical terms is that when I arrange a song, I take a constructivist approach. I’ll program a bass line, I might program a patch to play the chords. I’ll program several sounds, which are designed to work together, and some of them may only be designed for a single line of melody or a few notes here and there, so I built this patchwork. Joni’s style on the keyboard is a left-hand, right-hand style, with a rolling left hand and chords in the right hand, so if I’m programming a sound that might take twenty to thirty minutes, she’d come over and say, ‘Oooooh, that sounds lovely, let me try that.’ Then she’d sit down and play a piano part, using a sound that I designed to play three notes. And I’d say, ‘I’m not sure that’s really gonna work, because it’s going to muddy up the sound that I’d been developing for several days.’ And then she’d say, ‘Wipe those, wipe those! Let’s just put these over the top.’ She is very impulsive like that. It was painful at the time. Looking back, it’s quite comical, really.”
Thirty years later, Joni looks back on Dog Eat Dog as a particularly frustrating experience. “What happened there was, suddenly, Klein, my bass-playing husband, appointed himself my producer,” Joni said. “And then he appointed the engineer as a producer. Now, when you give a dwarf power, they get puffed up like you wouldn’t believe. So I had three puffed-up dwarfs. Everything was divide and conquer with Klein. He busted up all of my relationships in his insecurity. When you have a tyrannical, insecure husband who is very young and you’re trying to be a good wife, I questioned my own behavior.
“He insisted that we go from an eight-track machine with an ideal working relationship, an engineer who knew he was an engineer—and he was a great engineer, with no delusions to move up the corporate ladder; I called on him for things that had never been done before. We cut tape—I had to work in a very unorthodox way. I worked like a filmmaker, cutting tape and splicing. I gave him a gold-plated razor blade. After all those years, we were psychic. People would say, ‘Do you know what she’s talking about?’ And Henry would grin and say, ‘Yeah.’ Look at that picture of Henry and I at that console. It was a beautiful relationship. It was a delightful relationship and Klein, I guess, was jealous of it.
“Klein broke up anything that was close to me. So I get into this studio and Thomas was standing right next to me. We had gone into the ’80s and there was a new sound. I hated it. So did Henry. We called it ‘sizzle and fry.’ And we were determined to ride it through and keep a classical sound that wouldn’t date. We both liked good mics, good musicians, and nothing too tricky. But Klein was young, and I learned the mechanics of hip when I was sixteen. I played around with it from twelve to sixteen. I manipulated fashions. I had a column, ‘Fads and Fashions,’ where I would start fashions and end them. By the time I was sixteen, I knew hip was a herd mentality. It’s like saying, ‘You’ve got those ’70s plants.’ What’s ’70s about a plant? That mentality is so sick and so rampant in America. People are so afraid not to be hip, so that’s what a lot of the American marketplace is about—shallow, stupid people, keeping the economy going by being these frightened consumers. America works on that fear: It’s in, it’s out.”
Joni Mitchell did not give up without a fight. And what a fight. And yet there is one song on Dog Eat Dog that somehow survived the production, where the sonic choices made sense with everything else, and that song is “Ethiopia.” Nina Simone once saw Joni at the Beverly Center shopping mall. They had never met before, but Joni had respect for her and her work, particularly based on what Don Alias, who had been Simone’s drummer, had told her. No matter how much Simone seemed to be losing her stability, she always, Alias maintained, treated her musicians with the utmost dignity. Simone spotted Joni after the release and the negative press of Dog Eat Dog. There she was, the great and notoriously hard to please Nina Simone, past her prime, but still. Simone lifted her arms like a Y, approached Joni, and said, “Joni Mitchell! Joni Mitchell! ‘Ethiopia’!” Then she was gone.
She was on to something. It is a devastating song. Everyone is part of the problem and no one is part of the solution, especially well-meaning but ineffective celebrity charity jams. The song sounds like inconsolable grief by someone who knows she’s part of the problem, too. “On and on, the human greed
profanes,” Joni sings in the first verse. We needed music to face ourselves in the face of a problem that was getting well-meaning media attention, but that we still didn’t know how to solve. And Joni was crying to be heard. We are not exactly the world. We wish we were.
