Prince

  As usual, his work divided critics. Most reviewers called Musicology his most competent and commercial work in years. The Associated Press felt it was a relief after almost a decade of “convoluted, self-indulgent albums that only Prince fanatics cared about.” Rolling Stone had mixed feelings, offering praise in a review subtitled, “Prince can still bring the funk, but we’ve heard it all before.” Either way, Musicology debuted at No. 3, with first-week sales of over 191,000, doubling those of Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic. The album stayed in the Top 10. In several other nations, it reached the Top 5.

  April 28, MTV’s special The Art of Musicology drew even more people to his album and shows. The half-hour special aired on MTV, MTV2, VHI, VHI Classic, and BET, and showed him in concert, playing songs alone on an acoustic guitar. After years of struggle, Prince was finally triumphant. “‘Prince is crazy,’” he said. “I knew what people were saying.” When he used the , writers cracked jokes; but he was the one laughing. “I knew I’d be here today, feeling each new album is my first.”

  But his groundbreaking package soon inspired a rash of suspicious articles. Entertainment Weekly claimed “Prince schemes to top Billboard charts.” Labels complained of an “unfair precedent in tallying sales.” MTV, however, noted “only the four shows that have taken place since the album’s April 20 release have been counted.” With fifteen thousand people at each show, SoundScan credited Musicology for sixty thousand album sales. “But even with that number subtracted from the total, Musicology would still be the third best-selling album, since weekly sales of the No. 4 album, Now That’s What I Call Music! 15, stand at ninety-eight thousand.”

  At the same time, Prince’s idea was fueling the struggling music business. With concert prices rising 13 percent in the past year, fewer people bought tickets, meaning sales had slowed in the $2.5 billion industry. Pollstar’s editor-in-chief Gary Bongiovanni said, “This is a very good marketing strategy.” And while Prince’s average ticket price was slightly higher than the industry average of $58.71, the extra dollar or two he charged got customers the entire album. Even this price was still reportedly less than half what it cost to see other stars.

  Most reporters continued to imply Prince was somehow inflating sales figures, but one wrote this was “perhaps kicking off a music industry revolution.” Prince remained impervious to criticism. He called “this bundling situation” his “emancipation,” and noted it was a way to get around a biased media. “They pick and choose what they want to focus on,” he said of reporters. “We’re given prepackaged pop stars every day. They control who’s on heavy rotation.” Now, he turned the tables. Proudly, Prince said, “the album’s in the top ten.”

  He was just as confident about his other business projects. When HBO executives appeared backstage one night, to propose taping and airing the concert, he heard them say the deal meant having to avoid other TV specials for a year. “Excuse me?” Prince asked. “Oh no. End of discussion. You want to talk about something else? I know you flew a long way. We might as well talk philosophy or something.”

  One answered, “Well, that’s just our policy.”

  “Well, you keep your policy. You want some pizza? Cause you ain’t going to get no concert.”

  Despite a rash of suspicious articles, Prince kept welcoming reporters backstage. While driving many toward his various dressing rooms in a golf cart he cracked jokes. Behind the wheel one day, he told one, “Hang on. I don’t have insurance.” Another day, a writer noted the purple silk or tie-dyed fabrics, lit candles, couches, guitars, and keyboards in his dressing room. Prince waved a hand toward all of it. “They do this everywhere we go. Makes it feel like home.”

  He was more open with them, but some things didn’t change. “Like no tape recorders,” David Segal of The Washington Post reported. Now Prince claimed he didn’t like the sound of his voice. He also wouldn’t discuss his marriage. But when one writer invoked religion, Prince quickly said he was into spirituality and solutions, not odd ceremonies or conjecture. “I’m very practical. You go Trekkie on me, I gotta go.”

  Despite his sanitized set list, some interviewers kept referring to explicit songs. He felt he put five on twenty-five albums. “It’s more like a dozen,” a writer felt, “but no use quibbling.” In the end, Prince didn’t argue, either. “We’ve all used shock value to sell things,” he said, and early on, he did it to get attention. But even these works included messages about education, literacy, and respect for women. “Go and listen to the verses. All people focus on is the hooks.”

