Prince

by Matt Thorne

  While Lovesexy does feature the band playing on some tracks, it’s evident that these aren’t straightforward band performances. Matt Fink has no memory of playing on ‘Eye No’ (largely, I think, because the song was built up from the original out-take ‘The Ball’), and of ‘Lovesexy’ he said dismissively: ‘I guess I did [play on it]. I’m just in the mix. Sometimes you’re not sure when you’re being used.’ Constructed initially as a single suite of music – with no track breaks on the original release – Lovesexy is Prince’s densest and most coherent album. Unlike almost every other Prince album, it was almost entirely the result of a single concentrated, sustained period of writing and recording, with little second-guessing or trips to the Vault. ‘When 2 R in Love’, the one ‘positive’ song from The Black Album, was rescued and given a new placement, and ‘Eye No’, as mentioned above, was created from the bones of ‘The Ball’, but aside from that, the record was created entirely from scratch. The only out-take from the sessions is a not very good house-influenced track called ‘The Line’, which features Prince, Sheila E and Boni Boyer dicking around to a background of churchy synths and clicks.

  Lovesexy is also Prince’s most spiritual album, although the religious message is conveyed in a cryptic private code. As (almost) always with Prince, his beliefs are Manichaeistic, and the record (and the subsequent tour) gets dramatic purpose from an ongoing battle between God (personified here as ‘Lovesexy’) and the Devil (‘Spooky Electric’).

  ‘Eye No’ works as an origin story for the new Prince (and this record begins with him welcoming us to the ‘New Power Generation’), and contains a defiantly simplistic statement of the drama to follow: Prince knows there’s a heaven and hell, and this album is going to be the story of how he avoided the latter and found the former. The song combines what sounds like Prince’s personal redemption from a private hell with some vague sermonising (avoid drugs, don’t drink every day). The track turns largely on a homophonic pun (‘know’ and ‘no’), but it’s a confusing one: the song is initially a rejection of Spooky Electric’s negativity, but then Prince suggests that saying ‘no’ to temptation is the key to survival. The lyrics, though clearly important, are, however, far less arresting than the incredibly busy arrangement, which – in common with the rest of the album – feels as if every instrument, every motif, every sound is in competition. The horns, the vocals, the percussion: everything fights for supremacy, but as soon as a guitar lick or sampled vocal emerges from the mix, it’s brutally cut off. Prince has never been better.

  ‘Alphabet St.’ is one of Prince’s very greatest singles, and yet it’s also the one to which he’s done the greatest disservice, now always turning it into a country hoe-down (often accompanied by a throwaway line about how he can do country music too) when he plays it live.6 Peter Doggett has argued that the phrase ‘Wham bam thank you ma’am’, used by David Bowie in his song ‘Suffragette City’, first appeared (in music at least) on Charlie Mingus’s 1961 album Oh Yeah.7 Of course, by the time Prince used a variation of the phrase in his ‘Glam Slam’, it had long since passed into common currency, but it would be pleasing to think that, even if only subconsciously, the echo of glam rock in the title was an acknowledgment of Bowie’s previous use of the phrase.8

  ‘Anna Stesia’ is another song cherished by fans, one of the few to survive the Lovesexy tour in Prince’s live set. I write elsewhere in this book about how the song has become a vehicle for Prince’s sermonising – his message often surprisingly trivial (anti-smoking and anti-doughnuts in Lisbon in the late 1990s; imploring people to join his fan club in the live version of the song on 2002’s One Nite Alone … Live!) – but he has never quite destroyed the magic of the original in the same way he has with ‘Alphabet St.’. The song seems to fit with the Black Album/Lovesexy mythology, as well as Prince’s habit of attending nightclubs in search of material. The back story is this: on the first day of December 1987, Prince had gone to Minneapolis club Rupert’s to play his new album to club-goers. There he met local musician Ingrid Chavez, who supposedly contributed to his decision to abandon the release of The Black Album and work on a spiritually fulfilling album instead.

