by Matt Thorne
The version of ‘America’ on Around the World in a Day is just over three minutes long, edited down from a nearly twenty-two-minute version released on the twelve-inch single. But even this ‘extended version’ was an edit of the original recording. ‘“America” came from a massive jam,’ Wendy told me. ‘We were playing and rehearsing for hours and hours and we hit on this one groove that we continued to play for five hours, and then subsequent days afterwards we kept referring back to it, and then Prince came in and did that “America” solo and started singing and it turned into the song we know. To this day, we can put that track on and feel that band’s energy and feel what we were like at our best together – a fucking freight train. No one was like “psst … psst … psst”, like those cats he plays with now. It was just a massive freight train, and no one moved from the tracks. I’m really proud of that song. It’s a perfect representation of Prince and The Revolution.’
There would be many of these massive jams during this era, and indeed throughout Prince’s career. ‘They were like meditations, total meditations,’ Wendy says. ‘When the groove hit that one plateau, it was like … it was incredible. It would be one chord progression for hours on end. Prince would be practising a dance step or coming up with lyrics. He was grooving and playing and soloing. One chord and you’d find your place. It was like a mantra.’ Lisa agrees: ‘You never knew what it was. He’d say, “Groove in A. Everybody groove B flat.” It was an exercise in finding the cogs, especially with funk music, where there’s syncopation, so we weren’t playing on top of each other. We were experts at getting in synch, two guitar players, two keyboard players. Prince would call for certain people to drop out or come back in. “Lisa, what have you got?” “Let’s see, I got this.” What chords, things like that. It was an exercise – band yoga, relay racing. It was great training. We became Olympic musicians. It was great.’
For the video to accompany the song, rather than lip-synch in the conventional fashion, Prince recorded a third version, this time an entirely new live performance lasting for nearly ten minutes shot in front of an audience in Nice during the filming of Under the Cherry Moon. During the rehearsal for the performance at the Théâtre du Verdure, Prince played one of his only full performances of ‘Temptation’, as well as ‘Pop Life’, ‘Paisley Park’, a long version of the B-side ‘Love or Money’ and the Parade out-take ‘An Honest Man’. As he did not tour Around the World in a Day, not returning to the road until the release of Parade, this gives us the best sense of what an Around the World in a Day show might have been like, and the fact that he was performing a full horn-driven version of ‘Temptation’ suggests a lost opportunity.
The records that Prince was talking about in interview around the time of recording were not by The Beatles but were records that showed artists experimenting beyond their normal styles – he also name-checked Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants, Joni Mitchell’s The Hissing of Summer Lawns and Miles Davis’s later records – and it seemed that part of the purpose of this album was experimentation for experimentation’s sake. If the album is ultimately slightly unsatisfying, it’s less to do with the quality of the music (the album includes several of Prince’s very best tracks) than the sense that Prince was both trying on other styles to see how they fit and also constructing a secret code that, once cracked, revealed very little.
Nowhere was this more apparent than in the video for ‘Raspberry Beret’, the first to be shot by Prince himself, which begins with him coughing, a deliberate act designed to encourage speculation about his (confessedly meaningless) motives. ‘Raspberry Beret’ would go on to become one of Prince’s most beloved songs – though this didn’t stop him reinterpreting it years later as ‘Raspberry Sorbet’ and singing it to Rizzo the Rat.12 And suggesting that Susannah’s tastes might have really got to him, there’s that famous reference to a Led Zeppelin album title in the lyric.
Around the World in a Day may be an album about utopian community, but the post-success isolation blues evident in ‘Pop Life’ also drive ‘Condition of the Heart’ and ‘Tamborine’, a pair of songs driven by a new kind of itchy approach to love and sex. Aside from its obvious qualities, ‘Condition of the Heart’ is significant for two reasons: with its reference to Clara Bow, it reveals the interest in Hollywood history that would in part inspire Under the Cherry Moon, but it was also, according to Susan Rogers,13 written for Susannah Melvoin, Wendy’s sister and a muse who would inspire much of Prince’s best writing. I was present on the only occasion (to date) Prince has played ‘Tamborine’ live, at an after-show at the Marquee Club in London in 2002, a short, minute-long blast (he also did a barely recognisable version at rehearsal). It seemed a strange song to revive in the midst of his most spiritual tour, indicating that while explicitness was out, suggestion remained fine. On the album, in its original version, it’s a silly squib about genitalia, masturbation, (pornographic, it seems) models and distaste for promiscuous women, and is the worst song on any Prince album up to this point.
