by Matt Thorne
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When Prince returned to performing live in the autumn, the shows had grown significantly more varied. In Bergen, he began the main show as if it were an after-show, opening with ‘Empty Room’ and ‘Stratus’. At the next main show he opened with ‘Future Soul Song’, and at that night’s after-show played a fifteen-minute version of ‘Sticky Like Glue’ from 20Ten. This handful of European shows were up to nearly three hours in length, but he soon fell back on the hits, with no indication that the 20Ten songs were going to stay around long in his set list.
Prince had intimated that the European shows were a warm-up for a major US tour, and he ended 2010 and spent much of the first half of 2011 playing the Welcome 2 America tour on home shores, including what was billed as a 21 Night Stand in Los Angeles, replicating his long run in London. The promotion for this tour was similar to the way he’d pushed the London dates, with a press conference (this time at the Apollo theatre) that was as much of an event as the tour itself and grand promises. It was suggested that this would be as much about Prince showcasing other artists as playing himself, but most of the guests (Larry Graham, Maceo Parker, Mint Condition) were the same people he’d had as support for years, and the others were artists he’d either already covered or been championing for a while (Janelle Monáe, Cee Lo Green, Esperanza Spalding). One of the greatest disappointments regarding Prince’s work in recent years is his lack of engagement with the younger electronic artists for whom he remains a constant inspiration, and the bill for this tour reflected that. As an album, 20Ten is as innovative and peculiar as anything by Joker, Hudson Mohawke, SBTRKT or Odd Future, but live, post-Musicology, Prince seems to insist on presenting himself as a heritage act. Also, I understand that he has reservations about artists he considers musically inferior, and having guests on his records hasn’t worked in the past, but it seems to me that one of the great advantages of music over writing is that you can bring fresh blood into your projects, and I can’t understand why Prince doesn’t invite, for example, Larry Graham’s superstar nephew Drake into the studio for a collaboration.
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Though there was no new album to promote, Prince did introduce a few new songs, including one it seemed the tour was named after – ‘Welcome 2 America’ – initially sung offstage but featuring lyrics about the way the US had yet to change under the new administration (his complaints remained the same as they were way back on ‘Xenophobia’, Prince still fuming about airport searches), which suggested the Gil Scott-Heron influence on his work had not disappeared entirely. There was also another example of him introducing new lyrics through an old song, ‘Gingerbread Man’, which he sang over the music of ‘The Question of U’, a surreal song about Prince’s sexual skills that sounded like a fairy-tale rewrite of ‘Electric Man’.
The opening four songs of the eleventh night of the tour were broadcast on 102.3 KJLH in Los Angeles. Listening to this broadcast, it’s clear that no matter how pedestrian the set list seemed, Prince was on amusing form, adding musical jokes (a burst of jazz and a tribute to Stevie Wonder in ‘Pop Life’) and cryptic lines about phone numbers to ‘Musicology/Prince and the Band’. If his voice didn’t sound quite as strong as usual, this was understandable for the mid-point in a long run, and he covered this up well with the combination sing–rap vocals he has sometimes turned to in recent years, making it sound as if he was unstitching a song from the inside. He also sang a brilliant new song, ‘U Will Be with Me’, over music from ‘Shhh’ (he’d first introduced the song three nights before, singing it over ‘The Question of U’), a savage lyric about winning a woman from another man due to the fact that the size of his income dwarfed his love rival’s.
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In the summer, Prince played the idiosyncratically named Welcome 2 America European tour. To promote the shows, he conducted a joint interview with a French journalist from Le Parisien and Dorian Lynskey of the Guardian. Once again he talked about time being a trick, shutting off the possibility of addressing the subject of ageing in his music, territory other musicians not much older than him have found fertile. He’s a long way off recording his Time Out of Mind, of course, but he should be wary of the example of Cliff Richard and even Mick Jagger. Pop’s Peter Pans tend not to write the best lyrics in later life. Prince’s comments about not recording any more music and the order found in countries with only one religion caused such a stir among the fan community that Prince-favoured blogger Dr Funkenberry ran a piece on his blog about the set up of the interview, suggesting that Lynskey (who, like most journalists who interview Prince now, wasn’t allowed to record the exchange) had not delivered Prince’s comments entirely without spin, an accusation to which Lynskey’s editor responded robustly.
