Prince

by Matt Thorne

  Prince played ‘Roadhouse Garden’ at the live show at First Avenue on his twenty-sixth birthday, and twice in rehearsal for that performance. With its use of a mysterious location as the focus for its drama, it resembles ‘Paisley Park’, only with a harder and more cinematic focus than the latter song’s Haight-Ashbury fantasy. Prince would go on to write many songs about houses, real and imagined, and the parties within, but with its sense of lost pleasure, this is his most beguiling.

  Both during rehearsal and onstage, ‘Roadhouse Garden’ was linked with another song, ‘Our Destiny’. The show was only Wendy Melvoin’s second full performance with the band, and the song was her initiation: a duet about a couple unable to resist each other, featuring a spoken-word passage from Prince in which he offers a lighter variation on the erotic threat that he usually would make more blatant when recording songs alone. Given the apparent flirtation in this song, I asked Wendy if Prince knew about her sexuality. ‘He knew I was gay. I’m not a butch, but I’m not a super-femmy. I’m more androgynous.’

  Wendy and Lisa later worked on both of these songs – it was for ‘Our Destiny’ that they originally wrote the string section that opens ‘The Ladder’ – but these revised versions are not in circulation. Even if Fink is right and Roadhouse Garden was nearly finished, we can only guess what else might have been on the album, although the proposed track listing for the 1998 box set included several Revolution tracks usually associated with Dream Factory (‘Witness 4 the Prosecution’, ‘All My Dreams’, ‘In a Large Room with No Light’), as well as two other well-known out-takes from this era (‘Wonderful Ass’ and ‘Splash’), and perhaps most enticingly, the original version of ‘Empty Room’.

  While Prince has written plenty of songs inspired by the end of a relationship, he’s never written an out-and-out break-up album in the manner of Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, Marvin Gaye’s Here, My Dear or Nick Cave’s The Boatman’s Call. Some fans consider Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic the closest he came to this, but this relies largely on speculation. For me, it’s the songs he wrote during his relationship with Susannah Melvoin that give the closest sense of what such a record might sound like.

  I got to talk to Susannah Melvoin about these songs, and what they meant to her. Like her sister, Melvoin is an extremely intellectual and artistic woman, although she is slightly less direct and has a more abstract way of expressing herself. It was intriguing to discover that the subject of these songs felt the same way about them as the fans do. ‘Some people say I was his muse, and I don’t know if that’s what it was, but I can say I did inspire a certain kind of writing. There was a part of him that wanted to express himself in a deeper way, and I think our relationship was an opportunity for him to do that at the time. So if that’s what being a muse is, that’s what it was. I think Wendy and Lisa had the same effect.’

  The first thing I wanted to ask Susannah about was a song called ‘Wally’. Prince’s engineer during this period, Susan Rogers, has made great claims for the song, suggesting that it was one of the few times she witnessed Prince truly expressing his emotions, and it has often been suggested that this is the Holy Grail of unreleased Prince tracks. He supposedly recorded the song twice, the first time feeling so freaked out by what he’d committed to tape that he deliberately destroyed the track, only to come back and record a second version a day later.

  It’s easy to mythologise a track that hardly anyone has had a chance to hear, and I think there’s more than a little fetishism to the way this song has been built up. I don’t know if Susannah had heard the first version or the second, but she told me that the track held little emotional import for her, and that it wasn’t really significant that the song was an imagined conversation with Wally Safford – a later arrival to The Revolution, whose presence in the band caused great friction with Wendy and Lisa. ‘Prince just used that guy’s name. I have no attachment to that song.’ But she did have emotional attachment to almost every other song that Prince had written about her, among them one of his most beloved tracks, ‘Empty Room’.

