by Matt Thorne
‘LOVE ME.’
Which, of course, is all Prince has ever wanted.
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There is sheet music visible in Graffiti Bridge for two songs – ‘Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic’ and ‘God Is Alive’ – that didn’t make it onto the final soundtrack, but it is unclear whether it is there as another demonstration of the fecundity of Prince’s song-writing and as a tease to the fans, or if the songs were merely lost in an edit.7 Certainly, at least one major plot-line was lost along the way, a quest narrative in which Prince is searching for ‘The Grand Progression’, a chord sequence that seems to have similarities with Pythagoras’ harmonic scale. It’s possible to see Prince’s original conception of the story as being a more spiritual version of Purple Rain, and indeed a dramatisation of his own creative practice. In the script, Prince is seeking a song which will reveal the location of ‘Graffiti Bridge’, which is presented as a place of spiritual importance. In order for this to happen, he needs to come up with the right chord sequence. In reality, with each album Prince was trying to come up with the hit that would make the record, and he needed a song that would be even more epic and successful than ‘Purple Rain’ to make this sequel work – a near impossible task, not because ‘Purple Rain’ was so good, but because it had been so successful and resonated with so many people. Though this narrative seems relatively clear, ‘The Grand Progression’, the unreleased song that deals with this part of the plot (and which is included in the original screenplay), is, as often with Prince, more cryptic, questioning the notion of time and the existence of God, and focusing on the importance of sex with the person he’s with right at that moment. An overwrought, syrupy piano ballad backed with abrasive synth and FX, it has obvious echoes with the song that did appear on the album, ‘Still Would Stand All Time’, which shares some of the same ideas but lacks the theological questioning. Prince has clearly remained fond of ‘The Grand Progression’, implying that the song is one of his best in the lyrics to the much later track ‘F.U.N.K.’. But ‘Graffiti Bridge’, his first attempt to replicate ‘Purple Rain’, is one of a handful of truly terrible Prince songs, up there with ‘Poor Little Bastard’ and ‘Purple and Gold’. Though the song is awful, Brent Fischer remembers his father spending a great amount of time working on it. ‘That was another fairly complicated song, not as involved as “Crystal Ball”, but the level of complexities, the amount of hours it took to transcribe, then to sit and decide on an instrumentation.’ The problem with the song is that the lyrics – a trite description, and reduction, of existential pain – don’t justify the melodrama of the arrangement.
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Perhaps realising this, the lead single was instead ‘Thieves in the Temple’, recorded at the end of the process, and it’s one of only a few standouts on the album. I remember the excitement at the time of the release of the single, which did suggest that Prince may have found a way of moving on from ‘Alphabet St.’ and that this new album might be as significant a development from Lovesexy as Lovesexy was from Sign o’ the Times (leaving aside Batman for a moment). But it was a false lead. After the sustained writing period that had produced Lovesexy, Prince used the record as a clearing house for a lot of old material, dating back to the early 1980s, which made the double album seem thin. Sign o’ the Times was an extraordinarily rich collection with no filler; Graffiti Bridge had plenty of substandard material, and represented the first weak moment after nearly a decade of constant innovation.
It’s not just that the songs were old, but that the more time Prince had spent revisiting and reworking past tracks, the less compelling they’d become. The earliest track, ‘Tick, Tick, Bang’, had been around since Controversy, and the original power of the demo version had been completely neutralised by the time it appeared on Graffiti Bridge.8 The Vault dates ‘Can’t Stop This Feeling I Got’ back to some of Prince’s earliest home sessions, suggesting it was recorded at home sometime between 1981 and 1982. As with ‘We Can Funk’, Prince had dug out the song in 1986, having two more shots at it with The Revolution. Both ‘Can’t Stop This Feeling I Got’ and ‘We Can Funk’ are less compelling in their Graffiti Bridge versions, though the former does begin interestingly, with Prince speaking to his father, thus making one of the few explicit links between Graffiti Bridge and Purple Rain.9
Of greater significance are the Crystal Ball-connected song ‘Joy in Repetition’ and ‘The Question of U’, which though five years old by this time had not been considered for any previous projects.10 Both match the standard of ‘Thieves in the Temple’. In fact, one of the great frustrations of this album is that a third of it rates among Prince’s finest work, while the worst of the record is among the weakest of his entire output.