The last time I saw Prince to date was at Hop Farm in Kent, on this run, and although all the reviews were five-star raves, the show was, for a long-time supporter, boring. This is the experience of the Prince fan, for the time being at least: taking a gamble on when and where to see him, hoping that you get the magic instead of the hits. Later in the year, Prince told the Toronto Star: ‘Each audience is different. What they respond 2 most favourably usually dictates the flow of the concert and the choice of material,’3 suggesting that the quality of his performance is not in his hands but ours.
Perhaps this explains the frustrations of some shows and the delights of others. Whereas once Prince was one of the very few artists who could square the circle and perform a dense and fascinating show to a combined audience of hundreds of thousands, now most hard-core fans focus solely on the after-shows or special performances. As with other musicians in their fifties or older, after a lifetime onstage, Prince has to decide on a performance strategy. Some musicians in his position choose to perform their songs in new ways (Bob Dylan); others mix new songs in with classic hits (Neil Young); some even decide their set lists via a revolving wheel (Elvis Costello) or by grabbing song requests written on cardboard from the front rows (Bruce Springsteen). The ultimate way to move on is perhaps that offered by The Fall’s Mark E. Smith, whose shows usually consist of the album in progress and the couple which came before, with only occasionally a couple of old songs. At the moment, Prince performs mainly predictable main shows, but his after-shows remain as good as ever.
What do I want from Prince now? Leaving aside his need to make money, and focusing solely on the art, I’d like him to either give up on the main shows or come up with a concept that allows him to give his old songs a worthwhile new setting, as he did with Lovesexy or One Nite Alone …. I’d like him to stop playing ‘the hits’, as has been promised at so many tours before. I’d like every performance to be as exciting or unexpected as seeing him in a small club always is. I’d like him to find a way of putting out his unreleased songs, either via the Internet or CD or whatever new way of disseminating the music he’s currently considering. I’d like him to make public everything from his Vault. I’d like it if when he reworks an old song, as he’s just done with ‘Extra Loveable’ (at the time of writing the latest ‘new’ Prince song to be released), he could make the original version available, even if only for comparison. I get that he feels protective about his old work, but why not make it public? Why do sales matter now? If collectors-edition sets only sell a few hundred thousand or less, it’ll make no difference to the number of people queuing up at stadiums to watch him play. I’d like him to put out vast sets of out-takes and alternative versions, like The Beach Boys’ Smile Sessions or the manifold Miles Davis releases. I’d like him to carry on releasing CDs, but either to put out a huge number of songs as they’re composed, in the way he did in the late 1990s, or to release a CD that features enough songs he truly cares about for him to devote himself to promoting it and for him to find a way to get an audience, of whatever size, to care about it as much as they care about Purple Rain. I’d like to carry on seeing him live whenever he performs and find something new to love every time.
