by Matt Thorne
Coleman suggested that Prince’s habit of mixing up the set list, which would later become an essential part of his appeal, was partly due to them gauging the audience. ‘We were wise about which shows would work. If there was too much funk music, they didn’t like it, so we’d go more rock and roll. There was a good balance. Dez was such a fiery rock-guitar player. Wendy is a better funk player than Dez, but Dez could stamp on his distortion pedal and woo-eee! He’d do some of those solos and the kids would be like, “All right, rock and roll!” Prince was very good at being the mastermind. He’d say, “This is the set list for this city.”’
In a fringed green vest, red neckerchief, black pants and stockings, Prince looked like one of the Village People. When Lisa recited her lines in ‘Head’, she did so in a sulky, lazy voice from beneath her fedora, very different from the descriptions of how Gayle Chapman performed them. Rather than being objectified, she seemed as much a hoodlum as the rest of the band.
Prince would go on to have a long relationship with Europe – he’s unusual among American artists in that he generally alternates between US and European tours rather than embarking on massive world tours – and everyone who attended his first London show at the Lyceum talks about it with the same reverence that punks feel for The Sex Pistols at the 100 Club. Among the audience were Barney Hoskyns, Green Gartside, Geoff Travis,4 Lenny Henry and the late Paula Yates. Chris Poole, who would later handle Prince’s PR, went with Yates and remembers: ‘Paula had seen the ads – well, everyone had seen the ads in Billboard, the jockstrap and the raincoat – and she insisted on going and insisted on going upstairs so she could see the jockstrap, because she couldn’t see it downstairs, to see how well-filled it was.’
To coincide with Prince’s arrival in the UK, ‘Uptown’ was released as a single, backed with an unreleased track, ‘Gotta Stop (Messin’ About)’, a censorious song about a promiscuous woman that was more conservative than the louche, boundary-pushing material on Dirty Mind.
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After catching Prince on the Dirty Mind tour, Mick Jagger invited Prince to support The Rolling Stones, the occasion of Prince’s biggest-ever rejection by a mainstream rock audience, which must have been especially traumatic for brand-new member Mark Brown (soon to be renamed, in one of Prince’s less inspired formations, Brown Mark). As Lisa Coleman remembers: ‘It was horrible, we were booed off stage. We were so excited, we’d rehearsed our little booties off, our funky black asses. This is it, we’re gonna make the big time. Yay, it’s the Stones. We were booked for a few gigs, two here at the LA Coliseum. The first gig, we had high hopes. There was an incredible atmosphere, there were big stars backstage. And we lasted five minutes before being pummelled with chicken, bottles, a sea of corn, and there were all these fingers. “Fuck you, faggot,” the n-word, everything horrible. Prince took off, and the rest of us thought, “What do we do now?” So we finished the song and walked off stage. This was on Friday. We were supposed to play again on Sunday and we went back to our dressing rooms and Prince bolted. He went to the airport, he flew to Minneapolis. I thought Mick Jagger talked him back, but it turned out Dez Dickerson talked to him for forty-five minutes. He told him, “We can’t let them run us out of town. We’ve fought this stuff already – the racism, the sexism. Let’s hit and quit it.” The tension in the dressing room was horrible; we could’ve all been throwing up. I was so nervous. We hit the stage and it was like a blood sport. The second day they’d actually planned it – “Let’s boo these people.” They’d brought things. Shoes, apples, oranges. We stuck it out and played a short set. We played more rock and roll songs – didn’t matter, it was a game for them. We did it our way and ran. But we really thought it was going to be a great opportunity for us.’
Her friend Wendy Melvoin wasn’t yet a member of the band, but is very familiar with the story: ‘The roster was a nightmare – J. Geils, George Thoroughgood. Just Prince and the Stones would’ve been different. But this was a serious rock-and-roll crowd. They didn’t want to see a black guy in a bikini and a trench coat.’
