by Brian Morton
The Twin Cities bequeathed Prince an unusual perspective on American popular music. Minneapolis is what is known in the business as a vanilla market. British observers of the American scene are still perturbed by how sharply and how overtly the music industry is segregated. At one time ‘race records’ were cut exclusively for a black market but even in the 1970s and 1980s, there were separate charts for rock and r’n’b, which despite an enthusiastic take-up of black music by white teenagers was still tantamount to segregating audiences. Radio airplay was crucial and radio stations were more than ever in the grip of advertisers armed with demographic models and spreadsheets. As Dave Hill put it in Prince: A Pop Life, ‘Specific audiences were identified and catered to, in line with the dictates of commercials. And that “specialisation” effectively meant the resegregation of radio along racial lines that were no less rigid for justifying their informal apartheid with free-enterprise logic.’
In line with that relentless equation, Minneapolis had no infrastructure of black music stations. KMOJ had a virtual monopoly and thus a fairly safe, chart-driven playlist. For a time, KUXL offered smooth soul, classic Motown and some lite jazz to the small better-off black community on the South Side. All of which meant that even African-American youngsters of Prince’s age were drawn to a diet of white progressive rock on KQRS. His early band Grand Central, which some remember, probably wrongly, as Grand Central Station, was around too soon to have been named after Larry Graham’s mid-1970s funk unit Graham Central Station, though that might explain the confusion. (Graham later became a friend and something of a spiritual mentor, leading to the revelation in the late 1990s that Prince had followed his example and joined the Jehovah’s Witnesses.) The band’s later name-change to Champagne may well have been precipitated by optimistic recognition of a possible market clash, though it actually took place when Prince went to Central High, presumably so that it wouldn’t sound like a school band. The original name – or rather the second name since the group briefly went out as Phoenix – may also have been a nod to white bicep rockers Grand Funk Railroad, later known by the fans’ preferred short form Grand Funk. Theirs was the kind of heavy, anthemic rock that Prince and his friends dabbled in, and who knows, the later addiction for performing half-naked and glossed with oil might just be a screen memory of Grand Funk guitarist Mark Farmer stripped to the waist and sweating his way through a falsetto ‘Mean Mistreater’. Skinny kid looks at Charles Atlas advertisement and dreams.
For Prince’s contemporaries, Grand Funk, Iron Butterfly and the James Gang, British acts like Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and all the others that followed in the wake of the ‘invasion’ spearheaded by The Beatles and Herman’s Hermits were every bit as immediately compelling as r’n’b. These were the groups that played uptown and these were the groups that got the local airplay. In 1978 when Prince released his first album the best known Minneapolis band were punk thunderers Hüsker Dü; a couple of years later, you might mention The Replacements as well. Though punk as such didn’t make much impact on him, white rock and pop were to influence Prince’s music from the beginning.
It’s wrong to suggest that Minneapolis had no musical infrastructure, just that it was very different to those of Chicago or Philadelphia. The town’s most important contribution to popular music was the retail system established by Amos Hellicher’s distribution label Soma. By the late 1960s, though, it was living up to its name. People were being put to sleep by smooth, close-harmony romance and looking for a more resonant style of pop. There was also a thriving club scene in the Twin Cities, particularly in the knot of clubs and restaurants round Seven Corners, where John and Mattie Nelson played.
Records, gigs and radio are all influential, but what sparks many a career is a strong local role model, someone from the same background who makes good. Apart from his father, there was no one of a slightly older generation to emulate. Pianist Bobby Lyle is probably best known as MD to soul diva Anita Baker in the mid-1980s and from the smooth jazz of Pianomagic and 2004’s Straight and Smooth. Lyle grew up in Minneapolis, and was known to John Nelson. His early records seem to have been released only in Japan and by the mid-1970s he was drifting away from jazz, and from the Twin Cities. In 1976, though, Lyle was working with Sly & the Family Stone and Prince would certainly have been aware of that.
