Prince

by Matt Thorne

  The conflict that would soon emerge shouldn’t, however, overshadow the brilliance of this tour, particularly the American leg. Among the hard core, there are three candidates for Prince’s greatest tour: the Hit N Run/Parade tour of 1986, the Lovesexy tour, and to a lesser extent, the One Nite Alone … tour. But to a certain breed of fan, the Hit N Run/Parade tour easily ranks highest, largely because Prince was debuting an extraordinary amount of high-quality new material (the same would be true of the Sign o’ the Times and The Ultimate Live Experience tours, of course, but those shows were without The Revolution). These were Prince’s densest, most complicated shows. While still introducing a lot of Parade to an audience who would just be getting familiar with the new record, there were even more unexpected highlights to the evening: the band performing without him on the instrumental ‘Alexa de Paris’; an ever-growing ‘Mutiny’; and a compelling new version of the song he’d given to André Cymone the year before, ‘The Dance Electric’, which, performed with The Revolution and with Atlanta Bliss on Miles-like trumpet and Prince on guitar, sounded every bit as strong as any Parade song and in its confident demonstration of Prince’s burgeoning interest in jazz-funk provided the show’s highlight.

  At the Warfield Theater in San Francisco, Prince made space for Eric Leeds to take control of ‘Mutiny’ as he asked the girls in the audience for their phone numbers, before going into the unreleased ‘Dream Factory’. André Cymone appeared to sing ‘The Dance Electric’, but the song didn’t have the power it had when he wasn’t there, performed as a more straightforward rock song than it had been in Boston. The Revolution were most evident on ‘Anotherloverholenyohead’, Lisa’s pretty piano solo working its way up through the complicated arrangement. The show was one of the longest and loosest Prince had performed to date, the tightness of the first half giving way to extended jams (including fifteen minutes of ‘America’) towards the end.

  A week later, Prince brought the show to Los Angeles. Three of the best performances from this night – ‘Automatic’, ‘D.M.S.R.’ and ‘The Dance Electric’ – were released in soundboard quality by Prince’s NPG Music Club as part of the seventh Ahdio (sic) show, and it’s these recordings that should be sought out as one of two official documents of the tour, the other being Prince’s birthday show in Detroit, which was recorded for a concert film, Parade Live – long overdue a reissue. Although only featuring an hour of the show, along with the Dortmund Lovesexy show it’s the best video recording Prince has ever released. Only here can you get a full sense of the true power of a Prince and The Revolution show from this era. Prince on his checkerboard stage, dancing atop his piano, stripped to the waist, a show with none of the longueurs so familiar from Prince’s main shows over the past decade – no stop–starts, no dead spots: when he goes to the piano, it’s a dancing run to an upright organ, the whole band working as one of the most formidable machines popular music has ever seen. And while the set may be one of his more pared down, the show is still theatrical: there’s as much drama in Prince’s out-on-a-limb performance of ‘Head’/‘Electric Man’ as in any of his movies.

  The next two shows were an undocumented appearance in Louisville and one in Sheridan, chosen for the premiere of Under the Cherry Moon via a competition organised by Warner Brothers and MTV in which the winning Prince fan, who turned out to be Wyoming resident Lisa Barber, would get the premiere in their home town. Wendy Melvoin remembers: ‘We had the worst flight ever from Denver to Sheridan. Everyone was praying.’ ‘The plane was like a VW van with wings,’ Lisa Coleman adds. ‘We thought we were gonna die,’ says Wendy.

  ‘We arrived at the Holiday Inn in this tiny little town,’ Wendy explains. ‘I got in trouble for drinking a beer, and Prince docked me a bazillion dollars.’ For Lisa, ‘It was so strange to go to this little town and then do a gig in the ballroom. I was up on a riser but the ceiling was so low it was right there. The keys on the synth were curved from the heat. It was so hot on that stage it fried your head. There was all this hoopla. It was a tiny hotel.’