The one new song Prince managed to perform in his aborted five-song set was ‘Jack U Off’, from Controversy, which was released three days after the Stones show. Of the first ten albums that most consider as the essential canon of Prince recordings, Controversy – while a fascinating record in its own right – initially seems the most disposable. Prince went back and forth between his home studio and two studios in Los Angeles – Hollywood Sound and Sunset Sound – while recording the album in 1981, but though it has a remarkably polished sound, it ultimately lacks the freedom of his best home recordings or the experimentation of his best studio work. Every track on the record has its charms, and several have remained an important part of Prince’s live show to this day, but none feel truly essential. As with Prince, the intentions are clear and somewhat mercenary: the record seems designed to capitalise on the reputation he’d gained with Dirty Mind, while softening the lyrical content to appeal to a wider audience.
Once again, it is essentially a solo album, although Lisa Coleman has a strong presence on backing vocals, and given her contributions to The Time records, may have also provided occasional home-studio assistance here. It’s the only time in the early part of his career where Prince seems to lack a coherent conceptual vision. He had already shown on Dirty Mind how easy it was for him to create controversial content, but now he seemed to be commenting on the phenomenon rather than pushing more boundaries. With its references to Ronald Reagan and the political climate of the early 1980s (in the brief, inconsequential vamp ‘Ronnie, Talk to Russia’), it is one of his most lyrically dated records. But its sound has been plundered by several subsequent generations of electronic musicians. This is largely because so many who have followed have adopted Prince’s one-man-studio approach, his vocals mainly supported by his Oberheim synth and the drum machine he started using on this record that would famously become the bedrock of his sound – the Linn LM-1.5
‘Controversy’ has become one of Prince’s favourite songs to perform live. Among his first attempts to mythologise himself, it sees him spending seven minutes emphasising how hard he is to define. In the midst of all this egoism, however, he finds time to recite the Lord’s Prayer (always popular with musicians, from Elvis Presley to David Bowie), answering the question he poses in the song as to whether he believes most in himself or God. While ‘Controversy’ is devout enough to remain in the now much more religious Prince’s set, ‘Sexuality’ – a defiant proclamation of the importance of sex to existence – clearly troubles him, and he’s tried to make amends twice, first by smuggling lines from this song into a later religious song, ‘The Rainbow Children’, then by changing the name of the song (and the lyrics) to suggest that ‘Spirituality’ is really all that you need.
As with some of the tracks on Dirty Mind, there have been suggestions that ‘Do Me, Baby’ owed a little to André Cymone (indeed, Pepe Willie says Cymone wrote the song himself). The high point of the album, it is the template for – and best example of – all Prince’s later ballads – ‘International Lover’, ‘Scandalous’, ‘Insatiable’, ‘Shhh’, and so on. The song also features two narrative elements that Prince will return to several times throughout his career: the idea of being in an empty room, and a voyeuristic focus on watching sexual acts – something that would take on extra resonance, of course, when he sung the lines to the audience, challenging the barrier between those watching and the performer.
I’ve always found ‘Private Joy’ a little creepy. There are many Prince songs about keeping his lovers away from others, and the lyrical preoccupation with confining women will prompt some of his best work, but it also disturbs. It’s partly the infantilism of the lyrics, but also the reference to the love object in the song as a toy. It’s not a song Prince has continued to play, and after 1982 it disappeared from the set for ever.
Throughout Prince’s recordings there are frequent references to ‘work’ and ‘play’. Initially both ar
e synonymous with sex, and it’s this that is referred to in ‘Let’s Work’ (although there’s an additional resonance of ‘working’ with the band being the same as playing in the band). In yet another instance of what was once largely sexual becoming religious in Prince’s music, a much later song about work, ‘The Work Pt. 1’, refers to Christian work. It’s surprising how one of Prince’s most sexual records would later inspire so much of the spiritual in his music.6 It’s there in the title of ‘Annie Christian’ too, which includes a reference to John Lennon’s shooting, only in the song he isn’t killed by Mark Chapman but instead by this female personification of Satan. Prince was in New York the day Lennon was shot, and Dickerson writes about it in his autobiography, stating that the band (but not, it seems, Prince) went over to the Dakota building after it happened. Dickerson even draws an explicit connection between Prince’s band and Lennon, writing: ‘Here we were, these young Midwestern kids, in the Big City living our dream, when, just a few blocks away, one of the men instrumental in blazing the very trail we were on, had his dream snuffed out.’7
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Although ‘Jack U Off’ was the first time a song performed by the band appeared on an album, it did not – like the later ‘Computer Blue’ or ‘America’ – emerge out of a jam. Instead, as Matt Fink remembers, it was presented to the band with Prince teaching each member how to play their parts live. For Fink, it was a significant moment in the development of the band, and he was delighted to be made more a part of the creative process, even if this rockabilly number bore little relation to most of the music Prince had recorded previously or would in the future (at least for his own records).
