Prince

by Matt Thorne

  Lisa Coleman developed this thought. ‘I felt when I first joined the band he thought it was more important to pose questions than to get answers, and somewhere along the line he looked at it and now he doesn’t pose the questions any more, he tells you what the answers are. That counts a lot of people out.’ Wendy agreed: ‘He always had a tendency to speak in parables. He’s not a clear talker. He can speak quickly and monosyllabically and get to the point of what he wants, but when you get down to really philosophical questions and get into a conversation it can become very difficult to follow. He has a different language that he’s learned.’

  It was this segment of the show that also concerned critics, such as Ken Tucker of the Philadelphia Inquirer, who noted: ‘he … chatted with a hand-puppet and mused portentously about big issues like life, death and God’. Although in retrospect this seems like the moment when Prince conquered the world, it’s worth noting that many reviews of the tour were negative, although critics were uncertain whether Prince had lost his bite (as Robert Hilburn of the LA Times suggested) or become too offensive (as Matt Beer of the Detroit News, Richard Harrington of the Washington Post and Martin Keller of the Twin Cities Reader believed).

  Howard Bloom was also concerned and surprised by these segments, and remembers of this time: ‘In 1984, Prince started to withdraw from us. The first time I read that struggle was when I went to see him at the Nassau Coliseum. It was another fucking brilliant performance. Prince had immaculate taste in light shows, but in the middle of that tour all of a sudden a voice came from five storeys above your head and it was the voice of God. That was the first time Prince was having an inner conversation. Prince was going through a transition from the rebel to the moralist. And as a moralist he was judging himself very harshly. He was becoming his father, but he was becoming something larger than his father – his own interpretation of his father. And calling it God. And unfortunately he left the Dionysian God behind. And Prince needed both. Otherwise he’s inauthentic.’

  From then on, says Bloom, ‘Bob would rarely see him, I would rarely see him. The only time I would see him would be when I was backstage and I felt this tap on my right shoulder, and I looked around and a hundred feet away to my left was Prince, running and laughing. But I knew he still loved me because there was this little “Hi, Howard,” but he was afraid of me.’

  *

  Towards the end of the tour, in Inglewood, Prince played a show in which he invited two of the other biggest rock stars of the era – Bruce Springsteen and Madonna – onstage to take part in a mammoth version of ‘Baby, I’m a Star’. The guitar solo Springsteen played when Prince asked, ‘Bruce, you wanna play something?’ merely revealed how much less subtle a musician he is than the more flexible Prince. But Prince’s respect for Springsteen is genuine, and he is a musician he’s continued to appreciate (and go and watch live) to this day.

  Prince concluded the tour in Miami, finishing the show with an announcement that seemed to indicate that he might be considering retirement. When I asked Wendy if she’d believed the talk about getting off the road for ever at the time, she laughed. ‘No. Artists all say that. “I’m gonna to quit, I’m gonna retire, I’m gonna take a two-year break” – they all say it. I don’t know one best-selling artist – and we fucking know them all – who doesn’t say it. Just go have a sleep and a good meal.’

  9

  THERE AREN’T ANY RULES

  ‘The earlier records sound like shit,’ says Wendy Melvoin, ‘but then around the time of Around the World in a Day the quality of the recording and mixing started stepping up.’ Of course, Melvoin is a true audiophile with a straight-talking manner and she’s being playful here, but it’s definitely true that after Purple Rain Prince began to develop his studio sound further, and that Around the World in a Day and Parade are two of his richest (and most adventurous) productions, representing a break with the sound that had sustained him until this point.

  Although Prince had always kept up with his peers in the charts, after the success of Purple Rain – to his enormous credit – he began a new process of creative growth. It seems that having conquered the world, rather than consolidate this success with another record in the same vein, he was eager to make creative progress, and part of this involved opening himself up to new influences that he had previously eschewed. Some critics, both at the time and since, have suggested that Around the World in a Day was a result of Prince drawing greater inspiration from white rock music, but he had been a fan of Todd Rundgren since his teenage years, and Dez Dickerson and Matt Fink had previously encouraged his interest in rock, so it wasn’t quite the huge transformation it might have seemed. Alan Leeds, however, believes that ‘It was both ways. A lot is written about the fact that Wendy and Lisa and to some degree Sheila E were exposing Prince to music, but I’m not so sure he didn’t do it in return. They were really just increasing his vocabulary as a composer.’

