by Brian Morton
It is almost as if Prince has put aside his troublesome Christ-complex to cast himself as the Saved Thief who shared Calvary. The significance of ‘Christopher’ as a character name shouldn’t be overlooked. As ever, the musical larceny is hooded and respectful: Lennon and McCartney in the structure and sequencing every bit as much as in some of the songs; old movie soundtracks; raw r’n’b – ‘Kiss’ takes him back to that night with Hayward Baker at a James Brown gig and the inevitable moment where everything dropped out except a screaming voice and an electric guitar; the record also has a looser, almost jazzy feel that might well reflect John Nelson’s continuing influence. It’s all there and more. Parade may be not just Prince’s most overlooked record, but one of the unsung masterpieces of pop.
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At the start of 1987, Prince had one more classic record left in him, quite possibly the greatest and most complex of all. If the story ended with the release of Sign ‘O’ The Times, his place with the angels would still be guaranteed. In the event, he was to make another fifteen records between then and 2004’s mild, muted Musicology and 2006’s rather better 3121. Ask all but a devoted Prince fan to list them in chronological order and you’ll get at best a hesitant reply. The next period of Prince’s life was devoted largely to the development of his Paisley Park studio complex at Chanhassen outside Minneapolis, but within a few years he would fall out – terminally – with Warner Brothers, and lose his name. Some would say his mind went with it.
The consensus is that, after 1987, Prince also lost his audience. The truth is slightly more complex. If Parade saw Prince playfully exploring a new – albeit retro – definition of black identity, the next album marked a further but more measured retreat from the ‘biracial’ style that had won him millions of fans with Purple Rain. If Prince were Miles Davis, Sign ‘O’ The Times would be his On the Corner, on which the trumpeter deliberately aligned himself with a new constituency – hip, black, street-smart – and used his cover art to throw out an aggressively separatist gesture to the white fans whose loyalty was based entirely on Miles’s willingness to recycle the same cool idiom.
Prince had failed to deliver Purple Rain Mk II, though perhaps by happy accident rather than shrewd strategic planning. His next two records, and the notorious ‘bootleg’ which became the most famous unreleased record since the Beach Boys’ SMiLE, saw him turn back towards his original constituency. Both musically and in presentation, Sign ‘O’ The Times is a whiter album than Parade but the continuing slide in sales – it peaked at number six in the Billboard chart (its predecessor made it to number three) – was a sign that the notoriously fickle white audience was drifting away from a musician who seemed addicted to unpredictability. Either that, or he was drifting away from them.
Even so, Sign ‘O’ The Times’ cover is a muted version of Purple Rain’s raw cityscape – a montage of a faked-up neon background over a yellow-toned and flower-strewn stage set. Sheila E’s drum riser is a large car with busted, painted-over lights and Minnesota plates. Prince’s phallic yellow guitar lies abandoned just below it. The words ‘Paradise Set’, rather than the title of the album, are written at the bottom, but it seems to be if not Paradise Lost then certainly Paradise Abandoned. There is no sign of The Revolution either in person or on the cover credit, and Prince himself, wearing eyeglasses and looking wary, is out-of-focus and disappearing out of frame at bottom right as if he’s walking away not just from the disbanded Revolution but from the multiple pleasures promised in the retro neon backdrop. On stage and on camera, Prince has always cultivated a devastating ability to single you out with a look; it’s disconcerting for once not to meet his eye and read his intentions.
Can his mind be on things other than himself, you, and the possibility of seduction? There is a teasing clue right there in the title, where the ‘O’ is actually a nuclear disarmament sign (in the US usually described as a peace sign); and there is a striking new tone to the title track which opens the album on a long, weary-voiced litany of the world’s ills. Added to the familiar liberal roster – guns, crime, war, drugs, poverty – is the virus that in the mid-1980s wriggled into Prince’s sexual Eden and rendered his brand of unfettered desire steadily more unfashionable as the decade ran on. Given what follows on the record, it’s premature to label Sign ‘O’ The Times as Prince’s What’s Going On? or Prince as a freshly ‘engaged’ or even mildly ‘concerned’ artist.