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As most of the people I’ve interviewed duri
ng the writing of this book have maintained, Prince’s story won’t be over until long after he’s dead and all the music he’s recorded is in the public domain. But maybe that will never happen. During the time I’ve been writing, Prince’s output has slowed to a trickle, though he has at least contradicted the claim that he made to Dorian Lynskey of the Guardian that he had no plans to record another album, even though he has hundreds of songs ready for release, subsequently telling the Toronto Star shortly before his Welcome 2 Canada tour that he would break the deliberate self-restriction because he has ‘a writing addiction’, and that although ‘this break from recording is an attempt 2 curb the creative craving’, his current band was ‘way 2 talented’ not to be recorded.4
As I write this, Prince has just concluded a tour of Canada; from the set lists the shows sound predictable, but set lists never tell the whole story and every night there’s always at least one surprise. There are rumours that next year will bring more tours, shows in Australia and maybe a return to Europe. Reaching the end of this book, I find myself reflecting on the comment Pepe Willie made about Prince wanting to get to a place where no one can find him. Once, it was possible to see this as a geographical place, perhaps the fortress of Paisley Park. But he opened the doors of that location to fans and invited visitors in. So perhaps that place he’s looking for is a position in popular culture, one that he exists in now. Aside from a hard core of devoted fans, few people have a very clear sense of where Prince is now, musically at least. There’s no guarantee that new albums will be found in record stores, and many of his old ones are rapidly slipping out of print. His band is made up of largely anonymous figures who though charming onstage lack much of a media presence, and who rarely do interviews and are seemingly interchangeable at a moment’s notice. Prince’s relationship status is largely unknown, his lyrics are more cryptic than ever, and when he gives interviews his proclamations seem (deliberately, I believe) harder to follow than ever. He has been more successful at disengaging with the world than any major artist I can think of, and yet he can’t make that final break, can’t go into an extended hiatus like the one David Bowie is on now. This isn’t what I wish for him, but the now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t of the last decade has proved exhausting (at least for those of us still paying attention).
By the time this book is published, he might have gone back on his recent proclamations and delivered an album or two. Maybe a reissue programme might even have begun. Records and songs by Neil Young and Bob Dylan that most believed might never see release are now freely available, and perhaps Prince’s recent revisiting of songs like ‘In a Large Room with No Light’ and ‘Extra Loveable’ might indicate that he’s finally ready to come to terms with his past. One thing seems certain: he will be out there performing, somewhere, onstage or in the studio, every year for the rest of his life. Who knows how long this will continue? Endlessly, we can hope. Prince once said Wendy wants to live for ever. So does Prince. Maybe he will.
Prince with his father and family. Prince remained a fan of his father’s music and would play tapes of it to members of the Revolution in the mid eighties.
Prince and his sister Tyka attended John Hay Elementary School, which no longer exists.
Dez Dickerson (right) believes he was closest to Prince in the early days.
Morris Day and Jesse Johnson of The Time, which initially grew out of, Lisa Coleman believes, ‘jokes and silliness’.
Vanity 6 brought together Prince’s ex-girlfriend Susan Moonsie, Denise Katrina Matthews, whom Prince renamed ‘Vanity’ and his former ‘wardrobe mistress’, Brenda Bennett.
Sheila E has made regular appearances alongside Prince onstage from the mid eighties to the present day.
A planned concert video of the 1999 tour entitled The Second Coming was one of the first major projects to disappear into the Vault.
Lisa Coleman remembers that when Dez hit his distortion pedal the rock fans in the audience would go wild.
Wendy and Lisa were central to Prince’s sound throughout the mid eighties.
Prince brought Wendy and Lisa up with him when accepting the Oscar for Best Original Song Score from Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas, giving an incredibly dignified acceptance speech.
Prince’s massive Purple Rain tour included a six-date stand at the Nassau Coliseum.
Some were troubled by the depiction of The Kid and Appollonia’s relationship in Purple Rain. Prince answered criticism by pointing out he didn’t write the movie.
Hollywood comes to Sheridan, Wyoming, Lisa Barber won the competition to get the film’s premiere in her hometown, and Prince as her date for the evening.
The late eighties would see a refinement of the spiritual side of Prince’s performance. His stage shows would also grow ever more expensive, to the discontent of some members of his management.
The Lovesexy shows would begin with a descent into darkness, including this bizarre S&M sequence.
Graffiti Bridge was more a sequence of music videos than a coherent movie.
In its earliest incarnations, the New Power Generation was not always the happiest of bands. With Rosie Gaines and his trio of male dancers, the Game Boyz, Prince’s stage show changed dramatically.
