by Matt Thorne
*
Prince’s albums invariably improve with age, and while there are several astute Prince critics among music writers, those reviewing his albums at the time of release often find themselves at an unfortunate disadvantage. The records often come with their own myths, rumours and disclaimers, even on occasion with what seem like admissions that the work is substandard (both 1996’s Chaos and Disorder and 1999’s The Vault come with the warning that the enclosed material was originally intended ‘4 private use only’), and it’s often only with the release of subsequent albums (or knowledge of how the records were put together, of what was lost in the creative process) that the depth of Prince’s achievements becomes clear.
When I’ve attended playbacks of his recent albums, it’s been immediately apparent that those present can’t tell on one listen whether this new record is an important addition to his oeuvre or one that all but the most dedicated will wipe from their computers after a month. Prince’s work is particularly hard to assess at speed, especially if you are focusing on the quality of the music in relation to the rest of his output rather than how a record will fare commercially.12
At times, this has led certain parts of the critical establishment to focus on the larger aspects of Prince’s myth, something he’s often encouraged. The most obvious example of this is the furore that followed Prince’s decision to retire his name temporarily and record under an alias (taken as a sign of madness or egocentricity, it seems it was as much a business decision as a desire to erase his past). Also, Prince is so prolific that even when he’s putting out substandard material he’s often simultaneously stockpiling songs for alternative projects, and as he frequently returns to older recordings while constructing a new album, it can sometimes be hard to know exactly where an idea or song dates from.
In the meantime, alongside the official recordings and releases, there is an enormous body of unreleased work that has somehow reached the ears of collectors. Over the years there has been much finger-pointing about who is responsible. And while it’s clear that Prince believes the true fan is the one who contents himself with what he’s prepared to give him (at one point he even offered an amnesty for fans to return illegal bootleg recordings to him, in exchange, mainly, for goodwill), it’s hard not to shake the worrying possibility that Prince may never make the majority of his vast body of work available, even after his death.
His attitude towards his back catalogue changes all the time, and though Prince has famously stashed tapes of his unreleased songs in his fabled ‘Vault’13 throughout his career and does often revisit old ideas or exhume lost songs, promised compilations such as Roadhouse Garden (a proposed collection of unreleased songs recorded with his most famous band, The Revolution) and Crystal Ball II (a sequel to his 1998 three-CD set of previously unreleased recordings) have, so far, failed to materialise, and some within the inner sanctum have expressed their anxiety about whether Prince is even protecting his physical recordings adequately.
Matt Fink told me that the Vault is humidity-controlled and that he believes Prince’s masters were well preserved at the time of recording, but he doesn’t know if the tapes have gone through the necessary baking procedure14 to protect them since. Engineer Hans-Martin Buff, who worked with Prince during the late 1990s, echoed this, telling me, ‘The Vault itself is A-OK,’ but that he worried about some of the tapes because ‘we would take things out of the Vault for various reasons, starting with the Crystal Ball box set, which were a lot of tapes from different periods, and then we wouldn’t put them back in.
‘There was a room in front of the Vault which held just paraphernalia – an Oscar, a picture of him as a kid and stuff – and I would just put the tapes on the floor,’ Buff explains, ‘and this continued for two years until the entire floor was covered with tapes. Not just the stuff that we’d taken out of the Vault, but also the stuff that we’d finished, which was a lot of tapes. And water got in and there was carpeting in there and it soaked the carpeting and went into some of those tapes, and I told him about it but it took a very long time until he let me put that stuff in the Vault.’ Buff also wanted to digitise and bake the tapes, but it didn’t happen while he was there.
What he witnessed instead was Prince making use of his old tapes to make new music, but without giving it the respect that a musical historian might hope for. For Prince, it seems, everything is raw material, and maybe it’s wrong of us to wish to prevent him from painting over old canvases to produce new material. Prince has often emphasised the importance of the transitory, telling audiences that his shows should be for their memories only and resisting a full live album until late in his career. And though he has occasionally made alternative versions or old out-takes available, usually he seems to disregard the original sketches that led to the finished work. This is true of many musicians, of course, and leads to conflict between archivist and artist, but it presents a dilemma for anyone writing about him.
Prince has, on occasion, talked about music from the Vault getting a later release. In 2009, he gave a press conference in Paris during which he said that music from the Vault would come out eventually, but it was unclear whether he was referring to music he has recorded over the last few years – the Vault, it seems, is expanding all the time – or recordings from throughout his entire career.
