Prince

  In LA, Prince had Albert Magnoli join him at a meeting with Morris Day, Jimmy Jam, and Terry Lewis. Various Time members had approached Warner with their own film project. One member told executives, “We want to do another record and a movie.” They had a screenwriter, but wanted Prince’s help with the music, believing his participation would make it a true Time album. Prince meanwhile wanted to see if they could come together for Graffiti Bridge. Nothing was truly resolved during this talk. A few band members refused to participate in a band reunion. But Prince kept barreling forward as if they had, even going so far as to begin planning yet another Time album for which he would write all the songs, play every note, and lay out precise blueprints for how vocals should sound.

  As preproduction continued, however, Magnoli had doubts about the script and Prince’s plan to film it all with cheap sets on his soundstage. And so, rather than be involved with a project that could prove disastrous, Magnoli left the project. Prince tried working with manager Arthur Spivak but their chemistry didn’t seem to mix, publicist Jill Willis recalled. They stopped working together just when he wanted to create a new film then tour. “He needed someone to act as his manager and put it all together,” Willis noted. Anonymous sources told reporters his early treatment amounted to gibberish. “That was just a real rough thirty-page treatment I wrote with Kim,” Prince said. “Graffiti Bridge is an entirely different movie.”

  Before long, Prince learned two management firms, Stiefel Phillips and Lippman Kahane, were in talks with his attorney, Gary Stiffelman, and his business manager and accountant, Nancy Chapman. Based in LA, Arnold Stiefel and Randy Philips represented clients like Guns N’ Roses and Rod Stewart, among others. Stiefel had also been involved with various films, including Bette Midler’s The Rose, and the Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense. They promised a deal for Graffiti Bridge when “no one else wanted to touch it,” Marylou Badeaux recalled. In the end, Stiefel and Philips received the “twelve-month management consultancy contract,” Jill Willis remembered, before Prince actually met them. Prince told people not to refer to them as “his new managers,” Willis continued. The management team meanwhile got him the film deal.

  They sold it to Warner Bros. Pictures as a Prince musical. “He’s positively perceived at Warner Bros. Pictures,” Stiefel reported. “We presented the idea at the end of the day on a Tuesday and got the go-ahead by Wednesday morning.”

  But the story also changed. Now, as in Purple Rain, Prince would play the Kid. But this time, a dying friend left him and Morris a club called Glam Slam. Morris felt The Time’s funk sets were earning money while the Kid’s offbeat music and Janet Jackson-like dance routines were turning people off. So the two bands battled over the club’s direction.

  Prince met with The Time. “The next thing we knew, there was Graffiti Bridge,” said Jimmy Jam. “It became his project, and we were just kind of the bit players.” Prince agreed to let them co-write and record new tracks for a revised album called Pandemonium. They agreed to star in the film. Warner was happy. The Time album was suddenly scheduled.

  The Time cleared red tape and schedules, and arrived at Paisley Park to play Day’s band and henchmen, and record new songs, without him. But they didn’t discuss touring, or anything but Graffiti Bridge. “We’d like to see all that happen, but nothing happens if you push it,” said Jam.

  With Warner and The Time on board, Prince moved on to casting other parts. Ingrid Chavez, he decided, would be the romantic lead. He hired the twenty-five-year-old to play Aura, the Kid’s spiritual guide. “Kim Basinger had become Ingrid Chavez and Patti LaBelle had become Mavis Staples,” said Arnold Stiefel. Next, Prince recruited singer Jill Jones. But while flying to Minneapolis, Jones read the revised script and saw Prince had fused Kim Basinger’s role to Jill’s and handed it all to Ingrid. Her new part was a smaller rehash of her walk-on role in Purple Rain (another woman whose musical ambitions he stifles). She tore the script up, hurled pieces around the cabin, then fled to the bathroom. Her assistant darted down an aisle, saying, “That number 58 page there, in your fettuccine, can I have it please?” Jones thought, if she weren’t already on the plane, she’d go home.

  24

  PARDON ME FOR LIVING

  PRINCE STARTED WORKING ON THE SOUNDTRACK FOR GRAFFITI Bridge. Unlike with Batman, he worked slowly, creating a two-disc compilation from tracks he created over the last few years. Instead of rock guitar, however, he filled it with drum machines, synthesizers, and samples. Some sessions, he stopped playing a new idea and faced new engineer Michael Koppelman, a fan since Purple Rain and new to town. “You like that sort of shit don’t you?”