  His set list also alienated some of his older core audience. Where he once let these fans suggest numbers, he now accepted some wanted to keep reliving their glory days with provocative old numbers like “Darling Nikki.” “I’m not mad at them,” he said. “I feel for them. It takes all kinds.” At the same time, they had to accept he wasn’t “that old lady in Sunset Boulevard,” he said. He wouldn’t stay in a mansion, coasting on past glories and preparing for a close-up. “I’ve changed. I’m a different person.” From center stage, Prince stared out into the audience and saw grandmothers, mothers, teens, and children enjoying his music. Some shows, he invited them onstage to dance. During “Purple Rain,” he urged crowds to go home and open their Bibles. Ben Margolin, who ran fan site Prince.org, was surprised more people weren’t complaining. “I think the hard-core fans are placated because he’s playing a lot more guitar.”

  Even relations with Rolling Stone improved. He felt slighted by Jann Wenner’s magazine for years, but the rock journal put his face on its May 2004 cover for the first time in more than a decade. In the past, it would have been no big deal. “Once you’ve done anything, to do it again ain’t no big deal, you feel me?” He’d been on the cover with Vanity, and again “when I didn’t even do an interview, when I wouldn’t talk to them.” But now, he was excited about the attention. “Having once revolutionized rock ‘n’ roll,” the San Francisco Chronicle wrote, “Prince can now say he defied the rock establishment and survived.”

  45

  BABY I’M A STAR

  SOLD-OUT ARENA DATES ACCOUNTED FOR ONLY PART OF Musicology’s 632,000 sales in five weeks. But the controversy continued in May. MTV was supportive—understanding Prince wanted older fans to hear his new stuff—but noted he might be putting “unwanted multiple copies in the hands of his followers.” A married couple would leave a show with two copies. If they went to another show, they’d have even more. Also fans were receiving copies in a cardboard sleeve, instead of a jewel case with the genuine artwork.

  By now, Pollstar ranked his tour No. 1 in terms of dollars and units, reporting he had earned $45.7 million and sold 737,097 tickets. In every city, each show attracted about 24,800 people and earned $1.5 million. Reporters expected Prince to gross $45.7 million by June 30 and $100 million by the final show.

  One week in early June, Prince’s four concerts helped Musicology rise from No. 8 to No. 4. “The album also experienced a thirty-five percent rise in weekly sales, to more than ninety-five thousand copies, pushing its total to slightly less than eight hundred thousand,” MTV noted. At SoundScan and Billboard, executives suddenly rethought their policy regarding albums and concert tickets.

  Billboard chart editor Geoff Mayfield claimed one-fourth of the album’s sales—158,000 or so copies—were from concert tickets. And with Prince planning three or four shows a week until early September, Musicology wouldn’t leave the charts for any of that time. Billboard’s June 5 edition announced the magazine’s amended policy. “The consumer must be given the option to purchase a CD with a concert ticket for [the sale] to count toward the chart.” Customers had to be free to reject a CD, and pay less for a ticket. The CD’s cost also had to be close to what stores charged. “We’re not going to let them sell the album for two bucks,” said Mayfield.

  But it wouldn’t apply to Musicology. Billboard and SoundScan had to keep counting those sales. A week later, Musicology dropped a spot, to No. 5, but sold over seventy-two tho
usand more copies. Then, when Prince took a few days off from touring, the album dropped a little on the chart. But once he resumed touring, it returned to the Top 10 again. Attorney McMillan told the Hollywood Reporter they would dole out as many as 1.5 million copies during his summer tour. Entertainment Weekly predicted he’d stay in the Top 20 for months. “Almost 2 good 2 B true.”

  During this same period, Prince took time to react to radio deejays playing his album cut “Call My Name” so many times, the ballad—not even on a single—reached No. 75 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 27 on the R&B Chart. He quickly filmed a video for this clean-cut ode to monogamy and marriage, piling on scenes of a marriage proposal and wedding

  Eventually, Prince sold a million concert tickets. And since he launched the Musicology Tour in March, without an end date, he could tour for decades and have Billboard keep tallying album sales.

  As summer wore on, CNN/Money called him “the only top-draw performer whose tickets are selling well.” Soon Prince said, “We have sold more than three million CDs worldwide, and it will continue.”

  He announced in an online chat, “The music business as we know it is over.”

  Teenagers were creating entire albums and artwork on laptops, then uploading them to sites that served as “their own distribution service,” Prince said. “I mean, what do we really need record companies for?”

