by Alan Light
Regardless, what is clear is that the racial composition of the Twin Cities, and the pop and rock music he heard on the radio (there wasn’t even a round-the-clock black station in the city with a strong signal—just the low-wattage KMOJ), made for a complex blend of influences on the young Prince. “I was brought up in a black-and-white world,” he said to MTV. “Black and white, night and day, rich and poor. I listened to all kinds of music when I was young, and when I was younger, I always said that one day I would play all kinds of music and not be judged for the color of my skin, but the quality of my work.”
Prince’s family obviously made a powerful impact on his budding relationship with music. “Who said I was supposed to be a musician?” he said to me in a rare moment of openness in 2004. “I just watched my father, and saw that when he played it pleased my mother.”
Howard Bloom was Prince’s publicist from 1981 through 1988. He also worked with such other superstars as Michael Jackson, John Mellencamp, and Bob Marley before developing chronic fatigue syndrome and not leaving his Brooklyn apartment for years. When he recovered, he quit the music business and returned to a career focusing on his early training in the world of science. I meet Bloom on a blustery winter night at the local café that he uses as his office, and from there we head back to his cluttered walk-up to talk about his time working with Prince.
Bloom says that during his publicist days, he always searched for an artist’s “imprinting points . . . the moments when your brain opens up and you look for something with certain characteristics, and when you find it, you seize on it, and your brain is wrapped around it for the rest of your life.” He maintains that Prince’s first such imprint came when he was five years old and his mother took him to watch his dad rehearse: “He steps into a theater and there are all these chairs aimed at the center of the stage, and there’s his dad in the center of the light with five beautiful women behind him. And that was it.”
But the eccentricities and struggles of his parents, which would later be used so effectively in fictionalized form for the songs and story of Purple Rain, didn’t make for a stable household. (In 1996, he told Oprah Winfrey that the most autobiographical scene in the movie was “probably the scene with me looking at my mother crying.”) John and Mattie separated when Prince was ten years old, and in the years that followed, he was constantly shuttling between different homes. Sometimes he lived with his father—who worked for Honeywell Computers during the day and played gigs at night, so was seldom around—and sometimes with his mother and a stepfather he didn’t much like (but who did take him to a James Brown concert where, according to legend, Prince got onstage and danced). He tried living with an aunt for a while. Eventually he moved into the home of a neighboring family, the Andersons, who had six kids, one of whom was André, a friend of Prince’s from church who became known as André Cymone when he was a member of Prince’s band. At one point, in fact, André’s bass-playing father was in a band with Prince’s father.
The time he spent living in André’s basement became a big part of the Prince mythology. He spoke about it at some length to journalist Barbara Graustark in 1981 in an interview that was initially planned for Newsweek but eventually appeared in Musician magazine. As long as he continued attending Central High School, he said, “I could come in anytime I wanted; I could have girls spend the night. . . . I think it had a great deal to do with me coming out into my own and discovering myself.” He was also creating a community of other musical and sexual explorers: “One time [André’s mother] came down and saw a lot of us down there, and we weren’t all dressed, and stuff like that . . .”
This, says Bloom, was Prince’s next defining point. “He was imprinting on the hippie movement,” he says, “and started his own community, with the idea that if we indulged all of our sexual desires, then we wouldn’t make war. Prince was building a little tribe around this basic idea.”
Prince (guitar) and Anderson (bass) were joined by Prince’s cousin Charles Smith (who was later replaced by Morris Day) on the drums and André’s sister Linda on keyboards in a group they named Grand Central, playing Top 40 and funk covers at local clubs and parties. “I was into Kool and the Gang,” Cymone told writer Michael A. Gonzales in 2014. “Morris introduced us to Tower of Power, while Prince was into Chaka Khan and Earth, Wind and Fire.” The group played house parties and local clubs (“places where real pimps were the patrons”), and numerous battles of the bands. “We were playing against guys who were older,” he said, “but we were fearless and cocky.” Grand Central later changed its name to Champagne and started performing original music. While booking and playing frequent dates, and recording on his own at night in local studios, Prince kept up his grades at school and played basketball—apparently quite well, though his small stature limited his playing time.
