Prince

by Ronin Ro

  Other afternoons, Prince practiced with his band, which expanded its sound to include covers by jazzman Grover Washington and singer-songwriter Carole King. Sly Stone’s deep tone began to inspire Prince’s vocals. So did Stevie Wonder, who was producing melodies with over a dozen instruments. By August 1973, Prince’s band had changed its name to Soul Explosion, after a local TV show André liked. They played high schools and the local YMCA. At a talent show, they battled an older group, Flyte Tyme. “We didn’t have nothing,” said André, referring to their equipment. But Soul Explosion—at the time just Prince, André, their drummer Charles, and a percussionist—asked their opponents, “Can we, like, play on your stuff, man?” In the end, Charles told a deejay for San Francisco radio station KPFA, the judges announced the winner: “Charles’ Cousin and Friends.” The group looked dejected until Charles said, “We won, we won!” Everyone laughed. Someone asked Charles, “Man, when did you change the band’s name?”

  By this time, Prince was making headway with the group, but his strict Aunt Olivia reportedly tired of the noise. And so, as Rolling Stone reported, once again the teenage Prince found himself kicked out of the house and onto the street.

  Eventually, he wound up on André’s doorstep. Once André’s mother Bernadette spoke with Prince’s father John, Prince moved his things into André’s room and staged rehearsals in the basement. “The cutoff time for the music was ten each night,” Bernadette recalled. But some nights Prince lowered the volume and quietly played guitar.

  He also turned on the radio. With blacks representing less than I percent of the local population, station programmers felt there wasn’t a demographic. So Prince listened to black station KUXL until eight thirty, then switched over to rock station KQRS. Soon, he counted Santana, Graham Central Station, Led Zeppelin, and Fleetwood Mac among his favorites. He also dug Jimi Hendrix’s cover of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” and considered Jimi “one of his heroes,” local writer Neal Karlen recalled.

  When he moved into the basement—a move inspired by André’s untidiness—Prince used the weekly allowance John sent him to buy mirrors and a ten-dollar-swatch of rabbit fur. He hung them on his walls, along with the Hendrix posters his female friends brought over.

  Sophomore year, Prince didn’t make the school basketball lineup (for one of the city’s finest teams). At the same time, Duane was moving in on girls that Prince liked. Prince would speak with one, watch Duane arrive, then see them leave as a couple. Prince poured his frustrations into a film class project. In the short movie, he reenacts such a scene, then depicts himself in the library reading a book on kung fu. He uses his newfound martial arts skills to get the girl and defeat his Duane-like competitor, a cast member told the Minneapolis Star Tribune. He also penned new lyrics about two-timing women who leave him for his best friend.

  With basketball no longer an option, Prince threw himself into an extracurricular course, “The Business of Music,” taught by a pianist that once played with Ray Charles. He also mapped out a trajectory toward rock stardom. “Not a musician, but a rock star,” Prince’s future employee Alan Leeds stressed. In Prince’s mind, mass appeal would bring acceptance, power, and security, Leeds suggested.

  At the time, other students were ostracizing him; he was an excellent ball player, but too short to make the team. His older brother’s height made him more attractive to the ladies. Prince meanwhile felt he was in everyone’s shadow. Leeds speculates that Prince told himself, Okay, here’s how I can get back at the world. Here’s how I can get the girls and be the number one guy and get the attention that I never get.

  At sixteen, Prince kept writing songs. “I wrote like I was rich, had been everywhere, and been with every woman in the world,” he said. “I always liked fantasy and fiction.” Instead of tentative two-minute funk ditties, he brought his band seven-minute epics.

  Before he knew it, André was planning his own changes. During one rehearsal, Prince saw André’s shy, freckle-faced North High schoolmate Morris Day watching. Prince resented the intrusion but said nothing. Away from the group, André and Day had cut class and spent the day in Morris’s home, where Morris mentioned he also played drums. After he rocked a few beats, André told him, “Man, you’re good. We just happen to be having some scheduling problems with our current drummer,” referring to Charles, who had been missing practices.

