![[ about ]](../../../images/buttons/babout.gif)  ![[ concerts ]](../../../images/buttons/bconcert.gif) ![[ recordings ]](../../../images/buttons/brecordi.gif) ![[ royal court ]](../../../images/buttons/broyalco.gif) ![[ online ]](../../../images/buttons/bonline.gif) |
 
Publication: Mojo [UK]
[Note: This is an extremely large piece typed by Fredrik and Pernilla Glimberg. It is in essence several different articles joined into one large piece.] Paisley Parklife has been rather fraught for some time. Has The Artist Formerly Known As Prince been following a single minded vision or just having a freak-out? Have the identity crisis, the battle with Warner Brothers and the increasingly unfocused music amounted to an extended act of commercial suicide? Marc Weingarten explores behind the scenes in Minneapolis to see what Prince's working practices reveal, and finds out how the greatest music of his purple reign was made. Barney Hoskins asks of the man's former colleagues and players: "What is he like?" Sylvie Simmons sifts through the later albums to find diamonds in the rough. And on page 42, the man himself steps out of the shadows. Charles Koppelman feels like a million bucks. It's November 12, 1996, only a
week before A modular structure with a bleached-white exterior and pyramid roof, Paisley
Park has all the visual appeal of an industrial park. Inside, the
once-monochromatic colour scheme has been replaced by a rude clash of peach
and purple walls, tawdry trompe l'oeil cloudscapes and striated marble
floors. For years, Paisley Park, like it's owner, was shrouded in mystery.
Now it's practically in the public domain. Paisley appears in the video for
the new single, Betcha By Golly Wow; pictures of it adorn the booklet
accompanying Emancipation; Oprah Winfrey, the most popular talk-show host in
America, toured Paisley Park as part of her interview with When He's even magnanimous towards his old record label: " I owe a huge debt to
them. They built this place for me. I even invited them to come tonight."
No-one even bothers to ask why he only played three new songs in his set, or
how his new-born baby, at the time rumoured to be seriously ill, is doing.
One cowed writer, however, does feel compelled to comment that he's relieved
to discover his idol is just a normal guy.
When O(+> returns for a short, uninspired second set, the last, disingenuous
words he utters to the crowd are, "November 19, don't let me down." Judging
by the sea of smiling sweaty faces, it seems he won't have to worry.
Prince has fallen on hard times. His last album Chaos And Disorder barely
sold 100,000 copies in the US. This from an artist whose most successful
album, Purple Rain, sold in excess of 13 million. His domestic tours have
down-sized to the point where he's lucky to sell out 8,000-seat
amphitheatres. After finally closing the book on his rancorous battle with
the Brothers Warner, he's determined to make himself matter again. In order
to accomplish this. O(+> has slowly peeled away at the mystique he's so
carefully cultivated over the years by becoming press-friendly, appearing in
videos that extol family values, establishing a web site, etc. It's OK to be
a freaky genius when you're selling records, but for a culture weaned on
tabloid TV, O(+> is just another celebrity freak. His star status has shrunk
to the point where it eludes the media's radar, so he's forced to create his
own puffed-up photo ops. A media junket would have been unthinkable for
Prince a decade ago, when he was consistently racking up platinum sales. Now
it's a necessary survival tactic. "Nobody cares how Prince wears his hair
any more, or what clothes he likes," says Leeds. "People stopped caring
years ago, other than a shrinking base of fanatics."
Given his current predicament, the decision to release Emancipation as a
triple-disc set seems either calculatedly perverse or career suicide.
According to those who have worked with Prince in the past, it's possibly a
final act of revenge towards Warner Brothers, who in 1987 refused to allow
him to release Sign "O" The Times as a 3-CD set called Crystal Ball. It is ,
in fact, Prince's almost impossible prolific output, coupled with a
notoriously short attention span, that helped create the Warner rift.
"Editing himself has never been one of Prince's interests," says Leeds.
"He's a funnel for music. I once asked him why he puts so much pressure on
himself to keep cutting songs, and he said, If I don't finish it now, I'll
never finish it. I've got tomorrow to think about."
To hear O(+> tell it - and he's telling everyone - the Warner contretemps
was so disruptive and time-consuming that it adversely affected his ability
to make music, but there are some Paisley Park defectors who believe the
opposite is true. "Prince got to a certain point where he just tuned out the
business end of things," says one insider. A more likely scenario may be
that the conflict was a feint intended to mask gradually declining sales.
Although Prince's record sales, from the ground-breaking Around The World In
A Day onwards repeatedly failed to live up to their predecessors, the
intensity of their critical and public reception made up for the relative
slide in sales. However, with 1990's frustratingly inconsistent double
Graffiti Bridge, there came a public perception that one of the world's most
ambitious musicians was over-reaching himself. By the following year's
Diamond and Pearls, Prince was making a conscious attempt to chase trends
rather than create them. The '80s' most forward-thinking pop artist began to
look over his shoulder at the increasing commercial viability of hip hop; he
recruited a full-time rapper to the New Power Generation's line-up, and
laced his records with DJ scratching and brittle 808 beats, all of which
sounded hopelessly out of touch and disengaged. "For years, everyone else
was listening to Prince to see what he was doing, but then there came a time
when he began to listen to rap and other stuff, and said, "I can do that,
and I can do it better," says Eric Leeds. "I think the best stuff on the new
CD is the stuff that gets back to who he really is. It's not cutting edge,
but at least it's true."
The reception given Emancipation underlines the cross-roads at which O(+>
finds himself. Some of the songs have reminded the public of why he once was
so fêted, but the sheer volume and inconsistency of material once more
invites charges of self-indulgence, while the indifferent chart performance
represents an eloquent rebuttal of Koppelman's attempt to talk up the album.
Prince's new distribution deal with EMI will provide him with an enormous
amount of creative and commercial leeway, but how many Emancipations can the
market stand until it tunes out altogether? The man's own home page on the
World Wide Web already promises another 3-CD set to be released "soon". The
only way for Prince to work his way out of the hole he's dug for himself is
to admit that, for all the shrill scapegoating and finger-pointing, he
remains his own worst enemy.
