by Ronin Ro
But he meant what he said. was only at No. 93 on Billboard’s Top 200. Not even Warner’s release of his lame “The Morning Papers” helped. Neither did touring and high-fiving fans in the front row. The album had sold about 2 million in the United States but he needed 5 million to get the next big advance. Recent concerts sold out but the album hadn’t reappeared in the Top 10.
Prince stopped in at Warner Bros., a source recalled, to meet with chairman Mo Ostin and president Lenny Waronker and express “dissatisfactions and frustrations.” Then, April 27, he had Paisley President Davison call Ostin and Waronker in Burbank to say Prince wouldn’t deliver any more studio albums. That night, the ambush continued. A New York-based publicist sent reporters a press release headlined “Prince to retire from studio recording.” Instead of new studio works, he’d honor the rest of his six-album deal with old songs from his library of “five hundred unreleased recordings.” This way, Warner could release new Prince albums “well into the twenty-first century,” while he focused on “alternative media—including live theater, interactive media, nightclubs, and motion pictures.”
The Associated Press called Warner offices in Burbank for details but no one answered. “This is the first I’m hearing of this,” someone in Warner’s Minneapolis office told the Minneapolis Star Tribune. John Dukakis, business manager of Paisley Park Records in California, said, “The press release speaks for itself. In the coming days there will be more comment.” His management company wouldn’t take questions. Warner didn’t officially comment but an unnamed insider said, “People were laughing.” At Time Warner—owned Atlantic Records, Senior Vice President Danny Goldberg remarked, “Anything he says you have to take with a grain of salt.”
Eventually, Warner referred everyone to Paisley, where even his spokespeople couldn’t explain it. “The reason no one wants to comment is that no one knows,” said an unnamed associate. “There’s no information … . Who knows what he’s gonna do? Only Prince knows.” A spokeswoman there said, “No one speaks for Prince.” She referred everyone back to the press release, released by his publicist. The announcement made Eric Leeds chuckle, and think, Okay, here he goes again. Eventually, Eric Leeds publicly said, “Prince is a very mercurial fellow. He could change his mind tomorrow.” He figured Prince might not like something in the new deal “and he’s saying, ‘Well, let me play hardball with them for a minute.’”
When people heard Prince worked with his band the next day in an LA studio, many predicted this retirement would be brief. “I can guarantee that if he comes up with another ‘When Doves Cry,’ the first thing he’s going to do is go to Warner Bros. and say: ‘Release this. Tomorrow,”’ said Eric.
His brother Alan agreed. Only three things in life were certain, he joked. “We’re all born, we all die, and Prince will make another record one of these days.”
First manager Owen Husney meanwhile felt, “It’s very reminiscent of the recent death of Superman in the comics, only to have him reemerge three months later in six or seven different characters.”
More people spoke of isolation and yes-men leading him astray. “He goes from his indoor garage at his house to the underground garage of Paisley Park through the secret stairs to the studio,” said an associate in town. “Then he’s chauffeured to his own club, where he sits in his private guarded area.” Not interacting with people, including bandmates, showed in his music, some claimed. “Prince has gone from leading to following,” said another associate (anonymous due to a gag clause in Paisley Park contracts). “He’s following trends, not making them.”
Either way, his announcement left fans and associates alike baffled.
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UNSPEAKABLE
PRINCE WASN’T DONE WITH RECORDING. BUT HE WAS TRYING TO shift gears. He had in mind an album called Come. He combed through old recordings again. He reworked November 1991’s “Race.” Then, he included seven of ten songs from his proposed Ulysses production. He added the songs “Papa” and “Solo.” March 1994 found him creating the album’s only new work, “Letitgo.” And hoping to recapture the magic of “Gett Off,” Prince had Eric Leeds play flute.
He also had young dancer Mayte dash off a letter to the fanzine Controversy in which she claimed the “7” video—which featured lots of kids and showed Prince killing off old images—had changed him.
