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History and biographical writing, as well as autobiographical recollections are strange phenomena. The moment that an experience passes it begins to mutate and morph into something that is shaped in some way or another in our mind. I've often thought that depression, which I've had much experience with, is seeing too much truth. Some element of ego and the apprehension of higher ground in the narrative are big parts of the process of personal historical revision.

I have first editions of Churchill's WWII history. I love his writing and I'm a WWII-history-obsessed person. He was a great writer. Six long chest-crusher volumes, but worth it. However, guess who is always on the right side of history in them? You're correct!

We all shape and sculpt our memories in a way that helps us retain some kind of mental equilibrium, that keeps Churchill's Black Dog at bay, and in doing so, in some way or another the re-shaping casts us as at least a bit of a hero of our own narrative, and sometimes as the heroic center of gravity. We might not be able to walk outside and function otherwise. We all get up in the morning with the need to be able to look in the mirror, and go out into the world with a workable self-image, even if the accuracy of what we see looking back at us in the mirror is malleable.

I've been confronted with somewhat dramatic reinventions of shared experiences of late. What I write here will be Part III of something that is as close to the truth as I can get at with forty years of distance, and a lot of blood under the bridge in regard to the etiology and internal dynamics of the making of an album.

Expectations vs. Self Expression: The Writing Of Dog Eat Dog

Anger is a good drug to write on. Dopamine, adrenaline, noradrenaline, it all gives you a hell of a rush that can be stimulated and re-stimulated somewhat easily. Some of the best writing has been done on speed, strong coffee, or some kind of stimulant. Probably alcohol for Faulkner. For some booze focuses things. Philip K. Dick confessed that it was speed. I'm pretty sure Dylan on Blonde On Blonde too, though this could be apocryphal.

All of the writing on "Dog Eat Dog" didn't emanate from anger, in fact as usual on the albums that Joan and I worked on together, she was always conscious of the overall balance of pathos, levity, and the artful police report in "the play" that is the album form. However, the core of the album has always felt to me to be topical writing, driven by a whole lot of anger and frustration with the overall ethos that had come to the forefront in the arts and the world in general during the eighties.

To my mind, Joni's songwriting engine has always been pure. What I mean by that is that I think that she has a writing mechanism that was reflexive and instinctual; pretty much entirely governed by what was at the forefront of her mind experientially. I never observed her literally or figuratively writing out of a conscious intention to write, or the feeling that she should be writing.

In retrospect it seems to me that the critical reception of the album when Dog Eat Dog was released was one of disappointment. Aside from the fact that both Joni and I were interested in the idea of coupling the musical instruments of a new and fresh technology with organic elements, there was the fact that much of the songwriting was based in her version of topical commentary. It still consisted of the universal quality of her personal experience, but to a large extent built around the state of the world. Many in Joan's audience, as well as the community of musical criticism had come to expect and anticipate her songwriting to be centered around the search for, and nature of love. The nature of love from the perspective of the detective following the trail of experiential clues. The initial enthusiasm of flirtation, the joy of romance, and the anatomy of the crime. She actually had written quite a number of what could be classified as topical or "social commentary" songs before ("For The Roses" being the first that comes to mind....a great portrayal of the nature of fame and the record business), but they were outnumbered by the songs built around her one-of-a-kind gift of articulating the universal inside of her unguardedly intimate and personal pursuit of love. They wanted and expected her description of the search and its dark twin, the intrinsic pain and disappointment that is a cyclical part of that search.

The Songs

"Good Friends" Joan had a loft in Manhattan on Varick St. down near the Holland Tunnel when we met. One side of it was occupied by Nathan, an artist friend. From time to time we would go out and stay there together, but it really was her place. It always felt like foreign territory for me. It became a place where Joan could go to escape the domestic routine of a settled and married life, and to creatively shake things up . "Good Friends" is a treatise on the nature of the joys of, as well as the complexities that are intrinsic to male-female friendship in the context of both people being in committed relationships. I can't think of another song that deals with the dynamics of platonic friendship between a man and a woman in this way. I'll note that she wrote this one on guitar, a fact that will become of importance in the next section of the narrative.

"Fiction" The music of this song was born out of my early musical ideas that came to be via my stumbling around and experimenting on the Prophet V, Fairlight, and the Linn Drum Machine. It was one of the things that emanated from me playing around with song ideas in the upstairs bedroom studio in Malibu. Joan flagged it as something that she wanted to write lyrics to. "Klein!.... I like that one.... save that for me!"

The shape and nature of the melodic movement in the keyboard part presented a new context for her to work with lyrically, and as she noted, the short and clipped melodic phrases were unlike anything that she had ever worked with to write to. A new kind of puzzle for her to work with. The lyric that she wrote is a meditation on the transient nature of truth and fact in the context of an era that foreshadowed what I have come to refer to presently as The Age Of No History. It's a prescient idea that came to her during a time that was the beginning of the internet / personal computer / cable TV era. Earthlink and the Apple IIe. There were times when Joan would sit up late into the night, accompanied only by a legal pad and pencil, and a couple of packs of cigarettes. I could somehow sense that she was dialing into something well beyond just her personal perspective. It felt to me like she was accessing what Carl Jung would term as "the collective unconscious".

