by Matt Thorne
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But he hadn’t given up on old-fashioned ways of reaching fans. The publicity for 21 Nights made much of the fact that this was Prince’s first official book. Not so. In fact, it was his fourth. The first two, photo books entitled Prince Presents the Sacrifice of Victor and Neo Manifesto – Audentes Fortuna Juvat,20 were published in July 1994. Though beautifully produced, the most interesting photograph from Victor is the one on the cover of Come, and while the pictures in Neo Manifesto are largely garish, the book is of more value in that it contains lyrics from then-unreleased songs. Other than as part of a multimedia blitz, it’s hard to understand Prince’s motivation for putting out these lyrics.21 Was it his way of tipping off diehard fans (presumably the only people who would bother purchasing such a seemingly slight item from the NPG store) about songs available on bootlegs or soon to be officially released? Or a variation on his use of protégés to get more product out? Presumably, given that he was still under contract to Warner Brothers at this time, he wasn’t yet able to produce CDs of unreleased material for the shops to sell, so maybe this was the next best thing. Or were these the lyrics that he felt proudest of, lines he felt stood up well enough to be analysed? The collection does include the lyrics to four of Prince’s most highly regarded out-takes – ‘Empty Room’, ‘God Is Alive’, ‘Old Friends 4 Sale’ and ‘Crystal Ball’ – but also three far less distinguished songs – ‘Color’, ‘And How’ and ‘Don’t Talk 2 Strangers’ – eventually given to The Steeles, Jevetta Steele and Chaka Khan.22 Earlier that year, Prince had also attempted to launch a magazine, 10,000, which had a provocative cover, included an interview with Vanessa Marcil from The Undertaker and included the lyrics to yet another (still) unreleased song, ‘Adonis and Bathsheba’. But none of these projects truly took off and Prince would leave the print world behind, turning his attentions solely to the Internet for the next decade and a half, only returning to publications when he began to lose interest in the digital world.
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PART 2: ‘IT WAS JUST ABOUT NEEDING TO GET IT DONE …’
Some (including many at Warner Brothers) believed Prince concluded his record deal with albums compiled out of spite. And Come is Prince’s most confused and unappealing record. It appears to have a clear structure, beginning with cunnilingus and ending with an orgasm,1 but anyone putting this record on for Barry White purposes will have a nasty shock when they get to the song about child abuse (‘Papa’). Having decided to kill off ‘Prince’, it seems as if he wasn’t going to include his best songs on the record, and it’s really the soundtrack from Glam Slam Ulysses minus the five best tracks, but with the addition of two new, slightly more substantial songs – the appealingly smooth horn-driven ‘Letitgo’ and the aforementioned ‘Papa’, which some have read as autobiographical.
Evidently not an album Prince took particular care over, Come was nevertheless supported by two of his best maxi-discs, containing variations on ‘Letitgo’ and ‘Space’ respectively, and including one remix – the ‘Universal Love Remix’ of ‘Space’ – that many fans consider the best remix/alternative version of any Prince song. As with several Prince maxi-singles, these collections work as albums in their own right and in this instance rival their parent album.
Three months after Come, Prince continued the house-clearing with the official release of The Black Album. It would have been perfectly possible to turn this release into an event, but it seems that for whatever reason – Prince’s continuing ambivalence about the record, the increasing sense of conflict between the artist and his label – it slipped out uncelebrated, and it seems destined to be remembered for its status as a ‘once-legendary’ bootleg rather than for the quality of the music itself.
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While celebrating the death of Prince, the Artist was readying his debut album. Frustrated by delays (once he’d drawn a cross on his cheek; now he wrote ‘SLAVE’ there while attending recording-company meetings and making public appearances), Prince was road-testing new songs at small private shows at Paisley Park and embarking on a new period of spiritual growth brought on by adopting a new identity.
