The Rise of Prince 1958-1988

by Hahn, Alex

  Even Fargnoli, charged with convincing Warners to release the record, was lukewarm and himself had started to harbor doubts about the direction of Prince’s career. “I think Steve was getting to the point where he started to feel like he didn’t need this,” said Warners’ Marylou Badeaux. “It’s not unusual for an artist to make demands of his management, but some of Prince’s demands were getting more and more out in left field.”

  The dispute also marked a turning point in the relationship between Prince and Ostin, who was deeply concerned about the economics of a triple-album set. Shortly after learning of the project, Ostin visited Sunset Sound to hear the record and meet with Prince and Fargnoli. His response after listening to the album shocked and angered Prince. “I respect your vision, but it just won’t fly,” he said, insisting that Prince pare Crystal Ball to a double album.

  Prince refused to back down, and the battle over the album continued for several weeks. “There were a lot of meetings, a lot of loud hollering, a lot of frustration,” recalled Leeds. “It was very, very ugly.”

  Faced with the reality of his diminished commercial clout, Prince finally agreed to trim the set as Warners had asked. But he felt that the company had destroyed his meticulously constructed masterwork, and the relationship would never be the same. And with the project having fundamentally changed, his ardor for the album also cooled. “Prince lost interest beginning with editing it into two albums,” observed Leeds. “He had allowed himself to see it only as a three-record set, and as such it seemed to him an incomplete work – not the true vision he had set out.”

  Prince reluctantly scrapped the lengthy title track, which took up nearly half an album side, meaning that the album would also have to be re-titled. Clare and Brent Fischer, after putting so much effort into “Crystal Ball,” were disappointed to learn the song might never be released. Prince also discarded strong cuts like “Good Love,” an exuberant pop song that used the “Camille” vocal technique, and “Joy In Repetition.”

  Adding to Prince’s worries and frustrations, in December 1986, Susannah finally decided that she’d had enough; she packed her things and returned to Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley, joining Wendy and Lisa. “You can only subject yourself to so much, unless you’re self-abusive, and she had a lot of respect for herself,” observed Karen Krattinger. “He probably would have kept her back and forth on a yo-yo forever.” Prince had in short order experienced a professional disappointment and personal disruption, causing the enthusiasm that had burned so brightly just months ago to all but disappear.

  One evening shortly after Susannah’s departure, Susan Rogers could tell something was very wrong when Prince came down to the basement studio. Looking disconsolate and barely speaking, he began constructing a song around a melancholy piano pattern. His spoken lyrics portrayed a fictional dialogue between himself and Wally Safford, a dancer in the band. Sounding sad and lost, Prince asks Wally to borrow fifty dollars and some sunglasses so he can impress his lover, but then changes his mind and returns the items, telling Wally that since he is alone now, he has no one to spend the money on. Prince was accompanied only by piano throughout the verse, but guitar, bass, and drums entered as the song built into a chorus on which he sings the phrase, “o-ma-la-di-da.”

  Watching Prince construct the song, which he called “Wally,” Rogers was stunned by the honest emotion and wistful resignation it conveyed. She saw the song both as a farewell to Susannah and a means of expelling the poison of a failed relationship.

  “Do you know that malady means sickness, illness in French?” Prince asked Rogers, referring to the phrase he sings in the chorus. “It’s almost like the word melody, isn’t it?” Prince, who rarely exposed his inner feelings, even in his music, was groping for a metaphor that would convey his feelings of loss. Rogers felt it was a turning point in his songwriting.

  But as the session continued, Prince started to distance himself from the creation. He added extraneous instruments that diminished the song’s clarity. A percussion part cluttered the verse, detracting from the lyrics.

  “Don’t you think it was better before, Prince?” Rogers said, and then gently suggested, “Maybe we should stop.” He ignored her, adding a synthesizer riff. Soon it became clear to her: he was intentionally destroying the song. After larding the piece with additional instruments, he finally spoke.

  “Now put all twenty-four channels on record and erase it,” he told Rogers.

