by Matt Thorne
‘Girls & Boys’, though fairly slight lyrically, is another pointer to Prince’s future direction, and the first track to feature horn from Eric Leeds, evidence of the widening of his sound. It was one of the few older songs to stay in the set during the Sign o’ the Times tour and would show up on two live Prince albums recorded many years later. On the album version, the horns are used almost like a sample, but it’s a song that would long continue to evolve in performance.8 Only two songs on the album seem to have any continuity with Around the World in a Day: ‘Mountains’ and ‘Anotherloverholenyohead’. As with ‘America’, the similar full-band rock performance from the previous album, ‘Mountains’ was also released in an extended alternative, though this long-form version is far less essential than ‘America’. The Revolution play this song over the end credits of Under the Cherry Moon, and the video for the song was a colour version of the same sequence. It shares the same symbolic, faux-fairy-tale language as ‘Paisley Park’, Prince filling out his imagined fantasy world. ‘Anotherloverholenyohead’ is lyrically an extension of ‘New Position’, but musically a clear return to the broader palette of Around the World in a Day, and it stands out even more on this record, where it’s surrounded by songs that seem like little more than fragments.
Prince commentators often pick up on the difference between the reception this album received in his home country and everywhere else, Michaelangelo Matos stating: ‘Parade will always mean more in Europe than in America … in Europe … Parade announced Prince as a man of the world, getting his quirks across more fully, and with more nuance, than any of his previous albums.’9 And it’s true that the European critics were more welcoming of the record, with Steve Sutherland in Melody Maker claiming: ‘Parade eclipses anything else you’ll hear this year.’10 But there were significant exceptions, such as Prince biographer Barney Hoskyns, who in an NME review entitled ‘Sometimes It Pisses Down in April’ observed: ‘I find this album laboured and trite and self-satisfied and won’t be listening to it again.’11
The inconsequential nature of Prince’s lyrics is undoubtedly part of Parade’s charm, but notwithstanding the fact that it’s many Prince fans’ favourite album, the record has a high content of essentially pretty filler. ‘Under the Cherry Moon’ really feels like a sketch (and Prince would cannibalise it for ‘The Question of U’); ‘Life Can Be So Nice’ is so busy that it takes several listens to realise how little it truly contains, especially compared to all the far richer unreleased material Prince was recording at the time; and ‘Do U Lie?’, while musically charming, is an inconsequential nursery rhyme.
But the album does feature one of Prince’s finest achievements. The phrase ‘Sometimes it snows in April’ was something he had been using for a while, offering it as an explanation for why he wasn’t going to tour any more after concluding the Purple Rain run (a threat he soon rescinded) and giving it as dialogue to Tricky in the first draft of Under the Cherry Moon. Wendy Melvoin remembers the recording session as being one of her very favourite. ‘It was Sunset Sound, Studio 3, just the three of us, one take. I think I had some of the words written. Lisa playing the piano in an isolation booth, the guitars. It was written on the spot and recorded in a couple of hours. A beautiful moment, hanging out for a while, recording at Sunset Sound.’
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Although Dr Clare Fischer’s arrangements are a significant part of the record, more of the orchestrations ended up in Under the Cherry Moon than on Parade. I asked Brent Fischer if they knew when Prince contacted them that much of the music they were working on was intended for a film soundtrack. ‘We did know about that, but it didn’t change the way my father approached it because he’s never been a programmatic writer. He wasn’t interested in subscribing to the idea that many film composers have that if you want something comical you use oboe, if you want something ominous you use low strings, it’s how you do the writing. So in those particular instances Dad asked him to send a video of the rough take of the scene so that he could watch the scene and get a sense of what was going on in the story.’ Fischer remembers secrecy being paramount. ‘Prince was determined to make sure that nothing would leak out. One day the doorbell rang and there was a purple limousine out front, and he [the driver] said, “Is Clare Fischer here?” And I said, “Is that the video clip?” And the driver said, “Yeah.” And I said, “That’s OK, I’ll take it.” And he pulled it back and said, “I have specific instructions that this is to go into Clare Fischer’s hands only.” And so I yelled upstairs, “Dad, put your pants on, you’ve got to come downstairs and get this clip.”’
