Prince

by Matt Thorne

  The song makes the Dream Factory of the title (which Susannah also described as a building rather than merely a description of Hollywood) sound like a nightclub – partly because on one assembly of these songs it is preceded by ‘Nevaeh Ni Ecalp A’. This short track is a snippet of the song ‘A Place in Heaven’ played backwards, over which you can hear Wendy and Lisa pretending to be brattish teens mocking a bouncer questioning whether they’re underage. When the ‘man-that-Prince-is-not’ gets into the club, he’s immediately offered what seems like Ecstasy, a drug that would allegedly inspire at least one major creative decision from Prince soon after this. (Whenever Prince sings of the dangers of drugs or a dissolute lifestyle – as on the later ‘The Undertaker’ – he always either makes it sound desirable or, and this is more common, strikes the pose of a callous observer. He is not quite a libertarian, but neither quite a judge: you can do this, he allows, but if you do, you’re on your own.)

  ‘Movie Star’ is a lighter exploration of the same themes. Prince sings over an extremely sparse backing in his Jamie Starr voice of going to a nightclub with the two Time sidekicks, Jerome and Gilbert. It brings together many of Prince’s concerns at the time, and hints at a narrative that didn’t quite come to life in Graffiti Bridge but that could have worked as an alternative Purple Rain sequel. There’s an ambiguity in the song about whether Jamie/Morris is actually a movie star or merely imagining himself as a hero of his own imaginary film: it’s the ultimate culmination of the dialogue-driven songs on the first three Time albums, a deconstruction of Day’s persona that ends with him unable to pay for a round of drinks, the poverty of the sound reflecting his empty wallet. He also calls himself The Kid, an alias shared by Prince (in Purple Rain) and Morris (on Ice Cream Castle), which increases the sense of dislocation.

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  I felt embarrassed about bringing up ‘Big Tall Wall’ in front of Susannah Melvoin. It was as if I’d dug out an intimate love letter Prince had written her, filled with private detail, and asked her what she’d done to inspire it. Talking to Wendy and Lisa previously, I’d discovered that they’d heard out-takes, but didn’t necessarily have copies of them. And although I assumed that Susannah would have wanted to hear every song Prince had allegedly written about her, I had no idea if he’d played them to her at the time, and if not, whether she would have tracked them down.

  Susannah told me he hadn’t played her ‘Big Tall Wall’ at the time – and she hadn’t heard it in many years – but it was clear from her reaction that she still remembered the impact the lyrics had made on her. It’s easy to understand why, and also to appreciate why Prince has – to date – kept it from official release. Stylistically, it’s among his most important out-takes – you can hear in it the seeds of many of the songs on Sign o’ the Times, The Black Album, Lovesexy and Graffiti Bridge – but lyrically it’s unbelievably reactionary, a throwback to the lock-her-up-in-a-trunk misogynist crap of Cliff Richard’s ‘Living Doll’.3 The song is from the perspective of a possessive lover overwhelmed by a girlfriend – with a sexy body and curly brown hair – who decides to respond to her challenges by imprisoning her inside a circular stone wall, while continuing, it seems, to see another girlfriend on the side. This, the singer maintains, is true love. It would be a mistake to take the song too seriously: it’s a definite exercise in black humour, but by the end of the song he’s fully inhabited the persona of a psychopath.

  In spite of its heavy title, ‘Sexual Suicide’ – a song which, it has been argued, Prince initially considered to close the record – is a throwaway. The title was seemingly chosen for its alliteration, and the lyrics are hard to make out beneath the sax and percussion. Reading them reveals that the song is merely a repeated threat that anyone leaving the singer would be committing sexual suicide. This is a theme Prince had been expressing in song since his earliest demo tape.4 Prince again contradicts the suggested configuration of Dream Factory with his sleeve note to accompany ‘Last Heart’, another dark and aggressive love song that Per Nilsen suggests was on the second and third version of this record. Prince claims here that the song was ‘intended as a demo, which is unusually unheard of in Prince’s mind’. For a demo, it’s remarkably polished. The song features Susannah on backing vocals and Eric Leeds on saxophone, and works an incredible sleight-of-hand, making a lyric about a man threatening to murder a cheating lover seem almost AOR.

