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Part 1: Pacific Coast Highway

It's July 13, 1985 at about 2am. I'm with Joni and we're driving back to Malibu on Pacific Coast Highway after finishing work at Galaxy Studios in Hollywood. It's around closing time in Los Angeles on a Friday night and there's quite a bit of traffic on what is one of the most dangerous stretches of highway in California.

I look forward to the left and there's the Jonathan Club. A white Toyota comes across the center line toward us. There is a strange phenomenon that accompanies an experience like a car collision. Time slows down. Memory is stretched and becomes detailed and vivid. As the car came towards us, I quickly look to the right; there's a car next to us. We're boxed in. All that I can do to avoid a complete head-on collision is to slightly veer to the right.

I slam on the brakes, the Toyota doesn't brake, and smashes into us at 40mph. The engine of our car bursts into flames. Headlights, tail-lights, broken glass, water everywhere, and blood all over my shirt. I look over and am grateful that Joan is okay. Something's happened to my tongue. Firefighters in yellow hats, sirens wailing, an ambulance arriving, and paramedics arrive. Someone holding my forearm, guiding me into the ambulance; I've bitten my tongue in half. I've done something to my wrist. I flash on having pulled on the steering wheel like a team of horses.

The attending doctor in the emergency room is talking to me as he's preparing to stick a needle into my tongue. "This is going to hurt". Looking up into the lights in the OR I think "if a doctor actually says that something is going to hurt, it's going to really hurt.

The Aftermath

The collision was massive, partially because, as we subsequently discovered, the driver of the car that smashed into us was asleep at the wheel and didn't brake at all. Joni thankfully had crossed her arms in front of her, and a heavy bracelet that she had on her wrist protected her head from going into the windshield. Our shared perception was that the steering wheel in our car had been slightly bent, as if in the moment of impact I pulled on it hard enough to bend it in. The driver of the Toyota was drunk, and there were two young women with him, one in the passenger's seat, and one in the back seat. The woman in the back had blood streaming down from her forehead. She had been thrown forward against the back of the front seat. The driver, drunk and asleep, wasn't hurt.

There are times that experience seems to fall together in a cyclical nature. A day where everyone is driving badly. Every other car cuts you off. A day when you catch all of the green lights. The sequential poetry of a day can be light or dark. Sometimes events are grouped together in an allegorical way that involves things that are said, geographical locations, interactions with friends or strangers. Misunderstandings with friends or instances where communication is almost telepathic, where things are understood without even being articulated. Sometimes a combination of all of these things along with other factors. Days where everything is off-kilter or everything works right. Sometimes these days and nights are just grouped into a some kind tone; sometimes they occur in a poetic sequence that resembles a carefully crafted short story. Joni collected these, and referred to these instances as "mundane magic". I'm not generally magically-minded, but I notice this phenomenon.

The next morning, after I had been sewn up, the nurse called us a taxi to take us back to our house in Malibu. The driver chatted as he casually drove us through the area on PCH where the collision had occurred. The glass and water has been cleared. I see the Jonathan Club come up on the left. A car suddenly veers in front of us, forcing us to swerve sharply to avoid them. We both yelled. We've hit some kind of dark geographical pocket that the passing of hours has not lifted? Walking into our house, I turned on the the television, and Live-Aid was in progress.

This experience; the only serious and life-threatening car wreck that I've ever experienced, somehow feels like a center-point in the arc of things during the making of the album of Joni's that would be called "Dog Eat Dog".

Dog Eat Dog

It's November, and it's forty years now since "Dog Eat Dog" was released. I'm going to write down some memories and recollections about this album. As we careen through The Age Of No History it seems like a worthy pursuit to write about consequential experiences that carry a weight in one's life. History has become subject to the polarized lens of twenty-second social media posts and YouTube videos posted by "authorities". There are many views of an experience, and our personal history is inevitably colored to some degree by the limitations of perspective, but the world that we live in now is seemingly devoid of the pursuit of verified and factual historical information.

With regard to personal memory, I love Lawrence Durrell's "The Alexandria Quartet", a group of 4 books, "Justine", Balthazar", "Clea" and "Mountolive". Durrell said that the books are an exploration of relativity, the notion of continuum subject-object relation. Each book seems to say "you think that you understood what happened.... this is what really happened."

