by Alan Light
“He didn’t have any boundaries,” says Wendy Melvoin. “He didn’t have any margins when it came to separation between what a hard-on he had and that five seconds before his hard-on came, he was praying to God. There was no dividing, nothing. He didn’t have a guilt syndrome for that; it all worked for him.”
“There was no apology for his expression,” says singer/songwriter Tori Amos, calling from her dressing room before a show in Vienna. “People work and play with the whole idea of the sacred and the profane, but he was holding both at the same time, in a new way. It seemed to be this completely Dionysian energy, but it wasn’t segregated, and it wasn’t just to be shocking—sexuality can be forced, crass, gimmicky, but this was just who he was as a performer. He reminded me of Rimbaud and Baudelaire, this passionate kind of fire that always seemed to have intention.”
After years dedicated to the idea of pure independence and self-sufficiency, Prince also now seemed interested in the idea of a band. He ran a moody photo of the touring group, with their names graffitied on the wall, on the album’s inner sleeve. Dirty Mind’s centerpiece, “Uptown,” titled with the nickname Prince gave to the Minneapolis community he was building, offered his vision of an urban utopia: “White, black, Puerto Rican / Everybody just a-freakin.’ ” Even in the studio, things were occasionally more collaborative, with the album’s title song based on a fragment that Matt Fink came up with in rehearsal.
“We were jamming,” says Fink (who, after first trying jail stripes as his onstage uniform, switched to medical scrubs and was forever renamed “Dr. Fink”). “I played the main riff, and he goes, ‘Hey, I really like that. Remember that one. Let’s record that.’ So we recorded it on a boom box, and he said, ‘I want you to come out to my house tonight and see if we can come up with a song on that one.’ On the first two albums, he’d done everything himself—nobody had played on those records with him.
“So he invited me up to the house, and he said, ‘Okay, let’s lay this groove down. I’m going to help you with the arrangement.’ He wrote the bridge section, he played the drums, and then later he laid guitar on it. I got there at about nine at night and was there till midnight, and then after I left, he wrote the lyric and melody and finished tracking the song. He showed up the next day to rehearsal around noon and said, ‘Here’s the title track of the next album.’ ”
As the Dirty Mind album sleeve also showed, Prince had made a change in the band. Gayle Chapman had decided to leave rather than perform some of the provocative onstage moves he wanted in the show, and Lisa Coleman took her place at the keyboard—the first time anyone who had not grown up in Minneapolis entered the inner circle. A graduate of Hollywood High and the classically trained daughter of a Los Angeles session musician, Coleman introduced some more sophisticated influences into the Prince universe, and was as prepared as anyone could be for the discipline required in his band.
“We would talk about training your body, about practicing an instrument,” says Coleman. “We were at his father’s house, and he wanted me to play the piano for his dad—it was worse than your mom going, ‘Come on, Lisa, play your music for Grandma!’ or whatever, it was just like ‘Oh, God, Prince wants me to play the piano for his dad,’ a very nervous situation.
“We were playing and then talking about how I had studied classical music and taken lessons and did all those exercises, and we got into a whole philosophical conversation: as a musician, do you really need that? Do you need technique? My argument was, ‘Yes, you need technique, because then you can play anything that you hear.’ And they both looked at me like that was a revelation.”
The Dirty Mind tour took Prince into rock clubs across the country, but he was frustrated by the response. He was a star in Minneapolis, and a small but rabid cult of fans was beginning to form. “Even in the early years, I’d seen girls tear his shirt off leaving a theater,” says Fink. “Like, in 1980 that happened in San Francisco—they shredded him; we were barely able to get out the door to the show. So he had those moments of the Beatles/rock star thing, and it would’ve been more if he didn’t have good security.”
Elsewhere, though, audiences couldn’t quite figure out his rock/R&B hybrid, his mixed-race band, his explosive sexuality. The album sold only half as well as Prince, and the singles didn’t connect on white or black radio.
