by Matt Thorne
In all the later permutations – such as the TV movie The Beautiful Experience – the interaction would take place via the Internet, with a beautiful woman (occasionally played by Nona Gaye, who dated Prince for three years and may, just as much as Mayte, be the model for the character in the Come libretto) being drawn into Prince’s world through a master computer. But in this first version of the story, their affair is conducted through letters, and the libretto focused on a particular relationship between a star and a fan. As Hwang would later explain: ‘he [told] me this story based on his own experience. About his relationship with a fan. Which became obsessive and weird – in a sexual way (of course) [and he wanted] to do a show about it.’5
Prince’s proposal to Hwang was that the intense erotic affair between the musician and fan should also spin off into ‘exercises of fantasy and dominance’, something that seemingly preoccupied Prince at this time. Nona Gaye would later complain that during this time, she ‘was trying to be this woman I thought he wanted, very passive, just letting him lead’,6 describing the three years she said they dated as ‘a whirlwind of head trips and mind screws’.7
The extract from Come combines retro and futuristic technology (Prince ever the Barbarella admirer), opening with Orlando8 carrying a videosphere9 and putting on virtual-reality equipment in order to talk to the fan, Marie-Anne. The cocky Orlando has much in common with previous Prince personas such as The Kid. The extract also features the use of twin identities, as Marie-Anne suggests she has ‘another girl’ deep inside her. The fantasy action10 shifts first to the Garden of Eden,11 then ‘a mythical Babylon’. As on the album, the object of the rock star’s longings is a princess, this time of the ‘ancient empire of Babylon’,12 and as with Mayte’s character on that record, she is sexualised while a young girl, stating that even at fifteen her mind was filled with ‘the memories of a precious harlot’.13
This is troubling material, complicated further by the scene that follows, in which Marie-Anne as a fifteen-year-old spies on her father ravishing a slave girl, before she herself is ravished by strangers. The creative world of this piece is similar to that of the post-punk pornographic novelist Kathy Acker – although it is, of course, harder to accept this material when it comes from the imagination of two men, particularly when one has a history of relationships with younger women.
Prince’s project with Hwang didn’t come to fruition, although a smaller collaboration – the song ‘Solo’ – ended up on the Come album. This also came, Hwang said, from their first meeting. ‘He [asked] me to write a poem for him. About loss. The way you feel when you’ve lost someone you love. And you know they’re never coming back. And that, for the rest of your life, you’re going to be alone. He [wanted] to do a song that suddenly breaks into a spoken word interlude. They’re gonna say, “The boy’s really lost it this time.”’14 It’s intriguing Prince approached Hwang for this, as, along with the Garden of Eden, this scenario is the one that recurs most frequently in his later work. But after his failure to interest people in his and Hwang’s Come, Prince turned his attentions instead to a dance interpretation of Homer’s Odyssey entitled Glam Slam Ulysses.
This is an easy project to mock, with no clear connection between the various parts of the Odyssey being dramatised and the songs written for each section. The sappy ‘Strays of the World’ accompanied the arrival from a ship of a cast who looked like refugees from a fetish club. After a video insert of a woman being dragged around and roughed up, ‘Interactive’ soundtracked Kenny Everett’s idea of a Cyclops gurning in front of lightning on a video screen. ‘Dolphin’, a song that begs indulgence from the listener even on vinyl, gained nothing from being accompanied by synchronised swimming gestures. The sexuality of the piece is strip-club-influenced but fluid: ‘Pheromone’ had Circe (in a cat costume) and Carmen Electra cage-dancing (for more on Carmen and cages, see Chapter 34), while ‘Dark’, arguably the set’s best song, was accompanied by footage of male dancers urinating, while Carmen (as Penelope) spied on them from a stall. ‘Loose!’ entered Kenneth Anger territory, while the sirens who undulated to ‘Space’ had skeleton bikinis, skulls protecting their breasts and finger bones curled over their genitals (an outfit Lady Gaga might consider plagiarising). ‘Orgasm’ provoked embarrassed laughter from the audience, and quite what the Scylla was doing during ‘What’s My Name’ was almost impossible to determine. Another strong song, ‘Endorphinmachine’ – which Prince still performs to this day – was the most successfully choreographed, even managing to give some sense of the interaction between Calypso and Ulysses it was supposed to dramatise. ‘Race’, a serious song that intriguingly brings together a techno and jazz sound, was – although not obviously linked to the Ulysses story – another high point. A Trojan Horse would be dragged across the stage during another ‘Come’ reprise, before ‘Pope’ gave the cast something to dance to while they took their bows.
