Prince

by Matt Thorne

  But ‘Comeback’ is the most important song on the record, dealing with Prince’s interest in the afterlife and reincarnation, a subject that for obvious reasons still preoccupied him. Buff says the original version was even stronger. ‘“Comeback” had a little prelude – it was just a three-line a cappella singing that just touched me very much – that’s not in there any more. That part he tried to develop into a song that sounded in an arrangement way, not a music way, like ‘Man in a Uniform’, little bits here and there, little vocal FX, and then he left it off.’ The last song on the album is an acoustic version of a previously released song, ‘Welcome 2 the Dawn’. After telling us for so many years how much he hoped we’d live to see The Dawn, it couldn’t but come as a disappointment when we finally did.

  The Truth was warmly received because it was released at a time when Prince’s music was starting to seem samey and both the critics and the public were beginning to lose touch with his output. After the excess of Emancipation, The Truth seemed accessible (and no doubt would have done even better if released separately from Crystal Ball). As Parke says: ‘When it came to the music, sometimes outside of Prince fans I don’t know how many people were getting to hear what he was doing unless it was a single or a performance.’

  Steve Parke also remembers hearing tracks intended for this album that never made the finished record. ‘I heard a couple of things in The Truth vein that were really cool. I won’t take credit for influencing him, but I did say one time that I didn’t think his vocals ever get the credit that they’re due. Later, he was working on The Truth and he said, “Come down, I want to play you something,” and it was all vocals and it literally sent shivers down my spine. And I never heard that again. It never came out.’

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  Fans who ordered Crystal Ball direct from Prince received yet another bonus disc, containing the Kamasutra ‘orchestral-ballet’. Brent Fischer remembers that Prince sent a note with this tape similar to the one they had received with ‘Crystal Ball’, emphasising just how important the project was to him. Transcribing the track presented an epic challenge. As Fischer remembers: ‘In the early 1990s, we [got] one or another of the different movements of Kamasutra, I think one at a time. That was a difficult project because Prince had started experimenting around with his Synclavier, and one of the movements in particular he sent it to us right before I was going on tour with a band in Europe for about a month and it was very complicated music that I just recorded onto a forty-eight-track digital tape. I went into the studio and I transcribed track by track right there in the studio, but we couldn’t finish up all forty-eight tracks, so I took those cassette tapes with me while I was on tour in Europe, didn’t let any of the guys listen to it because of our confidentiality agreement with Prince, and I sat in the proverbial planes, trains, buses, everywhere I could, transcribing. I basically transcribed Kamasutra in ten different European countries.

  ‘It took about three months to get everything done, and again we never heard anything until years later. And Prince didn’t always send us CDs, but I think in that case he did because he was really proud of how it had turned out.’ Prince generally wouldn’t make any changes to the records after Fischer had sent the arrangements, but along with ‘Crystal Ball’, this was one case where he had completely changed everything and mixed and matched the orchestral parts.

  The importance of Kamasutra seems largely down to the narrative charge it was supposed to carry – why Prince chose his new name, and how he and Mayte came together. But as is often the case with orchestral pieces by pop musicians, the work lacks the impact of his more commercial music, and in places, sounds almost muzak-y. That said, it is easy to see why Prince regarded it as a personal artistic breakthrough, as it sees him bringing together jazz, classical music and sound FXs in one of his most ambitious works. The most intriguing section of the suite is the track ‘Cutz’, in which the sound of scissors snipping contrasts menacingly with the orchestra. What’s being severed is unclear, but it’s the one track that would frighten you if you heard it in a lift.

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  Prince’s next two releases, less than a month apart, would both be nominally NPG releases, but they are an essential part of his oeuvre. Although officially New Power Soul is an NPG album, during the process of composition it seems largely to have been thought of as a Prince record. Both Goldnigga and Exodus felt like New Power Generation albums, easily distinguishable from Prince’s main body of work (and are discussed in Chapter 34), but New Power Soul has Prince front and centre, both in presentation – he’s there on the front of the CD sleeve – and in the music.

