Dog Eat Dog

"...Dog Eat Dog" is just outstanding, especially twenty years later, when it is even more relevant than it was then..." Amazon reviewer Sean F. Moran "patrick pearse"

After the phenomenal Hejira in 1976, Joni spent several years investigating jazz with three albums that I pretty much ignored:

• Don Juan's Reckless Daughter (superb title)
• Mingus &
• Shadows & Light (LIVE drastic reinterpretations of her songs in a type of inaccessible jazz)   

Then in 1982 she signed with old friend (and lover), David Geffen, whose then-new label was the modestly named Geffen Records.  

Newly married and frivolously happy, Joni had a complete about face and dumped jazz, releasing the very slight, poppy and at times, 50's rock'n'roll album, Wild Things Run Fast.

While I was thrilled to hear Joni writing songs again, I thought that, other than on a couple of tracks, it stunk to high Heaven.  

In 1985, Joni released her second Geffen album, Dog Eat Dog, one which has become probably the least-liked of her non-jazz albums.

Why?

Well, Dog Eat Dog is not pretty! It's angry and highly political. Joni dives into the Reagan era with both liberal guns blazing, attacking the excesses of the society she saw with passion and fearless, righteous anger...and I love it!

Joni Mitchell on the Dog Eat Dog America of 1985:

'...This country is going very conservative, very right wing, and a lot of the progress made in the Sixties through liberal law-making is being undone. I think there is a sense of powerlessness developing among people. A lot of people I talk to say they feel angry. I feel it myself...' The Times interview November 1985

"...Yes, well, (Dog Eat Dog's) certainly not what most people expect from me..." she concedes "...I'm talking about everything from the insane arms race to the current attempts to censor lyrics by various extreme rightwingers. Basically, I feel that a lot of strides were made in this country during the 'Sixties - equal rights, feminism, freedom of speech, etc. - but under Reagan's new conservatism, much of that's being eroded and undone..." Los Angeles Herald March 1986

Joni Mitchell: Dog Eat Dog

Joni Mitchell on painting the Dog Eat Dog cover:

"...Well, Dog Eat Dog (originally) had a large canvas, 10-foot-by-5, all dogs: God dog, Jesus dog, you know, and racial dogs...in conflict and so on...Geffen told me: "Okay, Joan, we know you're an artist, but stick your picture on the cover." So I did a kind of a collage being attacked by wild dogs, you know, and that was fun to do. So there were really two album covers for that but he wanted my kisser on the cover, so I had to give it to him (laughs). The patron, the great patron, spoke..." KSCA interview 1994

At that time in pop music, only:

• John Lennon with Sometime In New York City &
• Todd Rundgren's Utopia with Swing To The Right 

...had tried similar diatribes...and their albums stiffed, too.

The Amazon reviews of Dog Eat Dog make fabulous reading, actually. There are basically three threads, with two disliking the album and the third, the majority, liking it, giving Dog Eat Dog an average...and surprisingly impressive, 4 stars:

a small percentage of fans complain about the "gimmicky" 80s synth-pop production with lots of Fairlight, samples etc. (but wasn't experimentation what Joni had been doing all her career?) Mind you, Stephen Holden of The New York Times described it as:

"...The most futuristic-sounding record of Miss Mitchell's career, it presents her pronouncements within the context of richly layered soundscapes that bear some comparison to Neo-Expressionist painting..."

Oh really? 

While Joni was to say:

"...It's tedious programming all that stuff but at the same time it give you a real compositional articulacy - you can put the beats exactly where you want them, and then colour the sound of them exactly how you want them..." The Saskatoon Star Phoenix

a larger percentage complained about the liberal bleeding heart etc., that Joni was preachy etc. Usually those complaining had been fans in their youth...and complained that Joni hadn't moved with the times...and joined them in jettisoning Woodstock for Conservatism & Materialism. (Incidentally, you may be interested in a short blog post that I did on the Amazon score bias) 

...And then there's Ethiopia, released only a few months after LIVE Aid, in which the words become a documentary about Famine, as seen through the eyes of the media. Picture Joni's words-camera filming the opening, establishing shots:

"...Hot winds and hunger cries - Ethiopia
Flies in your baby's eyes - Ethiopia
Walking sticks
On burning plains
Betrayed by politics
Abandoned by the rains
Ethiopia - Ethiopia..."

but then, avoiding the predictable, Joni's film editor intercuts between two sorts of famine in two different lands...

