by Hahn, Alex
Prince hit the streets in October, and a short U.S. swing began in November 1979. Prince had changed his stage image radically in the course of less than a year; by the time the Prince tour began, he was wearing skin-tight spandex pants with no underwear beneath the pants, an outfit so form-fitting as to leave almost nothing to the imagination. Dickerson gleefully did the same. “We were trying to dress as outrageously and outlandishly as we could,” the guitarist recalled.[185]
Bob Cavallo, whose personal tastes veered towards the conservative and who worried about a line being crossed into obscenity, hurried backstage after the opening show at the Roxy in Los Angeles to insist that Prince and Dickerson wear underwear going forward. When the manager left, Prince looked slyly at his guitarist. “Bob wants me to wear underwear? Okay, I’ll wear underwear.”[186]
At the next show, Cavallo was aghast to see Prince wearing nothing but a shirt and what could have passed for a pair of women’s black panties. But what had begun as a practical joke on Cavallo became something more serious. A shirt and black underwear remained Prince’s stage outfit for the rest of the tour, and became a perfect means to express his increasingly subversive sexual energies. And above all, he felt more comfortable wearing less clothing and showing off his body.
As the band played shows in Texas and Louisiana, “Lover” continued to speed up the charts, and would hit No. 1 on the Soul Charts in December. At a stop in Denver, the concert’s promoters installed Prince and his team in a mobile trailer outside of the venue to serve as their dressing room. After the show, band members began to notice loud noises around the perimeter of the trailer. Peering out the windows, they saw that they were surrounded by fans who were clamoring for the band’s attention. The throng grew and eventually began pushing the trailer, causing it to rock.[187]
Prince and the band started to panic, and their road manager somehow cleared a path outside and hustled them into a limousine. The vehicle pulled away, but many of the rabid fans piled into cars and gave pursuit.[188]
Worried about the danger of a high-speed chase, the road manager instead pulled in front of a hotel and told the band members to enter the lobby and pretend to be checking in. Meanwhile, he drove behind the hotel; the band members slipped out through the rear exit and piled back into the vehicle.
Many of the pursuing fans fell for the ruse, but several cars remained in pursuit. His patience fraying, the road manager stopped the limousine, exited, and jumped on the hood of a fan’s Volkswagen that had stopped next to the limo. The Volkswagen driver started his car and drove off, flinging the road manager off the hood. The horrified band members rushed him to a local emergency room, where his injuries fortunately proved minor.
The crazy scene demonstrated that, at least in certain parts of the country, fame had arrived for Prince, although some of its elements had turned out to be as disconcerting as they were intoxicating. As Andre recalled, “That’s when I realized, this is what the big time is all about.”[189]
***
At other times being on the road was tedious, with long stretches of time on buses and short bursts of sleep at humble hotels. But Prince had thoroughly loosened up around his band members, and his pranks kept the atmosphere lively. “During those early days, we were just laughing all of the time,” Dickerson remembered. In one recurring joke at airports, Prince would don a pair of dark sunglasses and then sit in a wheelchair with a blank look, appearing to be passed out. The band members then retreated into the background, making it seem that this odd figure had been abandoned. Prince slumped forward in his chair and even drooled, attracting shocked attention from passersby. At that point the band members re-emerged, trying to suppress their laughter as they pretended to come to his assistance.
The tour was unfortunately cut short when Prince suffered a real malady after a show on December 2, 1979 in New Orleans, coming down with a slight case of pneumonia. But following his recovery his management secured a prime opening slot with Kool & The Gang in San Mateo, California. Prince’s band largely blew away the more veteran funk group, further increasing their confidence.
Prince’s team also booked appearances on two prominent television shows, Midnight Special and American Bandstand. These would not be live performances as such; on both, the band would simply lip-sync to recorded versions of songs from Prince. The bandleader thus stayed focused on visual elements, using the appearances to begin fashioning a public image.
