by Matt Thorne
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… OR SIGN O’ THE TIMES?
Sign o’ the Times’ reputation has dipped slightly in recent years – it no longer tops the lists of various rock-heritage magazines’ hundred best albums, and sometimes doesn’t appear at all – but it remains not just among the high points of Prince’s career, but a central reference point for contemporary musicians. Should it ever be remastered and reissued, it will undoubtedly have a new life, especially if Prince puts out everything from the period. Alan Leeds says: ‘I often wish Prince were more interested in dealing with his archive, because first of all there’s no properly remastered versions of his classic albums because he refuses to participate in the process or allow Warner Brothers to do anything, but if I was in charge of his archive I would do the deluxe edition of Sign o’ the Times and recreate the three-disc version. Even perhaps a Dream Factory release.’
If Wendy Melvoin’s contention that Prince was always thinking about Sign o’ the Times as a self-contained album is true, it seems likely she was referring to the period between Prince recording the title song – during a week in Sunset Sound Studios in mid-July 1986 – and the disbanding of The Revolution. Although the song is Prince on his own, he did first introduce it during a performance with The Revolution in Osaka, singing the first two lines of the song before going into ‘Pop Life’ instead.
Prince often introduces new songs in this teasing way, but the connection between ‘Sign o’ the Times’ and ‘Pop Life’ is significant: as always with Prince’s political commentary, there’s an apocalyptic fatalism that makes ‘Sign o’ the Times’ something more1 (or for some listeners, less2) than a straightforward protest song. While there are straightforward digs at Ronald Reagan and the American administration in the song – an attack on his Star Wars programme and a suggestion that the Challenger space shuttle disaster is an argument for halting space exploration – and a criticism of US economic policy, he’s equally concerned with disease and natural disasters. Given the presence of a straight-forwardly Christian song elsewhere on the record, ‘The Cross’, the absence of any mention of God in the track surprises, as does the suggestion that the best way to cope with the question of theodicy is to get married and have a baby. But focusing on whether the lyric hangs together misses the point. The reason why this song is so beloved is the way it sounds. After all the avenues that Prince didn’t pursue, the song he finally settled on delighted because it sounded even more crisp and spare than Parade.
The way Prince controlled the slow release of information at the beginning of the record’s promotion was a masterclass in creating anticipation. There were two months between the single coming out and the album appearing, the period of greatest excitement for Prince fans who bought the records as they were released. Millions of listeners had deserted Prince after Around the World in a Day and Parade – and Sign o’ the Times would see only a small upswing in sales – but for those still paying attention, this was Prince’s most mysterious statement of intent to date. The cover of the single appeared to show Prince in drag, holding a black heart in front of his face (it was actually Cat Glover, a dancer and choreographer and another new member of his band). The video for the song told the audience nothing about the new personnel, the new direction or indeed the new album, instead forcing the audience to focus on the lyrics and sound of the song, as it consisted mainly of the song’s lyrics and the occasional heart or geometric graphic. Watching the video now, it doesn’t seem that groundbreaking, the pastel pink and electric blues in the graphics and lettering immediately marking it out as a typical 1980s project. But compare it to the majority of rock videos from 1987 – a year dominated by the big hair and glam metal of Starship, Heart and Def Leppard – and its restraint seems revolutionary.3
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Although not included on the actual album, the single’s B-side, ‘La, La, La, He, He, Hee’, was as much a clue to the album’s eventual contents as the main track. The nonsense talk so important to the album is most in evidence on this co-write with Sheena Easton. Per Nilsen has argued, without citing his source, that the song wasn’t a true collaboration, and that the credit was handed out for inspiration alone after a conversation between Prince and Easton in which she argued that lyrics had to be meaningful, while he protested (during a time when he was becoming increasingly preoccupied with surrealism and deliberate use of nonsense imagery) this needn’t be the case. If this is true – and it fits with his explanations of how he composed similarly lyrically lightweight songs such as ‘Poom Poom’ and ‘Make Your Mama Happy’ – it’s easy to imagine Prince walking into the studio, programming the drum machine to start barking and improvising the song to prove his point. But if so, he makes up for the simplicity of the chorus – which is about a cat and a dog who pursue each other sexually – with one of his most beguiling vocals and verses that play against the simplicity with weird psychodrama. It seems to be a song about groupies, or one-night stands, power and control: a foreshadowing of the serious themes that would preoccupy him in the early 1990s.4
Cats, dogs and sex would also inspire a Lovesexy-era B-side too, ‘Scarlet Pussy’, credited to Camille. Whether these feline references were inspired by Cat Glover5 – or merely the cat/pussy/vagina connection – is unclear, but there’s something very beguiling about these songs. If this conversation about lyrical content did take place, maybe it was the lyrics to the duet Sheena Easton sings on the album, ‘U Got the Look’, which inspired it, as although it was the album’s third (and most successful) single, it’s the album’s least lyrically sophisticated track.
