Prince

by Matt Thorne

  While the audience whistled, Prince began the show with a long, downbeat but thrilling guitar-and-piano jazz instrumental that expanded on the Madhouse-inspired jams he played at after-shows on the Sign o’ the Times tour and also resembled the Billy Cobham song ‘Stratus’ that would much later become a staple of Prince’s after-show set. It is this show that most contributed to fans’ awareness of how his after-shows would differ from a main concert, and this introduction immediately establishes the musical and artistic difference between the two strands of his live performances.

  The show as a whole was given a narrative thread by the way this instrumental (and ‘D.M.S.R.’, next in the set list) incorporated guitar elements from ‘Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic’, the song he would (coming full circle) end with. The show was also defined by the heavy use of sci-fi synth throughout, most prominently in the new song ‘People Without’.

  After thirteen minutes, Prince addressed the audience, praising them for their sobriety. Slowly, he put together ‘D.M.S.R.’, a song that always gives Prince and the band room to improvise. Having instructed Levi Seacer to ‘just rumble, junior’, he asked Sheila E what beat she could put to his guitar. In subsequent interviews, band members would talk about the joy and fear of the after-show concerts, during which Prince would deliver direct commands (although these can also be found on official albums, such as the pseudo-live recording of ‘It’s Gonna Be a Beautiful Night’ on Sign o’ the Times) and correct mistakes in front of the audience. As the song continued, he pushed Levi and Miko, giving the audience a demonstration of ‘chicken-grease’ guitar1 before playing a snatch from ‘America’.

  Although he’s never recorded a studio version, Prince’s cover of The Temptations’ ‘Just My Imagination’ (via the Stones’ version on Some Girls) is regarded by most as one of his live career high points.2 He played the song a dozen times during 1987 and 1988, and footage of him doing so (with Mica Paris guesting) at an after-show in Camden Palace a month earlier is one of the highlights of the Omnibus documentary finally broadcast in 1991. Sour immediately followed sweet: ‘People Without’ makes me sad, and uncomfortable. It reminds me of the much later ‘PFunk’ (aka ‘F.U.N.K.’), in which Prince’s scattershot approach seems to equate disease, ugliness and poverty. It was around this time that he started to toy with the concept of the ‘New Power Generation’, which would, of course, become the name of his backing band, but which also, at times, referred to the audience, and it tied into the occasionally authoritarian side of Prince’s message. Per Nilsen, who admires ‘People Without’, quotes Cat as claiming responsibility for inspiring it. She told Nilsen the attack is on people who ‘take for granted what they have, while there are others who don’t have anything’, but this doesn’t quite square with the lyric, which maybe isn’t that surprising given that, as Cat elaborates, ‘he was making all this up as we went along’.3 He would play the song again at the next after-show, but by then the menace had gone; in this version he’s almost paying penance for the cruelty of the first rendition.4

  Attempting to lighten the mood, Prince made a bad knock-knock joke, and when the audience didn’t get it, distanced himself from the gag with a jazzier, loose version of ‘Housequake’ with much less of the anger it used to have now that Holland did indeed know ’bout da quake. The next few songs were covers, the sort of blues and funk he’ll often dig out for his band to work on: a version of ‘Blues in C’ including ‘Down Home Blues’ and Charlie Parker’s ‘Billy’s Bounce’, then ‘Kansas City’ and James Brown’s ‘Cold Sweat’ for Boni. Often the covers section can be where an after-show loses its power, but there was something cold and precise about the performance that held the attention, plus the weird way that Boni sounds like she’s Brown’s sister and the return of Edward Lear the proto-rap lyricist as his ‘The Table and Chair’ is appropriated once more.

