Prince

by Matt Thorne

  As with many Prince projects, the album was not written entirely from scratch. ‘Feel U Up’ was originally demoed in 1981, and shares the erotomania of many songs from that time, having an obvious lyrical twin in ‘Jack U Off’. It’s easy to see why Prince would have remembered this song for the project, and if Susannah Melvoin is right about recording as Camille liberating Prince, then maybe one of the main attractions was being able to find a context for the darker sex songs that had been festering in the Vault. The main musical change to make it a Camille song was re-recording it with a speeded-up vocal, but singing this track with a hermaphrodite persona completely changes the impact of the lyrics. When Prince sings that he doesn’t want to be someone’s man, it seems like he’s avoiding attachment; when Camille sings (s)he doesn’t want to be someone’s man, it suggests that she is offering a different sort of pleasure, and feeling someone up changes from being sleazy to a joyous celebration of non-penetrative sex. Without any change to the lyrics, the song becomes an obvious companion to ‘If I Was Your Girlfriend’.

  There were also earlier performances of ‘Strange Relationship’, all of which demonstrate an ambivalence towards the lyrics. Prince played it alone at the piano sometime in 1983, singing in a very deep voice and pushing the track almost to the point of parody, and again at rehearsal in 1984, when he joked about Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and hammered it out in an extremely loose style, calling changes to the band but hiding the subtleties of the song. Wendy Melvoin told me that by 1985, the track had become significant to Prince and that it was the song everyone was focusing on. An alternative (and much-loved) version of the track, recorded with major input from Wendy and Lisa, has a much closer connection with Around the World in a Day than the finished song, with Wendy on tambourine and congas, Lisa on sitar and flute, and a more helpless, morose vocal from Prince. From this flux, ‘Strange Relationship’ would go on to become a regular part of Prince’s live set, and now he plays it the same way almost every show, hardened to the point where it no longer contains any real emotion; but there was one more radical reinterpretation of the song before it was committed to vinyl. Prince had occasionally played one-off shows before, but it was during the Parade tour with The Revolution that the after-show phenomenon as fans know it today was truly born, with two shows in London and one in Paris at Le New Morning.6 The latter performance was notable for both the special guest – Prince’s father, who joined them on piano – and because Prince played a very unusual version of ‘Strange Relationship’, the drums slowed down to a crawl while Prince scat-sang. He was still teaching chords to the band, but when Prince’s vocals came in, they had the weariness evident on the Wendy and Lisa version taken to an even further extreme. Prince seemed barely able to express himself, dropping out to let the band take over as they extended the song to twice its normal length. This version had Eric Leeds on saxophone, as the Sign o’ the Times version was once going to, before Prince changed his mind and discarded his contribution.

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  While promoting the far more spiritual Emancipation, Prince had an amusing way of responding to a question from a fan about whether ‘Shockadelica’ was his best song, saying that while it wasn’t for him to judge, Emancipation’s ‘The Holy River’ was about redemption, while ‘Shockadelica’ was about a witch.7 Rather than convince me of the superiority of Emancipation, it makes me long for the time when Prince was singing about witches. Susan Rogers has (rather cruelly) suggested that the song was inspired by Weekend at Bernies II actress Troy Beyer, another of Prince’s girlfriends of the time,8 who would go on to appear in the videos for ‘Gett Off’, ‘Sexy MF’ and the 3 Chains o’ Gold movie. Later, he would rename one of the Erotic City dancers at the LA branch of his Glam Slam nightclub empire after the song, which, if nothing else, seems an unusual way of inspiring a girl to dance for you.

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  Susannah Melvoin remembers ‘If I Was Your Girlfriend’ as being specifically about her. It is one of Prince’s most convoluted and complex lyrics (when Liz Jones told Prince that students studied this lyric in universities, he burst into tears9), but it has a straightforward history. It was the last track to be recorded for the Camille record, only to become a highlight of Sign o’ the Times. That Camille/Prince offers to dance a ballet is telling: Susannah had classical ballet training, and in her words, ‘a musical library that Prince had too [which] validated his musical tastes’, something also evident in another Camille track, ‘Good Love’, in which Prince name-checks Mahler, one of several classical composers who had a strong influence on him during this period. Susannah’s belief that working on Camille was a positive experience for Prince is confirmed by his sleeve note to the eventual release of this song, in which he writes: ‘Prince was very happy during this time and very optimistic about his musical possibilities with a new line-up of musicians, which included Sheila E.’