...Your top soil flies away - Ethiopia
We pump ours full of poison spray - Ethiopia
Between the brown skies... 
...And the sprinkling lawns...

and then to the rape of a third...

I hear the whine of...
...Chainsaws hacking...
...Rainforests...
...Down

On and on - insanities
On and on - short sighted greed abounds
Ethiopia - Ethiopia - Ethiopia..."

          Ethiopia 

...creating a stunning piece of theatre. Meanwhile truns the flame-thrower on Tax Free war-mongering tele-evangelists:

Joni Mitchell on the rise of the Moral Majority:

The growth of the TV preachers and the Moral Majority with all its hideous hawkishness has alarmed Mitchell more than somewhat. A child of the flower power years, she still cherishes the American ideal of plurality of thought and deed. She's Canadian herself, of course. "...The ideals of the Sixties and Seventies have a true and clear enemy in this new idea, absolutely focused...

...I guess people, finding that there was an emptiness in their lives and a lack of community in a certain way, turned to the churches and the more flamboyant of these speakers, looking for wholesome-ness, looking for something that perhaps had been lost in America with the family unit disintegrating and so on, they turned to this idea of the paternal figure at the head of the family, the wife in the kitchen and the children coming up, and temperance. This idea seemed to flower and expand. A lotta people stopped drinking, became born-again Christians..." Melody Maker interview January 1986

"...Pissed off
Jacked up
Scream into the mike
Spit into the living cup
Strut like a rooster
March like a man..."

...and features an acting cameo by Rod Steiger, who cajoles and rants in his best Fire & Brimstone fund-raising voice about the ills of the Ayatollahs and America's perceived enemies etc. ending with:

"...I think we should turn the United States marines loose on that little island south of Florida and stop that problem!..."

           Tax Free 

The End Of America   N.B.: It was during the 1980 election, the newly formed Moral Majority was "...credited with giving (Republican) Ronald Reagan two-thirds of the white evangelical vote, over (Democrat) Jimmy Carter..." whereas the split had historically always been around 50:50. Their actions (the Moral Majority was dissolved in 1989) and the Christian Right's actions since then, can be directly seen to have politicised American religion. The result of that is now present day politics.   Naomi Wolf: The End Of America October 11, 2007 at Kane Hall, University of Washington campus   Naomi Wolf: The End Of America "...One of the most important books that's been written, certainly in the last decade or two, and perhaps in my lifetime..." Thom Hartmann, best-selling author and host of The Thom Hartmann Radio Program "...Naomi Wolf's End of America is a vivid, urgent, mandatory wake-up call that addresses momentous issues of tyranny, democracy, and survival..." Blanche Wiesen Cook, author of the three-volume Eleanor Roosevelt "...You will be shocked and disturbed by this book. Most Americans reject outright any comparison of post 9/11 America with the fascism and totalitarianism of Nazi Germany or Pinochet's Chile. Sadly, the parallels and similarities, what Wolf calls the 'echoes' between those societies and America today, are all too compelling..." Michael Ratner, Center for Constitutional Rights

   

On the title track, Dog Eat Dog, Joni really lets loose: 

"...Dog eat dog: on prime-time crime
The victim begs
Money is the road to justice
And Power walks it on crooked legs

Prime-time crime:
Holy Hope in the hands of
Snakebite evangelists and racketeers...
...And big-wig financiers

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 gen-u-i-ne
Will be scorned
And conned
And cast away

Dog eat dog..."

          Dog Eat Dog 

As you can see, this ain't the Joni of old. Her words are clear. She's angry, really angry!

However, it's not all doom and gloom. Good Friends is a wonderful duet with Michael MacDonald...

