by David Yaffe
Among ’80s icons, Prince pledged fealty to Joni. The Hissing of Summer Lawns was not only his favorite Joni Mitchell album, but “the last album [he] loved all the way through.” Joni was pleased to get this praise, but had difficulty hearing her influence on him. She thought he was one of the greatest performers she had ever seen—maybe even the greatest—and that he was a compelling hybrid of Sly Stone and, she supposed, herself. As he did with “Manic Monday” for the Bangles and “Nothing Compares 2 U” for Sinéad O’Connor, Prince wrote a song for Joni to sing—“Emotional Pump.” The chorus was pure one-hundred-proof Prince: “You are my emotional pump / You make my body jump.” There was no way Joni was going to sing that.
Peter Asher, who replaced Elliot Roberts as Joni’s manager and was itching for his new client to make money, witnessed Prince giving Joni advice. “I remember Prince telling Joni how to have a hit,” Asher recalled. “He was an obsessive Joni fan. They had a conversation where he couldn’t understand why she couldn’t have a hit single. He was telling her what she should do and how to have a commercial record. She had no interest in listening to what he said.”
And yet the friendship endured, Prince’s longtime band mate Wendy Melvoin would later recall. “For my twentieth birthday, Prince decided to throw a surprise party for me at a club called Tramps in Minneapolis. He even flew in my twin sister, Susannah. At one point during the party, he said, ‘Do me a favor and sit down at this table and wait.’ So I waited, and then in comes Prince and Joni Mitchell to sit with me, and she gave me three of her lithographs as a present. It was one of my most profound moments. Prince was a fan of Joni’s, just like Lisa [Coleman] and I were, so to get to know her was incredible. I remember a time when we were in California, and Prince called me and said, ‘Let’s go out and have dinner at Joni’s place in Malibu.’ I just thought, Oh my god! The three of us get in the car and we played Blue on the drive to her place. We got there and opened the door and Joni was calling for her cat Puss-Puss in that beautiful voice of hers. The walls of her house were covered with her portraits of people like Miles Davis—it was amazing. So we’re on the couch, having these incredibly deep conversations with Joni Mitchell, and Prince walks over to the piano and starts playing ‘A Case of You.’ Then Joni says, ‘Oh wow! That’s really pretty. What song are you playing?’ We all yelled, ‘It’s your song!’ Prince got such a kick out of that.”
Nineteen eighty-two was the second year of MTV, and even though Reagan was in the White House, Thatcher was in 10 Downing Street, and Michael Jackson would saturate all media with Thriller, there was still enough of a hangover from the ’70s for Joni to release an album that had some connection to her ’70s self.
Wild Things Run Fast, released in October 1982, is never anyone’s favorite Joni Mitchell album, even though some of her fans cherish some of its songs like protective parents. Even its cover painting, of Joni wearing a blazer and pants, leaning on a television, seems arbitrary. We don’t imagine Joni leaning on a television. We imagine her running wild, howling with wolves that live in Lindsey. But it was bookended by two stone-cold masterpieces, one of which, “Chinese Café,” was as revealing as she would ever be about a secret from her past. The other, “Love,” would use words from the New Testament as a poetic inquiry about what love is and is not, a long way from a leotard-clad Olivia Newton John singing, in a 1982 number one single, “Let’s Get Physical.”
John Guerin would be on drums for his last Joni Mitchell session. (In addition to “Love,” he would also play on “Chinese Café,” “Ladies’ Man,” “Moon at the Window,” “Be Cool,” and “Man to Man.”) And it would feature a new bass player, to replace a by now impossibly erratic Jaco.
“I was playing with John Guerin in a number of different things,” Larry Klein, then a twenty-five-year-old bass player and engineer, recalled. “We played together in Victor Feldman’s band. We were doing a lot of work together, actually, in the studio and club dates. In some respects, Jaco influenced my playing. I don’t think you could be a bass player and not be influenced by him at that time. There was a great deal of imitation going on, of people glomming on to what he was doing, either trying to re-create it themselves or assimilate the most overt parts of what he was doing. One thing that I knew at a very young age is that it doesn’t make sense to do that. That’s a losing game.”
To everything there is a season, Joni might have supposed. This young man was not the next Jaco Pastorius, but he gave her what she wanted. Around this time, she liked to say, she looked up to the heavens and said, “Look, I know I don’t call. I don’t write. But I just need a guy who’s a good kisser and likes to play pinball.” When Klein asked Joni if she wanted to play video games, she looked up and said, “Close enough.” They were soon joined at the hip, emotionally and otherwise, and they married in a Buddhist ceremony on November 21, 1982. She was thirteen years older, and the marriage was the kind of thing a male celebrity would do without notice. She plucked a cute young thing from her band and then, because he had youth and claimed, somewhat prematurely, that he had engineering chops, gave him coproducer credit for the next albums she would make, ceding the independence that defined her in the ’70s, when there was no producer credit at all.