The letter ended with her saying he was happier than ever. “And free. And loving! He finally kissed me!” Then her postscript said, “The truth is that I had help writing this letter. I can’t say from whom—but his name isn’t Prince.”
Publicly, he claimed to have disbanded the New Power Generation. But he still had Sonny and Michael Bland stopping by to help with his songs.
While taping backup vocals for “Pheromone,” he muttered, to himself, “That was cool, wasn’t it?” Then: “Who can outsing me? Nobody! Good answer.”
Mayte watched, assuming this was part of his process.
When he finished sequencing the new songs, he played them for Mayte. “What are you going to do with this new music now that you have retired?” she asked.
“I’m going to give it to my friends.”
She looked confused, Mayte explained in her letter. He just laughed.
She realized he missed the days when no one knew who he was. “Now everyone knows him. And they think they know what he’s gonna do,” she explained in print. He had the band rehearse only these new songs and told people it felt like a new beginning. He looked forward to rocking a stadium with only new songs.
In May 1993, another Ulysses number, “Pope” found him presenting more hip-hop music. Over another speedy dance beat, he rapped about his superiority as a rapper. He was like a pontiff, he claimed, while presidents worked in lame governments and had no true power. It was a strong theme, but he softened the song by including Mayte’s chirpy singing on the chorus.
When he finished this round of recording in May 1993, the proposed album’s title track had over-the-top lyrics about oral sex and slurping noises. “Pheromone” had whispers and half-spoken vocals. “Solo,” with M. Butterfly’s David Hwang, was simple and spare. “Papa” darkly suggested he (or a character he played) had experienced child abuse. But it sounded dreary and colorless. Warner executives rejected the album.
At the same time, he worked on the New Power Generation’s debut, Gold Nigga. The album had eleven songs and five skits. There were also short instrumental bits. They finished recording in late June 1993. He had concealed his heavy involvement and creation of most song ideas by crediting the band with producing, arranging, and performing everything. But he had copyrighted the songs through NPG Publishing, which he owned.
At Warner, executives faced strange song titles like “Goldnigga Pt. 1” (and 2 and 3), “Guess Who’s Knockin’,” “Oilcan,” “Deuce and a Quarter,” “Goldie’s Parade,” and “Call the Law.”
Instead of tight songwriting, Gold Nigga offered Tony’s raps over loose funk riffs, chants, and horns. One song was about a car. Another echoed Wings’ 1976 hit “Let ’Em In.” On a third, Tony said, “Fuck the record company, there’s too many ways for them to stiff us.” The title track attacks labels for cheating black men and urged black artists to “Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights.” “2gether” encouraged black people to work together and stop the “black on black genocide.” Hearing few hits, Warner rejected the album. His drummer Michael Bland told the Minneapolis Star Tribune that he felt he had dragged them into his feud. Dude, I didn’t sign up for this, he thought. I just want to go out and rock, eat some steak, wear funky clothes, and watch a little Nick at Nite.
Now, Gold Nigga was rejected. With the label also owning his name, and the music associated with it, Prince felt even more like “a pawn used to produce more money.”
But he had a way out. For months, he had let a few people in on a secret. He’d talked about it for three or four weeks, executive vice president Jill Willis recalled. “I hoped for his sake that he would eventually let i
t go.” Everyone worried the media and public would disapprove. But he didn’t care. It was his way out.
That symbol that had appeared in his work for years.
It’s who he was.
His name.
Battling Warner could last for years. And he might not get out of his situation without observers thinking he was acting like a child. Still, he set his jaw and had New York publicists create the press release.
Suddenly he relaxed. It was all over. When people attacked Prince, they’d no longer be addressing him. “I’m telling you,” he said, “the pimples go away, all the stress in your system leaves.”
On his thirty-fifth birthday, the release announced, “From now on, Prince will be referred to as , the combination symbol for male and female which also served as the title for his most recent multiplatinum album.” He was also “separating from the NPG,” it claimed, though he actually had plans for their solo album.