"I don't like to talk..." My music is my language, "O(+> tells Serge Simonart, during a rare interview
in Paisley Park.
You have this incredible reputation for live shows, so why have you never
released an official live album?
-It'll happen. The bootlegs...some of these guys are making more off my
music than I am. But I understand a fan's need. I mean , I wanted to have
every note James Brown ever sung. It's just... maybe it's because a live
album is such a definitive statement. I don't like definitive statements. I
will play my old stuff again though. Maybe When Doves Cry will sound right
for once.
When Doves Cry was such a flop the first time around?
-Nnnoooo, haha... It's just that sometimes I get a better idea for a song,
but it's already recorded. Live versions can be radically different from the
original version. That's one of the reasons why, I guess. But that's OK. All
those ol' jazz cats never made definitive versions. On the other hand,
sometimes it's good not to mess with a song. Sign "O" The Times dies when
you mess with it.
Why did you record the covers on Emancipation?
-Betcha By Golly Wow (by The Stylistics) is a song I grew up with. Bonnie
Raitt is a good friend of mine, and I think I Can't Make You Love Me is one
of her best songs. And One Of Us is a great melody and an important
statement. It's one of those songs I would advise every artist to perform at
least once.
The studio we're in must be the place where the legend has it you spend 25
hours a day.
-It doesn't work like that. What happens is: I can't leave a good idea
unfinished. If I do that, it drives me nuts. You see I get these ideas.
Sometimes at 4am. So I get up, get dressed - and come and sit here (points
to the control room) until it's over. I've got a thousand songs in the
vaults. Finished songs. That's the thing: I have to finish a song to clear
my mind for the next idea. It can be a curse, you know.
Does it happen that you perhaps write a song but deliberately don't release
it because you feel the time isn't right? Because you feel the general
public might not be ready for it?
- Yeah. Kiss is an example. I had that song for a long time. Changed it
around a lot. (Dreamily) Yeah. Happens all the time.
When recording, do you listen to the competition? Or do you shield yourself
from outside musical influences?
-When I'm working, I'm working. I don't have time to... You Know what? It's
such a drag to have musicians claim they never listen to the competition.
They're liars, man. I mean, I know bands who in the press badmouth artists
they revere in rehearsal. I don't wanna be like that. I crave great
musicianship, and I don't care who provides it. I've got no problems saying
I dig D'Angelo. Or some of the things that Björk does...The Cocteau
Twins...Musicians - we're family. I hope young musicians learn from me - my
mistakes too - the way I learned. I was talking to D'Angelo just now, you
know, how when you are a one-man-band and you get in to the studio in a bad
mood, then the whole band is in a bad mood. That's why Emancipation is like
it is. I was happy. It's a happy album.
I'm glad you're talking, if only because when you're silent for so long, you
give all the gossip more room...
-Yeah...Rumours separate us, right? I realise that now. It's just, if I had
to spend my time denying every rumour about me, I wouldn't get around to
making records any more. And no offence, but I don't like to talk. I mean,
my music is my language. It really is like that. I played with Me'Shelle
Ngedeocello. She's no talker, believe me. But when we played...perfect
understanding.
"The Purple Gang" Outside the studio he was reticent. Inside he became the most ambitious,
audacious auteur of the '80s. Marc Weingarten talks to his key collaborators
to uncover Prince, the musician.
Prince's critics begrudge him his eccentricities for the same reason that
Salieri despised Mozart - it all comes too damned easy for him. Psychedelic
pop, art funk, metallic dance punk, lascivious R&B - Prince has effortlessly
bent all of these mutant genres to his will, for better or worse. It's a
telling fact that, of the four icons - Madonna, Bruce Springsteen, Michael
Jackson, and Prince - who seized the pop zeitgeist during the ‘80s, only
Prince has never relied on producers and regular co-writers to help conceive
his art. He's a true anomaly: the only multiplatinum artist in rock's
history who's also a polymath.
From his early, audaciously eclectic one-man-band recordings to the far moreByzantine constructions on albums such as Parade and Sign "O" The Times,
Prince has always been a self-sufficient, and cannily resourceful, creature
of the studio. His first four albums - For You(1978), Prince(1979), Dirty
Mind(1980) and Controversy(1981) - all bear the self-aggrandising credit
"Produced, Arranged, Composed and Performed by Prince." The last two albums
which created the blueprint for Prince's minimalist, pansexual pogo-funk,
were recorded entirely by the artist in the 16-track basement studio of his
first house, which perhaps accounts for the claustrophobic, charmingly
demo-like quality of those early, highly influential records.
1984's Purple Rain was a beast of an entirely different stripe, the
culmination of what long-time saxophonist Eric Leeds calls Prince's
"five-year plan" to bring one nation under his groove. In addition to
serving as a soundtrack for the film of the same name, this landmark album -
which perched itself at Number 1 on Billboard's Top 200 chart for a whopping
24 weeks - was both a concise encapsulation of his previous innovations and
a nod towards the future. Prince and For You had used live instrumentation
for their sinuous grooves, while 1999 - the 1982 album that spun off three
Top 20 singles, including the euphoric title song - had moved towards
Prince's trademark hermetic keyboard and drum-machine driven sound. Purple
Rain's nine tracks used a combination of live and programmed drums; the
album's fusion of 1999's new-wavey song structures with expansive,
arena-rock arrangements provided the necessary crossover appeal. Older
tracks like Bambi notwithstanding, Purple Rain was Prince's first overtly
rocking album, the one that would make him the biggest crossover star on the
planet during the summer of '84.
More significantly, it was also the first Prince record that bore any
resemblance to a collaborative effort. Perhaps sensing that a stronger
'rock'n'roll identity was necessary to broaden the considerable white fan
base he had won over with 1999, Prince created a formalised working band for
the album. In keeping with previous, multicultural units he had toured with
in the past, the new band - The Revolution - featured keyboardist Matt ‘Dr’
Fink and drummer Bobby ‘Z’ Rifkin, vets who had been playing with Prince
since the late '70s, and the bassist Brown Mark. Purple Rain was also the
start of Prince's symbiotic relationship with keyboardist Lisa Coleman, who
had been playing with Prince since the Controversy tour, and new recruit
Wendy Melvoin, an LA-based guitarist with a stellar music pedigree;
Melvoin's father had been an in-demand session musician in LA during the
'50s and '60s.
