Wild Things Run Fast [Geffen, 1982] represented a turning point for Joni Mitchell, as she moved on from the jazz of Mingus and Shadows and Light, and bassist Jaco Pastorius, and sought fresh terrain in the singer-songwriter vein. Enter Larry Klein, who was brought into the album sessions by longtime Mitchell drummer John Guerin. As if the specter of following Jaco wasn’t daunting enough, the 25-year-old Klein was also at the doorstep of his own transformation after becoming disillusioned with the chops-first mentality of many of his jazz heroes who he was backing as a sideman. The two met and sparks flew, creatively and romantically, leading long-term to their ten-year marriage and a producer artist collaboration that has yielded ten albums (and 12 Grammys collectively) and counting. But it all began in Hollywood’s A&M Studio A, for the Wild Things sessions. Remembers Klein, “I learned a tremendous amount from Joni; I was like a sponge. We’d sit and talk for four hours and it felt like five minutes went by. The ideas we talked about translated into the music we made; this concept of going beyond virtuosity to a level of fluency and poetry.” This extended to the bottom, of course, where Klein was able to formulate an approach that suited Mitchell’s alternative tastes in bass. “Obviously, out of respect for Jaco and the music, I didn’t want to play anything remotely derived from what he did,” Klein says. “To try and imitate him, or explore his paradigm, was a losing game, as it always is in the position of following an artist working at that level of innovation.” Fortunately, Mitchell and Klein were on the same page. “At this point, Joni was looking to turn over some new ground in every way—from songwriting, to the stories she was telling, to the way the band functioned. She wanted to work within the pop-song form again, at least in terms of having a little more cohesiveness and coherence in the rhythm section, but she didn’t want the cliché or normal thing—we were always in sync on that.” In fact, Joni abhorred what she called “ploddy” bass playing. “That was a word she used for the kind of traditional, symmetrical pop bass playing she disliked,” Klein says. “She still wanted forward motion, counterpoint, and fresh ideas from the bass, but something different. So my idea was to make the bass playing more compositional as opposed to the figurative commentary that Jaco was so brilliant at. ” Perhaps no track on Wild Things Run Fast captures this methodology better than “Moon at the Window,” which features Mitchell’s guitar and vocals, Guerin on drums, Wayne Shorter on soprano sax, and Russ Ferrante on Oberheim synthesizer. Klein uses four tracks of bass to create an orchestral approach. “I layered parts and built a whole harmonic context on the bottom that tied in contrapuntally to Joni’s syncopated rhythm guitar part, while a