They faxed a copy to his European publicist Chris Poole, who told Q Magazine, “He’s finally gone mad.” Poole called Paisley Park to make sure this wasn’t a joke. “They said, No. He’s serious. Put it out.”
The next day, photographer Jeff Katz flew into town. At Paisley Park, he told the receptionist, “I need to talk to him.” Usually, she’d page him. Now, she said, “We haven’t figured this whole thing out.” She wasn’t sure how, specifically, to address him.
“How do you get in touch with him?”
“We just wait ’til we see him in the halls, and we run and grab him.”
His band and management didn’t know what to call him, either. “After a while, everyone settled on ‘boss,’” said keyboardist Tommy Barbarella. That or “Hey, man.”
The announcement got Prince his most press in years. “My name is the eye of me,” he told USA Today. It had no sound, but looked beautiful; made him feel good and offered escape from Prince’s baggage—not to mention “massive ego.” In fanzines, and on Web sites, his die-hard fans calmly discussed it, accusing outsiders of being narrow-minded.
As reporters kept inquiring about the name, a publicist said, “There is no pronunciation for it.” Disc jockeys “just have to deal with it. They just have to explain what the symbol looks like.” When MTV referred to him, they showed his with a sound effect, “boingg.” His publicist joked may be starting a trend—sounds instead of names—but from a promotional perspective, it was no laughing matter.
“Everyone was baffled and upset,” said Warner’s Marylou Badeaux. “On top of everything else, now there was this. I couldn’t see how it would be a positive.” Paisley Park soon mailed reporters a bright-yellow floppy disk with the . “That way, art departments everywhere can print by just pushing a button,” George Kalogerakis wrote in Vanity Fair.
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UNDERTAKER
HE STILL OWED WARNER FIVE ALBUMS. HE COULD GIVE THEM that much vault material whenever they wanted. Then, as , he could release new stuff on a smaller label. It’d be a dream come true, to finally release as much music as he created. “I just wish I had some magic words I could say to Warner’s so it would work out.”
During one meeting, a Warner executive said, “We don’t want any more Prince albums.”
“That’s the name on the contract,” he answered.
“That’s not the name people know you by now.”
If he was going by they wanted ’s new work. But he said, “You didn’t sign him.”
Claiming he’d stop playing old Prince songs added to Warner’s frustration. Mo Ostin, Waronker, and other top executives and attorneys met to discuss his “retirement,” his refusal to submit new music, and his name change. He was retaliating for Gold Nigga, they felt, hoping to use “alternative media” for new projects while handing them old stuff. Some in the room called it breach of contract. But—thanks, some said, to Russ Thyret—they wouldn’t take immediate legal action. If anything, they were relieved. For once, he wasn’t in their face, asking them to release more music. They could also create a stopgap Greatest Hits collection.
That summer both sides retreated from a potential legal battle. They told Prince about the Greatest Hits collection. He reluctantly supported it. Though his Paisley Park Studios vault held about five hundred unreleased songs, project producer Gregg Geller of Warner Bros. didn’t use many. Warner filled it with classics like “When Doves Cry” and “1999,” and rare single B-sides. But Prince soon stepped forward to offer four unreleased numbers: his new song “Pink Cashmere,” his late-eighties ballad “Power Fantastic,” his smooth new dance-rap “Pope” and his fifties-inspired new rocker “Peach,” most of which featured playing by the New Power Generation. He even threw in his live version of “Nothing Compares 2 U,” with Rosie Gaines, recorded during an invitation-only Paisley Park event with revamped music.
Some reporters claimed Prince was discarding a celebrated trademark. But Prince felt when the lights went down in a concert hall, and he spoke into a microphone, “it doesn’t matter what your name is.” Jokes and references to “Symbol Man,” “the Glyph,” and “What’s-His-Symbol” crept into stories. As did accusations this symbol was part of a renegotiation strategy or scheme to escape his contract. Prince claimed he was just drawing a line in the sand. “Things change here.” He was seeing which media outlets respected him. And if something frustrated him, Prince remembered that Muhammad Ali saw reporters and fight fans call him Cassius Clay for years. Privately, however, Prince knew this decision was shrinking his audience even more.
