by Matt Thorne
16 was the final Madhouse album to see release, but Prince made several attempts in his later career to revive the band. His first attempt produced an entire album, 24, that has never seen release in this form. Picking up where 16 ended, the tracks intended for this third album all have sexualised subtitles – Eric Leeds told George Cole that Prince was ‘with’ Maneca Lightner, the model who is pictured on the cover of the Madhouse albums with a puppy, and who may therefore be the subject of ‘20 (A Girl and Her Puppy)’, though there are other candidates who may have inspired the titles of ‘17 (Penetration)’, ‘18 (R U Legal Yet?)’ or ‘19 (Jailbait)’. 24 began as a solo project, recorded during one of Prince’s career high points, during and just after the Lovesexy tour, before he invited Eric Leeds to add his parts to the album. Leeds suggests that the third Madhouse album may have been a victim of Prince’s continued conflict with Warner Brothers, though he himself ‘wasn’t that crazy about that album’, objecting to the mix. The version in circulation is of such quality that it’s hard to see why Leeds objected to it. ‘17 (Penetration)’, which would go on to become a standard for Miles Davis, is one of Prince’s finest and most forceful jazz tracks; ‘18 (R U Legal Yet?)’ is even darker and repetitive, using lines from Leeds and engineer Heidi Hanschu to set up a dramatic scenario in which a man questions a possibly underage girl, while she talks about the threat of her father shooting him, with an aggressive saxophone and piano in harsh contrast, taking the dominant style of The Black Album one step further; ‘19 (Jailbait)’ sounds like The Marketts, and indeed Prince would use this track as the basis for a proposed new version of the Batman theme for Tim Burton’s soundtrack. ‘20 (A Girl and Her Puppy)’ recalls the moments of full-band improvisation on the Lovesexy tour.13
After Leeds approached Prince about the possibility of remixing some of the songs, Prince responded by giving him around thirty-six tracks, encouraging him to sift through them and see if there was anything that might be the start of an alternative Madhouse album. But Leeds continued to focus on the 24 tracks, taking them and editing them down into the seven-minute ‘The Dopamine Rush’, which would become the stand-out track on Leeds’s Paisley Park-released debut album Times Squared. A large part of Leeds’s album (nine of the eleven tracks) was built around Prince’s jazz work, and features a tremendous band made up of Atlanta Bliss, Levi Seacer, Jr, Sheila E and Larry Fratangelo. Among the finest Prince-related tracks on this largely forgotten album are ‘Night Owl’, with Prince on synthesizer; ‘Overnight, Every Night’, which sounds like a less threatening dry run for Prince’s later ‘Xenophobia’; ‘Little Rock’, based around a great tenor-sax Leeds line; and ‘Times Squared’, a very heavy number with room-shaking bass which, with lyrics, could have fitted perfectly with, and indeed elevated, the Batman soundtrack. Leeds’s own songs are every bit the equal of Prince’s on this project, and the weakest song is a solely Prince-penned composition humorously entitled ‘Cape Horn’.14 Alan Leeds observed the closeness of his brother’s relationship with Prince. ‘Eric and Prince were really a good team in the studio. With all respect to Wendy and Lisa, because they’re pretty sharp too, Eric was the most sophisticated and advanced musician out of that gang. He had a more sophisticated sense of harmonics and structure than most of the people, so he brought something to Prince that Prince didn’t already have. As a result, he became a confidant. He also has a personality that meshed pretty easily with Prince. He wasn’t boisterous, he wasn’t pushy, he wasn’t territorial. He was just content to come in and experiment in the studio. I think he loved the process even more than the results.’
This was not the end of Prince’s interest in either a third Madhouse album or indeed the songs he’d recorded for the project. While Leeds had made something out of tracks 21–24, in 1991 Prince sent tracks 17–20 to Miles Davis, but George Cole notes: ‘Miles would not touch Prince’s 24-track recordings. Instead, he opted to rehearse the tunes with his band live on-stage and then record them with the band’15 in Germany,16 but when they went into the studio, ‘Miles was so weak and sick he just couldn’t play.’17 Nevertheless, he did manage to lay down guide tracks which he later considered of strong enough quality to ask Prince if he could include them on his 1992 album Doo-Bop (Prince refused). Prince was later approached to see if he would allow the songs to be included on a Miles Davis retrospective box, but again he withheld permission.