While Prince’s ferocious self-determination clearly didn’t develop in a vacuum, there was no black Minneapolitan he could point to and say: I want to be him. The only internationally famous Minnesotan was Bob Dylan, who was born in Duluth and grew up in grimy Hibbing, where black skin probably meant you worked in the iron mill and washed off at the end of the day. There were bands around who proved it was possible to make a go of a musical career, even on a relatively unstructured scene like that of North Side Minneapolis and, given the scale of the place, it’s inevitable that their histories intersect with Prince’s. Flyte Tyme was perhaps the most successful of the basement groups, with a membership that included Terry Lewis, Jellybean Johnson and later Jimmy Jam. It also featured a small horn section, which would not have endeared it to Prince, who was initially wary of horns. There was also another North Side band The Family (not to be confused with English rockers Family), for whom Prince later wrote ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’, best known from Sinéad O’Connor’s cover version.
Jam and Lewis, who went on to be Janet Jackson’s saviours, eventually co-opted the Flyte Tyme name for their production company, but by then the band had metamorphosed into Prince protégés The Time, who became an integral part of his scene-breaking tour packages, along with the shrewdly confected girl band Apollonia 6. Soul star Alexander O’Neal was proposed as vocalist for the new group, but declined; perhaps believing that Minneapolis wasn’t big enough for Prince and himself; perhaps outraged at the money side of the deal; perhaps (as in one version) sacked for being ‘too black’, or possibly looking too much like Billy Eckstine for a funk-rock group. Five years older than the young Pretender, O’Neal’s breakthrough nevertheless didn’t come until 1985, by which time Prince was touring the multiple-platinum Purple Rain.
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School friends remember him as Skipper (or Skippy) Nelson. The pet name came from his mother and might have been Mattie Shaw hitting back at her husband. Even if, as Jimmy Jam remembers, most of it was platforms and the biggest ’fro anyone had ever seen, those who talk about Prince remember him as having stature, on and off the basketball court. Not everyone called him Skippy or Princess or Butcher Dog; he was also known as ‘the Human Jukebox’, the kid who knew every song going and who could reproduce them on a widening array of instruments. Some of his celebrated multi-instrumentalism and composer credits are on the material released on Minneapolis Genius, but there Prince is very much a group player. The 94 East material, originally intended for Polydor before that deal fell through, overlaps with the first work on what became For You.
His musical career seems to have begun at home, picking out tunes on John Nelson’s piano. The first tune he learned to play is supposed to have been the television Batman theme, coincidentally given his later involvement with the Tim Burton movie. It’s said that he wrote his first song at the age of seven, and it may well be that that first manuscript (possibly known as ‘Funkmachine’) is lying in the vaults at Paisley Park even now. Interestingly, no one who knew him in his early teens remembers him as a prodigy. Prince’s ‘genius’ is more likely to have resulted from sheer hard work rather than some kind of Mozartian gift. There’s a possible parallel here with Andy Warhol, the ‘Picasso out of Pittsburgh’, whose apparently enervated and will-less approach to work disguised a ruggedly industrial and intensely hard-working background; no coincidence that this son of a manufacturing town should call his studio ‘the Factory’. It’s significant, too, that one of the most important aspects of Prince’s musical education was a business class. It was run at Central High by an easygoing former session player called Jim Davidson who taught students how to make and present demo tapes, as well as cop
yright, contract and other legal issues. Andre Anderson and Terry Lewis both took the class, but it was Prince who took the lessons most to heart. One wonders how often in later years he tried to apply Davidson’s uncomplicated principles to his dealings with Warners, sacked band members and copyright claimants.
There was scarcely a moment in his teens when Prince was not making music, either alone or with the friends who formed his first band. Grand Central went through a number of personnel, including Prince’s cousin Charles Smith, who seems to have been a respectable drummer. (He also introduced Prince to keyboard player Gayle Chapman.) He was probably better than his replacement Morris Day, who along with Andre Anderson and Prince formed the nucleus of the active band. There may have been an extra-musical reason for Day’s recruitment, since his attic offered an alternative rehearsal venue to Prince’s basement at the Anderson house. When they were working from home Andre’s sister Linda sometimes played keyboards.
