Prince

by Ronin Ro

  He was knee-deep in Emancipation when his advisers suggested he meet Londell McMillan. A dynamic young attorney raised in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, McMillan had once offered to work for him. Feeling the thirty-year-old was too young, Prince’s advisors rejected him. But after several other attorneys couldn’t resolve the situation after months of negotiations, his advisers suggested he give McMillan a shot.

  So Prince had him come to Paisley Park.

  Prince had started out trying to change the state of music. He wrote too many classics to count. He played almost every kind of music imaginable. But he started doubting himself, he told Rock & Folk magazine. While writing, he’d ask himself, Do I really have the sound of the day? Will this be a hit? Shouldn’t I be using the latest slang in these lyrics? He started reaching for samples; ordering his band to imitate C+C Music Factory; rapping to fit in—ruining everything he worked hard to build. “I really felt like a product and then I started turning in work that reflected that,” he said. He was also repeating himself, rehashing old hits, “doing my best to fulfill my contract.”

  Now, he knew where he wanted to go, but needed direction. “I looked up and L. Londell McMillan was there,” Prince said in Interview. Their discussion of “what we as black people are supposed to represent during this time period” inspired Prince to hire McMillan to be his sixth attorney since 1978.

  As winter receded, Prince was talking change. There was no color at Paisley Park. Only the same white walls and gray carpet he had ignored while stopping by to record seemingly every day for fifteen years. Facing artwork on a wall, he thought, pfft. That’s out of here. “Those pictures got to go,” he said aloud. He wanted colorful, alive. Prince must have been considering his impending parenthood. He wanted employees to bring their own kids to a kid-friendly workspace, complete with a carousel, educational playground equipment, and a twenty-four-hour day-care center. He also wanted primary colors with soft, oversize furniture, stars, and zodiac signs.

  He also planned personnel changes. He had employees return their keys to Paisley Park. Now people had to ring the buzzer. One evening, someone did. Mayte, barefoot and pregnant, answered and let keyboardist Ricky Peterson in. “It was the sweetest thing,” Peterson said. Then Prince descended a flight of stairs by the front door in big bunny slippers. “Come on in,” Prince said. “He was so happy,” Peterson remembered. “I’ve never seen him happier than when she was pregnant.”

  And in the studio, he expressed this joy on his big album.

  Marriage made him more focused. Songs came a lot easier. The whole album would be about love. He could already picture the finished work. And while he’d protest the 1992 Warner deal on one or two numbers, he would end these angry works on a positive note.

  It was the most exciting time of his life. Instead of rushing, he constructed the album and did what he felt. He left a familiar sample from George Clinton’s “Atomic Dog” on “Style.” Another time, he put a guitar on the floor and based a song on its feedback noise.

  Before long, he wrote about Mayte on his piano ballad “Let’s Have a Baby” (an account of their wedding night). He described a sperm making its way toward an egg on “Conception,” and told Mayte he wanted to include their unborn child’s in-utero heartbeat over the beat. “It was a hard decision,” Prince said. “But Mayte prayed on it, and then she said it was cool.” Midway through its creation, he decided its theme was too heavy. He changed a few things and offered the lighter “Sex in the Summer,” about guys seeking girls on a hot summer day.

  He covered Joan Osborne’s “One of Us” because he wanted to hear God’s name on the radio. He updated “Goodbye,” an idea from late-1991 sessions for , but changed his mind, setting it aside in favor of his lengthy “The Holy River.” And moments like these reminded him of why he was doing any of this.

  Without Warner, nothing stood in his way. No one looked over his shoulder. “Nothing was remixed, censored, chopped down, or edited,” Prince explained to USA Today. Where he might have pulled “1000 Hugs and Kisses” and “She Gave Her Angels” from Warner albums because he feared executives would frown on religious subject matter, he now openly mentioned God; he made his midtempo piano hymn “The Holy River” one of his longest tracks; and he didn’t “worry about what Billboard magazine will say.”

