by Matt Thorne
For what seems to have been intended as a pop record, The Family is often driven by dark emotions. ‘High Fashion’ is one of many songs in Prince’s oeuvre (see, for example, his two songs about models, ‘Cindy C’ on The Black Album and ‘Chelsea Rodgers’ on Planet Earth) in which he’s caught between admiration and disdain for a woman with expensive tastes. Prince’s demo version of ‘Mutiny’ is one of his angriest songs, a hint of the later darkness he’d pursue on parts of The Black Album. The metaphor he uses plays on the idea of a relation-‘ship’, with St Paul wanting to wrest control from his lover, but knowing that in doing so he’ll destroy their love for ever. Towards the end, Prince has a hidden message, low in the mix, to the members of The Time who abandoned him. If you turn the stereo up loud enough you can hear what sounds like a pair of scissors and Prince asking, ‘Morris, did you give? Miko, did you give?’5
The Family’s first single, ‘The Screams of Passion’, is a duet between St Paul and Susannah. It’s easy to see why it was chosen to lead – it’s the most straightforwardly pop song on the album, accompanied as it was with a fun video showing the band performing over a video screen of crashing waves – but it’s less immediately arresting than the two tracks that open the album. ‘Yes’, the first instrumental, is a dark jazz-funk song built around Prince’s drums, Eric’s sax and Prince’s groans. ‘River Run Dry’ is the only song on the album not by Prince, written instead by The Revolution’s drummer, Bobby Z (the brother of the album’s producer, but not a member of The Family). It’s a compelling depiction of the dog days of a doomed relationship, but it pales beside ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’, a song that got a second lease of life after it was covered by Sinead O’Connor, and which was subsequently reclaimed by Prince in performance and in duet with Rosie Gaines on his 1993 collection The Hits. Even before O’Connor added her tears, it was one of Prince’s loneliest songs, and one of The Family’s finest moments: a kind of answer record to 1999’s ‘Free’, in which the liberation of breaking up collapses into despair.
The title of ‘Susannah’s Pyjamas’ – the second, softer, instrumental – hints at the intimacy between Prince and The Family’s singer, Susannah Melvoin, with whom he had a long, creatively inspiring relationship. On the record’s final track, ‘Desire’, everything comes together: this is a poetic, mysterious song in which St Paul sings of unrequited love for a woman who’s saving herself for a soldier who’d rather die than be with her.
Susannah told me that she and St Paul were in rehearsal for ‘five months straight’, preparing for a live tour. Unfortunately, the tour didn’t happen, due, it seems, to Prince’s other commitments during this period. A frustrated St Paul left the band in late 1985.6
Melvoin told me that even after St Paul left, a second Family album might still have appeared, built around the out-takes from the first album. ‘After Paul went and did his own thing, Prince came to me and said, “Do you still want to do this?” And I was too young and dumb and I said, “If he doesn’t want to do it, I don’t want to do it.” I should’ve said, “Sure.”’ Susannah told me that had this second album appeared, the starting point would have been two songs that didn’t make the first album. While she didn’t name these tracks, she said she was sure everyone had heard these out-takes, so I assume she was referring to ‘Miss Understood’ and ‘Feline’, two unreleased Family tracks. While ‘Miss Understood’ is a far less lyrically sophisticated song than anything on The Family album, it’s such a winning pop track that it seems extraordinary that Prince didn’t use it in any of his subsequent female-fronted projects, especially as his engineer, Susan Rogers, is on record as saying that Susannah didn’t like the song because she thought it didn’t fit her character. The full version of ‘Feline’ is safely locked away,7 but an instrumental version indicates that it is closer to the rest of The Family album, another sax-driven track that shares the strange dark power of ‘Yes’ and ‘Susannah’s Pyjamas’ (Rogers has stated that it didn’t make the album because St Paul objected to the lyrical content).8
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Although both Prince’s parents performed in a jazz group, his former manager, Alan Leeds, has argued Prince had little first-hand knowledge of jazz before Leeds’s brother Eric (who would front Madhouse) joined The Revolution, suggesting that while Wendy and Lisa educated Prince in classic rock, Eric was introducing Prince to jazz. But Eric Leeds himself was very eager in conversation with me to emphasise how Prince’s jazz projects were, at least at first, essentially ‘Prince projects’ he contributed to rather than collaborations.
