by Matt Thorne
Another Rebels song that refused to die is ‘If I Love You Tonight’. As well as the Rebels version, there are two Prince demos of the song from 1987, and it was later covered by both Mica Paris and Mayte, who recorded two versions on her 1995 album Child of the Sun, one in English and the other in Spanish. The Rebels version is sung by Gayle Chapman and is a variation on Kris Kristofferson’s ‘Help Me Make It Through the Night’ from a seemingly suicidal woman prepared to hand over her gun to a one-night stand. Chapman recalls: ‘I remember being told to cry on that song. That’s why my voice sounded like it did. I don’t sound like that when I sing. I’ve never ever liked it, but I’ve had people to this day who’ve heard it and liked it, and I say, “What do you like about it? The music? The voice?” To me it grates my ears. I could do that song a million times better, but I had to choke up and try to sing.’
Prince’s versions, unusually, are the weakest of the six recordings, a strange blend of the slightly syrupy style he’d adopt in the early 1990s on tracks like ‘Graffiti Bridge’ and the more pared-down ‘Sign o’ the Times’ one-man bass, keyboard and drummachine approach. Mica Paris injects a bit of sarf London grit into her version, but by the time Mayte covers it, the song’s been transformed from a despondent suicidal blues into a full-on (and good) sunny house track.
‘Hard to Get’ is the most new-wave song, seemingly written under the inspiration of The Cars’ Candy-O album, which was released a month before The Rebels went into the studio and no doubt was still on Prince’s turntable at this time. (Dickerson, a huge fan of the band, remembers playing Cars riffs in rehearsal, and was surprised to hear that Prince has recently started covering ‘Let’s Go’ in concert.) Although musically appealing, it’s a generic rock song about a girl who won’t put out. The Cars’ influence is even stronger on a second version of the track, recorded in 1981 during the Controversy sessions. It recently emerged that Prince included a snippet of the song on a sampler tape of thirty tracks offered for other artists to record seemingly sometime in the late 1980s, so it clearly remained high in his estimation for several years.
It’s disappointing the record wasn’t released in 1979; just as his recordings as Madhouse reveal Prince the jazz musician, the rock underpinnings of his Rebels songs reveal Prince the new-waver and Prince the rockabilly, pre-dating the style of Controversy and the much later Chaos and Disorder, and displaying a side of his work that still remains under-represented in his main catalogue. It’s also the only album Prince has been involved in where he really is just one of the band rather than merely trying to give this impression; although he’d draw inspiration from many collaborators in the future, from now on he’d always remain in command.
Some critics have seen Prince’s protégés and side projects as outlets for different aspects of his music that won’t fit his mainstream releases, but this seems inaccurate. Better instead to see them as spurs to further production or a laboratory for experiments likely to find their way into his own albums, and as likely to inspire worthwhile music as the record company’s request for a new album. With The Rebels, Dickerson believes there may have been some concern from management about keeping the focus on Prince’s burgeoning career, but later side projects and bands slotted in easily alongside Prince’s own releases, and as Dickerson points out, Prince would look forward to moving from his own projects to albums where he remained incognito in the same way the average person might look forward to a holiday.
Instead of The Rebels, then, Prince’s most significant early side project was the first, eponymous album by The Time, which included one song, ‘Oh, Baby’, that was recorded and put aside during Prince’s sessions for his own second album. The six-track record features Prince in deep disguise, eschewing a song-writing credit and co-producing under the pseudonym Jamie Starr. Although The Time would evolve into a band with a very clear identity, the project initially grew, Lisa Coleman told me, out of jokes and silliness. She was living with Prince at the time, and her contribution to the album was seemingly greater than has previously been acknowledged. ‘My room was upstairs,’ she explains, ‘so he would call me down. “Lisa, would you help me do this string part? What about these lyrics? Can you finish this verse?” He involved me. I punched him in while he was playing the drums, whatever it was.’