  There’s more than a whiff of self-mythologising here, but ‘Anna Stesia’ offers a fascinating dramatisation of a similar club scene. Prince, lonely and lost, in search of anyone, of either gender, to save him from a nocturnal world, goes dancing with ‘Gregory’ – presumably his dancer Greg Brooks, serving the same valet service Jerome does for Morris or Wally did in ‘Wally’ – although rather than backing up his boss, tonight he looks like a ‘ghost’. Prince encounters ‘Anna Stesia’ (renaming the women around him again), who transforms his life by leading him back towards God, and the light.

  Lyrically, ‘Dance On’ is essentially a rewrite of ‘Sign o’ the Times’ that ends with a variation on ‘All the Critics Love U in New York’. It is even more cryptic and generalised than ‘Sign o’ the Times’, and more resigned – here people are dancing on not in defiance of the apocalypse, but because they’re past caring. The solution, Prince suggests, is a new power structure focused on production. But what makes this more than a funky economics lesson is the arrangement: the lyrics missing from the lyric sheet all relate to Prince’s bass, which he is encouraged to pick up like a man in a Western being thrown a gun, and the song alternates between bass lines, synths and machine-gun noises. It’s among Prince’s most musically adventurous tracks, and it’s a disappointment that he never returned to the song or the sound after the end of the Lovesexy tour.

  All the contradictions of the album are in evidence on the title song, ‘Lovesexy’, in which it’s deliberately unclear whether he’s singing about God, a lover or the divine part of himself. He defines ‘Lovesexy’ as the feeling of falling in love with the heavens, but this seems linked to the cosmic oneness following ejaculation (in this song, in a chipmunk voice, he’s caught dripping all over the floor) rather than going to church. Buried in the mix are some of his most explicit lyrics.

  ‘When 2 R in Love’ makes a lot more sense on this record than it did in the middle of The Black Album. It’s Prince back in the bathtub, a standard ballad given an elegant arrangement that raises this above all the future Xeroxes. The shortest song on the album, ‘I Wish U Heaven’ is barely there, little more than the title repeated over and over, and yet it’s still more moving and memorable than most of Prince’s 1990s output. He extended the track for a twelve-inch release, adding Parts 2 and 3 to the song. The second part begins as a parody-reworking of ‘Housequake’, turning into essentially a gospel number before Prince announces that he’s playing his ‘blue angel’ guitar, the blue cloud guitar he would famously favour during the Lovesexy tour. The final part of the song moves so far away from the original track that it’s been suggested (by the authors of The Vault) that it’s actually an alternative song called ‘Take This Beat’.

  ‘Positivity’ sums up the album’s message, but it has a curious querulous quality to it. Made up almost entirely of questions (this time to be answered ‘Yes’, the song keeps reminding us, instead of the ‘No’ that has pervaded the record so far), it’s never quite clear whether the song is attacking money itself, immorality in making it, the educational system or those who drop out. Only at the end does any clear message emerge, and once again it’s the rejection of Spooky Electric. But in spite of the relentless affirmation, as Prince sings with a mouth full of chewing gum, he’s never sounded so demonic, and it would be this tension that would drive his subsequent tour and next album.

  18

  CROSS THE LINE

  There are many Prince fans who regard the Sign o’ the Times era as a live high point for Prince. But for all the obvious qualities of this period, I can’t help but see it as a dry run for the tour that followed. While, ultimately, it’s hard to call whether Sign o’ the Times or Lovesexy is Prince’s greatest album, the Lovesexy tour was clearly superior to the run that preceded it. All of the anxious energy that crackled during the
Sign shows had clearly gone. Prince was relaxed at the Lovesexy rehearsals, chatting to his band about the acid-jazz/jazz-funk boom taking place in England at this time and telling them how much he enjoyed Weird Al Yankovic’s Michael Jackson parody ‘Fat’.

