Prince

by Ronin Ro

  He invited Prince to open during the Fire It Up Tour. Prince accepted, and suddenly he found himself with a chance to perform before thousands. The two musicians finally met in late January. James entered through a venue’s backstage entrance and saw Prince behind Bobby Z’s drums “playing some bullshit beat.” They’d be sharing stages for thirty-eight shows during the next nine weeks, but James sat behind his group’s drum set “where he [Prince] could see me,” James recalled, and started “playing some serious shit.” Prince watched him, James claimed, “and just got his little ass up and walked away”

  When Prince finally performed, Rick James said, “I felt sorry for him.” He was a “little dude” in high heels and a trench coat, standing in one spot on stage while playing New Wave. “Then at the end of his set he’d take off his trench coat and he’d be wearing little girl’s bloomers.” James laughed. Men in the audience “just booed this poor thing to death.” He let Prince keep opening—but he came to regret it.

  Every time James played, the headliner recalled, he saw Prince on the side of the stage “just staring and watching everything I did, like a kid in school.” James approached during a song and pointed his bass “right in his face,” grabbed his own crotch, gave Prince the finger, then kept playing. “He was remembering everything I did, like a computer,” James alleged. He kept doing what he called trademark moves: flipping the microphone stand, catching it “backwards, you name it,” doing call and response chants, with a hand on an ear while the crowd yelled back.

  One night, James entered an arena and heard the crowd chanting. He rushed to see what was happening. “Here’s Prince doing my chants,” James claimed in his 2007 memoir, Memoirs of a Super Freak. Prince was also “stalking the stage” like him, James insisted in print, doing his “funk sign”—holding up his thumb, forefinger, and pinky (a move today’s metal fans call “devil horns”)—“flipping the microphone and everything. The boy had stolen my whole show.” James was furious and so were his band members. But it kept happening night after night, he maintained. He saw more of his routine. It reached a point where James couldn’t do his own show, he said, because after the crowd saw Prince doing it, it “started to look like I was copying him.”

  Despite James’s claims, Prince was actually wary of similarities. At the time, Prince’s keyboardist Matt Fink had an image that consisted of a black-striped jail suit. But after a few shows—in which James donned one before his tune “Bustin’ Out of L Seven”—he asked Fink for other costume ideas. “How about a guy in a doctor suit?” Fink replied. Prince liked it. That day, wardrobe people found scrubs at a uniform shop, Fink recalled, “and I have been Dr. Fink ever since.”

  Though James spoke frequently of a competition, his onetime protege Teena Marie explained, “It wasn’t really Prince. It was more Rick than anything.” While Prince ignored him, James privately loved Prince’s music, she said, “although he would never admit to it.” (James, in fact, did later publicly credit Prince with being “a great player and a very innovative person.” But that came later).

  The tour continued. Furious songwriting sessions in various hotel rooms found him incorporating new influences. Sitting with a guitar after a Birmingham date led to “When You Were Mine,” an upbeat number with a melancholy message and a John Lennon-like vocal arrangement.

  He soon showed the band the up-tempo pop song. Its high-pitched organ, snare-heavy beat, and vocals (including backup) all screamed early Beatles. “It was probably inspired by an old girlfriend,” said Fink.

  Between concerts, Prince taught them another new song, “Head.” It described his meeting with a bride minutes before her wedding. She was in her gown, he sang, but still wanted to perform fellatio. He felt the shock value would draw more fans and reporters—but it had an immediate effect on the band. He wanted to perform “Head” on stage, with the blond—and religious—Gayle leaving her keyboard. As everyone played its cyclic groove, chanting its one-word title, she would perform a back bend. “The idea was in part inspired by Bob Fosse’s dance theater,” Gayle recalled. Once she bent, she added, “He would finger keyboard parts on my stomach in rhythm with what Matt was playing.” Other times, he’d play guitar. She’d kneel before him and bend backward “and he walked right over me. No hand gestures or funny mouth position.” Then, on two occasions, when the song ended, they French-kissed for about thirty seconds.