  The record features a song – ‘The One’ – that has showed up in the set list over a hundred times since he recorded it (often in a medley with ‘The Question of U’) and a hidden track –‘Wasted Kisses’, a noir playlet set in a hospital – that I consider to be the best Prince song of the 1990s. Buff says that ‘The One’ was actually the first song completed after finishing Emancipation, remaining in the Vault until this time, but that ‘Wasted Kisses’ was essentially a throwaway not considered significant by Prince (although the promo people couldn’t understand why it wasn’t the lead single). Buff also said that Prince was amused by the hidden track trick but didn’t want to go as far as Buff’s suggestion to identify every individual component of the song separately.

  If the album is not quite as experimental as ‘The War’, the twenty-six-minute apocalyptic jam Prince and the NPG would release a month later, it is nonetheless well worth rediscovering. Buff has reservations: in spite of working on it, he believes it’s the worst record Prince ever made. ‘On New Power Soul they’re all rough mixes,’ he told me, ‘and I think you can really hear that. “When U Love Somebody” could have been so much more. Mike Nelson [of The Hornheadz] offered to pay to have it mixed again, he wouldn’t have any of it, and I know why, because he screwed up something for once. But you couldn’t remix it. It’s one of those mixes that just sounded like a rough mix.’ While this is no doubt true, some of Prince’s best work has vexed audiophiles, and though the record is slightly too reliant on get-on-the-dance-floor throwaways (‘New Power Soul’, ‘Shoo-Bed-Ooh’, ‘Push It Up!’ ‘Freaks on This Side’ and ‘Funky Music’), the remainder of the album – ‘Mad Sex’, ‘Until U’re in My Arms Again’, ‘When U Love Somebody’, ‘Come On’, ‘The One’ and ‘Wasted Kisses’ – has a dark energy and intent that makes these tracks stronger than most of Emancipation, and even the club songs are growers. It’s also his most British record, with repeated references to London. Prince even shot a video for ‘Come On’ that featured him disguised as an old man – looking rather like Frank Zappa – making rude gestures at passers-by, busking, running around and eventually getting mugged in what looks like Regent’s Park.

  Buff has fond memories of some of the other songs recorded in this era that either came out later or remain unreleased. ‘There was a period around New Power Soul that I thought was really good. Some of it ended up on Rave, like “So Far, So Pleased”, “Baby Knows”. It was all in that vein. It was Linn-y, it had guitars on it, and I thought it was really well done. And it had Marva King on it. And there were a couple that came out later, like “Sadomasochistic Groove”, “Welcome 2 the Slaughterhouse”, “Madrid 2 Chicago”, “Beautiful Strange” I thought was a great song, “Silicon”, “Y Should Eye Do That When Eye Can Do This?” is a really funky song. “Pretty Man” was great. Michael Bland played on “Y Should I Do That …” and “Baby Knows”.’ Other songs from this period that Buff recalls recording (and liking) include ‘Golden Parachute’, ‘When I Lay My Hands on U’ and ‘If I Was the Man in Ur Life’ (which Prince would leave in the Vault until Musicology). ‘“Vavoom”,’ he says, ‘was a little later, afterwards.’

  Steve Parke also has fond memories of this period. ‘New Power Soul … he was playing a bunch of stuff around the studio at that time … and he had some stuff that showed up on the online compilations [The Slaughterhouse and The Chocolat
e Invasion] with crunchy vocals … almost as if he was rapping through a megaphone … super-funky … and those songs never got the push they deserved.’