  “No, you can’t do this!” Rogers said, dismayed by the prospect of losing this defining creation.

  “If you don’t, I will,” Prince responded.

  Rogers stood her ground, and Prince was forced to operate the soundboard himself as he destroyed his own music. “Wally,” like his relationship with Susannah, Wendy, and Lisa, involved more emotional intensity than Prince was willing to accept. “I thought it was the greatest thing he had done,” said Rogers. “I had waited years to hear a Prince song like this. I ached to hear him be this honest.”

  Yet, Prince’s refusal to explore his feelings was not altogether surprising. Rogers had discussed the topic of depression with him before and found Prince contemptuous of the very notion. “He thought it was practically a sin to be depressed,” she remembered. Many other associates had observed that Prince – not only in his relationships, but even in his music – was cryptic and unrevealing of his deepest feelings. “His music is very passionate, but he doesn’t let himself open up emotionally,” observed Marylou Badeaux. “And look at the way he’s dealt with women in his life – he’s not able to get emotional, he just kept it on the level of sex play.”

  “Wally” indeed served as a metaphor for how Prince felt about the destruction of Crystal Ball and the loss of Susannah. He wanted to erase that pain and move on, and sought in some fashion to accomplish this by also erasing “Wally.”

  Although Susannah had never formally been part of the Revolution, her personal and creative influence on Prince from 1983 to 1986 rivaled that of Wendy and Lisa. With her exit from the scene, the Revolution period ended irrevocably. The epitaph of this time would be “Wally,” a song no one would hear.

  25. Asterisk

  After being forced to pare down Crystal Ball to a double album, Prince retitled it Sign O’ The Times. The striking cover art showed a cluttered background of debris, including a junked auto; on the far right, in the foreground, is a blurry image of half of Prince’s face. The first single, “Sign O’ The Times,” tackled social and political issues, referencing the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, the spread of AIDS, and Reagan’s “Star Wars” missile defense program. This brilliant song became another prime example of Prince’s ability to mix artistry and commercialism. Sung somberly in his lower register, “Sign O’ The Times” sounded subdued, almost withdrawn, yet bristled with an underlying tension and angst. Far more challenging than most Top 40 fare, it nonetheless reached No. 3 on the Billboard Pop Singles Chart, an auspicious beginning for the project.

  Notwithstanding Prince’s disappointment over having to trim Crystal Ball, Sign O’ The Times was greeted as the crowning achievement he had wanted the triple album to be. Critical reaction to the album, which was released in March 1987, was almost uniformly strong, and it was compared to masterpiece double albums like the Rolling Stones’ Exile On Main Street and the Beatles’ White Album. “Truly this man is a genius,” wrote Ted Mica in Melody Maker. “There are hints of the Temptations, slices of Isaac Hayes, traces of Sly Stone, even footprints of Robert Palmer.” Q magazine lauded Prince’s “sophistication and chops” and commended him for creating a “funk ... edge that slices straight into the soft white gut of pop.”

  The triumph of Sign O’ The Times owed to many factors, among them Prince’s focus and drive following the exit of Wendy and Lisa, his facility with musical technologies like the Linn LM-1, and also the many new influences he had assimilated so rapidly. “To my ears, the better of the material seemed the artistic culmination of all the things he ha
d been exposed to and absorbed from Wendy, Lisa, Sheila, and Eric over the previous couple of years,” said Alan Leeds. “It showed musical growth and maturity, while taking him back to his R&B roots like no record of his since 1999.”

  And yet, Prince was somewhat unmoved by praise for the album. For him, Sign O’ The Times would always have an asterisk next to it, denoting that it should have been a three-album masterpiece entitled Crystal Ball. Sales figures, meanwhile, began to taper off rather quickly after an initial burst of purchases by serious fans. A key misstep accelerating this trend was Prince’s selection of “If I Was Your Girlfriend” as the second single; the song proved too quirky for radio.