  Within days, Prince saw André lead Day in to another rehearsal, this time to audition. Day got the gig. When Charles arrived another day, he saw Morris’s drums in his usual spot, and asked, “Who sold me out?”

  Everyone said, “Prince.”

  “It wasn’t just me,” Prince cried. “André, too!”

  “Oh, so it’s like that, huh?” Charles faced his replacement. “Morris, man, you’re my friend, and you just took my band like that, man.” Charles shook his head and left.

  Now, Prince played lead guitar, André played bass, Linda handled keyboards, and Morris was on drums. They wore suede-cloth suits with zodiac signs on the back (Prince with Gemini, the twins). Morris’s mother, Lavonne Daugherty, managed them: She shaped a professional image, named them “Grand Central Corporation,” formed a company that technically owned every instrument, and booked as many shows as possible.

  At age seventeen, though he had a local band with some success, Prince still loitered near the McDonald’s on Plymouth and Penn. “I didn’t have any money, so I’d just stand outside there and smell stuff.” Being broke left him tired, bitter, and insecure, he continued. “I’d attack anybody” He couldn’t keep a girlfriend for two weeks. “We’d argue about anything.” Standing there, sniffing the air, he wished he had enough for a cheeseburger, he told reporter Neal Karlen.

  Prince also wanted to leave school. “The only reason I stayed was because of André’s mother,” he later said. Bernadette was permissive about most activities but told him, “All I care about is you finishing school.”

  During their local shows, the band played the same old songs. “I hated top forty” Prince said. Everyone did. But white club owners and audiences expected it so they played “anything that was a hit; didn’t matter who it was.” It held the band back, but eventually earned them enough to finance demo tapes. It also let Prince include his family in his burgeoning career. Between sets, he’d let Tyka come out with her pals and perform the dance moves they picked up from Soul Train.

  One time while performing, he saw his father John in the crowd, taking pictures.

  Performing was great, but still, Prince had to do something more.

  Minneapolis was behind the curve. New music and dances arrived three months later than they did in other cities. Prince had to ignore trends. “Otherwise, when we did split Minneapolis, we were gonna be way behind and dated.” So down in the basement, he filled new lyrics with sexual fantasies and stories about “insane people” (perhaps inspired by half brother Alfred’s institutionalization). “I liked the idea of being insane, of someone who grew up totally alone and ended up in a hospital,” Prince explained in Musician magazine.

  Prince used cassette tape recorders to overdub separate performances onto dual tapes. He kept playing tapes back and taping more sounds on the other deck, teaching himself to arrange and produce. He also mixed incongruent influences—Santana solos with James Brown yells, Sly Stone’s elocution with his father John’s unconventional piano playing (inspired, John claimed, by Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk).

  By December 1975, Prince met Linster Willie at a ski party. Married to Prince’s cousin Shauntel, Linster was a Brooklyn transplant known locally as “Pepé,” who was trying to get his disco group 94 East off the ground. “I remember thinking, ‘Boy, he’s got a big Afro,’” Pepé recalled. Pepe started attending the band’s rehearsals in the attic of a South Minneapolis home. There, Prince played guitar while André handled bass, Morris Day played drums, Andre’s sister Linda played keyboards, and William Doughty added percussion. One day, Pepe asked them to play an original song. “It
was a disaster,” Pepe recalled. The young band would play a song for three minutes, then improvise for ten. Then they leaped into Andre’s work, “You Remind Me of Me.” But Prince was singing “she” while André sang “he.” “I couldn’t believe they didn’t take the time as a group to learn the words,” Pepe continued. He asked them to stop, put their instruments down, and actually learn the lyric.

  Even so, Pepe liked Grand Central’s playing. Before Prince knew it, his manager was telling him Willie wanted to pay Prince and his band for session work. They agreed to play his disco stuff. “We were just trying to make some money,” said André, who played bass, in a radio interview with KPFA.

