Prince

by Matt Thorne

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  The album also features the first studio appearance of bassist Rhonda Smith, who would play an important role in the NPG over the next eight years, helping shape the group’s heavier sound, and who would collaborate with Prince on songs for 1998’s well-respected The Truth.12 One song she appears on, ‘Get Yo Groove On’, also features a shout-out to D’Angelo,13 the R&B singer who’d inherit Prince’s road manager, Alan Leeds, although the line about playing D’Angelo’s new CD has acquired a new irony now that it’s taken him nearly twelve years to record the follow-up to Voodoo.14 Prince’s early work largely inhabited a closed universe, and although there were references to other musicians, they tended to be Prince side projects or protégés (Joni Mitchell or classical and jazz musicians aside), but from now on he would often record songs that would name-check musicians he admired.15 (Live, he’d add in a reference to Boyz II Men.)

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  In concert, Prince would combine ‘Get Yo Groove On’ with Madhouse’s ‘Six’ (played on his goldaxxe16), revealing the jazz underpinnings of this song. The importance of jazz as a renewed source of inspiration is also evident from ‘Courtin’ Time’, written after Eric Leeds played Prince Paul Gonsalves’s long sax solo from ‘Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue’ – one of the most famous jazz recordings of all time. The 7 July 1956 performance at the Newport Jazz Festival is admired as a feat of endurance (Gonsalves playing consistently for twenty-seven choruses), but also as a moment of musical innovation, as Duke Ellington successfully introduced a blues beat to jazz. Prince was particularly impressed by the story behind the performance: as Leeds told him, ‘the reason why this solo went as long as it did was that this lady jumped up on this table and started dancing to the rhythm, so nobody wanted to quit’. Prince claims that he initially played a twenty-minute version of ‘Courtin’ Time’, with Leeds ‘wailin’ that whole time’. I’ve already confessed my weakness for Prince’s longer tracks, and it seems a shame that he didn’t put this version onto Emancipation, as it might have helped listeners realise the ambition of the set. I haven’t heard this longer version (and don’t know if it’s in circulation), but to get a sense of how it might sound, listen to the live rendition played at a 1998 New Power Soul Festival Tour soundcheck officially released on the twelfth of the NPG Music Club downloads. This version isn’t particularly long (the entire track is less than five minutes), but it’s clear Prince is thinking of Gonsalves as he plays, making boasts about his guest horn player’s physical ability.

  Emancipation is a very busy record. ‘White Mansion’ is a potentially powerful, seemingly autobiographical song – perhaps even about that first trip Prince made to New York when he was looking for a record deal – with Prince singing about rags-to-riches success while being snubbed by a woman in the street,17 a track that is pulled off course by an overly complicated arrangement, a confusing sample and the crass inclusion of brand names18 at the end. The lyrics are crisp and witty, but the infuriating audio punctuation is there again (after Prince sings of needing a new guitar, you get a twang; when he talks of performing a song in a bar, there’s the sound of an audience; when he talks about playing a game, it’s underscored with the sound of a slot machine spitting out coins; when someone tells Prince to return to Minneapolis, you hear the sound of a plane taking off. Aarrggh!).

  There’s so much automatic writing on the album it’s tempting to hear the whole thing as a diary. Is ‘Damned If Eye Do’ really about a conflict between Prince and Mayte, and the argument they have before deciding that they either have to get married or break up? Is it truth or dirty realist fiction when Prince describes Mayte drinking vermouth when he doesn’t show up and getting cross when he doesn’t give her enough time to get ready? (If true, it sounds like the son of the parents in ‘When Doves Cry’ struggling with his own personal life). The presence of Mayte’s mother, Janelle, on the track, talking in Spanish with another man, increases the mystery, as does the strange line repeated in the lyric booklet (‘I won’t do it like Kevin’). Who’s Kevin? Um, believe it or not, Kevin Costner. The line refers to Costner’s character drinking his own urine in Waterworld: Prince is promising here that he won’t serve his girlfriend piss, surely one of the oddest jokes he’s made on record.

