Prince

by Matt Thorne

  Rather than shape the music to fit the film, Prince tried to shape the film to his music, creating a comic-book character for himself called Gemini6 who appeared in videos for the album, including the ‘Partyman’ video that would later inspire a homage from electro band Hot Chip. As well as the unreleased songs themselves, there are also unreleased alternative versions of some of the tracks, including ‘Electric Chair’, which have a clear affinity with other late-1980s/early-1990s tracks built around old soul samples, like Chad Jackson’s use of the sax intro from Marva Whitney’s ‘Unwind Yourself’ in his ‘Hear the Drummer (Get Wicked)’. Given Prince’s lasting interest in James Brown, it was inevitable that this sort of thing would capture his attention.

  Prince would dust off three recent songs for the project – ‘Electric Chair’, ‘Anna Waiting’ and ‘Scandalous’. It seems from interviews that Tim Burton was aware of this recycling. The rest were written specifically for the album (though the wonderful Camille-era ‘Feel U Up’ also received official release during this period as the B-side to ‘Partyman’). To support the album Prince performed ‘Electric Chair’ on Saturday Night Live, with a surprising line-up including Candy Dulfer and the protégé-who-never-quite-made-it, Margie Cox. While the stagecraft was overly regimented and slightly clumsy (you can understand why he hid the band as much as possible during Lovesexy), it was a surprisingly spirited performance, suggesting that no matter what motivated him to get involved with the project, Prince was capable of wringing some emotion out of work-for-hire material.

  While ‘Electric Chair’ was a perfect fit for this comic-book retro-futuristic project, ‘Anna Waiting’, written for Anna Garcia (credited in the acknowledgements under the alias Prince gave her, ‘Anna Fantastic’), didn’t really work with the title changed to ‘Vicki Waiting’, especially not with the added penis and vagina jokes at odds with the gothic-but-stately mood of Burton’s film. ‘Scandalous’ has not been explicitly linked to Garcia, but it seems that difference in age might well be the focus of the scandal in this song.7 In the narrative context of the Batman album, the scandal instead is the relationship between Bruce Wayne and Vicki Vale. But by the time Prince put out an extended, nineteen-minute version of the song entitled ‘The Scandalous Sex Suite’, the source of the scandal had changed again, now seeming to refer to the real-life relationship between Prince and Batman actress Kim Basinger, who was already part of Prince’s fantasy world due to her appearance in 9½ Weeks (the sort of classy soft-core that Prince often uses for inspiration, such as his early-1990s interest in Barbarella and Caligula). Basinger contributes straight-faced, suggestive (and hilarious) dialogue to this extended version, which appeared on a maxi-disc that also contained the absurd ‘Sex’, an extended dance song sung by an alien called ‘Endorphin’ from the planet Venus, who has come to Earth in search of a sex partner so talented he’ll be able to remain faithful to them.

  By comparison to ‘The Scandalous Sex Suite’, ‘The Arms of Orion’, a duet with Sheena Easton, was one of Prince’s blandest songs to date, and unsurprisingly, was not used in the actual film (the song’s B-side, ‘I Love U in Me’, was far more impressive). But the most memorable instance of Prince’s music in Burton’s film is ‘Partyman’, used to convincing diegetic effect as The Joker’s henchmen blast it from a 1980s boom box while the gang deface Whistler’s Mother and other priceless artworks at Gotham City’s Flugelheim museum. ‘Trust’, also used in the film, features Prince sneaking a Christian message into a Joker song, reminding us that we should trust God rather than a cartoon super-villain. ‘Lemon Crush’ (which didn’t make the movie) features Prince rhyming ‘jobba’ with ‘robba’ and is so lackadaisical it seems the definition of filler, largely of interest for Prince’s continued use of double entendre (at the risk of coming across like one of those awful English professors who see innuendo in everything, I’m assuming the ‘lemon’ here is a vagina and the crush both the sexual act and the secretions produced during it). Even ‘Batdance’, which was Prince’s first US number one since ‘Kiss’, has a sketchy feel to it, built on samples of dialogue from the film and a multitude of other released and unreleased songs.