Prince’s innovative sampling of Fischer’s orchestrations led to the introduction of a new criterion for how soundtrack musicians should be paid if their music was used in an incomplete fashion. ‘After the movie was done, right before they released it, we got a call from Warner Brothers that he had actually taken snippets of orchestral parts and he’d chosen those little snippets to be part of the background music in the movie, and that was sort of a first in the American Federation of Musicians’ history. They had to devise a formula to calculate how people should be remunerated for this new use of music.’
While he hardly wants for acclaim, Prince has yet to get full recognition for his ability to fuse (admittedly largely using Fischer’s arrangements) classical and pop. In the epilogue to his study of twentieth-century classical music, The Rest Is Noise, New Yorker music critic Alex Ross argues that ‘some of the liveliest reactions to twentieth-century and contemporary classical music have come from the pop arena, roughly defined,’12 yet the artists he names are all white musicians on the artier side of rock (Sonic Youth, Radiohead, Sufjan Stevens, Joanna Newsom and Björk), with no consideration of the arguably more interesting question of how classical music has influenced black artists such as Stevie Wonder, Outkast or Prince, and this is the record on which the marriage between the two styles is most fully achieved.
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Purple Rain (1984) will always be the definitive Prince film, but time has been kind to his second movie, Under the Cherry Moon (1986). Of its making, Bob Cavallo remembers: ‘Because they had made this very stringent deal with Purple Rain, we owned everything. I made them pay us so they couldn’t screw us on the back end of the film, and I made a three-picture deal where Prince had all the control. But unfortunately, then Prince became enamoured with being the next Fellini and he decided that he should co-write, even though there’s no credit. He demanded that the movie not be a musical, that he die at the end and that it be in black and white.’
Alan Leeds thinks the decision to set the film in France ‘might have something to do with the fact that shooting it in Europe in black and white gave him more of a licence to do that sort of theme, because it was something that was obviously unusual for a black-orientated film’. Leeds also claims the decision was influenced by Steve Fargnoli, who, he says, ‘was Prince’s closest confidant throughout the years. He totally understood the Prince vision.’ Cavallo remembers the behind-the-scenes discussions. ‘I said, “Why are we shooting in black and white?” And he told me that’s what he wanted. So I say, “Why are we shooting in the South of France? We can do this in the west or the south-west or Florida.” And he said, “No, I want the people in the community to see the south of France.” And I said, “Then why the hell do you want to do it in black and white?”
‘After Purple Rain and the tour of Purple Rain, where we played multiple dates everywhere in the country, now he was a true monster star and his creative chops were unbelievable, so he thought he could become a director, even though he had only acted in one film. So we got a great deal from Warner and forced them to do it in black and white so he got what he wanted. And some people liked it, but of course we knew it was going to be a stiff. We didn’t have high hopes for the movie. We just had a good time making it. We were in the south of France, we had big-time movie-business stuff: a beautiful villa on the Cap d’Antibes and two multilingual drivers. I bought a yacht. Fargnoli found me a 93-foot
Benetti and he said to me, “We’ll have the yacht the whole time we’re shooting the movie and then the captain can take it across to Fort Lauderdale, and between the lira and the dollar and the scarcity of that kind of boat in America you’ll come away with a profit, and we’ll have had a yacht and a crew of four for ten weeks. I called it ‘Fiddling while Rome burned’.”’
The original director was Mary Lambert, who, though she would go on to direct several guilty-pleasure movies, including Siesta, Pet Sematary and The In Crowd, was at that time best known for her videos for Madonna. Cavallo remembers: ‘I was tasked with firing her on the second day of shooting because Prince thought she wasn’t good’ – after which Prince himself took over direction.
Considered a turkey by most on release, and subsequently referred to in a disparaging manner even by cast members Kristin Scott Thomas and Steven Berkoff, Scott Thomas’s villainous father in the film, it did find favour among some critics, especially those, like Joe Baltake of the Philadelphia Daily News, who could appreciate the film’s Warholian qualities as deliberate (he suggested that the reason why everyone in the movie is behaving like ‘a vampire in those once-trendy Warhol/Paul Morrissey horror collaborations’ is because the film is a deliberate portrayal of ‘the expatriate as a young zombie’13), and has long been a firm fan favourite.