Prince would later say that growing up in Minneapolis was “kinda sad . . . the radio was dead, the discos was dead, ladies was kinda dead, so I felt like, if we wanted to make some noise, and I wanted to turn anything out, I was gonna have to get somethin’ together.” Eventually he grew so frustrated that in the autumn of 1976 he moved to New York, where he stayed with his sister. He had hoped that some of his bandmates would want to move, too, but they resisted: “I don’t think they really liked the idea of me trying to manipulate the band so much,” he said, “[but] I was always trying to get us to do something different.”
Though he would say “I never wanted to be a front man,” he found that there actually was some interest in his music in New York, and he was offered a few production and publishing deals. What he was looking for, though, was an actual recording deal, and the creative freedom that he felt his music required. “Any fifteen-year-old on Planet Earth, having an offer of any kind, is going to imagine that the minute he signs, he’s a superstar,” says Bloom. “But Prince did not take those offers. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. He had what we call in neurobiology ‘executive control’—the ability to inhibit his brain and maintain discipline in pursuit of what he wanted.” And so, after a few months, he moved back to Minneapolis.
“When I was sixteen, I was completely broke and needed to get a job,” he told Arsenio Hall. “So I got the Yellow Pages out, and I couldn’t find one thing that I wanted to do. So I decided I was going to push as hard as I could to be a musician, and win at it.”
• • •
While he was in New York, a demo tape that Prince had recorded with producer Chris Moon in Moon’s studio caught the attention of Minneapolis businessman Owen Husney, who signed Prince to a management contract. He financed a higher-quality demo, recorded by producer/engineer David Z. Cliff Siegel, a regional record promoter and a former bandmate of Husney’s (and a cousin of the Rivkins, just to show how close-knit the local music community was), recalled that as far back as those first sessions, Prince’s goals were “to do films, be number one, and produce other groups.”
Husney began cultivating Prince’s image as a brilliant, enigmatic cipher, a virtuoso on dozens of instruments who barely spoke or looked anyone in the eye. His ad agency created a press kit for Prince, which helped get the demo noticed by a number of major record labels, including CBS, A&M, and Warner Bros.—the last of whom eventually signed Prince to an unprecedented three-album deal in which he retained an unusual degree of creative control, producing his own recordings and even having approval over all photographs and album packaging. Prince also insisted that he sign and be treated as a regular Warners pop act, and not just be assigned to the black-music department, where budgets were smaller and influence was limited.
“When we signed Prince, he was nineteen years old,” says Mo Ostin, who at the time was chairman at Warner Bros. Records. “We all felt very strongly about him as an artist. A&M insisted on his publishing as part of the deal, and he wouldn’t give that up; Columbia made him an offer of a two-album commitment. So we said that we would not take publishing and would make a three-album co
mmitment, to show our faith in his future.
“Maurice White [from Earth, Wind & Fire] was willing to produce the first album, and he was a huge star at the time. Prince had never produced anything before but insisted that he would produce his own albums. [Warner executives] Lenny Waronker and Russ Titelman went to the studio to watch him do his thing, and they were so impressed [that] they said he didn’t need anybody; he could do it himself.”
He went to Sausalito, California, to record his first album in the celebrated Record Plant studio. The sessions did not go smoothly; though he had won the right to produce himself, he wasn’t really trained for the job (and would always be a self-taught producer with his own working language, for better and for worse). Playing all the instruments and singing all the vocal parts himself, and butting heads with Tommy Vicari, the executive producer whom Warners had assigned to oversee the project, Prince had trouble finding the sound and style he wanted. He ended up taking three months and spending almost $170,000 of the $180,000 that had been allotted for all three of his albums on the record that would be released in 1978 as For You. The title track included no fewer than forty-six vocal overdubs. “I was a physical wreck when I finished,” he said.