Making his television debut on January 8, 1980 on NBC’s late-night rock and pop show, Midnight Special, Prince wore an ensemble of zebra-striped briefs and a coordinating zebra-print fringed top, with a cheetah-print guitar strap. He completed the outfit with heeled, thigh-high black suede boots and a single, large hoop earring in his right ear.
The group managed to generate a frisson of energy as they lip-synced to “I Wanna Be Your Lover.” The imposingly tall Andre Cymone wielded his bass like a weapon; Matt Fink wore a jailbird suit; and Gayle Chapman had donned a red negligee. The interactions of the group members were loose and friendly, suggesting an almost democratic approach to performing, notwithstanding the bandleader’s primacy. “Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?” was also performed, with the pre-recorded track giving the audience a sense of Prince’s lead guitar chops.
During the next appearance two weeks later, on American Bandstand, Prince upped the ante by deliberately taunting the show’s host, the revered veteran Dick Clark. In a setting where obsequiousness was the rule, Prince decided to opt instead for insolence. “He knew he wasn’t going to suck up to Dick Clark and act like other idiots that go on that show,” said one band member, recalling the meeting where Prince told them how to treat the host.
An unwitting Clark listened as Prince and band lip-synced to “Lover.” The host then moved into what he expected to be a formulaic interview before the second song. Instead, Prince remained mute, gazing contemptuously at Clark. Asked about his age, the 21-year-old Prince replied that he was 19. Clark, his nerves fraying, responded nonsensically, “Well, then you have another year to go before you graduate.”
Next, when Clark asked how many instruments he played, Prince answered, “Thousands.” He held up four fingers in response to a question about how long he had been a musician. Embarrassed and frustrated, Clark truncated the segment.
In the immediate aftermath, it was unclear whether the event had been a fiasco or a triumph. In the short term, Prince had alienated a powerful television host and surely made no friends in the entertainment industry. But he was also throwing down a marker, and declaring that the media establishment existed to serve his needs, not vice versa.
Just the same, the wisdom of this approach was far from clear at Warner Bros. “His early interviews were really awkward,” said Bob Merlis, a former company publicist. “We thought maybe he just shouldn’t do them – they were bizarre, risqué.” In one interview, for example, Prince taunted a print reporter with questions about her pubic hair.
Prince, however, was not only comfortable with these methods, but saw a purpose in them that others did not. He wanted to shock, and felt that this was much more likely to make him famous than ingratiating himself with television hosts. Most appearances on The Dick Clark Show were forgotten almost as soon as they were over; Prince’s would be discussed for weeks if not years. “Prince was saying, ‘Dick Clark, you’re gonna remember me,’” Bobby Z. observed. “And he did.”
11. Battle I
Rick James on the Fire it Up! Tour
After Prince’s first two television appearances, his managers seemed to have stumbled upon another perfect opportunity – an opening slot on a tour headlined by Rick James, a powerhouse in the R&B market. Prince’s first solo tour, despite occasionally rabid audience responses like that experienced in Denver, had been spotty in terms of ticket sales. The presence of James atop the bill would solve that issue, and there would also be less pressure on Prince as a performer while his young band continued to come together.
For Rick Jame
s’ management team, the presence of Prince – given in particular his growing popularity with young female fans – also offered a benefit. And the pairing offered an enticing opportunity to have two funk artists, one well-established and the other up-and-coming, to duel for fan attention. Promoters thus billed the concerts as “The Battle of Funk.” And James and Prince, both competitive spirits, were only too happy to play along.
Although James was only a decade older and had achieved fame fairly recently, Prince saw him as an ossified figure, a drug-addled buffoon whose funk stylings were derivative and whose image – which included almost comically long, heavily braided hair – was cartoonish. James, meanwhile, saw Prince as an effeminate, overhyped upstart.