  Within a few shows Gayle left the band. She did so, she said, for “a number of reasons, the biggest of which was I needed more out of life than working as an employee in his band could offer at the time.” She stopped by his house on Orofino Bay on Lake Minnetonka. When they finished talking, they were still friends, she added. He told her if she ever needed his help, she should reach out. “And we left it at that,” she said.

  It was back home in Minnesota, between dates, that Prince steered his tiny Fiat through the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport to pick up a recent high school graduate. She asked if she could smoke. He said sure. “I don’t think his ashtray had ever been used,” she recalled in the Star Tribune. “He was really romancing me.”

  The young woman’s name was Lisa Coleman, and her father was a veteran session musician. By age nine, Lisa was studying classical piano. In 1971, her father had her join six other kids in a group that released a bubblegum pop album. After it flopped, Lisa attended Hollywood High and earned independent-study credits with original melodies and Joni Mitchell-style lyrics. “I basically just stayed home from school and wrote songs.”

  As an English major at Los Angeles Community College, Coleman maintained a 4.0 average and read voraciously—before dropping out. She was working for a documentary-film company’s shipping department (on the dock), and teaching piano when a friend at Cavallo-Ruffalo said Prince needed a replacement for Gayle Chapman. Coleman recorded a demo, and mailed it in.

  Prince was struck by it. He asked his managers to invite her to Minneapolis for a private audition. With Lisa now in Minnesota, Prince’s Fiat reached his house. He led her into his downstairs workspace and pointed at the piano. “You can go play, and I’ll be right back.” He was heading upstairs to change clothes. Suspecting he heard every note, she sped through a Mozart concerto she had been working on. “He came bounding down the stairs,” she said. He lifted a guitar and they jammed. “From the first chord, we hit it off.”

  She stayed the weekend in his spare bedroom. She walked through the house and peeked into his bedroom, where she saw the poster for the Kristofferson and Streisand remake A Star Is Born on a wall. “I thought that was so cute,” she recalled.

  Prince meanwhile liked her look, and started thinking of penning a song that urged her to leave her boyfriend and join him for a movie—and more. Whether anything romantic transpired between them is unknown. What is known, however, is that in later years, Lisa would form a romantic involvement that would last for about two decades, with another woman.

  Now, with an invitation to play in Prince’s band, Coleman had about a week to relocate. But she was elated. He played well and had an integrated band. “When I first joined the band,” she told Rolling Stone, “I got solace from the fact that here were some other people so different that they only fit in there.”

  With Coleman replacing Gayle in the band, he was able to return his focus to his next album, which he had taken to calling Dirty Mind, songs which he had begun writing during his tour with James. He knocked out new songs called “American Jam,” “Big Brass Bed,” “Plastic Love Affair,” “Eros,” “Bulgaria,” “Rough,” “When the Shit Comes Down,” and his maudlin “Lisa.” New ideas kept coming, so he left enough songs off to fill another full-length work.

  His mood became as dark as some of his song themes. As Prince told Rolling Stone’s Neal Karlen, “fits of depression” at this stage had left him “physically ill.” He frequently reached for the phone to “call people to help get me out of it.”

  His song “Sister” was another fast, shocking song. After singing about sleeping with
his sister—and enjoying it—he’d croon, “Oh sister, don’t put me on the street again.” The song’s narrator is confused, scared, willing to do anything to avoid homelessness.

  The tour with Rick James continued, and so did his bedevilment. Eventually, James’s frustrations boiled over. He told Prince’s manager if he stole any more of James’s moves he was off the tour. Another day both managers and bands had a meeting. In Prince’s room, James’s band—tall men in braids and leather—sat at one side, James explained, while Prince’s band—“in their eyelashes and makeup”—sat at the other looking “very afraid.” James’s band seemed ready to physically attack.

  According to James’s memoir, Prince sat on a bed during the meeting and mostly stayed quiet. “He acted like a little bitch while his band and mine patched up their differences,” James claimed. After this talk, James said, “things went back to normal,” namely, James upstaging Prince every night.