The album is mostly keyboard-based, bouncy post-disco that’s lacking in fire; the most fully realized track is probably the plaintive “Baby,” with classic, almost doo-wop harmony parts, while the closing “I’m Yours” displays some guitar flash in the album’s final minutes. The single was “Soft and Wet,” which grazed the pop charts, reaching number 92, though it fought its way up to number 12 on the R&B charts. It didn’t cross over to the wider audience Prince craved, but it did make an impression on some of the people who would later be among his key collaborators.
“I was thirteen years old, underage, at the Starwood dance club here in Los Angeles,” says Wendy Melvoin. “I heard ‘Soft and Wet’ and I went up to the DJ, asking, ‘Who’s this girl? Who’s this girl?’ And the DJ said, ‘It’s this young kid named Prince.’ I was fucking floored by him.”
“I lived in West Hollywood,” says Susan Rogers, who would later serve as Prince’s recording engineer for much of the 1980s, “and I was on the bus, and there was a kid sitting in the back with a boom box. I heard ‘Soft and Wet,’ and I remember thinking, ‘Whoever that artist is, I want to know more.’ I became a fan from that first record.”
To the extent that the rock-critic establishment noticed For You, the response was summarized in The Village Voice by Robert Christgau, who described the album as “lots of chops, not much challenge.” A follow-up single, “Just as Long as We’re Together,” stalled at number 91 on the R&B chart. Prince fell out with Husney, and the high-powered team of Bob Cavallo and Joe Ruffalo—who managed such acts as Earth, Wind & Fire and Ray Parker Jr.—bought out his deal for $50,000. (One of their employees, Steve Fargnoli, made a strong impression on Prince because he had previously worked as Sly Stone’s road manager; Fargnoli was soon promoted to partner in the company and would handle Prince’s day-to-day business.) They arranged for Prince’s first concert appearances on January 5 and 6, 1979, at the Capri Theater in Minneapolis, as a one-off showcase for the label to determine whether he was ready for a tour. The conclusion was that he needed more seasoning, which began his dedication to constant, almost obsessive rehearsal with his touring musicians.
• • •
Matt Fink and I are sitting in the control room of the recording studio in the basement of his comfortable home in suburban Minneapolis. (Outside, not surprisingly, snow is falling with increasing strength.) Down here, the former keyboard player in the Revolution keeps busy recording local bands and commercial work, as well as his sons’ various groups over the years. While he drove me around town pointing out some of the local Prince-related landmarks, he also ran through his upcoming travel schedule for shows with several different bands, including his Prince cover band, the Purple Xperience. It’s not a bad lifestyle, all essentially a direct result of the bet that he placed by signing up with Prince more than thirty-five years ago.
“Just to be involved with an artist signed to Warner Brothers was enough for me when I joined the band,” says Fink. “In those early years, there were a lot of skeptics around me. ‘Ah, he’s a flash in the pan. What are you doing? It’s never going to work.’ I got a lot of that. And I’d just look at them and say, ‘I think you’re wrong. I believe in Prince. I think he’s gonna break through; this guy’s gonna be huge someday.’ ”
Prince had assembled a group of local musicians—Cymone, guitarist Dez Dickerson, keyboard players Fink and Gayle Chapman, and drummer Bobby Z—which was then being called the Rebels, a name later modified to the Revolution. (Resentment from Morris Day may date back as far as this first band configuration: “I could play ten times better than Bobby Z, but we ain’t gonna get into that,” he said in 2012.) But he still worked alone on his second LP, which would be recorded in six weeks during the spring and released under the title Prince. Aware that he needed to make a strong impact this time around, this collection was a major step forward from For You, and included his first number one R&B hit, the bright post-disco “I Wanna Be Your Lover,” as well as the convincing rocker “Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?” and “I Feel for You,” a bouncy little number that become a major hit when it was recorded by Chaka Khan a few years later, at the height of Purple Rain mania. He sounded more relaxed, more confident, and while his singing voice remained firmly planted in his falsetto over too many of the songs, he was finding his way toward a style that was genuinely his own.
