by Ronin Ro
Dez meanwhile told the crowd, “Get ready for the Stones!”
They went into “When You Were Mine” from Dirty Mind, with Dez assisting on vocals and Prince using his deeper, natural voice. When this ended, the crowd applauded. But then, Prince started “Jack U Off,” an unreleased number from Controversy. With its cluttered arrangements, tempo, and the arena’s speakers, it was hard to hear. The falsetto and the audiences—yelling, booing, high on drugs—created a recipe for disaster. Still, the band played their speedy keyboard music over drum machine beats and handclaps, while Prince did some of his signature moves. For the crowd, this sounded like disco during an extremely divisive period in pop music. Even worse, Bobby recalled, the crowd “thought we were saying ‘fuck you’ or something. Then stuff came flying like you wouldn’t believe.” Prince sang its final lyric: “And as a matter of fact … you can jack me off!” The band stopped playing, but now the crowd was booing. Eventually, the jeers died down and Prince felt confident enough to start “Uptown.”
Mark Brown, playing his first show to one of the group’s largest crowds, struck the first note. An orange from the throng hit his bass. “Knocked him out of tune,” said Bobby. Prince saw the flying objects and heard the jeers. Initially, he told Robert Hilburn, he thought they were just having fun. Well, we just better play, he thought. Dez echoed the sentiment. Dez came within earshot, and told him. “Show ’em we can play, and then it’ll simmer down.” Prince kept performing. But then his eyes landed on “one dude right in the front,” and he saw “the hatred all over his face.” The guy wouldn’t stop throwing things. After fourteen minutes, he had had enough. He didn’t want to perform anymore. “I just wanted to fight him. I got really angry.” He felt like inviting the guy outside to work this out. “You know? How dare you throw something at me?” Prince left the stage.
“I’m sure wearing underwear and a trench coat didn’t help matters but if you throw trash at anybody, it’s because you weren’t trained right at home,” he said.
Dez recalled, “I look around and Prince is gone.” He returned to the stage and leaped into a fiery guitar solo that seemed to subdue the angry crowd.
Prince launched his final song, “Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?,” another guitar-heavy older work. Dez joined in playing its riffs, but Prince’s vocal sounded deflated. After ending the set to polite applause, Prince marched offstage, through the curtains, and out of the arena. Then, Dez recalled, the crowd really started to boo.
Prince was gone, leaving Matt Fink and Bobby Z backstage. The Stones Bill Wyman, Charlie Watts, and Mick Jagger offered their advice, suggesting they hang in there. But by then Prince, furious, was already on his way to a flight back to Minneapolis. Manager Steve Fargnoli said that Prince wouldn’t return for any more shows on the tour.
The band faced each other in defeat. Mainstream rock audiences didn’t want them, drummer Bobby thought. “I was almost in tears. It was catastrophic.”
They returned to their hotel rooms to wait. Promoter Bill Graham and Mick Jagger worried about how to convince Prince to return for the second show. Understandably, Prince wasn’t interested. “He was really, really unhappy,” said Bobby. Eventually, Jagger reached him on the telephone. “He said he didn’t want to do any more shows,” Jagger recalled. Jagger kept asking him to return. He wouldn’t. Drummer Bobby noted, “We had to do it.” He refused until Dez—at Fargnoli’s urging—called. He heard the guitarist describe gigs in biker bars that, until then, had never entertained blacks. “You can’t let them run you out of town,” he added.
Dez was right. Prince returned to LA.
They couldn’t even change the set list to emphasize more rock. There was no time. Right after Friday night’s first concert, the venue covered the stage and prepared for Saturday’s football game with the Rams.
At their next show, new bassist Mark Brown walked onstage for the second time. The eighteen-year-old faced about 110,000 people in the Coliseum and this time froze like a deer in the headlights. Prince came out in his bikini and trench coat. From his vantage point at the drum kit, Bobby felt Prince had an angel watching over him. Just as he started the first song and did a stage move—ducking his head—“a bottle crashed against the drum riser.” Someone threw a fifth of Jack Daniel’s. Then a gallon container slammed into Mark’s bass guitar and exploded. Indignant, Prince walked off stage in the middle of the lengthy “Uptown,” leaving them without an ending. People hurled Coke cups. Unaware of Prince’s departure, Dez kept playing, pointing at crowd members, smiling and waving. But then he looked around and saw their front man had left the stage. That didn’t stop the crowd, though; they kept throwing things. “So I signaled to the rest of the guys: Let’s do likewise.”
