Prince
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While the songs have, for the most part, substantial lyrical content, they also feature Prince scat-singing in places, presumably as a way of filling lines for which he had yet to write lyrics.2 Although sketchy, seemingly unfinished and primitively recorded, some of the songs on this tape have more complex lyrical content than Prince’s first album, and a closer connection with his later recordings. It also gives us an insight, at this early stage at least, into Prince’s method of composition: a man singing into a tape recorder with an acoustic guitar (and occasionally keyboard). But for all the primitiveness of the recording, it’s already as sophisticated as any lo-fi record put out in the 1980s or ’90s.
The most significant song on the tape, ‘Wouldn’t You Love to Love Me?’ (the title being tease, boast and invitation), adumbrates the major theme behind Prince’s early work: an explicit acknowledgement of both what he is offering and what he expects to receive. It is one of only two songs from that initial demo tape that would eventually be released, although not until 1987, and then by Taja Sevelle.3 The delay doesn’t seem to represent any anxiety on Prince’s part about the song, and indeed, although he held it back from the first album, he recorded a (unreleased) version with his first protégée, Sue Ann Carwell, in 1978. But maybe he felt it better suited for a female vocalist, the request too needy even for his earliest persona.4 As well as the Carwell and Sevelle versions, Prince has subsequently recorded the track three times, demoing it again in his home studio a year later and returning to it once more in 1987.
Of all the songs on the demo tape this presents the singer in his most seemingly powerful position, teasing his lover by refusing to settle down and dedicate himself to her (it will more usually be the male protagonist in this position in Prince’s early songs). Although the song’s lyrics are sung directly to a female lover, Prince is also addressing the listening audience, revelling in the attention he will get from female fans, while avoiding being imprisoned by their devotion. The only indication that the second version, recorded between the sessions for For You and Prince, is a demo is the return of the scat-singing (albeit here deliberately worked into the song’s construction, and still there even in the Sevelle version). It’s as good as anything on the first two albums, with a full arrangement and clear sound, and although some of the physical details refer directly to Prince, by the time of the third version – one of a number of early songs Prince returned to in 19875 – it’s become clear that this is a song he wants someone else to sing.
The instrumentals are brief and fragmentary. Perhaps the most significant track on the tape, though, at least in the light it shines on Prince’s creative future, is the cover of ‘Sweet Thing’, taken from a record whose arrangements were handled by Clare Fischer, who would go on to play such an important role in some of Prince’s mid-1980s music. Prince went from loving this record on his home stereo to playing it to his band, later telling band-mate Lisa Coleman that one day they would have to get Fischer to do string arrangements for them. Coleman responded by feeling jealous because they were her responsibility, but she knew that one day Prince would feel compelled to work with him, and eventually he came to tell her that he had called Fischer and asked him to work on The Family’s debut album, with Prince liking the result so much that Fischer was asked back to work on Parade.
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For almost a year, Prince would come over from the north side of Minneapolis to the south on the bus after school, getting to Chris Moon’s studio around lunchtime, with Moon joining him later in the afternoon. Moon remembers: ‘The night before he would show up I would sit down and write three sets of lyrics for him to choose from and leave them on the piano. And his job when he showed up was to come in and if he liked one, work on it, and if not, tear it up and tell me, and I’d come up with another set. By the time I would show up, he would have worked out a guitar track or some kind of basic rhythm to one of the sets of lyrics that I had left with him.’
In time, Moon also taught Prince how to find his way round the studio so he could also record and produce himself while Moon was at the ad agency. Everything was working well, as far as Moon was concerned, until it came to the vocals, which Prince was singing so softly and so high that the microphone couldn’t pick up his voice.
Worried about freaking him out or making him withdraw further, Moon went back into the studio and laid pillows on the floor. ‘And I said, “Lie down and get really relaxed.” And I take the microphone and I bring it down and stuff it in his mouth and turn all the lights off. So he’s in there in the dark, on the floor, with the microphone halfway down his throat, pillows under his head, and over the course of the next few days I coaxed vocals out of him. A little, high, falsetto voice. Sweet, kind of reminiscent of Michael Jackson, and he had always said that Michael Jackson was his hero.’
Among the songs that Moon and Prince worked on together was ‘Aces’,6 about which Moon remembers: ‘I wrote that song because I wanted to really start playing with techniques, backward tracks, an experimental process, so I needed a song that would form the foundation for that. It was designed to be very experimental in nature, much longer too – seven minutes – not necessarily a really rounded set of words, but something that would give Prince an ability to step in many different directions – Mediterranean, Indian, all these different feels I envisioned him experimenting with.’ This song was one of four on Prince’s first demo tape, and the only one from that tape that wasn’t reworked for his debut album. Though it has been suggested by past sessionologists that ‘Diamond Eyes’ was written by Moon, he told me that ‘it was one of the first songs Prince wrote the lyric to’, after he had started to worry that Moon would be writing all of his songs, and that more of the recording of this song was done in the control room than the studio as Moon taught Prince how to record. Ironically, Moon has forgotten about ‘Don’t Forget’, a song they did ‘that no one got that excited about’. Nor does he recall the details of ‘Don’t Hold Back’.