  The Bonnie Raitt cover on Emancipation is a dig at Warner Brothers. The American country and blues singer-songwriter had her own vexed relationship with the label,19 having an album shelved for three years when the label decided to drop her. Raitt nearly signed to Paisley Park,20 although in his memoir former Warner exec Danny Goldberg notes of the sessions: ‘Prince had simply plugged Bonnie into lyrics that easily could have been written for pop/R&B sex bombs like Vanity or Sheila E.’21 It’s clear in choosing ‘I Can’t Make You Love Me’ (retitled, in the usual manner, ‘Eye Can’t Make U Love Me’), a hit song from one of Raitt’s successful post-Warners albums, he was making a connection between her accomplishment after leaving the label and his own. The song has been covered many times, by everyone from George Michael to Bon Iver, and it’s now become an American Idol standard. It’s also worth remembering that it was Raitt’s brother who had first rented Prince rehearsal space.

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  For all the tabloid or trash-biography criticism of Prince’s attitude towards women, there remains something incredibly generous about the way he placed Mayte centre stage (literally: she would dance while he played) during this period of his creative life. Three years earlier, David Bowie had been inspired by his marriage to the model Iman Abdulmajid to compose his own wedding album (Black Tie, White Noise), but that record has nowhere near as much sincerity and passion as the most romantic tracks on Emancipation. It was during the Emancipation sessions that Prince married Mayte, and the final song from the second disc, ‘Friend, Lover, Sister, Mother/Wife’, was played during the wedding ceremony.22 ‘Let’s Have a Baby’ is hard to listen to now – on 16 October 1996, Mayte would give birth to a child with Pfeiffer syndrome who would die a week later – but it’s a beautiful song, an adult response to all those ‘I’m gonna get ya pregnant’ R&B tracks.

  There are songs on the album that don’t seem connected to Prince and Mayte’s relationship, like ‘Somebody’s Somebody’, but which are worked into the narrative through the videos that accompanied the release.23 Prince would release two alternative versions of this song, the ‘Livestudio Mix’ and an ‘Ultrafantasy Edit’. Both improve on the original.

  Perhaps inevitably given that the record is so long and Prince has never been concerned about recycling ideas or self-parody, some tracks feel like reworkings of his past successes. ‘One Kiss at a Time’, for example, is ‘Slow Love’ revisited for the R&B 1990s (which doesn’t make it any less great). Other tracks fit together through shared lyrics and ideas, ‘Soul Sanctuary’ (another song that plays with by-now-surely-bankrupt Garden of Eden imagery) slotting together with ‘The Love We Make’. The absence of Dr Clare Fischer’s arrangements from the album – aside from on ‘The Plan’, a brief and uncredited extract from Kamasutra – is surprising, as Prince had always previously utilised his work on his most ambitious records. With the release of the Crystal Ball out-takes collection, Prince revealed that there had indeed originally been a track with Fischer orchestration on it, ‘Goodbye’ (included in this later box set), which was replaced with the similarly epic ‘The Holy River’. Maybe Prince realised the perversity of saying farewell midway through a thirty-six-track record, and it’s now the final track on Crystal Ball.

  Aside from the covers (‘La, La, La Means Eye Love U’ and ‘One of Us’), the third disc is mainly a compilation of more dance-floor-orientated material. The two songs from the original assembly – ‘Slave’ and ‘New World’ – are techno-influenced and resemble the worst of Come, providing further proof that Prince and rave really don’t mix. Although he would soon use Buff exclusively, to begin with he brought in what Buff describes as ‘trusted people he would use when he didn’t want to think too much [about a song]’, Cesar Sogbe and Joe Ga
ldo, for two tracks on the final disc of the set, the ravey ‘The Human Body’ and the song that Prince also gave Peter Mokran, ‘Sleep Around’. There’s lots of this sort of stuff on the third CD, which, while it has its charms (‘Style’ is funny and sweet – it’s nice to hear Prince take Jackie O as a style icon), is repetitive. The stand-out track on this disc, ‘Face Down’, would have something of an afterlife. Prince played it on The Chris Rock Show, the best of his Emancipation promo appearances: brought out in a brown raincoat and white fedora, he was placed face down on the studio floor, before springing up, plucking playing cards from his pocket, bashing at a piano, swearing at the audience and ending up back, with the rest of his band, prone on the floor.