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Sheena Easton wasn’t the only woman Prince was having these kinds of creative conversations with: ‘Slow Love’ is co-credited to actress, singer and writer Carole Davis. I called Davis and asked her how the collaboration had worked, wondering if it was a similar situation to Prince’s work with Easton. But she said with her things were very different. ‘It wasn’t much of a collaboration. I wrote the song and he wanted to buy it from me. He had his lawyers call me, and they offered me $25,000 to own the song outright, and I refused, and they got back to me about a month later to give me 50 per cent of publishing and writers, which I accepted for the opportunity to appear on a Prince record.’
Davis is an accomplished actress, which is how she first came into Prince’s orbit. ‘I met him through auditioning for Purple Rain. They offered me the role, but at the time I’d just come off The Flamingo Kid and the script was only ten pages long and had page after page of what looked like porn. In the movie business, Prince was completely unknown.’ Davis wasn’t present when the song was recorded and found out about it through his attorneys. She knew it would appear on Sign o’ the Times, and he had already recorded it before he had Davis’s agreement. ‘He’s an emperor, you know.’
You can hear the additions Prince made to the song by playing it back-to-back with Davis’s own recording of the song, released on her 1989 album Heart of Gold. In Davis’s version, it’s the man on the moon rather than the man in the moon who’s smiling, and the race-car driver bit is new. That Prince should choose this song for the only appearance of Clare Fischer’s orchestrations on the album is further evidence of just how carefully this seemingly scattershot record was put together, and Brent Fischer remembers his father taking particular pleasure in playing on this track. ‘“Slow Love” was very fun for my father to work on, simply because he really likes those kinds of bluesy ballads, and he’s done a lot of work like that as a jazz musician, playing on somebody else’s record as a keyboard artist or playing on his own recordings. So he got to put into play all of those great influences – Ellington, Strayhorn, and also a little bit of Shostakovich in there too.’
Each of the four sides is linked just enough to work as coherent parts of the whole, but not so much that the record becomes an over-schematic concept album: where you expect fullness it is sparse, and vice versa. It grows in emotional intensity with each side (the opening track aside, it starts with party trac
ks, moves into sex songs, has a third side mainly of psychosexual drama, followed by a final side that combines religion and romantic devotion). There is no filler. But while the album is given emotional force by two of the Camille songs, ‘Strange Relationship’ and ‘If I Was Your Girlfriend’, there is also much in the lyric sheets that remains mysterious, although never lacking in psychological impact.
Later in the 1990s, Prince would start filling up his records with all sorts of samples and references that seem to lead nowhere deliberately, and there’s some of that on Sign o’ the Times, but for the most part his nursery-rhyme imagery is deployed with deliberate intent. It’s important not to play rock detective, though. I’d often wondered whether the character of Cynthia Rose in ‘Starfish and Coffee’ was a secret homage to Cynthia Robinson and Rose Stone of Sly and the Family Stone. But Susannah Melvoin told me the song portrayed a girl they knew. ‘We knew somebody named Cynthia Rose and [the song has] beautiful imagery, and we were at the house and he went downstairs and came upstairs a few hours later and there it was, “Starfish and Coffee”. I said, “It’s fantastic, it’s so sweet. Cynthia, if she really knew, she would love this.”’
Other songs never quite seem to reveal their secrets. ‘Play in the Sunshine’ seems like a straightforward party song, but there’s a sadness to the lyric: Prince sings about wanting to have fun as if it was the last time, and the initial take was recorded during his final recording session with Susannah. It would be reading too much into the song to suggest that Susannah’s encouragement to Prince to play and his refusal towards the end of the track might reveal something of the dynamic of their relationship in its final stages, but the song is undoubtedly more emotionally powerful than a light, bright pop track should be. It was also one of the few songs I asked Susannah about that she wouldn’t discuss.6
The lyric of ‘The Ballad of Dorothy Parker’ is similarly beguiling. Prince’s Dorothy Parker (a blonde waitress) has no relation to the great Algonquin Round Table wit (although it’s certainly fun to imagine her in a bathtub with Prince), and the lines in the song about Dorothy being quick-witted and the fact that the real Dorothy Parker died on the day Prince was born are merely fodder for the conspiracy theorists. The song was inspired (once again) by an argument with Susannah, or a dream Prince had, or a combination of both. Although the Parker reference seems accidental, that Dorothy’s favourite song is Joni Mitchell’s ‘Help Me’ seems more than just a shout-out to one of his biggest influences,7 as the song mentioned (from 1974’s Court and Spark) is a female inversion of the situation in which Prince has placed her.
