Dog Eat Dog At 40: Part III

Fresh Territory

History Etc.

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.