Ultimately, much of Around the World in a Day’s importance lies in the fact that it allowed Prince to step away from the potential artistic sterility of the stadium circuit and re-emphasise his interest in experimentation. While never losing sight of his musicality and still essentially a warm, pop album, it was a worthwhile sideways step from the more histrionic rock elements of Purple Rain, though this wasn’t necessarily what the management wanted. Bob Cavallo thinks: ‘I thought Around the World in a Day was Prince scratching an itch. It was wonderful but it hurt Purple Rain. We kinda stepped on Purple Rain. It was too soon for the marketplace.’ Prince was moving so fast during this era that the record’s overall style was largely quickly abandoned. The best indication of where Prince’s head was at (and how important his side projects were to his artistic development at this time) comes from a show he played at the Prom Center in St Paul with The Revolution and guests to an audience of eight hundred friends flown in from all over the US to celebrate his twenty-seventh birthday. Completely ignoring Around the World in a Day, which was just over a month old, he began instead with three unreleased songs from three separate projects – ‘A Love Bizarre’, from Sheila E’s second album, ‘Mutiny’, a song from The Family’s record, and ‘Sometimes It Snows in April’, which would be one of the highlights of Parade – before playing two non-album Purple Rain tour songs – ‘Irresistible Bitch’ and ‘Possessed’, a song that has appeared on video recordings but not as a studio version – The Time’s ‘The Bird’, the aforementioned throwaway ‘Drawers Burnin’’ and another yet-to-be-released Sheila E song called ‘Holly Rock’. While the performance of ‘Mutiny’ was the undoubted highlight of the evening, anyone paying attention would have noticed from the care with which Prince treated ‘Sometimes It Snows in April’, shouting out instructions to Wendy, Lisa, Bobby Z and Brown Mark as if he were still in rehearsal – having disguised his intentions by telling the audience to go to the bar – that it would be this song that would prove central to his next transformation.
10
NEW POSITION
Over the next few years of Prince’s career, his work was determined as much by what he didn’t release as what he did, as he moved on from discarding (or mothballing) individual tracks to jettisoning whole albums and concepts. Having received the green light from Warner Brothers for a second major movie, he employed the then-untested but later Oscar-winning screenwriter Becky Johnston to start on a script, and walked into Sunset Sound to start recording songs for a soundtrack.
It wouldn’t be until two months after these initial sessions at Sunset Sound that Prince would receive the first draft of Under the Cherry Moon, but he’d been carrying ideas for the film around since – it seems – childhood. Susannah Melvoin told me she saw various sections from rough drafts of scenes, written by Prince, that would end up in the script, mainly ‘dialogue between him and Jerome that he thought was very funny’. This dialogue included the film’s most memorable scene,
where Prince’s character Christopher Tracy writes the nonsense words ‘wrecka stow’ on a napkin and asks Mary, played by Kristin Scott Thomas, what the words mean. Susannah says that Prince wrote this scene and was very proud of it. ‘He couldn’t wait to shoot it. I guess some of these things were jokes from when he’d been a kid.’ (The ‘wrecka stow’ joke certainly seems to have been knocking around for a while: Paul Peterson of The Family told Dave Hill that Prince made him do the exchange the first time they met.1) Another exchange that may have originated with Prince (and which was cut from the finished film) is a complaint from Mary about a refined man who loves environmental tapes that ‘are supposed to make you horny’ but that just make her ‘wanna go to the bathroom’, a grumble all Prince fans will recognise from the later song ‘Movie Star’.