  Among those present at these rehearsals was Steve Parke, a lifelong Prince fan who would go on to become an important part of Prince’s creative team during the 1990s. Parke, a visual artist, had grown up dreaming of working for Prince. ‘[I had] no idea [in] what capacity,’ he told me, ‘but as a kid I was always drawing and painting, so I thought, “I’ll do paintings for him.”’ This ambition came true via a friendship with a musician in Sheila E’s band, Levi Seacer, Jr. When Seacer was playing guitar in Sheila E’s band, Parke had met him backstage, drawn his picture on a napkin and given him his number, and the two of them had stayed in touch as Seacer was drafted into Prince’s band. Parke had taken to sending Seacer paintings of Prince through the post, and Seacer had been showing them to his boss. After a year of this, Parke received a call from Alan Leeds asking him if he’d be interested in working on the set for the ‘Glam Slam’ video.

  When Parke got to Paisley Park, he says he ‘literally looked at the stage in the round that was for the Lovesexy tour, all [made] out of plywood. And we sat down with a piece of board and drew out all these elements and went to the wardrobe department and looked at all the knick-knacks they had to see what he was into and came up with this design. He approved it and off he went. I had three days of him being out of town. I hired two people from the Minneapolis children’s theatre and I said, “Let’s get a third of this stage done before he gets back.” I was twenty-five at the time, and I literally stayed up three days straight.’ But he got the job done, and Prince was pleased with him. Parke remembers that Prince would generally start rehearsals at one o’clock, and that he was there to watch them every single day. ‘Once I got in, my goal was to become as indispensable as possible,’ he says. ‘I told the merchandise woman I could design T-shirts for him. The first tour shirt I did for him, they were segmented into four pieces, they were different artistic styles, and I literally did that in my hotel room. I had to rent a compressor and an airbrush and just sit in my hotel room and paint. I remember at one point he thought the chin was a little too long, so I got him to sit down and drew him.’

  At that point, Parke recalls, the previous art team had left and Prince wanted to bring everything in-house. Parke was asked if he wanted to be the art director and if he knew how to do graphics on a computer. ‘I said, “Sure,”’ Parke remembers, ‘and I basically went out and bought a computer and taught myself.’ He also remembers getting to hear the various parts of Lovesexy as separate tracks, which confirmed to him the quality of the album. ‘I love Lovesexy. I thought it was a great step musically, but it was almost too much for people. My background is not as a musician but I like very complicated stuff. I grew up on fusion and was used to dissonant sounds and subtlety. I used to listen to an album thirty or forty times and wanted to be surprised every time. So getting to hear the separation of those tracks amazed me. It’s that balance between being artistically satisfied and really wanting people to see what you did.’

  The Lovesexy tour remains Prince’s greatest achievement. It offered the best-ever setting for his songs, and it’s the one show that truly integrated the best of his past with the music he had recently created. For seventy-eight shows across Europe, the US, Canada and Japan, Prince presented a show lasting between two and two and a half hours that dramatised the defining conflict in his art – a battle between the darker (occasionally violent, almost always sexual) side of his work, and his lighter, more spiritual music. Later in his career he would try to jettison almost all of the darker side, which meant that a reasonable amount of the first half of this show consists of songs that we will never hear live again. While Prince had had misgivings about releasing The Black Album as a whole, he was comfortable using ‘Superfunkycalifragisexy’ and ‘Bob George’ to take him deep into the darkness in the first half of the show.

  After the failure to record usable footage of the Sign o’ the Times show, this time Prince used a much bigger crew with a far greater number of cameras to record a show in Dortmund that is widely considered the best document of Prince’s live performance in existence. Broadcast all over Europe, the performance was later released on two videos (inexplicably, the first half of the show was titled Lovesexy Live 2 and the second half Live 1), but has never been re-released on DVD, a terrible oversight. The video recording is better than Double Live, Sign o’ the Times or any other Prince film or video release, and for all the acclaim awarded Sign o’ the Times, this truly deserves the accolade of the greatest concert film ever released.