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The strange combination of licentiousness and religious devotion that would later become Prince’s signature blend was also pursued on the Controversy live tour, where he would begin shows with a song that has never received an official release entitled ‘The Second Coming’. At the time, a film of the same name was also in the works – a combination of concert footage from a show at Bloomington’s Met Center and dramatic scenes, including autobiographical material. But Prince wasn’t suggesting that he is the Second Coming, instead invoking the Book of Revelation to warn of an impending apocalypse, a theme that would become even more dominant on his next album.
Focusing mainly on Controversy and Dirty Mind, the show revealed just how well those two albums complemented each other and worked together live. In later years, Prince, confident in his success and abilities, would bait and tease the audience, but for this run he was still winning them over. ‘Was that all right?’ he’d ask after stretching ‘Do Me, Baby’ to a sublime thirteen minutes, before launching into ‘Controversy’, a song which is all about Prince being what we want him to be. But he still had expectations. ‘Don’t y’all wanna play?’ he’d demand minutes later, an invitation that he’d repeat at many early shows, often contrasting it with ‘Let’s Work’. During a charged performance of the song in Detroit, Prince would shout ‘Motor city, let’s work’ at the audience, following it up with ‘I’m not fucking around’ when they failed to respond adequately.
One song from the past that still had resonance in the stage show was ‘Still Waiting’, which remained a regular highlight. Shortly after completing the tour, he’d duet with the woman he’d chosen as his first protégée, Sue Ann Carwell (see Chapter 6), at a home-town show at First Avenue, Prince countering the warmth of the song with the breathtakingly cold declaration, ‘See, I gotta little cause to celebrate … my girlfriend died. She made me wait for that love too long.’ Relishing the death of a teasing lover doesn’t fit well with the Christian side of Prince’s early music, but he was, after all, experimenting and enjoying improvisation as he precision-tooled his persona. There would be similarly dark new songs to follow too, as Prince tested boundaries and worked out exactly how much disturbance a mainstream audience could swallow. The Controversy album and show had featured Prince toning down his work, but for his commercial breakthrough he would balance the new softness with extremes, only in a candy-coated package that would take him to a much wider audience than ever before.
6
GIGOLOS GET LONELY TOO (PART 1)
As with Prince’s own releases, the records that his protégés and friends (and, in Mayte’s case, wife) have put out over the last thirty years have been of variable quality: some are considered classics of their kind (much of the output of The Time, Madhouse, The Family, Jill Jones and Sheila E), others have split opinion (Mayte’s very 1990s Child of the Sun or Ingrid Chavez’s poetic May 19 1992) and a few (such as Carmen Electra’s debut) are regarded as less successful. But just as almost every Prince track, even the bad ones, has something of interest, so any album or song that he has major involvement with is worth seeking out. It also seems significant to a deeper understanding of Prince’s creative nature that he’s continued to pursue this side of his career even in the face of record-company doubts and mass public indifference.
This strand of Prince’s music is driven by two major motivations: his delight in hiding from public view, something that he suggested in an early interview was proof of his modesty; and his workaholic nature – the fact that for all his interest in sports and movies, ballet and fashion, he enjoys being in a studio or onstage over anything else. But it’s more than a straightforward desire to release as much as possible. It goes beyond the recording studio and into his life. In fact, it isn’t stretching things too far to see Vanity, Apollonia and Sister Fate as Prince’s characters, part of the novel he sings about trying (and failing) to write in the unreleased ‘Moonbeam Levels’. Others have suggested it makes more sense to see them as Prince’s alter egos, and indeed, Prince is believed to have renamed Denise Matthews Vanity due to her physical similarity to him. Not everyone admires Prince’s work with his protégés, and several would argue that only a few of these projects are up to the quality of the main body of his output. As Alexis Taylor, the singer with Hot Chip, who initially found fame with their jokey ‘Down with Prince’ song, told me: ‘As a producer of his own work, I rate him as one of my favourites of all time – incredibly imaginative and unique sounding. In terms of producing anyone else, he seems to mainly strive to make them sound like himself, which I guess is an inherent problem with the protégés. They are great tools for him to use but they rarely seem to have been allowed to let their own personalities to come through fully.’
