by Ronin Ro
PART FOUR
The RETURN
38
INTO THE LIGHT
AS CEO OF NPG RECORDS, PRINCE OVERSAW A STAFF OF TWENTY-FIVE. But he didn’t view himself as a businessman. He hated the word. “It’s not a business, what I do.” Still, he was good at it. Critics claimed his music wasn’t as hot anymore, but his shows got him onto Pollstar’s list of top-earning tours. Playing midsized venues with little promotion and no booking agent also brought in a bigger cut of profits.
EMI was gone, but Prince had already made headway on his next offering, Crystal Ball, a four-CD collection of vault recordings. He figured he’d create about two thousand five hundred copies with special packaging and sell them directly to fans at his Web site. He claimed it would cost a whopping fifty dollars due to expensive manufacturing costs but admitted his label NPG would get “the bulk of that money” after paying the manufacturer. “And distribution is just a postage stamp.” Once he had the set mastered, he started taking orders. But he wouldn’t send any out until he received 100,000 payments.
His next move was even stranger. Though EMI Records had folded, he still had his acoustic work The Truth pressed. He planned to sell it over his 1-800-NEW-FUNK telephone line. But Mayte said he should just give it away, free, to people that helped this business grow. He announced he’d hand 100,000 copies out, then expanded this to include anyone that contacted his phone line or Web site.
“It’s a pretty slick idea,” he observed, “because the phone has been ringing off the hook.”
Mayte helped again when he planned a tour with acoustic instruments. Instead of focusing on his appearance and stage show, he had planned a more intimate performance to suit the mood of The Truth’s sobering sound.
But Mayte suggested he give his core audience what they expected: the electric instruments, flashy costumes, old hits in familiar recognizable form, and dance moves and party songs. This was what filled the coffers.
And so he changed the plan.
Then Prince considered a new stage set. He wanted something spectacular—a huge dream set shaped like his and sitting in the middle of huge arenas. But there was no time to build it. He decided instead on an empty stage. Next came booking shows. No middlemen. He’d do it himself, and start in relatively small fifteen- to twenty-thousand-seat venues.
Another change was the set list. An internal voice said, Play where you are now. But while surfing the net—something he allegedly did frequently—he saw fans wanted “Little Red Corvette,” and “Kiss.” Despite claiming he wouldn’t under his new name, he filled the set list with old Prince hits. “Even ‘When Doves Cry’ we play again,” he soon told MTV.
But he also kept an eye on the future. By September 30, fans had ordered eighty-four thousand copies of Crystal Ball, at fifty dollars a pop. Between concerts, he announced he’d press one hundred thousand copies. “Keep the orders flowing,” he added. “We might reach two hundred thousand!” Tower Records’ chairman Russ Solomon quipped, “Pearl Jam rides again.” Then more seriously, “The Internet is a hard way to do business.” But Prince’s next move shook up Tower even more. After considering how Best Buy, Musicland, and Blockbuster sold the most copies of Emancipation, Prince let Minneapolis-based Best Buy, a consumer electronics chain with 285 stores in 32 states, stock a four-CD version in stores. Tower’s Solomon frowned on the deal. “We wouldn’t strike one, and I would resent it if another chain struck one,” he said. But Musicland and Blockbuster also agreed to stock Crystal Ball.
In the end, Crystal Ball sold 250,000 copies without a video or radio play (about 100,000 domestically). At Warner, he would have received maybe 20 percent of this money after the label deducted “recoupable” expenses for recording, marketing, and tour support. Now, he earned anywhere from 80 to 95 percent. He settled into his new life as an artist and executive, and soon felt the hardest part of his day was writing checks.
Booking a show was easy. He called a few radio programmers, said he’d reach town in a few days, and bought a five-thousand-dollar ad. “That’s my idea of promotion.”
He would call the guy from Best Buy or Target and play them a record. Oh, you like it? How many you want? “That’s distribution.”