There’s too much of The Time on the album, four tracks – ‘Release It’, ‘Love Machine’, ‘Shake!’ and ‘The Latest Fashion’ – that seem incongruous here.11 The guest spots from Tevin Campbell (‘Round and Round’) and Mavis Staples (‘Melody Cool’) are substandard songs that don’t belong on this album. And Prince’s attempt to rename Staples Melody Cool in the way he did with past protégées is embarrassing. Staples gives the performance her all, but it is one of those songs that justifies criticisms that Prince didn’t know how to work with this particular music legend.
The song that gave his new band their name, ‘New Power Generation’, is here in two parts, the watered-down Pepsi-punk a strange comedown for someone who once genuinely challenged the sensibilities of mass America but had long since found wide acceptance (although I admit to a fondness for T. C. Ellis’s born-again anti-coke rap). Much of the rest of the record is equally substandard, though weirdly memorable, full of odd hooks that are hard to shake. ‘Elephants and Flowers’, for example, seems like a slight, silly song, but when Prince played the song live for the first time at his ‘Xenophobia’ celebration twelve years later, he became overwhelmed by the lyrics. It’s clear in this version that in spite of the title’s silly sexual analogies, it’s as much a religious song in the vein of much of Lovesexy as it is smut. ‘Still Would Stand All Time’ sounded great live but is forgettable on vinyl, smothered and slowed down to within an inch of its life (it’s easy to understand Prince’s logic in getting gospel-singing siblings The Steeles to do backing vocals, but for all the qualities of the group, it’s a polish too far).
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Prince was coming off the road when Graffiti Bridge was released, and although he did a few dates in Japan after the album came out, it was the tail end of the Nude tour rather than a significant new run. The last batch of songs connected to Graffiti Bridge – but recorded after Prince had begun recording songs for Diamonds and Pearls – was a brace of tracks recorded for a ‘New Power Generation’12 maxi-single. The run of maxi-singles Prince recorded around this time, beginning with ‘The Scandalous Sex Suite’ and continuing for several subsequent years, demonstrate a peculiar new creative impulse of Prince’s during this time – moving beyond straight remixes into large numbers of interconnected songs that all appear to grow out of the initial track. The repetitiveness is part of the songs’ charm, although there’s something about this process that doesn’t seem entirely healthy. In his 1999 novel Motherless Brooklyn, Jonathan Lethem presents Lionel Essrog, a character with Tourette’s who considers Prince a kindred spirit and is calmed by his remixes, which he considers ‘the nearest thing to art in [his] condition’.13
It’s easy (like Lionel Essrog) to get lost in this era, in the remixes and alternative versions and past takes, but for all the lost gems here, there is a lack of consistency, a sense of Prince putting out substandard work without truly contemplating how it worked as a whole. After the ruthless editing that had led to Sign o’ the Times and the creative cohesion of Lovesexy, Graffiti Bridge is an end point to Prince’s peerless run of pop achievement, to be followed by a period when the riches were sprinkled in far sparser amounts, a period when to be a Prince fan was no longer to marvel at the endless creativity but instead to focus hard on the records and t
ry to convince yourself that this was still the same man, that what once was so easy to love had not been lost.