  Prince’s most successful year ever continued. And now everyone saw what he worked so hard to achieve; what all of the unpredictable decisions and carrying on had been about. At Warner, he would have had to sell 666,666 albums to earn $1 million. Now, 142,857 copies of Musicology earned the same amount. And while Purple Rain reportedly earned him $19.5 million over twenty years, Musicology’s sales of 1.4 million had already brought $9,1 million. He continued to take jabs at his old label in interviews—especially while discussing his masters—but it was part of the act. He had actually softened his position on master tapes. He no longer demanded complete ownership. He’d settle for “more control and more generous financial terms,” a reporter said. He also kept thinking about his catalog. With Warner issuing old albums on CD, Prince heard one interviewer mention how Sign O’ the Times had unpredictable volume levels and muddy sound. Leaping to his feet, Prince yelled, “Tell them that! We need to bring it up to the industry standard!”

  Prince kept claiming he wanted remastered, even expanded versions with surround sound from his label. But the demands were accompanied by slights. One night onstage, while ad-libbing during a song, he sang, “Warner Brothers used to be a friend of mine. Now they’re just a monumental waste of time.”

  Warner executives ignored the bluster. They told The Wall Street Journal if Prince were more cooperative and helped launch a stronger marketing effort, they’d be “pleased to work closely with him.” But when the company reached out to him, for help with DVD editions of Under the Cherry Moon and Graffiti Bridge, Prince refused. Jon Bream understood why. In Cherry Moon, Prince was by far “the worst actor” and seemed natural only when singing “Girls and Boys” in a club. Graffiti Bridge, released in 1990, was “dreadful then,” Bream added. It was even worse today, playing like a bunch of “poorly lit music videos, shot on a low-budget set.”

  Purple Rain should have been different. With the film’s anniversary approaching, Warner Home Video planned a twentieth-anniversary DVD release. The company first released it on DVD in 1997, as one of the earliest products in this format, but fans viewed that version—no extras, and visuals trimmed to standard TV size—as primitive. Warner hoped to change this with a twenty-seven-dollar reissue.

  Warner convinced Wendy, Lisa, Jellybean Johnson, director Magnoli, producer Cavallo, and screenwriter William Blinn to grant interviews. They also included a documentary about the club First Avenue, MTV’s coverage of the July 1984 premiere, and eight music videos. Now, executives asked Prince to contribute a commentary track. Though most film creators didn’t charge for these, Jon Bream wrote in the Minneapolis Star Tribune that Prince “reportedly demanded a fee to participate in the project.” He did so, Bream added, during his most successful year as a concert performer, and despite Warner planning to pay royalties for the reissue. Further, Prince supposedly encouraged other cast members to seek payment. In the end, Morris Day and Apollonia didn’t do commentaries, either. Bream frowned on the decision in print. Prince was wise to avoid the other two DVDs “but his failure to participate in the reissue of his first movie leaves a black cloud over Purple Rain.”

  46

  THIS FRIENDSHIP HAD TO END

  IN NOVEMBER, PRINCE WAS WORKING ON HIS NEXT ALBUM, 3121. One day former drummer Michael Bland got a call out of the blue from Prince’s guitar technician, who said, “Prince wants to know where you and Sonny Thompson are at.”

  They were at a sound check for a jazz show that night in St. Paul.

  “Can you guys come out to Paisley Park after you’re done?”

  When Bland and Thompson left the theater at eleven thirty that night and arrived at the studio, Prince already had the equipment set up and ready to go. “Okay,” he told them, “there won’t be any mistakes. Just pay attention and go for it.”

  In three and a half hours, they knocked out eleven or twelve tracks.

  After the commercial and critical success of Musicology’s more traditional songs, Prince filled 3121 with the usual templates: “Black Sweat” had empty “Kiss”-style funk; “Satisfied” was another in a line of “Adore”-like ballads; “The Word” included some “Mountains”-like acoustic sounds; “Fury” had enough guitar for fans of “Let’s Go Crazy.” But he also tried something new—Santana-like riffs, and tapping the Spanish market, with “Te Amo Corazón.”