  I asked them how Prince responded to the unexpected location. ‘You know what, he never let on,’ says Wendy. As far as Lisa could tell, ‘He didn’t care. He was like, “We’re gonna rock Sheridan.”’ (And clearly he gave it his all. He spent eight hours going round town, responding to the repeated question about how he found the place by saying ‘Purple’ over and over.)

  The MTV special to celebrate the occasion, Premiere Party for Prince’s Under the Cherry Moon, is priceless, playing up the contrast between the ranches and rodeos of ‘Big Sky Country’ and ‘Prince and Hollywood’ (in the form of Ray Parker Jr, Rosanna Arquette and Joni Mitchell). The mayor of the town, Max Debolt, takes the stage to say how Prince coming to town is a natural progression from the Queen of England’s recent visit (when he says that some people think nothing ever happens in this part of Wyoming, a heckler can clearly be heard shouting, ‘It doesn’t!’). The live performance was high-energy but clearly a struggle for the band, a six-song mini-set of which only four songs were broadcast, the stained ceiling of the town’s Holiday Inn an impossible contrast to The Revolution’s glamour.

  After a show in Denver, the tour finished with two dates in New York. Andy Warhol attended the first and recorded in his diary: ‘Prince jumped out naked, or almost, and it [was] the greatest concert I’ve ever seen there, just so much energy and excitement. We went into the Mike Todd Room and it was just almost empty, tables set up, reserved, and there, in a white coat and pink bellbottoms, like a Puerto Rican at a prom, all by himself, was Prince. He danced with each and every girl – all these weird girls in sixties dresses. Literally with every girl, and he wasn’t even a good dancer.’18 Among the performances Warhol would have witnessed that night was an even more intense nine-minute version of ‘Mutiny’ featuring the ‘Ice Cream Castles’ and ‘the roof is on fire’ chants and a brilliant autobiographical monologue about his first trip to New York, when he was taken out by his sister’s boyfriend Bill and taken to Madison Square Garden and told that if he ever made it, this was where he’d play.

  *

  The next leg of the Parade run marked the first time Prince had toured in Europe since 1981, and it’s unsurprising that these shows rate so highly with fans on this side of the Atlantic and are considered by those who saw them as Prince in his prime. The tour opened with three nights at Wembley Arena. While the set was similar to the American one, he dropped ‘Mutiny’ after the first two nights (admittedly the song had lost some of its charm now that it featured former backstage man and new dancer Wally ‘doing the kangaroo’), replacing it with the far less compelling ‘A Love Bizarre’. He had also, as at the New York shows, replaced ‘The Dance Electric’ with ‘When Doves Cry’, which also made it a far more conventional show (although the performance of this song was still one of the most bracing moments of each night).

  Even after his terrible treatment at the hands of their fans, there remained an affinity between Prince and The Rolling Stones. Partly it was the friendship he had with Ron Wood, partly the moves he’d copped off Mick Jagger, but most of all, they had songs he admired, and on this tour Prince played ‘Miss You’ with Ron Wood and Sting at Wembley, and then again with Wood at an after-show at a club called Busby’s. (He also jammed with Eric Clapton at Kensington Roof Gardens.) Prince still plays ‘Miss You’ to this day.

  The tour continued with three nights in Rotterdam, then Copenhagen and Stockholm, the exuberance draining still further, before a show at the Zenith in Paris taped on a mobile recording unit (during a one-off performance of ‘17 Days’, Prince announced that they were recording the show and making a record, and that night they recorded the basic track for ‘It’s Gonna Be a Beautiful Night’), followed by one night in Frankfurt, a night in Brussels and four more German dates. The core members of The Revolution had become increasingly unhappy, sensing that the size and importance of their roles were steadily being diminished. As Wendy Melvoin remembers: ‘I was totally jealous and hu
rt. I was bummed by it and I ultimately knew … it made me realise it wasn’t the band I thought it was. It wasn’t a democracy; he could do whatever he wanted, crew expendable. That was the beginning of the end for us. We knew. “Wait, what is Wally doing?”’ Lisa shared her astonishment: ‘Those guys were carrying our luggage, and now they’re onstage?’ Says Wendy, ‘What? Excuse me! We were making the same pay cheque too. Oh, man! This is icky. We weren’t getting paid. Yeah, he was getting ready to let us go.’