For all its silliness, Prince clearly brought the same intensity to this project as he did to his albums. And it was clear that whatever his relationship with Warner Brothers, Prince wasn’t about to retreat from the media. His publicist, Chris Poole, remembers receiving the fax with the name-change press release and thinking: ‘“Well, [it’s] barking but genius, this’ll get them jumping …” And it did. And it was quite fun to be involved in something like that because no one had done anything like that before. There was this theory that if he wasn’t Prince any more, he wouldn’t be bound by his record contract with Warners. He had been reborn, Christ-like, with a new name, a new identity. But of course hot-shot American lawyers wouldn’t have anything to do with that. Still, [it worked, as] the main point of publicity is to have people talking about you.’ Among the many who were more doubtful about the strategy was his old collaborator Chris Moon, who, although he hadn’t seen Prince since 1982, remembers ‘screaming at the radio, “Do not change your name to a symbol, do not get rid of Prince, no, no no!”’
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Prince’s first creative project to be completed after he issued the name-change press release didn’t appear until the end of the year, and wouldn’t get a widespread release until two years later. The Undertaker, which began as another project for Nona Gaye,15 was worked on with one of his favoured directors from this era, Parris Patton, and was eventually released in two versions,16 starring a different actress, Vanessa Marcil. It’s hard to tell whether the completed scenes are indicative of the uncompleted film, but they suggest that it would have been another Warholian home movie, with a surprisingly lysergic edge.
Prince is, much of the time, more moralistic than Warhol, but while the film does have an anti-drugs message (most explicitly defined in the title song, which Mavis Staples claimed Prince wrote for her after telling him that she was married to a mortician for eight years17), the way it is constructed presents Prince as, if not a passive force, then at least one without the ability (or interest) to save the overdosing addict in front of him (unless it’s through the power of music).
Beginning in black and white, the longer edit opens with Marcil arriving at Paisley Park. Instructed not to disturb a rehearsal, she goes to a pay phone and tries to impress upon someone named Victor that she’s changed and wants to be with him. Her pleas go ignored and Victor hangs up. Vanessa then repeatedly bashes the receiver against the pay phone, laughing hysterically, before going through her bag and finding some pills. She swallows them and takes out a small harlequin clown, spinning in circles with him. Eventually, she enters the rehearsal space, finds a seat for the doll and rolls on the floor staring at strobe lights as Prince plays. Halfway through the first song she finds somewhere to vomit, and her presence throughout makes an already sinister set of songs seem even more menacing. And while Marcil is not especially sexualised, in spite of her supposedly grungy look, there is definitely a darker edge in her submission to the music, even if it eventually fills her with the emotional strength to leave.
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Prince’s original intention was to release
the film’s soundtrack with the magazine Guitar World. Given that it caused so much drama when he did eventually release a CD with a newspaper in 2008, it’s surprising no one noted he’d had the idea fourteen years earlier, and that it was one of the many points of conflict with Warner Brothers, although Prince’s motivation for doing so seems to have been as much personal as financial. Rather than intending to establish a new business model half a decade or so before everyone began exploring alternative means of distribution, he was simply keen for readers of this guitar-tech magazine to appreciate his fretwork.
The Undertaker was substantially different from most of the music he was releasing via more conventional channels at the time. ‘It starts off in a blues vein,’ he told the magazine, ‘but then quickly goes to funk. But because of that first song, people tend to want to put it in that [blues] glass of water.’18 Who these people were is not clear: he was talking here about a record that had yet to leak out even unofficially and presumably at this stage had only been heard by record execs and his immediate circle.
