Prince

by Matt Thorne

  The three-CD set was largely a collaboration with Kirk Johnson, who had joined Prince as one of the Game Boyz dancers on the Nude tour before graduating to percussion and dancing, and who would eventually replace Michael Bland as the drummer in Prince’s band (he was also Prince’s best man when he married Mayte). Johnson is one of the many Prince associates his fans love to hate, blaming him for the ‘plastic’ production on this album and the later New Power Soul (he’s also responsible for ‘computer programming’ on the final album Prince recorded as , Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic3), but this is unfair.

  Johnson won favour with Prince thanks to his remixes of Prince’s B-sides – one of which, a reinvention of the ‘The Continental’ entitled ‘Tell Me How U Wanna B Done’, ended up on Crystal Ball – and now runs a gym in Minneapolis and plays with other Prince-associated artists, such as Candy Dulfer, offering advice on his website about the best food for a health-conscious person to eat on the road. I tried to interview him, but he didn’t respond to my approaches, so the majority of this chapter relies on the testimony of the third person in the room during the second half of the production of this record – engineer H. M. Buff. I like Buff, an amusingly forthright German engineer who was initially very defensive, having read criticism of his work from fans over the years that has left him unable to truly relish his achievements. But during our conversations, as he realised I was a genuine fan of some of the albums he recorded for Prince, he became more expansive. Buff kept detailed notes of his time working with Prince which, coupled with his clear recall of sessions, helped fully explicate many of the mysteries of the next few years in Prince’s recording history.

  Before deciding to work with Johnson on Emancipation, Prince considered bringing in a producer from outside his immediate circle, largely, it seems, out of a desire to connect more fully with an R&B audience. During a show at Paisley Park in September 1995, he invited the Georgia-based producer and songwriter behind R&B girl group TLC, Dallas Austin – who had already worked for Prince, producing George Clinton’s contribution to 1-800-NEW-FUNK, ‘Hollywood’ – up to the stage and announced him as the producer of the forthcoming album, which at that point was planned to be even longer, a fifty-two-song set that would retail for $80, allowing Prince to estimate that if he could sell a million copies, he’d able to retire. Without wishing to dis Johnson, it’s a shame this didn’t happen, as it might have completely transformed the record – although it should be noted that ‘Secret’, the Austin-produced Madonna song that initially caught Prince’s ear, now sounds far more dated than Emancipation – and one of the biggest missed opportunities of Prince/’s career to date is his reluctance to work with a well-known producer. Personally, I’d love to hear what Rick Rubin or Jim O’Rourke or even Steve Albini might get out of him.

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  Many 1960s artists struggled in the 1980s. It was the decade of Prince, Michael Jackson and Madonna, and they didn’t know how to cope, ditching their styles and rushing into studios with equipment and producers that didn’t suit their sound. Now, in the mid-1990s, Prince was the one who sounded out of synch. What must have been even more galling was that the popular sounds were so close to what Prince had once done. He was facing the same problem the hippies had in the plastic decade, when they abandoned their old style and tried to sound like the music that was charting. Prince could do the new R&B style, that mix of overly saccharine lover-man ballads and party tracks, and Emancipation even shares some of the eccentricities of these records – one track even credits sleeve artist Steve Parke’s jeep as an instrument – but somehow this new style seemed to cheapen Prince’s music.

  The album Emancipation is closest to in style and spirit is not any other Prince or record, but R. Kelly’s R., recorded over the same period but released a year later. R. was far more successful commercially than Emancipation, selling eight million copies in America alone, and is almost as ambitious stylistically (and only fifty minutes shorter), but R. Kelly is a less interesting (though more amusing) lyricist than Prince (as well as a less versatile musician). Hans-Martin Buff told me that at one stage Prince even brought in R. Kelly’s engineer, Peter Mokran, to see what he could do with ‘Sleep Around’. ‘He mixed “Sleep Around” for three days,’ Buff told me, ‘but Prince didn’t like it.’

