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Collaboration

Collaboration is a complex endeavor at best. I've always thrived on it. Curiosity is its engine, and for me it has always been a way to get to unknown possibilities. Many times its a way to get past myself and my own limitations. A new route to something that might open me up and touch me in a new way. If the blend of circumstances and sensibilities isn't right it can go wrong in so many ways. So many parts of the equation need to be right for it to work well, but when it does work well its a ticket to going beyond original intent.

A good collaboration. An agreement on what is good and what could be better. A compatible rhythm to interaction. A shared sense of humor for a release. The ability to fall on your face twenty times with another person watching and not feel humiliated. The tacit agreement that an idea that doesn't work often leads to one that does. A good balance of self-doubt coupled with the confidence to defeat the inertia of the blank slate. Some mutual curiosity about what might be around the corner. The equation changes with every person and in every situation that you work in.

Some artists can really only function with a specific kind of collaboration. With Joni, she often had many ideas forming simultaneously when working on any given song. The last thing that she needed much of the time was someone to put more ideas on the table. There might be certain instances where she was stuck and not getting to what would work in a given situation, and at those times a new idea might help things to move forward, but she has always had a hyper-creative compositional mind. The best collaborator for her often was someone who might help her sort through those ideas, perhaps help to prioritize them, and suggest possible players and ways of approaching a musical idea.

New Paintbrushes

During the period where the songs were being written that were to end up becoming "Dog Eat Dog" the idea of using digital sampling and analog synthesizers as part of the paint set for the album began to interest Joni. She had played with previous analogs of the sonic material that these instruments offered on other albums of hers, including the monophonic synthesizer and tape loop that she used on "The Jungle Line" on her album "The Hissing Of Summer Lawns".

I had been excited about working with that early digital sampling technology along with the analog keyboards and drum machines that were appearing. I was gaining facility and coming across new musical ideas just by learning how these instruments functioned. I had my regimen of tutoring at the Fairlight office on Westwood Blvd. at 6am, learning to program and get around on this new instrument. New tools that opened up new territory to explore. New instruments to paint with.

As the writing process went on I heard an album that I felt was interesting and fresh. Thomas Dolby had a new album that came out during that year. I was already a fan of Thomas' talent, both as a singer, songwriter, and sonic architect, but to my mind this new album "The Flat Earth" was a big step forward in every area. The way that he was braiding together elements from the Fairlight, analog keyboards, along with organic elements was new. The other part of the territory that Thomas was getting to in a different way was what seemed to me like a new kind of contrast and depth to the mixing on the record that I hadn't heard before. Mike Shipley, who engineered and mixed the record, was a different kind of engineer. Great sonic instincts. He was working with reverbs and perspective in a new way that was fresh and different. I also could hear that Thomas clearly had been influenced by Joan's work.

What we were looking to do on this album was a delicate operation. I felt that we were after a new vocabulary that coupled these new possibilities with Joni's natural idiosyncratic guitar tunings and architectural instincts that were intrinsically part of her writing. These elements needed to add a dimension to the songs and their poetic imagery, but it needed to be in a natural way.

The way that Joan's creative engine worked was that ideas often came fast and in groups. She'd have a set of ideas that came together in her mind simultaneously, and when we would collaborate my function would often be more about suggesting an order and modus operandi to attacking them. More of a sounding board than someone to pile more ideas on to the process.

Its easy to do too much as a collaborator. It's also easy to fall into simply being someone who points out what isn't working and what it would entail to make that thing work. Problem-solving is a small part of being a good producer or collaborator, as the case might be. That was a trap that I fell into in some of the first work that Joan and I collaborated on. I might sit with a knit brow, thinking about a structural problem of some sort and not realize that I was weighing the feeling in the room down. A lot of times the best thing to say is nothing. One of Joan's favorite aphorisms was the Thumper quote from Bambi "if you can't say somethin' nice, don't say nothin' at all".

