Prince

by Ronin Ro

  Before month’s end, he learned another established white singer wanted to work with him. This time, engineer David Leonard said, Scottish-born Sheena Easton had asked him to relay that she was a huge fan. Easton was known for clean-cut hits like 1981’s “Morning Train,” “Modern Girl,” and “For Your Eyes Only” (from the James Bond film of the same name). She loved 1999 and hoped he’d write something for her album. He was surprised and flattered. He liked her voice, too. After some thought, he knocked out a racy dance number called “Sugar Walls.”

  He was also thinking about The Time. He had started their next album Ice Cream Castles in March, but encountered setbacks due to firings and departures. The group still reeled. And Morris was tired of him ordering him how to dress, sing, and act on stage, Per Nilsen noted. So, sound engineer Susan Rogers recalled to Mark Weingarten, “Prince recorded every note on that record. He even laid down guide vocals for Morris Day to follow.” He figured they’d get over it. They’d be in the film. This would pass.

  On October 4, he arranged for the new Time lineup to play eight songs at First Avenue. Once again, he had a mobile recording unit tape the show. The crowd, he saw, was enthusiastic about their two new songs “Jungle Love” and “The Bird.” But once Morris Day finished the last song, he stormed off stage. He was unhappy with Prince’s micromanaging, the band’s new members, and the fact that two commercially successful albums had brought him little money. He raced past the dressing room, Jellybean told Tones magazine, rushed out the back door, “into his waiting Porsche with his girlfriend,” and was “gone!” Confused band members stayed behind for a tense celebration. Prince decided the night’s version of “The Bird” (complete with a live audience) would go on their new album.

  In October, in Minneapolis, Prince saw new engineer Susan Rogers had installed a new console and fixed a tape machine in his home studio. Rogers had most recently worked for Crosby Stills, and Nash’s studio in Hollywood. But she leaped at the chance to become his new audio technician. “Prince was my favorite artist ever since the For You album, and the opportunity was a dream come true,” she said. A call to his managers got her an interview and the job.

  Since August, she had worked in his purple home on Kiowa Trail. But he threw her a curve ball, asking her to set up a vocal microphone so he could sing a few parts for “Darling Nikki.” She never professionally engineered, she explained. “Next thing I knew, I was in the engineering chair.”

  October 24 found Prince working with Jill Jones, on her contribution to the album, “Wednesday” It had a sweet piano melody and lyrics about suicide, Jill explained.

  Then, five days later, in his home studio, he tinkered with “Computer Blue” again. He and Matt Fink had created some great riffs; and Wendy and Lisa’s sultry introduction was fantastic. But Prince kept writing stronger songs, and wasn’t sure if there would be room for this one (since his managers and Warner didn’t want another double album). And he didn’t want to alienate his father John, whose old piano riff he had borrowed for the song. After years of discord, the two were actually getting along. Now John was telling people that purple was always his, John’s, favorite color and about a song he wrote years ago, called “Purple Shades”—before learning Prince also favored this shade.

  Vanity had left in August. They couldn’t just rewrite the script, so they arranged a casting call. They wanted someone that met certain requirements, some of them physical, and auditioned seven hundred women in New York and Los Angeles. One New York woman said she auditioned, got the part, but rejected it as too pornographic. An agent for twenty-two-year-old photo model Patty Kotero arranged an audition. Kotero lived in a clean West Hollywood apartment and starred in the miniseries Mystic Warriors. Her parents were born in Mexico, but she called herself “a Latin-German Jew.” Intrigued by the opportunity, she quickly arranged to audition in LA.

  Kotero took a flight to Minneapolis to meet Prince. They went to a deli and made small talk. He asked about her experience singing, dancing, and acting. Then he fixed her with a serious look. “Do you believe in God?” He drove her around for a while, hearing her sing to a tape. Then they hit First Avenue to see if she could dance. She had passed all his tests. And with that, he gave her the part and a new name, Apollonia, after a character in The Godfather. He then introduced her to Vanity 6’s remaining members, Susan Moonsie and Brenda Bennett, and told them they’d now be Apollonia 6 in the film, on their own album, and while touring to promote it.