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  A week before the album’s release, Prince played an Emancipation gig at Paisley Park. Broadcast on the major American music TV channels, and around the world, the footage is worth revisiting. Prince would reuse the ‘free at last’ sample from Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech on several occasions, but anyone troubled by his ongoing connection of a record contract with slavery would be most offended by its use here. If you compare the ‘Freedom’ concert with any of Prince’s past transformations, it’s underwhelming: ‘Jam of the Year’ and ‘Get Yo Groove On’ are not songs to hang your reputation on, and the many thousands who hated Joan Osborne’s ‘One of Us’ were hardly going to be won over by Prince’s rendition. But the two tours (‘Love 4 One Another Charities’ and ‘Jam of the Year’) that Prince embarked on while promoting this album, cherished only by hard-core fans, are less celebrated than they should be. The official releases from the tour are limited to a cassette release – ‘NYC Live’24 – but this is an era that deserves to be part of the official story. After introducing Prince songs to the previously all- set during the 1996 Japanese world tour, the 1997 Love 4 One Another Charities tour saw Prince bringing back hits like ‘Purple Rain’, ‘The Cross’ and ‘Do Me, Baby’, but integrating them into an ambitious set that presented a coherent new bass-driven sound, backed by an almost entirely new NPG.

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  During this time, Prince was starting to perform with Larry Graham, the former Sly and the Family Stone member who would go on to become his closest confidant and play an important role in changing Prince’s creative process, but on another night on this tour, at San Francisco’s Shoreline Amphitheatre, he would duet with another hero, Carlos Santana – the man Prince credits, far more than Jimi Hendrix, as being the inspiration for his guitar-playing style – on a long version of ‘Soul Sacrifice’ in which he paid full tribute to his idol, while matching him lick for lick. Across the two tours, Prince played over a hundred main shows, as well as more after-shows than he had ever played before. They would vary considerably in length (especially on the Jam tour), and this was one of those rare tours where the main shows are (for the most part) better than the after-shows, which tended to be short and often dominated by guests such as the rapper Doug E. Fresh, suggesting that Prince was now entirely comfortable with making hip hop part of his sound, as long as he had someone onstage to do it for him.

  As with the Nude tour, Prince once more performed in front of a deliberately stripped-down stage set. After over half a decade of complicated, confusing, overly constructed live shows, it seemed stripping it back to the music once again suited Prince. This, it seemed, was his true emancipation.

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  WASTED KISSES …

  Prince had begun the hype for Crystal Ball with the release of Emancipation, listing it among a set of forthcoming albums, including records from the NPG and Mayte. He seemed to have gone back and forth between intending this to be a limited-effort response to bootlegging and making it more of a statement, eventually loading the three-CD set with two extra discs, both of which contained material seemingly of greater significance to Prince than this selection from the Vault. H. M. Buff remembers of the process: ‘That was nice and quick, two weeks. We really just took stuff out. One of the things I really like is to take the beef off, stuff that makes it long. There were two songs on that album that I edited until the cows came home – “Crystal Ball” itself and “Cloreen Bacon Skin”. [The latter] was really long: there was another four minutes to it.’ There were also, Buff told me, some songs considered for release that didn’t make the cut, the most significant being ‘Wonderful Ass’.

  Designer Steve Parke remembers that the packaging of the record started out as something much more ambitious. ‘Bootlegging was happening more and more online, and I was asking myself how could you do something that people would want. The original idea was to do an actual crystal ball … with the two halves separating and the CDs suspended in the middle. The reality became what we ended up with. It was this weird dichotomy because on the one hand we were making it look like a bootleg, and on the other we were doing this really cool production where this thing would sit on your shelf and look cool. And then they ended up doing a deal with Best Buy and we had to do a whole package for that, which shot the idea of it being underground and bootleggy. So the final version was the path of least resistance. It was less than I hoped for.’

  The collection was also less than fans hoped for. While the set did feature some of Prince’s best-loved out-takes – ‘Crystal Ball’, ‘Dream Factory’ and ‘Movie Star’ – and genuinely worthwhile songs from some of his most significant creative periods – ‘Crucial’ from the Sign o’ the Times era, ‘Sexual Suicide’, ‘Last Heart’, ‘Make Your Mama Happy’, ‘An Honest Man’ and ‘Good Love’ from the fertile period that preceded it – the majority of the set was made up of less significant songs, including five remixes and five tracks that had already had some form of previous release. Of the four songs originally intended for The Gold Experience – ‘Acknowledge Me’, ‘Ripopgodazippa’, ‘Interactive’ and ‘Days of Wild’ – only the latter was as good as anything on the released album, and it was easy to understand why Prince had ditched the first three at the time. There were also two songs first played while promoting Emancipation – ‘2morrow’, a sketchy song largely based around a sample from ‘The Most Beautiful Girl in the World’ which had already been released to radio, and the pretty but syrupy and inessential ballad ‘She Gave Her Angels’, which he’d performed on Muppets Tonight – plus another out-take from the record – ‘Goodbye’, worthwhile for Dr Clare Fischer’s orchestration but in the same overly sweet register as the weakest tracks from Emancipation.