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  I’d hoped that asking Susannah about her contribution to ‘Rockhard in a Funky Place’ might reveal something about the composition of this murky song, but she told me it was merely part of her work as a session singer taken on after the dissolution of The Family. ‘I was hired by Prince as a staff singer.’ Susannah says that she didn’t always ‘know where [her contributions would] go. I knew they were a series of songs he wanted to record. With his history I knew they would turn into something, a particular project of his, but I didn’t know what. I didn’t know what he had in mind. I sang on a lot of different projects. He would just call me and say, “We’re in the studio, come on down.” He would record me. He would say, “These are the backgrounds, go in and do it.” There were a few occasions when he’d say, “You go in and do it, you go find the vocal arrangements,” and then Susan Rogers would send me the mix and I would get a call and he would say, “It was great.”’ Nevertheless, she did remember something of the mood of the time when this track was recorded. ‘It was a really good time for Prince and I. We had a strong relationship, and that was just a great track to do. It was one of those, I was just there recording with him and it was given that I’d get in there and do the vocals. The two of us would get in there and pull the microphones together and sing these backgrounds. I think it was in Minneapolis.’

  Camille was a coherent, fully developed project, but it seems that shelving it caused Prince no anguish. He kept Camille around as a character for the Sign o’ the Times album and even credited his alter ego with one last song, ‘Scarlet Pussy’ – recorded long after this album and included as the B-side to ‘I Wish U Heaven’. The ease with which Prince reached this decision seems to be evidence that, at least at this stage in his career, he was continuing with the same open approach to writing, selecting and discarding material that he’d always had. Camille was a powerful collection of songs, but the three tracks he would carry forward to Sign o’ the Times would represent only one facet of that extraordinary record, the greatest (at that point) he had recorded. But if Prince had had his way, his masterpiece might have been more complex still.

  It’s time to go to the Crystal Ball.

  14

  CRYSTAL BALL…

  Matt Fink claims that ‘Crystal Ball’ was a song rather than an album, and that it may have been dropped from the project due to the technical difficulties that playing the song live presented. ‘He gave it to the group at the time and told us, “Here, learn this,” and we started rehearsing and realised just how technically challenging it was. It’s a continuous piece, like a symphony. We were used to playing four-minute pop songs. I think I was rising to the challenge, as I could write my own charts, but some of the others were ear-players. There was so much going on, and Prince realised this and gave up on playing it live.’

  But Susannah Melvoin told me that The Revolution didn’t necessarily know everything about what was going on during this period, and that she is the only one who knows the full story. She says that while Prince usually recorded songs without making it clear on what project they might end up, ‘Crystal Ball’ was an e
xception, and was intended for a grand new project. ‘He did tell me about Crystal Ball. Crystal Ball was going to be an epic. I knew what we were going in to do with Crystal Ball. He would talk about what he wanted.’ What he wanted, Susannah believed, was to write what was ‘basically an opera’. She says that during this time, ‘The Revolution were on a break,’ not yet disbanded, and for the first time in a long while ‘Prince just had time. He was going through some personal transformations, and that’s how he expressed it. They weren’t going on the road, and when he has idle time, that’s how he plays it out. He doesn’t go to the park and hang out with himself.’

  Prince’s version of events is different. Rather than being the beginning of an exciting new project, he claims he wrote the track in ‘deepbluefunk [sic] depression’ about his future in the music business, during which time ‘his only solace … was his continuing search 4 a soul mate’.1 The vagueness of this wording is telling. Hinting at a theme that would be evident not just in this song, but also in ‘Sign o’ the Times’, Prince writes that ‘the notion of making love during the apocalypse was an interesting notion 2 us at the time’.2 Is the ‘us’ here Prince and Susannah? Or Prince and the band? Or the citizens of the 1980s?