  The stage set was enormously expensive, costing a rumoured $2 million, but worth it. A car engine starts and Prince rides to the stage in a Ford Thunderbird. For the first half of the show he is involved in a series of sexual, romantic and occasionally violent negotiations with Cat, Sheila E (and less frequently Boni Boyer). On a circular stage, the band is mostly shunted to the edges, while the focus remains on Prince as he performs his best (and mostly darkest) material. ‘Erotic City’ becomes the soundtrack to a ménage à trois, ‘Jack U Off’ a promise at the end of a date (an offer Cat responds to by momentarily switching her attentions to Miko). ‘Sister’, his most controversial released song, was played live for the first time since 1981 (and after this tour, would never be played again). Prince and Cat successfully shoot basketball hoops on the court that is just one part of this enormous and versatile stage. During ‘Head’ (the highlight of all Prince’s early shows), Cat would pretend to give Prince a blow job onstage, while he tried to silence the audience with a finger to his lips. In the mammoth show, with every song tightened to the bare minimum, he found room for an unreleased song too, and for many this version of ‘Blues in C (If I Had a Harem)’ was the highlight of the performance. (A studio version of this track does exist, but it is a pale sketch by comparison, and though Prince considered the song for a subsequent album, it was soon abandoned.)

  The most psychosexual section of the show begins with Prince pressing Cat up against his daddy’s car, before the two of them climb into a bed with a neon headboard. Suddenly, the mood changes, Cat escapes and Prince is left bouncing on the bed to ‘Superfunkycalifragisexy’. Cat ties Prince to a chair with plastic hose before the lights go on for ‘Bob George’, less a song than a one-act play as the two of them act out the roles of a jealous gangster and his moll. Using his microphone as a gun, Prince pretends to shoot Cat as the band plays machine-gun FX. He mimes getting drunk, and then sirens sound and the police arrive. He pantomimes a shoot-out with cops, before making a phone call to his friend Joey and identifying himself as Camille. As the police close in, he recites the Lord’s Prayer, as he once did during ‘Controversy’, only this time getting shot midway through.

  After Prince’s symbolic death, the darkness disappears and the show takes on a lighter, more spiritual quality, beginning with the stand-out track from Lovesexy, ‘Anna Stesia’. Rather than re-enact the dramatic events of this song, Prince plays it alone at the keyboard as he’s elevated upwards, sounding more serious about these lyrics than he’s ever been about anything. After an intermission, he plays a recording of Ingrid Chavez reciting lines from Romeo and Juliet and her poem ‘Cross the Line’, before performing the entire Lovesexy album – barring ‘Positivity’, which was dropped from the set and reserved for after-shows after the first few performances in France – interspersed with the more uplifting or religious songs from past albums, such as ‘The Cross’ and ‘Purple Rain’, and a long piano set (performed this night in an embroidered frock coat) which would become a staple of later performances. The stagecraft for this half of the show is mostly much simpler, the songs presented without theatrics. They meant too much not to be delivered straight. But as sometimes happens when an artist bases a tour around an album, he clearly tired of the Lovesexy songs, and after this
tour, he abandoned not just the darkness, but also the light: aside from ‘Anna Stesia’ and ‘Alphabet St.’, he would never play this music again.

  *

  Prince’s show at the Het Paard van Troje in The Hague was the third of nine after-shows he would play on the Lovesexy tour, and has become the most legendary after-show he ever performed. That Prince had the mental and physical stamina to create such an overwhelming experience in the middle of the night for the favoured few after what must have been an extraordinarily draining show in front of 30,000 people is a feat beyond any other (pop) musician. Even his band couldn’t keep up with him: Eric Leeds went to bed and missed the chance to play a role in this essential part of Prince’s history, which for the band member with the strongest memory and sense of occasion must have hurt (I didn’t ask him about this when I spoke to him – it seemed tactless).