But then, Bobby recalled, Prince came right back, and ended the song “and then that was it.” It was tough, but they got through their set.
Prince, however, wanted nothing to do with the tour.
“The other shows we were scheduled to do with them were cancelled,” Dez explained. “We never opened for anyone again.”
6
ALL THE THINGS PEOPLE SAY
ON OCTOBER 14, 1981, WARNER RELEASED CONTROVERSY, Prince’s fourth album. With relief, he saw his return to lighter dance fare sell almost twice as well as Dirty Mind. It went Gold within months and reached No. 21 on the U.S. Album Chart, his highest album placement yet. But critics offered mixed reviews. One thought it was “refreshingly relevant” while another grumbled about “a repetitive jerky Bee Gees pastiche.” And as usual, a few stretched, claiming the music—mostly dance music, drum machines like those on early rap singles—transcended “black” dance music for “white” rock and pop. They also remained divided between whether he was doing smut or had toned down things since Dirty Mind. It was all “senseless noise,” Prince’s future employee Alan Leeds felt, “and particularly aggravating” since his first single had “a witty lyric and catchy funk groove.” The single “Controversy” also got him back onto black radio.
November 20, 1981, the Controversy Tour started in Pittsburgh. The Time opened for him. Instead of the bikini briefs and leg warmers that inspired derision during the Stones gig, Prince wore a purple trench coat, conservative black trousers, a vest, a white shirt, and even a bow tie. He also improved his stage presentation. Huge red-lit Venetian blinds were everywhere. On an upper level—almost a balcony over the band and crowd—he stepped into view behind a blind, his silhouette fused with purple smoke. Bobby Z hit the drums and suddenly Prince appeared, leaping into “Uptown.” When it ended, he slid down the fireman’s pole at center stage and landed in time to start “Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?”
Normally, he felt uneasy taking the stage, especially as front man, he told Musician. This changed. “There was something about coming down the pole and going out in front,” Prince explained. “I felt real comfortable.” Each show ended with him spreading his arms in front of a backlit silhouette of a cross.
The tour moved from city to city, attracting more rock writers. After playing St. Louis, he flew to Los Angeles, to duck into Sunset Sound and expand his dance track, “Let’s Work” for a single. He got Warner this new remix, but also worked on the dance-driven “Baby I’m a Star,” and “Rearrange,” a new work that consisted mostly of him saying, “Rearrange your mind.” But these he set aside, for now.
Warner released his funk song “Let’s Work,” backed with “Ronnie, Talk to Russia,” on January 6, 1982. Its cover showed him in a gray suit without a shirt, with spiky hair and a brown guitar in hand. He looked like a new wave act from MTV.
His managers felt he needed more security. And they had the perfect candidate, too. In Tampa, before his January 1982 show, he held a band meeting in his hotel room and introduced his new guard “Big Chick.” Born Charles Huntsberry, Chick stood six foot eight inches tall, weighed almost four hundred pounds, and had a long white beard some compared to Santa Claus. His resume included some law enforcement in Tennessee and protecting the metal b
and AC/DC. But later that same day, Prince told Dez he was letting Chick go.
“Why?”
“He’s just too big. He scares me.”
Dez, who chatted with Chick on the tour bus, said, “I think he’s a good guy. You should give him a chance.” Chick stayed with the entourage, which grew to include another member in January.
By this point, Prince had chosen his pal Susan Moonsie, wardrobe assistant Brenda Bennett, and Cavallo, Ruffalo & Fargnoli employee Jamie Shoop to be in his next side project, The Hookers. Then, at a club one night, he met twenty-two-year-old former model Denise Matthews.