Now all these songs had found homes, when Prince returned to the possibility of a third Madhouse album in 1994, he composed a new set of songs with a band that have been referred to as ‘New Power Madhouse’, and for which Steve Parke remembers designing a cover that ‘had a big bank vault, with the guys in front of the vault stealing money’. Though the album wasn’t released, several of the songs have appeared officially. ‘17’, which has no connection to ‘17 (Penetration)’, was released on the 1-800-NEW-FUNK sampler, and as with several of this era of Madhouse tracks, emerged from a five-hour rehearsal/improvisation session.
How you feel about this song and these tracks will depend largely on your feelings for this particular band (Michael B, Sonny T, Levi Seacer, Jr, Prince and Eric Leeds). It’s among my favourite combinations of Prince’s musicians, and for this reason I far prefer this second attempt at the third Madhouse record than the first. The enormously appealing ‘Space’ (Prince dropped the convention of naming all songs after numbers for this record) appeared in an alternative version on his Come album; ‘Asswoop’ (also known as ‘Asswhuppin’ in a Trunk’) was later released as a download and given away – along with extracts from ‘Parlor Games’ and the whole of ‘Ethereal’, which consisted of half a minute of Prince on piano – on a sampler for attendees of The Ultimate Live Experience concert. But the album’s five other tracks remain unreleased, although one is merely a short ‘guitar segue’, ‘Michael B’ a drum solo and ‘Sonny T’ a longer guitar flourish. This version of 24 would have been a far more eclectic record than either the first two officially released Madhouse records or the initial version of the album, including as it does an unfortunately somewhat anaemic cover of Marvin Gaye’s ‘Got to Give It Up’ (with his daughter Nona on vocals) and far more emphasis on guitar than on the previous records. ‘Rootie Kazootie’ has a better saxophone performance from Leeds than almost anything on his solo album; Prince thought enough of ‘Asswoop’ to play it live (notably at a show at the London Emporium in 1995, where he also played ‘17’ with Eric Leeds); and ‘Parlor Games’ is a beautiful instrumental that ranks with the best of Prince’s soft-jazz songs, yet unlike most of the others, is completely lacking in schmaltz.18
A Madhouse album wasn’t the only project to fail to see the light in what must have been an extremely frustrating period for Prince, some of his pain leaking out into the sleeve notes of the later 1-800-NEW-FUNK compilation, in which he wrote of ‘the pain endured by the “parents of these children”’ (children here referring to songs) when their ‘children’ were left to die.19 Among these ‘parents’ was Minneapolis musician Margie Cox, who had begun her career as the lead singer in Ta Mara and the Seen, a band whose first album had been produced by Time member Jesse Johnson. After her first band had disbanded, Cox had joined Dr Mambo’s Combo, a Minneapolis bar band whose members would also include Michael Bland and Sonny T, both of whom would join The New Power Generation. With Cox, Prince was devising a band called MC Flash, a project that kept going for several years, during which Prince penned her numerous songs and also recorded covers with her.20
*
In 1989, road manager Alan Leeds took over as president of Paisley Park. He remembers: ‘Paisley Park as an entity had really just been an orphan. No one was in charge of the label. It had no phone number, no office, no personnel. It was merely an imprint. Theoretically, Cavallo and Ruffalo were in charge of running the label, but they were more interested in running Prince’s film career and his music career, and they had other artists. They only saw it as worthy for an act they thought was worth taking a crap shoot on. Like there
was a couple of kids called Good Question who made a dance record. Tony LeMans was another Fargnoli thought was worth recording. So I said to Prince, “Let’s start treating it as a real label.”’
