Prince

by Matt Thorne

  Certainly, Susannah believes that Prince lost something after this period. And while she and Wendy both acknowledge the quality of some of the songs on Lovesexy, they are less impressed by his subsequent records. As Susannah says: ‘Now he’s let himself off the proverbial hook, he doesn’t have to go to those places any more, he just stays right where he’s supposed to, to be safe with his heart. And I don’t know if we broke it for him. Good Lord, this is a guy who’d sleep on the couch in our house. We knew him the way he wanted to be known and we saw that guy on plenty of occasions, and we were the people who said, “You could be that guy all the time,” but it took a big leap of faith that he wouldn’t get his heart broken.’ Wendy goes further, and although she has worked with him on several occasions since the disbandment of The Revolution – and wanted to emphasise to me that though she was feeling down on him the day we talked, her feelings about him fluctuated (Lisa adding that if he walked into the room now, they’d both give him a hug) – sometimes she did feel annoyance. ‘People wanna talk about him all the time, and I’m happy to, but sometimes it’s hard. Yeah, he was great, he was better than most, but he’s not now.’

  By the time he had finished Sign o’ the Times and all the associated songs, Prince did not want to be that guy any more. Who he wanted to be instead would soon be revealed, in now traditional Prince fashion, to the audience at First Avenue.

  16

  FOR THOSE OF U ON VALIUM …

  As with the 1983 benefit concert for the Minnesota Dance Theatre, when Prince played First Avenue in 1987 he was showcasing a substantial amount of new material and introducing new band members, but this time he wasn’t in the early stages of engagement with a worldwide audience, instead competing with his past. In the years between these two shows, he’d become one of the most famous celebrities in the world, made two major motion pictures and recorded three albums still regarded as among the greatest pop records ever pressed to vinyl. But he must have drawn some confidence from knowing he had his best record to date about to ship.

  Prince introduced the performance as a rehearsal, as he often did with home-town shows – a regular stage in his creative process. The actual rehearsals had taken place in his usual space at the Washington Avenue Warehouse (it wouldn’t be long before Prince’s Paisley Park complex, the focal point of so much of the later part of his myth, would be complete, but for the moment he was continuing to rehearse in a space that held a strong connection to his past with The Revolution), but this was the first time he’d tested the new songs in front of a paying audience.

  In the Warehouse, they had been preparing a show somewhat different to the one he’d eventually take on the road, consisting almost entirely of the new album, plus ‘Kiss’, the Madhouse song ‘Four’ as an outro to ‘The Ballad of Dorothy Parker’, and a cover of Charlie Parker’s ‘Now’s the Time’. The most significant change with this new band was the presence of Sheila E on drums: for all her evident qualities as a solo artist, this was her finest hour (and one of the very few rock shows in history when the drummer embarking on a solo wouldn’t be a cue to visit the bar), and she knew it, telling MTV News that playing drums in Prince’s band was ‘more exciting, more fulfilling than being a solo artist’.

  In front of the Minneapolis audience, Prince played a whittled-down version of the rehearsal set, which still included one song (‘Strange Relationship’) he’d dump before the tour. On the way he’d also jettison ‘Starfish and Coffee’ – rehearsal recordings suggest he’d yet to work out how best to perform this song; by the Lovesexy tour it had become part of a piano medley, where it’s mostly stayed till this day – as well as ‘The Ballad of Dorothy Parker’ (the rehearsal version brought out both the Latin and soft-jazz inspirations, but lacked the album version’s dark urgency) and ‘U Got the Look’, which Prince attacked with fury in rehearsal, accusing the object of the song of taking a ‘fucking hour’ doing her make-up before replacing half the track with a Vegas vamp. That it would later become one of his favourite songs to play live seems extremely unlikely at this point.

  Wearing thick-framed glasses and a dangly earring, Prince introduced the band that night as ‘new friends’ – Levi, Miko, Greg Brooks, Cat, Wally, Boni – an ‘old friend’, Dr Fink, another new friend, his new polka-dot suit, Atlanta Bliss, ‘Mr Madhouse’ Eric Leeds, Sheila E on the drums, and then cracked, ‘For those of you on valium, my name is Prince.’