  And while acknowledging the incredible importance of Wendy, Lisa and Susannah Melvoin (and the other members of The Revolution) during this time, Prince remained in control throughout, and was as influenced by old favourites such as Joni Mitchell, one of Prince’s most lasting influences. Talking to Morrissey in 1996, Mitchell claimed that Prince copped to this at the famous playback of the album, when the record was previewed for twenty Warner Brothers staff and Prince’s father, telling her that a harmonic passage in one of the songs had been inspired by her and Larry Carlton.1

  Nevertheless, Wendy and Lisa – of whom Howard Bloom notes, ‘They were the only musicians you could walk into their hotel room and find books on their desk’ – are justifiably proud of their influence on Around the World in a Day. I asked Wendy if the record was influenced by The Beatles, something Prince has always denied.2 ‘Prince hates The Beatles,’ she said. ‘My take on it is that he hated The Beatles not for the music, but for something else. Maybe because of the iconic look of them or there was something about them that didn’t ring true for him and his rock stardom. But I always knew if he listened to “Dig a Pony” and “Let It Be”, he’d change his mind. Period. I know the guy’s taste. And “Polythene Pam”, if he just sat down and listened to that stuff, he’d get it. But he thinks of “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” or “Strawberry Fields Forever” and sees them as too populist.’

  But fellow Revolution member Matt Fink told me that Prince never voiced a dislike of The Beatles to him, and remembers him listening to The Beatles and the Stones and revisiting them when recording Around the World in a Day. So, I asked Wendy, given that many have heard echoes of Sgt Pepper in the record (an association seemingly encouraged by the cover art), would she still say that The Beatles were categorically not an influence on the record?

  ‘Not for him,’ she told me, before adding, in a jokey way, ‘but, y’know, we did that record.’ Lisa Coleman explained further: ‘But even still, it wasn’t really. I think we came to it honestly. It wasn’t The Beatles we were referencing, it was probably the same things The Beatles were referencing. We were seeking what they sought, we weren’t seeking them. Also, our brothers were a heavy influence. My brother was a world musician, he played the oud and cello and finger cymbals, darbuka hand drum. When Prince met those guys he was really blown away and impressed. It was our scene that we had going that Prince tuned into.’

  I wondered if by ‘our scene’ Wendy and Lisa were referring to the Paisley Underground, the concurrent rock revival that threw up two bands Prince would later have associations with – Three O’Clock (whom Prince would sign to his Paisley Park label, and to whom he would give the song ‘Neon Telephone’) and The Bangles (to whom Prince would give ‘Manic Monday’) – but Wendy suggested that the connection wasn’t that strong. ‘Prince’s ear was pricked up by The Bangles because he thought Susanna [Hoffs] was cute.’

  It’s important to note that while some members of The Revolution were facilitating Prince’s creative growth, the three songs that he started with for the record – ‘Paisley Park’, ‘Pop Life’
and ‘Temptation’ – follow on naturally from the songs on Purple Rain. Lisa Coleman told me: ‘Around the World in a Day wasn’t the title until that song came along, and that was really far into the project. He was thinking of it as “Paisley Park”.’

  As an album title, ‘Paisley Park’ sounds like a logical sequel to Purple Rain, encapsulating the sense of hard rock giving way to something more in tune with the Summer of Love (even if Prince would never quite get over his disdain for certain hippie indulgences). The sleeve notes claim that several of the songs were recorded at Paisley Park itself, but this was Prince bringing a fantasy to life as the actual Paisley Park complex wouldn’t be completed until 1988. ‘Paisley Park’ is one of several Prince songs about locations that offer liberation (‘Uptown’, ‘Roadhouse Garden’, ‘Graffiti Bridge’, ‘3121’, ‘77 Beverly Park’). In this instance, the destination was not necessarily a location but rather a state of enlightenment every listener could realise.