  ‘Empty Room’ has only grown in stature over the years, eventually receiving an official release, of a sort, in 2003.3 It is now a firm after-show favourite, but it took a long time, even in altered form, to escape Prince’s Vault, and the original take is still unreleased. ‘He played that for me right before we went to Europe,’ Susannah told me.4 ‘Bobby Z was going to Paris to get married at the weekend, and he made the band come in and record the night of Bobby’s wedding reception, and he recorded that song and played it for me the next day and left. He was having a hard time, I think, in the relationship that he had with me, and I don’t know how much of that relationship I should be talking about, but he was troubled, and I could hear he was troubled in the song and he was sad, and I was sad, and he left and I got a call to come out to France.’5

  There is an obvious companion song to ‘Empty Room’ called ‘Go’, which Prince, Wendy and Lisa worked on both in the studio and later recorded on tape during a rehearsal at the Théâtre du Verdure in Nice. This must have represented a strange recording experience for all concerned. As brilliant and as broad-minded as the Melvoins undoubtedly are, it can’t have been easy for Wendy to sing the chorus on a song powered by the frustrations of Prince’s relationship with her twin sister, and it’s a mark of Susannah’s sophistication that her response upon hearing the song was merely to note its brilliance.

  Of the many songs she inspired him to write, it is (along with ‘If I Was Your Girlfriend’) one of her very favourites, ‘where he was digging deep and really coming up with the great turning of phrases, and the clarity of thought and subtext and subject. If you were to dissect those lyrics, and the song-writing [itself], he was working it, they came to him at that time.’6

  If the ‘Go’ session was hard for Wendy, it no doubt paled in comparison to the time Prince, Wendy and Lisa spent working on a new version of ‘Wonderful Ass’. The anatomy of the female body is a recurring theme of Prince’s. Even if one doesn’t accept the suggestion that the title of ‘Little Red Corvette’ is a sly reference to female genitalia, New Power Generation member Tommy Barbarella mentions Prince writing a song called ‘Good Pussy’ in 1998,7 and there’s also the more famous Gold Experience song, ‘Pussy Control’.8 But Prince usually gets away with it because it is done either with humour or, as in this case, with a sense of the singer being overwhelmed by the pulchritudinous nature of the body before which he submits himself.

  It’s tempting to dismiss this song as a simplistic sketch in comparison to the more sophisticated discussion of sexual politics on much of Sign o’ the Times, but two of that album’s most emotionally compelling songs, ‘Strange Relationship’ and ‘I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man’, were also rescued from early-1980s tapes.9 As with those two songs, the cold and somewhat cruel sexual bite of the lyrics works in elegant contrast to the accessibility of the music, a prime example of 1980s rock-pop. It’s a song about a woman who’s jealous of Prince’s female friends because she thinks they’re his bed mates, whom he tolerates because of his admiration for her butt. But there’s a difference between Prince amusing himself about this idea alone and forming a chorus with Wendy and Lisa: their versions stretch out beyond all control. The song’s intricate mix and musical depth explain why Prince considered it for official release, but the presence of Wendy and Lisa alongside Prince singing in a taunting fashion about the physical qualities of a third woman may not quite fit with Prince’s latest reinvention of himself. Given what would happen to The Revolution soon afterwards, ‘Wonderful Ass’ also works as a fascinating dramatisation of the conflict that followed. In both versions, Wendy and Lisa insist ‘The Revolution will be heard’. Not for much longer.

  There are a handful of other songs recorded in this era not connected to Dream Factory. ‘Splash’, which eventually received two separate releases on different versions of Prince’s later online ventures, is one of Prince and The Revolution’s finest recordings.
The water imagery and light psychedelia link the track with Wendy and Lisa’s own later work as a duo, and in many ways their first two albums indicate where The Revolution might have taken Prince had the band stayed together. Among other tracks about which not that much is known is ‘Fun Love’, for which Brent Fischer retains his father’s score. He told me: ‘Unfortunately, we don’t retain every single score. It’s standard operating procedure when you’re done writing an arrangement to give the original to the person who paid for the arrangement. You might keep a copy for yourself, but you give the original to either the record company or the artist. So we usually relinquished all those things [and] my dad didn’t always keep copies.’ But he has ‘Fun Love’ and ‘Cosmic Day’, among many others, in an archive of sixty years of Clare Fischer compositions, and of the former he says, ‘The lyrics were very sensually suggestive.’