  Opening with ‘Housequake’ on this night was a defiant gesture: no one in the audience would know about the quake, and when they pretended they did, he called ‘bullshit’. By now, he had decided to integrate old songs into the show, and he played some tonight – ‘Girls & Boys’ and ‘Kiss’ – but the highlight was the song he’d ditch, ‘Strange Relationship’, during which Prince seemed to be channelling Stevie Wonder.

  The inclusion of Charlie Parker’s ‘Now’s the Time’ (on the road it was occasionally replaced by Prince’s own jazz song, Madhouse’s ‘Four’) was significant in a period when Prince was opening himself up to a stronger jazz influence in his music (his jazz band Madhouse were support for this tour1), and with this cover, Sheila’s drum solo and an extended ‘It’s Gonna Be a Beautiful Night’, which featured the ‘squirrel meat’ section and raps of the Black Album song ‘Superfunkycalifragisexy’, it was clear this new band were far less rock-focused than The Revolution. Still, there remained some rock-show clichés: a plasma lamp represented the Crystal Ball, which made it far less exciting than the lyrics had suggested.

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  For the tour proper, which took in thirty-four shows in Europe but no performances in either the US or the UK (some planned dates for London and Birmingham were cancelled due to weather and licensing problems), Prince expanded the show to include most of Sign o’ the Times plus a few hits – ‘Little Red Corvette’, ‘Girls & Boys’, Let’s Go Crazy’, ‘When Doves Cry’, ‘Purple Rain’, ‘1999’ and ‘Kiss’. Though lacking the incredible cohesion Prince would bring to his entire songbook on the Lovesexy tour, there was still juice in the hits and true pleasure to be found in the horn- and drum-heavy reworkings of ‘Let’s Go Crazy’ and (especially) ‘When Doves Cry’. During this period, ‘Purple Rain’ was generally kept under control, a reminder of the past instead of an excuse to jam, and the band seemed to get a lot more out of ‘It’s Gonna Be a Beautiful Night’, which would see Prince trying to bring together Duke Ellington and James Brown, a combination which perhaps best defines his ambition for this particular band.

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  Nineteen eighty-seven also saw the completion of Prince’s Paisley Park complex. One of the first releases to emerge from there was the film Sign o’ the Times, a strange hybrid of live-concert recording, self-conscious re-enactment and dramatic movie that provides a somewhat unsatisfactory document of the era.

  Prince had wanted to put out a live concert video of the European show as a way of avoiding an American tour. Alan Leeds says he was disappointed at this decision. ‘I think we all were. In hindsight I think it was a mistake. Aside from those “Hit and Run” dates, which were only a handful of dates, he didn’t tour to his American fan base. Particularly his black fan base. To anyone who was concerned about his new pop image, the fact that he was ignoring the traditional US touring routes only kinda fed that. I don’t want to say there was a backlash, but there might have been some confusion among his fan base because he seemed so completely focused on embracing Europe.’

  Prince employed a British camera crew to record the last three dates of the tour at the Ahoy in Rotterdam, but dissatisfied with the low-quality recordings, decided to overdub the sound and re-record the show on a soundstage, adding dramatic interludes between the songs to create a story about a love triangle between Prince and his dancers Greg Brooks and Cat. The film opens with Prince lurking in the shadows, while Cat and Greg argue. Early in the show, Cat rejects Prince, then later, after being upset by Brooks’s refusal to communicate, approaches Prince, who rebuffs her in turn with ‘I Could Never
Take the Place of Your Man’. By ‘Hot Thing’, some sort of arrangement seems to have been worked out, with Brooks and Prince both admiring the ‘sweet sticky thing’ as Prince slides through her legs to bite off her skirt. Soon, Prince and Cat are mounting a mirrored heart together, before Prince puts his clothes back on for the more spiritual conclusion of the show.

  If you ever want to see evidence of the strong and lasting friendship between Sheila E and Prince, track down the footage from an MTV documentary about the film in which she plays along with this scenario and suggests that the fictionalised relationship between Brooks and Cat was very much on her mind during the Sign o’ the Times performances, as if this was really what she was worrying about instead of keeping the beat.