The Lakeland Ledger reported that Prince approached Martin Scorsese to direct the film after the two of them met for breakfast in Paris, and that Scorsese demurred, allegedly claiming that it wasn’t a good idea for ‘two geniuses to work together’.14 The quote doesn’t sound quite right for Scorsese, even if made ironically, but Prince did use Scorsese’s director of photography from the era, Michael Ballhaus (something Cavallo says he arranged), and the film is unusual among Prince’s film and TV work in that it features him working largely with recognised talents rather than with his own retinue or untested discoveries.
Various drafts of Becky Johnston’s Under the Cherry Moon screenplay reveal an ambition not always apparent in the final film, suggesting a similar downsizing during the film’s development as occurred with the later Graffiti Bridge. The original draft opens with several pages of heavy-handed art-house/music-video symbolism, a note suggesting that ‘we should feel as if we are moving through a dream’ as the screen shows an elephant in fog, a grand piano on the edge of a cliff, the Venus de Milo15 being dragged through the ocean, a full moon, a flamingo next to a canoe buried in sand, a miniature merry-go-round, a St Christopher medallion and a Ford Thunderbird car, which fits with Cavallo’s suggestion that Fellini was the primary influence. The finished film ditches all this and opens in a piano bar, with Kristin Scott Thomas filling in the back story via voice-over. The set-up of the film is beguilingly simple, and it’s the only one of the three full-scale Prince motion pictures to have a workable plot: Christopher Tracy and his sidekick Tricky are hustlers running out of money and decide the only way to fulfil their childhood dream of wealth is for Tracy to seduce heiress Mary Sharon.
As in Graffiti Bridge, handwriting plays an important role. In the opening scene, Christopher Tracy’s partner, Tricky (Jerome Benton, fulfilling the sidekick/servant role he had previously played to Morris Day), sends Tracy a number of notes on napkins, advising him on how to make his piano-playing appealing to a possible conquest. Soon after, the camera lingers on facile notes that Tracy has written for his various women, and the aforementioned ‘wrecka stow’ scene also hinges on a written note.
Bathtubs, once again, are important, to an almost absurd extent; if Christopher Tracy is a vampire (and he does give his landlady a ‘Bela Lugosi look’), then these are his coffins. Giving credence to this reading, Rebecca Blake, who directed the ‘Kiss’ video from the same period, remembers that ‘I was on a heavy vampire kick … so that’s where the black veil on the dancer’s head [in that video] comes from.’16
The original plan was for Prince to cast Susannah Melvoin in Scott Thomas’s role. That she didn’t end up playing Mary Sharon is not something Susannah regrets. ‘Thank God [Scott Thomas] did it,’ Susannah told me. ‘Look at where she is now. It’s beautiful.’ In 1997, Liz Jones wrote that Prince ‘didn’t seem to be aware that [Scott Thomas] was still in the acting business’.17 If this is true (and given his cineaste leanings, it seems unlikely), he was definitely aware by 2009, when he wrote her the song ‘Better with Time’, which can be seen as a belated apology for the indignities of the role.
The biggest area of change during the film’s editing was the ending. Howard Bloom remembers getting a call similar to the one he’d received at the time of Purple Rain, saying that Bob Cavallo told him: ‘“We’re doing a screening of the film tomorrow at a theatre in Sunset Boulevard. It’s one of those theatres with a little dial, and you dial the dial to your right if you like a scene and to your left if you don’t. So you have constant audience feedback, and we’re not really sure if this is a picture.” I went to this theatre in Sunset Boulevard, and Warner Brothers had done something I would usually oppose with all my heart: they had made Prince change the ending to a happy ending. And I watched the movie and it was light but it was delightful. It wasn’t a classic like Purple Rain, but it was damn good entertainment, and I told that to Bob outside the theatre. My chest swelled with pride in someone I loved – I really loved this movie. Then two weeks later I got another phone call: “You’ve got to come out here immediately. Prince has changed the ending of the film.” I wasn’t supposed to be able to see this, so they got me a VHS of the film, waited till the building was closed for the night and made me sit on a rug on the floor of a storage room, watching this thing on a tiny TV because they were afraid that Prince would know that I had seen it. And I thought it was a piece of shit. I knew exactly why Prince had done what he did and killed off the main character, because in his mind the main character was a scamp – dishonest, defying God and breaking the rules of morality. To become moral, to become faithful to God, he had to kill his previous self off. It was a huge mistake.’
