by Matt Thorne
Continuing with the broken promises, also contained on the DVD is a robotic voice offering Prince’s seven-CD sampling set (retail price: $700): seven hundred samples from Prince’s catalogue for licence-free use, with no further royalties. Prince’s motivation for this collection is made clear on two short tracts included on the DVD’s menu under the heading ‘Freedom News’, in which he claims that the release of the sampler is intended as a political statement as well as an artistic one, a way of Prince claiming back what he believed was his rightful ownership of songs to which Warner Brothers owned the masters. But when it came down to it, he backed down and didn’t release the collection.
I asked Buff why he stopped working for Prince. ‘That was the hardest thing. I have a great wife who I’ve been with for eighteen years, since before I fell into the Purple trap, and one day she said she was down about the bad manners of the place sometimes and said, “The day you quit Paisley will be the happiest day of my life.” And it wasn’t a fight thing, but it really took a load off my shoulders in a big way. It made for a good lifestyle, especially as I hadn’t been working with the Madonnas of this world before and it was certainly the tip of my mountain at that point. And one of the bad things was I didn’t know I had a day off till it was over. Sometimes he would say, “We’ll see each other again at two tomorrow,” and I’d show up at two. But most of the time I’d get paged, not by him directly but either by the accountant or one of the bodyguards, “He wants you to come in.” I’d come in. That would be round the clock. There was some type of rhythm in regular times. I’d show up around two in the afternoon and go home around four in the morning. I got called past midnight once in all those years. There was usually a cut-off time where if he hadn’t called by nine or eight in the evening, I wouldn’t get called in. But that was hard.’
Steve Parke left around the same time, for similar reasons. ‘It was the birth of my son. The reality of working with Prince is that you need to be available. It’s a full-time commitment. And my son was born, I went out a couple more times, and I came back and saw my son and he’d grown in a week, and I didn’t want to be that guy who leaves for a week. And it’s not just the week out there; you have a week of preparing yourself because you know you’re gonna go out there, put in a huge number of hours, and when you come back you’re kinda wrecked. He asked me to come back and do a few things here and there, but I didn’t trust that three days wouldn’t turn into a week. I would still love to do stuff with him, but he seems to have his bases covered.’
29
JOIN MY CLUB
Author interview with Stephin Merritt, of The Magnetic Fields, April 2006
MT: What’s your opinion of Prince?
SM: I don’t look fondly on Christianity. I went to see him two or three years ago, and that Christianity stuff is just unbearable. And not just for people who don’t like Christianity. He is the worst evangelist I have ever heard. Totally counterproductive to his own cause. And for Prince to concentrate on not swearing as a major ethical principle? I think it’s charmingly eccentric, maybe. I have a lot of problems with fifteen-minute jazz-funk jams as well. I don’t care about instrumental prowess. I don’t care about quick-thinking improvisational skill. At all. I’m a songwriter and I’m familiar with Cage and I couldn’t really care about what notes people can think of quickly. It doesn’t interest me and I’m astounded that it interests other people still. Improvisation is what you do in the process of making something better.
MT: So he’s not someone you admire as a songwriter?
SM: Oh, definitely. The two-note melody of ‘When Doves Cry’ is famously brilliant. And as an arranger he made one-drum snare into an entire style, unheard of apart from Kraftwerk making the output of their keyboard an entire style. And he’s my height or shorter, which counts for a whole lot, and he’s impeccably tailored, which is difficult if you’re a very short man.
MT: I was thinking that you and he are the only popular musicians to release consistent three-hour albums.
SM: Which consistent three-hour album do you mean?
MT: Well, Emancipation …
SM: Uh … is that the one with the cover of ‘One of Us’?
MT: Yeah.
SM: Oh … ohhh … consistent in what way? Hmmm. That’s the one with the acoustic album as the third disc?
MT: No, that’s the fourth disc of Crystal Ball, the four-hour album.