  With the film’s start date approaching, he asked sound engineer David Leonard to fly to town to help with his studio. He wanted Susan Rogers and Leonard to move all of his equipment—including his home console—to the warehouse. He had recorded “Let’s Go Crazy” during the MDT benefit concert but felt, since it would accompany a concert scene, it should feel even more like a big live performance. Rogers thought it “seemed a little crazy” since “nobody had really done that before.” Producers didn’t record a band live without isolating musicians from an engineer. But for four years, he had loved the echo and big sound rehearsing in large spaces provides. Despite her misgivings, Rogers and Leonard set up his equipment in the center of the cavernous space. He arrived with a new part for the song, a riff that would make it even better, he felt.

  “Dearly Beloved,” he said over his sepulchral organ riff and sermon: “We are gathered here today to get through this thing called like …” Prince got the echo he wanted, but had to deal with track leakage and electrical interference from every device in the building. “There was never any proper separation between the board and the instruments,” drummer Bobby Z explained. But Prince valued spontaneity and a great performance over things like proper mic placement. He kept rolling tape and delivered his stunning new synth and guitar solo. The result had a few minor flaws, but Prince could live with them. He wanted this version on the album and in the film.

  After brief prep time, Magnoli started principal photography on November 1. Prince lived twenty minutes from the Twin Cities, close to his divorced father and a sister that sang in a local gospel choir. A day before filming, during rehearsal, he told the bands to arrive at a Holiday Inn at 5 A.M. “Be there, don’t fuck up,” Jellybean Johnson recalled being told. The bleary-eyed band was there. By 8 A.M., Magnoli was ready to shoot. But their new bass player Rocky Harris still hadn’t shown. According to Per Nilsen, Prince faced Morris. “Morris, this is costing me $30,000 an hour. What’re you going to do about it? You’re going to pay for it!” Nilsen quoted Prince as saying. Jesse Johnson called a replacement at home.

  Despite an early start, everyone stayed on the set until six or seven in the evening.

  Prince’s attention to detail impressed the crew. He was always on time. He knew his lines. If asked to repeat a scene, “he always remembered where his hands were in the previous shot,” said location manager Kirk Hokanson. Prince was also there, off camera, offering advice to band members. One day, they were choosing outfits for the film. New Time member Paul Peterson chose a cool black suit with pinstripes.

  “Nobody’s going to notice you with that. Wear this.” Prince handed him an orange pin-striped suit.

  “Oh, no, I don’t want to wear that.”

  “Wear it,” he said.

  New to the job, seventeen-year-old Peterson didn’t want to make waves. “And then they got a hold of my hair,” he said. They gave him a puffed-out hairstyle he had to constantly style with a curling iron. His girlfriend took less time getting ready than he did, he said.

  Magnoli started shooting exteriors downtown on November 7. That same day Prince received a test pressing of the soundtrack. At this point, it included his fiery “Let’s Go Crazy,” his ode to Susannah “The Beautiful Ones,” his collaboration with Wendy and Lisa “Computer Blue,” his harrowing “Darling Nikki,” the Jill Jones ditty “Wednesday” his power ballad “Purple Rain,” the dance cuts “I Would Die 4 U” and “Baby I’m a Star,” and the instrumental “Father’s Song.” He decided Jill’s “Wednesday”
wouldn’t work. He cut it from the lineup and broke the news to Jones. “He told me the scene was cut,” Jill recalled. “He said he was really sad about it. I really did not believe him.” Jill concealed her anger while Prince blamed his managers and the director for the decision. Then he got back to filming.

  Set designers turned a public street into a closed set. While Magnoli filmed Morris and Jerome walking down a street, Prince stood on the sidelines, ready to leap in and offer advice. Then it was Prince’s turn to spend a few weeks in front of the cameras, riding his bike in the country, flirting with a nude Apollonia near a lake, and shoving film rival Day into some trash cans in an alley.

  By this point, some say Day’s growing frustration made him uncooperative. He allegedly arrived late to every rehearsal or set. Sometimes, they had to send a crew member to wake him up.

  In the studio, while recording vocals for the third Time album, Morris stood in front of the mic, and matched Prince’s guide vocals on the six new songs. But at the board, engineer Susan Rogers felt a palpable tension. “Morris was very unhappy and basically nonparticipating,” she told author Alex Hahn. He wanted to “get the movie over with,” then leave.