  Usually, Koppelman said, “Yup, I do.”

  He’d then play something completely different.

  Another time, he and engineer Tom Garneau were recording with a TV monitor on, which was usually the case. When an ad for the group 10,000 Maniacs aired, Prince pointed at them, and sneered. “Do you like these guys?”

  Garneau replied, “Actually, I like them a lot. I thought it was one of this year’s best albums.”

  With a smile, Prince said he really liked them, too.

  “Who knows what that was really about,” Garneau quipped.

  As sessions continued, Prince created “Tick, Tick, Bang,” a glossy keyboard over Jimi Hendrix’s opening beat on “Little Miss Lover.” He added “The Question of U,” a catchy pop melody with numerous vocals, overdubs, handclaps, and abnormal grooves. He reworked a four-song sequence from an early version of Dream Factory and filled The Time number, “Shake,” with a big rock beat, sampled bass, and pop keyboard evoking Question Mark and the Mysterians’ “96 Tears.” The only new material was “New Power Generation,” “Round and Round,” and “Thieves in the Temple.”

  At the same time, Prince, never satisfied to have just one project in the works, started creating tracks for his next album. Songs came when least expected. And sometimes, they came back. This seemed to be the case with “Diamonds and Pearls,” a ballad that recycled part of a melody from Sheila E.’s fast-paced “Romance 1600.” Another time, Prince was in front of a mirror when lyrics for a song called “Cream” arrived. In the studio, he created a pop rock track that evoked T. Rex, The Cars’ “Dangerous Type,” and The Time’s “Shake.” Then he sang, smoothly, asking a woman to “get on top.”

  During one of these sessions, he told his new nineteen-year-old drummer Michael Bland, “Play the break like on Fresh, like how he goes over the barlines on ‘In Time.’”

  Bland asked, “What’s Fresh?”

  “Oh man, you haven’t heard ‘In Time’ on Fresh? You’ve got to stay after school.”

  Fresh was a Sly & The Family Stone album, one of a dozen works he had his housekeeper bring to Studio A. For three hours, Prince played Sly’s music and Graham Central Station and analyzed every note.

  Another day, Prince entered a studio and saw his bassist Levi Seacer, Jr., working with a thickset singer named Rosie Gaines. She was helping Levi create a demo for the Pointer Sisters. After she stopped singing, Prince quickly invited her into The New Power Generation. She wanted to be a soloist. “Join up with us,” he replied, “and I’ll put a record out on you.”

  He soon had her singing “Diamonds and Pearls” with him.

  January arrived, and Prince still needed someone to sing “Round and Round.” He considered Tevin Campbell. Warner executive Benny Medina and Michael Jackson’s former producer Quincy Jones discovered the eleven-year-old grade school student in Texas and had him sing two songs on Jones’s Back on the Block, an all-star album for Jones’s Warner-backed Qwest imprint. Prince reached for his phone. A kid answered. “Can I speak to Tevin?”

  “This is Tevin. Who is this?”

  “This is Prince.”

  Prince asked him to come to Minneapolis to sing “Round and Round” for the soundtrack, fit him into the cast as Mavis’s son, then—as a concession to a label executive—let Junior Vasquez, who remixed stuff for Madonna, work on “Rou
nd and Round,” the first time an outsider touched his tracks. Then Vasquez’s remix somehow became the album version of the song, engineer Tom Garneau recalled.

  Finally, Prince ended sessions with “Thieves in the Temple.” He entered the studio one day with the complex number done in his head. “We recorded and mixed it in one marathon thirty-hour session,” engineer Tom Garneau recalled. After Michael Koppelman spent fifteen hours at the board, Garneau took over. It was grueling, he recalled, but “strangely enjoyable being part of the process.”

  A day after finishing it, Prince leaped right into filming its video. Prince started filming Graffiti Bridge February 15. The first day, Stiefel flew in from Los Angeles. Minutes before shooting, Stiefel visited Prince’s dressing room and saw him in an outfit that reminded Stiefel of Flashdance. “When are you going to change?”