Joe Kviders, general manager of Tower Records in Chicago, said, “The Artist is bungling it.” But Best Buy senior vice president Gary Arnold said whenever he met Elton John, Elton always wanted to hear about Prince. In fact, everyone in the industry was watching Prince these days, “because he’s breaking ground,” and controlling his product when the business was “basically being run by five major corporations,” Arnold explained.
But selling Crystal Ball online and directly to Best Buy angered many distributors (middlemen that earned money by carrying records from labels to stores), Details magazine reported. He invited music retailers to Paisley to hear a new album, Newpower Soul, hoping they’d hear its ten tracks and order copies from its official distributor NPG. He told them they could have copies for ten dollars, one attendee told Details, with a suggested markup to $12. 99 in stores. A few balked at an unrealistic price. “I mean, how can anyone make money on a three-dollar markup?” These discs didn’t “magically go from Minneapolis to a store in New York,” he said. “There’s just not enough money for everybody in the middle.” Some retailers played hardball and got it for nine dollars, he claimed in Details. A few even got it for eight. “If I were a retailer who paid full fare and found that out, I’d be pretty hacked off,” said the distributor.
This same distributor also claimed he wanted cash on delivery for Newpower Soul, and agreed to the industry standard of a sixty-day billing period, this person continued, in Details. But twenty-five days after delivery, he allegedly changed his mind and wanted payment within thirty days, asking, “Can you shoot us a check next week?” “He has no clue how the industry operates,” this person continued. Attorney Londell, however, told Details that some retailers received discounts for buying in bulk, but other accusations were “absolutely not true.” Their pricing system, he stressed, was “absolutely consistent and standard.”
He hired independent distributors for Newpower Soul, but some retailers were still smarting. One felt it was “a pure ego thing, running a label without really knowing how,” and that he was as unsuccessful fighting the industry as Pearl Jam in their fight against Ticketmaster. Yet, BMG—parent company to labels like Arista Records—agreed to distribute Newpower Soul, credited to the New Power Generation, worldwide.
Prince had NPG Records release Newpower Soul on June 30, 1998. And while it was supposedly a group album, only he was on its cover. Rolling Stone complained that stiff rap and “clunky hip-hop and stale jamming” had now ruined another recent work. Other critics complained it was bankrupt of ideas and contained nothing they hadn’t heard in the past. Still more claimed it had fewer hit singles because he couldn’t write them anymore. “Well, that’s what they said before ‘The Most Beautiful Girl in the World,’ too,” he said. And right after Purple Rain, “and I had ten hits after that. And Lovesexy was supposed to be a failure.”
Newpower Soul did about as well as Chaos, reaching No. 22 on the Pop Chart, and No. 9 on the R&B Chart. It sold 138,000 its first months of release (low compared to earlier work but more than Chaos and Disorder for Warner). In the past, he would have worried. Critics and hard-core fans may not accept it but he had different priorities right now. They kept claiming he’d never match “the success of such and such, but I’m not on that road … .” He was happily receiving most of the $140 million an album and tour grossed. In the past, he claimed, “I’d get at most $7 million.” Though Newpower’s sales were nothing to brag about, the larger cut of profits meant this album alone earned enough for a magnificent, white and peach-bordered villa in Marbella, on Spain’s Costa del Sol.
He arranged another tour to promote this work, and Chaka Khan’s Come 2 My House, which he’d soon release through NPG. But disaster struck again after his September 27 show at Atlantic City’s
Marina Theater. That night, a fog machine covered the floor with moisture, MTV reported. Opening act Chaka fell but wasn’t hurt. Then he took the stage. Midway through “Delirious,” he strolled down a ramp on stage. His shoe caught on a piece of equipment and he tripped. In Cleveland, before his next show at CSU University, a doctor diagnosed him with a torn ligament.
And so on October 2, the tour was off. But he quickly announced a new record called Roadhouse Garden by his old eighties band, The Revolution. Like Crystal Ball, this album Roadhouse would compile unreleased tracks.
