by Matt Thorne
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Of Mayte, Chris Poole remembers: ‘She was a very young, very sweet young lady, a bit mesmerised like a rabbit in the headlights. She was quite a normal, down-to-earth person but she didn’t know how to react to what was going on around her.’ Prince’s relationship with her seems, at least during the long period of courtship, to have had some similarities to his relationships with musical collaborators such as Dr Clare Fischer. Prince would send her songs, and she would send back videotapes of herself dancing to them. She also claimed that ‘the kinkiest stuff we ever did was onstage – that was where I had the handcuffs’.12 This back-and-forth in the early period of their courtship clearly inspired, on the unreleased version, a second segue, which relates to the back-and-forth of the tapes. Prince has sent NPG member Kirk Johnson to find Mayte, and he’s returned with a gift of the three chains of Turin and a video message from her saying she’s in Cairo. In the 3 Chains o’ Gold film, Mayte also gives Prince a tape containing (genuine) footage of her as an eight-year-old performing sword and belly dancing on the US reality stunt show That’s Incredible.
As with ‘Strange Relationship’ and countless other Prince songs, there’s an element of sadomasochism to ‘Love 2 the 9’s’, which Prince begins but Tony again takes over, with Prince singing that he’d rather see Mayte crying than laughing, asking her to sleep on a bed of thorns and getting Tony to interrogate her. In an explicit reference to her age, she describes herself as ‘jailbait’.13 ‘The Morning Papers’ explores this age difference further, and given one of the album’s other major themes – the pursuit of Prince by the media – the press is presented in a surprisingly benign way. The truth is, Prince should have ditched ‘The Max’14 instead of the segues, a largely pointless rap track reminiscent of the worst of Diamonds and Pearls, accompanied, in 3 Chains o’ Gold, with footage of Tony M roller-skating and leading into one of the few segues that Prince kept on the record, with Alley-as-Vanessa-Bartholomew calling him for an interview. In the movie, he’s wearing what look like pink pyjamas for ‘Blue Light’, a reggae-influenced love song about sexual difference built around an Eric Leeds sax line and the engineer’s bass-playing which should be horrible but is actually one of the album’s few highlights.
When Prince revised the album, he edited and moved back the next segue, further destroying the record’s narrative. On the original version, this segue gathers up the record’s themes and narrative so far with the return of Kirstie Alley, who, promising that she’s not recording this time, interrogates Prince. The record’s spoken-word section features Prince disguising his voice with a tone box (‘Like in the movie Barbarella?’ Alley asks, making this the second Prince record inspired by the Roger Vadim film, which also plays in Prince’s private cinema while he makes out with Troy Beyer in 3 Chains o’ Gold).15 Prince explains – as he also does on the released version – that he has chosen Alley to get his message across. She tells him the three chains are as old as the pyramids and contain magic powers, and then questions him about Mayte being sixteen.
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Does it really matter that Prince got rid of a few segues in order to add a freshly written song he was enamoured with? The thing about music careers as long as Prince’s – or the filmographies of directors on which studio’s survival depends – is that aesthetic decisions invariably become tangled up with economics. It’s possible to make a case that the album derailed his whole career. There were complicated record-company negotiations going on around this time, endless discussions that eventually resulted in Prince benefiting from a complexly structured but on the face of it extremely lucrative deal, and the relative failure of this album’s singles in the US,16 at least until the third single release – ‘7’ – led to tension between Prince and the label. It’s also possible to see the beginning of Prince’s frustration with being Prince during this era from the way he had begun to cover his face continually with chains and masks. The gun microphone so prominently displayed on the cover of ‘Sexy MF’ also revealed that he was fantasising about swapping the life of a pop superstar for that of super-spy James Bond. Quite why this male fantasy should appeal to a man with no need for it is hard to discern.