“We didn’t know what the fuck Prince was,” says gangsta rap pioneer/TV star Ice T. “He was like a player, he kept bad bitches, he was little, he was a pimp. He’s got a ill hood side to him, too. He was just something else. Prince is dope, he’s a motherfucker, but he was really hard to figure out.”
As if to balance out the rock orientation of Dirty Mind, Prince put together his first side project; he reconfigured his friends in the group Flyte Tyme into an old-school funk band, complete with razor-sharp zoot suits and tight choreography, and dubbed them the Time. “The image was cool,” he would say. “That’s the key word. That’s what we built the Time around. Cool is an attitude, a self-respect thing.” His old Grand Central drummer, Morris Day, had essentially traded Prince a track he had written—which would become the basis for the song “Partyup,” the closing track on Dirty Mind—in exchange for help landing a record deal, so when singer Alexander O’Neal opted not to stick with the new model of the band, Day moved from behind the kit into the lead-vocalist spot.
“Prince took Morris on the road,” guitarist Jesse Johnson later told Wax Poetics magazine. “When Morris left, he was wearing jeans, sneakers, a regular shirt, and an Afro. When he came back, he looked like the Morris we know today. He was completely different. I never saw him in jeans again.”
Prince produced the Time’s album and laid down guide versions of the tracks for them, though he denied it publicly, and the album credit was given to “Jamie Starr.” It was the first sign that he was struggling to find a way to keep up with all of the music he wanted to make—and with its more easily classified (and masterfully executed) sound, The Time sold better than Dirty Mind did. With all these forces rattling around in his brain, Prince returned to the studio in August of 1981 and finished his next album in nine days.
Controversy was perhaps the most erratic record of Prince’s first decade, but it was also the moment when things started to come into focus. The title track was a guitar-powered statement of purpose, addressing the boldness of his image straight-on (“Am I black or white / Am I straight or gay?”), dropping in a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, and becoming a hit single that effectively defined his identity for the pop world. Elsewhere, he dove even deeper into the erotic (“Sexuality” and “Jack U Off”) and put down his first classic bedroom ballad, “Do Me Baby.” But Controversy also included Prince’s first forays into social commentary, with “Ronnie, Talk to Russia,” addressed to President Reagan (in March 2014, Salon included the song on a list of “17 Songs for the Coming Nuclear Apocalypse”), and “Annie Christian,” presenting a disturbing image of a mysterious satanic power. These songs marked the beginning of a fascination with the End of Days that would permeate his next few albums.
If the idea of band and community had reemerged in Dirty Mind, that door closed again for Controversy, as Prince hunkered down in full one-man-band mode. “I was horrible,” he would later say of his resistance to collaboration. “To be perfectly honest, I was surrounded by my friends, but nevertheless, we had a difference of opinion in a lot of situations—musically speaking, that is. A lot had to do with me not being quite sure exactly which direction I wanted to go in.”
To Jill Jones, who met Prince when she was singing backup for Teena Marie, the Controversy phase was when Prince began to see an opportunity to fulfill his dream of crossing racial barriers with his music and truly locked into that crusade. “I think he was on a mission, because during that time there was black radio and white radio, and he’d been trying so hard to get that opening up,” she says. “When he did Controversy, he started to see another window. He
knew that if he stayed with R&B radio, that’s where he was gonna be, so he had to try to figure out how to market it. I don’t think any of us were quite clear on what marketing was at the time. He was definitely ahead of his time on branding.”
Jones, funny and bright as she looks back at her time with Prince, knows something about this kind of business-speak herself. We meet in one of the conference rooms at the advertising firm where she works in the Westwood section of Los Angeles. Jones grew up in Ohio but then moved to California and into American musical royalty: her stepfather, Fuller Gordy, was the brother of Motown founder Berry Gordy Jr. After she left the Prince camp, Jones lived in New York with her daughter before moving back to LA.
The relative success of Controversy enabled Prince to play bigger venues on tour. André Cymone had left the band to pursue a solo career—he had a hit with the Prince composition “Dance Electric”—and was replaced by another Minneapolis bass player, Mark Brown (alternately known as Brown Mark). The band was now fully focused on all the preparation necessary to take on arena-sized audiences.