  Prince and Morris were hardly speaking. Still Magnoli had them film another scene. Before anyone knew it, Prince and Morris were swinging fists, having a real fight. Day later claimed the media blew it out of proportion, but Jellybean told Tones magazine, “I had to break it up.” Even worse, the weather changed before Magnoli could finish exterior shooting. They dealt with a particularly bitter winter. “The day before we began shooting, there was eighteen feet of snow and the weather plunged thirty below zero,” Magnoli later explained. With the crew facing temperatures ranging from twenty-eight degrees to below zero some crew members worked through bouts of frostbite. Then it kept raining when they tried to capture pivotal scenes.

  Apollonia, herself, kept filming in subzero temperatures. Between takes, a crew member rushed forward to wrap a blanket around her. Prince meanwhile started creating music she could perform in the film. On a day off, in November, he led her into his home studio. Susan Rogers heard her sing The Beatles’ gentle “When I’m Sixty-four” and thought, she told Mark Weingarten, “this is gonna be a long night.”

  Prince had Rogers play a version of “Sex Shooter” with Vanity’s lead vocals. Apollonia tried to replace Vanity’s performance with her own, but Prince stopped rolling the tape. It wasn’t working. They needed privacy, and so Rogers left the control room. Prince gave Apollonia a fifteen- to thirty-minute pep talk that left her sounding more assertive. “By the time we recorded it, the whole thing just clicked,” Rogers also told Weingarten. “She had this campy quality to her voice that was perfect. She sounded like an actress pretending to sing.”

  Prince was still filming when Michael Jackson popped back into the mainstream media yet again. This time, reporters all covered a November 23 press conference at Manhattan’s Tavern on the Green. Jackson joined his brothers—all in sunglasses—to talk up a reunion album and tour.

  In chilly Minneapolis, Prince spent a month filming performance scenes at First Avenue, where he wanted a full house. The club was cold, Wendy recalled. “They had space heaters all around.” He and The Revolution would lip-synch for the film’s live-performance sequences. Two 35mm cameras would have been more than enough but they had four or five. Prince told the sound department to make the playback level as loud as a real concert. The crew spent two hundred dollars on sound suppressors, then “brought in the stacks and let ’em have it,” said Playback operator Matt Quast.

  Every day at 7 A.M., six hundred extras entered, ready to react to the Kid’s seven numbers. During some takes, the extras cheered and danced. Some scenes called for an indifferent audience. But spirited performances, and new songs, had them cheering anyway. He’d finish lip-synching a song only to hear Magnoli call for another take. Still, Magnoli worked quickly, getting each number in a mere two or three takes.

  During a break in filming, Prince made another important connection. At the time, rap music was beginning its rise. Groups like Run-D. M.C. were beginning to attract mainstream attention with their own metal riffs and aggressive lyrics. The rest of the nation was embracing the sound and accompanying culture. Producers included break-dancers in Hollywood films like Flashdance. In Minneapolis, New York transplants joined locals to spread the artistic movement. In fact, a local break-dancing crew called 2 Be Rude—whose Prince-like logo included a tongue standing in for the letter “u”—showed up to an audition for extras and wound up being asked to help choose people.

  With The Time set to film their performance of “Jungle Love,” Prince heard noise from a restroom. He led in bodyguards and saw about seventeen teenagers having some sort of party. Most created rap beats by stomping feet and clapping hands. 2 Be Rude members Damon Dickson, Kirk Johnson, and Tony Mosley meanwhile were performing their best, most acrobatic moves. “He just kind of looked at us, stood there about five minutes, and turned around and walked out,” Dickson recalled. Dickson looked at Mosley. “We might be in trouble, dude.” But Prince came back, walked up to them, and handed them a tape. It was already 9:00 P.M. but he wanted to see seven routines by 7:00 A.M.

  Then Prince told Magnoli he wanted Apollonia 6’s “Sex Shooter” in the film, too. Magnoli also filmed a performance by Dez Dickerson’s new group The Modernaires. Since leaving The Revolution after the 1999 tour, Dez had formed his own interracial band. Prince also steered him to his management. After striking a handshake agreement (“no written contract,” Dez recalled), Dez started his own group album, creating “epic stadium rock with radio hooks.” The Modernaires believed they would soon ink a deal with Warner. Prince invited them into his film and was present the day they filmed their performance scene. “Technically he was my manager at the time,” Dez said.