Coleman wasn’t there on the night they decided to make Morris Day the front man, but she remembers him as a cute freckle-faced boy with a big ’fro who would run and get them hamburgers, a left-handed drummer who loved to jam. One version of the story of The Time’s genesis is that Day was offered the band as compensation for giving Prince the song ‘Partyup’, although Coleman says she wasn’t there the night this decision was made, and Dickerson can neither confirm nor deny the rumour. Coleman says Prince never doubted that Day would rise to the challenge, although she felt ‘The guy had had a huge responsibility thrust upon him and what seemed like fun and games at first became a big deal.’ But he soon got into it, especially once he’d established his uniform: Stacy Adams shoes and a leopard-print jacket. Prince also made use of his live band at the time, and Matt Fink remembers playing the synthesizer solo on ‘The Stick’.
As well as being an artistic success, this is one of Prince’s most commercially successful side projects, initially outselling his own Dirty Mind. The latter is arguably the better of the two records, but The Time feels more sophisticated, the lengthy nine- and ten-minute songs reminiscent of the 1999 songs ‘D.M.S.R.’, ‘Automatic’ and ‘Something in the Water (Does Not Compute)’. The pleasure of this album is the looseness of the jams. While a tighter song like ‘Girl’ pales when compared to ‘Free’ or ‘Scandalous’, long, lyrically simple tracks like ‘Get It Up’ (which would gain particular power when played live, Day’s slinky vocals sounding wonderfully sleazy-smooth) or ‘Cool’ work well, encouraging the listener to settle into a groove before shocking them to attention with a weird synth squiggle.
Vanity 6, Prince’s first female-fronted side project, was closer to Dirty Prince. The band, a three-piece girl group that originally consisted of Prince’s girlfriend Susan Moonsie, his costume designer Brenda Bennett and Bob Cavallo’s employee Jamie Shoop, who would soon be replaced by Denise Matthews, started out as The Hookers and very nearly had a lead singer named ‘Vagina’, but they were always a pop band, and the first song Prince wrote for the project, ‘Make-Up’, has an almost childlike innocence. For all his later play with male and female identities, nothing in his oeuvre seems quite as odd (or delicious) as the idea of Prince going into the studio and play-acting this song. A clear influence on Chicago house (it’s a toss-up whether this track or ‘Little Red Corvette’ was behind Frankie Knuckles’s ‘Baby Wants to Ride’), the song describes a woman putting on make-up, smoking a cigarette and lounging in a camisole as she waits for her lover to call.
‘Wet Dream’, the other song that Prince demoed for The Hookers, has a salacious title, but aside from the labial double entendre in the first line of the second verse (‘my lips start shaking’) and a mild sexual analogy (‘deliver the dam to the river’), it is a relatively innocuous lust song about a woman’s interest in a seemingly unobtainable man, a theme Prince would return to obsessively when writing songs for his female protégées.
What gives Prince’s earliest work much of its charm is his tireless subservience before unkind, promiscuous or uninterested women, and it seems surprising but sweet that when writing his first songs for women to sing, he didn’t take on the persona of the unavailable lover but imagined instead a sister to his poor, sexually frustrated brothers. As the lyric describes the woman’s jealousy when she sees the object of her affection taking another girl to the soda shop for ice cream, it doesn’t sound much like a song for a ‘hooker’ to sing. And from the description in the song of money changing hands in return for fulfilment of a fantasy, it seems this ‘hooker’ may have fallen for a gigolo.
It took over a year for The Hookers to metamorphose into Vanity 6. During that period, Warner Broth
ers put out Prince’s fourth album, Controversy, and the first record by The Time, and Prince went back on the road (supported by The Time) for a five-month, forty-eight-date US tour. Meeting a new woman often seems to inspire new bursts of creativity or changes in direction for Prince, and in a break during the Controversy tour he met Denise Matthews at a backstage party (an event he’d later dramatise in Purple Rain), renaming her Vanity and deciding to make her the front woman for his girl-group project.