Prince would change the title of one of the recorded songs to reflect the film, but only three of the Sunset Sound tracks (the title song ‘Under the Cherry Moon’, ‘Do U Lie?’ and ‘Sometimes It Snows in April’) are connected to the film’s narrative in any significant way. It may even have been that he chose the songs for Parade precisely because they were largely so deliberately vague. He also appears to have made a conscious decision with Parade not to pursue the lyrical questioning that was a central part of Around the World in a Day, replacing the lyrical sophistication with a new focus on creating elaborate new musical arrangements. In doing so, he removed the three most ambitious songs he’d written during sessions for the album: ‘All My Dreams’, a song more commonly associated with the Dream Factory-era (see Chapter 11); ‘Old Friends 4 Sale’, which features Prince responding in an unusually direct way to events in his life and would, in a revised version, become the title track of a later album, but which appears so autobiographical that it could never have soundtracked a film in which Prince was playing a fictional character; and ‘Others Here with Us’, one of the creepiest songs Prince has ever recorded. Utilising all the spookiest samples from the Fairlight synthesizer he started using in this period, it features the death of a baby and the suicide of a boy’s uncle, and the ghosts of these two characters, whose presence is supposed to be reassuring rather than frightening.2
While the removal of these narrative songs seems to be a deliberate attempt to simplify the album lyrics, Parade is arguably Prince’s most sonically adventurous album. What really marks out its sound is the balance between the minimalism of the majority of Prince’s contributions – aided on several tracks by Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman (the rest of The Revolution appear as a full band only on ‘Mountains’, although Eric Leeds, Sheila E, Susannah Melvoin and Jonathan Coleman also contributed smaller parts to various cuts) – and the orchestral arrangements by Dr Clare Fischer.
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Whether it’s coincidence, deliberate design or something to which he is subconsciously drawn, Prince has often worked with musicians who are, like himself, part of a musical family. As well as the Melvoins and Colemans (not to mention Paul and Ricky Peterson or Josh and Cora Dunham, the married couple who have played with him a great deal in recent years), there is also Dr Clare Fischer and his son Brent, who have a very close working relationship. Indeed, in an echo of Prince’s own relationship with his musician father and his piano, Brent’s earliest memory is of being three years old and lying under the piano with the family dog while Clare was composing.
Prince first worked with Clare Fischer on his protégé project The Family’s album. Several people suggested to me that they had played a role in encouraging Prince to use Fischer for this record, including Lisa Coleman and Susannah Melvoin, whose famous musician father, Mike Melvoin, knew Fischer well. Brent Fischer told me that either of these connections was possible, but that the version he heard through various engineers was that ‘Paul Peterson’s mother was a big Clare Fischer fan as a jazz keyboardist.’
Of his father’s work with Prince, Brent notes: ‘He [Prince] was very good at giving us music that was pretty much in its final state.’ For the Parade project Prince sent a cassette of the whole album. ‘Up to that point in my father’s career,’ Brent told me, ‘for all the arrangements he’d done for The Jacksons, Switch, DeBarge, Atlantic Starr, because they didn’t read or write music, they’d send him a cassette tape, and he’d have to listen to the tape and make a rough chart. And that became a lot of work for him to have to do that and also write the arrangement on a tight deadline.
‘When the Parade project came along, it was such a long project that he decided to hire me to give him extremely detailed transcriptions. So I started transcribing those Prince songs one-by-one and giving him the kind of detail that he had been missing from his rough sketches, writing out the entire bass line, the drum fills, all the vocal parts, including background vocal parts. Everything he needed to wrap the music in a velvet cloth of a Clare Fischer arrangement.’
Prince was supposed to attend the first session they did for Parade. ‘We figured we would get two songs recorded in the first recording session and then send them to him and continue on like that. So he was very enthusiastic and let us know that he would be there and was looking forward to meeting us and hearing the orchestra. For some reason, something in his schedule precluded him from actually being there when the date came up, so we recorded on our own and sent the tapes back to Chanhassen, where his compound was located. He called my father on the phone and said: ‘If I’d been there, I might have interfered, and I like what you did so much that I will always stay away from the recording sessions.’ And he has. And it’s worked out really well.’
Having decided that meeting Clare Fischer might jinx the relationship, Prince took avoiding him to a surprising extreme. Brent told me: ‘In 1986, my dad won a Grammy award for the best jazz vocal album, and Prince asked us to send him a copy. So we gave one of the albums to his assistant, and she told us when she handed it to him he turned his head away and said: “Just put it on. I want to hear it, but I don’t want to see what Clare Fischer looks like. I have the image of Clare Fischer in my head, and I don’t want to change it.”’