Until Prince was sidetracked – or monorailed – into making solo demos with Chris Moon, Grand Central and Champagne were the focus of his musical life. Recollections vary as to what they sounded like. One has to be wary of self-interest in the suggestion of band members that the roots of Prince’s black music revolution lay in those chaperoned gigs in downtown bars, where the age limit was a rock-solid twenty-one. Most reliable witnesses remember a mix of lightly funked-up rock and jazz. Champagne was a faintly ironic banner for the abstemious and in those days not even studiedly frivolous Prince. No underage drinking for him, in fact nothing that got in the way of making music.
If his father was the key early influence, it was a cousin by marriage who helped steer him and Grand Central along a more professional route. Linster Willie – always known as Pepe – left New York for Minneapolis after marrying Shauntel Manderville, who was the daughter of Mattie Nelson’s twin sister. Pepe had worked in and around the music business for some years, as a gofer for his uncle’s band Little Anthony and the Imperials and as a freelance songwriter. He knew Prince and talked to him about music, but it seems that it was Morris Day’s mother who suggested that he take Grand Central in hand. The first priority, as far as Willie was concerned, was to put the publishing situation on a proper footing, suggesting to Prince that he write to Broadcast Music Incorporated – the powerful BMI – and make sure that all songs were securely copyrighted. This was one area where Jim Davidson’s Business of Music lessons seem not to have taken, and later it was to be the source of much disagreement.
Like just about every association in Prince’s early life, this one ended acrimoniously, but for a time the cousins worked together effectively enough. Pepe helped streamline Prince’s songs, which demonstrated more creative ambition than structure or market awareness; in 1977, the year before his debut record, Prince was playing on Pepe’s own demos. They attracted some interest from Polydor, who were later set to release 94 East before that deal collapsed. Some of their overlapping work appears on Minneapolis Genius and Pepe Willie is the composer of the briefly successful ‘If You Feel Like Dancing’. Given how his own career stalled apart from that one minor hit, it’s not surprising that Pepe would lay claim to much of that material. Its real authors, though, were Andre and Pepe’s talented cousin.
Prince had begun to spread his wings, both creatively and geographically. He found being a band member constraining, particularly when he didn’t share their enthusiasm for white rum and beer. Andre – who later changed his second name to Cymone – dined out for a time on stories of adolescent exploits with Prince, but these read like a curious backward projection of the priapic star of Purple Rain and Parade onto the shy, almost puritanical kid. Prince’s later affiliation to the Jehovah’s Witnesses wasn’t so much an aberration as a return to his church roots. Alcohol and drugs have never played a significant role in the Prince entourage.
Pepe Willie had contacts in New York. He had contacts all over the place. One of the local ones was keyboard player Gayle Chapman. Another resident of the white St Louis Park suburb that raised the Rivkins, she was to play an important but largely unrecognised role in the early Prince story, bringing not just musical skills but a strong Christian sensibility that seems to have reinforced Prince’s notion that live performance had a sacred dimension. Pepe Willie knew her because they’d collaborated on songs. His more immediate value to Prince, though, was his knowledge of the New York studio scene. However important the Cookhouse and Studio 80 had been (and would continue to be, as witness the joint David Rivkin/Studio 80 thanks on For You), Prince’s ambition needed more sophisticated facilities. Some of the instrumental material on Minneapolis Genius was taped in New York, from where Prince kept close and sometimes anxious contact with the man he’d asked to be his manager. It is to Chris Moon’s eternal credit that he realised early that it would take someone with considerably heavier clout to manage ‘the new Stevie Wonder’.