  As well as the version released on the 1998 disc, which was heavily edited by engineer H. M. Buff, there were three alternative takes of ‘Crystal Ball’. These feature Wendy and Lisa on vocals, as well as Susannah (the released version is just Prince and Susannah). On the Wendy and Lisa versions, the intensity is increased by a spoken-word section panned across the speakers that addresses ‘sisters and brothers of the purple underground’ and associates danger with blackness, a concept Prince would continue to pursue. This direct address recalls early band member Dez Dickerson’s claim that Prince was always looking for more than just a band, wanting to shape his fans into a movement, something that would become of even greater importance to him during the 1990s and early twenty-first century before he would abruptly lose interest in the possibility of shaping mass opinion.

  Brent Fischer remembers him and his father being sent the song in 1986. ‘He was on a mission. When we first got that tape of “Crystal Ball”, he said it was the most important thing he’d done in his life up to that point. It was a huge undertaking because it was just so involved, so it took a long time to transcribe, and then Dad and I sat and talked about what we wanted to do with the different ideas that Prince presented, how we were going to envelop them in an orchestra and which instruments we were going to use to emphasise different ideas that Prince had come up with. That was a long, very complicated process. Because it was so important to him, we took more time to put this together. He didn’t give us a deadline, and that made it a lot easier. I remember we took our time in the studio. Normally, we would like to record two songs during a standard three-hour recording session. We can do that easily. We just set aside this whole one song, especially it being eight or nine minutes, to have its own session.

  ‘It was recorded at Ocean Way Studio 1. It was a very large room. We had a huge orchestra, a lot of unusual instruments, a lot of interesting techniques that we incorporated in there. We had eight French horns, I remember that, because there is something where [Dr Clare Fischer] used different horns with different mutes. He paired them into groups of two, and he would have a melody line, a short phrase of Prince, and then he would have a French horn answer it. The second French horn would answer with a certain type of mute, and then the third French horn would answer with an even deeper mute, and then the final French horn would answer with a metal mute. It almost sounded like a different instrument at that point; you could barely tell it was a French horn. And the idea behind this was that we were echoing the melody notes of Prince’s phrases and that the echoes were being produced naturally. There were no engineering techniques employed other than pressing “record” on a tape machine. The echo process was created through the different use of different mutes on the French horns.

  ‘There was also a great deal of difficult woodwind and string parts. I did most of the percussion parts on there. It took three hours between all the different overdubs we had to do as well. There were some times when [Clare Fischer] had the orchestra leave the room and just have the French horns be by themselves. That way we would give absolute mixing control to Prince later on. There wouldn’t be any bleed through the headphones of any of the other instruments. I was in the process of finishing a symphony-percussion degree, so we had a lot of fun with all the different orchestral instruments. There were a lot of percussion parts, and it was done with myself and another pretty well-known percussionist named Luis Conte. He did the Latin percussion stuff that I don’t generally play, like congas and timpani, and I did all the symphony percussion, such as marimba, xylophone, vibraphone and crash cymbals.

  ‘And then we sent it off, and we never heard a word back about “Crystal Ball”.’

  ‘Crystal Ball’ is undoubtedly an extraordinary song, regarded by most Prince fans as one of his very best, and it seems extraordinary that Prince held it back for twelve years. When it did appear in 1998, although it was the title track of a box set, it came out without any real sense of its historical context or place in Prince’s creative development – the three-CD set it kicked off contained three hours of randomly assembled tracks, seemingly deliberately sequenced to destroy any continuity or chronological or thematic links and instead reminding the casual listener of the quality of all his unreleased work. It’s possible to understand Prince’s thinking in 1998: recently freed from Warner Brothers and following up Emancipation, he was presenting another three hours of unreleased music (along with, depending which package you bought, another brand-new album and a ballet), releasing in fourteen months more new music than most bands deliver in a decade. Fans could hardly complain of being short-changed, but in the process he destroyed ‘Crystal Ball’’s mystique (as well as editing out the most interesting parts).