  Worse still, of the five tracks most of us didn’t know about – ‘Hide the Bone’, ‘Da Bang’, ‘18 & Over’, ‘Poom Poom’ and ‘Calhoun Square’ – only the last was of any true lasting interest, the remaining four being a quartet of admittedly funky comedy songs largely consisting of Prince delivering euphemisms for genitalia and intercourse in a variety of funny voices that gave the worrying impression that what was left in the Vault was innuendo and silliness, recorded mainly as a way of letting off creative steam.

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  Of more lasting interest was The Truth, the bonus disc tucked into all versions of the set, which should be considered as a Prince album in its own right rather than an additional extra. Planned for release by EMI as a stand-alone album, the follow-up to Emancipation, it was shelved when the label folded. Prince subsequently considered releasing it as a limited-edition cassette, before including it with Crystal Ball. H. M. Buff has one of these cassettes, which, he says, Prince ‘sent out to his buddies, and it was really cool to have it with that cover and stuff. It’s a nice cover’.

  Steve Parke, who designed this cover, was disappointed that this version of the record never saw the light of day. ‘I would have liked to have seen that as a full CD with artwork and everything. I liked that because it was a different tone. And we actually did shoot a series of photos specific towards that. We even did a full layout where I was pretty happy with my typework on it. The cover got squeezed up for a CD single. The shot of Prince was pretty good even squeezed up, but I thought it looked great as a CD cover.’

 
; Even if the record didn’t get as wide a release as it might have, it was highly regarded by the few critics who heard it, with the NME describing it as ‘a minor revelation’ and suggesting it might represent the future for Prince’s music. But it was a direction he chose not to pursue. Parke remembers: ‘At the The Truth photo shoot he was playing all this great blues stuff [in the same vein], and I told him, “You need to put out an album like that.” And he said, “When I’m old,” because I think he thought you have to be old to play the blues.’

  ‘The Truth’ is one of the best openers on any Prince album, as startling and exciting as ‘Sign o’ the Times’. Prince’s voice and guitar are clearer than on any other track, his bluesy keening given extra sparkle by cryptic sound FX (for once, a ticking clock adds rather than detracts from the arrangement). ‘Don’t Play Me’ is even better, a highlight of Prince’s output, in which – even if it is a bluff – he manages to make us feel he’s singing from the heart for the first time – the truth indeed. Buff says both songs were recorded in one ten-minute session and seem to have prompted a change in Prince’s creative direction, although he warns against thinking of the songs as a complete unit, noting that Prince had yet to think of The Truth as a cohesive album.

  Which it isn’t, really. ‘Circle of Amour’ is a very silly song. Yet another track that sexualises schooldays, it concerns four students who form a sex circle in high school. ‘3rd Eye’ is also a repetition of a theme Prince has revisited obsessively – Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden – combined with some woolly mysticism. ‘Dionne’ is a pleasing return of Prince in the role of rejected lover. Two of the songs are co-writes with NPG member Rhonda Smith: ‘Man in a Uniform’ is a depiction of a common female sexual fantasy (it’s intriguing to note the change in Prince’s lyrics around this era, when he becomes an observer or reteller of female sexual fantasy rather than the cause of it); and ‘Animal Kingdom’ is another celebration of the joys of veganism (I confess I preferred Prince when his perfect weekend required pizza and hot dogs). ‘The Other Side of the Pillow’ is another slight song that surprisingly made it onto Prince’s live box set four years later, while ‘Fascination’ is most notorious for containing a bitchy aside which some fans have interpreted as a slap at Michael Jackson (who had a son known as Prince), although the date of the song’s recording seems to disprove this, not to mention the fact that Jackson named his son after his grandfather. ‘One of Your Tears’ is perhaps Prince’s all-time funniest song, written – the lyrics claim – in retaliation for being sent a used condom by a lover.