by Matt Thorne
It’s clear from Dickerson’s autobiography that he had no doubts about his own talent, something Willie also observed. ‘Dez had come from this other group called Romeo, where he was the lead guy,’ Willie says, ‘and for him not to be the lead in Prince’s band was crazy, and when they had a break in rehearsals, I told Dez, “Look, Dez, I’m gonna produce you.” So me and Dez flew to New York and I produced three songs [with] Dez that I still have. And then Prince called me when I was in New York with Dez and goes, “Pepe, what are you doing? Dez is part of my band.” And I said, “Look, Prince, I brought you to New York, I brought André to New York. It’s no different. What’s the big deal?”’
*
It was also during these rehearsals that Prince parted ways with his first manager, Owen Husney. Everyone seems to agree that it was over Husney’s disinclination to drop everything and get Prince some space heaters, but in his autobiography Dickerson puts the blame for the split largely on Prince, commenting that ‘[Prince] was expecting more of a concierge than a manager’. Willie, however, says: ‘Prince needed some heaters in the basement. He was already signed, and I told him, “Your manager’s supposed to be doing this.” Owen had this company called the Ad Company. I told him, “Owen is not supposed to be in the Ad Company right now. As far as I’m concerned he’s supposed to be in New York or LA lobbying for you.” So I go over to Owen’s office and I says, “Owen, Prince is unhappy, he’s cold, he don’t have no space heaters.” And these are Owen’s exact words: he said to me, “So I’m supposed to leave my company and do all of this stuff for some artist that probably won’t make it?” When I told that to Owen a while ago, he denied it. Later on, he said he quit or whatever, but I told him, “Owen, you’re fired,” because Prince told me to fire him. Owen had said, “Well, Pepe, you manage him then.” And I said, “Owen, I am not a manager, but I am not going to let him get screwed up in this business.”’
So Willie temporarily took over Prince’s management, organising his first two live shows, the second of which Warner Brothers representatives were attending to see if they felt it was time for Prince to go on the road. ‘We set it up with the Capri theatre, we printed the tickets, we did the lighting. And when Warner Brothers came around we shuffled them into the theatre, and those were Prince’s first performances after rehearsing at my house for five or six months. He thought they were ready, and I thought they were great. But Warner Brothers thought he wasn’t quite ready. Now I felt they were flexing their muscle a little bit. Not wanting to give Prince a big ego. I’ve seen bands out there much worse. Maybe they saw something I didn’t.’
Dez Dickerson says this disappointment played a crucial part in his bonding with Prince. ‘There was a level of respect with Prince that came from our dynamic early on. That dry-dock experience when we didn’t get to tour. I really helped Prince through that. I gave him the benefit of my experience and helped him to lead the band. It was a devastating experience, but it was really necessary, more so than they understood because it allowed Prince to live up to all the qualities of his character. It was one of the heads of Warners. Warners had the best artist development in the history of the business.’
I told Dickerson I was surprised he had come to this conclusion and asked him whether he really felt it was right to keep them off the road in their early days. ‘I really did. I’d been doing it for so long, I was the point man, the drill sergeant who ensured the show had a flow, a beginning, middle and end. The show at the Capri theatre, we weren’t ready yet. If you looked at the band, if it was possible to view the Capri footage and compare it to later bootleg footage – and there’s a lot of it out there – it would be night and day. It’s about chemistry. It can’t be learnt and you can’t teach it. It’s an organism.’ Perhaps because of Prince’s feelings of disappointment, a new rock song he played that night, ‘I Am You’, has never been released, though Prince had warned the local Minneapolis Star and Tribune, ‘We’ve got a few songs we’ll do at the Capri that I’ll probably never record on an album because they’re too spicy.’1 Chapman doesn’t have strong memories of the show, but does remember the impact it had. ‘It was a learning experience for everyone. It was the first gig with Prince, who was clearly becoming this very important little monster in the music business, and it was good to see what that would be like in his home town.’