Just as fans would love for some of these old songs to be released, so would the musicians who played on them, especially as in many cases they don’t even have their own copies of the recordings. Dez Dickerson of The Revolution, for example, says that although Prince always had ‘a major archival mindset’, he himself has never broached the subject of releasing any old recordings and hasn’t had a business conversation with Prince since 1984. Alan Leeds, Prince’s road manager and a man who has done his bit to help bring sense to James Brown’s similarly massive back catalogue in liner notes and through co-editing (with Nelson George) The James Brown Reader, notes: ‘I suspect he’d have to do something with Warner Brothers. Theoretically, a normal recording contract would state anything he records while under that contract belongs to the label. But the majority, if not one hundred per cent, of the tapes are in his Vault.’
Brent Fischer, the son of the late Dr Clare Fischer – best known to Prince fans for his work on Parade – and a man who has his own shelf of scores written for unreleased Prince songs, says: ‘It is going to be very interesting to see what happens in the next fifty years because Prince has recorded so much music, and so much of that music remains unreleased. It’s just in the Vault, and it doesn’t matter that he may have spent a lot of money to get a thirty-, forty-, fifty-piece orchestra, paid for the arrangement, added the orchestra on and put everything in place and then decided he doesn’t want to release it. That’s fine with him.
‘This is not going to be like finding the one lost Beatles track. This is going to be an abundance of material, hundreds of songs. It’s difficult to keep track of them all because [as well as] the ones the public know about, [there’s another] seventy per cent that are unreleased that we’ve also dealt with, many of which are favourites of mine that I continue to play in my head, even though, for the time being at least, they’ll never be heard in public.’
*
No one else will ever have a career like Prince. The main reason for this is, of course, his incredible range of ability across so many creative disciplines: we will not see his like again. But the age has also changed. Not only does the music industry no longer have the money or promotional power to help force a star of his magnitude into such a wide popular consciousness and give him or her the lift-off necessary to sustain such a long career, but Prince’s career also took place over a period that saw changes and developments in the music industry that will never be repeated. Even something as simple as his fascination with maxi-singles and remixes reveals him exploiting formats that no longer really exist, and he seems to have largely given up producing (or, at least, releasing) extended versions of his hits now that there’s little mone
y to be made from them.15
This is not a book about the decline of the music industry, but it is, in part, about how Prince as an artist has managed to use the materials available to him to create a uniquely multifaceted body of work. As well as the music, his corpus also includes several hundred music videos for songs both released and unreleased, which differ from the music videos of most artists in that they often offer essential elucidation of the songs or work as short films of artistic merit in their own right; three narrative feature films (Purple Rain, Under the Cherry Moon and Graffiti Bridge); a theatrically released concert movie, Sign o’ the Times;16 three TV films; several officially released video recordings of (partial or complete) live shows; an ‘orchestral-ballet’; a dance interpretation of Homer’s Odyssey; two sanctioned comics; and four authorised book-length collaborations: Neo Manifesto – Audentes Fortuna Juvat, Prince Presents the Sacrifice of Victor, Prince in Hawaii: An Intimate Portrait of an Artist and 21 Nights. Prince once stated to an interviewer that ‘there are gems buried everywhere’,17 telling him that he didn’t care that it might be only diehard fans who locate them.
This book is written from that perspective: it’s an attempt to come to terms with the entirety of Prince’s career, from the earliest demos to the latest radio-station sneak releases, by analysing the music, images and recorded performances that he’s amassed, looking at influences, trends, thematic links and recurring preoccupations, all supported by interviews with his closest collaborators. It’s a study of the surprisingly consistent conceits and ideas that have driven this workaholic to produce an extraordinary body of work that, for all the acclaim he has received for his most popular songs and albums, has yet to be truly appreciated and understood by the world at large.
2
THE BUSINESS OF MUSIC
Past biographers have attempted to build up a picture of Prince’s childhood and family life from his songs (‘Sister’, ‘Da, Da, Da’, ‘The Sacrifice of Victor’ and ‘Papa’) that deal with childhood. And it is true that the content of some of these songs seems to chime with statements that Prince has made in interviews: his acknowledgement in a 2009 interview with Tavis Smiley that he had suffered from epilepsy as a child was treated as a major revelation by the media, but it was something he’d written about in ‘The Sacrifice of Victor’ seventeen years earlier.
It’s important, of course, not to read all Prince’s lyrics as autobiographical, and there is just as much myth-making in his work as there is personal revelation, but for all his reputation as an enigma, Prince is extraordinarily revealing in song and onstage, and often seems more truthful speaking to his audience than to any representative of a media he regards as hostile. The other problem with reading the work in order to understand the life is that there’s a gothic quality to several of these songs that suggests a self-dramatising enjoyment of myth-making.