"We were absolute musical equals in the sense that Prince respected us, and
allowed us to contribute to the music without any interference," says
Melvoin. "I think the secret to our working relationship was that we were
very non-possessive about our ideas, as opposed to some other people that
have worked with him. We didn't hoard stuff, and were more than willing to
give him what he needed. Men are very competitive, so if somebody same up
with a melody line, they would want credit for it."
"Wendy and Lisa were very important to Prince," says Eric Leeds. "They have
a very deep sense of structure and form, and a very conceptual approach to
music. They had a very deep underlying relationship with him." Recording
engineer Susan Rogers puts it more bluntly: "They thought of stuff that
Prince could never dream of. Prince's music never sounded the same after
they left."
There's a new-found complexity to Prince's writing on Purple Rain, subtle
shifts and gradations in mood and tone that can be directly traces to Wendy
and Lisa's influence. New elements were cropping up in Prince's music as a
result of Melvoin and Coleman exposing him to the music of Stravinsky,
Vaughan Williams, Scarletti and Ravel ("Prince played Bolero all the time,"
says Coleman.) The jagged, pointillistic string section that punctuates Take
Me With You's driving riff was arranged by Lisa and her brother David, who
plays the cello on the track. When Doves Cry's pseudo-classical keyboard
climax is also directly attributable to Coleman's influence. "I think I
influenced When Doves Cry to the extent that Prince was engaged in a healthy
competition with us. He was always thinking, How can I kick their ass?" says
Coleman.
Prince has always surrounded himself with women in the studio. In addition
to Wendy and Lisa, engineers Susan Rogers and Peggy McCreary manned the
boards for Purple Rain in Minneapolis and LA's Sunset Sound, respectively.
"Women have a very nurturing nature, and Prince thrives in that atmosphere,"
says Susan Rogers. "He likes a studio atmosphere where people are flexible."
Rogers was presented with a mammoth challenge when she was hired by Prince
to create an ad hoc studio for Purple Rain. Prince had been renting a
warehouses as rehearsal spaces since 1979, mostly because he favoured the
epic wallop and ricocheting echo-chamber effect the acoustics provided. This
time, however, a 'live' vibe was necessary for the tracks that would be
matched to the club footage for the Purple Rain film, which was to be shot
later that year. So he hired studio apprentice Rogers to turn a rented
warehouse into a functioning recording space.
"I had been working for Crosby, Stills & Nash as a maintenance tech when I
heard that Prince was looking for someone to work with," says Rogers. "I
jumped at the chance. He wanted me to remove his home console and put it in
this warehouse, which seemed a little crazy, but we managed to make it work.
I mean, nobody had really done that before." Rogers got more than she
bargained for. "The first time I met Prince, after everything was set up, he
asked me to set up a vocal mike so he could record. I had never
professionally engineered in my life, but I really had no other choice.
That's how I began my engineering career."
"What Prince was doing with the warehouse was totally unique" says Bobby Z.
"He put this board right in the middle of this very echoey place, and rolled
tape without giving the technical aspects of it any real thought. There was
never any proper separation between the board and the instruments. If it
sounded OK, that other just didn't matter to him. He believes in spontaneity
and getting good performances, not whether a mic is placed properly or not."
Even for an artist with such a superhuman work ethic, the work ethic, the
production schedule for Purple Rain during the summer of '83 was frenetic.
The warehouse became his primary base of operations. In addition to
rehearsing and recording parts of Purple Rain there, Prince insisted that
The Revolution take dancing, acting and choreography lessons in preparation
for the movie and world tour that would follow. Purple Rain co-stars The
Time and Appolonia 6 were also enduring the rigours of his training regimen.
(He was simultaneously recording, under the pseudonym Jamie Starr, The
Time's breakthrough Ice Cream Castle, a band album in one name only: "Prince
recorded every note on that record on that record," says Susan Rogers. "He
even laid down guide vocals for Morris Day to follow.")
"That whole period was like boot camp" says Matt Fink. "He knew this was a
major deal for him, and he certainly felt a lot of pressure to pull it off.
He made it very clear to all of us that we had to be disciplined in our work
and dedicated to what we were doing. He just worked non-stop; he never
slept." Recording sessions became marathon tests of endurance. "We recorded
constantly, day and night,," says Susan Rogers. "You never knew when one
record began and the other one ended."
Once the Revolution had coalesced into a rock solid unit, Prince decided to
road test them with a live performance. "Prince had agreed to perform a
benefit concert at the First Avenue night-club in Uptown Minneapolis Dance
Theatre," says Alan Leeds. "She had trained everyone how to dance for the
film, so Prince wanted to return the favour. At the very last minute,
though, he asked me to get a mobile truck down to the club so he could
record. We had no idea what he wanted to do, but we set it up with David
Rifkin (Bobby's brother) engineering. The night of the show, it was just
elbow to elbow, a goddamn sweat box, and no-one knew what to expect, 'cos
Prince was gonna play a bunch of new stuff that no-one had heard. But it
turned out to be one of the great Prince shows. He did Joni Mitchell's A
Case Of You that night, which he's only done about two times live. And
Purple Rain brought the house down. That's the version you hear on the
album. It was a great night - thank God we got it all on tape."
Prince conjures magic capriciously and sometimes unexpectedly, which may be
the key to his strength as a record-maker. Musicians and engineers who have
worked with him recall sessions being called at all hours of the night, or
scheduled sessions that never materialised. "You really never knew what he
was going to do next," says engineer Peggy McCreary. "We'd have everything
set up for a mix, and he would stop and, say, Put up a clean tape. Well,
that's not an easy thing to do. I'd have to throw the board back to the
mics, and get the right drum sound and reset the EQs, and the trick was to
do it all in about five minutes. 'Cos if I didn't get it done fast enough,
he'd yell, I'm losing my groove, Peggy! But then he'd come up with something
great, and it would all be worth it."