Howard Bloom remembers that on several occasions when Prince began working with a protégée, he would send her to him to go through the same process of locating the person’s passion points as he’d used with Prince. ‘Prince had sent me Vanity, and I went out to Minneapolis, got the whole story of her life, and then went back and trained Vanity on how to do interviews. And then in 1981 I got a call from [Prince’s assistant] Jamie Shoop, and Jamie says, “I have another one of Prince’s artists, and he wants you to do what you do.” And I said, “I’m sick. I’m at home in bed, I’m naked.” And Jamie said, “We’re going to be there at eleven o’clock tomorrow, be ready.” And the next morning this limousine pulls up outside my house and this guy gets out in an absolutely immaculate zoot suit, so well-pressed it looked like a stylist had been in the limo with him, and Morris walked in and one of my dogs attacked him from the front and one from the rear.’
Vanity 6’s most famous song, ‘Nasty Girl’, may be less well-known than Prince’s greatest hits, but it’s among the most influential songs Prince has written. It’s easy to trace a line from Madonna, who in her earliest incarnation could have been a fourth member of the band, on to Janet Jackson, whose 1986 song ‘Nasty’ (produced by two former members of The Time) reverses the gender from ‘nasty girls’ to ‘nasty boys’, to Britney Spears, who claimed that the track ‘Boys’, from her 2001 album Britney, had ‘a kinda Prince feel to it’, but actually lifts directly from ‘Nasty Girl’ (the song is produced by The Neptunes, and its remixed version, ‘Boys (The Co-Ed Remix)’, features vocals from Pharrell Williams, a producer and rapper and diehard Prince fanatic). Britney’s ‘Let’s turn this dance floor into our own little nasty world’, and repeated invocations to ‘get nasty’, are clear Xeroxes of Vanity’s ‘my own little nasty world’ and ‘dance nasty girls’.
The video for Vanity 6’s ‘Drive Me Wild’ begins with Susan in bed, wearing striped pyjamas and clutching a teddy (a look later borrowed by Britney for a Rolling Stone cover), before Brenda and Vanity emerge from the dry ice, looking like zombie hookers, and drag her out of her bedroom and into a waiting Cadillac. The creepy 1980s porn feel of the video is emphasised by the strange guests they then meet at a party: a fat white-haired man in a cardboard crown, red cape and rude-boy T-shirt; a man in a Richard Nixon mask juggling cassettes; and various men who have mislaid their trousers or shirts. Brenda, in dog collar and chain, punches a greasy-haired dude in shades who’s been coming on to her, before the whole video is revealed to be Susan’s peculiar dream.
‘Drive Me Wild’ is another invocation to a lover, but sweet-yet-strange Susan is a less demanding sexual partner than Brenda or Vanity, closer to Prince in her willingness to please (although she lacks his sexual confidence or experience: in the lyric, she compares herself to a car, telephone, radio and baby doll, and implies she’s still a virgin). What’s most appealing about the song is its simplicity, and in the extended version at least, the possibility that Prince might spin out this basic track for ever. The moments of Prince’s music that give me greatest pleasure are when he stretches these jams to almost ludicrous extremes (e.g. the over fifty-minute-long ‘Billy’, inspired by a character in Purple Rain, or the hour-long original version of ‘Soul Psychodelicide’), where you get a sense of Prince proving his youth, energy and exuberance by matching himself against machines. It’s this side of Prince that seemingly influenced the bedroom-bound musicians of Detroit, and he played as important a role in influencing techno as the more commonly name-checked Kraftwerk, Prince’s greatest contribution to this style and sound being the way he combined sexuality with technology.
While working on the Vanity 6 album, Prince had also been preparing The Time’s second album, released a fortnight later. While the first album cover showed the whole band, Morris Day stands alone on What Time Is It?, checking his watch in front of a wall covered with clocks. The record has more character than its predecessor, and although it is similarly structured, with three long dance tracks and three shorter songs, the lyrics are sharper and less generic, the concept now clearly in focus. It would be the hits from the third Time album that would fix the band in the public consciousness, but this is just as good. Prince’s association with the band was now well-established, as they’d supported him on his Controversy tour, but once again he kept his involvement hidden, with only the co-production credit for ‘The Starr Company’ – the anonymous Jamie Starr’s3 new enterprise, also responsible for the Vanity 6 record – hinting at Prince’s involvement.