But maybe Bloom is wrong in perceiving that Prince was focusing his criticism on his inner self. Chris Moon, Prince’s earliest mentor, believes he was the real target. ‘Do you remember how the movie starts?’ he asked me. ‘It starts out this movie is about Christopher. Christopher only cares about two things – girls and money. You know what Cherry Moon is, right? C. Moon. In the movie, he plays a guy called Christopher and he hands out his business card, and the only thing that’s on the business card is a crescent moon, and the only jewellery I’ve ever worn is a gold crescent moon around my neck. I watched that movie a couple of times and I thought, “I’m not quite sure what the message is here, but I know who you’re trying to communicate to.”’ Alan Leeds isn’t so sure about this: ‘That’s like me taking credit for Leeds University.’ And Bob Cavallo has an entirely different interpretation of the end of the film, believing that Prince wasn’t turning his back on his fans but instead thought ‘they would like the operatic emotionality of that kind of thing’.
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Prince opened what became known as the Hit N Run tour with a surprise home-town show at First Avenue, a month before the release of Parade. As he did when playing there in 1982, and would again when premiering the Sign o’ the Times show in 1987, he was eager to establish that this was a rehearsal. In the time between the last Purple Rain show at the Orange Bowl in Miami nearly a year earlier and this performance, Prince had played only three shows, and this was the first chance for a paying audience to witness the major changes he had undergone since the bombast of the Purple Rain tour. Just as Parade represented a change in his sound from the rock-orientated previous two albums, so the Hit N Run tour revealed a more playful Prince than the angst-ridden kid last seen onstage.
At the First Avenue show, Prince announced that they’d only been rehearsing a week – in reality, they’d been working on the show for a month – but he clearly felt they needed more work as he took the band back into rehearsal after the show and appeared anxious about how the
show might be received, offering up further apologies throughout the performance. ‘Paisley Park’ sounded particularly ragged that evening, as Prince struggled and strained to make it fit, and it’s a song that he performed only a handful of times on the tour, as it didn’t really work in a show more focused on the Parade material. He turned on his bandmates too. When someone began the intro for a song not due until later in the set, he snapped: ‘Man, that’s what I said: you let somebody new in the band, they always want to solo.’
The mention of new people joining the band was an acknowledgement of a recent sore point. After the break-up of The Time, Prince had absorbed several new members into the band, including Jerome Benton, his right-hand man from Under the Cherry Moon, and would now interrupt ‘Raspberry Beret’ to banter with him about breast sizes, giving an early indication as to why some members of The Revolution would soon become frustrated with the new direction. Prince would use Jerome as a foil throughout the tour, seemingly in an attempt to absorb The Time into The Revolution, the childish interplay between the two of them an odd contrast to the sophisticated music Prince and his band were playing. About the change, Matt Fink says: ‘I wasn’t completely crazy about it, but I warmed up to it. It was a result of what happened with The Family. Paul Peterson couldn’t come to an agreement for his terms of contract. Prince wanted to tie him down for seven years, or at least three years with an option, but he just wanted one year with an option. So he walked away, and Prince felt bad so he offered places in The Revolution to members of The Family.’ But Fink accepts that it wasn’t just kindness or guilt behind the restructuring. ‘There was some creative element. The music started to need people playing horns and stuff like that.’ Other additions to the band included Eric Leeds, Atlanta Bliss, and more contentiously, as dancers and on backing vocals, Wally Safford, Greg Brooks and Wendy’s sister Susannah Melvoin.