When Live Aid happened in 1984, the only stars to crack the mood of weirdly jubilant anxiety about the planet’s wrongs were both from Minnesota. Bob Dylan’s faux pas was to suggest that some of the proceeds should be directed to America’s farmers rather than to Africa; Prince’s was not to turn up at all. Later he did contribute a track – the soso ‘4 the Tears in Your Eyes’ – for the USA For Africa album. His decision three years later to graft a social comment song into Sign ‘O’ The Times, indeed to place it first on the album, wasn’t so much missionary zeal as a brilliantly wrong-footing tactic that highlights the record’s dominant mood of erotic subtlety and softens the listener up (if that’s the right expression) for the chastened optimism of ‘The Cross’.
Nowhere else in his work has Prince so carefully blended his spectrum of musical styles. James Brown funk sits alongside Joni Mitchell imagism, gospel, punk and anthem rock, all co-existing in a richly improvisatory collage.
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If Prince came of age as an engineer with 1999, by the time he released Sign ‘O’ The Times he was in the process of creating his very own state-of-the-art engineering set-up. The Paisley Park studio complex is located about half an hour’s drive to the west of Minneapolis centre at 7801 Audubon Parkway in the dormitory suburb of Chanhassen. The $10-million complex, designed by Prince himself and looking very much that way, is pictured on the inside booklet of Emancipation with a weird-looking Prince posed in front of his white BMW. The studios were officially opened on September 11, 1987, but parts of Sign were recorded there, as well as at the familiar Sunset Sound. The new set-up featured two forty-eight-track recording studios as well as a 12,000-square-foot soundstage where Prince and anyone else who cared to book the facility (takers have included Barry Manilow, The Bee Gees, George Benson, Steve Miller and even, improbably, REM) can rehearse stage shows, shoot videos and even put on full-scale concerts. Like the mansion at Lake Minnetonka, it was widely seen as another folie de grandeur, but it provided Prince with a working space and power base that seemed to strengthen his creative independence.
It also provided fans with an instant shrine, a Graceland minus the tombstone but featuring the latest technology. Tours became an obligatory station on a Twin Cities pilgrimage, and a rival attraction to Bob McCoy’s celebrated Museum of Questionable Sexual Devices, always with the faint lure of a personal appearance by the Questionable Sexual Practitioner himself. Such manifestations were rare, though Prince was still occasionally spotted in Minneapolis clubs, checking out the talent, seemingly happy in the role of local boy made good. What the tours did serve was to dent the notion of the artist as a reclusive paranoiac, hiding inside what might have passed as a supervillain’s lair in a Bond movie.
If Paisley Park was Prince’s Xanadu, its fortunes ebbed and flowed with his. His decision to keep it open – and therefore manned – 24/7, just in case the recording muse struck in the middle of the night, as it was apt to do, contributed substantially to Prince’s financial problems of the mid-1990s. By then, there were outstanding bills, and Prince’s step-brother Duane – not the most reliable operative on the planet – was in nominal charge, following the departure of Paisley Park Enterprises president Gilbert Davison. The studios were effectively closed between 1996, the nadir of Prince’s personal, commercial and critical arc, and the summer of 2004, when they reopened newly digitalised and upgraded. Listening to Sign ‘O’ The Times is a little like running your hand over the brand new headquarters’ dust-free surfaces and wiggling your toes in the plush carpets reserved for its private areas. It is Prince’s most se
nsuous – as opposed to sensual – record, a hymn to increasingly responsible pleasures. It also dramatises perfectly his ongoing effort to meld sin and redemption, thoughtful engagement and thoughtless indulgence, and to show off stolen wares with the confidence of ownership. The Thief had his own temple at last.