However personally rewarding he might have found this, my innate faith in Prince’s intellect is seriously challenged by the fact that he was – for a few years at least – going round recommending the self-help book Embraced by the Light, by Betty J. Eadie. There is an obvious disconnect between the people who write about rock stars – unhealthy, obsessive types who have read, heard and seen (and in some cases, eaten) too much – and the superhumans they describe, and it’s perhaps inevitable that pop stars are more likely to be impressed by New Age philosophy than anyone who has spent too much time inside a lecture theatre, concert hall or darkened screening room. But even so, Embraced by the Light? Come on! Still, as galling as it is to have to read this sort of dreck in search of what Prince found of value in it, it’s easy to find in this book many sections that chime with Prince’s occasionally mechanistic beliefs, such as Eadie’s insistence that our bodies punish us for any sins of the flesh.
It is this sense of being ‘responsible for our bodies’ that lies behind ‘P. Control’, the opening track of The Gold Experience, the one album from this era that fans hold in high esteem. The next stage in Prince’s development from sexual revolutionary to reactionary conservative, ‘P. Control’ brings together many of his long-running obsessions (the sexualisation of schooldays; the importance of money in sexual and romantic relationships; dominance and submission) in the most basic formation to date (can you imagine a male equivalent called ‘Cock Control’?). The song is worth hearing for Prince’s hip-hop inspired OTT delivery, but it’s an offputting opening. If this is, then bring back Prince.
The Gold Experience includes the two most immediate songs from Glam Slam Ulysses – ‘Endorphinmachine’ and ‘Dolphin’ – as well as ‘The Most Beautiful Girl in the World’, which has the silliest audio punctuation ever, not just the ticking clock but the plip of Prince’s teardrops of joy, and more than the usual amount of filler: ‘Shhh’ is a fairly run-of-the-mill ballad – most notable for its drum solo – which Prince has played in concert more times than any song not from his classic era; ‘We March’ is another self-celebration song; ‘Now’ and ‘319’ are almost instantly forgettable, though the former includes one of Prince’s most suggestive lines and ends with him comparing the NPG to drugs. His claim that ‘319’ – a song about a man photographing a woman masturbating in a hotel room – was inspired by the actress Elizabeth Berkley from Showgirls makes one want to see the pictures if nothing else.
The three best songs are stacked together towards the end of the record, each of them tinged with a darkness and violence more disturbing than anything since The Black Album. ‘Shy’ is Prince’s psychosexual response to gangsta rap, featuring him meeting a woman who tells him about an initiation murder she’s committed, while the narrator wonders if the story is true. ‘Billy Jack Bitch’ is Prince firing back after criticism from journalists, a pun in the lyrics suggesting the song’s target is C.J., the gossip columnist from Minneapolis’s Star Tribune, who would frequently mock Prince in her column and who gave him the insulting nickname ‘Symbolina’ (Prince denied the song was about her; she claimed Mayte confirmed it). But the album’s most successful track is ‘Eye Hate U’, which was spun out with six versions on yet another maxi-disc, entitled ‘The Hate Experience’. Beginning as a put-down of a woman who betrayed her lover, it continues with a comical courtroom scene reminiscent of ‘Witness 4 the Prosecution’ that ends with the singer tying up his lover and having sex with her in front of a jury. Funny, erotic and faintly ridiculous, the song’s evident lack of sincerity only makes it more entertaining. A few more tracks like this and The Gold Experience might have truly represented a worthwhile new beginning.
A letter Mayte sent to the Prince fanzine Controversy (but believed to be written by Prince) suggested ‘Gold’ was Prince’s latest attempt to write another ‘Purple Rain’. Like ‘Graffiti Bridge�
�, the song is a failure, mainly because it relies on cliché and self-improvement mantras and is overblown instead of genuinely stirring. Of more lasting interest was ‘Gold”s B-side, ‘Rock N Roll Is Alive! (And It Lives in Minneapolis)’, a witty answer song to Lenny Kravitz’s sluggish lament ‘Rock and Roll Is Dead’. This comedy comeback confirmed how good Prince’s goof-offs can be, especially when he feels he has something to prove.