  Buff became the main engineer on Emancipation through working his way up the ranks. ‘Throughout the 1990s Paisley was a commercial studio where you could just book time and record, like you could at Abbey Road, for example,’ he told me. ‘It was fully staffed, and there was a group of engineers who were called internally “the Prince pool”. They worked just for him directly because he’s such an intense guy and likes to work many hours.

  ‘It was usually three people, but then a situation arose where Prince only wanted one engineer and the whole studio to himself, so he closed Paisley as a commercial facility and let everybody go, with the exception of his direct engineer at the time, a man named Steve Durkee. I had a pager, which was the method of being summoned in those days, and it didn’t go off for four months, until July of 1996, and then I dropped my current projects and came in.’

  The situation Buff discovered when coming to work on the album was not a harmonious one. ‘Steve Durkee had left not on friendly terms, which is not unusual in the Paisley world, and the whole place was a shambles. I arrived there at eight in the morning and found out that the guy I was supposed to assist didn’t know about it and didn’t have time that day, and so I put the studio together, and Prince came in and stood behind me and strummed his guitar and asked if I had time for him that week.’

  This was the beginning of a working relationship that would last for the next four years.

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  It’s tempting to see the process of stripping things back as Prince closing down everything to focus on this major project, but Buff suggests this is not how his creative process works. ‘Unlike other musicians, Prince continuously works on whatever he works on and doesn’t just listen to the one song he’s working on but tries to always assemblage as a sequence right away. He always has segues of the current project, and usually at the end of the project he sees the direction and starts writing songs for the project rather than assembling the songs he was making into a project.’ Buff also says that while Johnson was Prince’s closest friend – ‘at least until Larry Graham showed up’ – the process of collaboration between the two ‘would be on Prince’s terms’. Johnson ‘would do the rhythmic basis for every one of those songs. He would supervise a lot of the recordings.’

  Prince, however, is on record claiming the project began with ‘Right Back Here in My Arms’. This track was on the first projected assembly of Emancipation, along with the title song, two songs that eventually opened the third disc, a track later given to Chaka Khan (‘Journey 2 the Center of Your Heart’) and four as yet unreleased tracks.4 The song doesn’t represent any particular progression in Prince’s work, though most of the songs on the set are in the same style: ill-fitting samples, fluctuations in Prince’s voice, different vocal styles married – like much of the record – to a repetitive and straightforward lyric. And the other substantial song from this assembly, ‘Emancipation’, also relies strongly on Prince’s past ideas rather than moving anywhere new – ‘purple rain’, the relationship between Adam and Eve (yet again!), chains, a character called Johnny, money problems, and the desire for freedom. Fortunately, when Prince expanded the CD from one disc to three, his ambition expanded, albeit gradually.

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  After all the years of him avoiding the press, to support this record Prince as talked to anyone who would listen, and there’s more first-hand information about the recording of this album than any other. He told Musician that Johnson’s production skills stemmed from him being a drum programmer. ‘He’s good at using the computer to put a rhythm track together. I don’t like setting that kind of stuff up, because a lot of times the song will leave me while I’m doing it. But when Kirk and I are doing it together, we ca
n keep each other excited.’

  The joylessness of this comment reflects the worst aspects of this record: Prince sounds as if he’s Brian Keenan describing how he passed time with John McCarthy while incarcerated in a Lebanese dungeon. Prince doesn’t mean it this way; he goes on to disparage 1999 in comparison to Emancipation, arguing that the earlier record is less varied because he was doing all the programming himself. But the more he talks, the more he gives himself away: later in the same interview, he talks about constructing ‘In This Bed I Scream’ by putting a guitar on the ground and letting it feed back, which made him wonder whether instruments have a soul of their own and if they might start writing the songs without his input, a Fantasia fantasy revealing just how exhausted this sorcerer’s apprentice was at the time. It’s also revealing that he dedicated a song created in such a simple way to his former band-mates Wendy and Lisa (as well as his ex-lover Susannah Melvoin), who could do so much with even the simplest idea. When Wendy listened to Emancipation and heard this song, ‘I was sad,’ she says. Lisa, too, was troubled by it. ‘It was surprising. He didn’t make an effort to have a relationship. Whenever he’s asked us to do something, we’ve done it. I understand how emotions come when you’re writing a song. It’s not “ripped from the headlines”. I miss you sometimes too.’

