Joni and Larry Klein in the early '80s, by Joel Bernstein After that car wreck, she decided that she didn’t want to be driving on Pacific Coast Highway anymore, so we moved back into town.” Joan was pretty much uninjured, but I broke my wrist and practically bit my tongue in half. We were in a bad wreck, and the engine in our car caught fire.
#Stuck in the middle with you bass tab driver
We were driving home to Malibu from the studio very late at night - I remember the date distinctly, because it was the morning of Live Aid - and a drunk driver hit us on Pacific Coast Highway. “During the recording, we had a very close brush with death. Through Mike, we got in contact with Thomas, and that led to the forming of the team for the recording of Dog Eat Dog. “I loved the elegance and depth of the sonic perspective of The Flat Earth, so at some point I got together with Mike Shipley, who had engineered and mixed that record. Joni would hear me working on new music up in the studio while she was painting, and that’s how the songs that we ended up co-writing from Dog Eat Dog began to develop. Joan was writing new songs that were very topical in nature, as there were a lot of quite shocking issues at hand in the world, and we were both disturbed and upset at where things were going in this country. I had gotten a little studio together in a room in the house, and I was listening to all kinds of stuff, but one record I ended up really loving at that time was Thomas Dolby’s The Flat Earth. We were both working on new music, and she was painting all the time. “During the next period, Joni and I moved out to Malibu. It was like a little village of people who loved each other - we all loved the way each other played and loved playing this music together.” We had this great band playing these wonderful songs of hers, and we were traveling around with a great crew.
“We ended up going on the road for about a year after Wild Things,” Larry says. Once the album was out, Joni and the band - keyboardist Russell Ferrante, drummer Vinnie Colaiuta, Michael Landau on guitar, and musical director Klein on bass - toured Japan, Australia, Europe, and the U.S., documented on the Refuge of the Roads DVD. It was wild and surprising to us both, and yet very organic and kind of innocent in the way that it happened.” The latter part of making that record consisted of us working together while she was still writing some of the music, and then completing the recording process, mixing the record, and all of that. We just liked each other so much and loved being around each other. We had fun on those sessions, recorded some beautiful music, and at a certain point, we were going out to meals together, and then we just sort of naturally gravitated into a relationship. Honestly, I had never spent time around a person with whom I could have a meaningful and stimulating dialogue for hours, and then meld perfectly on a musical level. “I loved the songs, and we had a very similar sensibility and aesthetic philosophy in many areas. “Joni and I hit it off pretty good from the get-go,” says Klein. Both players added sophisticated grooves to Court and Spark (1974) and The Hissing of Summer Lawns (1975) while helping Joni to articulate what she wanted next, which she found in abundance in a 24-year-old force of nature from Florida (top left). Max Bennett (right, middle) had a dazzling list of credits - from Cannonball Adderley, Ella Fitzgerald, Marvin Gaye, and George Harrison to Elvis Presley, Charlie Parker, Diana Ross, Barbra Streisand, and Frank Zappa - by the time he met Joni as a member of the L.A. Wilton Felder (bottom left), the Crusaders sax legend whose immortal bass lines include the Jackson 5’s “ABC” and “I Want You Back,” had already logged studio time with Stanley Turrentine, Shuggie Otis, Jean-Luc Ponty, and Donald Byrd before he began working with Joni on For the Roses in 1972. Joni’s earliest albums featured sparse bass by Buffalo Springfield/Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young icon Stephen Stills (on our cover at bottom right), but soon, two of L.A.’s finest players stepped in to add new colors to her canvas. As you’ll see below, her penchant for low end took root long before she began thinking of herself as a singer.
Joni Mitchell owns a special place in our hearts because she has consistently sought out killer bass performances and made them central to her work.