  Hopes were high in early 1976, when Morris’s mother Lavonne got them into another studio to record six originals. The results so pleased Prince, he bragged about his group in the school newspaper that February. By early spring, Prince was done with school. Despite Day’s mother’s promise that Grand Central would have an album out that summer, that “wasn’t fast enough for Prince,” Bernadette recalled. “He wanted her to get them a contract right away”

  Prince didn’t give up, though. “I’m going to get out there and see if I can make it,” he told Bernadette. But if he couldn’t—if he failed at music like his father John—he still wouldn’t waste his life in some local factory. He’d come back, enroll in college, and “major in music.”

  With no money, dependents, or girlfriends, and without a day job, Prince started writing more songs—up to four a day—about romantic relationships. “All fantasies,” he shrugged, or about ex-girlfriends. He was “broke, and poor, and hungry” and dreaming of meeting people with money, success, and “a lot of food in their fridge.” But he also faced reality. If one thing didn’t work, Grand Central had to try another. He told the band they needed more instruments, assembling a twelve-piece outfit called “Shampagne.” The rest went along, though only four people on stage actually played instruments. “Eight were faking,” said Prince.

  But things weren’t working out. Conversations among the band members became arguments. The others resented Prince’s changes. “It was always me against them,” he said.

  Still, Prince was joined by his bandmates for a session that spring at Moon-Sound, an eight-track studio that charged about thirty-five dollars an hour. He showed up early, sipping from a chocolate shake and ignoring Chris Moon, a young, bearded white man with an Afro. He set his beverage aside, bashed some drums, and played piano. Once everyone arrived, Shampagne worked on a few more songs.

  Later, back at André’s house, the phone rang for Prince. Moon, from the studio, said, “I’ve got an idea for you. I’m looking to put together some music that I have written.” They were on acoustic guitar but needed some piano. He’d pay for Prince’s work.

  And so Prince returned to the South Minneapolis neighborhood to work with Moon. Twenty-four-year-old Moon had moved to town from Britain while in his teens, and tried his hand at everything from advertising, to professional photography to real estate, to promoting local rock concerts. Now, instead of using his homemade studio to tape rock bands and advertising jingles, he wanted to give pop music a try.

  Back at Moon-Sound, Prince finished the piano riffs. Did Moon need bass?

  “Sure, but I don’t want to pay for a bass player.”

  Prince added a bass line, drums, electric guitar, and cascading backup vocals. Awestruck, the studio owner proposed teaming up. He handed Prince a key to the place and handwritten instructions on how to run the equipment. “He’d stay the weekend, sleep on the studio floor,” Moon recalled.

  Prince had bigger aspirations now than his band could handle. “Do you want to stay here, or do you want to go to New York?” he finally asked.

  His bandmates wanted to stay in town. “They liked their lifestyle, I guess,” Prince said.

  He was left with no choice: He left the group.

  2

  DON’T MAKE ME BLACK

  THAT AUTUMN, PRINCE—NOW OUT OF SHAMPAGNE AND STILL nursing his dreams of stardom—spent an hour every day riding city buses to reach the studio. There, he played the new music he wrote for Moon’s lyrics. Some afternoons, Moon rejected the music, urging him to try again. More sessions led to greater confidence. He told Moon he wanted to play everything himself, including drums. Moon said another drummer would play better. “You don’t think I can do it, do you?” Prince asked, according to Steve Perry in Musician magazine.

  Prince stopped acceding to requests for another take on a melody or vocal. “You can’t even play anything,” Prince said at one point. “Why should you be able to tell me what to do?” This was the mood when Moon taped Prince recording a song called “Aces.” Moon asked for another take but Prince wouldn’t do it.

  Finally, Prince relented. “Okay this time. But only because you own the studio!”

  What Moon couldn’t know was Prince’s discomfort at taking center stage. In Grand Central and Shampagne, friends surrounded him. “I never wanted to be a front man,” Prince said. Now, it felt “spooky to be at the mike alone.” He performed moves while singing but was never quite as comfortable as observers might have guessed.