“It was the worst period of my life,” he later told Salon.com. “I was being made physically ill by what was going on.” But he had started on this path and couldn’t give in. He had to keep putting on a brave front. He told another writer at Paisley Park, “Here there is solitude, silence. I like to stay in this controlled environment.” People were saying he was out of touch. Fine. He’d create twenty-five to thirty albums and “catch up with Sinatra so you tell me who’s out of touch.” Detractors could say what they want. “One thing I ain’t gonna run out of is music.” A magazine wrote that fulfilling his Warner contract with vault songs while releasing new ones somewhere else as didn’t “hold much promise as a legal theory.” And before Prince knew it, the media had a new name for him. After a British journalist described him as the Artist Formerly Known as Prince, others adopted the phrase. It seemingly ridiculed his decision but American newspaper writers used it, too. So did TV stations. He frowned. “I’m not the Artist Formerly Known as Anything. Use my name.”
By July 1993, he wanted to release a song as on another label. Warner chairman Mo Ostin said no. They could find a way “but they’re afraid of the ripple effect, that everybody would want to do it,” Prince felt. But Warner wasn’t the only problem. It was the entire industry. “There’s just a few people with all the power.” After declining to play the MTV Music Awards “suddenly, I can’t get a video on MTV, and you can’t get a hit without that.” He earned respect for Pearl Jam, who recently decided not to film any more videos.
Unable to release music as , Prince decided to cram new music into other media. August 21, he premiered Glam Slam Ulysses, a play that offered a modern take on Homer’s Odyssey in his new Glam Slam club in Los Angeles (his renovated club). The production cost several hundred thousand dollars and included twelve dancers, and thirteen new songs. But the LA Times called it “silly.” Once it flopped, Prince kept moving these new songs from one project to another.
Around him, people felt Prince was wasting money on what insiders called “things of little or no commercial value.” These included the erotic stage version of Ulysses, a cheaply packaged “poly-gender fragrance” called “Get Wild,” stage sets and rehearsals for tours he never took, and videos. If someone told him “no,” he grew exasperated. A business manager urged him to spend less, and he told her, “I don’t need a mother.”
Alternative media could also mean movies. So Prince agreed to provide songs for director James Brooks’s latest film. The fifty-three-year-old�
��s debut as writer-director, 1984’s Terms of Endearment, won three Oscars, including Best Picture. His 1987 film Broadcast News frowned on network news stations and infotainment. His latest, I’ll Do Anything, was a father-daughter story with Nick Nolte, Tracy Ullman, and other cast members singing songs. Prince handed Brooks all-new works called “Wow,” “Make Believe,” a title track, “Don’t Talk 2 Strangers,” “My Little Pill,” “There Is Lonely,” “Be My Mirror,” and “I Can’t Love U Anymore.” He offered two others, “The Rest of My Life” and “Empty Room,” but Brooks rejected them early in production. (By August 1993, Brooks had finished the film. Columbia Pictures held the first test screening. “Audience response was calamitous,” Time reported. “One hundred people walked out, and opinion cards showed they hated the songs.”)
September 7 and 8, Prince was in London, with Rob Borm, director of the “Gett Off” video, filming his shows. But just as Prince was about to take the stage, according to Bruce Orwall in the St. Paul Pioneer Press, Borm asked about the $450,000 Paisley Park still owed him for the “Gett Off” video. “You should know better than to talk to me about money, especially before a gig,” Prince snapped. Prince went onstage to perform but his attorney and business manager soon delivered similar lectures. Facing angry creditors, Borm called his own attorney for advice. The lawyer advised Borm to pull his crew, come home, and start negotiating for payment. The tour ended by September 1993. And back home, Prince finally dismissed the New Power Generation.