SM: OK. ’Cause I loved that. I didn’t like the electric part, but the acoustic disc was beautifully produced. It made it obvious what direction he ought to be going in instead of fifteen-minute jazz-funk jams. And the fact that he’s still obviously capable of making beautiful music, he just doesn’t want to, I respect that … but I don’t want to listen to it.1
It’s always depressing when a musician or group turns inward and starts asking fans for more of a commitment than just purchasing their albums or the occasional concert ticket. No one wants to wake up and find themselves part of some odd cult, paying for prog bands to host their own festivals or taking out a time share in the Santa Monica condo owned by Wedding Present front man David Gedge. But when Prince started going down this route, it seemed different. He wasn’t asking fans to facilitate his continued existence, but was instead attempting a new model, one that seemed better suited to his manner of producing music than working with a record company ever had been. And I’m not trying to be controversial or facetious when I say that between 2001 and 2004, Prince became, once again, the most exciting musician in the US. His work may have been aimed at a smaller audience, and there was undoubtedly something insular about his new approach to disseminating his work, but the run of records from 2001’s The Rainbow Children to 2004’s The Slaughterhouse – albeit with greater and lesser success – reveal Prince indulging in a new stream of experimentation that prompted three of the most exciting years for Prince fans since his career began. And not only was the music interesting again, but so were the shows, the One Nite Alone … tour Prince’s greatest since Lovesexy. It was also the period of his heaviest Internet activity, allowing him to build up a new relationship with fans that reminded them of why they had fallen in love with the artist in the first place.
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His divorce from Mayte recently completed, Prince’s first two shows after abandoning his alias2 were low-key, late-night performances at Paisley Park. Three weeks later, however, he performed at a much higher-profile event: the first of his week-long annual Celebrations, when Prince would get fans to gather in Minneapolis to watch shows by old protégés (Taja Sevelle) and his band-mates’ new projects (Kirk Johnson’s Fonky Bald Heads). The week would also include parties where Prince would talk to fans and nights at Paisley where he would DJ. He was also continuing his resolution not to swear onstage, rebuking the audience for indulging in the now-familiar chant of ‘play that motherfucking bass’ during ‘Days of Wild’.
Introducing Larry Graham, he went on to talk about how Graham told him that Sly and the Family Stone had a rule that they weren’t allowed to play with other bands and that he had to turn down playing with Hendrix.3 Prince extolled the virtues of Graham and Maceo Parker, before explaining how his New York lawyer, L. Londell McMillan, had been encouraging him to give the audience what they want – old hits – something he resisted, invoking the title of a song he’d released an excerpt from on his website that week, ‘Y Should Eye Do That When Eye Can Do This?’. The question of whether to comfort his fans with songs from the past or offer them something new would become a constant dilemma for Prince over the next few years, before he largely gave in and focused on the hits that made his name. The last-ever Celebration show was significant for seeing a partial reunion of The Revolution, with Bobby Z, Brown Mark and Matt Fink coming onstage to play ‘America’, though the occasion also prompted Prince to joke about his former band-mates onstage, seeming to emphasise his distance from his old self.
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For most of 2000, Prince limited himself to private performances at Paisley
Park, before embarking on a short Hit N Run tour at the end of the year. These were hit-heavy shows, and the only truly interesting thing about the set lists for these performances was the return of ‘Mutiny’ as if it was a lost hit, and the debuting of a new song entitled ‘The Work Pt 1’ that was the first indication of the dramatic change in direction Prince would soon make. But his addresses to the audience also seemed at odds with a show designed to win back the masses. At a ‘Hit N Run’ show in Oakland, in the midst of one of his anti-record-company and pro-website rants Prince told his audience that if they weren’t self-employed, they were slaves, which came across more as a criticism of his audience than encouragement to free themselves from their chains. At the same show he played an eleven-minute version of ‘U Make My Sun Shine’, talking to his dancer Geneva and criticising the length of her skirt, making her change her clothes and telling her to dress like a lady, saying he needed to be able to respect her before he could spend money on her.