  Buff says: ‘At some point “Madrid 2 Chicago” and “Breathe” were one suite. There was something else I forget and “Man o’ War”. And that would be the start of the album for a while, and then we’d take some from the previous batch into it and then he would reconsider and make new sequences.’ Steve Parke remembers: ‘I did a type treatment on “Madrid 2 Chicago” which included using dashed lines almost like a map, and a big Madrid and Chicago with a bottom line swinging through it. That had a very old jazz-record look to it too, with just funky typefaces and colours. It was like a “Tiki Bar” kinda font. A swinging jazz font. I’d heard the record had a jazz element to it, so that’s the direction I went.’

  Parke remembers other unreleased projects. ‘We did a collection of Prince’s love songs that took some of the art from … it had a mood to it like an old Quincy Jones record … a lot of almost jazz in the early 1970s, African art quality. It would have been cool and something you wouldn’t expect.’ He also recalls: ‘There was an “NPG2000” thing I didn’t do but I remember seeing the artwork for. It was a picture of a model of a building in the shape of the symbol.’ It is unclear whether this was a fourth NPG album or, as has been rumoured on fan boards, another anthology of songs by Prince-associated artists in the style of the previous compilation, 1-800-NEW-FUNK (see Chapter 34).

  The next project to receive official release – albeit only as a cassette and download – made the darkness bubbling beneath the tracks on New Power Soul explicit. In ‘The War’, Prince gives full voice to his most paranoid (or, depending on your perspective, prescient) science-fiction fantasies, reworking Gil Scott-Heron’s ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’ as ‘the evolution will be colourised’ and warning about the increasing hold technology companies have on Earth’s citizens by suggesting it’s a matter of time before we all have microchips in our necks. Originally part of a forty-five-minute jam recorded at one of the many late-night concerts Prince played at Paisley Park that year, it shows one side of his live band at this time, which included Larry Graham (on whom much more later), churning out an aggressive theological-political funk that made his shows during this era unique. Some of Prince’s most challenging – and brilliant – performances took place around this time: a version of ‘Anna Stesia’ in Lisbon where he spent eight minutes trying to persuade the audience that their hands were out to kill them; a twenty-minute-plus version of ‘Days of Wild’ in Cologne that ended with him berating the audience for smoking marijuana; and perhaps best of all, a performance at the Hippodrome in London in which he gave full rein once again to the apocalyptic side of his imagination. Midway through the show, Prince played a jam1 which was heavily reliant on Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra2 (the jam had been played during several shows on this tour: at an after-show in Tivoli he would sing over this music about needing to get back to the US because of his fear of a bomb attack from Osama bin Laden), before performing not just an eleven-minute version of ‘The War’, but also a new extension of the song confirming he was singing about a third world war. The audience immediately launched into the ‘evolution will be colourised’ chant as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Prince asked the audience how many of them owned a Bible and how many owned a gun (when this was greeted by silence, Prince was satisfied and drew attention to the recent bombing of Sudan, suggesting that Great Britain may have played a role in this attack). When ‘The War’ ended, he altered his ‘Dearly beloved …’ opening to ‘Let’s Go Crazy’ to say tonight they were there to get through World War III. This one-off song is even more peculiar than ‘The War’ in that it feels jaunty and light, as if Prince is revelling in the NPG’s musical ability throughout an apocalyptic period (admittedly, the idea of partying through a world-ending crisis was nothing new to Prince).

  I am extremely fond of this period in Prince’s live performances, and wish there was an official document of the era (there was a variety of brief TV appearances across the US and Europe, as well as thirty minutes of a performance recorded the night after the Hippodrome show at the Café de Paris, which was later extended into an eighty-minute video Beautiful Strange, but the focus of these broadcasts was on the non-apocalyptic side of Prince’s performance). Others, however, consider 1998–99 the nadir of his live career. Certainly, his band at the time was an unusual combination of talents, his basic line-up of Mike Scott, Rhonda Smith, Morris Hayes, Kirk Johnson and Marva King frequently joined by Larry Graham and Chaka Khan, as well as continued appearances from the rapper Doug E. Fresh.3

  The Beautiful Strange video is also notable for a segment in which Prince is interviewed by Melanie Brown of The Spice Girls. Given Prince’s interest in female vocalists and girl groups, it was inevitable that the British band, riding high at the time, would catch his attention, and he brought the Scary One to Paisley Park to interview him before attending their show at the Target Center in Minneapolis. Telling her to call him ‘Spud’, he described New Power Soul as ‘spiritually political’ and said the album was one of the ‘maddest’ he’d recorded.