But let’s forget about the economics and look at what Prince gained by shoving ‘Eye Wanna Melt with U’ in the middle of the record.17 Not until the faux-gangsterisms of the late 1990s would he again write anything quite so tacky, and those later songs are harder still to enjoy because of the puerile misogyny. The accompanying video continues from the same stock of bankrupt erotic imagery that Prince began using in the Gett Off mini-movie (as in Vanity 6’s ‘Drive Me Wild’ video, it’s a sexual nightmare: Prince is wearing a mask; there are menacing shots of the man who killed Princess Mayte’s father holding a knife and frequent flashes of naked women at what looks like an orgy, while Mayte tosses and turns in bed. Prince likes his sweet women to be the victim of incubi18). If this was who he wanted to be now, it’s difficult to comprehend why. To challenge gangsta rap? Fit in with his band members? Impress his fans? Impossible to tell.
Even songs that seemed saccharine hid new harshness. Presented as a love letter in 3 Chains, ‘Sweet Baby’ seems at first to be another of the many throwaway self-empowerment songs that he wrote during this period. But as well as being one of the prettier (and relatively uncelebrated) deep cuts on any Prince album, it also sees him again (as in The Undertaker film and many other works from this era) taking on the perspective of a God-like observer, making the song an audaciously cruel piece of convoluted manipulation.19 ‘The Continental’ is the first Prince song to be released featuring a guest appearance from dancer and rapper Carmen Electra, a trash-sex rap that reveals Prince revelling in strip-club glamour like he’s planning an Abel Ferrara film. A reference in the song to a woman asking a man to marry her if she can flip coins with her belly echoes with comments Mayte made about Prince rushing people into the room to watch when she told him she could do this trick.20
Even his sex songs were now angry, as the title of ‘Damn U’ indicates.21 A gentler variation on ‘Tick, Tick, Bang’, onstage Prince would take this song into even woozier territory, giving a remarkably convincing portrayal of a man approaching orgasm. It also features a prominent contribution from Dr Clare Fischer, who is credited with strings for the whole album.22 That Prince would fill a song called ‘Arrogance’ with rap samples (from Eric B and Rakim, NWA) raises the possibility that this is less a justification of the perceptions of him than a more subtle version of the rapper-baiting ‘Dead On It’. But its placing on the album suggests that Prince’s attitude towards hip hop was increasingly ambivalent, followed as it is by ‘The Flow’.23
In the next snipped segue, Mayte explains that seven men killed her father and are coming for her and the three chains of gold, setting up the next song. With Prince albums from around this period, it became much harder to predict which songs would stay in his set, and the survival of ‘7’ through so many years is surprising. Prince clearly valued it enough to make it a single, and it proved the most successful from the album – puzzling for a record which also included ‘Sexy MF’ and ‘My Name Is Prince’ – which may explain why it’s a track which has retained its value for Prince, undergoing a metamorphosis in recent years as Prince started to play it as part of a medley with The Beatles’ ‘Come Together’.24 Perhaps the reason why the song has lasted is less down to its quality than its symbolic significance, being the track most closely linked with his decision to retire his name. In 3 Chains o’ Gold, the number seven refers to both the assassins and the seven alternative Princes, whom he kills off one by one in the video, foreshadowing the ‘death’ of Prince that would follow when he changed his name to . This link is made explicit in a conversation between Mayte and Kirstie Alley that plays over the end credits of the film, in which Mayte hints at the change Prince is about to make, and which is followed by a literal explanation of the transformation written on screen.
The title of ‘And God Created Woman’ suggests that Pr
ince’s much-mentioned cinephilia remained limited – at this time – to soft-core classics. It’s one of the many songs he has written about the Garden of Eden, a preoccupation that first appeared during the Purple Rain shows’ stage conversations with God and which Prince would return to ad nauseam, constantly connecting the beginning of new relationships with a return to a prelapsarian state.
Having set up the narrative about the search for these three chains of gold, Prince now sings about having them but not caring any more about his lover (presumably Mayte), whom he considers evil and hopes will die before him.25 A full-band performance, ‘3 Chains o’ Gold’ is one of Prince’s most OTT releases, resembling some ghastly Jim Steinman or Roy Baker production in its multipart faux-operatic silliness, complete with a chorus of multitracked Princes (maybe the seven personalities he killed in the movie), soft-metal guitars and drums. It also overlaps with imagery that Prince would go on to explore in more detail – an Undertaker figure that would later inspire an album and short film. Missing from the released album is a concluding segue with Prince and Mayte reunited, suggesting that this song is intended to represent some kind of dramatic conclusion.