  *

  Brent Fischer, whose father’s work is sampled on the album, remembers: ‘We never knew about the whole Batman thing. We got a call from somebody at Warner Brothers saying that music that we had previously recorded for Prince for an unrelated song had been lifted from that song, the orchestra tracks had been lifted from that song and placed as sort of background noise behind a new song that Prince had recorded for Batman.’ Although Fischer does not remember which song was sampled, he thinks it was one of the unreleased ones, and ‘The Future’ features string samples from the then yet to be released ‘Crystal Ball’. ‘I don’t believe that the orchestra parts are in the same key or even in the same tempo as the new song in which they were used, but what they were used for was an effect.’

  *

  ‘I got a new band,’ Prince announced onstage at the Civic Center in St Paul, previewing the Nude tour to a Minneapolis audience and acknowledging the reshuffle that had taken place since the Lovesexy run. His band had actually steadily diminished (in number, if not necessarily in quality) since the Sign o’ the Times tour. Dancers Greg and Wally had gone before Lovesexy, while Boni Boyer, Eric Leeds, Sheila E, Atlanta Bliss and Cat Glover had departed afterwards, leaving only Miko Weaver, Levi Seacer, Jr and Dr Fink.

  This was a tough period for Prince. Weaver and Fink would leave after this tour, and before it began the rest of the band witnessed Prince and Miko arguing after Prince kept asking him to turn his guitar down, prompting Prince to invite Miko to continue the conversation outside, something Miko refused to do because of Prince’s bodyguards.8 Nevertheless, for a while at least, both Weaver and Fink remained essential to Prince’s band.

  The new members for the Nude tour were Rosie Gaines, drummer Michael Bland and three new male dancers, The Game Boyz – Kirk Johnson, Damon Dickson and Tony Mosley – whose presence might initially have seemed risible but of whom at least two would go on to play a very important role in Prince’s later direction. Indeed, playing in Prince’s band was starting to resemble working for a company, with ample opportunity for promotion.

  Given the showmanship and sheer ambition of the Sign o’ the Times and Lovesexy concerts, the stripped-down, back-to-basics Nude tour was inevitably going to be a let-down for those who came expecting to see Prince playing basketball while singing and riding around on top of a Thunderbird with Cat and Sheila E. It wasn’t the first time that Prince had followed up a big, showy, theatrical tour with stripped-down concerts (such as the 1986 ‘Hit and Run’ shows that followed Purple Rain), and he would do so again in the future, but the Nude tour was surprisingly long, with fifty-one dates in Europe before five in Japan. It was also frustrating to see Prince returning to so much of Purple Rain and sticking mostly to a relatively concise show, playing largely the same set night after night. But the set was given a unique dimension by the presence of Batman material, as well as songs from the as yet unreleased Graffiti Bridge (there would be no tour for that album, which came out during the Nude run). Every night he would open the show with ‘The Future’, but the song would undergo a fascinating development during the run, as Tony Mosley began to use it as the basis of a new rap song entitled ‘The Flow’, which would prove crucial to later changes in Prince’s sound.

  This tour would also be the only time Prince would play ‘Batdance’ live, and was also the only time he regularly played ‘Partyman’, until he inexplicably revived it in 2006. Fans who’d yet to hear Graffiti Bridge were astonished by the stunning blues of new song ‘The Question of U’, which occasionally saw him reviving his ‘Electric Man’ rap from 1985 to newly powerful effect. Blues was also present in the show with a hold-over of ‘Blues in C (If I Had a Harem)’, from the Lovesexy tour, and a cover of B. B. King’s ‘Don’t Make Me Pay for His Mistakes’. And this was also the tour which saw Prince beginning his recl
amation of ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ from Sinead O’Connor, and I remember the one date I saw with great fondness. The disappearance of Fink and Miko after this tour didn’t represent as dramatic a schism as the break-up of The Revolution, but it did accompany a significant change in Prince’s sound, and for those who prefer the harderedged Prince work, there is much to be found in this era, when Prince took one of the most commercially marketable intellectual properties in the world – Batman – and made it work for him.

  20

  WHAT’S WRONG WITH GRAFFITI BRIDGE?