  Far more sophisticated is ‘In a Large Room with No Light’. The darkness of this song’s lyric seems less personal than political or theological: it points backwards to ‘Annie Christian’ and ‘Ronnie, Talk to Russia’ and forwards to ‘Sign o’ the Times’ and Diamonds and Pearls’ ‘Live 4 Love’. Prince always seems to be spooked by threats of war, and the song was inspired by the geopolitical situation at the time. Of all Prince’s political songs, it’s the most nihilistic. It is less an exploration of theodicy than a statement of the darkness of life, and for once the response is not to party but to despair.

  The bleakness of the lyric is balanced by an upbeat and unusual jazz backing, which surprises as Prince usually does this sort of song alone with his synth and drum machines.5 I never imagined I would get to see Prince perform this long-lost track, but he exhumed it in 2009 for the third of three shows in one night in Los Angeles. Performed in the middle of a heavily jazz-influenced set, it was clear that the anguish that had originally driven the song was long gone.6

  It’s easy to see why Prince eventually decided to give ‘Train’ to Mavis Staples, as it is, in essence, a bluesy lover-done-me-wrong track that suits the power of her voice. It seems likely, too, that he was remembering the importance of trains in gospel music, although the train here is offering salvation only from a doomed relationship. Prince’s version has a spoken-word intro in which he encourages a friend to pack his bags and leave with him, but aside from that the lyric is the same, which makes me wonder if the song was always intended for a woman: gender is often fluid in Prince’s work, but his original version (if intended for release) puts a male singer in an unusual position, staying behind while encouraging his lover to go play Jack Kerouac.

  In spite of the closeness of their working relationship, it’s easy to see how Wendy and Lisa might not have realised where Prince was heading. Wendy told me if they’d stayed around, Prince and the band would have gone in a different direction, one that she believes would have been for the good. During this period, Prince was often off recording alone, and those Wendy and Lisa songs are (mostly) of such high quality that it must have been hard to believe that they would be permanently discarded. At the time, everything (it seems) was up for grabs, a creative scenario that Wendy says was not that different from the way Around the World in a Day and Parade were put together.

  The difficulty of trying to draw any firm conclusions about the Dream Factory track listing is emphasised by Lisa Coleman’s revelation that just as some commentators see Sign o’ the Times as a digest of several contemporaneous alternative projects, so Dream Factory might itself have been a digest of yet more so-far-unheard projects. For example, ‘Visions’, the song which, it has been suggested, would open Dream Factory, was, according to Coleman, one of a number of two-and-a-half minute pieces Prince asked her to record both as a way of testing his new piano set-up of the time and as the starting point for some future release.7

  ‘It’s a Wonderful Day’ sounds like a development or variation on ‘Wonderful Ass’, Prince, Wendy and Lisa once again singing in harmony, but this time without the sexual charge. Prince’s voice is not quite at the pitch he would use when disguising himself as Camille, but it’s much lighter than it is on the songs he was recording alone at the time, and if the track is dated by a drum machine set to generic pop settings he would rarely use when recording alone, it’s still worthy of release. And while lyrically ‘Teacher, Teacher’ – an old cast-off that Prince gave to Wendy and Lisa to transform – returns to overfamiliar territory for Prince (whenever Prince sings about education, it’s almost always of a
sexual kind), it is more sophisticated than any of his other treatments of this theme. The song has a harpsichord-style keyboard sound that (as with much of Wendy and Lisa’s work) gives it a pleasingly retro 1960s sound and elevates it above protégé territory.

  But while all these tracks are appealing and worthwhile, they pale next to the remaining Wendy and Lisa/Prince collaborations, which represent a career high point for all concerned, though only one, ‘Power Fantastic’, has been released in its original form, hidden away at the end of a bonus disc of B-sides. Lisa Coleman remembers writing the music for ‘Power Fantastic’ when Prince gave her and Wendy studio time (it was originally for a song of theirs called ‘Carousel’). She told me that, as with ‘Visions’, the song was born out of instrument testing and experimentation: ‘A lot of the songs were test studies, to hear how something sounds.’ Having written the music, they recorded the song at Prince’s house with The Revolution, with Lisa on the new piano upstairs and the rest of the band in the downstairs studio. Unlike ‘Visions’, which has an improvisational feel, this is one of Prince’s most sophisticated out-takes, Atlanta Bliss’s trumpet-playing of such quality that for many years those who heard it mistook it for a collaboration between Prince and Miles Davis.