  Prince stared blankly. “I’m not. This is what I’m wearing. What’s wrong with it?”

  “What’s wrong with it? Everything.”

  Stiefel left.

  Within minutes, a bodyguard approached on the soundstage. “He’d be more comfortable if you weren’t here.”

  Stiefel asked, “You mean here on the set?”

  “No. Here in Minneapolis.”

  Warner had Peter MacDonald working out of an office outside the main courtyard. MacDonald had worked in the business for over thirty years, operating the camera for Bob Fosse’s Cabaret and Barbra Streisand’s Yentl; directing Rambo III; executive producing Stallone’s Tango & Cash. Now, he claimed he was merely an executive producer, not a potential backup director. “The idea is his. The script is his. The music is his. It seemed like a good bet to put him in charge.”

  On the soundstage, Prince had work crews re-create the Seven Corners of the 1950s—a local intersection where seven streets ran into each other, and jazz musicians like Prince’s father John Nelson played sets in the area’s many nightclubs, hoping to become famous. Extras meanwhile dressed as hipsters. It all resembled old Gene Kelly musicals. “Yeah, cheap!” Prince quipped. “Actually, that’s okay. It’s like how we did Dirty Mind. But man, what I’d do with a $25 million budget.”

  As director, Prince handled every problem thrown his way. But the biggest seemed to be his vow to deliver “a different kind of movie. It’s not violent,” he continued. “Nobody gets laid.”

  At one point, it was working out. “We’re already two days ahead of schedule,” MacDonald reported. “That’s probably because he doesn’t sleep.” But he kept bringing new songs to the set and shoehorning them into the film. “When he comes in humming,” MacDonald quipped, “we all know we’re in trouble.”

  From the sidelines, Alan Leeds remembered Purple Rain brilliantly capturing an era. “Most importantly, it was a film produced and directed by professionals.” He had qualms about the new one, though. Prince could be a great director and producer if he’d “study and learn the craft.” Instead, he hired a crew that unquestioningly followed orders. He made lighting a scene take even more time by improvising changes on the spot. He kept arguing with MacDonald and trying to cram eighteen or nineteen musical numbers into a thirty-six-day shoot. “It’s been a challenge to stay just behind him,” MacDonald soon explained. “His energy: It never seems to run out, unfortunately. I’d like for him to get tired a bit more often so we can go home.”

  There were other obstacles. His final week of shooting, CBS started filming a TV movie in town. Some of his crew left for that project. Then he couldn’t always find equipment or facilities. On the last day of shooting, Benny Medina was still at Paisley Park. Head of Warner’s black-music division in Burbank, Medina was the top executive handling his albums.

  As usual, Warner wanted to promote at least three singles to radio before the film’s release. Medina needed to know what the first single would be. He wouldn’t leave until he got an answer. Without one, Warner wouldn’t be able to start pushing the music.

  If he wrapped principal photography today, Warner would book the film in fourteen hundred theaters by August. Knowing music drew people to movies, Medina wanted to release a Time single to black radio in April, trailers to theaters after Memorial Day, a Prince single in June, a second Time single in July, and scenes from the movie in both acts’ videos. Prince felt it was a great plan, just the sort of high-powered promotional push he felt his work deserved.

  In March 1990, after thirty-six days, Prince completed principal photography. Instead of his typical unbridled confidence, he told a reporter he’d survive if Graffiti Bridge flopped. “I can’t please everybody,” he said.

  That month, Sinead O‘Connor’s cover of The Family’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” was all over pop radio. Her producer Nellee Hooper had ignored Prince’s pianos, and overdubs, and emphasized a mellow drumbeat, minimal keyboard, and her piercing vocal. Reporters preferred her version to The Family’s original and most of Prince’s own recent work. And O’Connor’s manager, Steve Fargnoli—now running a new London-based agency, Pure Acts Ltd.—bragged, “She is not someone who is driven by a pop career or pop sales.” She was exciting. “She’s willing to take risks because she’s not trying to protect anything … such as a record career. She’ll do what interests her.”

  Despite having written the shaved-headed singer’s hit, Prince still heard anxiety from the Warner executive visiting his complex. Prince was asked to delay the Graffiti Bridge album so his five-million-seller Batman could sell more copies, and not jeopardize sales of both albums.

