by Matt Thorne
PRINCE
MATT THORNE
For Lee Brackstone,
who commissioned this book,
and for Luke and Tom,
who were patient while I wrote it.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
List of Illustrations
Prologue: Come 2 My House (Part 1)
1 Justifications from a Mamma-Jamma
2 The Business of Music
3 Wouldn’t You Love to Love Me?
4 Still Waiting
5 Creating Uptown
6 Gigolos Get Lonely Too (Part 1)
7 Royal Jewels
8 Nikki’s Castle
9 There Aren’t Any Rules
10 New Position
11 Roadhouse Garden and Songs for Susannah
12 The Story of a Man I Am Not
13 Rebirth of the Flesh
14 Crystal Ball …
15 … Or Sign o’ the Times?
16 For Those of U on Valium …
17 Spooky and All That He Crawls for …
18 Cross the Line
19 Dance with the Devil
20 What’s Wrong with Graffiti Bridge?
21 Gigolos Get Lonely Too (Part 2)
22 Playing Strip Pool with Vanessa
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23 The Chains of Turin
24 Part I: Introducing the Friction Years
25 Part 2: ‘It Was Just About Needing to Get It Done …’
26 Part 3: ‘All I Gotta Do Is Sell a Million and I Can Quit …’
27 Wasted Kisses …
28 … And Missed Opportunities
29 Join My Club
30 New Directions in Music
31 True Funk Soldier
32 Come 2 My House (Part 2)
33 21 Nights in London: A Fan’s Notes
34 Gigolos Get Lonely Too (Part 3)
35 An Entirely New Galaxy Awaits …
36 Ending Endlessly
Plates
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Illustration Credits
General Index
Index of Works by Prince
About the Author
Copyright
ILLUSTRATIONS
Prince with his father and family.
Prince’s fifth-grade yearbook picture from John Hay Elementary School.
André Cymone, Prince and Dez Dickerson performing at the Ritz club, New York, 22 March 1981.
Morris Day and Jesse Johnson of The Time performing at First Avenue, December 1985.
Vanity 6 publicity shot.
An early photo of Sheila E performing on stage.
Brown Mark, Prince and Dez Dickerson on the 1999 tour.
Prince and Dez Dickerson during the Dirty Mind tour.
Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman in San Remo, 1988.
Wendy, Prince and Lisa accepting the Oscar for Best Original Song Score for Purple Rain, 25 March 1985.
Prince during a Purple Rain show at Nassau Coliseum, 18 March 1985.
Still from Purple Rain.
Apollonia Kotero performing in Purple Rain.
Under the Cherry Moon premiere in Sheridan, Wyoming, 2 July 1986.
Prince and Lisa Barber arrive at the Under the Cherry Moon premiere.
Prince on stage at Madison Square Garden during the Lovesexy tour, 1 October 1988.
Prince and Cat Glover on stage at Wembley Arena during the Lovesexy tour, 3 August 1988.
Prince on stage at Wembley Arena during the Lovesexy tour, 3 August 1988.
Still from Graffiti Bridge.
Prince and The New Power Generation during the Diamonds and Pearls tour, 1991.
Prince and Mayte Garcia opening a branch of the NPG store on Chalk Farm Road in Camden Lock, England.
Prince performing in 1995 with ‘Slave’ written on his face.
Prince (as Tora Tora) performing at the Virgin Megastore in London, 5 April 1995.
The Artist Formerly Known as Prince promoting his triple-CD set Emancipation at the San Jose Event Center, 19 April 1997.
Prince and Manuela Testolini watching an LA Lakers game, 25 December 2004.
Carmen Electra.
Prince performing at the El Rey Theatre in LA during the Musicology tour, 24 February 2004.
Prince announcing the 21 Nights tour at the Hospital Club in London.
Prince on stage at Hop Farm, Kent, 3 July 2011.
Prince with The Twinz at the O2, 24 August 2007.
Prince on stage at Hop Farm, Kent, 3 July 2011.
PROLOGUE: COME 2 MY HOUSE (PART 1)
In early 2006, I received an invitation to attend a party at Prince’s home in Los Angeles, as part of the promotion of his then-current album, 3121.