  Yet, despite alleged tensions—apparently caused by James himself—James invited them all to his birthday party. Prince attended that night and sat at a table but didn’t drink. James, who loved partying almost as much as funk, claimed he then walked up, grabbed the back of Prince’s hair, and forced cognac into his mouth. “He spit it out like a little bitch and I laughed and walked away,” James claimed in print. He loved, James admitted, “fucking with him like that.”

  By spring 1980, the shows, and Rick James, were behind him. Thanks to his long and winding dance hit “I Wanna Be Your Lover,” Prince reached No. 3 on Billboard’s Soul Album Chart—staying there twenty-three weeks—and No. 22 on the Pop Chart. But after the lead single, Warner shipped “Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?” to stores and sold few copies of the funk-rock single. Warner decided to shift gears, putting out his schmaltzy ballad “Still Waiting.” Same thing. Little interest. By May, after a twenty-eight-week stay on the Pop Chart, Prince vanished.

  Prince himself left his first house in Edina, and carted his possessions and makeshift sixteen-track studio into a rental in a secluded, costly western suburb near Lake Minnetonka. There he worked mostly alone in his densely packed basement on Dirty Mind. At the end of the Rick James tour, Prince had searched in vain for his synthesizers, only to find they were gone. Rick James, Teena Marie explained, had taken them and was using them in Sausalito, California, to record his next album, Street Songs. Only when James finished recording would he write thank you on a postcard and send it and the equipment back to Prince. The theft only added to Prince’s agitation. But he kept working.

  He recorded most songs quickly, during all-night sessions. As usual, he used his falsetto on a few numbers. He hoped lyrics would shock people and draw attention. He wrote about oral sex (“Head”), incest (“Sister”), orgies (“Uptown”), bedding a woman in her “daddy’s car” (the title track); satisfying another (“Jack U Off”), and an ill-fated threesome (“When You Were Mine”).

  Musically, he abandoned horns, cluttered keyboards, and excessive overdubs and turned to electronic instruments he hoped would differentiate him from other acts on the market. His drum machine created pounding dance beats, synthesizers delivered icy melodies, and he strummed a few minimal riffs on guitar. “He really found himself with that album,” drummer Bobby Z felt. He wrote better songs, and “the roughness of it gave it an edge. It was a little more garage sounding.”

  With more songs in the can, he played his albums back to back, and heard the difference. His first two had more falsetto, serenading women or else begging them to stay. “I was in love a lot back then when I used to make those records. The emotion meant more.”

  Now, he felt that he had been gullible, he told Musician magazine. “I believed in everybody around me. I believed in Owen, I believed in Warner Brothers, I believed in everybody. If someone said something good to me, I believed it.” He hinted that he had been pressured to write ballads. And he once liked romantic themes, felt good singing those words. But much had happened the past three years. His new stuff reflected his anger. His lyrics avoided talk of deep feelings or romance. Song after song said he wanted a good time. “I’m screaming more now than I used to.”

  He also remained open to including his band members. During one performance rehearsal, he heard Fink play an intriguing synthesizer groove. At day’s end, he invited Fink to his home, played Fink the basic track of “Dirty Mind,” then had him re-create the riff. He wrote a bridge and altered a few things “and that was it,” Fink recalled. “I got home about one in the morning.” After another hour of work, Prince put it on tape. Ten hours later, at rehearsal, he showed the band a rough mix complete with vocals. “He had stayed up, written lyrics, and finished the whole thing after I left,” Fink said. “We were amazed.” He and Fink worked the same way for “Head.” As the song blared from speakers, Fink improvised five or six solos. “Prince had final approval of course,” he said, but Fink’s ideas made the cut.

  He created another song after letting Morris Day use his studio. Once the freckly faced black drummer left, Prince listened to one of his grooves and wrote a lyric called “Partyup.” He rerecorded Morris’s track and then offered him a choice of ten thousand dollars or help landing a record deal. Morris, who washed cars for a living, wanted the deal.