Prince’s work with protégés had previously been largely separate from his main career, but as the 1990s approached, it began to bleed over into his main work. The prime example of this is Graffiti Bridge, which ended up becoming a showcase for Prince’s entire stable. As well as the return of The Time, the project also involved Robin Power, Elisa Fiorillo,21 George Clinton, T. C. Ellis, Tevin Campbell, The Steeles, Mavis Staples and Ingrid Chavez, but during and after the production of his own album Prince was also writing music for almost all of these artists. Prince had already produced (and written six songs for) Mavis Staples’s first Paisley Park record, Time Waits for No One, and after her role on the soundtrack and in the film Graffiti Bridge he would also contribute nine songs to her second, The Voice.22 But though turning her into ‘Melody Cool’ may have not been the most sympathetic use of this artist, and while the first album featured several songs from the Vault – including the standout ‘Train’ from the post-Parade, pre-Sign era and ‘I Guess I’m Crazy’, as well as ‘Jaguar’ and ‘Come Home’, songs originally written for other artists – he also made a real effort, especially on the second album, to draw from Staples’s life and persona in his writing for her. Of the two songs specifically written for Time Waits for No One, the title track (a co-write with Staples), which echoes in theme and sound ‘Still Would Stand All Time’, works better than ‘Interesting’, but the latter, an account of a sleazy man approaching Staples in a bar, is still far more compelling than any of the non-Prince tracks on the record, such as the soporific nostalgia of ‘The Old Songs’.
Prince pursued his interest in time as a subject for lyrics once more on The Voice, suggesting that ‘Blood Is Thicker than Time’ in a song that seems much more suited to Staples’s personality, combining gospel, biblical references (Moses, Cain and Abel) and her biography, though still in the slightly sickly style of Graffiti Bridge. It’s a far more thematically coherent record than their first collaboration, with the Prince tracks linked by content (in particular, a dismay for gang violence and a need for increased education, expressed in ‘Blood Is Thicker than Time’, ‘House in Order’,23 ‘You Will Be Moved’ and ‘The Voice’), but also featuring recurring imagery, with an ‘Undertaker’ figure, based on Staples’s mortician ex-husband, showing up in two songs (Staples’s wonderful version of ‘The Undertaker’, a song Prince would later try to make his own, and the misguided dance track ‘House in Order’). There are also many connections with Prince’s own music, not least with the covers of ‘Positivity’, which shares the subject matter of this album, and a revise of ‘Melody Cool’. Alan Leeds says: ‘The Mavis Staples record I thought was a really good record, a bit conservative, but it was the wrong time and the wrong place. The world wasn’t ready for the renaissance that she’s enjoying now.’
There had always been a degree of fluidity between which songs ended up on which project, but now tracks seemed multipurposed right from the start. One of the best (but disturbing) unreleased songs from this era, ‘Nine Lives’, was one of a number of feline-inspired songs (‘Cat and Mouse’, ‘Cat Attack’) considered for dancer Cat Glover’s debut album. With Cat singing about her ‘bad self’, it also echoed the later tracks Prince would write for Carmen Electra. But when the Cat project folded, Prince kept her vocal and turned the song into a dialogue with Morris Day. As with many of his songs from this era, the focus of the Cat version of the song is psychological manipulation of a woman by her lover. Here, as elsewhere, it’s what the woman (Cat in the original version, Margie Cox in the revised song) desires, at least if she did have nine lives, wanting a love who could ‘kill’ her again and again. The Morris Day lyrics, unusually, temper the song, suggesting that each death is nothing more than an orgasm. Most appealing about the revised version is Day singing about the 1990s, added when the song became the planned single for Corporate World, which was Prince’s original title for the fourth Time album.
Unlike the record that was eventually released, the aptly named Pandemonium, Corporate World was a collaboration between Prince, Morris Day and Jerome Benton – though of course Prince’s input was the most pronounced. The other songs written for Corporate World that didn’t make it to Pandemonium were the title track, ‘Corporate World’, which perhaps surprisingly for a record (and a band) who have always boasted about their enjoyment of the high life has lyrics that could be recited at an ‘Occupy Wall Street’ demo, and ‘Murph Drag’, which did see eventual release (of a sort) credited to The Time when played on the third of Prince’s NPG Ahdio (sic) shows. The latter song, another of The Time’s finest tracks, about a new imaginary dance that only ‘people with money’ can do and which easily rivals ‘The Bird’, deserves a fuller release.
With the loss of these tracks – and the songs carried across to Graffiti Bridge – Pandemonium could only seem weak. Its ugly (and very 1990s) cover shows The Time cooking in a frying pan and surrounded by chicken drumsticks, cutlery and cooking oil – a reference, it seems, to the fact that three of the songs (or rather two songs, ‘Chocolate’ and ‘Skillet’, and one skit, ‘Cooking Class’) are about food. This tired conceit of cookin’ up the funk is a much weaker idea to build an album around than Prince’s original conceit.