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Steve Parke was brought in to help out on the album’s design. Presented with an already-completed alternative concept, he tried to come up with a way of making it stand out on the stacks. ‘I wanted to do gold-foil paper, and we had a company who could do it for us, but as you might imagine, it got real pricey. We did that one mock-up that he had on the David Letterman show. I even had a jewel case that had specks of gold inside the plastic. Then once Warner Brothers gotta hold of it, I’m sure they didn’t want to put that extra bit of energy into it.’
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Underappreciated at the time, receiving mixed reviews and even prompting audience members to request refunds, The Ultimate Live Experience was Prince’s most audacious tour. It’s not unusual for Prince to base a show primarily around music from a new album (indeed, he’d done so two years earlier with the Act I tour), but in this case not only had the record yet to be released, but it would be the first that Prince would release under his new identity. When you add in the fact that the Artist would open the show by announcing Prince’s death, that the show’s most compelling song, ‘Days of Wild’, wouldn’t even appear on the new record, that during the show he promoted a different new album (the NPG’s second record, Exodus) and that he was interspersing the new songs with covers of songs by his heroes Graham Central Station, James Brown and Sly and the Family Stone, it’s easy to see why the audience (and critics) struggled to comprehend the change. But these shows really deserve to be documented with an official live release.
In this instance, however, a live album would suffice. The power of the music was not matched by the stage show, a Spinal Tapstyle affair that featured an ‘Endorphinmachine’ stage so troublesome it led to the sacking of one member of staff2 before it was abandoned in London. There was also a cumbersome conveyor-belt system, stagecraft which included Tommy Barbarella and Mayte being flown over the heads of the audience, and choreography that largely consisted of Mayte clomping around the stage in bikini and boots. Surrounded by this nonsense, Prince focused on his guitar and singing, giving his most powerful performance in years.
His dedication is all the more impressive given the technical and logistical problems they were facing. Poole remembers: ‘He’d shipped over this huge big set that he’d had built, and he was at war with the band. He decided that he didn’t want somebody in the audience mixing the sound. He didn’t want a sound guy sitting in the middle of the audience mixing the sound where he couldn’t communicate with him. So he had that sort of egg thing and the sound person was put in that egg thing. And suddenly I found myself as the only person who would speak to him.
‘There was a revolt, and I had to say, “This can’t work.” What you want is to get the best possible sound, and to have your sound guy on the stage behind the speakers isn’t going to achieve that. “Sorry, but the band don’t want this. The sound is terrible out the front. It sounds awful.” In the end he gave in.
‘He was feeling very under siege on that tour because the accountants had made him strip down the whole set and he was entering crisis proportions with money. He borrowed a lot of money off Warner Music publishing, and of course his record sales were slipping, especially in America, and it was what happened to Michael Jackson a few years later. He’s got this lavish lifestyle, and money was no object. “Are you sure you want me to rent a shop and fill it with stuff? Are you sure you want me to have a studio on standby twenty-four hours a day in case you fancy recording?” You’d have limos on standby, decoy limos … Vast amounts of money were being spent on these tours. And this accountant was the first guy who’d actually turned round and said, “Sorry, you haven’t got the money to do this. It can’t work.” I was told by Gilbert Davidson that he’d made no money from the previous two tours; if anything, he’d lost money. But in a strange kind of way it wasn’t about money with him. Money was a sign of success and enabled him to do what he wanted to do, but I don’t know if money for money’s sake was his motivation. But on that tour he went into this Chitlin Circuit mentality. He wanted to do after-shows every night and would say, “I won’t go on for less than $10,000.” I said, “Fine.” I arranged a VIP area and I said, “Here’s your VIP area, your personal waiter,” worked out $10,000, bundled it into a Sainsbury’s carrier bag, took it upstairs to where he was sitting with his feet on the table. I dumped it on the table and said, “There you go, $10,000. Right, what time do you want to go on?”’