Wendy Melvoin explains further: ‘I still think that Prince isn’t a be-bopper, he’s not a cool jazz guy, he’s not an avant-garde jazz guy, he’s certainly not a Coltrane guy. He’s like more of a contemporary-jazz guy, the kind of jazz that I always refer to as weather-channel music, the stuff you hear on the weather channel, really smooth, and he functions well in that environment, but I wouldn’t put a fake book in front of Prince and say, “Can you go ahead and play ‘Autumn Leaves’ for me?”’ Eric Leeds said something similar to George Cole: ‘Prince is not a jazz musician in the traditional sense and certainly doesn’t have the harmonic background that we would associate with straight-up jazz musicians, [but] he can apply a sense of spontaneity, whether he’s in the studio or in rehearsal or in a live situation that is more true to the jazz ethic than a lot of jazz musicians that I’ve played with.’9
One thing that everyone seems to agree on, though, is Prince’s admiration for Miles Davis. Shortly after Davis signed to Warner Brothers, the two of them met at an airport in Los Angeles, and Davis asked Prince to submit a song for inclusion on what would eventually become Tutu. During this period, Davis had become increasingly interested in pop music, covering Michael Jackson’s ‘Human Nature’ and Cyndi Lauper’s ‘Time After Time’. Like Prince, he also used new-wave elements in his music – collaborating with Scritti Politti’s Green Gartside – and was eager for Prince to contribute a song for his new album.
For the past several years, Prince had merrily given away songs seemingly to anyone who asked, but this request evidently affected him more deeply than usual. He responded in his normal speedy way, going into the studio he’d booked over the Christmas period and recording a song called ‘Can I Play with U’ for Miles’s consideration. The title, of course, has a double meaning, being an extra-diegetic invitation to Miles, but also referring in the narrative of the song to a woman Prince is trying to pick up in a club. Miles liked the song and added his trumpet. At the same sessions Prince recorded a tribute to Davis called
‘A Couple of Miles’ (Davis would return the favour with ‘Half Nelson’), and a few days later began two days of jazz-style jamming on a new project he called The Flesh with Eric Leeds. ‘It was a lot of spontaneous, very improvisational, Madhouse-ish kinda stuff that included Sheila E and Levi Seacer, Jr. It was more of a quartet,’ Alan Leeds remembers. When I asked Eric Leeds about these sessions, he explained that in spite of the mythology that has grown up around this record – it has been suggested that a potential album was assembled which would include on side one a twenty-minute version of ‘Junk Music’, an instrumental track that can be heard playing (for thirty seconds) on the soundtrack to Under the Cherry Moon – the project was nothing more than studio jams. ‘Those sessions were in LA. Prince was finishing up the Parade album, working on tracks that would end up on Sign o’ the Times and working on the incidental music for Under the Cherry Moon. Prince was happy with some of the stuff we produced, and there was a sense that something might come out of it that was worthy of release. But it was a very loose idea; there wasn’t a plan there. Prince called out a key and we started playing.’ Leeds also warns not to read too much significance into the fact that this project had a name. ‘I suspect the name came up when we were sitting in the studio laughing and joking, and then it took on a life of its own. But the idea formed and then it disappeared for ever.’
Well, almost disappeared. We do still have the snippet of �
��Junk Music’ and the full ‘U Gotta Shake Something’, a fifteen-minute, very repetitive track which features the reappearance of what sounds suspiciously like Jamie Starr asking questions like ‘You ever seen a black man play guitar with no clothes on?’10 and a retaliation to the Parental Music Resource Center when Prince sings, ‘Washington wives, you can’t fuck with us.’
The meeting with Davis also inspired Prince to spend a day recording with his father, although it would be nearly a year before he began work on the Madhouse project. Between The Flesh and Madhouse, Prince had withdrawn ‘Can I Play with U?’ from Tutu, uncertain whether it would work alongside the rest of Davis’s album. Although the song is easy to locate, and Prince would go on to work with Davis on a Chaka Khan song and later Davis would cover Prince tracks including ‘Movie Star’ in concert (as described in Chapter 16, Prince and Miles also played together live on New Year’s Eve 1987), it’s a shame this track wasn’t included on Tutu, especially as it’s better than anything else on that album. But even if the relationship with Davis didn’t produce as much as might be hoped, Melvoin believes it was instrumental in giving Prince confidence in this style. ‘He struck up a relationship with Miles after a while, and Miles was influential in convincing Prince, making him feel more confident in doing that thing you do when you’re playing jazz, which is to stretch the scales, invert the chords, harmonically stretch something, screw with the rhythms and the polyrhythms. Miles gave him the confidence to do that because it really validated Prince. And then he got involved in working with Eric Leeds, and he was really instrumental in helping him mould a certain jazz philosophy, and Prince was learning quickly. I suppose you could say he was a quick learner.’