  I haven’t heard the complete version of ‘Everybody Want What They Don’t Got’,10 but I have read the whole lyric in Prince’s 1994 book Neo Manifesto (about which more later), and it’s one of those songs, like ‘Pop Life’ or the later ‘People Without’ or much later ‘F.U.N.K.’ or ‘Rich Friends’, which reveal the crueller side of Prince’s social commentary. It’s much easier to mock material greed when you have achieved enormous wealth. The fact that the items the characters in this song desire are so stupid (a Jack Benny album!) or that Prince implicates himself at the end by admitting he’s got his eye on a neighbour’s sprinkler system only make the song’s moralising more galling.

  The highlight of this era for me is the session that produced four songs over two days in June 1986, which represents the last time the band sound untroubled. It has been suggested that the songs were recorded for a planned Broadway musical,11 although details on this are vague, and it was a project that never came to fruition. Another idea in the air at the time, Lisa Coleman told me, was a concept record about an imaginary nightclub, on which at least two of these songs would fit, as well as several others from this period. This concept seems to have been folded into the Graffiti Bridge project, on which two of these songs (in considerably different versions) later appeared.

  Three of the tracks Prince took into Minneapolis’s Washington Avenue Warehouse for this midweek session were old: he’d first committed ‘Can’t Stop This Feeling I Got’, ‘Girl o’ My Dreams’ and ‘We Can Funk’ to tape in the early 1980s, during the period while he was working on 1999 and before he’d started on Purple Rain, and all of the songs would undergo further reinvention before they were released.

  ‘Can’t Stop This Feeling I Got’ and ‘Girl o’ My Dreams’ are short, funny, rockabilly freak-outs, and the released versions of the songs are both disposable. On Graffiti Bridge, ‘Can’t Stop This Feeling I Got’ is Prince solo (although surrounded by crowd noise and encouragement), as it was when he first recorded it in 1982,12 and despairing – the song is still in the same style, but drawn out and much more of a genuine lament. But in the Warehouse, playing with a line-up of The Revolution that had swollen to nine members,13 Prince performed the song with infectious joy. ‘Girl o’ My Dreams’ is a short throwaway with a funny cinephile lyric about how his favourite women are old-time movie stars like Marilyn Monroe and Lauren Bacall. Prince can’t resist making a joke about Bacall being old and wrinkled (at the time he wrote the song she was sixty-two), but the song is redeemed by a member of The Revolution (or Prince himself putting on a funny voice14) taking him to task for his chauvinism. Prince would never release the song himself, instead giving it to Paisley Park-signed rapper T. C. Ellis. It can sometimes seem as if Prince is either genuinely perverse about deciding which unreleased song goes to which artist (or perhaps, in most instances, he simply doesn’t care), but giving T. C. Ellis ‘Girl o’ My Dreams’ was a truly baffling move. It’s not that the song is a lost classic, and the Paisley Park album on which it appeared (True Confessions) is long forgotten, so it would be easy for him to put it out again, but I can’t help wondering whether he was having a little joke or conducting deliberate sabotage by deciding that an aspiring rapper should be singing about Lena Horne.

  But it’s the other two songs recorded during this session that really show The Revolution as a live unit at their very best. ‘We Can Funk’ is one of those songs through which it’s possible to trace ten years of Prince’s development. Prince has recorded at least eight versions, and it resurfaces at various points in his career, leaking poison along the way. The song began as a track on a 1983 tape called ‘We Can Fuck’ and ended up as a somewhat tepid PG-rated George Clinton duet on Graffiti Bridge. When Prince finally decided to ready the song for release, he took as the basis his original tape rather than the Revolution recording,15 which seems surprising given that Wendy and Lisa also played on this early 1983 version (as well as Susannah, Jonathan Melvoin and David Coleman). Wendy remembers the song with particular fondness, preferring its original title.