It works better as a CD than a video. It has never been officially released: in a neat reversal of the legend of The Black Album, Prince is said to have privately pressed a thousand copies of the CD, which, it is claimed, Warner Brothers ordered him to destroy. ‘The Ride’ is one of Prince’s most-loved blues-based songs, and this version is far superior to the one on the Crystal Ball set – a loose, long, near-eleven-minute jam that resembles guitar-driven tracks like ‘Billy’ that Prince had never previously officially released. ‘Poorgoo’, however, although it shares some of the same impressive blues-based guitar work, particularly when played live, is a throwaway about some unfortunate associate of Prince’s19 who has bad luck with women.
Prince often covers Rolling Stones songs in concert – notably ‘Miss You’ and ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ – but this version of ‘Honky Tonk Women’ is particularly spectacular, showing Prince abandoning most of the lyrics and indulging in the kind of Hendrix-style guitar-playing he’d return to in the Lotusflow3r era. For all his insistence that this is a blues and funk record, the new version of old song ‘Bambi’ is delivered in a similarly heavy-rock style, followed by a brief snippet of ‘Zannalee’ (a song that would later appear on this record’s closest equivalent among Prince’s officially released records, Chaos and Disorder) and another long ten-minute jam on ‘The Undertaker’.
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Nineteen ninety-three saw no new Prince album (although he did include six previously unavailable songs on The Hits/The B-Sides triple CD released in September), but he made good on his promise to record with other artists by releasing two substantial records: Carmen Electra’s eponymous debut, and the first of the NPG albums, Goldnigga (although ‘released’ may be too grand a term for an album rejected for distribution by Warner Brothers and sold only at Act II shows in Europe and the NPG store).
There were several pleasing things about Prince’s Hits compilations – the fact that he’d asked Alan Leeds to write the sleeve notes, which Leeds says Prince co-operated with, and which offer a fascinating close insight into his music; the inclusion of six unreleased songs, including the long-coveted ‘Power Fantastic’; and the extra CD full of B-sides – but a greatest-hits record is no way to appreciate an artist whose best albums have no filler. The unreleased songs included ‘Pink Cashmere’, considered for the first version of Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic and in the meantime sent to Dr Clare Fischer for his input; ‘Pope’, a slight rap inspired by Bernie Mac; and the only truly significant new song, ‘Peach’, a fun piece of comic smut with a questionable line about a gay preacher. The album also contained Prince’s own version of ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ (not the demo but a live version recorded at Paisley Park) and a ‘video version’ of ‘4 the Tears in Your Eyes’.
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His first run of performances after changing his name from Prince to , the Act II tour saw the newly anonymous Artist having great fun with the concept of identity. It appeared as if the show was beginning with Prince being lowered from the ceiling on a swing, dressed in his chained hat and brandishing a cane as he performed ‘My Name Is Prince’ in an even more aggressive way than he had on the Act I tour. But at the end of the song, the sleight of hand was revealed: the figure wasn’t Prince but Mayte, who stripped out of her Prince outfit before gyrating around the stage in pink underwear and heavy boots. It was an audacious opening, another example of Prince having fun with this seemingly egocentric song. It also made clear that even in the most masculinist period of his career, Prince remained interested in gender roles and sexual identity.
The Act II shows were more audience-pleasing than the Act I tour, and not just because dancers The Game Boyz had gone. The set list ranged more widely through Prince’s backlist, and this was the first of many occasions when a show would be hyped with the announcement that this would be the last time an audience would get to hear the hits (on his next tour he’d play almost entirely new music). Songs like ‘The Beautiful Ones’, ‘The Cross’ and ‘Raspberry Beret’ diluted the stodge of the album material, although the interaction between Prince and Mayte remained as central to the performance as it had been on the earlier tour.