Not all the songs are lyrically ambiguous. Never performed live in full, and recorded by Prince alone, ‘It’ is a straightforward statement of sexual obsession. Prince is back having sex on the stairs (he finally sounds like he’s a perfect match for Darling Nikki), and the song is essentially a repeated insistence of how much he likes ‘it’. But it’s all about the delivery. In chorus with himself, taunting himself, whispering, standing up close to the microphone and sounding so far away he can barely be heard, this is one of his most complex performances. ‘Forever in My Life’, which he confessed he wrote for Susannah,8 is delivered almost entirely without kink. Susannah believes the reason why this song (and the others he wrote for her) are so significant and lasting is that there was more ‘on [the] line’. The song has remained potent: the late John Kennedy Jr played it at his wedding, and I saw Prince reinvent it on his 2010 tour, singing it with a power he hadn’t brought to Sign o’ the Times songs for years (he usually throws them away as part of his synth or piano medleys) while his new girlfriend, Bria Valente, stood at the side of the stage, smiling.
Alongside the three Camille songs on side three is ‘I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man’, another track rescued from his early-1980s home-studio tapes. It’s another variation on a theme that preoccupied Prince during the early years: that he is such a good lover that no woman would be satisfied with having been with him for only one night. The complication here is that the woman he approaches is a single mother, and it’s not just sex she wants, but a husband. The song is almost a short story – Prince the dirty realist – and a model of coherence compared to his sketchier later lyrics.
But it’s not just love and sex that inspires straight-talking on the record. Prince’s use of religious imagery is almost always cryptic – and his two most spiritual albums, Lovesexy and The Rainbow Children, are so dense they seem to be written in secret code – but ‘The Cross’9 is unusually direct, a straightforward tale of the Second Coming that fits with the apocalyptic themes elsewhere on the record. Surprisingly, given Prince’s frustration at losing out to U2 at the Grammys when Sign o’ the Times came out, when Bono took the stage with Prince at The Pod in Dublin in 1995, Prince let him sing ‘The Cross’. Halfway through, a source who was present confirmed for me, Bono forgot the words (‘Eastertime?’ he improvised hopefully at one point) and started ululating.10
‘It’s Gonna Be a Beautiful Night’ is described in the sleeve notes as a straightforward live track, the last song to be credited to Prince and The Revolution until he briefly revived the name for 1999: The New Master. In reality, it’s a far more complicated creation. Beginning as an onstage jam at the Zenith in Paris recorded by a mobile truck in the same way he did with the original versions of ‘I Would Die 4 U’, ‘Baby, I’m a Star’ and ‘Purple Rain’, the song was subject to endless tinkering. Susannah says Prince told her the song needed backing vocals, and that he got her and Jill Jones to add these during a session with Susan Rogers at Sunset Sound. He then recorded Sheila E doing her rap interpretation of Edward Lear down a phone line from Mississippi over the song, and got Matt Bliss and Eric Leeds to add new instrumentation. It’s hard to understand why Prince wanted to expend so much effort on the track, especially given the superiority of tracks like ‘We Can Funk’, but he’d talked onstage earlier that night about making a live album, so perhaps when that project was abandoned, this was a way of justifying the expense of recording the show. Although I doubt this was a deliberate intention, there’s also something poignant in the fact that Prince was literally recording over his work with The Revolution with members of his new line-up.
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More than any other Prince album, Sign o’ the Times is structured as an experience that requires deep immersion. Any seeming sloppiness in the construction generally proves to be a case of second-guessing. If Prince was going to include a long live (or pseudo-live) track on the record, the obvious place for it is at the end of the final side. But he flipped the order of the last two tracks, so that once you’ve got through the looseness of ‘Beautiful Night’, there’s one last beautifully constructed treat, ‘Adore’. It’s not a hidden track, but the reason for the positioning seems similar. Later, Prince would ruin the song when playing it live by turning it into a stand-up routine.11 But in its original version it’s a perfect encapsulation of the album’s themes, and a precursor to the sound and the mixture of spirituality and sex that he would expand on in Lovesexy.
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At the time, if splitting from The Revolution was the price necessary for Prince to produce records of the calibre of Sign o’ the Times, The Black Album and Lovesexy, it seemed an acceptable one. As wonderful a band as The Revolution undoubtedly were, it was the right time for Prince to change his line-up and return to the studio alone. And it is clear that Prince did feel a great deal of responsibility towards all the musicians working for him – the problems with The Revolution, after all, started when he overloaded the band with new personnel and created what some dubbed ‘The Counter-Revolution’. But from the long perspective, and after twenty years of hearing Prince play with various permutations of The New Power Generation, it seems like a far more serious sacrifice and it’s hard not to regret that Prince didn’t find some way of treating the group like Neil Young does his Crazy Horse or Bruce Springsteen his E Street band. Prince has, at various times, used members of The Revolution again, as well a
s reviving the band’s name – briefly – for an entirely different line-up, but some fans still remain desperate for a full reunion.12 It seems clear that the reason Prince avoids this is due to his distaste for nostalgia (and possibly, Wendy has suggested, religions concerns) – although it’s possible he will change his mind on this if and when he reissues his old records – but rather than hear the band rehash the past, a new collaboration could still produce interesting work.