Moon recalls that in an early example of the recording process Prince has adopted for the whole of his professional career, most of the songs were worked on late into the night. Only one song, ‘Fantasy’, was recorded during the day and was, he remembers, accordingly much brighter than the rest of the tracks. He also says that ‘Surprise’, another song previously credited to him, was actually a Prince-penned lyric and that it came in response to thinking about Prince’s potential career.
‘I had told Prince, “We’ve got to think about how we’re going to market you.” What I had learned in the ad agency was that when you had a product, there had to be a theme to the product and a marketing direction, and so I was applying this to Prince. I said, “We’ve got to figure out our audience, and for you old teenagers are not going to be buying your stuff, this is going to be for young girls. You’re cute-looking, you dance and jump around, so we need to have a marketing theme in the songs that speaks to them. Young girls, they’re coming of age, they’re becoming aware of their sexuality. I think that’s probably the most powerful force that we can speak to, and if we can anchor the music to the strong new feelings they’re having, we might really be able to gain some traction and connect with the audience.”’
Moon says that while he was ‘playing with songs that were of a general sexual nature, Prince was playing around with songs around the concept of getting pregnant’. ‘Surprise’ was one of these songs; ‘Baby’, also demoed during these sessions and later included on For You, was another. ‘I don’t know if this was something he was worried about or wary of, but I told him I think we want to stay away from babies because that’s not something young girls are going to want to be thinking about.’
Instead, Moon suggested that Prince work with sexual suggestion. Past commentators have suggested that he gave Prince the concept of ‘implied naughty sexuality’ or ‘naughty sexual innuendo’, but Moon says he now remembers very clearly that ‘double entendre’ was, in fact, ‘the exact phrase I used with Prince. I’ll never forget it. The way
this all came about was I had Sundays off, and that particular Sunday I had a fortunate experience with more than one girl. It was a late-night party, and these girls had come back to my studio and it had been one of those pleasant, memorable experiences. And I think I’d drunk a little too much rum because the next morning I felt like hell and had to go to work. So I locked the door, and I’m lying there recovering from this wild night before and I’m replaying in my mind some of the highlights and this song comes to mind, “Soft and Wet”. What I’d been trying to do was come up with the anchor tune that would summarise this marketing concept, that would deliver the positioning of this artist to the audience in just the right way. And so I wrote “Soft and Wet” sitting in ad agency Campbell Mithun after this wonderful evening, tired, a little bit hung-over, it was ten o’clock in the morning, and the original version was: “Angora fur, the Aegean sea, it’s a soft, wet love that you have for me.”’
With this song, which Prince liked and immediately started working on, Moon felt he’d hit on a template for their planned album. ‘It was the first song where Prince introduced a break into the music. The words were so short and it was a lot more punctuated and a lot more staccato and abbreviated than anything we had done before.’ There were a few more songs, penned by Prince, that were lost on the way to the debut album: ‘Since We’ve Been Together’, three instrumentals – one of which, ‘Jelly Jam’, became part of ‘Just as Long as We’re Together’ – a revised version of ‘Leaving for New York’ and the Moon-penned ‘Make It Through the Storm’, which Prince later recorded with Sue Ann Carwell. But at the end of the session Prince produced a four-track demo tape containing ‘Baby’, ‘Soft and Wet’, ‘Aces’ and ‘My Love Is Forever’. Before sending it out, Moon says he had a little more work to do with Prince, who, he claims, didn’t want to release his records under his Christian name. ‘He said, “It’s gotta be Mr Nelson.” I said, “Mr Nelson? Look, let me break it down to you this way. There’s this white guy named Willie. Maybe you’ve heard of him, maybe you haven’t, but we don’t want to be getting confused with Willie Nelson.”’
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Moon was also involved in Prince’s first concrete attempt to get a record contract. When Prince went to visit his sister Sharon in New York, he asked Moon to set some record-company meetings up for him. This proved harder than Moon expected, prompting him to pretend that he represented Stevie Wonder, only to switch and explain he had the new Stevie Wonder when he finally got someone on the phone. Prince got a meeting out of this but nothing came of it, and when he came back Moon remembers him being deflated. ‘He thought the first person who heard him would sign him. And it didn’t happen, and neither did the second guy or the third guy. So now what I got to do is get him into the record companies in the right way. Prince wanted me to be his manager. And I had no interest in being his manager. I didn’t want to make sure he got on planes, I didn’t want to book his hotel rooms, I didn’t want to pay for his meals. I’m only interested in the music.