  Keyboards dominated Dirty Mind, but Prince also used the tougher sounding Oberheim synthesizer and an electric piano. “When You Were Mine” had a sixties Farfisa-style organ sound that evoked sixties garage rock. Minimal guitar—letting falsetto, large drums, and throbbing bass carry tunes—added to his gripping new sound. The songs were far more aggressive than anything on For You or Prince. Within twelve days, he had finished the album. “I became totally engulfed in it,” he said. And no one was able to tell him to include ballads. “It really felt like me for once.”

  With another album recorded, he had to make sure the cover reflected his bold new direction. In a studio one hot summer day, with the band rehearsing in the background, he slipped a scarf around his neck, like an outlaw, then slid into his long duster coat. The raincoat had a studded right shoulder and a round button, pinned to his left lapel, which read, “Rude Boy.” Then he stared down photographer Allen Beaulieu’s camera while standing in front of what resembled a bedspring hanging on a wall. To Beaulieu’s surprise, Prince opened the coat to reveal nothing but black briefs and matching thigh-high boots. His straightened, spiky hair, his “rude boy” button, and the rumpled raincoat made him fit in with this emerging “New Wave” market. The band photo meanwhile, also black and white, with male and female members, would soon strike one rock writer as furthering the new wave, two-tone checkerboard motif. Come time to list credits, he also included pseudonymous Jamie Starr as engineer—Matt Fink said that was Prince not wanting “it to seem like he did everything.”

  Prince took his heartfelt home-recorded demos to California to redo them. After playing them for one of his managers, he heard the man say, “This is the best stuff I’ve heard in a long time. This should be your album.” Prince felt the same way. This album held the sort of music he really wanted to hear.

  His managers submitted the tapes to Warner as is. But Warner didn’t know what to think. The label expected more hits like “I Wanna Be Your Lover.” But during his visits to the label, Prince was a changed man. With Dirty Mind possibly the final album on the contract, he marched down office corridors in bikini briefs, high heels, makeup, and an open, flapping trench coat. Gone was the shy, retiring musician who let his managers do the talking. He told the label to release these home demos—which included a few lyrics no radio deejay would play. Warner for their part “flinched at just about everything,” he recalled. One person, he remembered, said, “The sound of it is fine. The songs we ain’t so sure about. We can’t get this on the radio. It’s not like your last album at all.”

  He answered, “But it’s like me; more so than the last album; much more so than the first one.”

  Other employees kept complaining about its low-fidelity and lyrics. But after more discu
ssion, Warner finally agreed to release Dirty Mind as is.

  In Los Angeles that June, Prince booked time at Hollywood Sound Recorders and mixed the album. For a week and a half, he made a number of important creative decisions. On some numbers, harmonies were a bit messy. But he left them on. He also resisted the urge to add new elements, or improve what grooves he did set over drums. “The rhythm tracks I kept pretty basic,” he said later. “I didn’t try a lotta fancy stuff so I didn’t have to go back and do things over.” People in Warner’s promotion department predicted these lyrics, not to mention releasing demos, simply wouldn’t work, but his managers supported him. “Sure it was a risky record,” Bob Cavallo conceded. “Some thought we were losing our minds.” But it was brilliant and sure to impress reporters. In the end, Warner rolled with it.

  With Warner’s decision to renew on the line, there was more than just the provocative new album’s success at stake for Prince.

  5

  I MAY NOT BE A STAR

  ON OCTOBER 8, 1980, WARNER RELEASED DIRTY MIND. CRITICS called it a winning fusion of rock, pop, and soul, with risque themes, flamboyance, and falsettos. Rolling Stone gave it four and a half stars. The Village Voice placed it in that year’s Top Ten. The Los Angeles Times and Newsweek sang its praise. Critically, it was his most successful album to date (and perhaps ever). But not everyone liked its frankness. After Prince played him the album, his own father John Nelson complained, “You’re swearing on the record. Why do you have to do that?”