Prince’s interest in classical music would later prompt him to write a ballet for his wedding and would inform much of his later music, but it is most easily identified in the records from this period. After Lisa Coleman had introduced Prince to Vaughan Williams and Paul Hindemith, Clare Fischer, with his own interest in a synthesis between jazz and classical (or rather, orchestral) music, represented the perfect new collaborator. ‘Usually an orchestral arranger might have a symphonic background or they might have a pop or jazz background,’ Brent explained, ‘but my father has a fusion of both.’
Through his own private musical study, Clare Fischer discovered classical composers, including Bach, Bartók, Shostakovich, Stravinsky and Henri Dutilleux, jazz musicians like Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, and 1930s boogie-woogie key-boardist Meade Lux Lewis, bringing all these influences together in his own music.
His son told me that when they first received the Parade tape, the song that eventually became ‘Christopher Tracy’s Parade’ was known as ‘Little Girl Wendy’s Parade’.3 Both versions of the song are intriguing in terms of Prince’s theological development, in that the Devil is defeated by music, although the fact that he’s driving an ‘evil car’ makes the conflict seem somewhat comical. This is something Prince would exaggerate on stage by doing an impersonation of the Devil driving off.4 This is not a particularly spiritual album, but it seems Prince wanted it to take place in an atmosphere of light.
I spoke to Brent Fischer about ‘I Wonder U’ and Clare Fischer’s contribution to the record. ‘At the beginning it was so sparse,’ Brent explained, ‘with little bass riffs, a little bit of percussion and just the voice, a few other very minimal sounds, and the first approach was to add a large orchestra on it. Right as we were finishing up recording that, we actually got a note from his assistant that he had decided that he’d rather not have full orchestra on this one, just a family of flutes, so my dad gave him the best family of flutes that he could ever
have, and then we went in and recorded that about a week later, and the engineer said: “Just for fun, let’s play both of them back at the same time.” And we played it all back, and except for one or two bars it all just blended together beautifully. And that was all coincidental; it wasn’t intended that the flutes would complement the string part. It’s just another hallmark of good writing. We sent both of them to Prince, and he used bits and pieces of both arrangements.’
The increased influence of classical music on Prince can also be heard on the album’s ‘Venus De Milo’, a piano instrumental to which Clare Fischer added his arrangement. For all its prettiness, it sounds like incidental music. But this strand of Prince’s music would become increasingly important to his work, the piano interludes onstage eventually leading to the mostly solo-piano album One Nite Alone …
There has been some controversy about what exactly John L. Nelson contributed to the two songs for which he receives a co-writing credit on the album, ‘Christopher Tracy’s Parade’ and ‘Under the Cherry Moon’, but it seems likely from what those close to Prince have said that this was in recognition of a progression in the song that echoed something he remembered from his father’s piano-playing. For an album that’s soundtracking a film about a gigolo – a persona Prince had previously flirted with mainly through songs for The Time – several of the songs seem overly concerned with extending an existing sexual relationship, among them ‘New Position’. What Prince seems to be saying to his lover – and also his audience – is: ‘Let’s not get bored with each other.’
In fact, ‘New Position’ was an old song, a home demo from 1982, but there were plenty of harsher songs he could pull from the Vault. Which is not to say the song doesn’t contain a certain degree of sexual threat: listen to Prince’s porny giggle after saying ‘spunk’. It’s the Carribean steel drum he plays on the track that gives the song much of its lightness, underlining the new position offered by Prince the lover with a new sound offered by Prince the performer. The album also includes six songs that have continued to be an important part of Prince’s live act to the present day: the aforementioned ‘Venus De Milo’, ‘Girls & Boys’, ‘Mountains’, ‘Anotherloverholenyohead’, ‘Sometimes It Snows in April’ and the song he’s played most often in concert aside from ‘Purple Rain’, his number-one hit in the US, ‘Kiss’.5 Much has been made of the fact that Prince took a while to register what he’d achieved with the song, originally offering it to former Revolution member Brown Mark for his band Mazarati.6 The arrangement of the song is credited to Mazarati’s producer David Z and the band are credited for background vocals, so it seems David Z played a similar role in developing the song as members of The Revolution did with other songs from this era, although the most famous innovation of the song – the minimalist sound achieved by dropping the bass – was a later decision by Prince.7