Willie says Prince’s reaction to being told he couldn’t go on the road was to rehearse harder than ever. ‘He had to rehearse more. One time I remember he was rehearsing at my house from ten o’clock in the morning. At ten at night we kicked everybody out and I wanted to get hold of Prince, so I called him on the phone and I couldn’t get him on the phone. So I drove over to his house and I’m knocking on the door and nobody answers, and I hear this little tapping, so I walk around the house and look through the window, and it was Prince in the basement playing drums. This is after ten hours of practice.’
But he still needed new management. Willie got in touch with a friend of his named Don Taylor, telling him he had an artist already signed with Warner Brothers. ‘Don Taylor did the same kind of job that I did with Little Anthony and the Imperials when they went to Jamaica. They found this poor Jamaican dude who wanted to valet for them and they hired him and brought him back to America. And Don Taylor had learned the business like I had, and later on started managing the Imperials and also Bob Marley and the Wailers.
‘I called Don because I wanted Prince to have the best. Don flew me and Prince to Miami and got us both hotel rooms, and he picked Prince up. And I just stayed at the hotel room because I didn’t want to influence nobody.’ Willie believes that Taylor made an immediate difference to Warners’ attitude in regard to Prince going on the road. ‘Prince did sign with Don for a year, and Don knew Mo Ostin at Warner Brothers and immediately he got Prince’s tour budget raised from $80,000 to $180,000, just on a phone call.’
Taylor’s comments about Prince in his autobiography are mostly negative. He tried to engineer a collaboration between Prince and Bob Marley, to which Marley responded, according to Taylor, ‘Don Taylor a dem dah man yo want me fe work with? – mi hum in a dem day batty boy business, mi nuh even wan cum a yah office an meet dem or even sit inna same chair as im.’2
Taylor himself found Prince emotionless and was put out by Prince’s lack of concern about going over budget on his first album. Prince’s association with him came to an end, Taylor writes, after Prince made aggressive comments about his sister to Taylor’s assistant, Karen Baxter, and this side of his career was soon taken over by the Warner Brothers-approved management duo of Bob Cavallo and Joe Ruffalo, though in future years it would be their employee Steve Fargnoli (who would eventually graduate to full partner) who truly had Prince’s ear and worked as one of his main representatives throughout the most creatively and commercially successful period of his career.
Cavallo told me that it was Prince who sought them out rather than vice versa. ‘Supposedly the story is Prince saw Earth, Wind and Fire play at the big arena in Minneapolis and thought the show was unbelievable. He called and asked someone at Warner records, “Who’s the manager who helped them put that big show together?” And they said me. So he reached out to me and we set up a meeting.’ Cavallo says he had known about Prince even before he signed to Warners and ‘tried to sign him to ARC records, which was the label that me and Earth, Wind and Fire and my partner Joe Ruffalo owned. He was then very young, and somehow the head of A&R from Columbia got to him, knowing that I was trying to sign him, and told him that if he came with them, he’d have Columbia’s marketing and of course it would be possible for Maurice White [of Earth, Wind and Fire] to produce him. And that meant you had no chance of signing him.’
Still, he wanted him to audition and went to see a show. ‘It was kinda funny really. He was very respectful to me up through Purple Rain. He was a nice kid. Quiet. But I brought my eight-year-old daughter when they performed somewhere down in Orange County, not really the right kind of place. I didn’t set
up the gig. And under the raincoat he had stockings and a little G-string. When he’d spin around, the coat would fly open, and I was sitting there with my daughter, going, “Holy Christ.” The story goes I go in and say, “Young man, you can’t really perform in your underwear,” and then he comes out in the second show without any underwear.’ Nonetheless, Cavallo was impressed with Prince’s musical talents. ‘I thought he was incredible and his band was very cool, a well-thought-out placement of characters. And I was all for it.’
*
Though he had sold around a hundred and fifty thousand copies of his debut, Prince was still prepared to work as a musician for hire, and when Pepe Willie got in touch to ask if he and André would work with his friend Tony Silvester from soul and R&B group The Main Ingredient, demoing new songs intended for performance by a new incarnation of Willie’s uncle’s band the Imperials, he quickly agreed.
