Prince

by Matt Thorne

  Among the most mysterious of his officially released tracks, with neither the personnel nor the date of recording known, ‘When the Lights Go Down’ is one of Prince’s most accomplished pieces of light jazz, and hints at a darker subject matter. Lyrically, it’s a song about a woman resisting a pick-up, but there seems to be something far more disturbing at work. Is the man after her merely a sleaze or a more obviously evil figure? And what’s at stake when the lights go down? There’s a line where Prince just repeats something like ‘duh, dun’ instead of using actual words, famously the sort of thing Bob Dylan does often, but unusual for Prince. One might imagine it marks out the song as a botched take or a work-in-progress, but I’m not so sure. Prince didn’t perform the track live until 2002, when he performed it at his ‘Xenophobia’ celebration in a version that improves on the released recording: on this night, Prince made the missing line seem deliberate with his scat-singing. He played a more faithful rendition at a soundcheck in Australia later that year, then forgot about it for another seven years. It’s a song I’ve always connected with the celebrated out-take ‘In a Large Room with No Light’, and on one of the few occasions Prince has performed the track at Club Nokia in Los Angeles (one of the best after-shows, sound problems notwithstanding, I’ve ever seen), he played it in a set with this song. This live version was darker still than the studio recording, with Renato Neto’s keyboards at their most sci-fi and wiggly, but although the rendition lasted a good eleven minutes, he stopped before the mystery line and returned to the chorus. He played the song one last time (to date) at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 2009 (a suitable home for the song), a more awkward stop–start rendition which did include an approximation of the complete lyric.

  ‘Sarah’ is Prince at his most mischievous, a kiss-off to an unwanted woman in which he jokes about domestic violence, but then carefully makes it clear that this isn’t to be taken seriously. The song is so ebullient it feels that the target of the song has to be invented. If any more proof were needed that no Prince song is truly throwaway to him, the last track of The Vault …, ‘Extraordinary’, became a concert staple in 2002 – and frequently the finest performance of the night – eventually being included on his One Nite Alone … Live! album of the same year, a song which, much like The Vault … Old Friends 4 Sale itself, reminds the listener why even Prince’s most obscure or least valued records are worth tracking down.

  28

  … AND MISSED OPPORTUNITIES

  With the millennium approaching, Prince was still trying to work out how to reclaim one of his greatest songs, and most significant albums, from Warner Brothers. ‘The plan at the time was to redo the whole 1999 album,’ says H. M. Buff. ‘He even announced he was going to re-record the original album, but it never went anywhere other than my taking the original tapes and transferring them to digital tapes.’ He does, however, remember Morris Hayes programming a quick-tempo drum-and-bass version of ‘Let’s Pretend We’re Married’ that, perhaps fortunately, never saw release. What did come out, though, was a new version of the title track. The title – ‘1999: The New Master’ – is an ironic indication of the futility of the EP, and the fact that he had revived ‘Prince and The Revolution’ for a project that had nothing to do with his original band added to the insult. A maxi-single consisting of seven remixes, the record featured a fairly unfortunate combination of Prince/ associates (Larry Graham, Rosie Gaines, Doug E. Fresh), as well as the actress Rosario Dawson. Buff says: ‘A lot of people complained about the Latin part in “1999: The New Master”, [but] funnily enough, there was a Latin part on the original, [and that] was edited out at the time.’ While ‘The New Master’ and the other mixes are horrible, Dawson does contribute to one worthwhile track, ‘Rosario 1999’, which resembles Emancipation out-take ‘2020’ and features the chords of ‘Little Red Corvette’ behind her vocal, a fragment from this larger proposed project.

  Even if this went nowhere, the mood at Paisley was optimistic. ‘We all thought, “1999, that’s Prince’s year,”’ says Buff. ‘We did that stupid version late November of 1998, and it should have been ready to rock. [But] like I said, it’s all on his terms, and we went with the flow.’

  Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic is among Prince as’s least-loved albums, but Buff believes that it could have been as (commercially) successful as Musicology if Prince had done as much promotion as he did for that album, including high-profile moves like playing at the Grammys. Buff remembers the album’s title track wasn’t brought out from the Vault until well into the process. Well over a decade old, Prince told Steve Jones of USA Today that the reason for the delay was that it sounded too much like ‘Kiss’, so he ‘put it in the vault and let it marinate for a while’.1 It is one of a number of songs believed to be influenced by former muse Anna Garcia (such as ‘Pink Cashmere’, ‘Vicki Waiting’, ‘Lemon Crush’ and the Carmen Electra song ‘Fantasia Erotica’), Joy Fantastic being the stage name Prince originally proposed for her. Although the track hasn’t dated, and no doubt sounded fresh to those unfamiliar with it, the song was already well-known by most Prince fans.

  His first release for Arista, the album prompted a lot of thought from Prince, who even put out an alternative version entitled Rave In2 the Joy Fantastic soon after the original record’s release. Still, in such a big catalogue, it’s an easy album to pass over. Certainly, it didn’t move from its space on my shelf for a decade until I saw Prince perform ‘The Sun, the Moon and Stars’ and ‘Eye Love U, But Eye Don’t Trust U Anymore’ at the Club Nokia after-show mentioned in the previous chapter, and while the rest of the Prince-loving world was getting into Lotusflow3r and MPLSound, I found myself giving Rave a second chance.

  Brent Fischer says his memories of him and his father working on ‘The Sun, the Moon and Stars’ are vague, but that by 1999 there had been a couple of changes in their working process. ‘I was at the point where I was making suggestions, because I had such an intimate knowledge of the tune after transcribing it. I would suggest, “How about putting French horns around this guitar line here?” for example. It was the beginning of our collaborative period.’ Also, by now Prince was sending them Pro Tools files rather than tapes, something Buff – who remembers teaching Prince about the technology – helped facilitate.

  In the summer before the November release of Rave, Prince gave an unusually revealing interview to Beth Coleman, of Paper, in which he compared his relationship with Mayte to the one he had with record companies (intriguingly, he put himself in the role of the evil record-company overlord and suggested Mayte was the victim in this scenario). Once again, he returned to the Bible as a reference point, tracing, Coleman claimed, ‘the origin of the marriage contract to Pontius Pilate organizing the consensus to crucify Jesus’. He referred again to the Garden of Eden, saying of his marriage: ‘we pretend it didn’t even happen. Like a lot of things in life I don’t like, I pretend it isn’t there and it goes away. We decided to go back to the Garden.’2 The desire to obliterate everything that came before is explicit on the record, with the lovers of ‘The Sun, the Moon and Stars’ throwing their past onto a fire.

  Some have interpreted this record as a break-up album, but Buff says the very last song to be recorded for the album was ‘The Greatest Romance Ever Sold’, which Steve Parke remembers as coming from a time when Prince and Mayte were still together. ‘I got to go to Spain to shoot Prince and Mayte at their house. A lot of the stuff for “The Greatest Romance Ever Sold” came from that.’ So if it isn’t a break-up record, why are the lyrics so angry and sad? The couple were still together at the time of Rave’s release, and wouldn’t officially divorce until the following year, but it is clear the record appeared at the tail end of the relationship. As always with Prince/, it’s dangerous to make too close a connection between his biographical situation and the content of the songs, as ideas and songs can ‘marinate’ for long periods, but the references to drinking in three consecutive tracks – ‘Tangerine’, ‘So Far, So Pleased’ and ‘The Sun, the
Moon and Stars’ – particularly coming from this usually abstemious singer, increase the record’s maudlin feel.

  Rave sounds different to the other records Prince made at this time. ‘The difference with this [album]’, Buff told me, ‘is that he brought out the old Linn drum machine. I took it out of the basement and it just didn’t work. There was a really cool store in Minneapolis that fixed old stuff but they took their sweet time, the usual nerds with long beards, and Prince wanted to put MIDI into it, which I duly asked, but you couldn’t. Once it was fixed I hooked it up and he started going at it, and it was really interesting to see how he worked with that because that was very creative. You know, he would do fills on the fly, he would just do that and record it at the same time, he wouldn’t programme the drum machine per se, or he would take a tom-tom sound and run it through a flanger – really cool stuff.’