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  Shortly after the film’s release, Prince would play a handful of shows in the US: a show at Minneapolis venue Rupert’s – a club that would soon play an important role in Prince’s myth – attended by his father and Susannah Melvoin, where he debuted ‘The Sex of It’; a ten-minute performance at the MTV Music Awards, followed by an after-show where he performed with Huey Lewis; and two significant jazz-orientated shows. At the first, Prince and his band masqueraded as The Fine Liners and covered Miles Davis’s ‘Freddie Freeloader’; at the second, a New Year’s performance at Paisley Park, he performed with the man himself on a version of ‘It’s Gonna Be a Beautiful Night’ that stretched for over thirty-three minutes. For all its historical significance, Davis commentator George Cole suggests the collaboration was of less value than might have been hoped, observing that ‘although Miles’s chops are good, his presence is less than imposing, and his body language lacks the confident swagger one is accustomed to seeing when Miles is on-stage. The interaction between Miles and Prince consists of a short section where Prince copies Miles’s trumpet phases with scat vocals. In less than four minutes, Miles has blown his horn and gone.’2

  Nevertheless, it marked a moment. And if the brief period when Miles and Prince collaborate onstage is not that significant beyond the fact that it happened at all, this is only one part of a huge performance of this song, which later includes Prince telling Miles it’s past his bedtime and (somewhat half-assedly) dissing Greg Brooks and (with far more assurance) his biographer Jon Bream, comparing him (among other things) to Grover from Sesame Street, before, chuckling at his own malevolence, wishing him ‘Happy New Year’, and then at the end of the song and the show promising it was all a joke.

  To those Prince fans (or casual admirers) who believe that he lost his way with The Black Album and Lovesexy, this show might even be seen as marking the end of his significance. So it seems ironic that this period seems to have meant so little to Prince, who couldn’t be bothered to tour the US and would soon be completely swept up in an entirely new creative direction. While his management might have been irritated with him, Prince made the right decision and was about to achieve his creative peak. But before he could find the light, he first needed to lose his way.

  17

  SPOOKY AND ALL THAT HE CRAWLS FOR …

  For all the mythology around Dream Factory and Crystal Ball, it seems at least some of the stories surrounding The Black Album are true. The album was slated for release, and according to Matt Fink, Prince gave copies of it to his band, encouraging them to learn the songs for a forthcoming tour (in the event, only three of them were performed, ‘Bob George’, ‘Superfunkycalifragisexy’ and ‘When 2 R in Love’, which was rescued from this project and placed on Lovesexy, the album eventually released instead).

  In his Possessed: The Rise and Fall of Prince, Alex Hahn marshals several sources to suggest that Prince decided to hold back the album after an experience with Ecstasy, writing that Matt Fink was told this by Prince’s bodyguard, Gilbert Davidson.1 The theological crisis Prince experienced at this time seems to be a mid-point in his religious development. Unlike the conversation with God that took place onstage during performances on the Purple Rain tour, this seems to have been a genuine crisis, albeit one that provided the music press with a useful bit of mythology with which to promote the new album. But at the same time, it doesn’t seem to have been as deep-rooted a change in attitude as would take place later in the 1990s. Prince would begin a period of reading and searching in 1991, but at this time it still seems that his religious questioning was part of the performance, something that would give a shape to the shows on the Lovesexy tour.

  Whatever his motives, the decision to withhold the release of the completed album was a publicity masterstroke. The record’s cultural impact was enormous, and lasting, as it became one of the world’s best-known bootlegs. A year after the official release of The Black Album, British novelist Hanif Kureishi published a novel of the same name set in London in 1989 that uses knowledge of the bootleg as a cultural test (pp. 18–19) and features a character, Shahid, who is encouraged to write a paper on the singer by his supervisor (p. 25), while Keith Richards writes in his autobiography of the record’s impact on Mick Jagger.2 Still, The Black Album’s reputation suffered a serious hit when it received official release.

  Perhaps the most surprising thing about the record is that (a large portion of it) was conceived as party music, with songs recorded for Sheila E’s birthday. There are references to dancing and sex, but there is also an unmistakably harsher tone to the album, and it’s easy to see how Prince spooked himself with the disturbing quality of some of his lyrics. In another of the apparently deliberate contradictions that turn regular fans into obsessives, while Prince sneaked a message into the ‘Alphabet St.’ video telling fans not to buy the record, there is a semi-hidden intro to the beginning of The Black Album during the first song, ‘Le Grind’, which suggests that by locating the record listeners have been initiated into a secret club. Addressing the listener directly (but in a slurred, distorted voice), Prince announces his presence and conveys his pleasure that we have found him. This introduction makes it seem that Prince always knew that finding the record would be a challenge, although presumably because he planned to release it in a plain black sleeve as ‘Something’ by ‘Somebody’ rather than because he always planned to suppress it. That said, during an MTV report on the Sign o’ the Times film premiere, the announcer reveals that Prince has announced the forthcoming release of his Black Album (as well as a 1988 US tour that never materialised), so every music fan of the time would certainly have known about it.