“The first time I saw him was on the Controversy tour in Pittsburgh, which I later learned was the opening show of the tour,” says Alan Leeds, who would soon step in as Prince’s road manager. “A girlfriend of mine who worked for the black radio station WMO begged me to go with her, because the station copromoted the gig. I barely knew who he was—I knew ‘I Wanna Be Your Lover’; I’m not even sure I had heard ‘Controversy’ yet.
“Anyway, I reluctantly went, just so she’d have a date. And of course it was the typical story of ‘Oh my God, what did I just see?’ I remember saying to her, ‘God, I’d love to work with them sometime.’ It wasn’t just the fact that he was mind-blowing, but the entire production—the lights were not just state-of-the-art technically but were very musical, very artistic. Remember, this is ’81, so everybody’s still disco crazy, and this was decidedly something else.”
The crowd response had not been so positive, though, when Prince was faced with his biggest challenge yet. Mick Jagger had invited him to open two of the Rolling Stones’ dates at the Los Angeles Coliseum in October 1981. Almost as soon as he got onstage, the audience started booing and throwing things. He stormed offstage the first night, got directly onto a plane, and flew back to Minneapolis; Jagger reached him on the phone after the Stones’ set and convinced him to jet back to LA in time for the second concert—where his reception was even more hostile than it had been the show before. It was a reminder that it would still take a big leap for a white, rock-based audience to accept a sexually provocative black front man with a strong dance beat behind him, no matter how much guitar he played. (Prince would never open for another band again.)
His label still saw growth in his future. “A lot of effort had been put into Prince,” says former Warner Bros. publicist Merlis. “Putting him on those Stones dates—we tried a lot of things to keep him relevant to the public. There was always tremendous belief in him.”
Prince took the Time out as the opening act for the Controversy tour, which went so well that it created problems. When some reviews said that the opening band outshined the headliner, Prince dropped them from certain dates. The humor and pure pleasure of the Time offered a contrast to the intensity and drama of Prince’s set, and he was clearly torn between encouraging them to be great (sometimes showing them footage of Muhammad Ali backstage to inspire them) and wanting to make clear that they were in the support slot. Meanwhile, he began casting his second set of protégées—this time, a hypersexual girl group that he had initially considered calling the Hookers before he found Denise Matthews, rechristened her Vanity, and named the trio Vanity 6.
Through the summer of 1982, he was recording song after song, building up enough material that he told Warner Bros. his next record would be a double album—widely considered a risky move for a rising star, especially a black artist. His management was pleased with the music they were hearing, but felt like the knockout punch was missing, the song that could build on the template of “Controversy.” When Prince played the record for Bob Cavallo, the manager recalls saying, “ ‘This is a great album, but we don’t have a first single. We have singles that’ll be hits, but we don’t have a thematic, important thing that can be embraced by everybody, different countries, et cetera.’ He cursed me, and he went away—but he didn’t force me to put it out. Two weeks later, he came back and he played ‘1999,’ and that became the title of the album.”
• • •
The double LP 1999 was released on October 27, 1982. Despite Prince’s dreams of a crossover audience for his music, thus far the mentality of the Rolling Stones’ audience remained all too representative—and in fact, that exact month represented an all-time low point in pop music integration. Steve Greenberg would later write in Billboard that “in 1979, nearly half of the songs on the weekly Billboard Hot 100 pop chart could also be found on the urban contemporary chart. By 1982, the amount of black music on the Hot 100 was down by almost 80 percent. . . . Not one record by a black artist could be found in the Top 20 on the Top 200 album chart or the Hot 100 singles chart for three consecutive weeks that October—a phenomenon unseen since before the creation of Top 40 radio in the mid-1950s.”