We had come to the end of the era where a butcher's son became a butcher; where there were already far more choices for input of all kinds than there ever had been before. Too many choices. There was a new kind of freedom that was accompanied by an untethered and chaotic quality in our culture that went well with cocaine. Unleashed from cultural truths, altruistic ideals and traditions. Liberated from 3 T.V. channels, from Walter Cronkite as the voice of the notion of real truth on the nightly news, from anything remotely resembling verified facts. In this era of the smartphone, social media, and A.I., the lyric is more pertinent than ever.

I can't decide
I don't know
Which way to go
The options multiply
The choices grow
Which way to go?
What should I buy?
What should I be?
Which way to go?
(Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief)
So much comes at you
Too much for me
Which way to go?

Elusive dreams and vague desires
Fanned to fiery needs by golden boys
In ad empires
Fiction
Truth
Fiction
Truth
Fiction
Truth
Fiction
Fiction of the boob tube
Fiction of the papers
Fiction of the image and the image makers
Fiction of the magazines
Fiction of the movies
Fiction of the "buy me," "Watch me," "Listen to me"

I can't decide
I'm so confused
Which way to go?
I'm being useful here
I'm being used
Which way to go?
Some line gets drawn
What line is this?
Which way to go?
Could be a threshold or a precipice
Which way to go?

Elusive dreams and vague desires
Fanned to fiery needs by sexy boys
In flaming TV fires
Fiction
Truth
Fiction
Truth
Fiction
Truth
Fiction
Fiction of obedience
Fiction of rebellion
Fiction of the goody-goody and the hellion
Fiction of destroyers
Fiction of preservers
Fiction of peacemakers and shit disturbers

Fiction of the moralist
Fiction of the nihilist
Fiction of the innovator and the stylist
Fiction of the killjoy
Fiction of the charmer
Fiction of the clay feet and the shining armour
Fiction of the declaimers
Fiction of the rebukers
Fiction of the pro and the no nukers
Fiction of the gizmo
Fiction of the data
Fiction of the this is this and that is that ahh!

I can't decide
I don't know
Which way to go?
The more you learn
The less you know
Which way to go?
Some follow blind
And never know
Which way to go?
To lead you need some place to go
Which way to go?

Elusive dreams and vague desires
Fanned to fiery needs by deadly deeds
In falling empires
Fiction
Truth
Fiction
Truth
Fiction
Truth
Fiction
Fiction of the diplomat
Fiction of the critic
Fiction of the Pollyanna and the cynic
Fiction of the coward
Fiction of the hero
Fiction of the monuments reduced to zero

"The Three Great Stimulants" Another song that I remember feeling like Joan somehow had channeled the collective unconscious stream on. Though the spark of the triad "artifice, brutality and innocence" came from the "Flies In The Marketplace" section of Nietzsche's "Also Sprach Zarathustra" (Thus Spoke Zarathustra), the big idea that this opened up into was something that came to Joan on another of her all-night sessions with pad, pencil, one smoke burning and another burning in the ashtray.

"Tax Free" This song began as another of my sketchpad pieces of music that I came up with and developed in our little bedroom studio. I seemed to hear a song called "Bette Davis' Eyes" every time I got in the car. It was in high rotation all over the radio. The main riff of that song was obviously played on a Prophet. I started playing around with that kind of wirey Prophet sound at the core of that track, then began altering it, taking it somewhere new. I was thinking about the idea of hollow two-note chords, the harmonic content of which, along with the bass, moved around minimally for the musical foundation of a verse section. I worked with the idea where the bass movement was a 3-note Aston Barrett type figure in the beginning of the bar, followed by hollow chords that morphed through the verse, then released into pre-chorus with contrasting pads, the harmony changing with the minimal movement of the top note of the chords. An eighth note-based bass groove kicked in for the B Section, then moving back to the verse scenario for the chorus. I've always loved the idea of the musical structure of a verse becoming a chorus because of a new and recurring melody and lyric, but with the same harmonic structure. This idea has been worked with on so many great songs. This was a piece that Joni, after hearing it waft downstairs in the house, responded with "I like that one! Save that for me!"

It became a topical poem about tele-evangelists. We initially set about recording actual Jimmy Swaggart dialog straight off of the television. It worked perfectly, even in its grainy sonic character to lay these audio clips into the track. Knowing that if we actually used this material there would be a good chance that we'd be hit with a lawsuit, we came up with the idea of having an actor occupy Swaggert's role in the song, but delivering the dialog that we had grabbed from Swaggart. Our first choice was Robert Duvall, who we were both avid fans of. We had just watched "Tender Mercies", the great film written by Horton Foote that he starred in with Tess Harper. He had to pass because, as he explained, he was working on a similar character for a film of his own about an evangelical preacher. That film ended up being "The Apostle". Next we went to Jack Nicholson, who I recall said yes, but then didn't show up at Galaxy Studios on the chosen evening, and in the end just didn't feel comfortable playing the role. We then decided to go to our coffeeshop counter-friend Rod Steiger, who's acting we both loved, and who we could actually pitch the idea to in person. He said yes. When we did the session with him we recorded him without the distraction of the music, just feeding him each of the Swaggart fragments to work with. At one point Joni ventured into the studio to attempt to give him direction. His response was to move in close to the microphone, looking into the control room, and barely containing his temper, and say "Larry..... get her out of here...". We let him fly with the role, playing him the Swaggart material as a reference for him to lean on.