  By this stage in his career, implying that Warner demanded dance music, rap-ready sounds, and contemporary slang on his recent commercial turkeys had become part of his rhetoric. Nevertheless, left to his own devices, Prince hurriedly included all three on some of these new works. He dabbled in many styles, but delivered what many other R&B contemporaries (and West Coast rap producer Dr. Dre) had been doing for years. His vision for pop and R&B on the first disc, ballads on the second, and dance music on the third was impressive—and the sort of structure he seemed to need—but he wasn’t really breaking any new ground. His epic and resonant ballad “The Love We Make” is one of his more powerful, effective, and engaging songs of the 1990s and one of his best lyrics ever. But he then returned to slapping R&B riffs over sedate beats, forging songs that weren’t as bad as Come, but that lacked the energy, innovation, and daring generally associated with Prince albums.

  Warner released the Spike Lee soundtrack to Girl 6 on March 19. The compilation of old hits included Prince’s newer creation “Pink Cashmere.” But he focused on the future. By early April, his publicists issued a release that said “glyph is about to assume another name: Dad.” People reported on it, calling a short news item, “Little Red Bassinet.”

  That same month he summoned his New Power Generation band to his enormous studio complex, and finally dismissed them. The payroll clerk called individual employees to meetings and canned them, too. “Last week he even laid off his longest-term employee, Paisley’s chief engineer, with Prince for twelve years,” reporter Jon Bream wrote. When he was done, Prince reportedly trimmed his payroll to a receptionist, two people to run his day-to-day business, a personal recording engineer, and outside accountants. He agreed to rent one of his two main studios but stayed in the other, working on the perfect album to celebrate his marriage and the impending birth. Soon, he stopped renting the second room. Remaining employees called clients to cancel sessions.

  Director of operations Juli Knapp-Winge explained Paisley was heading in a new direction, preparing for twenty-first-century challenges and aggressive corporate goals. A new staff would enhance advances they made “corporately, operationally, and creatively.” They regretted losing talent, but were “excited about the new direction,” looking forward “to an exciting and aggressive future for Paisley Park.” Prince also closed his New Power Generation store in Minneapolis, according to Jon Bream. When people called 1-800-NEW-FUNK, a recording said, “We are currently restructuring our shipping department.” The tape steered callers to a 612 area code number but another machine answered there, too.

  Warner Bros. Records wasn’t angry with Prince. They just felt Prince needed to understand that the label could not just release everything he spewed. “That way of thinking can come from living isolated like he has in a place like Minnesota,” an executive explained derisively. There, Prince was shy, secluded, and surrounded by “a small group of people around him who never told him anything he didn’t want to hear.” So Prince continued to believe he was right. “He wanted his freedom so badly,” this executive added. “He was really tortured.”

  For almost four months, Warner had been willing to negotiate with his new lawyer, McMillan. “We were prepared to go to litigation,” McMillan told a reporter, but they didn’t since all parties were sincerely interested in, and eager to reach, a deal that would benefit the company, and Prince himself.

  His 1992 deal called for six albums. , Come, and The Gold Experience were three of them. Warner released the soundtrack to Spike Lee’s Girl 6 and The Black Album but they reportedly didn’t count. Prince still owed Warner three albums of new material. Thyret, many said, gave him a break. Warner woul
d let Prince leave if he submitted two. But he’d have to let Warner release the two albums, and two more compilations of material he recorded while under contract. Warner would also hold onto his back catalog and pay lower advances on royalties.

  With an agreement taking shape, Prince took a break from Emancipation to create one of the final two albums of new material for Warner. He wanted the first, Chaos and Disorder, to sound better than recent works. He searched tapes of things he created at Paisley Park, looking for spiritual subtexts and the sort of loud guitar playing that had carried him to the top. He started finding short, catchy numbers that highlighted the guitar skills that fans saw onstage but rarely heard on albums.