We liked working together, we generally collaborated well, and working together enabled us to obsess over the things that we made together. When we were working on an album together our lives were completely centered around that work. Breakfast, lunch and dinner. With this new group of songs, and the idea that we had of doing something different with synths and the Fairlight, and what I had come to know about the rhythm of how Joan liked to work, I felt that we would need to add someone into the recording team who had more mileage under their belt with these new vehicles. Someone who had a kindred aesthetic, and who was faster and more facile than I was who I could work in tandem with.

Joan and I would often play things that excited us for each other. It was part of the crop rotation of things that we enjoyed doing with each other in our relationship. We shared a creatively obsessive nature, and most of the time both us were either making things on our own, showing the things that we were working on to each other, or sharing other things that were inspiring us, and that might be catalytic for each other. One afternoon I played a few tracks from The Flat Earth for her. I brought up the possibility of us working with Thomas and Mike on the new songs that we were intending to start working on recording. Both of them were excited about the idea of working with us on the new project. Joni's manager Elliot Roberts set the album up as a co-production between the four of us.

Recording

Once we started work I felt that Thomas and Mike brought what I had hoped for to the project. Joan initially shared my enthusiasm for the collaboration. The work went well on "Fiction" and "Tax Free", which were the songs that I had written the music on. I came to realize that this was because these songs were written on these keyboards that we were introducing into the palette. As we moved into the other songs there came a point at which Joni began to feel that she was being sidelined on her own album.

The rhythm of the interaction wasn't working. I tried to assure her that everything that was being done needed to fit into her creative vision, but the process itself was becoming a source of frustration and anger for her. There were times when she would shoot down ideas before they could be fleshed out enough to show how they could work. I tried different ways of working the collaboration between the four of us. I tried getting into the studio early with Mike and Thomas to work on refining keyboard elements before Joan got to the studio. This way she wouldn't have to sit through the process finding and refining sounds. These strategies worked in some instances, but there were also times when the three of us veered off course in the way that we were trying to braid the colors together, lacking Joni's input. Some days we would work intensely on an element, feeling like we had gotten to something extraordinary, only to find out later that our idea didn't feel right to Joan. The blending of the new electronic elements into the songs required wandering down some dead-end paths. Sometimes we had to stumble around in the dark before we found our way to the right solution.

Joni was used to working in a way where everything emanated from how she wrote the song on guitar or piano. The way the rhythm section functioned was implied by her internal harmonic and figurative motion of he music that she had written. When she wanted to use horns or orchestral elements, the specifics of their movement and design was generally implied for her by what she was playing and singing. The core of the song. When she brought in outside players she would edit them in a way that served the poetry of the song. This way of working had been part of what made her records so idiosyncratic and original. It was what made them great records in a totally personal sense.

One of the ideas that we were experimenting with was taking out the compositional spine of the guitar or piano part that Joan had written, then playing with ways of orchestrating that spine by farming out parts of it to other instruments. This way of coming at the recording process was the exact opposite of the way that she had always worked before. This worked on some songs like "The Three Great Stimulants" but not on others. Even though she would be the ultimate judge of whether an approach worked, much of the time she felt that the experimentation involved in distilling how these new sounds could work got in the way of her own process of discovery. Her discovery process had always been a big part of what she loved about making records. Waiting for the specifics of the new colors to take shape made doing what she loved intolerable for her.

I could see the double-bind that we were in, and tried to find a way for us to work that got what we were after from working with this new palette. We were getting at fresh terrain, but the collaborative dynamic made it feel like the project was always on the verge of imploding. In the initial conversations about working on the album Thomas had said "I'd be happy to sweep the floors", but once we were in the thick of the album he understandably was excited about having more of a creative role in the arrangement aspect. My role increasingly became one of being as much of a diplomat with the mission of finding a way for us to complete work in a way that was up to our standards as much as being a musical collaborator. We made good, but halting progress.