Joni Mitchell on recording with Michael McDonald:

'...he was chosen for his wonderful color. I just love the sound of his voice and I'd never really had a song that had the right strength of groove, and this just seemed to be the perfect opportunity to sing with him....' WNEW FM interview January 1986

...about ex-lovers who meet up once in a while:

"...I have to come and see you maybe once or twice a year...no hearts of gold no nerves of steel, no blame for what we can or cannot feel...You say: '...You're unscrupulous...', You say: '...You're naive...', synchronised like magic, good friends, you'n'me..."

Impossible Dreamer, said to be about John Lennon 

"...In the darkest part of the night...I thought of you, Dreamer. No acid rain, Love without pain. Impossible, impossible dreamer..." &

Lucky Girl, the album closer where our heroine finds true love (you guessed it, it didn't last...but while it did...):

"...I'm a lucky girl, I found my friend. I've been all around the world, Mission Impossible, chasing the rainbow's end...wise guys, booby-prize guys and sly lover boys with big bad bedroom eyes. I never met a man I trusted...till I met you..."

There's not a lot that I can say about Dog Eat Dog. It is what it is, Joni's welcome return to comprehensible songs. Whether the subject matter or lack of "musicality" isn't your thing is another subject altogether. I really like it, especially when I'm in a "World, I told you so!" type of mood. I hope you do, too.

Joni Mitchell: Dog Eat Dog

"...Listen past the more dated elements of the musical arrangements and you will hear that Joni's songwriting has never been stronger; her poetic insight proves as sharp as ever and her way with melody continues its' evolution. Along with such wildly dissimilar albums such as Blue and Hejira, Dog Eat Dog is a crucial element to understanding the whole of Joni Mitchell's vision as a real non-conformist, not afraid to be truly provocative with her art..." Amazon reviewer rex

"...Bought this on vinyl the year that it came out and hated it. Then whilst cleaning out the storage shed the other day, I came upon a box full of old records I had forgotten about. Interestingly, DOG EAT DOG was on top, so I proceeded to brush it off, bring it in the house, and jack up the ol' grammaphone. I can only say that from that point on, I became transfixed and transported. Had I really changed so much in these last 18 years, or was Joni just that much more ahead of her time...or both?..." Amazon reviewer Craig Marsden

"...If this was Joni's rant on the Reagan era, take another listen... It pretty much sums up the Bush II era NOW....We had come to expect the singer-songwriter to pour out their soul in confessionals & introspection. This album is when Joni said "Enough about me, how 'bout you folks take a look at yourselves in the mirror"..." Amazon reviewer tompan "tompanus"

see also:

• wikipedia Dog Eat Dog

Joni Mitchell on smoking & what was behind Dog Eat Dog's, Try Another:

'...Cigarettes and coffee are the things that I have a hard time giving up, you know. Having passed through rock and roll, well, you - in a drug generation, I've sampled everything but nothing was permanently obsessive for me. It all turned left, you know, sooner or later you realize when I take this substance, I feel worse than before I took it. So what's the point? You know, after you go through that a few times, and then it's easy to quit. With tobacco I'm truly an addict. I mean I'll smoke with chronic bronchitis. I'll smoke through it... - so I understand addiction.

PF: You've incorporated it into your art as well on the new album. "...Well, the way that came about was when we were making that - that was recorded for the last album, for the Wild Things album at A&M, the cigarette machine was out in the parking lot and the guy who serviced it, who stocked it, didn't. He just didn't show up for months and months so first my brand ran out. Then the next favorite brand ran out, and soon it was down to Camel plains and Kools. You know, like you really had to be desperate.

So one night I said to Skipper who was the assistant on that record, you know, grab an extension cord, we're going to mike the machine because the sound of the gears pushing out nothing when you hit a chamber that was empty...was so rhythmic and interesting it went 'chin-con-kwa-coo-doo... hoo.' It had two feminine squeaks in the gears and so we stuck a mike up inside of it and that is neither sampled nor looped. That's acoustic cigarette machine (laughs). WNEW FM interview January 1986