James entered the fray with debits and advantages – he was a confident performer, but in many respects an artistic mediocrity. But Prince and his comrades would be tested by the tour as never before. Forty-two shows would occur over two grueling months, taking the bands on circuitous swings through the Midwestern and Southern United States, with occasional stops in Eastern cities. Gigs would often take place four or five nights in a row, each usually in a different city. Lip-syncing on television shows was one thing; performing night-after-night in these demanding circumstances was something else altogether. And the presence of Rick James nearly guaranteed that any number of unexpected and bizarre events would occur.
James, born James Ambrose Johnson, was 30 years old and already a hardened veteran of the music industry when his debut album, Come and Get It! appeared on April 20, 1978 – the same month that Prince’s For You debuted. James was determined to at long last achieve fame and music industry fortune, which appeared to have occurred as two hit singles, “You and I” and “Mary Jane,” skyrocketed up the charts.
Come and Get It! had ended up as a double-platinum smash, and its successor, Bustin’ Out of L Seven, had gone platinum. By the time his third album, Fire It Up!, was released in autumn 1979, James was a potent commercial force.
Born in Buffalo, New York, James was raised as one of eight children by a single mother in a strict Catholic household. Music ran in the family: James’ uncle was Melvin Franklin, bass vocalist of the Temptations, and James himself earnestly pursued a music career from an early age, first by singing on street corners.
James’ teenage attempts to launch a musical career were ultimately thwarted at every turn, and from there his life careened wildly between unbelievable strokes of good fortune and extreme bad luck. First, his efforts to avoid being drafted into the Vietnam War prompted him to join the naval reserve. When this eventually appeared unlikely to keep him out of combat, he hightailed it out of his hometown of Buffalo to Toronto, Canada, becoming a refugee from the draft. There, James managed to connect with future musical luminaries including Joni Mitchell, who in turn introduced James to Neil Young.
Unlikely as it might seem, James entered a hippie phase, joining up with Young and other gifted musicians including Bruce Palmer to create a folk-blues band called the Mynah Birds. Given the immense level of talent in the Mynah Birds, it was unsurprising that the band landed a recording contract with Motown Records. Unfortunately, after the band was on the brink of releasing their first single, Motown discovered that James was a fugitive from the law and nullified the contract.
The military finally caught up to James, and he was arrested for desertion and thrown in the brig in the U.S. After serving a year, James moved to Los Angeles and continued with his musical career, along the way also variously acting as a pimp, running drugs, and writing for Motown.
Of all the stories that emerged from James’ colorful run of legal and illegal activities in California, the most famous may have been his incredible good fortune on the night of August 9, 1969. James, after being invited to a party at the film director Roman Polanski’s Beverly Hills home, got blasted the night before and ended up too hung over to attend. This enabled him to avoid the fate suffered by Polanski’s wife Sharon Tate and four other guests, who were murdered at the party that night by disciples of the cult leader Charles Manson.[190]
By the time his tour with Prince rolled around, James had finally established himself as a major R&B artist on the strength of his first two solo albums. But with decades of hard living behind him, coupled with serious drug addiction issues, he could not have stood in starker contrast to the younger Prince. Unchastened by his brushes with the law and violence, James treated the road as a haven for excess and substance abuse. But Prince, as he had throughout his formative years, disdained drinking and drugs, viewing them as signs of indolence and artistic rot. Whereas Prince had recorded For You at the Record Plant in Sausalito under nearly monastic conditions, James created Fire It Up! at the same studio a year later while fueled by prodigious quantities of cocaine. The clash between the two artists was thus as much cultural as it was musical.
James expected to make short work of Prince in the competition between the two bands. He scoffed at Prince’s androgynous image, which made him seem an unfit rival. What James was not aware of, however, was that Prince, as well as bassist Andre Cymone, had grown up amidst a daily battle of the bands on the Northside of Minneapolis, and reveled in the sort of combat that was about to unfold.
Prince’s second album and James’ Fire It Up! had been released within days of each other in October 1979. By the time Prince joined James’ tour in January 1980, “I Wanna Be Your Lover” had been on the charts for several months and was slowly climbing; it would eventually reach number one on the Billboard R&B singles chart. The initial sales of Fire It Up!, meanwhile, were tepid.