The recorded version of ‘The Sacrifice of Victor’ is easy to mistake for another ‘how great is the NPG’ celebration, but Prince performed an exceptional live version at an after-show at the DNA Lounge in San Francisco, on a night when he had bronchitis but felt determined to perform nonetheless. This version brought out the chill of the lyrics and emphasised the harsh sentiment of the song previously buried by the NPG’s wittering. Seemingly one of Prince’s most autobiographical songs – although as with any track about his childhood, it’s important to be aware of his mythmaking (he notes the passage about his epilepsy is ‘TRUE’ in mirror-writing on his lyric sheet) – it features him singing about child abuse, the sense that the racial mix at his school was a social experiment, the death of Martin Luther King, the drug abuse his friends indulged in and the important influence in his early life of André Cymone’s mother, Bernadette Anderson. Ditching the first verse, he intoned the second in a throaty murmur, before reworking the song into a slow-jazz Heron-esque grumble that cries out for official release.
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The Act I show was paradoxically both Prince’s most thuggish and his most romantic. One of the most appealing elements of almost all of his stage shows up to this point was the fact that the sexual energies were so free-floating: he was creating an adult playground where everyone was in costume and appealing to the audience. With Act I, the focus of the majority of the show was the relationship between Prince and Mayte, between musician and dancer. She spent most of it atop his piano, with Prince directing almost all of his lyrics to her (focusing mainly on the album, this show featured Prince playing far more piano than guitar).
There are more disturbing moments in this show than those from any other era. Whether it was the aforementioned scene where a female reporter is stripped (admittedly only to her slip, which is still more than Cat got to wear during the Lovesexy shows) or Prince singing in front of a firing squad or Mayte’s sword dance, the pantomime elements of the performance drained the typical fun of a Prince show. His outfits were more aggressive too: he had introduced the peaked cap with chains over his face for the last tour, but now he spent much of the show waving a cane as well, in his own take on hip-hop accessorising.
Using hip-hop language, Prince would refer to himself as a ‘nigga’ onstage during ‘Peach’, the first of five new songs that would show up in the set, all of which had an even heavier edge than the material (the others were three NPG songs, ‘Deuce and a Quarter’, ‘Johnny’ and ‘Goldnigga’, and the frantic Come track, ‘Loose!’). Usually, when Prince introduced unreleased songs in a set, they pointed at a future direction, but fun as ‘Peach’ and ‘Johnny’ both undoubtedly are, they represent dead ends. The only truly good-natured stretch of the show was the first of the mass stage invasions that would become a familiar part of Prince’s stage show from this period onwards.
Prince would later look back at the time when he first started engaging with hip hop as his ‘friction years’, which I see as starting in earnest in 1993, telling Spike Lee in 1997: ‘I’ve gotten some criticism for the rap I’ve chosen to put in my past work. But there again, it came during my friction years. If you notice, not a lot of that stuff is incorporated into my sets now … on the rap tip, though, it’s an old style and I’ve always done it kind of differently – half sung, you know like “Irresistible Bitch” and some of the other things I used to do.’26 But if the friction years did begin in the early 1990s, the conflict wouldn’t truly flourish until it came to the last album Prince would put out before the most dramatic and important transformation of his entire career.
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PART 1: INTRODUCING THE FRICTION YEARS
Rock history coagulates around shape-shifters. Dylan going electric, getting God, begging to join The Grateful Dead. Neil Young being sued by David Geffen for not being Neil Young enough. Bowie killing off Ziggy Stardust, fronting Tin Machine, becoming a junglist. But after electric Dylan, arguably the second-most famous rock transformation came from the self-styled Electric Man: the seven years Prince spent as . He made the announcement on his thirty-fifth birthday, issuing a press release that caused such media confusion that he was continuing to clarify the matter two years later. In a statement on his website of the time, The Dawn, Prince explained that he felt his name had become commoditised by Warner Brothers, and that the only solution was to adopt as a moniker a symbol that could not be pronounced.