  A recurring pattern in Prince’s life is him inspiring, whether wittingly or unwittingly, other people to produce artistic work of their own which surpasses anything they do that is not connected to him. This is most obvious with musicians, but it’s also true of artists and film-makers. And when he becomes aware of this, Prince can be enormously generous to other dedicated souls.

  Steve Parke’s female Baltimore neighbour told him that twenty years ago, she remembered walking past his house daily and noticing him working until three in the morning every day on a painting of Prince. It was this painting that helped inspire Prince’s next album and new film. ‘The Graffiti Bridge album cover’, Parke says, ‘was really a showpiece for my skills at the time. Basically, I said because I’ve got the contact with Prince, I might as well do something that he might like or might inspire an idea. A lot of it was channelling my inner fan. What has he done, what hasn’t he done? What are elements that I hadn’t seen him use? A lot of elements were just things I thought would be kinda cool, kinda trippy. It was a nod to the ’70s Bitches Brew [-style] covers: not as dark, much poppier and more commercial.’

  When he’d finished the painting, he got in touch with Levi Seacer, Jr, who said: ‘“Why don’t you send the painting out here?” So I sent it out and one day he called me and said, “Hey, Prince has got that on his desk. He looks at it a lot.” And then I get a call from Prince one day, and he says, “I think I want to make this the album cover.” Oh, really? I thought it might inspire an idea but not become the cover. I did have to go back in and rework it a little bit. I had to put Morris Day in, I had to put in Ingrid and I had to take what was a picture of my wife and put Jill Jones’s face on it.’

  The dark-haired Venus de Milo among the imagery, which might have seemed either something Prince would have included for continuity with his past symbolism or something that Parke might have included in reference to Prince’s previous work, was a subconscious inclusion, and not something Parke thought about. ‘It’s just like Shakespeare,’ he says. ‘Shakespeare’s like, “Sure, you wanna think that?”’

  While staring at the painting, Prince had been doing a lot of second-guessing. The process he went through to arrive at the eventual released configuration of Graffiti Bridge was almost as complicated as the writing, recording and revision that led to Sign o’ the Times (and indeed, began around the same time). Once again he was working on several projects at once: an early version of what would become Graffiti Bridge, a record called Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic (very different to the version eventually released in 1999), and a planned fourth album for The Time, Corporate World (which eventually emerged, in a different form, as 1990’s Pandemonium), finally merging songs recorded for all three projects.

  *

  It’s ironic that although so much of the music written for the various permutations of Graffiti Bridge seemed designed largely to explore or further a narrative, the released movie has hardly any story at all, and is often (and justifiably) dismissed as a collection of loosely interlinked music videos. By far the weakest of Prince’s four theatrically released films, it is far closer to later TV movies or video releases like The Beautiful Experience or 3 Chains o’ Gold than Purple Rain or Under the Cherry Moon. Bob Cavallo remembers early on in the process, ‘We were at odds with each other. Our contract was up; five years had gone by since Purple Rain. We met at the Four Seasons with his lawyer and his accountant, me and Steve Fargnoli to discuss some kind of rapprochement because he had fired us. Basically he said, “I’ll work with you again but you’ve got to help me make this movie.” I read the treatment and said, “This could be an interesting thing,” and I said, “I’ll try to put you together with some young hip writers and maybe we can come up with a script quickly, ’cause this is pretty detailed.” And he went, “What are you talking about? That is the script.” It was thirty pages. And he said, “I’m going to shoot it, I know exactly how to do it.” So I said, “Maybe we could get this on Broadway for you. Would you be interested in that?” And he said, “No.” Now he was pissed that I didn’t think this was a good enough script, so we shook hands and that was the end of it. Then, about a year later, we were suing each other. But even when we sued each other, it was kinda funny. I said, “How could you not pay me?” He said, “How could you sue me?” He said, “You can’t have my children, those songs. You’re gonna give your involvement in those songs to your grandchildren?” And I said, “Yeah, I put ten years of my life into you, and you sucked all the air out of the room. I couldn’t really manage anybody else except for your friends.”’