  If, as Brent Fischer and Susannah suggest, the song did represent a true new direction for Prince, it seems that he may have abandoned his highest ambitions for the new project midway through. Only four songs recorded in this era seem to have obvious connections with this larger concept, particularly if it was being considered as a rock opera: ‘The Ball’, ‘Joy in Repetition’, a sixty-minute track called ‘Soul Psychodelicide’ and the Sign o’ the Times song ‘Hot Thing’. None of these three tracks quite share the sophistication of ‘Crystal Ball’, and in fact indicate that if Crystal Ball was a concept record, it might have been similar to some of The Time’s work, particularly their second album, What Time Is It?. As with ‘Darling Nikki’, there seems to be a combination of fairy tale and De Sadean narratives: the Crystal Ball is a place where innocents are exploited by libertines.

  These innocents include the barely twenty-one-year-old ‘Hot Thing’ who Prince appears eager to corrupt in the song of the same title. The song includes the only reference to the Crystal Ball on the finished Sign o’ the Times. Heard in that context, it’s easy to pass over it as more of the nonsense talk that peppers the album – including quotations from Edward Lear’s ‘The Table and the Chair’ in ‘It’s Gonna Be a Beautiful Night’ – but placed alongside ‘The Ball’ it gains a more sinister quality. When Prince tells his date to inform her parents that she’s going to the Crystal Ball, the fact she might never return becomes far more frightening. Is the song recorded as a cautionary tale? It sounds like lover-man preening, but Prince is not singing in his normal voice, shrieking and screaming and moving beyond language in the last verse, and maybe it’s more threat than come-on. The extended version is even more of a blunt instrument, Prince’s shuddering and animal calls sounding like a man about to ejaculate. ‘The Ball’ opens with distorted voices talking about this party and finishes with similar deliberate distortion masking Prince telling the girl he’s talking to not to stop him from what he’s doing to her and to hit him instead. In one of the takes of this song, horns lead the listener into the less disturbing, but s
till mysterious, ‘Joy in Repetition’, one of Prince’s most beloved tracks. It would go on to become a centrepiece of Graffiti Bridge, and would always be of great importance in his live performances, and seems even here, in its earliest two versions, another narrative song that hints at a story Prince was still making up. During the track, Prince sings of a band playing a year-long song called ‘Soul Psychodelicide’. A few days later, he had a crack at recording if not a year-long song, then certainly one of his longest jams.3

  While ‘Soul Psychodelicide’ has length, there is nothing else on the planned triple that demonstrates the same range and ambition as the title song, and if ‘Crystal Ball’ was intended as the opening of an opera, I can only conclude that Prince didn’t get round to writing any more of it. He would return to this ambition – if not the song – in the early 1990s (and some of the narrative seems to have been carried forward into the plot of his fourth feature film, Graffiti Bridge). But later that year, while rehearsing a song called ‘The Sex of It’, which he would later give to Kid Creole and the Coconuts, you can hear Prince being dismissive of what he calls ‘stupid storytelling stuff’ to his band.

  While he was clearly disappointed to be forced to abandon his larger ambitions for this set – unless there are some vital missing pieces locked in his Vault – it’s important to acknowledge that the Crystal Ball concept was largely inchoate. Would the triple set have been a greater artistic achievement than the double album? Undoubtedly. Look at all the songs dropped during the editing process – ‘Rebirth of the Flesh’, ‘Crystal Ball’, ‘Rockhard in a Funky Place’, ‘The Ball’, ‘Joy in Repetition’, ‘Shockadelica’ and ‘Good Love’. And this battle could be seen as the beginning of the conflict between artist and record company that would continue for much of the next decade. But it also seems likely that Crystal Ball or an extended Sign o’ the Times might not have been as big a commercial or critical success: the four sides of Sign o’ the Times took long enough to absorb, and an extra seven songs might have prompted listeners and critics to dismiss the record – as some did with the later Emancipation – as an overstuffed folly. Certainly, Alan Leeds believes there was no possibility that Warner Brothers were criticising the actual music on offer, only the feasibility of putting out a triple album. ‘The argument wasn’t about the music,’ he says now, ‘it was about doing three records. It was too high a retail price point, too cumbersome and difficult to market. It just wasn’t wise. Sign o’ the Times was an important record because Purple Rain had gone through the roof and Around the World in a Day did quite well but turned its back on some of his fan base, and there had been a backlash in the black media particularly. And Under the Cherry Moon didn’t do what Prince wanted it to do. This was the record where we needed to get radio back on our side, quit being too cutting edge and too difficult and deliver a fastball down the middle.’