Born in Ontario to Scottish and Eurasian parents, Matthews had modeled and—as “D.D. Winters”—appeared in the low budget Canadian slasher Terror Train, and Tanya’s Island. “I really did think Prince was gay when I first met him,” Matthews told author Liz Jones. But after they went out to dinner, she added, “I realized he was definitely not gay.”
For weeks after the meeting, he thought of her. He changed his plan for The Hookers: He’d create the group around her, he said. His plan for risque themes and lingerie excited her. He said he wanted to call her “Vagina” (pronounced: “Va-GEE-na”).
Prince was excited at the prospect, but before he could get any further, he had to handle other business.
The second leg of the tour, in February, found Prince sometimes demoting The Time from the bill. With their debut finding an audience (selling 500,000 copies in only seven months), he was allegedly threatened—even terrified—by the band’s success. It didn’t help that one reviewer wrote, “Morris led the band to the point where it now often steals the show … even from Prince.” Prince kept removing them from bills, even though editors at Rolling Stone had decided that he—not The Time—would be on their cover.
Prince let Time members sit in on sessions for his girl group idea. Denise Matthews was to call herself Vanity, now, and lead a group that Prince decided to call Vanity 6. While he averaged a song a day of new material, The Time stood on the sidelines, watching and learning. “He would record everything way too loud,” Jimmy Jam felt. But it made for more excitement and gave each song an edge. He set most songs to catchy synthesizers and mechanical beats from his Linn LM-I. In some ways, Uptown magazine felt, this lighter, playful music was his version of the day’s popular electro-pop sound.
With an album for Vanity 6 recorded, Prince turned his focus to their image. Cover photos were shot in different rooms of his house. Each member added a suggestive quality to her basic lingerie and heels. Vanity, in revealing black teddy, knee-high black leather boots, and tuxedo coat, looked sultry, glamorous, and mysterious. Brenda wore leather belts and straps studded with silver conch shells, a chain-link belt, and a cigarette to give her a “bad girl” persona. Susan’s lace-trimmed white camisole and demure pose offered a spin on the good girl archetype. On the sidelines, Matthews felt, “it was all about being sexy, getting slimmer, and getting cuter.”
Downstairs from the living room of his Chanhassen home, en route to the master bedroom, Prince kept a narrow little workroom filled with recording equipment. He called this setup “Uptown” and he elected to record his entire new album here. Some tracks dated from the Dirty Mind sessions or earlier. But unlike that album, this time around he was using a twenty-four-track recorder. Many nights at three, he would invite Bobby Z to the studio. Sometimes the drummer came, sometimes he didn’t. So he found himself relying more on technology. Appropriately, he named the album-to-be 1999.
Prince turned to the Roger Linn drum machine he got in 1981. One of the first ever created, it let him create an original beat in five seconds. With technology providing instant results, 1999 morphed into becoming all about Prince running computers. But there were drawbacks. When he heard sounds in his head, he worked with the tools in front of him. He didn’t think in terms of instruments. The sounds now dictated how he developed ideas. Another change was that Prince no longer limited himself to re-creating demos or a set number of songs in the studio. He recorded new ideas as they arrived. Thus, March 30, 1982, found him knocking out another quick groove and singing a new song, “Let’s Pretend We’re Married.” Then he tried “Turn It Up,” another shuffling work with drum machine and throbbing bass. He threw in drumrolls, synth overdubs, and his voice wailing “Turn it up. Turn it up, baby. Work me like a radio.” He kept revisiting it, trying other ideas, then set it aside when he created the similarly paced “Delirious.”
Another morning, after recording all night, Prince sat in Lisa Coleman’s pink Edsel. At this point, Lisa—a platonic bandmate—was sometimes staying in his home, or with one of his ex-girlfriends, and continued to appear on some of his songs. He was dozing off, but an idea arrived. “I guess I should have known by the way you parked your car sideways that it wouldn’t last,” he thought. As more lyrics came, he jotted them down between short naps. He started creating a track filled with pensive synthesizer, and a lyric called “Little Red Corvette.”