  When asked about how he decided whether a song was good enough to include on a record, Prince told Musician that he so hated criticising music that he couldn’t even appraise his own. Pushed on this question, he responded with a non sequitur about how he and Mayte were ‘into this thing now of wondering whether we’re supposed to get out of bed when we get up’, before concluding, ‘each song writes itself. It’s already perfect.’ This might lead a reader to believe that Emancipation might be half-baked, or unfinished and scrappy. It’s not, although it does feature the return of Chaos and Disorder’s Scrap D (on ‘Mr. Happy’ and ‘Da, Da, Da’). Prince told the reporter that the pressure (both from himself and the record company) to produce hits cramped his writing process, and that on this album he wasn’t trying to write great singles any more (indeed, the first single he’d release from Emancipation would be a cover), but was instead concentrating on expressing the truth, whether or not this was appropriate for the pop market.

  Buff shed further light on the composition process. ‘We would start something, then get Kirk in, and either Kirk would offer some of the beats he had created, or Prince would say, “I want something in a particular tempo.” And it wouldn’t be programmed like you usually would, where you’d programme the verse and then the chorus, it would be the same eight or ten sounds all the way through, and we’d record that to tape for about eight minutes, and then Prince would usually record some melodic instrument on top, usually a guitar or a keyboard, and pretty much straight away write a song around it, or if he’d already written it, do it just with vocals and embellish it with other arrangement bits and FX, and then he would take the ten rhythmic sounds that he did in the beginning and just erase them.’

  When Buff started work on the album, he was presented with a song sequence that he put into (‘dismal’) sequencing software, as Prince started updating tracks he didn’t like, taking songs out and working on the album’s structure. Songs that Buff remembers being completed before his arrival included two of the record’s four cover songs – The Stylistics’ ‘Betcha By Golly Wow!’5 and Joan Osborne’s ‘One of Us’ – as well as the Kate Bush collaboration, ‘My Computer’, and the second CD’s ‘Friend, Lover, Sister, Mother/Wife’. Even late in the recording, Prince was spontaneously producing an enormous amount of material. ‘The first day I worked for him we started five new songs,’ Buff told me. These five were ‘Emale’, ‘Sleep Around’, ‘Dreamin’ about U’,6 ‘The Love We Make’ and a ‘gospel-like ballad’ that remains unreleased.

  So what sort of music did Prince bring to the studio that first day? A revenge ballad that seems aimed at a writer, a song warning a man to satisfy his lover if he doesn’t want her to stray, a fairly rote ballad enlivened by Prince singing again about the notion of having an imagined twin inside him, and the day’s most substantial known achievement (assuming he didn’t woodshed the session’s best song), ‘The Love We Make’, one of very few Emancipation tracks that Prince has returned to subsequently in live performance. Towards the end of a long record, it’s easy to miss, but it’s one of the set’s strongest moments. While it does rely on the occasional cliché and is essentially yet another self-empowerment song, it’s heartfelt in a way much of the album isn’t. Seemingly about a forthcoming Rapture, it echoes ‘The Cross’, a song Prince would soon rework – but with a more apocalyptic feel.