Willie remembers: ‘Tony Silvester called me looking for musicians, and I told him, “Look, I got two musicians who can play everything.” Don had this record label and he had hired Tony to produce the Imperials and they were going to use some of the songs that we played at Sound 80. So Tony flew me, Prince and André to New York and put us up at the Hilton Hotel. And Prince had started writing ‘I Feel for You’, and he had just wrote it on piano, and André had written this one song, ‘Do Me, Baby’. And I had written this song called ‘If You Feel Like Dancin’’, and the Imperials recorded it but it didn’t go anywhere, so we came back to Minneapolis.’3
*
Though Prince would pursue the rock/new-wave sound beloved by Dickerson and Fink on his side project with The Rebels (see Chapter 6), for his second record (recorded without the band) he remained focused on funk, taking into the studio the song he’d recently demoed in New York, ‘I Feel for You’.
Just as Controversy is a more commercial reworking of the themes, ideas and style of Dirty Mind, so Prince’s eponymous second album is a more commercial sequel to his debut. Although more songs from this record have endured in his set and at least three of them are considered classics (‘I Wanna Be Your Lover’, ‘I Feel for You’ and ‘Sexy Dancer’), it initially seems less satisfying than either his debut or the record that followed, Dirty Mind – Prince’s first truly great album, and one that remains among his very best. The reason for the record’s slightly second-rate feel is simple: it’s too driven by sheer naked ambition – Prince’s desire to finish the job he started with For You. He took less care over it too. Recording it in a fifth of the time he spent on the first album, and with a reduced budget, he seemed to have learnt not to indulge himself in the studio, and from then on would always move relatively fast when recording.
But while there is something mercenary about Prince, it’s an important record in the artist’s creative development. It starts brilliantly, and Prince would use the first two songs to launch himself to a wider audience in January 1980, lip-synching with the band to ‘I Wanna Be Your Lover’ and ‘Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?’ on the then-popular Saturday-night rock show Midnight Special and Dick Clark’s American Bandstand.
The American Bandstand performance also included an early and important part in Prince’s creation of his popular image: an interview with Dick Clark that the veteran host would later describe as the most difficult he’d ever done. Although Clark lay the blame on Prince, this was no Bill Grundy moment. Prince sounded polite and shy, as Clark interviewed him in the sort of tone avuncular hosts usually reserve for maths or chess prodigies. His questions were insulting, suggesting that Prince’s music wasn’t the sort of thing that usually came out of his home town, making fun of his youth (which visibly increased Prince’s anxiety, as he had shaved two years off his age), joking about Matt Fink’s outfit – ‘The man who escaped on keyboards,’ he joshed, as Fink had yet to start dressing up as a doctor and was instead wearing a striped shirt and dark glasses, which did, admittedly, make him look like a convict – and mocking his ability to play many instruments.
When Prince paused to recollect how many instruments he could play, Clark turned to the audience and made fun of him, and then questioned why he needed a band. The only moment when Prince truly appeared in any way provocative was when he answered how many years ago he recorded his demos by holding out four fingers in Clark’s face. Bandstand’s producer Larry Klein later defended Prince, saying that the audiences who were offended by his perceived rudeness to Clark ‘misinterpreted what [he thought] was basic shyness on Prince’s part’.4 Pepe Willie, however, says: ‘I ripped him a new one on that one. I didn’t understand that at all. He came back to Minnesota, and I said to him, “What the hell happened to you?” I was so pissed at him because the media was something we needed. I wanted him to call radio stations and thank them for playing his records. He wouldn’t do that, not after Dick Clark. What happened, he got stage fright, and he told me, “That will never happen again, Pepe.” From then on, in his interviews, he never talks about his family, always about music, he never talks about his friends. It’s what he wants to talk about. He doesn’t want anything to do with Owen Husney, which is terrible, or Chris Moon.’ Though Klein suggests it was shyness, and Willie stage fright, Dickerson writes in his autobiography that it was deliberate and that Prince had instructed his band not to talk to Clark backstage before they went on. Gayle Chapman agrees that this was the real reason: ‘Prince told us when he started the interview we were not to say anything. Dick Clark is a professional at his gig and he had this child on his show thinking he’s being mysterious. No smiling and no talking. And I couldn’t help it – Dick said my name and I smiled.’