Prince remained in the headlines, but for the average listener, it was hard to work out what on earth was going on. Opening shops that sold little of interest, painting ‘Slave’ on his face, appearing with his face covered and in increasingly bizarre outfits, Prince continued to hide in plain sight.
Prince’s The Rainbow Children album seemed to have been influenced by his relationship with second wife, Manuela Testolini.
Prince was determined to make Carmen Electra a star, pouring an enormous amount of time, energy and promotion into her debut album.
In recent years, Prince has become an increasingly conservative figure. From the Musicology tour onwards, his main shows would grow more predictable.
The announcement of the 21 Nights in London tour delighted European fans, and was celebrated with a last minute show at the London nightclub Koko.
Prince, seen here with his dancers The Twinz, was understandably proud of his twenty-one night stand at the O2.
He returned to England in 2011 with his confusingly titled Welcome 2 America Euro Tour.
Now Prince has turned his back on the internet and distanced himself from record companies, fans await the next development in Prince’s career with strong curiosity. But they still queue up for festival shows across Europe, such as this Hop Farm appearance.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
It quickly became clear to me while writing this book that throughout his career Prince has surrounded himself with the most diligent, intelligent and charming people, and among his many accomplishments is his ability to seek out the most dedicated collaborators, and in this book I have endeavoured to tell their stories alongside my commentary on Prince’s work. While he has not endorsed this book (or read it), I am grateful to Prince Rogers Nelson for allowing me to come to his house and to attend the launch of 21 Nights, both unforgettable evenings.
Thanks to Shane O’Neill and Sarah Boorman for their part in getting me to Prince’s house, and Hannah Corbett for helping arrange the trip to the Hotel Gansevoort.
For agreeing to be interviewed, thanks to Arthur Baker, Howard Bloom, Hans-Martin Buff, Bob Cavallo, Gayle Chapman, Lisa Coleman, Carole Davis, Dez Dickerson, Brent Fischer, Dr Clare Fischer, Frank Griffiths, Nancy Hynes, Alan Leeds, Eric Leeds, Susannah Melvoin, Wendy Melvoin, Stephin Merritt, Chris Moon, Steve Parke, Chris Poole, Alexis Taylor and Pepe Willie.
The deal for the book was completed by my wife, and at that time, agent Lesley Thorne, who has also put up with the seven years of research it has taken me to complete it.
Thanks to Thomas Patterson for introducing me to Renata Kanderz, who set up the interview with Lisa Coleman and Wendy Melvoin; Rachel Lichtman, aka DJ Rotary Rachel, for accompanying me to that interview, and to her and Tom for putting me up in Los Angeles; Wendy
and Lisa for putting me in contact with Matt Fink and Dez Dickerson; Matt Fink for putting me in touch with Gayle Chapman and Alan Leeds; Julie Masi for setting up the interview with Susannah Melvoin in Los Angeles; Paul Peterson for helping me contact and interview Eric Leeds; and Gaby Green for getting me backstage at an fDeluxe show. I am grateful to Frank Griffiths and Donna Fischer for putting me in contact with Brent and Dr Clare Fischer; Steve Johnson and Sarah Cheyne for introducing me to Chris Poole; and Anwen Rees at the BBC for putting me in contact with Kristie Lazenberry, who arranged the interview with Pepe Willie. Bernardine Evaristo helped me get in touch with Nancy Hynes. Barney Hoskyns let me try out some ideas on him, for which I am grateful.
Thanks to Brunel University for a sabbatical to complete this work, and in particular to Celia Brayfield, Professor Steve Dixon, Max Kinnings, Dr William Leahy, Sarah Penny, Professor Fay Weldon, Tony White and Tim Lott. I am also grateful to fellow Prince observer Professor Sarah Niblock and her partner-in-Paisley-crime Professor Stan Hawkins. Thanks to Stuart Batford, Nicholas Blincoe and Matthew De Abaitua (whenever there’s a mention of ‘a Prince fan of my acquaintance’ in the text, it’s usually him).