Throughout the tour Prince gave clues to his future direction. Several shows saw him premiering songs that would end up on Come and The Gold Album (as well as tracks from the just-released Goldnigga), and at Wembley Arena Prince made a nine-minute song-speech that incorporated lyrics from ‘What’s My Name’, ‘Come’ and ‘Race’, and encouraged bootlegging of his concerts by telling audience members to bring tape recorders to his gigs if they wanted to keep up with him. Refusing to answer to the name Prince, he threatened to retire from recording, made cryptic remarks about having to sugar-coat his music and returned to one of his recurring bugbears in this era: his record company’s concern that he was releasing too much.
The official documentation didn’t arrive until two years later. The Sacrifice of Victor is a concert film again directed by Parris Patton that – along with the Terry Gydesen photo book published in 1994 – is the main record of the tour. At this stage, Prince had yet to put out a live album, but had always chosen wisely in the shows he officially released on videotape, which made it all the more disappointing that his first after-show recording seemed, in its heavily edited release, indigestibly eclectic, lurching from the soothing gospel of The Steeles to Tony M stripped to the waist and channelling House of Pain to Mayte stage-diving in the space of thirty minutes. Gospel, rap, blues and metal: Prince in the 1990s was proving impossible to pin down.
Of this night Chris Poole remembers: ‘That was the after-show of all after-shows. He wanted a warehouse party, but for obvious reasons that wasn’t going to happen. It was the nearest we could do to having a warehouse party and putting some boundaries around it so we wouldn’t get into trouble. But it did get quite ugly.’
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Poole was also involved in the next stage of Prince’s slow emancipation from Warner Brothers, the independent release of a single entitled ‘The Most Beautiful Girl in the World’. He believes Warners allowed this in the hope that it might make Prince more aware of how important they were to his continued career. ‘I think what happened was that Warners thought, “Oh well, we’ll show him. We’ll let him release his own record and then he’ll realise how difficult it is …”’ But it backfired. ‘Whoops, first number-one single he’d ever had [in the UK].’ Poole says he played a large role in the record’s campaign. ‘I found the distributor, found the pluggers – I did everything.’ The handmade nature of the project extended to every element, including the video. Steve Parke says of preparing Paisley for the accompanying shoot: ‘I think everybody in the building was responsible for melting some of those candles. We had to get them melted very quickly and then film.’
But although Prince retained his extraordinary skill to surround himself with people who would fulfil their roles to the very best of their abilities, he was setting up an extremely large infrast
ructure, and could not oversee every element. Parke remembers of Prince’s burgeoning nightclub empire: ‘I ended up doing work down at the Glam Slam club in Miami. It was completely outside of the Paisley work ethic; it was the Miami-beach work ethic. They were basically, “It’s three o’clock (in the afternoon), we’re done.”’
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Prince’s interest in computers had been apparent from his earliest recordings, both in his delight in the way they allowed him to record without band-mates, and also as a lyrical preoccupation. It seemed inevitable, then, that as part of his move away from releasing albums in the conventional manner he would look to technology as a way of reaching a new audience, releasing a CD-Rom entitled Interactive. A year earlier, musicians had begun to explore ‘multimedia’, with Peter Gabriel releasing Xplora 1: Peter Gabriel’s Secret World and Todd Rundgren an ‘interactive’ version of his album No World Order under the pseudonym TR-i which allowed the purchaser to alter the album’s ‘mix’. Interactive played once again on making Prince’s private space public, beginning with the player crash-landing in a spaceship before getting out to explore the nearest building: Prince’s mansion.
The game, which mainly consisted of putting puzzle pieces together in order to hear the then-unreleased ‘Interactive’, received warmer reviews than Bowie’s contemporaneous Jump: The David Bowie Interactive CD-Rom but suffered from the same problem that would mar several of Prince/’s subsequent computer-based projects: the amount of effort required did not lead to sufficient reward. Howard Bloom believes that it was Prince’s interest in computers, and subsequently the Internet, which helped make him relevant again. ‘Prince began to live part of his life on the Internet. He established a beachhead in cyberspace. And cyberspace is a way of making contact with your audience without having the fearful presence of men’s bodies. And Prince was able to get back in touch with his audience. And being back in touch brought Prince back.’