Thomas' way of working was built around being able to dial in a group of sounds that would form the core sound set that would anchor his way of approaching the design of a song, then to create the core of another entire arrangement scenario. This worked on "Good Friends" as a genesis to work from. Much of the time the only workable situation was to be able to access Thomas' sonic sensibility for specific parts or elements. He was understandably frustrated that his role had gradually evolved into that of a keyboard programmer. I had also envisioned a much more integrated collaboration. My goal had been to get as much of each of our talent-sets as possible into the album, supporting Joan's sensibility, but the reality of a situation often ends up dictating how close to this ideal that is possible on projects.

As the tracks gradually took more of a defined shape that supported the writing, we discerned that we needed to bring in outside players to put more blood into the sonic picture. Jerry Hey wrote an incredibly inventive and unusual horn arrangement for "Shiny Toys". Beautiful and unusual. We brought Mike Landau, Vinnie Colaiuta, and finally Wayne Shorter in, and they added more interpretive asymmetry that we needed to the picture. We were getting to a language that felt fresh and had the onomatopoeic quality that we were after. In fits and starts, I felt that we had made our way towards something that illustrated the poetry and Joni's sensibility, and that evoked the dark and materialistic ethos of the moment, but was counter-weighted with humor and pathos as part of the play.

Life As Art, Art As Life

The contour of our lives always seemed to match the art and music we made. What at first was an escape to rural paradise in on Old Colony Road turned into a setting for a distant and isolated way of living for us. Joan's anger and disappointment with the cold materialism and greed that dominated the spirit that was at hand began to consume her. It manifested in me as a deep sadness. The long drive up P.C.H. created a lack of spontaneous community, which was an important part of both of our lives. The changes and events that transpired in Malibu felt almost biblical. The sea came close to consuming us with storms and high tides, fires roared right up to the other side of the highway, with the threat of crossing over to us, and finally the drunk driver and the flaming car wreck. The crash even became a visual metaphor that Joan used in the form of a photo of the car as part of the album's cover art. She combined photos of the bent wreckage with images of wolves from a photo session that we did, then painted over the combination of photos on the painting that became the back cover of the album.

Epilogue

Our lives were always full of synchronicity. There was even synchronicity in the Live-Aid broadcast being the first images coughed up when we turned the T.V. on; the Yellow Taxi dropping us abruptly at home after our accident. The ride from the hospital, crossing through the cursed stretch of highway in front of The Jonathan Club. All of it matched the poetic cycle of the album. For me the album became the rough and dark pearl that came out of an abrasive collaboration and multiple crises.

Live-Aid, with it's admirable intentions. In a sad footnote that seemingly was only noted in the back pages of the newspapers, most of the money generated ended up being siphoned off by the military and the Tigray rebels in Ethiopia. A fraction of the money donated reached the people who needed it. I remember sitting in the early morning with a sewn-up split tongue and a broken wrist watching what seemed to both of us a well-meaning but somewhat naive gesture of charity. Perhaps my perspective had been darkened by the ethos that had cast a shadow over things for me. There are times that I think of depression as seeing truth too clearly.

Malibu wasn't the same for us after the wreck. Joan couldn't drive on Pacific Coast Highway. The small-town ethos of what had been a magical and charmed place seemed to start to disappear. It felt that things inalterably changed in the feeling of the place. We both felt compelled to move back into town.

The counter at the little coffeeshop and the small Hughes Market came to be replaced by a mall full of quickly erected luxury shops made of cheap stucco, and the little movie theatre was torn down to make room for more high-end shops with $400 T-shirts. Old Malibu, with the last vestiges of the old movie colony from the twenties, gave way to becoming a new array of cosmetic shops serving wealthy venture-capitalists and the trust-fund endowed.

As the moving van came around the corner the day that we were moving back to town, I remember a line from a song of Joan's song "Chinese Cafe" that came to mind. "Nothing lasts for long".