But why did he choose this particular symbol? According to his wedding programme, the decision came to him in a vision while visiting Mayte in Puerto Rico, where he saw the symbol, wondered what it meant and heard a voice telling him it was his new name. It was a nice attempt at a superhero-style origin story, but the symbol had been a developing part of his iconography for years, now gaining the extra horn from one of the alchemical symbols for soapstone (although some fans prefer the notion that the horn represents the fusion of man, woman and musical instrument).1
Prince’s decision to change his name came two months after he faxed a press release to the media saying he was retiring from studio recording. Earlier that same day, he had had a meeting with Warner Brothers in which he told them that he wouldn’t be delivering any more studio albums, instead planning to fulfil his deal with old songs from his Vault. After releasing fifteen albums in fifteen years, Prince planned to concentrate instead on theatre, interactive media, nightclubs and movies. This has usually been reported as Prince being provocative, the opening salvo in a PR war that would cause untold damage to his career. And it’s easy to understand why Warner Brothers executives would be upset by this after signing a reported $100 million deal with Prince barely a year before, but handled differently there might have been a different outcome to this situation.2
Alan Leeds believes that Prince’s frustration was partly fuelled by the deal itself. ‘His contract was coming up for renewal, and both Madonna and Janet Jackson had had contract renewals that had gained headlines, and he wanted a deal that would trump the Madonna deal. He was so desperate to get that headline that he was allowing his team to negotiate away certain royalties, certain publishing rights and all kinds of things in order to get bigger guarantees. It was one of those deals that was all on paper. It was all incentive-driven, so while it was technically accurate to say the deal was worth $100 million or whatever the number was, it was predicated on, “If you sell this many units, then you’ll get this big advance, and if it all worked out, then you’ll get this.” It was a smoke-and-mirrors deal.’
Still, if Prince had allowed Warner Brothers to go through the Vault and select songs themselves rather than merely take what they were given, they could have compiled the best Prince release to date. And why even announce he was no longer going to record? Surely, with a bit of sneakiness, he could have presented (or reworked) old recordings as new albums without anyone (asi
de from obsessive fans with studio-production log reports) realising? After all, when he did finally escape from Warner Brothers, his second release under the alias was a three-CD set of old recordings.
When Prince stated that he would make no more studio recordings under his own name, he also explained that he would continue to write songs for other artists and tour. But almost every Prince interview had included talk of a side project – whether film, ballet or opera – and given the success of the Joffrey Ballet’s Billboards the previous January, and the rock-opera nature of the album and accompanying tour, it may have seemed a logical way of developing his career.
Even before making this announcement, Prince had planned a change of direction, and for some time had been considering ways of releasing music without going through Warners. Alan Leeds remembers: ‘We had a conversation where he said we had to start releasing records on our own because Warners couldn’t absorb the product that he was putting out quickly enough, and this was a precursor to downloading music. He said the idea of going to record stores is old and it’s not necessary. We should make a record, put it on our own label and buy advertising space on late-night television and sell it mail-order. And I said, “Prince, we can’t do that, it’s in violation of your deal with Warners.” He wanted me to do it, and I told him, “I can’t be the figurehead because I run a joint venture with them!” So he said, “Let’s put in Gwen [Leeds’s wife]’s name and she’ll go on TV and advertise these records.”’
Prince had also met with the Tony award-winning playwright David Henry Hwang to discuss collaborating on a musical. What Prince was interested in, Hwang explained in his introduction to ‘From Come’, the only extract of the libretto that survives (published in an anthology entitled On a Bed of Rice: An Asian American Erotic Feast3), was ‘sex between lovers who never meet’.4 This concept would show up, in various ways, in most of Prince’s work from the mid-1990s, across all media.