Take Me With U, a duet featuring Prince protégé and Purple Rain co-star
Apollonia Kotero and Sheila E. on drums, is a prime illustration of how, as
a producer, Prince is capable of maximising mediocre talent. Susan Rogers:
"Apollonia couldn't sing, really. She was in the film, and he needed the
song for the movie. The day we had to record this, Prince brought her to his
house to rehearse. He asked her to do the Vanity 6 song Sex Shooter, and she
starts singing When I'm Sixty-four in this soft voice. I remember thinking,
This is gone be a long night. He took her into another room for 15 minutes
alone, and tried to coax her into being a little bolder, a little more
assertive. By the time we recorded it, the whole thing just clicked. She had
this campy quality to her voice that was perfect. She sounded like an
actress pretending to sing."
Purple Rain may have tapped into Prince's strengths as a band leader and
talent facilitator, but the album's most powerful tracks feature nothing
more than Prince alone with a drum machine and a rudimentary keyboard riff.
When Doves Cry, the stark, emotionally wrenching centrepiece of the album,
is a bleak, boldly experimental cri de coer buffeted by one of his most
imaginative drum machine patterns. Peggy McCreary, who engineered When Doves
Cry at Sunset Sound, still marvels at the swift dispatch with which the
track was recorded. "He just came in, cut it, and mixed it in a day. It was
the most amazing thing I'd ever seen," says McCreary. The decision not to
use the bass - a radical move at the time - came during the final mix: "He
was listening, and just popped the bass track out. And it worked out
beautifully."
Prince has always been enthralled by the possibilities of synthetic drums,
not only for the autonomy they provide, but for the implosive, 'dead' drum
sound he can create with them. When Linn produced their very first drum
machine in the late '70s, he immediately began recording with it.
"Prince is one of the very best drum programmers, because he can get very
warm sounds out of machines, particularly on songs like When Doves Cry,"
says Bobby Z. "He really liked the sound the Linn gave him, and hung on to
it for a long time, even after it was obsolete." "No-one can program a drum
machine better than he can," concurs Susan Rogers. "He can take a four-track
machine and create a completed track out of it."
Bobby Z: "When Prince first started using the drum machine, I was scared to
death of it, sort of like an assembly worker faced with a robot. I Thought
I'd be out of a job. But Prince was so ahead of the game that he had a
technician design an interface so that I could play those songs from Purple
Rain on pads in a live situation. You have to remember, this was years
before this technology was commonplace. I mean this thing was like a Model
T; it broke down a lot. But Linn hadn't even thought of doing this, and here
we were playing with it."
"Prince often started with drums in a recording situation," says Susan
Rogers. "They were of paramount importance to him. He'd either come in and
lay down a drum track on the machine, or walk over to the drum kit and tape
the lyrics to the tom-tom, so he could sing the song in his head as he was
playing. Mind you, he never had a click track going. All the music and
arrangements would be worked out in his head, and he just played the fills
where he thought he would need them."
Prince's vocal tracks were all performed behind locked doors, a common
practice for him. "No-one would be in the control room when Prince did
vocals," says Rogers. "Not even me. He would control the tape machine
himself, and punch in whenever he felt necessary. Those lyrics were very
intimate, and he didn't want anyone around when he sang them." The man would
frequently ignore the recording booth and sing the vocals by means of a mic
hung over the mixing desk, on which he'd alter the controls as he sang. He
was effectively using the recording studio as if it were merely a
portastudio, a musicians' toy used for making demos.
Deeply resonant those songs may have been to Prince, but they also pushed
Purple Rain past the 10 million mark and helped the semi-autobiographical
film gross over $70 million in the US. The ensuing world tour that followed,
according to it's participants, was sheer madness. "That was closest thing
to The Beatles that I've ever experienced," says Matt Fink. "It was just
insanity."
Sax player Eric Leeds claims, "The purpose of the show was to do the movie
in condensed form, without the actors and without the plot. He ran the tour
like it was the Marines. "And the recording didn't stop. "Prince travelled
with a mobile truck all the time. I think he has every show he's done on
tape," says Susan Rogers. "He would often wait until after a show, when the
hall was empty, and just jam with the band, to see if anything came out of
it. Soundchecks were recorded to for the same reason."
"That tour really closed the book in that chapter of his life, though," says
Leeds. "After that things started to open up a little. He had accomplished
what he wanted to accomplish and that gave him the opportunity to grow."
Subsequent albums such as Around The World In A Day - portions of which were
recorded prior to the Purple Rain tour - and Parade were steeped in the
baroque pop and hippy mystcism of the Sgt Pepper-era Beatles and early Led
Zeppelin (Prince has also named the Cocteu Twin's Treasure as a profound
influence on the sound of Parade). Chord progressions were becoming more
sophisticated - check out the modulation that occurs halfway through Sign
"O" The Times' Play In The Sunshine - the end result of a self-administered
education in the Miles Davis canon. (Sadly, the fabled recording session
that took place in 1985 between Prince and Miles was abortive.) But the more
adventurous Prince's approach, the more his market share diminished; Around
The world... and Parade sold only a fraction of Purple Rain.
Originally scheduled for release as a three album set called Crystal Ball
but rejected by Warner Brothers as unmarketable, 1987's double-album Sign
"O" The Times was a transitional album, an attempt to reclaim his Purple
Rain aundience with a smattering of approaches from fatback funk to sweaty
balladry, without sacrificing the florid, more mature style he had developed
on more recent efforts. It was also the first album featuring tracks
recorded at Paisley Park, the sprawling studio complex that Warner Brothers
had bankrolled to his specifications. In fact, the terminally impatient
artist insisted on recording there even before the studio was even complete.
"Sisters of the Revolution" Prince's most valued collaborators have not discussed
their contribution to his finest moments. Until now...
Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman remain the closest thing to musical
co-conspirators Prince has ever had. During their all-too-brief four year
(1983-87) tenure, the dynamic duo pratically ghost-wrote by proxy large
chunks of Around The World In A Day and Parade, the two albums that delve
deeper into meticulously arranged psychedelifunk than any Prince music
before or since. "We had a very private, very deep relationship with him
that no one else had at the time ," says Melvoin.