4
In 2004, Prince released an album called Musicology. Like the first two albums, it is neither bad nor great, and for much of its length merely competent. No one expected the forty-six-year-old to make another Sign ‘O’ The Times, or even a Dirty Mind, but after a run of indifferently received albums another disappointment would have rated as a technical knock-out. In the event, it wasn’t so much treated as a win on points as a sign of recovery, the work of a man who’d come back from a very bad place, calm and rebalanced, less paranoid and vituperative. Prince was Prince again, no longer The Artist Currently Known As Wanker, ‘Squiggle’ or ‘SLAVE’. In the first showcases, he spoke warmly in that unexpected baritone about loyalty to the fans who’d stuck with him, and he delivered an album full of gentle seduction (more Marvin Gaye than Rick James), jazzy soul and power pop.
The fans attributed much of its success to a set of words that appeared over several of the tracks. They were a reminder of where Prince had begun in 1978. The major credit line on For You reads ‘Produced, Arranged, Composed and Performed by Prince’. Lest there be any ambiguity, the publisher details run ‘All selections by Ecnirp Music Inc’. In Prince: A Pop Life, Dave Hill quotes the album’s executive producer Tommy Vicari, somewhere between admiration and exasperation, asking Prince ‘Why don’t you press the record and take the picture as well?’ No sooner said than . . . ‘Dust Cover Design by Prince’.
The actual photography on For You is by Joe Giannetti. It catches the producer/arranger/composer/performer/dust-cover designer in blurry soft focus, his towering Afro backlit, the look guarded rather than lustful or defiant. But for a shadow of moustache, it might almost be the young, pre-surgery Michael Jackson. It is a low-key image and it fits the product, because For You is certainly not the epoch sometimes claimed; like its distant successor Musicology, it now seems fussily competent rather than organically brilliant, interesting as a first exposure to Prince’s distinctive coalition of funk, tv jazz and heavy rock, interesting above all for the circumstances in which it was made.
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Central to the Prince mythology is that he was the first black musician to cut free of corporate interference and insist on control of every creative dimension of the music. Even if the latter part is true as read, he certainly wasn’t the first. eBay browsers occasionally turn up albums by the Jimmy Castor Bunch, in fact Jimmy Castor himself, as the silhouette-only images of the other band members might have given away. Jimmy played just about everything you heard. Somewhat up the creative scale was Stevie Wonder, who turned twenty-one in 1971, came of legal age and, benefiting from earlier in-fighting with the label by the self-driven Marvin Gaye, made what was effectively a shotgun contract with Motown which allowed him to write, produce and perform his own work.
By then, though, Stevie Wonder was a veteran, having been spotted by Berry Gordy at the age of ten, and with an enormous amount of second-hand studio knowledge and market awareness. Even so, Wonder’s independence shouldn’t be exaggerated. His greatest albums are the fruit of collaboration, specifically with synthesizer wizards Malcolm Cecil and Robe
rt Margouleff of The Original New Timbral Orchestra, better known to record buyers of a certain age as Tonto’s Expanding Headband. When Stevie split with them later, convinced he’d mastered their skills for himself, his work went into sharp decline. By the same token, Prince’s celebrated independence on For You and after needs to be examined more closely.
The only exception to Prince’s sole credit on For You and the reason there’s a little asterisk beside ‘Composed’ is that the lyrics to the album’s first single ‘Soft and Wet’ are attributed to ‘Prince and C. Moon’. He’s the same C. Moon who’s thanked along with God, Mum and Dad, Bernadette Anderson and a slew of Minneapolis friends and bandmates. He’s also the same Christopher Moon who turned up in the office of the Minneapolis businessman Owen Husney announcing he’d found the next Stevie Wonder.
Both white men – Moon is English by birth and Husney Jewish – play a central part in the Prince story. Husney’s advertising background allowed him to lay siege to the major labels in the most blatant way. His schtick was a good one. Here was a black kid from Minneapolis – virgin territory as far as New York and San Francisco executives were concerned – who played all the instruments and sang all the voices on Moon’s demo tape. If his first reaction was surprise and delight – and Husney was an amateur musician with a bit of band experience – then surely there was someone out there who’d share that response and clinch it with a signature?