Recorded in September 1986 and released in January of the following year, the first Madhouse album, 8, was, then, Prince’s first proper jazz record. All Prince projects featuring Eric Leeds have jazz-influenced moments, but it would be fifteen years before Prince wholeheartedly engaged with the genre. With The Time and The Family, Prince disguised his involvement by sending forth a group of musicians to play his songs. When presenting Madhouse to the public, the group identity was initially less well-developed. Prince certainly had some ideas for the new project, approaching it once again as a complete conceit. He invented a new imaginary producer, Austra Chanel, paid a woman named Maneca Lightner to appear on the cover of both Madhouse albums but turn down all other modelling work, and handed over publicity to Eric Leeds, his main collaborator on the project, while denying any involvement himself. Alan Leeds believes his brother soon got bored with the pretence, though not the project, tiring of ‘the whole idea of Madhouse being a fictitious band, and creating names and bios for the three musicians who were supposed to be on it with Eric and all of that silliness. Eventually, Eric got frustrated with it and said, “This is dumb. This is me and Prince making a record and my bio looks better if we say it’s me and Prince.”’
The album has eight numbered tracks, any of which would fit on Prince’s later jazz records (‘One’, for example, could easily be a Rainbow Children B-side). Throughout the project Prince seems particularly interested in how to add drama to instrumental music, with little tricks like putting voices low in the mix throughout ‘Two’, or adding the sound of an overloaded telephone exchange to ‘Five’, as a squeaky female voice repeats ‘How you doin’, sexy?’, or even recycling Vanity’s orgasmic moans on ‘Seven’. Several of these songs, such as ‘Six’, which was released as a single – and which worked particularly well in its heavy live version – sound more like break-downs or jams edited out of conventional Prince songs than jazz, but this doesn’t weaken, or invalidate, the project. While Eric Leeds contributed and played a significant role, he says that it is a ‘misconception’ to see Madhouse as a band, even though the group did reform for a one-off show alongside The Family, Jill Jones and various other Prince associates in 2003, and when fDeluxe (which the group of musicians previously known as The Family called themselves when denied permission to perform under the original name) finally went on the road in 2012, there was a Madhouse medley (‘Ten’ and ‘Six’) as part of the show.
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Jill Jones had to earn her solo album, working with Prince for a long time in a low-key and semi-secret capacity. He started working with her when she was very young, having first met her when she was providing backing vocals for Teena Marie. She’s the J.J. who has a small role singing on ‘1999’, ‘Automatic’ and ‘Free’, and who plays the Lady Cab Driver on the song of the same name. She provided backing vocals for both Vanity 6 and Prince on the Triple Threat tour, and has a perfectly judged cameo as a snotty but ultimately helpful waitress in Purple Rain. The album took a long time to come together, pieced together from sessions between 1982 and 1986 and including two of the best non-Family tracks from that era, ‘G-Spot’ and ‘All Day, All Night’.
Maybe the reason why Jones is considered a more mature artist is that the album’s first single, ‘Mia Bocca’, is sung from the perspective of a monogamous woman who’s only had one lover since she was twelve. Prince uses this to intensify his favourite dramatic situation when writing from a female perspective: a woman who is devoted to her lover and yet tempted by another. But as good as ‘G-Spot’ undoubtedly is, particularly in its extended remix, I’m not entirely convinced it works when sung by a female vocalist. The original demo, recorded by Prince in 1983, feels slower and more insistent than the poppy released version, and the whole point of the song is that it’s being sung by a frustrated lover failing to satisfy his girlfriend because he can’t find her erogenous zone. The song’s successful because it’s Prince in lazy lover mode: he may not be able to locate his partner’s G-spot yet, but he’s going to keep going until he does. He’s detached and icy: that man-machine again. When Jill Jones does the track, she has to sing from the perspective of a frustrated woman, either in the middle of making love or masturbating, but because she mirrors Prince’s laid-back vocal approach, the song lacks erotic charge. Somehow the demo’s sleaziness has ebbed away.