‘[But] I realised it was all going to stop right then and there, unless I could find someone who could pick up where I left off, and build on what I’d done and take it to the next step. The only manager I could think of had come and booked some time in the studio for this folk group, two guys, a kind of Hall and Oates take-off.’ This person was Owen Husney. ‘And he owned a dinky ad agency, two or three people working for him in Minneapolis, and I thought, “There’s a guy cut from the same cloth as me,”’ Moon remembers. But it took a week of sitting in his office before Husney would see Moon. ‘It started on a Monday, and by Friday I’d bugged the shit out of him enough that they finally said, “Look, this guy’s not going away, you’ve got to sit down and listen to him.”’ Moon persuaded Husney to listen to the tape, and he remembers that when he came back a few days later, ‘the lights had gone on for Owen’. Moon told Husney he wasn’t looking for anything more from him or Prince than credit for the lyrics he had written.
Pepe Willie remembers being impressed with Husney because he found Prince an apartment and paid for it, allowing Prince to concentrate on his music. Prince spent much of the first half of 1977 recording at Minneapolis recording complex Sound 80, working on improving the songs he’d demoed with Moon, paying special attention to ‘Baby’, ‘Just as Long as We’re Together’, ‘My Love Is Forever’ – which Moon says he had more involvement in than has been credited for, telling me that ‘that song was about a girl that I slept with for a year, and we never had sex’ – ‘Soft and Wet’, an instrumental, one song that would later be recorded and released by his first protégée, Sue Ann Carwell, ‘Make It Through the Storm’, and another, ‘We Can Work It Out’, that is Prince’s first out-take to rival the quality of any official release.7
This song, which ends with Prince hoping for a harmonious relationship with Warner Brothers, must have been written after Husney had found him a deal with the label. Prince has spoken resentfully about biographers seeking out Husney for interview, and though I did contact him, when he didn’t respond I didn’t push it. Whatever Prince’s feelings, Husney undoubtedly played an important role in bringing Prince’s music to the public, creating deluxe press kits to accompany his demo tapes that eventually secured the deal with Warner Brothers. While at Sound 80, Prince is also believed to have contributed backing vocals and guitar to a song, ‘Got to Be Something Here’, on a self-titled album by The Lewis Connection, working with Sonny T, a musician who would later join Prince’s New Power Generation and who Prince is on record as saying had an enormous influence on him as a young musician. He also ran into Pepe Willie and 94 East, who had come to the studio to record two songs for a single, ‘Fortune Teller’ (which had been written for the band by Hank Cosby, a member of Motown’s studio band The Funk Brothers and co-writer of Stevie Wonder’s ‘My Cherie Amour’, among several other hits) and ‘10.15’. ‘We were going in and he was coming out,’ Willie remembers, ‘and he said, “What are you guys doing?” And we were like, “Hey, man, we’re gonna go and record our single.” And he says, “Can I play on it, man?” And we go, “Sure, you can play on our stuff.” And he never even went home after his session, he just hung out with us in the studio and played guitar on “10.15” and “Fortune Teller”.’
By now, Willie recalls, they had hired Bobby Rivkin as drummer. Soon after, Rivkin (later Bobby Z) would join Prince’s first band. Also, on the first version of ‘Fortune Teller’, Colonel Abrams – who would eventually become famous as a house singer, best known for the hit ‘Trapped’ – was singing vocals. But when the tapes were taken back to New York, ‘Hank Cosby didn’t like the drums Bobby was playing, so he got this other drummer called Buddy Williams to play drums on “Fortune Teller”, and Bobby was heartbroken.’8
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It was tapes from the sessions at Sound 80 which led to early band-mate Matt Fink asking Bobby Rivkin for an introduction to Prince. Fink told me he was impressed by ‘just the fact that he was my age, that he was eighteen at the time in 1977. Bobby Z hadn’t been hired [by Prince] yet; he was working for Prince’s manager Owen Husney. He brought in the demo and said, “Just listen to this stuff.” When I discovered who he was, that he’d performed, written, played and engineered this stuff, I jumped out of my pants in excitement and asked if I could be involved. There was no one else around like him.’
Though it would be a while before Prince officially recruited a backing band, before he headed off, alone, to California to work on his first album, he recorded another dozen demos as part of a trio, eight of which were instrumentals. These 1977 instrumentals are of a much higher standard than those demoed the year before. Indeed, while occasionally lapsing into music-shop-demonstration-style vamping (and featuring one track – #4 – that tails off rather than finishes), these eight tracks are, in places, as interesting as Prince’s first two albums with Madhouse. Though it would be a few years before playing with a band would become an important part of his creative process, hearing him here with bassist André Cymone a
nd drummer Bobby Z gives a fascinating insight into his early musicianship. Lengthy jazz-funk with a tension and drama that quickly establish this is more than mere noodling, some of the tracks (#3, #6 and the first-melancholy-then-amusingly-upbeat #7 in particular) sound far more expansive than those on For You, revealing how in order to achieve commercial success, Prince would have to begin by narrowing his creative focus. There were other demos too, known only by their titles – ‘Darling Marie’, ‘Hello, My Love’, ‘I Like What You’re Doing’ and ‘Neurotic Lover’s Baby Bedroom’ – along with several other tracks lost or abandoned on the way to that first album.
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