By April, he was at Sunset Sound again. There, husband and wife team David Leonard and Peggy McCreary helped him record and mix the new songs. Usually, he recorded drums or piano. “Then he puts on bass, and builds from there: keyboards, guitars, vocals,” remembered McCreary. He started in the morning and was usually finished that night. He left with a basic mix but returned the next day to improve it. “We do it all in one or two days, very rarely three days,” she said. “That’s different to me!”
Talented musicians surrounded him, but he found it easier to work alone. “I have a communication problem sometimes when I’m trying to describe music,” he explained. Then there was the fact that some sessions lasted so long he wore two or three engineers out. “He’d work three days straight without sleeping,” Dez recalled. Dez usually stopped by once a song was almost finished.
He also wanted engineers to move quickly. If Peggy took too long preparing to record a fleeting idea, he’d say forget it; it was an omen, it wasn’t happening. If he suddenly wanted a different drum sound, she had it ready in less than five minutes. In the control booth, hearing a song, he might create a vocal hook immediately. He’d reach for the mic she now kept nearby to punch in the new part without returning to the other room.
On April 3, he was trying new ideas. He filled “Extra Loveable” with rock guitar, Linn drumbeats, and a lyric inviting his girl to join him for a bath. He could be “very cruel” and rape her, he sang. Three days later, he recorded “If It’ll Make U Happy,” a sensitive three-chord number in which he left his girl then changed his mind. “I really love you baby, no matter what your friends may say.”
He shifted gears again, filling his funky “Lady Cab Driver” with street sounds “and almost a kind of rap,” said Bobby.
His attitude in the studio was “anything goes,” Bobby explained. Prince tried experimental sounds and backwards-recorded tracks. He avoided the disco hi-hats and grooves this time. He was just having fun, finally. He was keeping things loose, seeing what came out. April 20, for instance, during “D.M.S.R.,” he ad-libbed, “All the white people clap your hands on the four now: one, two, three [clap].” By April 25, he had recorded a windy rock ballad called “Free” and let Lisa Coleman’s brunette friend Wendy Melvoin sing backup.
Wendy lived near Lisa in California until her divorced mother moved her to North Conway, New Hampshire. After graduating from high school, she returned to Los Angeles, waited tables, worked as a secretary, and planned to attend a music college. She kept showing up at the studio to visit Lisa. Prince decided she’d also sound good on “Irresistible Bitch.”
A day after “Free,” April 26, he asked engineer Peggy McCreary to bring a bottle of wine to the studio. This way, he’d sound pretty bummed out while crooning the downbeat lyric on his ballad “How Come You Don’t Call Me Anymore.” Two days later, he shifted gears again, creating the upbeat but equally mordant “Something in the Water (Does Not Compute),” with synthesizers, Linn drum, and lyrics as ominous as his keyboard textures. Drummer Bo
bby Z said, “The groove got settled. He knew it was back to dance. There wasn’t anymore of the ‘Ronnie, Talk to Russia’ kind of songs.” This new feel was Bohemian yet “still very funky,” Bobby added. “I think he found his groove and the groove never left.”
Back home in Minneapolis, on May 9, he refined “Little Red Corvette.” Dez visited his home studio. They were alone, and he played Dez what he had. He wailed the lyric and when it ended, Dez lifted his guitar. Prince started recording. “He would always let me play what I wanted to.” Dez offered three different solos. Prince then “comped” them into one, connecting different sections. “I was finished within half an hour!”
He kept working on his fifth album, and found that the songs kept mentioning the color purple. His fascination with the color—also favored by his hometown’s pro football team the Minnesota Vikings—stretched back to an early demo on which he mentioned a “purple lawn.” He must surely have been thinking, too, of one of his idols, Jimi Hendrix and his rock classic called “Purple Haze.” Either way, Prince used the word now to describe a bloody conflict waged in blue skies, between angels and demons, which would cause red and blue to mix. He tried the word in a title for a droning dance number called “Purple Music.”
July 6, he was again at Sunset Sound, recording another rock ballad. Titled “Moonbeam Levels,” its description of future events evoked Jimi Hendrix’s “1983.” He was still working on July 16, when Warner released his hysterical ballad “Do Me Baby” backed with “Private Joy,” both off last year’s Controversy, on a promotional single not sold in stores.