  Presented as a sequel to Purple Rain, it has some continuity with the earlier movie. Once again Prince plays a character called The Kid, who finds himself in competition with The Time – an imaginary rivalry which after nearly a decade was getting tiresome.1 The Kid writes letters to his dead father (who committed suicide in the first film), and the various clubs in Seven Corners have been willed to their owners by Billy Sparks from Purple Rain. But instead of being rooted in the real Minneapolis venue of First Avenue, this movie takes place on an obvious soundstage and features four rival clubs. And while the first film had originated from observations made by a scriptwriter who had observed the Triple Threat tour, this film, written and directed by Prince, is rooted in a far more uneasy blend of fantasy and reality.

  Prince’s famous response to the film’s failure – ‘It was nonviolent, positive and had no blatant sex scenes … Maybe it will take people thirty years to get it. They trashed The Wizard of Oz too’2 – was clearly an off-the-cuff defence, but he seemed genuinely unaware of the disturbing qualities of his third fiction movie. Although less hard-edged than Purple Rain, Graffiti Bridge has a dark undercurrent, with a recurrence of the troubling gender relations that for many feminists marred Purple Rain. The fact that much of this occurs on a pastel and neon set and there’s lots of New Age talk seems only to heighten rather than smooth out these elements.

  Still, much of the violence is directed inward. The Kid considers suicide throughout the film, wondering whether he will follow his father’s example. And Prince’s interest in sadomasochism returns – when he strips off his shirt he has the words ‘Beat Me’ written inside a heart on his chest. But the women get a tough time of it too. The relationship between Morris Day and his on–off girlfriend Robin Power is troubling: when Morris arrives at the club, his henchman, Jerome, wrestles her expensive coat from her to lay over a puddle to stop Morris dirtying his shoes; and once again pushing the gigolo lifestyle into the gothic, she is forced to dance in a cage at his nightclub and in her underwear at his home. And poor Jill Jones, who, according to Ronin Ro, was so incensed by changes in the script diminishing her role that she tore up the script and scattered it around the aeroplane taking her to Minneapolis,3 had to make the most of a scene in which she responds to questions from The Kid by removing her panties and leaving them on the floor.

  The Kid’s main love interest, Aura, is treated less shabbily than Apollonia, but she’s still threatened with a ‘pimp sandwich’, drugged and eventually run over. And there is a distasteful scene of homophobic panic when Morris and Jerome are provoked to retching after accidentally touching each other up in the dark. The film also feels airless in a way Purple Rain didn’t, and makes the common mistake of low-budget films4 in that it skimps on extras, with almost all the clubs seeming much emptier than First Avenue. (Significantly, Albert Magnoli noted of Purple Rain: ‘We had o
ver 900 extras who … gave the [film] a tremendous amount of realism.’5) Without this, Graffiti Bridge looks chilly. Certainly, it was something the film needed to explain away. ‘Bit quiet tonight,’ Aura comments to T.C. ‘That don’t ever stop The Kid,’ T.C. replies.

  While the film continues to be regarded as a turkey – the Fox TV film critic Shawn Edwards voting it top of a list of ‘the worst black movies ever’ in 2010 – revisionists seized upon the ten minutes or so of circulating out-takes when they leaked, arguing the more sophisticated elements of Prince’s vision were lost in the edit suite. But these out-takes consist largely of three more scenes that are, like much of the film, essentially music videos, with only one additional dramatic scene. The music videos – for soundtrack songs ‘Can’t Stop This Feeling I Got’, ‘The Question of U’, ‘Round and Round’ and ‘The Latest Fashion’ – while entertaining, don’t really point towards any hidden extra layers.6 Only ‘The Question of U’ expands the style of the film, with a troop of creepy black-and-white-clad mimes pretending to be spiders, while Aura scribbles in her diary. The additional scene shows Aura and The Kid on the soundstage playing a game of hangman that presumably precedes the scene in the released version where Aura and The Kid do this in bed. Aura fashions a noose, places this around The Kid’s neck, draws a hangman game on the wall with a marker pen and encourages The Kid to choose a letter. The Kid proves no better than Aura at the game, offering as she did ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’ and ‘D’ (don’t they know you’re supposed to start with the vowels?) as she tightens the noose and threatens to kick his chair away. Fortunately, although he loses the game, she lets him live and we see the phrase she’s written is the pleading request from ‘Joy in Repetition’ (and seen on the wall of the club in the finished film):