With the year 1999 approaching, reporters kept invoking the good old days. Prince had to tell a reporter, “I know that people want to talk about the past. But we’re not at Purple Rain anymore.” He and the band didn’t act or dress like that anymore. “If you talk about that, the next thing you know, people start writing things like The Revolution is going to reunite!” Sure enough, writers claimed it would happen. Before he knew it, he and Wendy Melvoin were speaking on the phone, for the first time in years. But when she called him Prince, Wendy told Steve Appleford, of Yahoo Music, he said, “Ohhh, don’t call me that.”
“I’m so sorry,” she remembered replying. “I’m not used to this. I’m not really sure what to do. Please forgive my clumsiness in the situation.” They moved past it. He said he’d send old vault material she could update for Roadhouse.
Warner meanwhile reacted to growing fan and media nostalgia by reissuing his 1982 hit “1999” as a promotional single for radio stations. But reporters kept bombarding the label with questions, to the point where Bob Merlis said, “Never has the simple servicing of a seasonally appropriate song generated so much press attention.”
Warner simply wanted to do radio stations a favor. With the year 1999 approaching, many stations would want to keep the song on the air; they’d need copies; they’d realize this and start calling, clogging voice mail. Warner pressed CDs and sent them out to various stations. But that was it. They wouldn’t do anything else to promote “1999” during the next twelve months. Everyone already knew the song. If they wanted it, they could get it on the 1999 album or a greatest hits collection.
But Prince wasn’t satisfied. He was now “faced with a problem. But ‘pro’ is the prefix of problem, so I decided to do something about it.” On his site, he wrote that he’d release a new remastered version on his own NPG label. Subsequent messages hinted he might even remake the entire album.
On the surface, it seemed as if Prince simply wanted to tweak his old label. But it was actually a canny business move. By this point, licensing songs to commercial advertisers and television and motion picture creators had become a more lucrative proposition. Most commercials and TV shows now included pop songs, instead of jingles or themes. Some labels were making $20 million annually through licensing, before handing the artists any money. Artists generally went for it—since they signed deals that agreed to split licensing fees with a label that released a song, and agreed to avoid remaking their songs until five years after their deals expired. Now, many older artists saw a way around it. With the ban on remakes having passed, they could rerecord a song, own the new version, and license it for ads or films without having to hand their old label a share of profits. Once Aerosmith offered automotive giant General Motors a remake of their signature work “Sweet Emotion” for one of their ads, other artists rushed to studios to create remakes—and then to ad agencies on Madison Avenue to sell them. For artists it was a great deal. And many music publishers were just as delighted. These firms could strike licensing deals faster—without having to wait for label approval—if they were dealing with a songwriter directly, and a remake for which labels held no rights.
Rolling Stone, which put him on its cover five times, frowned on the idea, but Prince was within his rights. Warner owned the back catalogue but he could legally rerecord any Warner song so long as the original had been in stores for five to seven years. And in fact, according to The New York Times, he had already re-created “significant portions of his catalog.” Then Prince casually dropped a bombshell. He actually possessed the old master tapes. “I don’t own ‘em. But I got ’em.”
In the studio, he worked on 1999: The New Master, seven new versions he hoped would lure fans away from Warner’s reissue. He planned to release the CD on NPG Records, and sell it in stores and on his site. Into December, he kept posting sour comments about Warner Bros.’s reissue of “199.” In one, he wrote that despite having created the song, its rerelease would benefit Warner, who owned the master tape. And Warner would keep taking the “bulk of the profits” until “this absurd concept is challenged.” But someone at Warner finally said, “It’s our right to do this, and we’re doing it. But we don’t begrudge him anything. He’s a free agent; he can do what he wants.”
During this same period, he and Mayte traveled to Spain. December 12, they met with reporters and announced they had annulled their marriage. Prince told The New York Times they both studied documents they signed in 1996, “and there were a lot of things in there we didn’t like.” But Mayte told Judith Woods it was his decision and one she accepted with reluctance. “I never wanted to be a divorcée.” The conference found them claiming they’d only be apart until Valentine’s Day 1999 “when they plan to remarry,” MTV noted.