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  Prince’s seeming determination to perform himself into obscurity was not halted by the release of his next album, the second of the two kiss-off records delivered to Warner Brothers. At the time of release, The Vault … Old Friends 4 Sale seemed a very curious collection. Given a low-key release in August 1999, it had little apparent connection with ’s work, but even though it was put out under Prince’s name, it wasn’t obviously linked to his past records either. As with Chaos and Disorder, the sense of antagonism driving the album was clear: if it is not as obviously a record created in anger, it was at least delivered with resentment. On the back cover Prince appears to be looking down in despair, and the title – with its multiple sense of betrayal – revealed that this was not a happy release.

  As with Chaos and Disorder, the record came with a warning that seemed designed to make listeners feel guilty for playing it. Made up of material that was largely unfamiliar to all but the most hard-core of fans, it’s actually one of his most varied and enjoyable later records (particularly for those interested in Prince’s more jazz-influenced music), weakened only by the inclusion of slightly too much material rejected from I’ll Do Anything (although, thankfully, no ‘Poor Little Bastard’). Nevertheless, many listeners were bitterly disappointed when they heard how Prince had altered ‘Old Friends 4 Sale’, removing the autobiographical details from the original version of the song – although there’s still a small cocaine reference and a line about Prince losing a lover to his brother, which add a little spice to this otherwise sanitised reworking.

  If it had come out when Prince first presented it to Warner Brothers, it would have been an interesting stylistic opposite to Chaos and Disorder, indicating the true breadth of Prince’s stylistic range, and no doubt released together the two albums would have got more attention than they did. ‘The Rest of My Life’, cherry-picked from I’ll Do Anything, gains an additional significance from being placed at the start of a record serving as a kiss-off to Warner Brothers; again, if it had come out at the time, it would have worked as an introduction to the forthcoming Emancipation. The other I’ll Do Anything tracks include one bizarre skit, ‘My Little Pill’, similar to the later ‘Wedding Feast’ in its brevity and oddness, and which makes little sense outside of its original context; and a second, ‘There Is Lonely’, originally intended to be sung by Albert Brooks. Prince fans should be grateful the Brooks rendition never achieved release, as he sounds like a drunken muppet in comparison to Prince’s version of the track, an expression of isolation not dissimilar to ‘Empty Room’.

  The arrangement of the horn-driven ‘It’s About That Walk’ is so pretty that it takes a while for the lyrical unpleasantness to sink in. Written and recorded during the Act II tour, it’s a song about a woman’s ass (presumably, given her hab
it of shaking it onstage during this period, Mayte’s). The recording has deliberate call-outs to the band and ‘fellas’ that make it sound like a live improvisation or rehearsal: as on ‘It’s Gonna Be a Beautiful Night’, Prince calls out band instructions, here asking for a Vegas ending and the familiar ‘on the one’, but there’s something about these shout-outs that makes them feel staged, as with the original version of ‘Extra Loveable’. I can’t decide if the snickering at the end which acknowledges the song as something of a joke justifies it or makes it worse. Certainly, the snippet of what sounds like a boxing match in the middle only increases the thuggishness.

  ‘5 Women +’ is the album’s high point, a song that Prince had originally given to Joe Cocker. It’s a kind of sister song to ‘Blues in C (If I Had a Harem)’, which Prince was still playing live on the Nude tour when he wrote this. Now, Prince does have a harem (of sorts), but working through them doesn’t help erase the memory of the woman he’s lost.