  Tonight, ‘Forever in My Life’ began with the music from ‘I Wish U Heaven (Part 3)’, and Prince sang the song with no commitment whatsoever; it’s a reminder that the song is sung to a lover and could easily be a closing-time lie. On vinyl ‘Still Would Stand All Time’ will sound like filler, but in front of the Dutch it became a lost slow-blues masterpiece (even if Prince sang in a slightly silly voice and the band cocked it up5) enlivened with peculiar imagery (who takes a black box of paraphernalia on a date?) and inappropriate anger. On this night, Boni did The Staple Singers’ ‘I’ll Take U There’ so well that it would forever afterwards be apparent that she was the best of the strong female voices Prince has surrounded himself with onstage ever since, and then he played the best version of ‘Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic’ he’d ever do, a song so strong he’d twice try to create an album around it. His band were so emboldened by their performances that now when he gave them instructions, they answered back, so confident were they in what they’d achieved.

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  Alan Leeds was disappointed by Prince’s last-minute decision to switch the US leg of the tour to after the European performances. ‘It would have made a lot of sense to tour America first. His audience were clamouring for it. He hadn’t really toured since Purple Rain, this was now the fourth record since then. And the record was being received a bit apprehensively: in retail because of the controversy over the cover, at radio because the record was programmed in one suite. So we had a lot of challenges. I don’t understand why he was hesitant. I suspect that the success of Purple Rain had been so mammoth that he was just gun-shy about trying to compete with that. And feeling that anything he would do would pale in comparison. It just wasn’t smart.’ Bob Cavallo was no fan of this tour, telling me: ‘I wanted him to do what he eventually did many years later. I said we shouldn’t be doing all this production. He comes out in a car, he has a piano that goes two storeys high and he preaches during the intermission. I didn’t like it. I thought he should have the best musicians he could have, whoever they may be, a clean stage, no production, and play music and show his unbelievable performance and songwriting ability.’

  During the US leg, there were after-shows, all of which had their moments, but nothing to rival the Dutch Trojan Horse performance for quality or significance, before an eight-date tour of Japan to finish off the project. What Prince wants to do with his treasure trove of live recordings is up to him, of course, but if he put the Trojan Horse show out officially, it would lead to a reappraisal of his live work that might help the world at large move on from repeatedly calling him a ‘genius’ performer, without any real sense of what that ‘genius’ entails, to truly understanding how his work onstage and at after-shows is as vital a part of his art as anything manufactured in a recording studio.

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  This year, when Prince was truly at his peak, he also collaborated with his female equivalent in the pop world, Madonna, writing the track ‘Love Song’ with her. He also played guitar on two other tracks on her album Like a Prayer, ‘Act of Contrition’ and ‘Keep It Together’, as well as offering her the song ‘By Alien Means’. But ‘Love Song’ is the only track that feels like a true meeting of their respective styles. In a 1989 interview, Madonna would tell Paul Zollo6 how her collaboration with Prince worked, and also make critical comments about his relationship with the outside world. Assuming that everything she says is true,7 she explained that in this instance it was more collaborative than Prince’s usual process when writing songs for other artists. Prince played the drums, and Madonna played the synthesizer, and they came up with the melody line together. Then she improvised lyrics, and Prince overdubbed some guitars. Prince made a loop of this improvisation, and Madonna added sections and sang parts to it and sent it back, and the process continued in this way. As she explained, ‘It was like this sentence that turned into a paragraph that turned into a little miniseries.’8

  Madonna also made the pertinent observation that although Prince generally tended to dominate people, their collaboration was refreshing for him because they’d achieved the same level of success. Zollo encouraged Madonna to show off by sugge
sting that her two 1980s pop contemporaries, Prince and Michael Jackson, had experienced a weakening of their ‘connection with the world’, while hers had strengthened. Madonna took the bait, claiming that was because she’d stayed in touch with the world, while ‘Michael Jackson and Prince have really isolated themselves.’9 Still, in this interview she emphasises that she is a major fan of Prince’s music, saying how incredible she found the tracks on his next album (presumably Graffiti Bridge, as Prince wanted Madonna to play the love interest in the movie, although she didn’t consider the script worthy of her talents).