  He soon added another winner to the lineup. He reconnected with a singer named Tamar Davis. The Houston native had left Girl Tyme, a group with preteen Beyonce Knowles and Kelly Rowland that competed and lost on the TV talent show Star Search. Her solo demo had reached Paisley Park in 1997. Prince liked it. “He flew me and my mom into town to Paisley Park and I recorded ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow,’” Tamar told EURweb. Prince didn’t meet the thirteen-year-old but still offered her a production contract.

  In the years since, Tamar had moved on, studying music at USC, and joining all-female jazz/funk band Angaza for their album Light. Now, Prince had Tamar’s friend, choreographer Fatima Robinson, who was helping with one of his videos, invite Tamar to the set. Between takes, Tamar approached to say, “Hey, you did a song (on me) at thirteen.”

  He remembered, and had her sing something then and there. She did and he thought she could make 3121 even hotter than it was. “So we went in the studio and started singing and ended up writing ‘Beautiful, Loved, and Blessed,’” she explained. Its sound so pleased him, Prince helped the young singer create her debut Milk & Honey at Paisley Park.

  He was about to shop another album around, during a period in which media reports continued to emphasize his recent successes. His Musicology Tour’s ninety-six dates attracted almost 1.5 million people. Its reported earnings of $90.2 million inspired Pollstar to crown him 2004’s top concert draw. Rolling Stone had him at twenty-eight on their list of 100 Greatest Artists of All Time. Then, in December 2004, Rolling Stone readers named him Best Male Performer and Most Welcome Comeback and—in the same issue—listed him at number five on a list of Top Pop Artists of the Past 25 Years. Since he wasn’t reclusive anymore, or suspicious, or lecturing reporters, or denouncing Warner, or going by the unspeakable , a writer noted, “Suddenly, liking Prince didn’t feel like such a chore. In fact, it was fun.”

  At the 2005 Grammy Awards, his Musicology ballad “Call My Name” won Best Male R&B Vocal Performance. His title track won another Grammy, for Best Traditional R&B Vocal Performance. They also nominated him for Best R&B Song, Best R&B Album, and Best Male Pop Vocal Performance (for his polemical “Cinnamon Girl”). His success continued in February when the Academy Awards invited him to present an Oscar at that year’s ceremony. Then in M
arch, he took a Los Angeles stage to accept a NAACP Image Vanguard Award (during a ceremony televised on Fox). For each appearance, he looked stylish, youthful, and warm, but still—despite a mountain of press written about him in the preceding two decades—somewhat unknowable. Nonetheless, his image as a troublesome rabble-rouser had receded. And major labels were suddenly very open to working with him.

  At Universal, Prince hammered out terms for a one-album deal without using an attorney. He didn’t need one. Being independent so long—earning good money with things like Crystal Ball—he wouldn’t sign any deal that didn’t benefit him. As always, he brought marketing ideas along, too: renting a house in Los Angeles, renovating it to resemble the sort of party setting he sang about on his title track, including tickets—purple, of course—in select copies of the album, allowing customers that found them to attend a special, intimate show, inviting reporters to this event. Universal liked the sound of his ideas, not to mention his Spanish track “Te Amo Corazón,” and the ballad with Tamar. The world’s largest major label agreed to release 3121 in early 2006 and expressed interest in Tamar’s own album Milk & Honey. One thing at a time. “It wasn’t a contract,” Prince noted. “I don’t believe in contracts.” It was a handshake deal “but we do sign some agreements to ensure business gets accomplished.”

  He was thrilled with the arrangement but soon faced Barney Hoskyns, an interviewer for The Observer that felt he’d gone from rebuking labels to leaping “aboard the biggest slavery ship of them all.” Prince corrected him. “I got a chance to structure the agreement the way I saw fit as opposed to it being the other way around.”

  In October 2005, Prince focused on promoting the next album, signing an eight-month lease for a ten-bedroom, eleven-bath home on Sierra Alta Way, in West Hollywood. The lease called for a seventy-thousand-dollar monthly rent, thesmokinggun.com reported, and included a nondisclosure agreement barring tenant and landlord from discussing the deal. Then he arranged for laborers to prepare it for the private show by slapping some purple striping on the exterior, painting his and the number 3121, installing a purple monogrammed carpet in the master bedroom, and adding plumbing and piping to a downstairs bedroom so his beauty salon chairs could have water.