For anyone seeking a straight story rather than revelling in the obscurantism, it doesn’t help that Prince’s mythological approach to his past is shared by some of his family members. While attempting to launch a musical career in 1988, his one full sister, Tyka Nelson – Prince also has two half-sisters, Lorna and Sharon Nelson, and one half-brother, John, Jr, on his father’s side, and one half-brother, Alfred, on his mother’s – backed up Prince’s early story (denied by his mother, Mattie Baker) in an interview with a British tabloid while promoting Royal Blue, a pleasant but lightweight collection of pop-funk that features a song about an imaginary friend, Marc Anthony, that the two of them would read her collection of pornographic novels, an autobiographical detail given by Prince that past commentators have occasionally questioned.
Much of Prince’s early life has been turned into stories that seem to obscure as much as they reveal. Take, for example, his father’s musicianship. John L. Nelson has been described as a jazz musician, but it seems that his music was not straightforward jazz but something far stranger, perhaps closer to outsider music.1
Whatever Prince’s feelings towards his father (and they seem to have fluctuated over the years before his death), one thing that does emerge is his respect for his talent. He would make cassettes of his father’s songs for members of The Revolution, and although it has been suggested that he was giving his father writing credits on songs like ‘Around the World in a Day’, ‘The Ladder’ and ‘Scandalous’ out of filial loyalty or kindness, it seems that he was genuinely inspired by memories of his father’s piano-playing. Asked about his musical career by MTV VJ Martha Quinn during the premiere party for his son’s second film, Nelson said: ‘I was a piano-player for strippers down on Hampton Avenue in Minneapolis, having a lot of fun.’ The son would grow up to share his father’s interest in strip clubs as a source of creative inspiration, later sending a copy of the song he wrote for his protégée Carmen Electra to strip clubs across America.
Nancy Hynes, who was a contemporary of Prince at the John Hay Elementary School and lived in the same neighbourhood, gave me some background to the area and the school. Her parents, she told me, were ‘white liberals who moved into the black inner city as a gesture of civil-rights activism and solidarity’. They moved in in 1967, ‘just a month after the largest riot in West Minneapolis, which took out primarily the commercial area – between ’65 and ‘67 that avenue lost thirty-two of its businesses. The house that we bought was being vacated by two elderly Jewish sisters [and] no one could understand why a white family was buying a house in that neighbourhood. The houses either side, one was sold to a mixed-race couple, which was legal in Minnesota at the time but not in many of the southern states, and [the other to] a black family. Prince at various times stayed across the street from us, [which was] where his aunt lived.’
Of the school, Hynes remembers an enthusiastic young staff, many of whom were choosing to teach in the inner cities. ‘The kids were economically mixed, but the majority were black, which in US terms of the times included mixed-race kids. Classes were relatively small. There was a lot of music in the classroom, [but] formal music lessons were another matter. I remember peripatetic music-teaching. My friend remembers a music teacher who came once a week. There weren’t any bands that I remember, but we listened to records and used to be asked, I think to settle us down, if we wanted to listen to the Osmonds or the Jackson Five, and the Jackson Five always won.’
What seems intriguing given the nature of Prince’s later career and the ease with which he could move from music to film to art to live performance, is that a holistic approach was part of the school’s ethos. Hynes remembers: ‘You wouldn’t have considered it odd to be asked to write a short story after watching a film or to make a painting. I don’t remember painting being only something that happened in art class. In home room we’d talk about music, we’d talk about film.’ Prince’s sister Tyka told previous Prince biographer and sessionologist Per Nilsen about the privations she experienced at the school, noting that ‘there weren’t any school lunches’2 and that students at the school had to go and find people prepared to feed them. Hynes, however, remembers things differently. ‘I remember the school lunches vividly, and they were awful. Mash and gravy, and the mash would end up on the ceiling, where it deserved to be.’
Although she didn’t share classes with Prince, she did share teachers, including a ‘particularly good’ teacher called Mrs Rader. Hynes’s friend, Elizabeth Fuller, who went both to John Hay and later to the same high school, and who had more access to Prince than Hynes, recalls: ‘OK, now just as a fan … what was Prince like in high school? Too cool for school? Absolutely. He spent most of his time in or around the music rooms on the fourth floor, often in a private practice room or sitting on one of the wide brick windowsills playing guitar to himself. The band directors never could convince him to actually join the band. I do seem to remember that his own band played at least one of our winter dances. The one song that sticks out in my mind consisted entirely of four-letter words.’
*
While not wanting to rehash old stories, there is
one legend which shows up in most Prince biographies that it would be remiss not to include, and which Howard Bloom – who handled Prince’s publicity from the early 1980s onward – says the musician told him was his most important formative memory: being five years old and seeing his father onstage in front of a screaming audience, surrounded by attractive women. Two years later, at seven, Prince completed his first song. In an early indication of the future direction of his lifetime’s work, it was called ‘FunkMachine’.3