Coleman had been permanent tour keyboardist for Prince since 1980 when
Melvoin, a childhood friend of Coleman's, was hired to replace guitarist Dez
Dickerson just prior to the Purple Rain sessions. "I was just in the right
place in the right time," says Melvoin. "Prince heard me screwing around one
day at a soundtrack and hired me on the spot." Wendy and Lisa were Prince's
George Martin, the ones he turned to when he required a complex arrangement,
or when a half-baked musical notion needed rounding out.
"Prince would send us masters in LA, and we would work out the arrangements
or whatever else, and then send it back to him," says Coleman. "Often, they
would just be skeletons of songs, like (Parade's) Christopher Tracy's
Parade, which was originally called Wendy's Parade. He never second guessed
any of the work we did for him."
Prince had become so reliant on Wendy and Lisa's input, in fact, that it lay
behind his decision to give them the pink slip halfway through the Sign "O"
The Times sessions. "He had startes to distance himself from the music, and
told us he needed to go back to making music the way he used to make it,"
says Coleman. "We had actually recorded a lot of stuff for Sign "O" The
Times, but he started from scratch, and none of it made it to the album."
Embarking on their own career, the duo made two outstanding albums, Wendy
And Lisa (1987) and Fruit At The Bottom (1989) featuring their unique blend
of sweet melodicism and exotic dancefloor grooves, followed by a veritable
masterwork, Eroica which, like its predecessors, was generally ignored.
"They (the label) just didn't get it at all," says Melvoin. "The A&R guys
who signed us loved the album, but the promo people were like, What is this?
We came up with a million ideas to try and market it, but they were at a
loss. It
wasn't our time, I guess." A fourth album, produced by Trevor Horn,
continues to languish in the vaults. Rather tahn lick their wounds, they
embarked on a busy session career which included playing on Seal's first
album, and writing songs on the second. They also scored the Michelle
Pfeiffer film Dangerous Minds, and are currently working on a movie called
Soul Food with uber-producer Babyface. Production duties on Dionne Farris's
album await them in 1997, and they are currently in negotistions with
Dreamworks so they can finally get down to making records under their own
names again.
As for their erstwhile mentor, he did dedicate Emancipation's In This Bed I
Scream to them, a song that can only be construed as a plea for forgiveness
and reconcilliation ("How did we ever lose communication/How did we ever
lose each other's sound?"). Informed of this, both are incredulous, but
intrigued. "It's so funny, because he had sent that song to us to see if we
wanted to work on it," says Melvoin. "We gave him some suggestions about it,
and he sounded like he was into it, but then we never heard from him again
on the subject. He did call us recently, though, to invite us to a party, so
we'll see. We'd definitely be willing to work with him again. We're just
waiting for that 4am phone call."
"Purple Gang (Continued)" Prince hired a guy named Frank Demedi to install one of his state-of-the-art
consoles in Paisley Park, and it was taking forever," says Susan Rogers.
"But one night Prince had dreamt a song, which turned out to be The Ballad
Of Dorothy Parker, and insisted on recording it. As we were laying it down,
though, I noticed there was something wrong with the console. There was no
high end at all, but I figured I'd fix it in the mix. But Prince often
records and mixes in the same session, and that's what we did this night.
Turned out one half of the console wasn't working, but when I played it back
to him, he loved it. It's a total mistake if you listen to it, but he likes
good mistakes if they work."
Other happy accidents abounded during the Sign "O" The Times sessions. If I
Was Your Girlfriend, the slinky, sexy single, features a distorted vocal
that's obvious on the finished track; the feverishly funked-up Housequake
was inspired by a late night jam session with LA pop starlets The Bangles,
while a surprise studio visit by Sheena Easton during the recording of U Got
The Look resulted in the album's highest charting hit.
"Sheena came into the studio unannounced one day 'cos she wanted Prince to
produce her next album," says Rogers. "He didn't feel like socialising,
though. U Got The Look had gone through a million changes, and he was reallystruggling with it. He felt this was an important single for him. It was
originally a mid-tempo thing, but he had sped it up at the last minute and
asked her to sing on it. I think she was a little taken aback by the sexual
nature of it first, but he convinced her to get into it, and it worked
perfectly."
For the Sign "O" The Times European tour, Prince put together a super-slick
band capable of throwing down in any idiom. In addition to Revolution
holdovers Eric Leeds and Matt Fink, it included pianist/vocalist Rosie
Gaines, bassist Levi Seacer Jr, and drummer Sheila E, "by far the best
drummer Prince ever had," according to Eric Leeds. It was with remnants of
this line-up that Prince recorded the notorious Black Album, a project whose
serendipitous origins may have accounted for Prince's last minute decision
to pull the record from distribution. "The Black Album came during a break
from Sign "O" The Times sessions in December of 1987," says Susan Rogers.
"Sheila's birthday was coming up, and Prince wanted to have a big party for
her in LA, and he wanted to record some mindless party songs for her. The
sessions for Sign had been so intense, and he just wanted to lay down some
mindless jams. Mot too much thought went into them. He just recorded the
tracks, walked over to Bernie Grundman's to master an acetate for the DJ to
play that night, and that was it."
The stage that Prince mounted for the Sign "O" The Times European tour was a
dazzling sight, indeed. Newer songs were radically rearranged to allow the
band to stretch out, while older songs were re-imagined and decked out with
multiple tempo changes, breakdowns and split-second musical cues, all
orchestrated on-stage by Prince. "Prince was a huge admirer of James Brown,
and loved to direct the band with cues the way James did." says Leeds. "But
nothing was ever left to chance. If he held up two fingers, you'd hit him
two times, if he pulled a finger across his throat, you had to end it on the
one, and so on.
Although the European wing of the tour was a triumph, planned UK dates were
abandoned, ostensibly on the grounds of poor weather threatening the open
air dates - according to rumour, problems with the promoters or
disappointing ticket sales were a more likely cause of the cancellations.