  Still, optimism remained high at Warner Bros. and among Prince’s bandmates that the album could be revived on the charts when a two-month European tour in support of Sign O’ The Times began in May. Prince’s popularity in Europe was still increasing, and the well-designed show proved to be one of the most exciting of his career. The absence of Wendy and Lisa was filled to some extent by the kinetic Sheila E., whose percussion work added a new dimension to Prince’s live sound and electrified crowds. The other members of the revamped band included Levi Seacer, Jr. on bass, Boni Boyer on keyboards and vocals, Matt Fink on keyboards, and Miko Weaver on guitar. Another new member was dancer Cat Glover, who became a visual focal point. The carryovers from the Parade tour, along with Fink and Weaver, were Eric Leeds on saxophone and Matt Blistan on trumpet. Dancers Jerome Benton, Greg Brooks, and Wally Safford also remained onstage, but were less prominent than on the Parade tour.

  The evenly paced set emphasized the strong Sign O’ The Times material and gave the band ample opportunity to jam, particularly on the lengthy set-closer, “It’s Gonna Be A Beautiful Night.” The tour was a success in every respect, convincing Warners and Prince’s management that a U.S. tour could reinvigorate sales of Sign O’ The Times in the United States.

  But Prince had other plans. Frustrated by the tepid response of American consumers, and already impatient to move onto his next project, he opted instead to have the final shows of the European tour filmed and packaged into a concert film for American audiences. “To put it very bluntly, the film was Prince’s way of getting out of doing the tour,” said Alan Leeds. “Nobody was in favor of the idea.” Warners’ film division, leery about Prince’s filmmaking after Under The Cherry Moon, declined to get involved, forcing him to find another distributor.

  Prince’s hurry to conclude the campaign stemmed from his desire to move on to other projects, including what he expected would be a major feature film called Graffiti Bridge. By characterizing it as a sequel to Purple Rain, and reprising some of the plot elements and actors, he hoped to attract financing and film studio support. And by recruiting Madonna as the female lead, he would create an alliance of two of the decade’s most iconic and marketable figures.

  Although she and Prince had stayed in touch only sporadically since their romance petered out in 1985, Madonna agreed to travel to Minnesota to discuss the project. Wanting to welcome his co-star in style, Prince had an apartment lavishly furnished for her. “He thought she would fall in love with the screenplay and stay a month,” recalled Karen Krattinger, who was in charge of Madonna’s arrangements. Instead, the Material Girl left the unit after one night, preferring the amenities offered by an upscale hotel. Her reaction to Graffiti Bridge was much more disturbing; she brazenly told Prince the screenplay was awful and then split town, leaving the project in doubt and without a strong co-star.

  Despite this setback, Prince had plenty to celebrate as fall 1987 arrived; his Paisley Park Studios complex was complete. Located in the Minneapolis suburb of Chanhassen, just a few minutes’ drive from Prince’s home, the facility included three recording studios, a 12,400-foot soundstage for live performances and film productions, and various business offices for a growing staff. Below was a garage where Prince entered in his purple BMW, and from where he took a private elevator to the ground floor. Studio A, his main workplace, boasted a forty-eight-track console, an array of high-tech equipment, and an isolation room with granite walls to generate brilliantly clear reverb sounds.

  All of this had been made possible by the largesse generated by Purple Rain, making Paisley Park a tangible expression of everything Prince had accomplished. During a recording session at Sunset Sound not long before Paisley opened, Susan Rogers experienced a tender moment that underscored how far he had come from his life growing up on the Northside. Rogers excused herself from the session to make a phone call; when she returned, she apologized for her absence and mentioned that she had just closed on a new home. Prince asked where.

  “Lake Harriet,” Rogers responded, referring to a picturesque lake in Southwest Minneapolis surrounded by expensive homes.

  Surprisingly, Prince became emotional. “When I was a kid, I always dreamed that someday I’d grow up, be rich, and live on Lake Harriet,” Prince responded. “And now I’ve got people working for me who live on Lake Harriet.” A few minutes later, Prince had bottles of champagne brought in to toast her triumph.