Already feeling threatened, James lurched into erratic behavior from the tour’s initial hours. At the first stop on February 22, 1980 at Fort Worth, Texas, he pointed what appeared to be a gun at Andre Cymone. It was in fact a stage prop that he used while performing his 1979 hit “Love Gun,” but Andre nonetheless took James’ “prank” as a dangerous and foolhardy transgression. Only with Prince’s intervention was Andre dissuaded from a physical altercation with James. “Where I come from, if you pull a gun on somebody, then you better use it,” Andre recalled later.[191]
In the coming nights, as the tour got into full swing, James settled down as he basked in the adulation of audiences that swelled to more than ten thousand on some stops. And it seemed he had little to worry about in terms of competition from Prince. Despite the strong chart performance of “Lover,” audiences were reacting poorly to the opening act; most had come primarily to see James, and some were repulsed by the visual elements of Prince’s act, which evoked homosexuality, transvestism, and a blurring of racial boundaries. That some of the tour’s stops were deep in America’s Bible Belt aggravated such reactions, and racist and anti-gay epithets were frequently hurled during Prince’s first several songs. Seemingly oblivious to the innate moral conservatism of the landscape he was traversing, Prince often played in the nude other than the now-standard pair of black underwear.
Only after a number of dates did this dynamic began to shift. Gradually, by mid-set on many evenings, the band watched with surprise as catcalls turned into cheers.[192] The audiences above all wanted to party, and the energy of Prince’s band was ebullient and infectious. And although Prince appeared effeminate on the surface, audiences quickly detected that his manic energy was in fact aggressively masculine. With his James Brown-inspired stage moves, assured falsetto vocals, and wailing guitar solos, the sheer diversity of his musical talents proved impossible to ignore.
Prince’s compact set list, which never changed for the entire tour, included “Soft and Wet,” “Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad,” “Still Waiting,” “I Feel For You,” “Sexy Dancer,” “Just As Long As We’re Together,” and “I Wanna Be Your Lover.” The rock and funk numbers blended perfectly, and James’ sets seemed lumbering and bloated by comparison.
Prince’s antipathy for his rival increased after James began making unwanted advances towards keyboardist Gayle Chapman. Prince’s response to this threat, oddly, was to insi
st that Chapman’s stage attire – which to date had consisted of a silk Olga brand nightgown – become even sexier. Chapman received a knock on her door late at night after a show in Jacksonville, Florida, and one of Prince’s girlfriends handed over a bag of lingerie. “Prince says wear this or you’re fired,” the young woman said bluntly.[193]
After inspecting the items – which included a bra with cups that were several sizes larger than her petite breasts – an incredulous Chapman told the emissary to tell Prince that she would go shopping the next day, and that he could wait at least that long before firing her. Chapman visited a lingerie shop the next morning and selected a black corset. The entire exercise served in part as a way to further tweak James – not only could he not have Chapman, but she was becoming more sexually desirable by the day.
As the tour wore on, James and his entourage, lost in a haze of drugs and alcohol backstage, were largely oblivious to growing audience enthusiasm during Prince’s opening sets. Prince, by contrast, watched James’s performances from the side of the stage each night, pondering how to further upstage him.
One of James’ set pieces was the song “Bustin’ Out (On Funk).” As the band slogged through an instrumental introduction, James emerged from backstage wearing a striped jail suit, which he ripped off during the song’s climax. While unimpressed with the gag itself, Prince was troubled by the similarity between James’ outfit and the costume worn each night by his keyboardist, Matt Fink. The jailbird motif had been Fink’s creation, and he expressed disappointment when Prince asked him to select another costume. Fink pointed out that James wore the jail suit for not even half of a single song – why did this justify a wholesale costume change?[194] Unmoved, the bandleader told Fink to chose a different persona.