Since moving to LA in 2005, Prince had been re-establishing contact with Hollywood by inviting A-listers to exclusive parties. Parties had always been a central part of Prince’s legend, but his Hollywood gatherings were different to those that had helped make his name in Minneapolis. These were invitation-only events and included annual post-Oscars celebrations to which aspiring gatecrashers, such as Karen O from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, were refused entry. If the plan for these parties was to boost his profile among the rich and famous, he succeeded: over the next few years, American chat shows would often feature celebrities describing the experience. The actor Ryan Phillippe told Conan O’Brien he’d interrupted Prince in the middle of a song to ask him for directions to the bathroom; 30 Rock star Tracy Morgan would later describe how he’d attended a party at the height of his alcoholism and had refused to leave until Prince came down and threw him out. American news anchor Anderson Cooper would tell daytime TV hosts Regis and Kelly about fighting comedian David Chappelle for one of Prince’s discarded plectrums at a later party at the Hotel Gansevoort, a bash I also attended. Mortification seemed to be a common experience of celebrities who got to go to Prince’s parties, usually cool stars thrown into a flap when encountering someone whose image and aura out-stripped their own.
On the night of the 3121 party, a limousine driver showed up at the Mondrian to drive me up to Prince’s house for the eleven o’clock guest entry. As we slowly snaked through West Hollywood, the Russian chauffeur ranked his favourite Nabokov novels in order of preference and told me about the celebrities he’d taken to previous parties at Prince’s place, and I realised that Prince was trying to transform Los Angeles into Uptown in the same way he’d managed with Minneapolis nearly thirty years earlier. When we reached the house, the numbers on the front gate had been rearranged to read ‘3121’. The title of Prince’s album had prompted much speculation, with fans wondering if it was a year (making the title song a futuristic update of ‘1999’), a biblical line reference or something to do with numerology (the numbers added up to seven, a significant number for Prince). But they had read too much into it: it was merely the address of the Los Angeles property Prince had rented (and recorded in) before moving here.
Even for a private event like this, Prince was a stickler for detail. The security guards checking the guest lists had purple clipboards and collar pins in the shape of the symbol Prince adopted as a name in 1993. As I stood with the celebrities and wannabes by the front gates to Prince’s house, a neighbour came by trying to wangle his way in. Prince had sent over a bottle of wine as an apology for any noise, but the neighbour wanted to come to the party instead, hopping from one foot to the other as the guards radioed the house. Whenever I’ve attended any of Prince’s smaller shows, anxiety about getting in has given the evening an extra charge, and I wished the man luck as the rest of us clambered into the van for the ride up.
Prince’s property was a bewitching example of that sinister Walt Disney-meets-David Lynch architecture that appeals only to the wealthiest celebrities,
a surreal modern fantasy of feudal living where you can remain in splendid isolation and yet convince yourself the whole of Hollywood is at your command. Prince captured the imagination of the ’80s generation by connecting his music to a secret wonderland of exclusive shows: for anyone other than the lucky denizens of Minneapolis, the Paisley Park recording complex he started working in during 1987 seemed a distant utopia, as fans read about all-night sessions and secret parties and wished they could somehow attend. With the release of 3121, Prince had (for the umpteenth time) returned and reignited what remained a fantasy for most but was a daily reality for him, as the whole album was designed as – and best understood as – the aural equivalent of a private party.
From the duration of his shows to the access he allows his fans, Prince has challenged all conventional notions of what an audience might reasonably expect from an artist. Music critics have often drawn parallels between the elaborate backstage environments constructed by bands and a royal court – both places where privilege and favour allow various members of the entourage or esteemed guests to pass through a series of heavily protected barriers and get closer to the artist’s inner sanctum. In this world, drug dealers and groupies often have greater freedom of movement than band members’ wives and girlfriends, but from an early stage in his career Prince has insisted he has no interest in drugs1 and only minimal interest in alcohol (wine, champagne and, during an odd period in the mid-1990s, port). And while his supposed sexual insatiability has always been a central part of his persona, Alan Leeds – Prince’s tour manager from 1983 until 1990 – has stated that Prince avoided all but the most interesting female fans, such as Anna Garcia or Mayte, spending the majority of his time with his female tour mates instead. So, rather than offering freedoms to those who might offer him drugs or sex, Prince instead rewards them with money, fame or enthusiasm. The more tenacious the fan and, to a certain extent, the more money they can pay, the greater access they get (although the celebrity remains the most welcome visitor).