  But even as he was heading in this direction, ‘Pop Life’ pulled away from the possibility of peace and love. It’s a song that’s continued to rub people up the wrong way – the music writer Garry Mulholland wrote recently that the track ‘essentially tells the listener to shut up about not being as rich as the singer, and stop whingeing, and put up with your essentially shitty life’3 – and is one that also marks out Around the World in a Day as a disguised version of the post-super-success album that often follows when an artist reaches the top and looks back down.

  One of Prince’s common techniques when introducing new songs is to let them emerge slowly, so that they seem to grow out of other tracks onstage. He did this with ‘Temptation’ on the Purple Rain tour, including it as part of the ‘conversation with God’ segment of the stage show. Whether this was merely, as Wendy Melvoin suggests, ‘showbiz’, or a dramatisation of Prince’s genuine theological concerns of the time, it’s clear that ‘Temptation’ (which Prince had partly written and recorded before going on tour) was his latest attempt to bring together the sacred and profane. While it’s unclear how seriously he took the notion that his songs or persona might have been sinful at this stage of his career, it’s clearly something he started to take more earnestly later in life.

  Asked about it at the time, Prince sounded as if his religious beliefs were still fairly lightweight. To Neal Karlen he said: ‘It’s just so nice to know that there is someone and someplace else. And if we’re wrong, and I’m wrong, and there is nothing, then big deal!’ Though he did add: ‘A while back, I had an experience that changed me … I’m going to make a film about it – not the next one, but the one after that. I think when one discovers himself, he discovers God. Or maybe it’s the other way around. I’m not sure … It’s hard to put into words. It’s a feeling – someone knows when they get it. That’s all I can really say.’4 It’s unclear whether this film was Graffiti Bridge or an unrealised project – possibly the long mooted but unmade The Dawn – but certainly the sequel to Purple Rain had a more spiritual dimension than either that film or Under the Cherry Moon.

  Placed at the end of Around the World in a Day and offering the record’s dramatic climax, the conversation with Christ in ‘Temptation’ (‘Oh silly man …’) is impossible to take seriously, and aside from trying it out during one rehearsal, Prince didn’t return to it in live performance after the end of the Purple Rain tour. The monologue that the lyrics grew out of seems to confuse two separate impulses – a sexual threat to a woman, warning her that she needs to make up her mind whether she wants him, and a semi-penitent sinner talking to God and pleading that he is only bad because the audience enjoys it. (Later he makes reference to the Garden of Eden and original sin, which Prince would write about over and over again in the later period of his career.)

  Onstage, God wouldn’t speak, but Prince would make His presence known by playing (relatively) discordant piano. In ‘Temptation’, Prince seems to voice God himself, but with no degree of solemnity. He may threaten Prince with death, but it’s not something that the listener seems expected to fret about, and after some piano and FX, he is pardoned. But some did hear genuine penitence in the song. For journalist Kyle Parks of Florida’s Evening Independent,5 writing in direct response to some of the negative press Prince was receiving at the time, ‘Temptation’ represented a new ‘maturity’ in Prince’s music also evident in ‘4 the Tears in Your Eyes’, a song that Prince put out two versions of, before and after the release of Around the World in a Day. The first version was written for the USA for Africa We Are the World project after Prince declined to participate in the group’s ‘We Are the World’ single; the second was an acoustic version presented only as a video, in which he’s recorded in black and white singing with Wendy and Lisa and which premiered during Live Aid (and was later chosen over the original for Prince’s The Hits/The B-Sides collection, and is now the only version of the song widely available). The ‘maturity’ Parks located in the song (and in ‘Temptation’) seems largely to have come from the directness of the lyrics and the straightforward Christian message.