  He added his May 1993 blues-rock creation, “Zannalee.” Then “Chaos and Disorder” and “Right the Wrong,” both created on the same day during sessions for Gold. “Chaos” discussed how social mores were changing for the worse. “Right the Wrong” was about race and reparations. He also decided his epic “The Same December,” from 1994, should appear. His more recent tapes held February 1996’s “Into the Light” and “I Will,” both with spiritual messages that would be right at home on Emancipation. The only misstep was “I Rock, Therefore I Am,” taped in March, and about identity. Its chunky rock riffs, Tony’s old raps, and Rosie’s singing all sounded stale. His eighty-six-second “Had U,” was a better choice. Set to nothing but dirgelike strings and classical-style guitar, it found him bitterly describing a relationship two words at a time. After outlining his happiness at the onset, his emotions during various stages, and his ultimate disappointment, he ended with the phrase “Fuck you,” causing many listeners to believe this slow, epic work was directed at Warner. This was more than enough, but Prince still felt the album needed something more. So he booked time at South Beach Studios in Miami and flew most of his old band down there in early April. Here he remembered someone saying Van Halen recorded its debut in a week. “That’s what we were going for—spontaneity, seeing how fast and hard we could thrash it out,” he explained. In Miami, he achieved his goal.

  He taped a delicate work called “Dinner With Dolores” that described a strange, unpleasant interlude with what sounded like an aging hard-core fan. Musically, he set it to balmy jazz-tinged melodies and gentle guitar that revived the soft rock style of “Money Don’t Matter 2 Night.” Then with Bland on drums, and old mentor Sonny Thompson on bass, he plugged in his guitar and played catchy sixties-styled pop-rock on “I Like It There.” This one offered chugging metal bass and upbeat singing, a frenzied solo in the middle, and his shift from rhythm to lead.

  When it ended, he breathed easier. Ten days’ work led to a noisy, forty-minute rock collection that worked. But it also drained him and dredged up painful feelings. It was nearly over. The album, Warner, all of it. “That whole album is loud and raucous,” he said later, “but it’s also dark and unhappy.”

  By April 18, he returned home. He had a lot on his mind: the recent album Chaos, Emancipation, the firings at Paisley Park, the end of his relationship with Warner, not to mention impending fatherhood. But he dressed and left the house to hit the studio. He had to create the second album of new material for Warner.

  No one worried when he didn’t come home that night. But then he didn’t stop in the next day, either. Or that night. Or the day after. Finally, April 21, Mayte traveled to his complex. She entered the studio and couldn’t believe her eyes. Prince was lying there unconscious, according to reporter Stuart White. Near him, there were reportedly four empty wine bottles and a pill jar. “Oh my God, he’s dead!” she screamed. Her twenty-six-year-old bodyguard Arlene tried to rouse him. Prince muttered a few words. Arlene rushed ahead to tell Fairview-Northdale hospital he was on the way. Mayte helped him into a car and got him to the emergency room. There, nurses quickly started an intravenous drip. A doctor called Mayte and Arlene over and asked if it was a suicide attempt.

  All they knew was he had been missing three days. “We don’t know how long he’d been drinking or how many aspirins he’d taken,” Arlene told Stuart White. “But he’d clearly vomited and that may have saved his life, bringing up the tablets. He told the doctor he’d taken drink and pills to stop heart palpitations,” she added.

  It was later revealed that in recent months he had been feeling heart palpitations. Whether stress caused them is not clear, although Prince—offstage, in some creative decisions, and even in scenes during his semiautobiographical Purple Rain—showed he was prone to worrying. Author Alex Hahn noted that the pains had Prince questioning whether he was experiencing heart problems. Either way, it had certainly been a stressful time. Almost as stressful as the period preceding his creation of Dirty Mind, during which, he openly admitted, he had sought escape in wine, women, and song. After a long winter spent working on Emancipation and getting used to a new life as a happily married monogamist, Prince faced a springtime filled with layoffs at his studio complex, complications with his wife’s pregnancy, a never-ending stream of negative press, and suspense over his representatives’ negotiations with Warner Bros. executives in Los Angeles. From the references to wine in various song lyrics—including Chaos’s “Zannalee,” and his Emancipation number “The Holy River”—it seemed Prince had decided to bring a few bottles of the stuff with him into the studio. Now he was in a hospital.

  That night he woke with a start. “What am I doing here?”