  With both ‘Witness 4 the Prosecution’ and ‘A Place in Heaven’, Prince handed over a degree of control to Wendy and Lisa (and his engineer Susan Rogers), although with the former, he reclaimed the song as his own by recording a new version six months later. The difference between the two versions is fascinating, a similar transformation to the one Prince made to ‘Strange Relationship’ between recording it with Wendy and Lisa and redoing it for Sign o’ the Times. Prince also revisited the idea of a relationship being tried in a courtroom, which gives this song its shape, in the much later Gold Experience song ‘Eye Hate U’, which has a similar, albeit even darker, feel. It’s an extremely erotic idea, combining a sanctioned sadomasochism with the wish-fulfilment fantasy of sexual arguments being resolved in public.

  On the first version of ‘Witness’ the three women were also joined by Eric Leeds on saxophone and Susannah Melvoin, who Susan Rogers has suggested was, once again, the subject of the song,8 although if so, this is heavily disguised, as the vocal describes the relationship beginning in school. But even if the song wasn’t about her, it is an indication of the uniqueness of Prince’s set-up at the time that he could present these four women with a lyric in which he defends his obsessive behaviour and ask them to finish it off for him while he went to France. The second version makes explicit the suggestion that it is a song about childhood love, with a spoken intro from Prince stating that it is a story of two childhood sweethearts, and even implying that he is taking on a character’s perspective in the track. With Prince singing of wanting to be given the ‘electric chair’ for his sins, the track also pre-echoes the later Batman song of this title.

  ‘A Place in Heaven’ also exists in two versions. Both feature piano and the harpsichord-sounding keyboard also evident on ‘Teacher, Teacher’. The ‘place in heaven’ is described as a suite with no room service, which feints towards the ‘it is easier to pass through an eye of a needle’ of the Synoptic Gospels, and Prince gives an example of a self-pitying woman frustrated by this, but then the song ends up suggesting instead that given the trickiness of finding comfort (or luxury) in heaven,9 we should concentrate on life on Earth.

  Per Nilsen suggests that ‘All My Dreams’ – which at one time was considered for Parade – was not on the first assembly of Dream Factory. If he was ever considering putting out a single-album version of this record, it seems surprising that he would have left the track out. It is the last song on the suggested second and third assemblies – both double albums – a suitable place for such an epic track, among the most ambitious never to receive release from the Vault. Wendy has said of the song, ‘It reminded me of classic Kid Creole and the Coconuts,’ explaining how Prince sang through a megaphone on one track and kept the other clean, before mixing the two while she and Lisa did crazy background vocals.

  The instructions for these vocals, Lisa has explained, was to ‘sing like you are Bette Davis’. Revealing once again how important films are to Prince in shaping and driving his creative development – and also demonstrating how Prince was going in one direction with Wendy and Lisa and another more darker direction while alone – she explains they were watching 1930s ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz’-era films while working.10 The track is also a favourite of Matt Fink’s, who considers it ‘a great piece of work’, while Brent Fischer, who also worked on the song, says it’s his favourite unreleased track: ‘It’s a great, great tune and I hope it will be released one day, and it’s got a great orchestral arrangement to it too, if I can pat my dad on the back.’ But unless Prince returns to his Roadhouse Garden project and pulls together these Revolution-related tracks into some sort of coherent order – which seems unlikely – or writes more liner autobiography about this period – and given the cryptic nature of his publications to date, it’s doubtful – it seems that this era will remain the least understood but most talked about of Prince’s career, a time when he was producing material of incredible quality yet failed to find a satisfactory way of putting it out.