  Zollo pointed out the similarities in Prince’s and Madonna’s early careers, and how they had both concentrated in their music on the separation between sexuality and religion. But there are also parallels between their later careers, particularly in the way that both artists have attempted to adapt or absorb subsequent musical trends: both faced the problem of having to follow up enormous world-conquering success; both suffered a stalled film career; both are ruthlessly upwardly mobile; and both ended up courting Hollywood anew with their Oscar parties. Prince critic Alex Hahn has suggested that Madonna proved a shrewder strategist than Prince, arguing that she fared better as an actor10 and evolved more gracefully as an artist. This is debatable. It’s true that Madonna didn’t suffer the public ignominies that Prince did during the 1990s, that she tried to help him with his record label in 199711 and that he turned to her for assistance once more in 1999,12 but although many of her records have been more enthusiastically received by music critics at the time of release, her body of work is ultimately far less interesting (and rewarding) than Prince’s, and has already begun to feel dated.13 While Madonna, who at the time of writing is well into a new career as a director, made the right decision in ducking Graffiti Bridge, the lack of further collaboration between the pair, as between Prince and Miles Davis (though Prince has boasted of treasures recorded with Davis still in the Vault), cannot but seem like a missed opportunity.

  19

  DANCE WITH THE DEVIL

  It’s easy to understand why Prince would be attracted to writing songs for the Batman film, and why its director, Tim Burton, would want to work with him. It must also have seemed like a good instance of creative synergy for Warner Brothers. Alongside the obvious money-generating benefits, it gave Prince a more commercial playground in which to explore the Manichaeism he had toyed with using invented personas such as Spooky Electric. The deal also came at a time of great behind-the-scenes turmoil for Prince, having recently made a business decision which from the outside looked extraordinary, replacing the management team that had served him so well with the director of Purple Rain. Alan Leeds remembers: ‘Famously, at the end of 1988, he decided to clean house, and we came into work the day after New Year’s and there were all these legal notifications that Fargnoli, Ruffalo and Cavallo were fired, Fred Moultrie, his business manager in accountancy, was fired. Even Lee Philips, his attorney, was fired. By this time, we had offices in Paisley Park, and by now we had clerical staff and engineers – twenty employees in the building every day. And I shared an office with Karen Krattinger, who helped run the building for Prince and took care of his personal stuff, and she said, “You’re not going to believe the telegrams that have been floating around this morning. You’d better sit down.” And the question became who in the world is he replacing them with and how come we didn’t know this? This was all so clandestine. And all of a sudden the new manager is Al Magnoli. I thought it was insane. A music-business manager? He had absolutely no background or experience for that.’

  But Prince had a history of forming close relationships with someone and then expecting them to take on roles beyond their normal capability, and the strange decision was not out of character. Leeds says: ‘He was very frustrated with what he deemed the failure of the Lovesexy project. And the management stood up to him and wanted to hold him accountable for the decisions he had made and how they had contributed to that failure. And there were money issues at the time. Purple Rain was a cash cow, but he built Paisley Park from the ground up with cash. He had a sizeable staff on retainer year round. He had a wardrobe shop with seven or eight employees working five days a week. The overheads got completely out of hand. And he was frustrated with Warners. It was somebody waking up and thinking, “Let’s start over.”’

  It wasn’t just the appointment of Magnoli that Leeds questioned. ‘The replacements for the business management and the legal team came recommended by Magnoli, so I saw it as a huge conflict of interest. That’s not to suggest anybody in there had improper agendas, but there’s going to be a point where decisions are made and there’s differences between artists and management and you need somebody to be a tie-breaker, and you’re putting them in a position where they can’t do that.’ Howard Bloom believes that this decision was fatal to Prince’s career. ‘When Prince withdrew, he withdrew not just from me, but also from Bob Cavallo, which was a big mistake because we were his contact with reality and his audience.’