21
GIGOLOS GET LONELY TOO (PART 2)
Alongside the projects he’s self-generated – the models, wannabe actresses or make-up girls pushed into the spotlight – Prince has always kept a keen eye on British (almost exclusively female) talent. The list of British women he has either spent time with in the UK or invited to his studios includes everyone from Lisa Stansfield to Spice Girl Mel B, Beverley Knight to the late Amy Winehouse. Now, no mooted collaboration would raise eyebrows, but in 1984 his work with Scottish starlet Sheena Easton startled some. Before Michael Hutchence boasted of corrupting Kylie, or the alumni of The Mickey Mouse Club (Britney/Justin/Christina) grew up and started taking an interest in adult pleasures, Prince set the template for the squeaky-clean-to-sex-machine transformation. Maybe driven by a sense of deliberate pop provocation, or perhaps merely wanting to see how far she would go, he wrote Easton – whose interest in and admiration for Prince had been relayed to him via an engineer who’d worked with both – a song (‘Sugar Walls’) so dirty it charted at number two on the Parental Music Resource Center’s Filthy Fifteen.1
Vanity may have stopped working with Prince, but he hadn’t given up on girl groups. The common perception of the Apollonia 6 project is that it is inferior to the work Prince produced with Vanity 6, and while it’s true Prince strip-mined the eponymous album, taking ‘Take Me with U’ for Purple Rain and giving ‘Manic Monday’ to The Bangles, the record is by no means a failure, and is long overdue a reissue. Prince often seems uninterested in revisiting his past, but this CD deserves to be remastered. And it should be packaged with the nineteen minutes of footage from the unreleased Apollonia 6 video-album that surfaced on the Internet in 2008.
Directed by Brian Thomson, the production designer of Shock Treatment – a deeply peculiar 1981 follow-up to The Rocky Horror Picture Show – the incomplete Apollonia 6 movie feels like a collaboration between David Lynch, Kenny Everett and Greg Dark. Beginning at a funeral (the girls are attending in their underwear, and Susan has brought her teddy bear), the girls are informed that Mr Christian, the schoolteacher Apollonia sleeps with in the album’s first song, has left everything to his beautiful blonde lawyer. ‘Tough titty, girls,’ he tells them. ‘It’s time you learned the value of hard, honest work.’ ‘But’, protests Apollonia, ‘we have nothing to wear.’ ‘Precisely,’ announces the deceased Mr Christian from beyond the grave.
Nothing, that is, aside from French-maid outfits, which they don before heading off to a 1980s diner (soundtracked by ‘Sex Shooter’, the album’s ‘Nasty Girl’ and the one song that had a life beyond the project). With scenes including Susan being groped through her lingerie by a succession of teddy bears and one prospective lover being teased and abandoned in a shopping trolley, looking as tormented as Winston Smith in Room 101, both the album and the video are guilty pleasures, all the more appealing for being so ephemeral.
Prince launched his Paisley Park label with a second record from Sheila E. As with her first, it is a concept album. This time Sheila even has a character, Sister Fate, while the rest of the band are saddled with aliases that make them sound like refugees from Their Satanic Majesties Request: Benintino the Wizard, Dame Kelly, Sir Dancelot, The Court Jester (on bongos, no less), The Nobleman, the Earl of Grey and Sir Stephen (had Prince been reading Story of O?). The album is called Romance 1600, and although Prince also works in references and ideas from the early-1980s New Romantic movement, which was largely inspired by the second half of the eighteenth century, there are several elements of the album that suggest Prince does know his history, such as the fact that court jesters died out with the Civil War, or that Prince also references the pre-1600 Renaissance artist Michelangelo in ‘Dear Michaelangelo’ (Prince clearly prefers Ruskin’s spelling), or that the album’s title song takes place at a masked ball. But as with all Prince conceits, this only goes so far, and trying to force all the songs to fit the overarching concept would be to misread (mishear?) the record. The album also has a hidden theme: an analysis of sexual difference and the importance of trusting individual desire. Forget Vanity and Apollonia: this is Prince’s most sexually liberated album.
The first track, ‘Sister Fate’, introduces us to Sheila’s new character and establishes the idea of the record being like a movie. It was also the first single, accompanied by a video that was a deliberate exercise in toying with Prince’s loyal fan base and bringing them to the project. The most striking things about the video are that Sheila and her band are now dressed like Prince and The Revolution and that Prince himself makes a brief appearance. After a copy of the Daily Tribune (a disguised version of Minneapolis’s Star Tribune) is flashed up on screen with the headline ‘Who Is Sheila E’s Mystery Love?’, Prince appears in profile, grinning as he turns his head. Sheila plays two characters in the video, herself and ‘Sister Fate’, who shapes destiny by blessing lovers with a wand like a good fairy. The lyric refers to a ‘nasty rumour’ (the video suggests that this is that Prince and Sheila are in a relationship) that the singer doesn’t deny but is leaving up to fate to resolve. The song’s innuendo can be read in a different way, however, with several hints that it is really about a secret lesbian relationship, with references to ‘goin’ down’ and the ensuing scandal if people discovered ‘the real truth’. It’s one of the most striking opening tracks on any protégé’s album; Prince at his most playful. He gave extra encouragement to his fans to seek it out by putting the twelve-inch vinyl record of the song in Christopher Tracy’s apartment in Under the Cherry Moon, along with a copy of Miles Davis’s 1985 album You’re Under Arrest.