This would be the album that truly announced Prince’s arrival, complete with music videos and (uncomfortable) appearances on The Midnight Special and American Bandstand. This time, Christgau raved in the Voice that “this boy is going to be a big star, and he deserves it,” though he did also note that he felt Prince “does leave something to be desired in the depth-of-feeling department—you know, soul.” Prince was subjected to his first intense round of talking to the press, something he was never at ease with. “His early interviews were really awkward,” says Bob Merlis, a former Warner Bros. publicist. “We thought maybe he just shouldn’t do them—they were bizarre, risqué. I remember he asked one writer from Record World magazine whether her pubic hair went up to her belly button, stuff like that.”
After the sessions for Prince, he worked on a band-based project, but never completed or released that album. Prince and the group started their first tour on November 26, 1979, at the Roxy in West Hollywood. They played eleven club dates before moving into bigger theaters and arenas in February as the opening act for forty-two stops on a tour by “the king of punk funk,” Rick James. James would become a bitter rival in the years ahead, later telling Rolling Stone, “I can’t believe people are gullible enough to buy Prince’s jive records.” He complained that Prince was stealing his stage moves, and according to Teena Marie, who sang with James, James retaliated by stealing Prince’s equipment. “Back then people weren’t really programming their own synthesizers,” she said. “Prince . . . and Stevie [Wonder] were the only ones really doing it.” At the end of the tour, according to Marie (who would in turn take the opening slot on Prince’s own next tour), James simply took Prince’s synthesizers and used them on his pop breakthrough album Street Songs—“and then he sent them back to [Prince] with a thank-you card.” (In his posthumous autobiography, Glow, James wrote, “When I saw that Prince was stealing from me, I stole from him.”)
It was during this time that the band was becoming a formidable unit. “As that original lineup came together, we felt like Transformers, that all the parts had come together,” says Dickerson. “We thoroughly believed that we were supposed to be the biggest band in the world.” Presumably emboldened by the nightly spectacle of James’s leather-clad, pot-smoking onstage persona, Prince began pushing his writing into the territory he had explored during his days and nights in André’s basement. In 1980, he blindsided th
e music world with Dirty Mind, a near-perfect, thirty-minute manifesto of sexual liberation and broken taboos. Between the album title and the cover photo (a black-and-white shot of Prince in a trench coat, open to reveal that he was wearing only briefs underneath), the packaging couldn’t have made the new direction more obvious.
The sound of Dirty Mind was more rock than funk, heavy on spiky, new wave–inspired keyboards. The subject matter was outright shocking: “Head” saw the singer ejaculating on the wedding dress of a bride headed to her nuptials, and the frantic “Sister” offered an ambiguous account of incest. (In 2013, at a Carnegie Hall concert paying tribute to the songs of Prince, Philadelphia-based singer Bilal delivered a slowed-down version of the song that drew out the harrowing emotions at its center.) “When You Were Mine” was an irresistibly hooky, classic pop song about a ménage à trois. The outrageous image, combined with his growing reputation as a live performer, piqued the attention of the rock establishment, and Prince landed a story in Rolling Stone and a booking on Saturday Night Live.
There was truly something distinctive about Prince’s conception of sexuality. Traditionally, black artists—many of whom had started out singing in church—struggled with the tensions between the flesh and the spirit. You could make an argument that before Prince, that dichotomy defined black pop music, as it played out in the work of giants like Sam Cooke, Little Richard, Marvin Gaye, and Al Green. But Prince didn’t seem to recognize a distinction or a conflict between these two forces. In his music, sex and salvation were often the same, and, as for the most hedonistic and simple-minded rock singers, any sense of guilt was absent from the equation.