But 1999’s release also fell directly in between two events that would forever change pop’s rules. In September of 1982, the fledgling cable network MTV, which had launched a year earlier, was added to the cable systems in the New York area, followed by those in Los Angeles a few months later, setting in motion its true impact as a national music channel. And one month after 1999 hit stores, on November 30, Michael Jackson’s Thriller album came out, which would create an entirely new sense of scale for recordings, music videos, and the impact of all musicians.
Critics picked up on 1999, which had both a stronger focus on guitars and a revolutionary new set of synthesizer sounds. The title song, with its unforgettable call to party in the face of nuclear devastation, made some impact but still came up short of the Top 40. The plans were for Prince to participate in the album promotion, or at least his own version of it, but after his first interview—with Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times—he walked out of the room and announced that he would never speak to the press again. It would indeed be two and a half years before he sat down with another journalist.
It was apparently time to truly secure the mythology he had been refining over the years. Prince’s band watched him assume a superstar’s persona long before he had actually earned the status. “Growing up, like anyone would practice their instrument, he practiced his face; he practiced what he looked like on camera,” says Lisa Coleman. “He would videotape himself in his bedroom at night, just talking or doing things, and he’d watch himself to see what he looked like. He really worked on it as if he was a dancer or something, training himself for being a big star—almost the way Motown used to have the finishing school. He just decided, ‘I’ve gotta be famous.’
“One time in Minneapolis, really early on, he was still a cute guy with a ’fro, but some girls saw him walking down the street and one of the girls said, ‘Is that Prince?’ and the other one said, ‘Nah’—like, he didn’t look good that day. And that changed his life forever.” He saw that to truly fulfill his vision, he needed to be Prince every minute of every day, not have a separate and distinct performing persona.
The 24/7 commitment to being a larger-than-life star eventually extended to the rest of the band, who weren’t allowed to appear in public in regular street clothes. “He used to get upset when anyone would refer to the clothes as costumes,” says Wendy Melvoin. “He freaked—‘Those aren’t costumes, those are clothes!’ ” Engineer Susan Rogers remembered Steve Fargnoli coming to rehearsal and saying to Prince, “Shall I have the band get into their stage costumes?” He responded just as Melvoin indicated. “I knew immediately that he had misspoken, that that was a mistake,” says Rogers, “and Prince right away corrected Steve
and said, ‘They aren’t costumes. They’re clothes.’ ” (Albert Magnoli, director of Purple Rain, would say that Prince’s insistence on using stage clothes conceived by his personal designer, Sorbonne graduate Marie France—later described by journalist Maureen Callahan as evocative of “extravagant romanticism”—as everyday wear throughout the film was one of the greatest challenges of the production.)
“It’s like he created a doppelgänger of himself,” says Susannah Melvoin, Wendy’s twin sister, who would become both romantically and musically involved with Prince. “He didn’t want to be the smart kid in high school who played piano in the music room; he didn’t want to be normal, and he didn’t want anyone around him to be, either. And that could create conflict—if you showed yourself to be broken or fallible, to be weak in some way, he’d be on you, sometimes mad. Like, ‘If you fuck it up, I look like I’m not real—I have to believe in it or I’m not going to be able to sell it.’ ”
Meantime, the Triple Threat tour rolled out, initially in theaters, with Vanity 6 (who had a hit of their own with “Nasty Girl”) and the Time (whose fantastic What Time Is It? album reached number two on the R&B charts) opening the dates. Now that Prince had used the other groups to help plant the seeds and create the context for his sound, the fate of 1999, and of his career, changed with the February 1983 release of “Little Red Corvette” as his next single, which found Prince turning his attention from apocalypse back to sex. The slinky, metaphor-laced tale of a promiscuous and irresistible lover shot up the charts, eventually becoming his first Top Ten hit. With a fleet, jagged guitar solo by Dez Dickerson (named in 2008 by Guitar World magazine as one of the 100 Greatest Guitar Solos of All Time), the song seemed to connect with white listeners in a new way; incredibly, it was released just a few days before Michael Jackson issued “Beat It,” his own rocked-up track that included an Eddie Van Halen guitar solo, as a single.