  While Emancipation had featured several covers, following the template of Santana’s Supernatural,3 Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic has a large number of guest appearances, including Chuck D, Eve, Sheryl Crow (whose song ‘Everyday Is a Winding Road’ is also covered on the album), Gwen Stefani and Ani DiFranco. In Chuck D and Eve, Prince was finally working with two of hip hop’s finest, although it’s worth pointing out that he was lagging way behind the times: white indie rockers Sonic Youth had recorded with Chuck D way back in 1990. And while ‘Undisputed’ was a little disappointing (the NPG getting rowdy yet again), Prince and Chuck D did make for a surprisingly seamless pairing, and ‘Hot wit U’ is a true guilty pleasure, and arguably the best song on the original version of the record, with Eve’s response to Prince’s sexual demands bringing a dynamic to the song completely missing from the mid-1990s strip-club songs. If Prince had given Carmen Electra comebacks of this quality, her musical career would have been assured.

  Buff says: ‘There’s a song on there that wouldn’t be on there if it wasn’t for me, “Strange but True”. I begged and pleaded for him to put that on there because I thought it was awesome, and then he had to add those scratches. Before it was just straight Prince 1980s stuff, which I loved.’ He adds that he and Manuela Testolini, who would become Prince’s second wife when the two of them married on New Year’s Eve 2001, and who is thanked alongside Mayte in the album’s sleeve notes, also fought hard for Prince to include ‘Tangerine’ – a savage song about a man trying to forget the colour of a lover’s negligee – on the record. ‘I tried to get “The Sun, the Moon and Stars” off. I thought it was terrible. And then he goes, “Hans, how’s your sex life?” He thought he needed that to get laid.’

  Buff says that as with Emancipation, there were a few songs that were written or recorded after the sequence had been set to round out and finish off the album: ‘Silly Game’, ‘Eye Love U, but Eye Don’t Trust U Anymore’, the cover of ‘Everyday Is a Winding Road’ and ‘The Greatest Romance Ever Sold’. But on the final assembly the album’s final track is ‘Wherever U Go, Whatever U Do’, yet another positive affirmation song in the manner of much of Diamonds and Pearls and ’s ‘Sweet Baby’. If the album is read as a divorce record, this can be seen as having a stronger sense of finality than the other ‘he’s gone, get over it’ tracks.

  Buff had to filter some of the flak coming from the record label about the album. ‘I remember Rave was with Arista, so for a while I was part of this halo around him [and] put in a weird position of talking to Clive Davis before he could talk to Prince. And Clive, of course, took it as some underling standing in the way. I tried to explain to him, “You don’t have to argue with me, Clive. I pass everything on that you tell me, but if he just says no, I work for him.” And there was one thing where he wanted to do something for “Man o’ War”, this great guitar solo, and Clive said something to the effect of, “[If you do that,] they won’t play it on urban radio.” And Prince said, “Well, I’m a guitar player.” There were two remixes of “The Greatest Romance Ever Sold”, and Clive wanted to combine them to make something new, and I had passed that on and Prince didn’t want to talk to him. And finally he was in the same room looking at me, and I gave him the puppy eyes, and he said, “Oh, that’s what you want. I’d rather be dragged through nails.”’

  The album came with a poster. Steve Parke remembers: ‘Those shots we took in Spain. I really liked the ones in the pool because I liked being out of the studio with him. I like the idea: he’s in the water, at the time he was talking about bringing things to the Internet, making things virtual. I was thinking of the Kraftwerk album with the models for heads. I liked the idea with the hands: you think of connection, the organic with the digital.’

  *

  Less than six months after the release of the album, Prince put out a new version of the record, Rave In2 the Joy Fantastic, this time distributed to members of his Internet-based NPG Music Club. While fans debated earnestly over which version of the record was best, and all kinds of motives were ascribed to Prince for what seemed to be either a deliberate act of career sabotage or an angry response to the promotion of the original album, Buff is quick to note: ‘It’s not that different. There were a couple of steps taken making Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic, they were just undone [from the original].’ What Buff’s referring to here, I believe, is the four songs that are slightly extended – ‘The Sun, the Moon and Stars’, ‘Tangerine’, ‘Baby Knows’ and the hidden track, ‘Prettyman’. While Buff had managed to get Prince to include ‘Strange but True’ on the parent album, he couldn’t stop him removing it from the remix, along with the Sheryl Crow cover. This new version opened with a truly dreadful ‘rave’ version of the title track, finally destroying all the magic of the original song. The three guest tracks got remixes, ‘Undisputed’ coming in a ‘Moneyappolis Mix’ with more space for Prince’s complaining and boasting, and ‘Hot wit U’ mashed up with his old Vanity 6 hit, ‘Nasty Girl’. In places, Eve’s vocal is splintered into fragments, almost as if Prince is trying to get revenge on the song. Strangely, given his ambivalence to combining remixes of ‘The Greatest Romance Ever Sold’ on the album proper, the version on Rave In2 the Joy Fantastic is exactly that, spinning out to eight minutes. Maybe he included it out of spite.