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The opening is, again, a surprise. A marimba-like figure and expectant drumbeats are punctuated by the kind of erotic yelp – ‘Oh, yeah’ – that suggests funky, James Brown soul. Then, the single most astonishing opening in the entire Prince canon. ‘In France a skinny man died of a big disease with a little name . . .’; his girlfriend picks up a needle and goes the same way; a gang of seventeen-year-olds called The Disciples (!) do crack and pack machine-guns; a black girl kills her baby because she can’t afford to feed it; in September ‘my cousin’ tries hash for the first time and by June he’s doing heroin – all followed by the devastating, sarcastic hook, they’re ‘silly’, these signs o’ the times.
What’s often overlooked is that interwoven with these relatively generic ills are references to the Challenger disaster (which happened on January 28, 1986) and to the moment when a church roof is ripped off by ‘Hurricane Annie’ (a half-conscious echo of the time when ‘Annie Christian’ was the repository of all that was wrong with the world). These are more subtle reminders of human hubris, but possibly also of hope, because after the space shuttle explosion everyone still wanted to fly.
The clinching astonishment is the song’s conclusion. After repeating the old, fatalistic assertion that no one’s really happy until they’re dead, Prince exhorts us to hurry up before it’s too late, but not to join him in the apocalyptic orgy of 1999: ‘Let’s fall in love, get married, have a baby / We’ll call him Nate (if it’s a boy).’ It’s a ‘silly’ pay-off, but love, marriage, babies? This can’t be Prince, surely, even if he is being ironic?
In 1987, time, as well as ‘the times’, was beginning to weigh more heavily on him. His thirtieth birthday was just a year away. There is a strong sense of haste around Sign ‘O’ The Times, which comes out of the busiest year of Prince’s entire career. Sign ‘O’ The Times is a double album, his first since 1999. Unlike the baggy monsters of later years, every track justifies its place. If there really were hundreds of songs lying in his studio, he was determined to get them down on tape, not just because Paisley Park meant he could do, but also because he had to. It is the classic nihilist’s dilemma: what to do when the apocalypse fails to happen?
Even after the gentle pay-off to the title-track, we’re still prepared for something darker and more sober from the rest. The next song begins with another ecstatic soul wail – ‘Ooh doggies’ – and the sound of an ambulance dopplering past but ‘Play in the Sunshine’ is all danceable, piano-driven pop, with just the minor proviso that the promised pleasure is taken without the help of ‘a Margarita or Exstacy [sic]’. It’s a curious track, rendered less transparent from following the title song, but also because the fiery guitar solo at its heart sits oddly with the nursery rhyme lyrics, stuff about four-leafed clovers, ‘pop goes the music’ and a big, white, talking rabbit. Dancing ‘like it’s gonna be the last time’ is another throwback reference, but again instead of mindless partying we’re asked to love our enemies until the ‘gorilla’ – initially misheard as ‘mirror’ – ‘falls off the wall’. Is this the young black-and-white movie freak remembering that epic of failed love and bigotry King Kong, or is it something altogether simpler?
Natural disaster is recast as celebration on ‘Housequake’, the B-side of ‘U Got the Look’ and a disco favourite. Here is a falsetto Prince as alter ego ‘Camille’, with vocal party favours from engineers Susan Rogers, Coke Johnson and others. Punctuated by a camply petulant ‘Shut up already, damn!’, the shouty vocal has a cheerfully retro ‘dance craze’ feel, even namechecking the Twist. Prince yelps. Eric Leeds and Atlanta Bliss blare their horns like members of the JBs.
In contrast to the title track and the truly bizarre song which follows, ‘Housequake’ is content-free. ‘The Ballad of Dorothy Parker’ is one of Prince’s strangest creations. Dorothy is a dishwater blonde waitress on the promenade, with a sharp tongue (so it may be a nickname). Prince’s character has been ‘talking stuff / In a violent room / Fighting with lovers past’. He goes to the restaurant and, not very hungry, orders a fruit cocktail. She makes a sarcastic comment about his manhood, but finds him cute and suggests he takes a bath. He insists on keeping his pants on. She puts on the radio and listen to her favourite song, Joni Mitchell’s ‘Help Me’, from Prince’s and the Melvoins’ favourite Court and Spark album. (Joni certainly knows of the literary Dorothy Parker, even if it’s hard to imagine Prince being a fan.) The phone rings. Dorothy says whoever it is can’t be as cute as him. The pants come off, but Dorothy hasn’t read the script. ‘Instead she pretended she was blind / An affliction brought on by a witch’s curse.’ Prince goes back to his violent room but next time the fighting starts he takes another bubble bath with his pants on, and that makes everything right.