I have a vivid memory of some parts of the events surrounding the making of this album. The record and it's songs emerged from the mid-eighties, which in retrospect feel in many ways like a period that somehow foreshadowed much of the disintegration and darkness that envelop us now. Tele-evangelists sidled up to powerful politicians, selfish greed was a quality that was admired and aspired to, cocaine was omnipresent as a social engine, empathy and humility became a trivial anachronism. There was a perceptible ethos equating brutality with hipness that seemed to be reflected in politics, art and the collective language of the era. Sound familiar?

Part 2 (Jan 4, 2026):

In 1984 Malibu was a small town. A little movie house, a Hughes Market, and The Colony Coffeeshop with the pharmacy attached to it. What a great joint.

Herb Brown ran the place with his wife. Herb, with all of the attributes of a consummate diner host. Brooklyn roots, a healthy insouciance and disregard of celebrity, a bartender's knack for dispensing advice, wanted or not, and that natural ability to make the room feel good, to make you feel like you belong there. He ran pools out of the place and moderated rambling discussions on everything from how the Rams were doing that season to who had been on the Johnny Carson show the night before. He took the piss out of everyone, regardless of fame or status. That coffeeshop was everyone's kitchen table in the Colony neighborhood.

In order to make a new beginning, without baggage from prior relationships, Joan and I moved into a house just outside the The Colony on Old Colony Road. The Colony had been started in the twenties by the Rindge family, who owned that strip in Malibu. They leased lots for houses to movie people ranging from Raoul Walsh and Jack Warner to Bing Crosby, Gary Cooper, Gloria Swanson, Douglas Fairbanks; a who's who of the twenties. By the time that we came to live in the neighborhood many vestiges of the movie and music business were still present.

I'd go to grab some breakfast in the morning and sit down at the counter, with Herb introducing me to Rod Steiger, Paul Newman, Timothy Hutton, Robert Redford, or anyone else who happened to walk in. "Hey Larry.... meet Paul!".... then I'd look up and it was a Paul alright.... Paul Newman. I don't think that I have ever been starstruck like I was in that moment. The eyes. Miles Davis lived up the highway a little ways with Cicely Tyson. He came over to see the new paintings that Joni was working on. We had gravitated there partially because it felt like a fresh start for our relatively new relationship and partially in search of community. Joan's manager Elliot lived just a five minute walk down the beach with his girlfriend. Our friends Peter and Wendy Asher also lived there with their daughter Victoria, a bit further down the beach. Moving up there, we had a fresh palette for our life that came with a little built-in neighborhood of friends who weren't skeptical about our relationship and marriage.

I set up a little studio in one of the bedrooms. I had an Otari half-inch 8-track tape machine, a few mics, some guitars and basses, a Prophet 5 synthesizer, Linn Drum Machine, and eventually a Fairlight II. The Fairlight was the first computer-based musical instrument and it had changed the musical landscape with the previously unimaginable new ability to manipulate short digital samples. On days where I wasn't in town doing a record date or a jingle, I'd walk to the coffeeshop, get something to eat, pick up a wheat grass shot at Hughes, walk across the road back home, put a fresh pot of coffee on, then straight into that little room to practice and work on some musical idea or another. Joan generally got up late, so I'd just be scribbling away on my own, with a new pot of coffee every few hours, and a run on the beach in between mucking about in my little bedroom studio. Most days and nights that we were home Joni was painting downstairs while I was trying things out; sketching out song ideas without words and textural ideas upstairs. I'd yell down to her "let's watch some TV" and we'd be watching a great obscure film that was on cable, MTV, VH-1, the news, or whatever we happened on when we'd flip the cable on.