  But the second version of this album is most notable for the inclusion of ‘Beautiful Strange’, a song that ranks among Prince’s finest. Prince clearly thought enough of it to make it the title track of the filmed Café de Paris concert, including a full video for the song in the package. It’s also one of those videos that spells out the lyrics, which usually indicates Prince wants us to pay special attention to the words. It’s a combination of a self-affirmation song (albeit more subtle and winning than most in this vein) and a celebration of God (I think), but as much as he wanted us to pay attention to the lyrics, it’s a track most vital for Prince’s guitar-playing, something he emphasises whenever he plays it in concert.

  Of the unreleased tracks rumoured to have been recorded during these sessions, Buff doesn’t remember ‘Don’t Say No’, and although he does remember working on ‘I Ain’t Gonna Run’, he can’t recall details of it. Of ‘This Is Your Life’ he says: ‘It’s not quite as dramatic or as preachy as “We March”, but it was a “Listen up, I’ll give you some good advice” song.’ It’s always hard to say with any certainty that we’ve heard the best of Prince’s work from any period, but this does seem to be a time when, thanks to him making use of the Internet to distribute more songs than ever before, the majority of his new music was officially released.

  Warner Brothers also put out a spoiler of their own around this time, a single-disc greatest-hits compilation entitled The Very Best of Prince that was of little worth to anyone who already owned Prince’s albums. Far inferior to the Hits collection, it was also of less interest than the third best-of, 2006’s Ultimate Prince, which at least included a CD of remixes.

  *

  Prince made one further attempt to claim back ‘1999’ from Warner Brothers, making it a feature of his seventh video of live-concert footage, Rave Un2 the Year 2000, with the
anonymous author of the sleeve notes claiming that this would be the last time Prince would play the song in concert (in reality, he retired it for four years, before bringing it back without fanfare). Perhaps he was just nervous about how the song would work once it became nostalgic instead of futuristic, and then relieved when the tune carried it through.

  This video, presented as if it was a New Year show (and broadcast on pay-per-view in America that night), was actually cobbled together from two shows recorded at Paisley Park earlier in December, one featuring The Time and the other with Prince and a large number of guests, including Lenny Kravitz, George Clinton, Rosie Gaines and Maceo Parker. After making Larry Graham such a central part of his previous few tours, here he also brought in Graham’s former Family Stone band-mates Cynthia Robinson and Jerry Martini, who’d been joining Prince at shows around this time to play on ‘Everyday People’. To fend off any criticism of the incredibly dull set list, the notes promise that the songs ‘r plated [sic] with respect 2 the original versions, but with a new and xciting interpretation, often besting their studio counterparts’.

  But with the best will in the world, I can’t imagine anyone choosing any of these versions as their favourite renditions of any of Prince’s hits, played as they are by the weakest assembly of the NPG (Morris Hayes, Kirk Johnson, Mike Scott and Kip Blackshire) and accompanied by lacklustre interpretative dance. As with The Sacrifice of Victor video, Prince gives over a generous portion of the recording to his guests – two songs from The Time’s show; two Lenny Kravitz tracks where Prince (mostly) cedes the microphone to his guest and joins him on guitar; a Sly and the Family Stone section; various blues medleys – and while this desire to share the stage with heroes and epigones is a touching indication of his mindset during this era, this is a recording that will leave all but the most generous-minded Prince fan feeling short-changed. When the highlight of a concert video is a nondescript jam in which Prince puts aside his keytar for a splits competition, you know it’s not one for the ages. (There’s also a weird moment when Prince calls up blues singer Jonny Lang in the middle of a blues medley and he fails to appear on stage.) It’s hard to shake the impression that Prince has mainly agreed to do a New Year’s telecast merely to question the concept of celebrating dates, sermonising during ‘Purple Rain’ about how acknowledging birthdays causes one’s body to deteriorate.