There are a few obvious interpretations. Is this a screened memory of a real-life encounter, perhaps when the teenage Prince was out on the streets, midway between John Nelson’s and Bernadette Anderson’s? Did some kindly, brassy dame take pity on the kid and offer him a bath? Like his memory of that dancer outside his father’s club, it smells of fantasy sprinkled over a more neutral encounter. The mention of violence is the one thing that makes it troubling. Prince says he dreamed the whole thing, which only half-answers the question. It’s an odd-sounding track, very bottomy and almost submarine, perhaps because it was recorded at the yet to be opened Paisley Park on a half-built desk.
Again, Prince sequences the album brilliantly. Like the later ‘Hot Thing’, ‘IT’ is pure lustful funk, though you’re still left wondering whether this is the same damaged kid in the diner who’s singing. ‘Starfish and Coffee’ is a delightful schooldays fantasy, with a hook – ‘. . . Maple syrup and jam / Butterscotch clouds, a tangerine / And a side order of ham’ – as infectious as the ’flu. Originally intended for the abandoned Dream Factory album, it was co-written with Susannah, and further evidence of the Melvoins’ devotion to Joni Mitchell and The Beatles; there’s even a ‘Lucy’ in there along with Kevin, Miss Kathleen and the far from ordinary Cynthia Rose, whose breakfast menu provides that mad chorus. Next up is ‘Slow Love’, swathed in Claire Fischer’s strings, while ‘Forever in My Life’ ends the first disc with a promise of unfailing fidelity. It’s a song he has reworked more than almost any other.
By now, the listener has been well primed to expect the unexpected, but why assign the male lead vocal of ‘U Got the Look’, which opens the second disc, to ‘Camille’, when it’s billed as ‘Boy versus Girl in the World Series of Love’. What complicates the picture still more is that it’s the girl who’s playing tough as a whole new racial scenario is played out, coloured peach and black. (It’s often forgotten that yellow and peach are also signature Prince hues.) Sheila E provides limber jazz percussion, but it’s Sheena E who acts out the other half of this curious number, which again finds Prince using a self-consciously black argot – ‘U sho’nuf be cookin’ in my book’ – as (s)he goes about a notably rough and ready wooing. The key rhyme – ‘. . . jammin’ . . . heck-a-slammin’ / If love is good, let’s get 2 rammin’’ – doesn’t suggest the same Prince as sides one and two with their promise of ‘Slow Love’ and undying affection.
At first glance ‘If I Was Your Girlfriend’ sounds like another attempt to cast himself in a female role, but it’s more subtle than that. This is Prince, again tricked out as Camille, wondering wistfully, even weepily, how things might be different between men and women if they could only make like good girlfriends instead of lovers. So subtle are the sexual politics here that we’re creeping perilously close to post-post-feminism. Why won’t she undress in front of ‘him’? Why can’t ‘he’ help without making her feel helpless? The break in that small voice when he g
oes ‘Plea-hea-hease’ is heartbreaking and funny by turns; it’s as if James Brown’s kid sister got up on stage to do ‘Please, Please, Please’. But then Camille drops into a husky speaking voice, thick with desire as she lists all the things she’d like to do, including kissing you ‘down there, where it really counts’, promising to drink up ‘every ounce’. There is hardly a better, franker, more emotionally honest love song in the whole history of pop and soul and what makes it musically is that where you’d expect to hear Lisa, Wendy and Susannah touching in the background harmonies, it’s a chorus of gruff-voiced ‘men’, murmuring their assent.