Larry Klein said, “She had said to me, ‘I need you to help me with my records.’ I said, ‘You seem to have done a good job on your own so far.’ And she said, ‘No, no. I want your help.’ I know she was looking for something different. She always was, of course, and any vital artist is always looking for something new. That’s how I came to produce these records with her. She very clearly insisted that she wanted and needed me to work on them. As young as I was at that time, I perceived that as probably a good idea, but a dangerous one. I didn’t coproduce with her until we were married. Once we were married, I never took a salary, I never took any kind of advance or payment of any kind. I had some trepidation about the whole thing. I could see what could happen if she paid me to be in this role on the records. I thought it could cause problems at some point. What was naïve on my part—maybe romantically naive—was that we didn’t tuck our assets away, so why should I ask her to pay me?”
After marrying Joni, Klein built up quite a résumé, playing bass with Robbie Robertson, Don Henley, Bob Dylan, Dianne Reeves, Bobby McFerrin, Neil Diamond, Tracy Chapman, Peter Gabriel, Warren Zevon, and Bryan Adams, among others. When Joni lost a Grammy in 1988 to Tracy Chapman, who was represented by Elliot Roberts, it was to a record that featured Klein.
“She had a huge influence on me when we met and started working together,” Klein recalled. “I was working on one of her records when we met, and then we worked together for over fifteen years. For me, at twenty-four, I had never met a woman like this. There isn’t really another woman like her on the planet. She was an incredible combination of things. For me, it very much was a learning experience, being in a relationship with her, whether it was working or in a personal relationship, because we were constantly discussing everything under the sun and she had absorbed an incredible amount of . . . everything. I’m a very curious person. It was an incredible environment for me to grow in every way. She was thirteen years older than me, and of course iconoclastic and idiosyncratic, an interesting thinker in every way.”
Things began beautifully between Joni and Klein. It was only later that Klein realized that, amid such creativity, inspiration, and the full bloom of romantic love, as Joni sang on “Chinese Café,” nothing lasts for long. “I think that the seed of the angry, narcissistic element of her personality was always there, but I think that it was a gradual process of that part of her growing, and the curious and joyful part gradually receding,” Klein recalled in 2015. “When we first met she was just an incredibly stimulating, smart, of course incredibly talented, funny, and brilliant woman. I was so taken with her. I had never met a woman with a fraction of her intuitive intelligence in my life. I had grown up in the San Gabriel Valley, gone to music school, then had been on the road playing with my jazz he
roes for about five years or so. In fact, I was still playing with Freddie Hubbard when I met her on the first sessions for Wild Things Run Fast. She was always thirsty for input on sessions, and I had developed some strong architectural ideas about music and arrangement, and I found her way of working to be a revelation.”
Klein kept superb time, hit those harmonics, and knew, the longer he used it, how the studio worked. He was miles away from Jaco Pastorius, but then, it would have been hard to find anyone in Jaco’s stratosphere, especially if she wanted someone dependable.
Wild Things Run Fast is the only album with the credit “Produced by Joni Mitchell,” and it is the last of the decade not to be saturated by synthetic timbres. And her voice on the album is essentially the same as it was on Rolling Thunder, although that was on the cusp of changing. “How did you go bankrupt?” wrote Hemingway. “Two ways: gradually and then suddenly.”
The sudden part would come soon. “I think that it is important to remember that Wild Things was recorded when she was thirty-eight years old,” said Klein. “From the beginning of the time that we began working together, she smoked about four packs of cigarettes a day. What that amounts to is that she was literally smoking pretty much every waking moment. If you take what she says as the truth, she had been smoking since she was about nine years old. This kind of assault on the throat can only go on so long without really starting to show in the husk of the character of voice, the width of the vibrato, range, and intonation. Also, I do think that when you see this start showing up in singers who are living hard in one way or another, it does start piling on in somewhat of an exponential way once it starts becoming noticeable. She repeatedly tried to quit, but never successfully. One of the times that she tried, she was given an injection which was to, in effect, put the smoker into a sedated state for the first couple of days, which of course is the time when the withdrawal is most brutal. She had tried a number of times at home, but it had become quite evident that she became too ill-tempered and hostile towards anybody around her during the withdrawal, that I would end up saying, ‘Here . . . please smoke!’ I couldn’t take being at the other end of these kinds of mood swings.”
Klein volunteered to drive her out to Two Bunch Palms in Desert Hot Springs, so that “she could wake up from the anesthesia in a pleasant place where she didn’t have access to cigarettes, and where I wasn’t around as a focus of the negative effects of the withdrawal. I got her into her room, got everything set up, then drove back to LA.”
After a couple of days he tried to call her, but couldn’t get an answer. He began to worry, imagining that if she was having some kind of adverse effect from this injection, nobody would know. He drove back out to the desert. “When I got there, I discovered that she had borrowed someone’s little Stingray bicycle to ride down to the local Thrifty’s and get several packs of smokes,” he told me. “Pretty funny. We both had a good laugh about it. I believe that we might have tried another scheme or two to try and get her off of tobacco, but I finally realized that on some very deep level, she actually would rather die than live without smoking.”