Back in Minneapolis, Prince continued to claim they were a couple. “We pretend it didn’t even happen,” he said of the marriage. “Like a lot of things in life I don’t like, I pretend it isn’t there and it goes away.”
But Mayte soon packed her stuff and moved to the house in Spain. There, she wondered if she should change her name. “I didn’t want to be forever known as Prince’s ex-wife.” She decided against it.
In Minneapolis, meanwhile, he was touchy about rumors that claimed he kicked her out. During one interview with the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s Vickie Gilmer, he raised the subject. “I implore you to realize that I’m perfectly healthy and happy. My wife and I, you can see nobody’s kicked her out.”
In mid-January, Prince was still releasing albums to his fan club. He was still in business with Warner thanks to the publishing-related deal he signed in 1992. And he still wanted the master tapes for his Warner albums, starting with For You. On his Web site, he posted an open letter to Madonna, who remained one of Warner’s top draws. Eccentric, florid language described a dream in which he saw her at the Grammy Awards, and asked her to help convince Warner to give him the masters. She didn’t respond.
He wanted the year 1999 to be “a time for reflection.” But he kept recording. Instead of the usual four or five albums at once, and side projects, he focused only on Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic. In June 1998, he had taken the first steps toward creating Rave. He wanted a “very memorable album” to take listeners back to the days when they could remember and sing along with great songs. He wrote catchy hooks and intricate drum machine patterns, balanced genres and styles, and hoped to draw new fans while satisfying calls for what Per Nilsen called “the risk-taking that characterized much of his eighties work.”
In February, he released 1999: The New Master on NPG. Most critics ignored the work. Fans did, too. But he was still thinking about his master tapes. By April 15, 1999, he publicly claimed that he had no choice but to rerecord the seventeen albums he recorded for the label between 1978 and 1996. “I wanted to buy my masters back from Warner Bros. They said no way. So I’m going to rerecord them. All of them.” He smiled. “Now you will have two catalogs with pretty much exactly the same music—except mine will be better—and you can either give your money to WB, the big company, or to NPG. You choose.”
Instead of doing this, however, he moved forward with plans to return to a major label. He had done well for two years, pitching albums to retailers and selling three to online fans. But major labels could get him on radio, back in the mainstream media. In New York, he wanted a label to release Rave and let him keep the master tapes.
He was making the rounds in Manhattan when his lawyer Londell
McMillan met with Arista president Clive Davis to discuss unrelated matters. When Prince’s name came up in conversation, Davis asserted that he hadn’t had “the right record” for some time.
McMillan noted that Prince was in New York, with a few new songs from a new album.
They quickly arranged a meeting.
Prince drove up in his limo.
Davis left the building, approached the car, and got in.
In the car, he played the aging executive four or five pop- and rock-oriented tracks, such as “So Far, So Pleased” and “Whatever U Do, Wherever U Go.” Davis liked what he heard. These were just the sort of hits Prince needed.
Even better, Davis said he’d let him own his masters. “I almost get misty when I think about it,” Prince said. “It was really like being reborn. There is no ceiling now, no limits. I can see the sky.”
At this point, Prince wanted only ten tracks. But Davis’s praise made him feel he had in his hands his biggest hit since Purple Rain. Davis’s enthusiasm inspired more sessions and his new ballad “The Greatest Romance Ever Sold.”
Davis loved this one, too.
Then he even included the name “Prince” as producer. But in spite of the presence of his Linn drum machine and analog Oberheim synthesizer, and the production credit, most tracks had nothing in common with his eighties hits. Prince avoided excessive overdubs or melodies and filled some songs with the modern beat-heavy R&B of Emancipation. Either way, by May 20, he had a fifteen-track album sequenced and ready to go. He told one source it revived the style of Sign O’ the Times.