  ‘Le Grind’ resembles the party music on Sign o’ the Times, and the connection of dancing to sex is nothing new, but the lyrics seem more reductive than ever before. It’s ironic that the album that features Prince explicitly dismissing hip hop (on the track ‘Dead on It’) should feature his own rapper of the time, Cat Glover, swiping lines from J. M. Silk’s ‘Music Is the Key’ on ‘Cindy C’.3 The song is inspired by the supermodel Cindy Crawford (there he goes once again, falling in love with a face in a magazine), but it’s a strange tribute, with Prince rhapsodising about her ‘furry melting thing’, which sounds more like a Womble in a heatwave than anything you’d be hoping to find in a supermodel’s underwear.

  The two most significant songs, opening the second side of the vinyl album, while not officially released at the time, made it into the live performance. ‘We learned some of the songs,’ Matt Fink told me, ‘and performed “Bob George” live on the Lovesexy tour and “Superfunkycalifragisexy”, but not every night.’ ‘Bob George’, which would be performed almost as a mini-play, is among the most theatrical of Prince’s songs, almost spoken-word in places. Prince sings the song in character (exactly who he’s playing is open to debate: when he performed the song onstage he would explicitly refer to himself as ‘Camille’, but this isn’t the case on the album) as a man who beats his unfaithful girlfriend and is capable of scaring off the police when they arrive to arrest him. Though we never hear from the girlfriend, it becomes clear that she’s seeing the Bob George of the title (the name believed to be a combination of manager Bob Cavallo and music critic Nelson George), who manag
es Prince. This man refers to Prince as a skinny motherfucker with a high voice,4 before having a phone conversation with his conscience (onstage, it would be with a man named Joey, perhaps a reference to past alter ego Joey Coco). I asked Cavallo what he made of a song believed to be about him. ‘I don’t understand it. Why do people say it’s a reference to me? I certainly didn’t go around with any hookers or buy furs for women or whatever he was insinuating.’

  ‘Superfunkycalifragisexy’, which was accompanied in the live show by Prince and Cat performing S&M games onstage, is one of the most intense songs Prince has ever written. Sharing some of the surrealism of ‘Play in the Sunshine’, it appears to be an account of drug-fuelled sex, but instead of referring to the Ecstasy or cocaine one might imagine playing a role in such a sex session, the lovers are feeding on ‘squirrel meat’, brought to them by Brother Maurice.5 The song also shares a mood with some of the 1999-era out-takes, suggesting Prince pushing himself beyond all the boundaries that normally confine his work.

  ‘2 Nigs United 4 West Compton’, by comparison, is a dull funk-jazz workout, reminiscent of the worst of Miles Davis’s late recordings. I wrote in Chapter 13 about Susannah’s experience of working on ‘Rockhard in a Funky Place’, and it was clear from her comments there that the song was a throwaway, of little interest beyond the title’s pun.

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  Some previous biographers and critics have dismissed Lovesexy. And some of the musicians around Prince at the time have also expressed misgivings. Those who approach Prince’s career as a narrative often see this as the start of his creative decline (although it’s striking how many of Prince’s erstwhile associates refer to the album’s first single, ‘Alphabet St.’, as his career highlight). For me it rivals Sign o’ the Times as Prince’s finest album. It’s the record that proves Prince could survive creatively without The Revolution, and if Sign o’ the Times was not quite the solo endeavour it appeared, then Lovesexy represents a true leap forward in Prince’s work on his own. It is not entirely a solo pursuit: Cat raps on ‘Alphabet St.’, the late Boni Boyer occasionally provides backing vocals, Sheila E plays drums throughout, and ‘Eye No’ was recorded with his band of the time. But although he makes light of his work by noting in the sleeve notes that he plays ‘whatever’ on the album, it is the most satisfying example of Prince (nearly) alone in the studio, striking out into new territory. It would be a long time until he would record another album as complete and satisfying as Lovesexy, and only twice after would he so successfully change gear and present a record that came as a true surprise (The Rainbow Children and 3121).