  13

  REBIRTH OF THE FLESH

  It has long been known that Prince was inspired to write the song ‘Shockadelica’ after hearing an advance copy of former Time member Jesse Johnson’s album of the same name. But Susannah Melvoin suggested that the record may have kick-started not just the song, but this entire period of recording, believing that it represents the true starting point for the post-Revolution era. Still, it’s worth remembering that things are rarely so clear-cut with Prince, and also that he often finds ways of moving forward through returning to his past. It’s true that the character of ‘Camille’ was given a name in the lyric to ‘Shockadelica’, and the concept of Camille seems to have followed that song, but Prince first used the speeded-up vocal style that characterised this project three years earlier on ‘Erotic City’. The inspiration, Prince confessed,1 was the nineteenth-century hermaphrodite Herculine Barbin, nicknamed Camille, whose journals were brought to wider attention in the 1980s by French philosopher Michel Foucault. If Prince was inspired by Johnson’s record, it was to return to a previous style of his own.

  Susannah also believes that the Camille album and The Black Album are perhaps more closely linked than has previously been acknowledged, which is borne out by the recording times: Prince worked on the first song to be completed for The Black Album, ‘Superfunkycalifragisexy’, the day after finishing the first Camille song, ‘Shockadelica’. ‘I think it was a cathartic thing for him,’ Susannah told me, before suggesting that it eventually took him somewhere he might not have wanted to go, hence his decision not to release either album.

  Although The Black Album (which begins with a song identifying it under the alternative title ‘The Funk Bible’) includes Prince’s most obvious (and contentious) response to hip hop (‘2 Nigs United 4 West Compton’), there also seems something of his answer to this genre in the Camille record, especially his underlying suspicion of anyone he doesn’t consider sufficiently musically skilled.2 Camille is not a rap record as such, but it’s informed by the genre.

  Because all of the Camille tracks were eventually released,3 it is a relatively uncelebrated project, remembered mainly for the three tracks that ended up on Sign o’ the Times. Maybe the excitement for the listener of finding songs credited to Camille on that album – including one, ‘U Got the Look’, that was written after Prince had abandoned the Camille album – and being led into the world of Prince’s alter egos in such a subtle way was worth the death of this alternative project. But it’s also worth considering as an album rather than merely the first appearance of a set of some of Prince’s most appealing songs. It’s actually a better record than The Black Album, and although it lacks the breadth of Sign o’ the Times, it might have been the braver release. Certainly, these t
racks work brilliantly as a suite, and as good as most are separately, they undoubtedly gain added power from being heard together.

  ‘Rebirth of the Flesh’ is a slightly sinister, heavily symbolic title for one of Prince’s brightest, poppiest songs, but perhaps as well as its obvious significance – opening a record that features Prince moving away from rock back towards funk (or, in this case, even dance), and therefore offering a more explicit connection with the body – it might also refer to Prince’s at the time recently abandoned jazz-jam side project The Flesh. (If it’s too much of a stretch to imagine that this might have been Prince’s way of noting that he was carrying ideas from that mostly unheard endeavour into a new planned side project, then maybe it was merely a word he was toying with at the time, a semi-conscious way of forcing himself in a new direction, as well as having obvious theological resonance.) There is also, of course, a more obvious joke: had Camille come into full existence to promote the record, he/she would have likely existed as a concept without a body, sans flesh.

  ‘Housequake’ was the second Camille track to be recorded (after ‘Shockadelica’), and you can really feel the competitiveness starting to set in, the sense of Prince rediscovering a side of himself that had largely lain dormant (aside from the occasional unreleased song or track for other artists) since he had set his sights on mass appeal with Purple Rain. It was a track Prince would remain proud of, and some of the tensions underlying this era would be made apparent when, after losing a Grammy to U2, he claimed that they would never be capable of writing a song like ‘Housequake’. Making up imaginary dances was nothing new for Prince, of course, but various commentators have suggested that he may have had other targets in mind. Michaelangelo Matos gave credence to Greg Tate’s theory – expressed in the Village Voice at the time of the record’s release – that the song was ‘a swipe at Chicago house’,4 adding that it might also be a dismissal of hip hop.5