‘Violet Blue’ is yet another Prince song in which a woman objectifies the physical traits of a potential lover (here, his eyes), redeemed by Dr Clare Fischer’s complex arrangement, which features nearly fifty musicians. Although regular gig-attenders had long since known about Prince’s propensity for revisiting (and reinterpreting) past songs, the appearance of ‘With You’ on this album (bearing in mind Prince’s huge stockpile of unreleased material) surprised. Given the stand-out tracks on Prince that Jones could have covered (‘I Wanna Be Your Lover’, ‘Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?’, even ‘Bambi’), it’s hard to understand why Prince decided to exhume this slight song, especially as his lyrical powers had developed so considerably since then. Maybe it’s precisely because it was a forgotten song that he decided it needed a second chance. If so, it gains little from being revisited (although Jones’s version is less queasy than the original), and has the unusual distinction of being the weakest track on two self-titled albums.
‘All Day, All Night’ is the other keeper. Built up from a live performance by The Revolution at First Avenue on Prince’s twenty-sixth birthday, it features Jones singing of how excited she is by watching her lover having sex with other men.11 One song later (‘For Love’), she’s offering to let a lover watch her make out with another man. After these two songs in which Jones boasts of her sexual liberation, ‘My Man’ comes as suddenly conservative. It’s a musically and lyrically basic song about a woman who’s annoyed with a cheating lover. There’s a danger, once again, in reading this album as a narrative rather than a simple collection of unconnected songs. It’s not a concept album, so there’s no reason to look for themes or to see ‘Jill Jones’ as a created persona, but Prince always gives great thought to sequencing: maybe ‘My Man’ is there to counterbalance the licentious feel of so much of the record; to distinguish Jones from Apollonia and Vanity. The last track, ‘Baby, You’re a Trip’, is a female take on ‘Something in the Water (Does Not Compute
)’, even including similar lines. But while in the 1999 song Prince is constantly justifying himself and pointing out how other women can’t understand why his lover treats him so bad, in this song Jones is resigned to the fact that her lover is so special that she should be grateful for whatever she can get from him.12
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By the time of the second Madhouse album, Prince had put together a live band and taken them out as tour support. The touring band (introduced onstage as ‘inmates’) included three of the four musicians credited for the second album (Levi Seacer, Jr, Eric Leeds and Dr Fink), who would play four or five tracks each night. Prince must have had a high opinion of his audience to trust that they could deal with a jazz-funk opener, but Matt Fink says: ‘They appreciated it. We would start out as Madhouse, and then there might be Madhouse tracks in the main show, and they’d also appear in the after-shows. Eric and Prince would come up with the set list. We knew all the songs for the first and second albums, and we could pick and choose, but some were more difficult to make fly live.’
The second Madhouse album, 16, was the first thing Prince recorded after he finished the Sign o’ the Times movie. Completed within a week, the album featured drums from an uncredited Sheila E on three tracks and came with another new concept: gangsters. Prince has often mentioned his fondness for the Francis Ford Coppola film The Godfather, and it has frequently shown up as a reference point in his music (it’s where he got the name Apollonia), and on this album he samples dialogue from the first two instalments. While he’d featured gunfire on the live version of ‘Six’, 16 is given additional drama by this theme, and the cover shows Madhouse model Maneca Lightner toting a tommy gun. Maybe Prince deliberately used this image to contradict the belief that jazz-funk is soft. The album is not quite as consistent as the debut, with a couple of duff tracks (‘Twelve’ is a dull swing song, ‘Fourteen’ is elevator muzak), but it’s also more varied and experimental. ‘Ten’ has truly brutal synths ’n’ sax (even funkier on the twelve-inch’s ‘Perfect Mix’). ‘Eleven’ is sublime electro-jazz, Susannah Melvoin repeating the phrase ‘Baby doll house’ in an emotionless robot voice over Prince’s squelchy keyboards. There was also an accompanying movie, Hard Life, and videos, both of which featured Matt Fink’s parents. ‘Prince knew my mom was an actress,’ he told me, ‘so he just thought of her for the piece, and put my father in one of the videos. It was meant to be a dark comedy, and it never saw the light of the day.’