  Nonetheless, anyone who has experienced the difficulty of endeavouring with a creative project once you have lost the support of your closest confidants will understand the siege mentality that Prince appeared to adopt during this period – though it wouldn’t be long before Albert Magnoli would also leave Prince’s employ, and the repercussions of these decisions would continue to impact throughout much of the next decade. During the honeymoon period, however, there was Batman, and though this was always regarded as a shrewd business decision, it is rarely given its due as a work in itself. It should also be noted that this record wasn’t the film’s soundtrack – the score was by Danny Elfman and was released separately – and that only five of the album’s nine songs (‘The Future’, ‘Electric Chair’, ‘Partyman’, ‘Vicki Waiting’ and ‘Scandalous’) appear in the movie, with ‘The Future’ heard only in the distance and ‘Scandalous’ buried in the end credits. It makes most sense, then, no matter how this sounds, to view it as a concept album about Batman, and it can be seen as the third of an unofficial trilogy following The Black Album and Lovesexy, the three Prince records that seem most concerned with a conflict between good and evil. Alan Leeds considers it a natural successor to The Black Album, but also sees in it the seeds of the hip-hop-influenced records that followed, pointing out that it’s ‘very dance- and funk-orientated’.

  Weaker overall than most Prince albums, it’s a significant work nonetheless,1 and only Purple Rain sold more copies on initial release, although this seems more down to the publicity machine than the quality of the songs. But out-takes and alternative versions of songs intended for this record reveal that it could have been a much more adventurous project. The most substantial song not to be included on the finished album, and the one truly great track completed during this era, is ‘Dance with the Devil’, which resembles the later song (and video project) ‘The Undertaker’ in its personification of evil and the lure of wickedness. As with ‘Batdance’, the lead single released from the album, it was inspired (and built around) a line from Sam Hamm and Warren Skaaren’s screenplay.

  The Batman screenplay, rather like Prince’s song-suite, has a curious surface-level to it, with many lines seeming to refer to themes or ideas that have been left out of the finished film. The line this song is built around also resurfaces in ‘Batdance’ (and is followed by terrible screams, sampled from the soundtrack but given an extra charge here) and is one of the most memorable from the film – The Joker’s kiss-off to his victims, and in the movie, the line that unlocks Bruce Wayne’s memory that it was The Joker who killed his father.2 Prince even reworks the line in his acknowledgements, although in the twist he gives it here (and in the ‘Dance with the Devil’ lyric), it seems to take on an additional meaning not necessarily apparent in the original screenplay. Prince seems to blame the victim, suggesting that dancing with the Devil is something someone does out of curiosity, and in doing so the person dooms themselves. Although it has been suggested that Prince abandoned the so
ng because it was too dark – if true, it seems like this was a period when there was a lot of self-censorship going on – it’s also a song that doesn’t fit with the drama. For Jack Nicholson’s Joker, the Devil is someone to make jokes about, albeit of a sinister nature (for him, dancing with the Devil is just something of which he likes the sound). Prince, however, does not share this lightness: a song about the Devil is serious business. But in his interpretation, the victims deserve what’s coming to them: it’s a punishment for curiosity.

  On the album as released, the sleeve notes suggest that each song is from the perspective of a Batman character or characters (‘The Future’ and ‘Scandalous’ by Batman;3 ‘Electric Chair’ and ‘Trust’ by The Joker; ‘The Arms of Orion’ by Bruce Wayne and his girlfriend, Vicki Vale; ‘Vicki Waiting’ by Bruce Wayne; and ‘Batdance’ by Batman, Bruce Wayne, Vicki Vale, The Joker and a new character Prince had created for himself for the project, Gemini), but ‘Dance with the Devil’ doesn’t appear in character (unless Prince planned for Batman to share his perspective). However, this system is further complicated by Prince’s claim in an interview with a German journalist that The Joker wrote ‘The Arms of Orion’. In the same interview, Prince also says that ‘the album was supposed to be a duet between Michael Jackson and me … he as Batman, me as Joker’.4 Liz Jones suggests this was a passing whim of Batman producer Jon Peters.5

  The other songs that Prince demoed for the album but which didn’t make the final record – ‘200 Balloons’, ‘Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic’, a revamp of the ‘Batman Theme’ and ‘We Got the Power’ – are far less compelling, with the first emerging as a B-side and lines from the third being rolled into ‘Batdance’. As with much of the album, these are extremely minimalist, repetitive tracks that, while appealing, feel more like sketches than significant songs. Closer in sound to The Black Album than Lovesexy, they show Prince using this opportunity to explore dark and disturbing work (his lyrics in ‘We Got the Power’ are murky and violent) within a comic-book scenario.