  Relations between the two became more tense, but through it all, Prince and Moon worked side by side at the board. Slowly but surely Prince learned the art of engineering. After six months, Prince was able to run an entire session himself. Prince also started to write more lyrics. Now, he was producing, writing, and playing every note. From the sidelines, Moon called for alternate bass lines or vocals, but Prince mostly ignored him.

  Prince began to further sculpt his image. He practiced his autograph—inserting a heart over the “i” in his name. He also, Moon claimed, agreed to knock two years off his age and go simply by his first name. Most important, Moon continued, Prince listened to Moon stress the importance of attracting a white crossover audience.

  But his image, as Moon told Steve Perry, still needed something. The final piece clicked. Moon began to write a lyric. “Angora fur, the Aegean Sea,” he began. “It’s a soft wet love that you have for me.” Moon shared the lyric with Prince, which he called “Soft and Wet.”

  “I think we’ve got your marketing strategy worked out, and a song to go with it,” Moon remembered telling him. “We’ll have thousands of thirteen- and fourteen-year-old girls going crazy over you.”

  Prince offered what Moon called a rare smile.

  After nine months, and with a few numbers on tape, Prince needed management. On the phone one day, he told his older half sister Sharon, then living in New Jersey about his setbacks in trying to launch his career. Prince wanted to go to New York to get a deal. “Well come here and I’ll help you,” she answered. So, with four songs he and Moon chose from the album they recorded together, and with an invitation from his half sister, he left Minneapolis for New Jersey. He was sure his sister’s winning personality could land him a deal. At the same time, Chris Moon said he’d call labels.

  But after a week on the East Coast, he called Moon to ask why there weren’t any meetings. According to Per Nilsen, Moon admitted he was having trouble—every time he called, receptionists took messages, but no one called back. Still, he kept at it. He told an Atlantic Records receptionist he represented Stevie Wonder. It worked. Within two minutes, a higher-up was on the phone. “This is Chris Moon, and I’m representing Prince. If you like Stevie Wonder, you’re gonna love my artist. He’s only eighteen, he plays all the instruments, and he’s not blind!”

  The executive laughed, Nilsen confirmed. “I don’t know who this artist is but send him in tomorrow morning at nine.” Ultimately, Atlantic rejected Prince’s sound as “too Midwestern” and his songwriting as noncommercial. He would have kept at it, Prince said. But he told Musician magazine “that’s when me and my sister kinda had a dispute.” He was “running up sort of a bill there, at her place,” he said evasively. She wanted him to sell his publishing “for like $380 or something like that, which I thought was kinda foolish.” He said he coul
d form his own publishing company.

  Back home, Chris Moon wanted to get the songs out there. He thought of his associate Owen Husney.

  Husney—only twenty-seven at the time—was a promoter, manager, studio owner, and ran a marketing company. He had played with the High Spirits in the mid to late sixties and achieved some success. That band lasted until late 1968, when their guitarist David Rivkin left. Though he’d abandoned a musical career, Husney excelled at advertising and still loved music.

  There, in an office overlooking a small park with lakes, on the edge of downtown Minneapolis, Husney listened as Moon told him over the phone that “he had the next big thing in music,” Husney remembered. Having heard this many times during his career, Husney didn’t pay any attention to him.

  After hearing the same claim every day for a week, Husney relented. “Finally on Friday I told him to come into my office, but for just a minute,” Husney said. When the cassette began, Husney knew in one second (“being a musician myself”) that Moon had something. The songs were pretty long—ten to twelve minutes apiece—but when Prince’s tape ended, Husney said, “Not bad. Who are they?”

  Moon replied, “It’s one seventeen-year-old kid.”

  “Who?”

  “Prince.”

  Husney wasn’t as impressed by the songs as much as the fact that one guy had done everything.

  “You gotta be kidding!” he told Moon. “I mean this is ridiculous. Where is he? Let’s just get him on the phone now.”