We paid him in wine. He didn't want any money to for the job. He asked for, and received a case of Chateau Margaux.

"Empty, Try Another" This song was born when, during the recording of the previous album, "Wild Things Run Fast" but came to fruition on "Dog Eat Dog". Joni discovered a cyclical mechanical sound that would occur when she would try to buy Marlboro Lights from the cigarette machine in the lobby at A&M Studios, but the stock was out in the machine. We brought a mic out into the hallway, stuck it into the guts of the machine, and she proceeded to play the cigarette machine. Characteristic of Joan's ingenuity. A wide-open creative mind with sound. We added vocal figures and a bass part that answered.

"Shiny Toys" A great example of Joan braiding together the topical theme of what felt like omnipresent materialism and worship of wealth with the simple and somewhat shallow Malibu lightness that surrounded us at that time.

I'm reading people rags in the checkout lane
Look, here's a hunk, here's a honey
Celebrated people and their claims to fame
Here's a boy and his money
And pictures of the winners in the latest
Ratepoll games

Whatever makes you "yahoo"
Whatever makes your time feel satisfyin'
Whatever makes you
"Oh, I'm so excited"
Whatever makes you feel like you're right on time

It provided some levity, yet was a social critique as well. It was another song that was born on the guitar, but that we took the fabric of the guitar apart in the process of adapting it to the musical language of the album. I asked Jerry Hey to write a horn chart for us, and he came up with a stunning and unconventional way of approaching an unusual context to write for horns in.

"Ethiopia" Famine in Ethiopia had reached a particularly tragic pitch, and was being documented and broadcast on television in a way that a global crisis of this kind had, to my mind, never been seen before. Multiple charity organizations asked for money with heart wrenching footage of starvation driving home the urgency of the situation. The tragedy that was inescapable culminated in the Live Aid event. This poem felt to me like topical commentary coupled with a tangential update on "Woodstock". Through the lens of the Ethiopian famine, she was dealing with the state of the planet, and in doing so plugged into a prescient reality of climate change, pesticide use, the decimation of the rain forests, and much more. After searching for indigenous Ethiopian music we chose to weave grainy samples off of an LP of Pygmy singing that we sampled with the Fairlight.

"Impossible Dreamer" Despite the fact that we worked for months on a number of albums together there were instances on some projects where I left the specific literal meaning of a line to be a product of the mystical part of Joan's gift. I left the mystery of it alone, and worked to what it meant to me. This song always has felt to me like a note to John Lennon. A response to "Imagine" perhaps. There are some songs in which the poetry came to Joan in an inspired burst. I remember it as initially being a piece of music that she worked with on piano, then adapted to Prophet in the context of the album.

"Lucky Girl" Joan literally crafted this song out of a group of digital mismatches. At a point of frustration and conflict, the digital information of a track got put up with the wrong instrument file on the Fairlight. The initial combination of sounds that were the result of this initially felt like incongruous fragments of noise. At the particular time that this occurred, Joan's intense desire for creative autonomy kicked in, and she decided that she was going to make a song out of whatever appeared in the arsenal of instruments that had become that was accessible without the interference of anyone else's input. A song appeared to her in the midst of sonic chaos. The poem was a simple and lovely gift to me that was a sweet note to end the album with. We did have many happy years, living, playing, traveling, and making things together. This was part of the picture, even in the midst of a very difficult period on this project.

There was nobody that we could imagine inhabiting the solo spot on the song other than Wayne Shorter. Wayne always came to any situation sideways in one way or another. In the way that he did this he always brought a wild card to any musical endeavor or conversation. He would describe his musical angle on a song in a single sentence, a story, or a quote from a classic film. His wife Ana Maria would shake her head, waving and laughing "Oh Wayne!!" Nobody remotely like him...ever. In playing on a piece of music he became a character in the play rather than just a musical participant. He was a screenwriter on anything that he played on. He never had to make his way through intellect, virtuosity, melodrama, or any other detour on his way to dramatic contrast. He went straight to the insouciant heart of the matter.

When he came in to play the solo spot on this song, he sat and listened intently, then told us a story that I've always loved. "I would look down at the street on Sundays and watch all the people walking to church..... There was one little girl who would pass by every week..... she had these beautiful shiny shoes that she wore every week. My mother came over to the window, looked down, and said "You see that girl down there with those shiny shoes?...... She's a lucky girl!"