“Ethiopia” faces a complex human calamity with startling chords. The song touched a nerve so deep, its structures confounded even Joni’s most knowing and sympathetic listeners. Wayne Shorter, who had always gone the distance for Joni, was troubled by the chords. Joni recalls he told her that at the Berklee School of Music, they said that you weren’t supposed to follow a suspended chord with another suspended chord. “What kinds of chords are these?” he asked. “These are not guitar chords. These are not piano chords.” (Wayne Shorter, incidentally, has a music education degree from NYU and an honorary doctorate from the Berklee School, but did not actually attend the Berklee School.) All she could say was “This is a song about people starving to death. What is it supposed to sound like? ‘Wake Up Little Susie’?”
Joni did not sing on “We Are the World” or at “Live Aid.” She did sing on the Canadian famine relief song, “Tears Are Not Enough,” but in truth she was skeptical that these events did any good beyond the posturing of the artists. And her response to the suffering of others was deeply personal. Being a penniless young Toronto folkie in 1964 is a long way from the Third World, but she had been a mother who felt she could not afford to raise her daughter. The helpless mother and her dying child—these are the images that linger longest, beginning with “Hot winds and hunger cries, Ethiopia / Flies in your babies’ eyes, Ethiopia,” and then describing a TV host “with a PR smile” who calls your baby “it.” When Joni sings, “You suffer with such dignity,” she is describing an unintentional performance by the starving and dying Ethiopians caught on video. Then she goes deeper, into the suffering itself. Joni was right to compose chords that would flummox even Wayne Shorter.
Joni could take the pain of losing her daughter and use it to imagine the pain of the mother watching her children die, while dying herself. “Ethiopia” is the sound of Joni inhabiting the voice of that mother, those children.
Thomas Dolby, before he realized the repellent effect he had on Joni, cherished his memories of her loaning him her blue ’69 Mercedes convertible, of her stories of Greek caves, of Miles Davis falling asleep clinging to her ankles, and of piano shopping with her (when he tried, unsuccessfully, to get her to jam with him on her old songs). But he concluded from her interviews promoting the album that he wasn’t her favorite person in the world. Which was putting it mildly. “Slimy little bugger,” Joni called him forty years later.
Joni tells this story: At one point, Joni wanted Dolby to provide a click track—a synchronized track—of Marvin Gaye’s “Trouble Man,” just to use as a rhythmic basis for “Lucky Girl,” the album’s closing track. The results were not pretty.
“The lyrics of ‘Trouble Man’ are very honest and the form is very eccentric, but it’s beautiful,” Joni told me. “The form is very irregular, the architecture, the structure of the music. So I said, make me a click track in the same form as the ‘Trouble Man’ groove.”
“I don’t like it,” sneered Dolby.
“I don’t care whether you like it or not,” Joni told him. “Just make me a click track to that tempo and that groove.”
He stormed out in a huff. Two weeks later, he returned.
“I made you that track,” he said. What he played her was, she recalled, “this corny-ass piece of music, with horns and everything.”
“That’s your composition,” Joni said. “That’s not what I asked you for. I asked you for a click track. Just give me that groove to play to and then I’m going to put drums in afterwards that are different.”
The song they were arguing over, “Lucky Girl,” was the only love song on the album. There was no love in the studio. Joni became so exasperated, she put Dolby on a beeper and told him, “If we need you, we’ll call you.”
They tried to get the rhythm track off his machine and the sounds were, to Joni’s ears, hideous.
“Never mind,” she said. “I’ll block it out like a baby crying.”
“I’ve been struggling to get this asshole to help, and he’s refusing, and then he creates this whole piece of boring music that has no soul,” Joni recalled. “So I played to it, but it was so abstract, and everyone was holding their ears. I played the piano to it, and when I was done, I yanked it out completely and started to rebuild it. Because it was so abstract, I couldn’t tell which was the downbeat. So I took an upbeat as a downbeat, and I came to this really eccentric place, and when I came to program the drums, I had a problem, because it was moving on two and four, but on the four, I had built my own drum collection that I would use, including Jimmy Cliff on hand drums. Nothing worked. And it needed anchoring on four.”