  In one of Prince’s most self-referential moments, he wrote a second song, ‘Hello’, about the writing of the first. As Alan Leeds observed, ‘somehow his decision to pass on the We Are The World session became convoluted by an ugly encounter with an overzealous paparazzo and gossip mongers had a field day’.6 It wasn’t just paparazzi and gossip-mongers who had a pop at Prince for this; the cartoonist Garry Trudeau also worked it into his ongoing Doonesbury series. Invited to witness the recording session, Trudeau depicts Prince calling Quincy Jones to tell him he’ll contribute if he cuts out Michael Jackson’s parts.7 According to Leeds, the criticism stung Prince: ‘Downright defiant about his sensitivity to world hunger, for once Prince fired back. “Hello” is one of those rare cases where he used his studio forum for personal commentary, directly answering all those who second-guessed the effort and sincerity that had gone into “4 the Tears in Your Eyes”.’8 While ‘Hello’ is autobiographical and ‘4 the Tears in Your Eyes’ is straightforward sermonising, both songs contrast with the cryptic qualities of Around the World in a Day. Trips to the Vault during this period of composition were, it seems, largely confined to B-sides, such as ‘Girl’, which he revamped and placed on the reverse of ‘America’.

  Whether it was something he was always planning or something that occurred to him during the writing, there is a deliberate narrative link between at least three songs in the album, ‘Around the World in the Day’ introducing the concept of a ladder to salvation, searched for in ‘Temptation’ and ‘The Ladder’. There is also an obvious conceptual connection between this song and the hoary Led Zeppelin chestnut ‘Stairway to Heaven’, a band Prince mentioned to Rolling Stone but whom Susannah Melvoin remembers him initially hating, in the same way her sister remembers him disdaining The Beatles. ‘I remember playing a Led Zeppelin record, and he was saying, “Oh, this is terrible, this is awful,”’ Susannah told me, ‘and I just kind of rolled my eyes and thought, “One day.” He just couldn’t stand it at the time. He thought it was crap.’ Susannah didn’t have to wait long for Prince to change his opinion, again to Neal Karlen, to whom he said that he liked psychedelia ‘because that was the only period in recent history that delivered songs and colors. Led Zeppelin, for example, would make you feel differently on each song.’9 Now, Prince regularly plays ‘Whole Lotta Love’ in concert.

  In ‘Temptation’, Prince sings of ‘mamas’, ‘papas’ and a ‘daughter of morality’ (whoever she is). Given his recurrent use of the name ‘Elektra’,10 it might seem as if the narrative of ‘The Ladder’, in which a sinful king is beloved by a subject of this name, is a coded return to the incest Prince sang about in ‘Sister’. The song is co-credited to Prince’s father, and although once again this might have been because it reminded him of something he heard in his father’s music, it seems intriguing that Prince should think of his dad when singing about a king (he also addresses his father in the other song co-credited to J
ohn L. Nelson on the record, ‘Around the World in a Day’, telling him he wants to dance). Certainly, there is evidence of Prince trying to involve his father in his creative processes at this time, and in the Rolling Stone interview mentioned above, Karlen witnesses Prince taking his father a tape of music Wendy and Lisa have mixed for his father’s comments.

  *

  Wendy and Lisa both remember Prince making a present to them of studio time, and he extended this kindness to Lisa’s brother David in 1984, giving him two days at Sunset Sound as a birthday present. While there he recorded ‘Around the World in a Day’. Later, Lisa got the cassette and played it to Prince, and in her words, ‘his mind went whoosh, this is the record, and he sent for our brothers and worked on the rest of the album’. The songs recorded later in the process include ‘America’, ‘Raspberry Beret’, ‘Tamborine’ and ‘Condition of the Heart’. David Coleman is credited as playing the cello on ‘Raspberry Beret’, while ‘America’ is a full-band performance, but ‘Tamborine’ and ‘Condition of the Heart’ are Prince playing solo.11

  Prince recorded an alternative version of ‘Around the World of the Day’ which was never released and which, while still featuring much of the arrangement and instrumentation of the finished song, is a more obvious pop track. Had Prince released this version, the album might not have been considered quite such a break from his past. Having decided on his new direction, Prince trailed ‘Around the World in a Day’ in the Purple Rain tour programme, including a scribbled note with the first verse among its pages, once again leading the faithful forward with seemingly cryptic messages that later became clear.