Prince's decision not to follow up with a US tour was quite possibly,
according to Eric Leeds, the seed for his subsequent problems. "I just think
that was the biggest mistake he ever made. It came at a very crucial time
for him, 'cos he had some momentum going with the record. He told us the
concert movie would fill in for the tour... but nobody went to see it."
From the dizzy heights of Purple Rain and Sign "O" The Times, it was an
inevitable downhill slide. Although there were internittent moments of
genius on subsequent albums, the technical daring and flouting of convention
was soon a thing for the past. But even if he hadn't made another album
after Sign "O" The Times, Prince's achievement as one of rock's true auteurs
would be assured. "I have seen Prince write songs right before my eyes,
great songs," says Bobby Z. "He just has the gift. He's a true visionary,
and long after people forget about all the other stuff, they'll come back to
the music and realise what a genius he is."
"Prince: ‘ere, what's 'e like?" "I am not a woman, I am not a man/I am something that
you'll never understand..."
On a cold night in the spring of 1983, a cavalcade of Luxuricruiser buses
pulls off Interstate 94 in northern Indiana and - to the mild consternation
of the establishment's regular clientele - unloads a motley assortment of
spangled, strangely becoiffed freaks into a huge truckstop diner. Members of
The Time, Vanity 6 and Prince's group The Revolution mingle with roadies and
techies and tour personnel and pour into the restaurant to replenish
themselves after an exhausting show in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
I am an NME writer tagging along with the 1999 tour for three dates to try
to make sense of the burgeoning pop phenomenon that is Prince, and I take my
place in one of the boots with manager Steve Fargnoli and the lissome Dee
Dee Winters, aka Vanity. The general atmosphere on the tour seems to
correspond loosely with Prince's much-vaunted rhetoric about a big happy
freaky multi-racial party, so I'm assuming that the empurpled genius will be
joining us for dinner. Rash assumption, as it turns out. Only when everybody
is settled and ready to order does Prince, engulfed in the shadow of his
giant bearded bodyguard Chick Huntsberry, enter the restaurant, gliding
silently past the row of booths and making his way over to the other side of
the room - about as far away from his band members, protégés, crew and
manager as is physically possible. Just Prince and Chick, then, and not much
evidence of lively conversation when you dare to peer over at their booth.
Nobody at my table says anything about how odd this is, or how conspicuously
it fails to sync with what Prince is singing about every night. For that
matter, nobody seems to remark on how peculiar it is that Vanity, supposedly
enjoying pride of place between the little chap's sheets at this time,
actually kips on her own in a separate bus and scarcely exchanges a word
with him throughout the three days I'm on the tour.
It all leaves me even more nonplussed about the curious creature whose
career I've been following assiduously ever since I Wanna Be Your Lover made
the American Top 20 at the tail end of 1979. And I find myself asking a
numbingly obvious, crassly stupid question that I will put to myself
repeatedly over the ensuing decade: Who the hell is Prince?
"Why do people have to know who I am?" Prince asked the black teen magazine
Right On! in 1979, when he was still just a budding Soul Train contender
with an Afro. And he had a point. We don't have to know who O)+> is in order
to love his greatest music. One could even argue that any ad hominem
approach to the man is hopelessly reductive: in music journalist Simon
Reynolds's 1988 words, "Prince isn't so much a person as a persona".
Madonna may have been right when she said that, like her, he "has a chip on
his shoulder, he's competitive, he's from the Mid-west, from a screwed-up
home, and he has something to prove." But doesn't O)+> defy such pat showbiz
socio-psychology? Isn't his genius so much less deconstructible than that?
On the other hand, we're only human, and we still can't quite contain our
fascination with this man. As with any genius, we long to know more: to get
inside his head and "understand" what makes him tick. And there are
particular reasons for asking these questions again at this moment, as
pivotal a point as any in his 20-year career. He has finally broken free
from Warner Brothers recording contract that he perceived as so enslaving.
He has released Emancipation, a three-CD album that contains, at the very
least, a smattering of his best work since Lovesexy. And he has become a
husband, as well as a father of the baby that so tragically died in November.
He himself is only too aware of how much is at stake at this moment. To help
sell Emancipation, O)+> has even gone so far as to open the doors to Paisley
Park and allow talk-show hostess Oprah Winfrey to interview him and his wife
Mayte. Broadcast back in mid-November, the Winfrey interview has been widely
received as a PR triumph, revealing the man as a calm, coyly charming figure
even as it yanked away heavy layer of mystique. On the other hand, as might
be expected, it raised more questions than it answered, teasing us with
revelations that weren't quite explanations: in particular, the fact that
therapy had revealed an alternate personality created by Prince at the age
of five, something which arguably makes a mockery of the whole question of
O)+>'s identity.
Several former O)+> insiders I spoke to after the interview were hardly
surprised by the news. "I absolutely concur with him that there may be more
than one personality in there," says Owen Husney, the manager and
father-figure who got Prince signed to Warner Brothers in 1976. "I was
conscious of seeing that personality shift at a very early age. One was a
more nurturing personality, and the other was the more hurt side. The mind
is a very interesting playground when it comes to protecting itself. If
you've been hurt as a child, you throw up all kinds of protections. You may
not let people get close to you; your whole thing after that happens is
keeping others at a distance. If you're a control freak like him, you're
just trying to control your environment so you won't get hurt."
Minneapolis writer Jon Bream, the first journalist ever to interview Prince
and author of Prince: Inside The Purple Reign (1984), goes further still: "I
always said he’s like Sybil - I think there are multiple personalities
there, and there always have been. And the nice personality that we're
seeing now, I've seen it before. Not in abundance, and not for such a
prolonged period of time, but it's been there. "Even if we take the
schizophrenic theory with a pinch of salt, it is clear that many of O)+>'s
personality traits - his isolation, his need to control, an inability to
trust that borders on paranoia - stem from a childhood that roughly answers
to the term "dysfunctional".