  I asked Matt Fink if he had any inkling of the trouble that lay ahead. ‘No, it came as a surprise. His arguments with Wendy and Lisa led up to it. Wendy and Lisa didn’t want to quit. It was a shock when he got rid of them and Bobby in one fell swoop. I was disappointed. He asked me if I wanted to stay or go, but he clearly stated he would understand if I left. I felt maybe he was checking to see my loyalty. But there was also a question of making a living and not wanting to depart. I tried to dissuade him. We were an established group with an identity that he was busting up. I stayed on and felt terrible. It really saddened me; it was rough. Of course, he would’ve been doing what he did no matter what. It didn’t change him creatively, although things were definitely different after the departure of Wendy and Lisa.’

  Lisa also believes that Prince’s development at this time wasn’t solely creative: ‘I think he wanted more party time. We were too serious and into the music. We weren’t wearing the sexy clothes. In the beginning I did because it was more punk and I dug that, it was cutting edge, but then it moved into … I didn’t want to be a hoochie mama, I wasn’t into it any more. It changed. I think he was trying to put the party back into it somehow.’ For Wendy there was another problem: ‘And there was this weird personal spilky because he was involved with my sister at the time.’ Lisa agrees. ‘That put a damper on things.’

  The European tour was followed by four dates in Japan. The band flew out at the beginning of September. By the time they returned, The Revolution was over.

  11

  ROADHOUSE GARDEN AND SONGS FOR SUSANNAH

  For Wendy Melvoin, the end of The Revolution is easily identified: the last night of the Parade tour at the Yokohama stadium in Tokyo, which climaxed with Prince smashing up his ‘Purple Rain’ guitar: a symbolic act that she believed indicated his desire to break with the band and his past.

  Before this dramatic end, Prince paid tribute to the era and everything he had gone through with his band-mates by playing one of his most heartfelt renditions of ‘Sometimes It Snows in April’, concluding the song by thanking Wendy and Lisa for their performances. Then he actually smashed two guitars – not, it should be noted, in Pete Townshend axe-trashing style, but for as controlled a performer as Prince it was significant enough, dropping each to the floor in anger as if it was the instrument’s fault for failing to convey the strength of his emotions on this charged night. He also drew back his arm as if to cold-clock his band members as he took the second guitar, a playful act that nevertheless prompted a flinch in response. Although he’d announced his retirement at the end of the Purple Rain tour, this time the duo realised it was serious. ‘We knew, “Oh fuck, this is it,”’ Wendy told me. ‘We got back to LA, and he took me and Lisa aside and he said, “I’ve got to let you go.” And we’re like, “But we just finished five records of material.” So we figured the reason he let us go was that he’d lost control and needed to get it back.’

  What was on these five records has long been the subject of speculation. Dozens of largely unreleased songs recorded during this period circulate, along with complex theories about how the tracks might have been arranged on vinyl. Indeed, it is the period from the end of Parade to the release of Sign o’ the Times on which a large part of the legend of Prince’s Vault rests.

  The most famous of Prince’s suppressed records is The Black Album, an album which became one of the world’s most popular bootlegs1 because, unlike most ‘lost’ recordings, it was finished and relatively easily located, its dissemination spreading far beyond the usual narrow circle of tape traders. And the record did, of course, eventually get an official release. But even more venerated are the lost albums believed to have been recorded in the run-up to Sign o’ the Times – among them Dream Factory, Camille and Crystal Ball.