‘Dear Michaelangelo’ is a peculiar song. On a literal level it’s about a female peasant who is stopped from suicide only by her love for the artist. Aware that he is gay, she decides that nevertheless she will only sleep with him, or if she can’t have him, other homosexual men. This leads conceptually to ‘A Love Bizarre’, an orgiastic celebration of ‘bizarre love’, ‘outrageous sin’ and getting rough in the back of the limousine, encouraging the listener to abandon the ‘ivory tower’ and join in the fun. But if you don’t have a lover (or a limousine), there’s always (for female listeners at least) the ‘Toy Box’. Boxes are often sexual for Prince (who can forget the one in ‘Gett Off’?), and here it’s a metaphor for Sister Fate’s vagina. It’s the most perverse song on a perverse album, not because it celebrates masturbation, but because it does so in a childhood context. The first verse suggests that Sister Fate’s brother is sad because he doesn’t have a vagina, the second emphasises how easy it is to have an orgasm when you’re young (one touch too much), and the third addresses how age brings sexual repression. Uh oh.2 ‘Yellow’ sees Sheila E dropping her ‘Sister Fate’ guise for an autobiographical song in which she sings of her envy of her sister’s breasts (using her sister’s real name, Zina). For Prince, the playground is often a sexualised arena, and that’s the case here, as Sheila describes cheerleaders being jealous of her ass-hugging yellow pants and boys envying her yellow Riviera star car. The song moves from the schoolyard to Sheila’s frustration with relationships after a sexual encounter with an unworthy man. The album’s title song, ‘Romance 1600’, describes a masked ball and a mysterious sexual encounter that fits with the orgiastic abandon of ‘A Love Bizarre’.
‘Bedtime Story’, like ‘Noon Rendezvous’ on the first album, is a slight song when performed by Sheila E – a self-referential sketch about a Prince and a princess that recalls ‘Temptation’ from Around the World in a Day – but totally transformed in Prince’s far longer demo version. Again unfinished (he shouts out key changes and identifies verses throughout), it nonetheless contains an emotional power absent from the released recording. Though Sheila E’s third, self-titled album includes five songs co-written by Prince, it lacks the high concept of the first two records, with two tracks about partying, one straightforward, ‘One Day (I’m Gonna Ma
ke You Mine)’, the other, ‘Koo Koo’, including a darker discussion of abortion and war. Only ‘Pride and the Passion’ resembles previous Sheila E songs like ‘The Belle of St. Mark’ or ‘Noon Rendezvous’, another song about a woman who falls in love with a sophisticated, wealthy and seemingly older man, while ‘Boys’ Club’ is a female version of the nightclub songs once sung by Morris Day, and ‘Love on a Blue Train’ a busy horn-and-percussion-driven celebration of inter-railing.
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But while some fans rate the Sheila E or The Time or Jill Jones’s albums as the best records by a Prince protégé, nothing compares to The Family, the first band to put out a debut on Paisley Park. The Family features some of the most talented musicians Prince has worked with on any side project, but as Eric Leeds – who plays sax on the album, the beginning of a creative relationship with Prince that initially lasted from 1986 to 1999, and which would be reignited between 2002 and 2003, when the focus of Prince’s music shifted from funk to jazz – told me, ‘The music of The Family was primarily Prince,3 and we were assigned roles.’4 Lead roles went to Paul Peterson, a keyboardist with The Time who had featured with the band in Purple Rain (and who, like many Prince associates, took on a new name, St Paul, a play on the Minnesota state), and Susannah Melvoin. The two other members of The Family were also exiles from The Time: Jellybean Johnson and Jerome Benton.