  Arlene, sleeping out in the corridor right outside his room, ran in.

  “What’s going on? Get me out of here!”

  He yanked the drip from his arm, leaped into a wheelchair, and told Arlene to drive him home. There he continued getting two albums ready. He and McMillan had to meet with Warner out west.

  37

  SEE YOU IN THE PURPLE RAIN

  FOR YEARS, PRINCE AND VARIOUS MEDIA OUTLETS HAD DRAGGED Warner through the mud. “We never were angry,” said Bob Merlis. “We were puzzled. He evinced great unhappiness at being here.” The issue wasn’t content, but quality. Warner also wanted him to adhere to his contract. “He had artistic control. We didn’t want to stifle his creative spirit.” But he wanted to release more albums than his contract called for, each for a sizable advance. He wanted a different contract that went against good business practices. “He made a habit of it, and we accommodated him to the best of our ability,” Merlis added.

  “It was better for everyone that it ended … . He’s happier, and we don’t have to fuss and fume with him anymore.”

  In Los Angeles, Prince sat with McMillan and Warner executives to hash out a termination agreement. It was April 26, and he had the two new albums with him. He handed Warner Chaos and Disorder and the compilation, The Vault: Old Friends 4 Sale along with artwork for both. For Chaos, instead of something as elaborate as The Gold Experience, he and his designer Steve Parke supposedly threw a crude photo collage together with a home computer and a color copy machine one afternoon. A panel showed a syringe full of money. Blood dripped from its tip onto a Polaroid of a reel-to-reel machine and “racks of master tapes.” A heart sat in a toilet, various boot marks all over. His teary-eyed face was on the label of a broken vinyl platter. Five photos showed awards, gold records, guitars, and a secret vault. A matchbook had a burnt match. The title Chaos and Disorder was in red. The cover also included burning roses with a razor blade, a Bible with his initials “P.R.N.” burned into its cover, a credit reading all songs were composed by , and an off-putting disclaimer (“originally intended 4 private use only, this compilation serves as the last original material recorded by [The Artist] 4 Warner brothers records”). The other album, The Vault: Old Friends 4 sale, was a turkey. But Warner executives had no say in what the albums contained. A Warner executive called it a “take it or leave it” presentation. Several high-ranking executives were livid: Much of this stuff was beyond pedestrian. Still, they accepted the albums to end this. And Prince surprised them by agreeing to shoot a video for “Dinner With Dolores.”

  Warner promoted Chaos and Disorder, by “”
The album arrived in stores Monday, July 8, 1996. Critics were quick to attack. Rolling Stone’s review called it as sour and jagged as its cover. “At its best, the record sounds like a collection of polished demos.” Or worse, a bad Prince impersonator. Whether “his record-company battles” distracted him or he ran out of ideas was unclear, their critic added, but “it’s been a while since (The Symbol) has really had anything important to say in his music.” And it didn’t matter what he called himself, “Chaos and Disorder is the sound of the man repeating himself badly.”

  Prince ignored this review and others. With critics trashing Chaos, he was already turning his attention to Emancipation. He had spent a year working on the new set but saw light at the end of the tunnel. One day, he wrote three new songs and worked on recording two of them, Prince told the London Times. He was tired when he ended this recording session at 5:00 A.M., but coffee helped.

  Later that day, he slipped into a tailored black suit and met in Manhattan with LA Times reporter Elysa Gardner in his only U.S. interview for Chaos. He held no real grudges, he said. “I was bitter before, but now I’ve washed my face. I can just move on. I’m free.”

  On July 10, Prince did his first of two TV appearances in support of the album. Monday night, with “Slave” again on his right cheek and glitter in his hair, he sat at a piano on Late Show with David Letterman and played “Dinner With Dolores,” Chaos’s first single. Before leaving the stage, he said “Free TLC,” supporting the female trio that sold 9 million copies of CrazySexyCool, but wanted to leave their current label, according to Gil Kaufman of Addicted to Noise. The next morning, on the street outside the Today show studio, he again played “Dinner,” and “Zannalee,” also on Chaos.