Dickerson says that as with ‘Cool’ on the first album, Prince gave him the title for What Time Is It?’s opener, ‘Wild and Loose’, and he came up with the words, which Prince sexed up. The lyric has some superficial similarities with the later ‘Hot Thing’. Both songs are about a man picking up a young, sexually free woman and taking her to a party. In ‘Hot Thing’, she’s ‘barely twentyone’; in ‘Wild and Loose’, her ‘body’s saying twenty-one’ but her face ‘seventeen’. In ‘Hot Thing’, Prince tells the girl to give her folks a call because she’s going to the Crystal Ball; in ‘Wild and Loose’, Day gives his girl the porno-creepy instruction to tell her mother she won’t be home because they have plans for her. The disturbing sense that this groupie is going to be roasted by all the members of The Time is intensified by a mid-section breakdown in which multiple male and female voices bring to life the kind of after-party an R&B thug would appreciate, but countered by the fact that the groupie is played by Vanity, who’s surely more than a match for Day.
While Dickerson was shocked to hear how Prince had altered his lyric, he was even more surprised to hear the second track on the album, as its title – ‘777-9311’ – was his phone number, recalling that he was called by ‘every bozo with a telephone and a cheesy sense of humour’. Although the song’s a throwaway about Day trying to get a woman’s number, it was the album’s biggest hit. ‘Onedayi’mgonnabesomebody’ is similarly disposable, a short, itchy funk song about making it big.
The nine-minute dance track ‘The Walk’ is a dry run for the more famous ‘The Bird’, introducing a new dance style to First Avenue and ending with a hilarious exchange between Day and Vanity, as he persuades her to take off her skin-tight jeans and change into the lingerie he keeps in his car’s glove box (none of his girls wear gloves), only to be surprised by the size of the butt she reveals when acquiescing to his request.
The silly party mood of the first two-thirds of the album is abandoned for the last two ballads, ‘Gigolos Get Lonely Too’ and ‘I Don’t Wanna Leave You’, which would have sat well on any of the first four Prince albums. ‘Gigolos Get Lonely Too’ is the better song, a lament from a ladykiller who wants to make love without taking off his clothes. The other ballad is another Prince song about an impossible woman, and another frustrated lover prepared to put up with anything to keep the relationship going.
Prince took Vanity 6 and The Time on tour as support when promoting 1999, seemingly happy now to reveal himself as puppet-master. The live versions of Vanity 6’s songs didn’t differ that significantly from the record, but the more shocking lyrics lost some of their power when thrown away onstage. It’s unclear whether this is due to vocal weakness or whether it’s a deliberate tactic, but it seems telling that when introducing ‘Nasty Girl’ live in Minneapolis, Vanity has to psyche herself up: ‘Listen, Minneapolis, in order for me to keep up with my reputation, I want you to tell me, “Vanity is nasty …”’4
Although it’s now common for Prince to play up to five hours a night, his 1999
performance was little more than an hour, just twenty minutes longer than The Time’s average set, and it seems he was being genuine when describing his fear of being upstaged by his support act. Playing the best tracks from The Time’s first two albums, Monte Moir’s and Jimmy Jam’s electro keyboards sound incredible, and there’s a truly manic, unhinged energy to their audience-pleasing chicanery. ‘Gigolo’s Get Lonely Too’ is a live highlight, spun out to twice its recorded length and with a Morris Day soliloquy about his diamonds, ‘baggies’ (baggy trousers) and aforementioned Stacy Adams shoes as he invites a woman onstage for a glass of wine. During this tour, a screenwriter was on the bus with them, noting down details for what would later become Purple Rain (although the project would see a change of writer before reaching the screen). There was also friction between the various camps, and Lisa Coleman remembers there being no doubt as to who was in charge. ‘There were three buses. Vanity 6 had a bus, we had a bus and The Time had a bus. Our bus had a video machine on it, and we stopped at a truck stop and the video machine was gone. Me and Dez went onto Vanity 6’s bus, and Prince was on the bus watching something with Vanity. And we said, “Hey, that’s from our bus.’ And he said, “They’re all my buses.” “Oh … right …” But that really hurt us, and we had to do the walk of shame back to our bus.’