Klein’s devotion to Joni in these days was certainly a display of love, an emotion that has proved to be the complex theme she revisited, even when she thought she was through with it. A song called “Love” closes the album, but it actually began the sessions. The occasion was a film to be produced by Barry Levinson, whose breakthrough film, Diner, would be released in 1982, the same year as Wild Things Run Fast. Joni was among nine women to receive the following pitch from Levinson: “Write a 10-minute script on the subject of love, preferably from a sexual point of view. Whatever you write, I’ll produce.” The other women included Liv Ullmann, most notable for her performances in Ingmar Bergman films; the Irish novelist and playwright Edna O’Brien; and the New Yorker film critic Penelope Gilliatt (who tag-teamed with the far more influential Pauline Kael). Rebecca West, Gloria Steinem, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis all passed. Joni, more of a cineaste than a poetry reader, eagerly said yes. She was expected to write the soundtrack but instead wrote, directed, and starred in a film about Art Nouveau, her black male pimp character, who meets an old lover at a costume party. The project never got off the ground, but Joni’s theme song for the project survived.
The lyrics for “Love” are adapted from 1 Corinthians 13. (As has been noted, Joni had become quite a Gideon reader in her days on the road.) St. Paul is speaking to the people of Corinth in the form of a letter, addressing both the spiritual and the material. Love is something in between.
Here is the King James Version, raw material for Joni to adapt:
1 Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.
2 And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.
3 And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.
4 Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,
5 Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil;
6 Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth;
7 Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.
8 Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.
9 For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.
10 But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.
11 When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
12 For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
13 And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.
Joni had to see beyond the archaisms and all the beareth, hopeth, and endureth-isms to create a song that would sound both ancient and contemporary, and also filled something passionate and vital. Joni creates one rhyming couplet in this prose poem:
Love suffers long
Love is kind!
Enduring all things
Love has no evil in mind
Wild Things Run Fast is extravagantly filled with love songs. Joni felt she was pilloried by critics who counted the number of times she said “the ell word.” (Fifty-seven, went one count.) She was giddy, almost like a teenager, at the most cynical crossroads of the music industry. They had denied her entry in the past for being a social critic on The Hissing of Summer Lawns; for stretching out with jazz musicians on Hejira, Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, and Mingus; for sometimes eschewing her gift for melody to get the words out in the kind of speak-song heard on “Coyote,” “Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter,” and elsewhere. But now that she was making something that had more resemblance to meat-and-potatoes rock and roll and straight-up conjugal bliss, they missed the ironic Joni, the lovelorn folk princess of Blue.
The fetish for hip was driving Joni up the wall, especially since, for the first time, she was trying, and trying hard. AOR, an acronym for album-oriented rock, was a big radio format, and songs with big, fat guitars were the sound of it circa ’82—yet, for all these contortions, the songs of Wild Things Run Fast were not getting on the radio or MTV.
“I called up the president of the record company and said ‘You’ll be happy to hear my music is headed in a more rock and rollish manner,’” Joni said upon the album’s release. “You’d think he would be delighted, but to his great credit he said, ‘Oh no, don’t do that: they’ll know . . .’”
Was she still being punished for Mingus? Joni has written so many song
s about love (which are not always love songs, per se) that, in 2013, she halted production on a ballet based on her songs called Love because she felt overwhelmed by the volume of material she had written on the matter. Fitting it in a single ballet seemed impossible. (It became a box set called Love Has Many Faces, released in 2014, and she removed Larry Klein’s credit as coproducer on several tracks.)
Going back through Joni’s catalogue, one finds a quality throughout that is elusive on the Wild Things Run Fast love songs (with the exception of “Love”): ambiguity. “Cactus Tree” is about accumulating love through experiencing many lovers; just one will not do, and, you know, there may be more. “My Old Man” is a straight-up love song for Graham Nash, but it is on the bridge about the “lonesome blues” that the chords get interesting, as they also do when she says they don’t need no paper from the city hall. “Help Me” is melodically audacious, with a refrain about lovin’ freedom more than lovin’ (which is really the freedom to have more lovin’). “See You Sometime,” like “Blue Motel Room,” is about missing a lover (James Taylor for the former and John Guerin for the latter), knowing that there is a lack of fidelity on both sides. “A Strange Boy” is about an unworthy lover. “The Silky Veils of Ardor,” which closes Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, is based on a traditional folk song, a cautionary tale about passion leading to pain and jealousy. Joni told what she believed many thought to be her cold truth on “Amelia”: “Maybe I’ve never really loved, I guess that is the truth. I’ve spent my whole life in clouds at icy altitudes.” This harsh imagery is especially powerful since it builds from the uncertainty of “Maybe.”