During this period, Prince’s website was becoming increasingly significant to him, although this new method of music distribution wasn’t without its teething troubles. Given the fans’ nostalgia for the NPG Music Club when Lotusflow3r went online, it’s worth pointing out that criticism of his Internet ventures was nothing new. Indeed, eight years before Rolling Stone attacked Lotusflow3r’s ‘bandwidth problems … inability to recognise underscores in user name(s) and passwords, downloading issues, choppy videos and inaccessibility to Europe’,4 David Kushner wrote an article for the same outlet, in which he suggested that Prince’s NPG Online Ltd ‘just shows Prince’s utter cluelessness’.5 Just as music writers (and fans) would later be annoyed by the fact that you had to work out a riddle before being able to join Lotusflow3r.com, so Kushner was irritated that you had to follow cryptic messages to find two songs, ‘U Make My Sun Shine’ and his cover of ‘When Will We B Paid?’. But this was only the beginning of what turned out to be a torrent (no pun intended) of new material during the site’s first year.
The NPG Music Club seemed to offer fans exactly what they’d always wanted. By putting up single songs rather than waiting until he had compiled an album, it was possible to see his creative process at work, in the manner Buff described in the last chapter. The two albums that eventually brought together the best of the NPG Music Club downloads, The Chocolate Invasion and The Slaughterhouse, were different from the majority of Prince albums in that they were explicitly presented as compilations, but essentially this was a public version of the private process that had led to the creation of past albums like Sign o’ the Times or Graffiti Bridge. There were even, in the usual manner, three albums – two Prince records called Madrid 2 Chicago and High, and a planned fourth NPG album, Peace – abandoned along the way (not to mention a promised seven-CD box set that would bring together all the NPG’s full-length album releases).
The new songs that Prince released via this distribution method, along with many previously unreleased live recordings that didn’t make it onto the eventual compilations (or the One Nite Alone … album), were ‘Funky Design’, ‘Mad’, the old unreleased Revolution song ‘Splash’, ‘My Medallion’, a cover of The Staple Singers’ ‘When Will We Be Paid?’, an instrumental jam including elements of Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Machine Gun’ (later removed) renamed ‘Habibi’ after one of Prince’s guitars, an original version of ‘Van Gogh’, the song he co-wrote with Sandra St. Victor and gave to the band of the same name, ‘I Like to Play’, an instrumental song offered as a competition for fans to complete, a rehearsal version of ‘Rebirth of the Flesh’, ‘Jukebox with a Heartbeat’, ‘Breathe’ and ‘Madrid 2 Chicago’ (the two Madrid 2 Chicago songs Buff and Parke mentioned in Chapter 27), and a video-only release of ‘One Song’.
‘Funky Design’ and ‘Mad’ both started out as songs for the NPG, and there are versions of both with Sonny T rapping that make more sense than Prince’s renditions, as they are fairly basic, aggressive raps that suit T more than P. ‘My Medallion’ and ‘When Will We B Paid?’ were originally intended for High, an album that got lost in the shuffle but which actually seems to have got further than most of Prince’s aborted projects, with a complete track listing. Neither song reveals Prince at his most graceful, and it’s easy to see why he didn’t include either in the later compilations of work from this era.
Prince’s interest in country music is clear from his songs written for country stars under his Joey Coco alias, but ‘I Like to Play’ is closer to Jagger’s pseudo-country songs, a piss-take sung in a croaky voice accompanied with booing from a roadhouse audience. It’s good, though, and evidence of the new creative opportunities Prince explored while programming his Ahdio shows, a series of broadcasts from an imaginary radio station that were made available for download. ‘Jukebox with a Heartbeat’ is a downbeat grumble about the limitations of ‘the people’ as listeners and the methods of getting songs to them. More important than either of these squibs is ‘One Song’, one of a handful of Prince songs that genuinely frighten me. It begins as an update of ‘Sign o’ the Times’, but with the funky music now gone as Prince intones a list of disasters as the words appear on the screen in the same way they did on his 1987 hit. After this catalogue of natural mayhem, he turns his attentions to artists who create violent films and TV programmes, suggesting that in doing so they are destroying people’s minds, before using a variation of the story of the Tower of Babel to suggest that some languages take people away from God and that democracy is utterly without value.