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  The other Emancipation songs Buff has strong memories of are ‘Jam of the Year’, which had been started but not finished when he arrived, ‘We Gets Up’, ‘Mr. Happy’, ‘Sex in the Summer’, ‘Curious Child’ and ‘Joint 2 Joint’, his favourite song, and the last track recorded for the album (Buff makes a guest vocal appearance on it, playing the role of Prince’s driver). ‘Jam of the Year’ is the album in miniature: meandering low-key fun, in no hurry to go anywhere. This is one of several albums (1999, Purple Rain, 3121) that starts with an invitation to dance, but this time it’s not apocalyptic or cathartic or anything much really. Lyrically, it’s utterly inconsequential: Prince is in a club, with a Puerto Rican woman (Mayte’s parents are of Puerto Rican descent), when his favourite song comes on. Prince even acknowledges the limited resources with which Emancipation was created, saying all he needs is a drummer (or, it seems, a drum programmer) and a funky bass line. ‘We Gets Up’ is one of countless songs praising the musical skills of the NPG, an odd inclusion when the NPG were in a state of flux and aren’t that prevalent on the album. In fact, the solitary nature of how Prince was working during this period soon became apparent to Buff. ‘Prince does a lot himself, especially vocals. Of all the many, many times – I think it was about two hundred songs I was involved in – he was present for two lead vocals. Usually he has the microphone over the console and does it himself. When he’s done recording it, and when he wants to mix it or needs assistance, he calls people over the intercom.’

  Buff is dismissive of ‘Mr. Happy’, one of several rap-influenced songs on the set, which features a sample from Ice Cube’s ‘What Can I Do’, the 1993 song that features a line about Cube moving in next door to Prince,7 considering it ‘a waste of time’, but hip hop is an important part of this record. There are three sampled appearances by the female rapper Poet 99, who first came to attention on Canadian rappers Dream Warriors’ 1994 record Subliminal Stimulation (the sample on ‘Face Down’ is recycled from this album), which was recorded around the same time that Prince was working with her.8

  ‘Sex in the Summer’ is another of Prince’s musical palimpsests, an extremely mixed-up song built over an unreleased track called ‘Conception’ about exactly that which features the ultrasound heartbeat of ‘the 1st conceived 2 Prince’, a process he would describe in detail to Oprah Winfrey. How much of the original song is left in this track is unclear, but the finished track see-saws uneasily between the sacred and the profane. Particularly confusing is Prince’s choice of listening: Mahalia Jackson’s famous hymn, ‘In the Upper Room’.9 The reference is so incongruous that it increases the sense that this album is just a series of present-tense snapshots, written without reflection.

  Similarly, ‘Curious Child’ is little more than a melodramatic fragment, and, it seems, another Lolita song (unless Prince is the one who’s underage). ‘Joint 2 Joint’ is more substantial. Buff remembers being more impressed by the way Prince recorded this song than any other, amazed by the way he built it up in the studio. This track is Prince goofing off, pulling everything down from the shelves and shoving it into the track, constructing a narrative beyond the lyrics in the way he did on ‘Play in the Sunshine’ or ‘Crystal Ball’, working in tap-dancing, distorted vocals and lines sung while munching cereal, all of which Buff remembers Prince doing live
in the studio.

  Buff told me that Prince’s working processes during this time were so open-ended that when Emancipation was finally completed, Kirk Johnson – who’d started to fear it might never be finished – didn’t even realise it was done. But Buff had noticed the songs written towards the end of the process – such as ‘Joint 2 Joint’ and ‘The Plan’ – seemed custom-fit to round out the album. Buff eventually told Johnson he knew they were done because he and Prince had spent a huge all-night session ensuring each disc lasted exactly sixty minutes. ‘We edited it if it was over, we put some stuff in – like in “Saviour”, we had guitar distortion and the sound of doors opening. We made segues and made little things here and there. It was a big deal.’

  This might seem a fairly pointless pursuit, but the press liked it, a Spanish journalist suggesting to Prince that he was inspired by the pyramids of Egypt when he constructed Emancipation because it has three discs of the same duration. (Prince didn’t disagree, merely observing that building the pyramids took a tremendous collective mental effort.10) Emancipation is also unusual in the extreme amount of audio punctuation it includes. Ticking clocks, thunderstorms, doors slamming – almost every track is tricked out with tiny details. ‘We had a huge sound library called Sound Ideas,’11 Buff told me. ‘And I would get called in, and Prince would say, “I need a clock.” And there was a huge index and we’d come up with some clocks.’