  While it’s hard to fathom why Prince gave ‘Girl o’ My Dreams’ to T. C. Ellis, I wonder whether ‘Data Bank’ might always have been intended for its eventual recipients, The Time, and if The Time might always have been part of whatever project Prince was working on then, the musical or the nightclub record. In the lyrics he mentions ‘the time’, ‘Movie Star’ (the title of a song Prince wrote for Morris Day a couple of months earlier) and ‘The Kid’, and although there are shout-outs to Eric and Lisa, the song’s subject – getting women’s numbers – makes it an obvious sequel to ‘777-9311’.

  While little of this music can be said to be truly lost, largely having survived in alternative versions, it resists being fitted together into an easily identifiable package and remains an overlooked period in Prince’s career. The mythology around Dream Factory and Crystal Ball may be frustrating to the former members of The Revolution, but at least it means those songs continue to be written and thought about. When I talked to Matt Fink about this era, he struggled to recall some of the songs, and needed me to jog his memory with song titles. As far as official endings are concerned, the last recorded evidence of The Revolution as a band is ‘It’s Gonna Be a Beautiful Night’, which began as an onstage jam at the Paris Zenith before being almost completely overdubbed. And there are at least two more Revolution-connected out-takes – ‘Eggplant’ and the ominously titled ‘It Ain’t Over ’Til the Fat Lady Sings’ – known to exist but which have never reached a larger audience.16 Maybe one day we’ll know the full story, but for the moment let’s remember them like this, jamming away in the Washington Avenue Warehouse, with no idea how little time they have left.

  12

  THE STORY OF A MAN I AM NOT

  The romantic version of the story is that Prince abandoned the Dream Factory project when Wendy and Lisa left, and it’s true that the majority of the tracks involved them. But the project also included more heavily Prince-focused songs that he could have easily carried over to Sign o’ the Times, and it seems he had yet to land upon a unifying concept, unless, as several close to Prince maintain, Sign o’ the Times was indeed always the big album all along.

  ‘When people ask what was on Dream Factory,’ Lisa Coleman says now, ‘I tell them, “I’ve no idea what you’re talking about. I know there was a song called ‘Dream Factory’.” But was there an album? I know it got as far as having a cover, drawn by Susannah Melvoin, who was sharing Prince’s bed and studio at the time.’ This cover, Melvoin told me, was ‘kooky and cartoonish, [with] great imagery of the doors of the Dream Factory opening and [someone] walking into space’. And although it has never appeared in any official form, Dream Factory has been the subject of several magazine articles, with many critics arguing that it represents Prince’s finest achievement. But none of the three versions of the album suggested by bootleggers and sessionologists work as cohesive records, something at which Prince (at least at this point in his career) always excelled.

  If he was seriously considering Dream Factory as a proper release, it seems that much like The Black Album, it was a project born
out of anger that if taken through to completion might have inspired second thoughts. Although Wendy and Lisa’s skill with light and shade gives the songs they worked on a brightness and energy, the Prince songs related to the project represent some of the darkest music he had considered releasing under his own name.

  ‘Dream Factory’ is a straightforward revenge song, Prince’s equivalent of Bob Dylan’s ‘Positively Fourth Street’. This is something Prince didn’t try to hide at the time, although the sleeve note he offered to explain the song when it was eventually released is a half-hearted attempt at obfuscation. The track was written, he writes, ‘4 a turncoat, who after a quick brush with success, lost themselves in a haze of wine, women and pills … or so the fiction goes? This person is not Prince – “Listen 2 the story of a man Eye am not.”’1

  Per Nilsen and his associates identify this person as The Family’s Paul Peterson, who had aroused Prince’s anger by walking out on his project in search of a solo career. Peterson refuses to discuss this era – although onstage he will occasionally make jokes about the clothes Prince used to make him wear – so while I did talk to him off the record, I cannot confirm the rumour.2 But given the state of Prince’s film career at this time – although coming off the flop Under the Cherry Moon, it wouldn’t be long before he began plans for a sequel to Purple Rain – the song could also have been a note-to-self about the importance of keeping Hollywood at a distance.