Shorter came in and the track was not finished. His brow knit up, he picked up his tenor, went out in the studio, and anchored the four beat with his horn. “Wayne’s a genius. He went straight to the problem, he saw the problem right off the bat, he anchored it. All these drums had failed and what succeeded was just Wayne playing one note all the way through it on four. Then he picked up the soprano and played—total genius. Then the next thing I know, Thomas Dolby claims he wrote the song. Completely insane. There wasn’t a note from his programming on it. All there was was the tempo, like I had asked. But what I had to go through were these crazy sounds. And I had a screaming match with him on the phone with his manager. It was like I had Tourette’s. The audacity that he said that he cowrote that song. So he’s a cheap little bastard. The only thing he contributed was when he said, ‘Oh, I’m so excited’ on ‘Shiny Toys.’ Other than that, we were just using his palette, which dates like crazy. I knew it would.”
“How in the hell did I end up with three producers on the most unpleasant session of my whole career?” Joni thought. Suddenly there were three men, including her husband, telling her, “I don’t like it.” Joni, who had been so fiercely independent, was now arguing with a committee of men. Elliot Roberts hired these guys to coproduce. Now Roberts, who had been by her side for nearly twenty years, would be fired. “So now Elliot’s gone and Henry’s gone and Klein is just cleaning house,” Joni recalled. “He tells me which friends I can keep.”
Klein is, unsurprisingly, baffled by this account. “She contradicted herself. First, I was the bad guy, then Elliot was the bad guy. So I’m cleaning house and Elliot is gone, implying that I was the one who got rid of Elliot. So she was so unhappy with the situation that I had brought about with Thomas and Mike Shipley that she fired Elliot. Man, I tell you, that is really crazy stuff.”
Elliot Roberts was replaced by Peter Asher; Joni says she never trusted him. Asher was part of the duo Peter and Gordon in the ’60s and the brother of the actress Jane Asher, whom Paul McCartney was dating at the peak of Beatlemania. Peter and Gordon had hit singles with “World Without Love” and other Lennon-McCartney songs. Eventually, Asher went to the business side of music; he was the one who brought a fledgling and unknown James Taylor to the attention of McCartney and Apple Records.
In Joni’s telling, Asher was curt with her; they were always fighting. He remembers it differently. “I disagree with her characterization of me, of course, but that’s to be expected,” Asher told me. “She didn’t annoy me. I may be curt—I’m probably curt. I try to make the point succinctly. Elliot was the opposite of curt. Elliot would smoke a joint and ramble.”
He thinks about it some more. Maybe, he says, Joni has a point. “I guess we were all doing lots of coke, including Joni. Cocaine was very much around in that era. It made us all a little extra curt. Maybe in my case it made me extra curt and it made Joni extra voluble.”
Joni also believes that Asher had a conflict of interest because he also managed Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor, and Joni, in 2015, was convinced that she was bound to be on the losing end of that rivalry. When she left Elliot, she told me,
“I was without management and it was all landing on Klein. I couldn’t see a decent manager on the horizon, and Peter came up to me one day and said, ‘I’m offering my services. Elliot says it’s okay.’ It was a stupid thing to do, because he was used to competing with Elliot, with James and Linda versus me and Neil Young. And he never lost that thing, so that he resented any successes of mine as being threatening to James, because they loved to pit James versus Carly and now they had me and James in the same stable. So when I put out Dog Eat Dog, James put out a competent album, but nothing spectacular. Elliot was afraid that the press would like Dog Eat Dog but not James’s and it would invite unfavorable competition. So they liked James’s album and they called Dog Eat Dog sophomoric, for being politically active at a time when ‘Material Girl’ was reigning and it was not a time for protest.”
Here, Peter Asher draws the line. “Is Joni saying that Dog Eat Dog would eclipse James’s album and get better press and then didn’t, presumably through my efforts? That actually smacks of insanity. That’s really mad. James and Linda versus Joni and Neil are chalk and cheese, particularly Linda’s case. We had a career that was dependent on hit singles, not writing, a completely other kind of world. I never conceived of Linda and Joni as rivals or in the same business. It’s distressing in the sense that I would only manage somebody without wishing them the utmost success. Why would anyone do that? I love Joni and think she’s a genius. That’s the only reason I worked with her. We worked very hard on Dog Eat Dog, getting it the best recognition and attention that we could. I’m not a shrink, but it reaches the point like the moon landings didn’t happen or something like that. It’s a completely alternate version of reality that doesn’t even have a basis. It’s distressing, it’s worrying.” Joni’s anger was boiling, and about to boil over. She had already predicted, way back in “For the Roses,” that it was only a matter of time before that wreath was going to be put around her neck and she’d be put out to pasture for good. Who would be around to watch over her now?