Whether or not he witnessed the domestic violence depicted in the film
Purple Rain, he undoubtedly felt rejected by his parents. Had it not been
for guitarist Andre Cymone's mother allowing Prince to live in her basement,
the boy wonder might have been homeless. "In some respects he was an
all-American boy," says Susan Rogers, Prince's engineer during his five-year
commercial peak in the '80s. "But there was some abuse in his childhood and
he had a weird name and he was smaller than his classmates. From the start
you had the makings of someone who'd grow up to be an artist - an extremely
intelligent and very sensitive young man. What no-one could've predicted was
just how extraordinary this guy would become; how, all on his own,
culturally isolated from the rest of the country, he'd plan out the arc of
his career."
Focused and disciplined beyond his years, Prince's chronic introvertedness
was already notorious by his mid-teens. Unable or unwilling to express
himself through language, he worked at music with near-fanaticism, mastering
several instruments in the process. "At 17, Prince had the vision and
astuteness of a 40-year-old man," says Owen Husney. "He was the kind of guy
who could sit in a room with you and absorb everything in your brain and
know more than you by the time you left the room, and then have no more use
for you. That's not his fault, that's an ability he has, and I saw it time
and time again in the early days. Prince might hang late, but it was all for
the music. He wasn't looking to get high with the guys."
"It seems pretty clear that most of Prince's personality traits and
eccentricities were pretty well set before his success," says Alan Leeds,
Prince's tour manager from 1982 to 1992, and brother of sax man Eric. "Sure,
money and fame change things, but the leanings were there. Talk to people
who knew him as a youngster, they'll tell you he was shy and introverted,
and these things continue to be the case." To Leeds I wonder if Prince, in
going from high school more or less straight into a record deal, missed a
crucial stage of emotional growth in which you form a peer group around you
and develop social skills to carry you through your career and family life.
"Yeah, but he was a very impatient person, and continues to be. I'm not so
sure he would have been content to go through that phase, and the fact that
he was able to leapfrog over it said everything. Here was a guy who said I
don't wanna waste five years jerkin around, let me figure out a short cut.
And he did."
The first journalists to encounter the brilliant Mid-western prodigy all
tell the same story of taciturnity bordering on autism; of a strange
doe-eyed youth who could barely bring himself to answer "Yes" or "No" to
questions.
"I'd seen him around Minneapolis with Husney," says Jon Bream. "He seemed
very aloof and he'd stand against the wall and keep to himself. When I first
interviewed him, I talked to him for and hour and a half and did almost all
the talking. He told me at the end that this was the longest he'd talked to
anyone in his entire life. He also said that at some point he would stop
doing interviews altogether. And another thing I'd tell you, I knew him for
six years before he ever looked me in the eye."
"He sort of mumbled and looked at his feet a lot," recalls John Mortland,
founder of New York's legendary Punk magazine. "He was struck dumb by very
simple questions. He'd say things that were completely self-contradictory,
and I'd pick him up on those things and he'd just get this puzzled look on
his face and glaze over. He seemed to be really afraid of people. I don't
think there was much image-conscious smokescreening. If he was controlling
things it was with what he didn't say - with the silence. I wasn't surprised
as he got bigger and bigger, that he went deeper and deeper into a fairly
small manageable world entirely of his own making, which I think is what
Paisley Park is."
The silence and bashfulness are clearly things that haven't improved much in
20-odd years. When Mavis Staples first met him in 1989 to talk about
recording an album for his Paisley Park label, he clammed up on her. "He
wouldn't talk at all," she remembers. " I must have been with him about six
months before he really opened up. He was just like a little kid, you know:
when they first meet you, they shy away from you...until they get to know
you, and then everything comes out. I've seen the little boy, I've seen the
kid, and I've seen the man in him. He likes to goof around, jump out from
behind things and scare you - 'I love to see that scared look on your face,
Mavis!' He's kind of like a little animated character at times. He does
things that just seem to me like they should be in a cartoon."
With the silence and mumbling came the odd shock for early interviewers;
evidence perhaps of an alternate personality. "There was this interview he
did with Record World," says Bob Merlis, one of Prince's press officers at
Warners. "The girl asked him the typical boilerplate-interview questions,
and then suddenly he asked her, 'Does your pubic hair go all the way up to
your belly-button?' And this became known to us back here in the office -
that he had kind of a different skew!"
Perhaps the 'multiple personality' theory is the only way to reconcile the
tales of Prince's crippling shyness with his onstage transformation into a
lewd sex god - or with his increasingly ruthless control of the Minneapolis
music scene, for that matter. "The real mystique of Prince," says Susan
Rogers, "is how a guy could come out of Minneapolis and not only start a new
trend in soul music but have the foresight to invent his own competition. To
realise that if he rose up from Minneapolis on his own it wouldn't have as
much impact as it would if there was a scene around him. "If this was
another 'side' of Prince it was certainly one that put more than a few backs up.
"You can't work with Prince unless he controls you absolutely," grouched
Alexander O'Neal, originally the lead singer of the band that became The
Time. On the other hand, Time keyboardist Jimmy Jam gave Prince his dues as
"a great motivator", even after being sacked by the miniature generalissimo
during the 1999 tour. "He's a classic control freak," says Jon Bream. "The
most honest lyric he ever wrote was 'Maybe I'm just too demanding' in Doves
Cry. But then the quality wouldn't have been so high if he hadn't been so
demanding."
"I know that in the five years I worked for him I put in 15 years' work,"
says Susan Rogers. "You were exhausted, because this was a guy who'd work
for 24 hours straight, then sleep for four hours, then work for another 24
hours. But when you're on top like that, you have the fire underneath you. Imean, we weren't winning any prizes for engineering, we were shovelling coal
into the fire, so it just depended on how motivated you were. I gave up a
lot in order to do that. There were other people who were perhaps more
balanced than I who wanted to have a life beyond the studio. I did see it as
workaholism. We worked so many Christmas Eves and New Year's Days. It was
compulsion, it was ambition, but it also filled a vacancy in his life. There
wasn't much else going on. we'd spend time talking, but it was always while
working. He always figured, as long as I'm sitting here talking to these
musicians I could just as easily be recording them."