Prince is responsible for a third of the record including another Corporate World standout – ‘Donald Trump (Black Version)’, which continues the theme of a black rewrite of Wall Street – and four tracks with rich histories. ‘Jerk Out’ was initially written in 1981, around the time that Prince was experimenting with more sexually aggressive lyrics such as ‘Extra Lovable’, and if released at this time would have seen him extending Day’s gigolo persona into unwelcome new territory, forcing S&M on a white lover as a form of class and race war. Prince clearly wanted to maintain some of the nastiness in the released version, but here Day committed the more palatable sin of asking his lover to leave after sex.
‘Data Bank’, though perfect for Day, was also much weaker in this Time version than it was when Prince was backed by The Revolution (though musically rather than lyrically). ‘Chocolate’ also has Revolution connections: it began as a song recorded by Prince with Wendy and Lisa. There was no way a revised version of this would appeal as much as the well-loved out-take – with Prince in full Jamie Starr mode, teasing a brilliant performance from Wendy – but the longer Time reworking, which replaces Prince’s vocal with Day’s but keeps Wendy and Lisa in the background, is still among The Time’s best tracks. Less worthwhile was ‘My Summertime Thang’, a song that having already provided the music for ‘The Latest Fashion’, had little fresh purpose.24
*
Prince’s first collaboration with his Funkadelic hero George Clinton25 was on a 1989 maxi-single entitled ‘Tweakin’’, from an album, The Cinderella Theory, put out by Paisley Park. Though it featured many of Prince’s retinue, including Eric Leeds and Atlanta Bliss, Prince uncharacteristically avoided playing on the song. Alan Leeds remembers: ‘I had known George Clinton for years. George was without a label at the time, and he’d sent me a tape of some of his most recent studio stuff. Prince walked into my office as I was playing the tape one day and heard it and liked it and wanted to put him out on Paisley.’
Though he was involved in several remixes of the fraught ‘Tweakin’’, it wasn’t until after he had made Clinton a central part of Graffiti Bridge that he started writing songs for him, including the unreleased ‘My Pony’ (I wonder if it stayed in the Vault because someone alerted Prince to Bob Dylan’s use of the same metaphor in ‘New Pony’), which didn’t make Clinton’s charmingly titled second Paisley Park album, Hey Man … Smell My Finger, and the lascivious and very silly ‘The Big Pump’, which did.26 Leeds believes that Clinton’s music for Paisley Park ‘was far from his best work. We inherited a lot of unfinished tracks. There were ideas about Prince and
George doing some collaboration, which ended up being a hasty swapping of a couple of tapes.’
Fellow Graffiti Bridge star T. C. Ellis got two old songs (out-take ‘Girl o’ My Dreams’ and ‘Bambi’, of which he did a ridiculous heavy-metal rap version that makes the listener feel guilty for excusing the original) and one new, vaguely misogynistic one (‘Miss Thang’), which has a hilarious video in which a woman in a black lace teddy drapes bras over Ellis’s shoulders, while his 1990s-style suited male dancers gyrate in the background. Tevin Campbell got to put a remix of ‘Round and Round’ on his T.E.V.I.N. record and got four Prince songs for I’m Ready, including the first release of what would become one of Prince’s favourite tracks to play live, ‘Shhh’, and three others credited to Paisley Park: a deeply strange song, ‘The Halls of Desire’, in which Prince reworked the themes of the ‘hallway corridor’ version of ‘Computer Blue’; the politically angry but musically weedy ‘Uncle Sam’; and a linked song, ‘Paris 1798430’. And when Jevetta Steele’s album was released twice, Prince wrote two separate tracks for each version, co-writing (with David Rivkin and Levi Seacer, Jr) for the first release the idiosyncratically spiritual ‘And How’ and yet another creepy sexualised schooldays song, the awkwardly phrased ‘Skip 2 My U Mya Darlin’’. For the second version he wrote the generic ballad ‘Hold Me’ and collaborated with Martika on ‘Open Book’, an amusingly contradictory song which initially appears to be about the importance of openness between lovers but soon becomes an angry denial of its possibility; as well as another self-empowerment track, entitled ‘Well Done’, for an album recorded by The Steeles as a group.27