  Because Paisley would be expensive to run and maintain, Steve Fargnoli prevailed upon Prince to allow other musicians to book studio time when he didn’t need it. An obscure band called Limited Warranty was first to use Studio A; Prince noticed their master tapes on a console during a tour of the finished complex with Rogers. “The place was beautiful; he was grinning ear-to-ear,” the engineer recalled. Prince opened up the boxes containing Limited Warranty’s music and smirked at Rogers. “Wouldn’t it be funny,” he asked, “If we stayed up all night and did overdubs on their tape?” Rogers gave him a worried look. Prince kept smiling, but put the boxes down and resumed wandering about the facility.

  ***

  Before Prince could actively work on new music at the studio, the Sign O’ The Times campaign needed to be wrapped up, which he wanted to do expeditiously. As soon as editing of the Sign O’ The Times film was complete, Prince insisted on rushing the movie into theaters in November 1987 against the judgment of his advisors; the release date guaranteed it would be lost in the swirl of year-end Oscar contenders. “A number of us told him that the release date was a mistake, but in his mind, we were just trying to undermine him,” Badeaux said.

  And unfortunately, the movie failed to capture the ambiance of the electrifying European shows. Although the music was culled from the concert tour, the video footage was too grainy for professional use, and Prince decided to reshoot the visuals on a soundstage at Paisley Park. The band was thus forced to lip-sync to previously recorded live material, giving the film a sterile feel despite its powerful music. Only at one point did it soar, during “Forever In My Life.” Prince, center stage with only an acoustic guitar, riffs playfully and then delivers a searing vocal as Boni Boyer, Sheila E., and other band members contribute gospel-like backup singing over a simple drum-machine riff.

  The film, while critically praised, was a commercial flop and failed to boost sales for the album. Prince, having already skipped the U.S. tour, largely withdrew from promotional activities for Sign O’ The Times, much to the dismay of Warners. Recalled company vice president Marylou Badeaux: “We needed more time with the record, but he was done with Sign O’ The Times in every way.”

  Seeking to regain momentum by tacking in an entirely different direction, Prince conceived of a strange project to be called The Black Album. As kind of a rejoinder to The Beatles, a record that became known as “The White Album,” it would have no cover art or identifying markings, other than a stark black front and back. The name “Prince” would not appear.

  Most of the music had been recorded over the past couple of years, but Prince deliberately selected songs that were dark and gritty to comport with the overall concept of the project. When Warners officials listened to the album, they found lascivious funk jams, anarchic jazz-rock instrumentals, and nothing resembling a radio-friendly single. On “Bob George,” Prince’s voice slowed down to a Barry White-like growl; o
n “Superfunkycalifragisexy,” he sang about bondage, masturbation, and sexual rituals involving both gerbils and squirrel meat. The Warners officials blanched; in many respects the album would be commercially just as risky as Crystal Ball.

  Another major catalyst behind the album was Prince’s desire to reconnect with his African-American fan base. His various excursions into rock, along with the fawning attention he received from the largely white critical establishment, left him worried about perceptions that he had strayed from his roots; The Black Album’s emphasis on funk was designed in part to compensate for “whiter” records like Purple Rain and Around The World In A Day. But beyond this, Prince’s vision for the album was otherwise not particularly clear, and the “dark” nature of the music was more reflective of his mood following the demises of Crystal Ball and his relationship with Susannah.

  From the perspective of Warners, The Black Album was emblematic of the label’s concerns about Prince’s career. The company desperately wanted Prince to come up with catchy songs that would re-establish him as a potent hitmaker and guide him back towards Purple Rain-like levels of fame. What it got instead was The Black Album.

  Adding to the confusion and angst at the label, Warners was still in the process of promoting Sign O’ The Times, and the immediate release of another album would clash with those efforts. “We told him, you can’t put a record out to interfere with the existing record.” Ostin recalled. “But he insisted, and we again went along with him.”[224]