Prince also recorded his first-ever video, for ‘I Wanna Be Your Lover’.5 The well-known footage includes Prince in a low-cut leopard-skin top, playing all the instruments and backing himself on drums as he sings in a visual recreation of the studio process. But there was also an alternative version which focused on Prince’s interaction with his band. Stripped to the waist, he is dressed in baggy shorts, leg warmers and shiny boots, his hair long and glossy as he snuggles against Dez Dickerson and strokes Gayle Chapman’s face as she steps out from behind her keyboards. Ultimately unreleased, it shows Prince creating an inclusive world that – while still punk and potentially shocking to Establishment adults like Clark – let the audience know that anyone was welcome to worship him. Though it stopped just outside the Billboard top ten, the record was Prince’s first real hit.
Even more straightforward, ‘Sexy Dancer’ is not just about voyeurism, but sexual interaction: whether she’s a stripper or a girl in a club, the lyric establishes that she’s touching Prince as well as moving for him.6 Along the same lines, but lyrically more gauche, ‘When We’re Dancing Close and Slow’ has Prince admitting to a clinical-sounding ‘sex-related fantasy’, with none of the lover-man prowess he would later develop,7 while ‘With You’ is Prince promising devotion for the first of a thousand times across his oeuvre.
*
Only one song hinted at the more complicated sexual scenarios he would explore on his next record. When appraised in the context of the era, ‘Bambi’ can be dismissed as a jejune sexual fantasy – a way of taking his obsession with cruel, unkind or uninterested lovers to the next level – but Prince’s very simplistic lyric is more troubling when considered in the light of his later conservatism. It seems telling that he played the song a few times in the very early 1980s, dropped it during the Revolution years, then returned to it in 1990 as his act became more macho again, including it (albeit very sporadically) in his set ever since. It’s always a mistake to associate the mental and emotional state of the singer delivering the song with the cool mind that’s constructed the lyrics, but with its premise that heterosexual love is superior to lesbianism, and its reference to making Bambi ‘bleed’ in the final line, this remains a difficult song.
The rest of Prince is far less confrontational. ‘Still Waiting’, a track easily passed over on the album, became an unexpected highlight in live shows: an early exampl
e of Prince’s ability, like Bob Dylan and The Grateful Dead, to completely transform a song in live performance, and it would become increasingly baroque and bizarre as he stretched it out with odd improvisations, eventually reaching a strange extreme in Monroe and Minneapolis on the 1982 Controversy tour. ‘I Feel for You’ also had an intriguing development, growing out of Prince’s earliest rehearsals, when he was still influenced by his early heroes, and then being offered to and rejected by Patrice Rushen8 before becoming a massive hit for Chaka Khan, so much so that until he reclaimed it, it was more usually associated with Khan than Prince – the first of several occasions when an artist who covered one of his songs seemed more able to wring emotion from it than Prince himself. Far less significant, ‘It’s Gonna Be Lonely’ is a romantic ode to a Parisian woman, the start of an obsession with European sexual sophistication that prefigures similar Francophilia on Sheila E’s debut and would reach full fruition in Prince’s second movie, Under the Cherry Moon.
*
After the disappointment at the Capri theatre, Prince and his band had to wait nine months before being given a second chance to impress Warner Brothers. Dickerson describes these shows as an unalloyed success, noting that it was at these shows that Prince began the tradition of the ‘post-show jam’ that remains an essential part of his stagecraft to this day. But as successful as these shows were, Prince still struggled with live performance. Though his first tour began with two successful shows in Los Angeles, Dickerson notes that the next night they were playing to twenty people at a cowboy joint in Dallas, and the night after to an inappropriately old-school audience at an R&B club. After a few more shows Prince lost his voice and had to cancel the entire tour.