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Prince would conclude his deal with Warner Brothers (compilations aside) with two albums he dismissed on the sleeve notes as recorded ‘4 private use only’, seemingly wanting to make the purchasers feel guilty for buying them. Warner Brothers held up the release of the second of these albums, The Vault … Old Friends 4 Sale, for over three years, finally putting it out between Crystal Ball/The Truth and Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic.3 Although Prince initially dismissed the first, Chaos and Disorder, as an album created in anger, he seems to have come to terms with it over the years, occasionally introducing songs from the record into his after-shows. And, of course, while it’s no doubt true that he was eager to be shot of the label and that this was the most rapid way of doing it, at the same time the ambition to record a quick rock album had been there as far back as The Rebels. As he told Elysa Gardner of the LA Times: ‘Someone told me that Van Halen did their first record in a week. That’s what we were going for – spontaneity, seeing how fast and hard we could thrash it out.’
Only, as usual, this isn’t the full story. It would have been perfectly possible for Prince to go into the studio with the NPG and thrash out a quick rock record, but as always, when he started thinking of a concept, old orphaned songs came to him. And while much of the record did come together in March and April while recording at South Beach Studios in Miami, he did also include older songs (such as the title track). It’s obvious he wanted out of his contract, and he didn’t appear bothered about the commercial success of the record, but this isn’t a substandard collection. It’s more a punk-rock equivalent to Marvin Gaye’s Here, My Dear, offered to a record company instead of a single woman. For the fan who appreciates /Prince’s rock songs, it’s among his most exhilarating records, and for a pseudo-punk record, the arrangements are surprisingly complex, with an enormous amount of audio FX.
‘Chaos and Disorder’ and ‘I Like It There’ are defiant in their refusal to say anything. Prince takes on the guise of a ‘no-name reporter’ who doesn’t want to say anything because Shakespeare has always got there first. For such a prolific lyricist, these songs are striking – Prince as boasting about how to write compelling songs without a single revelation. ‘Dinner with Delores’ is a pretty song with nasty lyrics, the reference to a woman stuck in 1984 suggesting a response to any wannabe Darling Nikkis who had yet to get the message. ‘The Same December’ is more cryptic pseudo-theology, but ‘Right the Wrong’ is an intriguing use of a Jagger-esque faux-country register to criticise the mistreatment of Native Americans.
The full version of ‘Zannalee’ reveals it to be a spectacularly silly song: policemen go out to investigate a disturbance, only to find Prince being double-teamed by two women (this is toned down in the accompanying promo). ‘I Rock, Therefore I Am’ shows Prince exploring rock-ragga, while boasting about his musical skill, alongside Minneapolis rappers Scrap D and Steppa Ranks, who encourage female listeners to reveal their breasts. ‘Into the Light’ is more Eadie-inspired spiritualism, and almost indistinguishable from ‘I Will’. After this moment of brightness, the album ends in bitterness, with the techno-influenced and self-explanatory ‘Dig U Better Dead
’ and the extraordinarily savage ‘Had U’, less a song than words you might find written on the mirror in lipstick at a crime scene.
The artwork is particularly primitive. Steve Parke says this was deliberate. ‘It was trying to be, like, an angry look. It was thrown together very quickly. I shot a bunch of Polaroids around Paisley and just set up little scenes of things burning and stuff. I had a lot of worries about printing, because that was the point where colour calibration was not there yet. I remember asking the people at Warner Brothers, “Can you get back to me if there are colour issues?” I never heard anything from them, and then when I saw it come out there were some issues. My impression was at the time, the contentious nature with Warner Brothers … it wasn’t about spending a whole lot of time on it, just about needing to get it done.’
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PART 3: ‘ALL I GOTTA DO IS SELL A MILLION AND I CAN QUIT …’
Emancipation is an abandoned (white) mansion. At the time of release, Prince defined it as a happy album, in contrast to The Black Album or Chaos and Disorder, but there’s something sad about these thirty-six almost entirely forgotten songs, many never played live, with those that did make it into a set unlikely to be exhumed again.1 Nevertheless, it is also Prince as ’s finest achievement: his Purple Rain, his Sign o’ the Times, championed by several critics at the time (it got his warmest reviews in years) and still highly regarded by those who have written full-length books about Prince,2 if largely ignored by the listening public, regularly showing up in the discount bins at the world’s last few remaining CD stores.