Others have stronger words for the man. " I think he's almost like a
vampire," says Chris Poole, who for five years worked as O)+>'s British
press officer. " He'll latch on to somebody and take what he wants from them
and then, you know, move on to somebody else. I think there are some very
sad cases where people built their whole lives around him... I saw a few
people who were completely devastated. His personal assistant of 12 years,
his valet who had been running around for him all that time, he just dumped
unceremoniously and unfairly. He's got weird expectations of people: he'll
take a valet and expect him to be able to promote concerts, and then he'll
completely blow him away when they don't meet those expectations. He can be
charming, but he can equally be utterly loathsome. It's almost like this
incubus figure appears in front of you. I've seen him reduce people to tears."
Alan Leeds, who after almost a decade parted from Prince on amicable terms,
defend him against such charges. "Too many people in pop music live through
the artists. The secret is, don't fool yourself about who these people are.
My self-esteem wasn't dependent on Prince, it's never been dependent on
anyone I've worked for."
One thing that seems clear is that over the last few years O)+> has
increasingly isolated himself within the music business, starting with the
move to sever himself from Warner Brothers and culminating in his decision
last year to both close Paisley Park as a rental property and let go of
almost his entire staff.
"I think he's constructed a universe where nothing touches him that he
doesn't want to," says Alan Light, editor-in-chief of Quincy Jones's Vibe
magazine and a journalist who has spent several hours with O)+>. "It's all
about enabling him to work. Everything else is designed that if he doesn't
choose to come out of that music bubble, he doesn't have to. When he wants
to, he'll reach out and bring you in, but not the other way round. When
you're dealing with the raw genius of what his talents are, that's an
isolation unto itself anyway."
"You have to look at who this man is," says Alan Leeds. "This is, by
rock'n'roll standards, a remarkably provincial man. Someone who's had on his
doorstep the opportunity to become a lot more worldly than he has chosen to
be. For whatever reasons, he's eschewed that and stayed in his little
cocoon." The battle with Warner Brothers seems to have brought out the worst
of the self-cocooned O)+>'s paranoia. Quite apart from the obscenely
inappropriate use of the word 'Slave' - an insult to the entire
African-American people - the very public feud betrayed a bizarre degree of
vituperation in the man.
"Something that's typical of a person who's been hurt as a child is
projected anger," says Owen Husney. "What happens narcissistically is that
it can't be your fault - it has to be Warner Brother's fault. I think
Warners did make some mistakes, but on the other hand you cannot write
'SLAVE' on your face, because you have to understand that maybe those are
your own chains. The bottom line is that there were some people back there
in the early days who absolutely protected that kid. I know times where
(Warners CEO) Russ Thyret went to the point of putting his job on the line
for Prince, and you can't fuck with that, no matter what." For Husney, there
is enormous hubris in "slashing the faces of those who protected you". "When
you cut those chains," he says, "you float free and you become real vulnerable."
So just how vulnerable is O)+> in January 1997? What happens if his grand
"emancipation" backfires miserably? When one considers that Chaos And
Disorder sold a mere 98,000 copies in America, the likelihood of a far
pricier 3-CD set improving on those sales seems remote. "I think he could be
successful both commercially and artistically if he accepts a role as a
major international cult figure," says Vibe's Alan Light. "The problem comes
when there's a disparity between wanting to have the freedom of a cult
artist and wanting to be treated as an A-list superstar. What I worry is
that while he's being more accessible for this album if it doesn't
immediately explode he's gonna say, 'See, I tried to do it your way and it
didn't happen' and he's gonna close off even more."
One American journalist who interviewed O)+> recently is Rolling Stone's
Anthony DeCurtis, who found him "isolated, even if he was much friendlier
than I thought he'd be... There was this moment where he was negotiating
with me as to whether there would be a court stenographer present during the
interviews, and he's standing there with the phone in his hand, with his
assistant on the other end asking him what he wants to do... and it was
almost touching in a certain way, but he seemed very vulnerable. I asked him
what was worrying him, but I'm not sure he really knew. He seemed a little
clingy as far as Mayte concerned. He was likeable and interesting and smart,
but I wondered how many people feel like they're close to him."
"Obviously it's got to concern anyone when your records don't sell as well
as they once did," says Susan Rogers. "There isn't a person alive in the
business who hasn't hit that wall. Look at Stevie Wonder, look at Brian
Wilson: everyone who was ever great gets to a point where they're past their
peak. Because O)+> is highly intelligent, I think he'll be able to look at
that and deal with it philosophically. He probably understands that this is
inevitable, and he'll probably be able to set his sight on some further goal
and at some point evolve into a musician doing creative and vital work
again." The most reassuring words come from mama Mavis Staples, who thinks
O)+> is "as happy as a lark... as light as a feather" after cutting his ties
to Warner Brothers. For her, at least, the total control that O)+> now has
is tantamount to the total isolation that others see him bringing on
himself. "I think that this child is strong enough and bright enough to know
that, well, that didn't work but I'm not gonna go under because of it. I'm
gonna pick myself up, brush off and start over again. I don't think he's
gonna let it take him out. He'll know what to do. "Let's hope this is true.
For O)+>'s sake, let's hope there are enough people who care whether it's true.
"The Crown Jewels" Sylvie Simmons select the dangerously good highlights from
Prince's patchy period.
In many ways the ultimate '80s self-made man, Prince spent the decade
inventing and reinventing himself. The scope of the man's ambition was
mindboggling; the result some of the most innovative music around. But,
having surged through so many uncharted seas, by decade's end he was
starting to tread water. Between '89 and '96 - the so-called Patchy Period -
Prince released seven albums (not counting the bootlegged Black Album and
recent, already-discussed triple CD Emancipation) and reduced his already
truncated name to an unpronounceable symbol. If the 80-odd tracks aren't as
risky as his earlier output, there's still more dangerously good songs to be
found than most of his contemporaries could manage in a half-dozen years. A
cassette-stuffing selection for your delectation.
Batman
Graffiti Bridge
Diamonds And Pearls
O(+>
Come
The Gold Experience
Chaos And Disorder
Batman (1989)
Graffiti Bridge (1990)
Diamonds And Pearls (1991)
Symbol (1992)
Come (1994)
Gold Experience (1995)
Chaos And Disorder (1996)
|