These newly hard-line thoughts are pursued not just in the songs and videos, but in the radio programmes themselves. The second Ahdio show, for example, begins with a spoken-word intro from a female-voiced ‘Salome’ (but clearly written by Prince) that name-checks Bob Dylan, alongside his more usual heroes, and displays the evident ferocity of Prince’s religious perspective at this time. In this intro, Salome suggests that art became a commodity when Satan became a lawyer and turned everything artistic into property. Salome imagines a future where lawyers want to carry music into the twenty-seventh century and ‘replant the seed’ of Curtis Mayfield, Mavis Staples, Aretha Franklin and The Jackson Five (carried as ‘uploaded files’) on ‘the future planets’. She suggests that ‘the top lawyers in Babylon’ say that without them, artists wouldn’t be famous, and yet this is a fallacy because Hendrix was Hendrix before he recorded a note and that irrespective of whether he became a recording artist, Bob Dylan (who, bizarrely, seems to be described here as a ‘black musician’) would have spoken out against injustice. The logic of the piece is torturous, as Prince tries to bring together science fiction, religious fervour and anger against the music business. But it would be these concerns that would define much of Prince’s work over the next decade, from The Rainbow Children to Lotusflow3r.
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H. M. Buff told me he was ‘personally pissed off that the greatest album [Prince] had recorded in ten years was the one he did after I left’. Buff’s being hard on himself, but it’s undoubtedly true that The Rainbow Children was Prince’s most important album since Lovesexy. There had been many significant records in the time between these two albums, but The Rainbow Children was the first to truly expand on Prince’s sound and see him returning to the experimentation that had driven his work throughout the 1980s. Initially broadcast as the ninth of the NPG Music Club shows, it was given a full release a few months later.
The Rainbow Children is a concept album, but as usual with Prince, the record’s narrative is incredibly muddled and obscure. But at least, unlike the album, Prince took risks to ensure the record worked as a complete piece. Each song is a different chapter, and Prince narrates over the songs in a distorted, sinister voice (the most offputting feature for some listeners). The opening title track – which Prince would also use to open shows – features Prince elucidating a biblical narrative over light jazz, explaining how ‘the Rainbow Children’ built ‘a new nation’ based upon the teachings of the Jehovah Witness-favoured New Translation of the Bi
ble. This is yet another Eden story, featuring a ‘Wise One’, ‘his woman’ and ‘the Resistor’. The song goes on to describe the birth of Christ and the uprising of the Rainbow Children. To this day, Prince talks about becoming a Jehovah’s Witness as giving him a necessary rebirth that allowed him to slough off his past once more, telling the Vancouver Sun: ‘The rear-view mirror got broken a long time ago. Being baptized as 1 of Jehovah’s Witnesses gave me a center & a release from a past way of life.’6
‘Muse 2 the Pharoah’ is a song about the ‘Wise One’ finding a perfect wife, inspired by Proverbs 31:10 and featuring a controversial line that seems to dismiss the Holocaust. Both these songs initially seem, with their hard-core theology and oppressive sound, very different to anything Prince has released before, but though the devoutness is new, lyrically ‘The Rainbow Children’ and ‘Muse 2 the Pharoah’ can be seen as rewrites of ‘The Beautiful Ones’ and ‘Sexy MF’, and perhaps the most impressive element of Prince’s new music was how he managed to map his old obsessions onto his newfound belief.