Prince’s first collaboration – with soul singer Sue Ann Carwell – wasn’t released, but it was the start of several trends that would play an important part in his subsequent work with protégés: his ‘Idolmaker’ instinct, Prince’s attraction to women who have proved their raw talent by winning contests;1 his desire to write songs either from a female perspective or come up with ones that would work when sung by a woman; and his willingness to share out his stockpile of songs, never fearing he might dry up. It was also the first time he attempted to give a protégé a new identity, suggesting Carwell rename herself Suzy Stone, although unlike Denise Matthews (Vanity) or Patricia Kotero (Apollonia), Carwell refused, reluctant to have her career co-opted in this way. Pepe Willie remembers: ‘He knew Sue Ann from over north. Everybody knew Sue Ann because she was really good. She was, like, seventeen. There was so much talent here in Minnesota.’
Prince and Carwell worked together on a small number of songs (conflicting reports suggest there were three, four or five), of which the most well-known are ‘Make It Through the Storm’, the lyrics of which were written not by Prince but by his early collaborator Chris Moon, and ‘Wouldn’t You Love to Love Me?’. Both songs would later be released, the former three years later as the B-side of Carwell’s single ‘Let Me Let You Rock Me’ (without Prince’s music), and the latter not until 1987, when Prince would give it to Taja Sevelle. Demo versions of the tracks (including one on Prince’s very first home session) reveal them to be in the For You mode, reminding the listener that by nineteen Prince was a fully mature talent. It would take him a while to regress t
o the point where he could write a song like Vanity 6’s ‘Wet Dream’. Though it’s not in circulation, Pepe Willie remembers Prince playing him another song he’d written for Sue Ann Carwell called ‘Kiss Me Quick’.2
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In the summer of 1979, Prince asked his management to organise studio time and took his band of the era – guitarist Dez Dickerson, bassist André Cymone, keyboardists Gayle Chapman and Matt Fink and drummer Bobby Z – to Boulder, Colorado, to work on his first planned side project, a new-wave band named The Rebels. Unlike later side projects such as Vanity 6 or The Time (or, indeed, Prince’s own early albums, which he recorded mostly alone) this was a fully collaborative project. There are conflicting stories about whether the band was going to be involved in the promotion. Bobby Z has suggested that the band was intended to be like Milli Vanilli or The Monkees, but Dez Dickerson told me this was never clarified, and that they were still talking about the photo shoot when everyone got distracted by the swift progression of Prince’s career.
Although the nine Rebels songs are cherished by collectors, the album was never released. But unlike many of Prince’s abandoned or unreleased side projects, this is a finished project, and as such is essential to understanding Prince’s early development. While the record was clearly an exploratory enterprise and produced in a relatively speedy eleven days, this doesn’t mean Prince took it any less seriously, as he completed his own second album in a month. Dickerson remembers Prince taking painstaking effort over the project, with whole days given up to getting the tracking and overdubbing right. ‘You’, which Prince later renamed ‘U’ and revisited twice – recording an unreleased demo in 1987 before giving the song to Paula Abdul for her 1991 Spellbound album – is a simple track, with Prince telling a woman a list of things he likes about her. Even on the Rebels version you can hear the seeds of Prince’s own later take on techno (although it’s definitely rock), which he would display on tracks like ‘Loose!’, from the 1994 album Come, or ‘The Human Body’, from 1996’s Emancipation, but by 1987 (one year before ‘techno’ was properly defined as a genre), it sounds like it’s come straight outta Detroit. When Abdul does it in 1991, she retains Prince’s spoken sections from the 1987 version, but the techno-stomp is toned down, and the central sense of unblinking devotion loses something of its manic quality.