  Amazingly, Magnoli had all of the concert scenes done in only ten days. “We went into it three weeks behind and came out of it on schedule,” co-manager Bob Cavallo recalled.

  A few days before Christmas, Magnoli wrapped principal photography. The film’s budget was “very small in terms of [its] results,” he said proudly. He shot the entire story and even included numerous production numbers.

  While cast and crew celebrated during an all-night wrap party in Bloomington, Minnesota, Prince considered his next task. He had to fly to Los Angeles to shoot more outdoor scenes in warmer weather. But the budget Warner’s Mo Ostin personally provided was gone. And they still had no one to get the film into theaters. “They had their necks out and were out of money,” said Alan Leeds.

  Cavallo and Fargnoli asked Warner Bros. Pictures, a separate arm of the company, to invest money and distribute Purple Rain, “We believe Prince has much greater name value than the number of records he’s sold,” Cavallo felt. Warner Bros. Pictures thought his two or three million record fans might see a movie. But the managers predicted he’d attract a much larger general interest audience. “People don’t know a lot about him,” Cavallo explained. “He’s a little mysterioso and he has a controversial image.” Finally the night of the wrap party, his managers called with good news. That very night, while everyone was partying, they had finalized the deal. Warner Bros. had financed production, which wound up going over budget, Alan Leeds explained. The studio still didn’t know how many theaters would actually commit to booking the film. Warner agreed to pay $6 million upon delivery of the negative. If not for this last-minute finance, Leeds explained, “Postproduction might have been canceled.”

  Now Prince had both a great product and the means to finish it. But would movie viewers care?

  11

  EVERYBODY CAN’T BE ON TOP

  DECEMBER 30, IN THE WAREHOUSE, PRINCE KNOCKED OUT A song called “She’s Always in My Hair.” Over a stilted keyboard riff, raw guitar work, and a funky beat, he sang about a woman that loved him. Prince told ever-supportive Jill Jones the song was about her. She understood; she always asked him “to treat me better,” she
explained.

  Either way a nearby road crew heard its guitar riff and stopped what they were doing. It paralyzed them, Alan Leeds recalled. That same day, he moved on to another number with a musician he had recently reconnected with, Sheila Escovedo.

  Sheila was a drummer, like her famous father Pete. As a child, she went from wanting to play outside to playing drums, a decision her parents supported. Prince first saw her backstage at an Al Jarreau show in 1978, but they didn’t speak that night. Then she attended a late 1979 concert, when he was promoting Prince. She saw his trench coat and leg warmers and thought, what is he doing? “It was a shocker,” she recalled. “But it was cool.” She went backstage to compliment his music and he told her, “I know who you are.” He asked how much she’d charge to be his drummer. She told him. He quipped, “Well, I’ll never be able to afford that.” Still, they kept in touch and now he was inviting her to Sunset Sound. She thought Prince wanted her to play drums.

  “No,” he said, “I want you to sing this song called ‘Erotic City.’” He played her a track with a spare beat, catchy hooks, and electro-pop rhythms. She reluctantly agreed. But she heard the lyrics and didn’t “want to sing the curse words.” So Prince did. “We had a great time doing it,” she said. And while “Erotic City” included a few expletives, some radio stations played it anyway.

  In Los Angeles, at Sunset Sound on January 1 and 2, 1984, recording overrode even sleep or regular meals. “He likes coffee,” an engineer explained. Someone suggested a meal. “No, it’ll make me sleepy” Even after long sessions, inspiration arrived. One night, he left the studio at dawn but called to say he’d resume at ten. During these sessions, he was working on the Apollonia 6 album, revisiting his old demo, “Moral Majority”

  By now, his employees back in Minnesota had moved his equipment into an old metal hangar on Flying Cloud Drive, in Eden Prairie. He wanted his own studio complex and considered this a good choice. The hangar had everything he’d need—an arena-sized rehearsal stage, a costume room, and his musical equipment—so he went from renting it (in early 1984) to buying it for a reported $450,000. He returned to town to record new music, but neighbors on Flying Cloud Drive complained about his rehearsals.