She'd step back from the canvas that she was working on, one smoke, half ash, burning in the ashtray and one in her hand, saying "what do think, Klein?" Once in a while she would hear something that I was doing and I'd hear her voice echo through the hall from downstairs, "I like that one! Save that for me!" I bought a crock pot and learned how to cook a chicken in it. Dinner consisted of a choice of two or three local restaurants, or I'd broil some steaks with baked potatoes for us. If we ventured into town to hear some music we'd hit Dan Tana's where Joan would have her usual Liver and Onions with a Tana's Salad, and I'd wander around the expanses of their big menu. We'd go to hear someone play, then over to either the upstairs area at Imperial Gardens on Sunset or On The Rox above The Roxy. We were both creatively obsessed 24 hours a day. Other than music and painting, long conversations centered on books, movies and philosophy ruled the day. We got invited to Hal Ashby's cutting room, a little ways down the highway, and he played us all of the takes of some of Jack Nicholson's scenes in "The Last Detail". Pure creative genius, inspiring and catalytic.

1984: The Ethos

There had been a been a shift. Ronald Reagan was president. Televangelists had reached the height of their power and reach. The apotheosis of snake-oil religion reaching straight into the halls of power. Ernest Angley still asked you to "put your hands on the T.V. screen", but there was a new breed of tele-preacher that was knocking him out of the cable mainstream. Jimmy Swaggert. He was Jerry Lee Lewis' cousin (he even played piano and sung), and he was the shining star of this new-old-time religion that was making in-roads in the political world. He was on every night and being received on a red carpet like royalty in the White House. Religious melodramatists Jim Bakker and his wife Tammy Faye were courted by the rich and powerful.

Madonna and Billy Idol were on high rotation on MTV. Michael Jackson was still the video king. Prince was in high rotation as well. He had evolved from a nice but mysterious and quiet young guy who would sit in the corner of the couch during some of our sessions at A&M to a hyper-creative and innovative young genius with a killing band that had the two great women that I came to know and love, Wendy and Lisa, as fantastic driving wheels built into it for him to draw upon. Madonna was able to use the relatively new visual medium of the music video to put herself into a position from which she could set and reset the stylistic focus in pop music and fashion with each single and video. The music was unremarkable, but she had extraordinary style sense, and was smart enough to work with the great director and photographer Jean Baptiste Mondino, later to become a friend through music video producer friend David Naylor, on the visual aspect of what she was doing. It felt like a major cultural upheaval had occurred.

I had been given "Decline Of The West", Oswald Spengler's treatise on the cyclical nature of ascent and disintegration of cultures, by my sixth-grade teacher Mr. Kaufman. He would sit outside of our classroom during recess and let me join him while he had his cigarette, talking to me about the cyclical nature of history and the prescient genius of Nietzsche, as I had little interest in what seemed at the time like sadistic ball games called "murderball" that were the usual playground fare. Probably a bit early for me to hear about these axioms, but he was a great Damon Runyan character, and naturally compelling for me. He introduced me to Camus and Proust as well. In seventh grade the music teacher at my suburban middle school played the same stimulating role for me, going through the Beethoven symphonies on Kalmus Miniatures, introducing me to serial composition via Anton Webern's string quartets, Alban Berg's "Lulu" and Schoenberg's "Verklaerte Nacht (Transfigured Night)", the dreamworld of Charles Ives' America in his second symphony, and the cutting edge area occupied by composers like Krzysztof Penderecki with his "Threnody For The Victims Of Hiroshima", John Cage, and Alan Hovanhess called aleatoric composition.

I had always looked to music and songwriting for what in Jewish texts is called a circumcision of the heart. Music for me was a vehicle for accessing the deepest intrinsic sorrow and brokenness that I had always needed to articulate within myself. I recall being laid bare by John Lennon's first solo album "Plastic Ono Band", "Rubber Soul" having ignited the obsessive drive to become a musician. I still remember coming home with that album, listening to it, and thinking "if you can make yourself feel like that with a song, I want to do that!"

This shift in the popular tone of music and art felt Spenglerian to me. The dominant force in the arts felt like it had moved to a place where changes in stylistic detail and shifting clothing leitmotifs, combined with dark and compelling sexuality, had come to trump personal honesty in great songwriting, relegating the need for truth, love, loneliness and sorrow to be articulated to the back-burner of the collective consciousness. Cocaine was everywhere, and it's cold ten-minute burst of optimistic confidence that one would spend the rest of a long evening into day chasing, was the omnipresent social engine of the day. I recall standing in the hallway at A&M with a coke dealer who I only knew as "Mel" whispering in my ear about how he had just made a session "happen". There was a perceptible feeling of style over content in the arts and in the advertising syntax of the day. In Malibu I wrestled with my ever-present depressive demons which seemed so curiously out of place in the privileged and idyllic surroundings of Old Colony Road, living two houses away from geniuses like Norman Jewison and Don Rickles.