  Much of the mythology that has grown up around these lost albums can be traced back to the writings of Princeologist Per Nilsen, and seems to hinge largely on what Nilsen has described as ‘assemblies’ of songs that he argues were made at certain points.2 While Nilsen has been described by Prince’s former manager Alan Leeds as a ‘fastidious historian’ and his sessionology is the cornerstone of any serious Prince study, all the members of The Revolution that I interviewed for this book cautioned me against reading too much intent into these early configurations. ‘Fans talk about Dream Factory and Crystal Ball,’ Wendy Melvoin told me, ‘but all of these songs weren’t records. Roadhouse Garden, Crystal Ball, Dream Factory and all the songs from Sign o’ the Times that we did after Parade was done and by the time we were let go, that’s all the music that was accumulated. I don’t know who’s turned them into what, unless people have got hold of Prince’s cassettes that he’d play in the car that he’d title for shits and giggles and it’d turn into the Crystal Ball record, Dream Factory. That’s all myth.’ Lisa Coleman confirms this, saying: ‘It was never that he’d come up with these as proper titles; he’d label the cassettes after the title of the last song.’ Leeds adds: ‘I think it was just a process of evolution as he continued to record and amass this vast archive of new material. He had to wrestle with how to shape it into an album. There were points along the way where he thought he was there, he would sequence something. One of those sequences was called Crystal Ball, and he decided that wasn’t it, and he starts again, and one of those sequences was called Dream Factory, and another was Camille.’ Leeds says as well as tapes, there were also ‘reference discs’, hard shellac acetates of an album that would be mastered for Prince to live with and make decisions about what he wanted to change. But Leeds says three discs of Sign o’ the Times were presented to Warner Brothers, who asked Prince to slim it down to a double.

  Even if the ‘assemblies’ were put together without as much thought as some fans would like to believe, there’s no question about the quality of the songs themselves, and the period also saw Prince playing with different overarching concepts – like disguising himself as the hermaphrodite Camille. ‘There are loads of those [songs] sitting around, including “Go”, “Teacher, Teacher”, all those songs,’ Wendy told me. ‘That was the busiest time for the three of us, pounding away in the south of France. When Sign o’ the Times was almost done, that’s when he fired everybody. I don’t have any specifics other than this was a really busy time when we were constantly recording.’ Matt Fink agrees. ‘There were a few things that were worked on.’

  Fink doesn’t remember all the stuff they recorded during this period, but he does say that it was another rumoured album, Roadhouse Garden, that they ‘were three-quarters of the way through. We were doing session work in the studios in his house. Paisley Park wasn’t built yet.’ And it was Roadhouse Garden – rather than Dream Factory – that Prince used as a title for a proposed box set of unreleased Revolution songs considered at the end of the 1990s but which ultimately never saw the light of day.

  This box set was eagerly anticipated by fans who wanted an official record of this period and who were eager to hear the songs in greater fidelity, but it abruptly disappeared from the schedule. Prince said anyone wanting to know what happened to the project should ask Wendy and Lisa. So I did, and they told me: ‘Because we’re gay. The Lord thinks we’re evil, and we’re damning The Revolution to hell.’ Fink also says that as much as he’d love for people to hear that stuff, Prince never discussed this planned later release with him. H. M. Buff, who worked on this later Roadhouse Garden project, says he’s glad it was never completed. ‘I’m glad it didn’t work out, to be honest with you. I was very excited about it, b
ut he thought he could improve on things, so I would transfer the mix of what was there and he would add those keyboards he liked so much at the time. But we didn’t work on many songs. I remember “Splash” was worked on, “Roadhouse Garden” and “Wonderful Ass” once again came out of the Vault. Maybe there were a couple more that I don’t remember.’

  Although there are no proposed track listings for the first version of Roadhouse Garden in circulation, there are a sizeable number of Revolution-connected songs that haven’t been linked to Dream Factory or any other immediately subsequent projects. If the album did indeed exist as a possible project, it has intriguing links with the Purple Rain era, and it seems it might have represented a deliberate step backwards to safer commercial-rock territory after the more experimental (and less popular) Around the World in a Day and Parade, working as a rock-orientated sequel to his biggest-selling album.