  Prince ignored this and threw himself into rehearsing for another tour. His new managers organized it quickly. But they didn’t tie it to the new album. If anything, it would let Prince capitalize on overseas popularity and generate revenue.

  In April, he was still rehearsing when he heard forty-nine-year-old Chick had died of heart failure on April 2.

  After leaving in 1985, his former bodyguard sank so low he sold his lawnmower to buy coke. But he kicked the habit, becoming an evangelist, who lectured in schools and prisons. Now, he died without life insurance. Prince agreed to help Chick’s widow Linda and his six kids by playing a hundred-dollar-a-ticket concert at Rupert’s Nightclub.

  That night, six hundred people showed up. His mother Mattie sat near Chick’s widow and kids. More than just a benefit, Prince used the show to test-market his upcoming tour set.

  His shirtless silhouette opened with a brief eulogy and “The Future” (one of four Batman songs). He told everyone the show was for Chick, who was “looking down, smiling.” His new dancers joined him on Rupert’s small stage, to perform steps that evoked some by then-popular Bobby Brown. Prince did a few signature hits. “Alphabet St.” included part of Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock’s current rap hit, “It Takes Two.” New singer Rosie Gaines covered Aretha’s “Respect.” He introduced “Purple Rain” by saying Chick usually played air guitar when Prince was on stage playing its solo. He dedicated this performance to Chick and filled it with fiery Jimi-like solos.

  Besides “The Question of U,” his set list held plenty of old hits. Prince rearranged their elements but longtime fan and writer Per Nilsen still felt he should set them aside for a while. “After all, Prince had played them on all of his four European tours since 1986.” He played more old songs then threw in “Nothing Compares 2 U,” popularized only a month ago by Sinéad. In the end, he raised about sixty thousand dollars for Chick’s family. And Rolling Stone’s David Fricke felt, “This was the kind of Prince gig you don’t get to see much anymore: no fancy props or heavy sacred-sexual shtick, just hit songs, dirty dancing, whiplash funk, and blowtorch guitar.”

  Prince finished his first cut of Graffiti Bridge on April 19. Warner saw a rough cut and felt the story was unintelligible and it looked amateurish. The studio nevertheless arranged a screening in the Pasadena theater where Purple Rain pulled in its second-highest grosses. But three or four unruly viewers kept making wisecracks. After the screening, people kept saying it sucked. “It was all mixed up,” Ingrid Chavez recalled. “There wasn’t m
uch of a story there.” The characters were unsympathetic, she added. He was improvising on the set, following gut instincts. “But when it came to putting it together, he realized he needed to structure it a little bit better.” His manager Stiefel however defended it. “Never have a screening in Pasadena,” he said. “The film was not ready yet. The sound was wrong. It was too early.” Either way, Warner Bros. Pictures said it needed editing. But his new managers Arnold Stiefel and Randy Phillips had a tour ready to start.

  Warner enlisted Steve Rivkin, brother of Bobby Z and David Rivkin, to edit the film, still wanting to open in fourteen hundred U.S. cinemas on August 7. Prince wanted to postpone the tour to finish the film but couldn’t: Money was at stake. The tour kicked off in Dublin on April 27, but he wanted to stay in the loop while he toured Europe. He kept receiving videotapes of edited scenes, dictating changes by telephone, and moving dates around to buy time in the editing room.

  His summer tour of Europe and Japan would build anticipation for his film and album Graffiti Bridge. Instead of a show as structured as the Lovesexy Tour, he wanted something as loose and unpredictable as a party. In Spain, he took the stage with blinding lights—ten feet high—spelling his name. When he reached “Purple Rain,” the lights rose. He started playing the guitar. Everyone in the crowd pulled out their lighters. “It was a real golden-oldies thing,” an observer noted. But he played only one verse and the solo. He then lingered at a piano, with long, winding melodies that led to an austere “Nothing Compares 2 U.”

  He reached Germany, where he’d play July 22 to 29. And after one show, everything changed.

  Prince was backstage in his dressing room when a security guard brought him a videotape. The guard received it from a Puerto Rican man standing near the back door. The man was still out there with his family. Prince watched the tape, which showed a short, shapely beauty dancing.