The Turning Point

The old rules were just that. The new rules were that the smart guy was the seamless grifter. Success was finding a way to screw the other guy. The California State Board Of Equalization decided records that were made in the state by artists who had artistic control written into their record deals could be taxed as independent creators of an album as product, even though their record companies, who actually manufactured the product, were taking the lion's share of the profits from the records. This included a ten percent "breakage" clause, even though vinyl records had given way to the CD as the dominant record medium. They decided that they could do this retroactively, which meant that these artists had to pay up on current releases as well as albums that had been done years before. The singer-songwriter who had enough leverage to be able to have complete control over their musical art were in the crosshairs of the crafty state-employed lawyers who were searching for a fresh source of illegitimate income. The coffers needed to be filled; deficits compensated for, and this was a new angle.

For artists who had been able to concentrate on writing great songs and finding fresh musical ground to turn over this was a rude awakening. The best had been able to relegate the specifics of their business and financial dealings to managers and business managers, but now it was a free-for-all for lawyers and politicians. The golden era of creative focus being uninterrupted by business concerns, where the artist could just concentrate on the pursuit of the highest level of experimentation, revision, and the invention of a new musical language for each album was over. Technology was racing forward at breakneck speed with the advent of personal computers, and finely crafted songwriting and adventurous wandering in record-making were gradually being devalued in the inevitable shift into primitivism in the arts.

The Songwriting

Joan's writing began to shift into a more topical area, borne of her deep well of volatile anger and disappointment, and the sea-change in the greedy and amoral ethos that had become undeniably prevalent around us. She framed the dark state of affairs with her usual finely honed precision.

It's dog eat dog, I'm just waking up
The dove is in the dungeon
And the white washed hawks pedal hate and call it love
Dog Eat Dog
Holy hope in the hands of
Snakebite evangelists and racketeers
And big wig financiers

Dog eat dog
On prime time crime the victim begs
Money is the road to justice
And power walks it on crooked legs
Primetime, Crime
Holy hope in the hands of
Snakebite evangelists and racketeers
And big wig financiers

Where the wealth's displayed
Thieves and sycophants parade
And where it's made
The slaves will be taken
Some are treated well
In these games of buy and sell
And some like poor beast
Are burdened down to breaking

Dog eat dog It's dog eat dog, ain't it Flim Flam man
Dog eat dog, you can lie, cheat, skim, scam
Beat'em any way you can
Dog eat Dog
You'll do well in this land of
Snakebite evangelists and racketeers
You could get to be
A big wig financier

In the bridge, she addressed cultural acceleration with a razor-sharp eye...

Land of snap decisions
Land of short attention spans
Nothing is savored
Long enough to really understand
In every culture in decline
The watchful ones among the slaves
Know all that is genuine will be
Scorned and conned and cast away

She used Nietzsche's merciless and brutally honest self-examination in the "Flies In The Marketplace" section of "Also Sprach Zarathustra" as a starting-block of inspiration for a new song titled "The Three Great Stimulants", the music for which she wrote in one of her tunings on guitar.

I picked the morning paper off the floor
It was full of other people's little wars
Wouldn't they like their peace?
Don't we get bored?
And we called for the three great stimulants
Of the exhausted ones
Artifice, brutality and innocence
Artifice and innocence

No tanks have ever rumbled through these streets
And the drone of planes at night has never frightened me
I keep the hours and the company that I please
And we call for the three great stimulants
Of the exhausted ones
Artifice, brutality and innocence
Artifice and innocence

The difficult and uphill challenge of writing great songs in a happy and settled relationship was replaced with an undeniable focus on the darkness that was stretching out over the cultural landscape that we now inhabited. Anger and a sense of foreboding became the new engine.

...to be continued...