Even so, Princeland has to be delicately balanced. Because he’s previously allowed his fans extraordinary access (such as his week-long Celebrations at Paisley Park), they complain whenever he plays shows for a celebrity audience or charges an extortionate ticket price.2 But it’s a mistake to expect consistency from Prince. Like almost all of the handful of household-name rock stars who have had careers that have lasted over several decades, he wants different things at different times, going through periods when he produces non-commercial albums and relies on the understanding of his hard-core fan base, then attempting to win back the mainstream with greatest-hits tours and audience-friendly records like Musicology or Planet Earth. In recent years, money and power seem to have become increasingly important to him as, having predicted (and survived) the collapse of the record industry, he seeks out new ways of maintaining his success.
On the night I went to his house, he was in the middle of many campaigns. As well as impressing celebrities (the guests on this night included Bruce Willis, Sharon Stone, David Duchovny and Jessica Alba), Prince was throwing the party to promote his new album, blow a few fans’ minds, encourage his record company to distribute an album he’d created with his then-current protégée Támar, and no doubt achieve half-a-dozen other aims as well. I’d been to Prince’s after-shows and exclusive performances before, but nothing like this. I was about to experience the intimate Prince performance I’d been lusting for from the moment I first heard his music.
1
JUSTIFICATIONS FROM A MAMMA-JAMMA
There are four main strands to Prince’s music: first, the official releases, from his 1978 debut For You to 2010’s 20Ten, including not only the studio albums and singles, but also myriad remixes and maxi-albums, often with as many as six or seven variations on the original track; second, the unreleased songs which have kept several bootleg labels afloat for decades, now so multitudinous that labels can put out collections that would take weeks to listen to and still not exhaust the material in circulation; third, the live recordings: two official releases – the One Nite Alone … box set and 2008’s Indigo Nights – and literally thousands of bootleg recordings, including several versions of the same show in various fidelities; and fourth, the songs he has given to other artists and protégés, from Sue Ann Carwell in 1978 to Bria Valente’s Elixer in 2009.
As far as Prince is concerned, the only person who knows anything about this music is Prince. He was done with critics as early as 1982, when he recorded the sardonic ‘All the Critics Love U in New York’, and he never misses an opportunity to remind the lowly writer that he has little regard for anyone who spends the majority of their time at a desk. To the Detroit DJ The Electrifying Mojo, Prince described writers as ‘mamma-jamma(s) wearing glasses and an alligator shirt behind a typewriter’. And in a 1990 Rolling Stone interview with Neal Karlen, Prince maintained, ‘There’s nothing a critic can tell me that I can learn from,’ adding that he cares only what musicians think of him.1 His attitude towards journalists hardened still further in the early 1990s, when he included a journalist character as part of the narrative of his album who was ridiculed and, in the accompanying stage show, stripped. Two albums later, on The Gold Experience, he included a song, ‘Billy Jack Bitch’, that appeared deliberately to address (and demean) one local journalist who had given him a particularly hard ride (and there are rumours of an unreleased track entitled ‘Fuck D Press’2). Prince is far from the only musician who feels this way – check out any sophomore rap album from an artist who got more than his fair share of press attention first time round – but, with him, it goes deep.
He’s equally dismissive of critical studies that include interviews with people who’ve shared his studio, claiming that his engineers and producers are not equipped to speak knowledgeably about his work. Many of the most detailed accounts of Prince’s unreleased work have come from Susan Rogers – the engineer who worked with him through five of the most successful years of his career – but Prince maintains that she knows nothing about his music,3 and told respected rock writer Barney Hoskyns that he was playing a role for his earliest biographer, Jon Bream, whose 1984 book made much of his inner-circle access. ‘If you look at it,’ he told Hoskyns, ‘I’ve only really given you music.’ In interview, he’d ‘give cryptic little answers … that made no sense’.4
Early band-mate Dez Dickerson confirms this was part of Prince’s interview strategy from near the beginning: ‘If they weren’t going to print what he actually said, why not just make things up? I don’t believe there was any malice in this, but it was just a precocious way of responding to what he felt was the press’ dishonesty.’5 Looking at Prince’s interviews over the years, this is borne out. He can sound astonishingly strange in interviews, even when appearing to be relaxed and normal. Television, in particular, seems to bring out this side of him. Whether it’s telling Oprah Winfrey in a 1996 interview he has a second person living inside him, an alternate personality created when he was five, or insisting to Tavis Smiley in 2010 that he was cured of childhood epilepsy by an angel, it often seems as if he’s deliberately constructing myths for his own amusement.
Even when talking to journalists he’s personally vetted, he tells them he considers their peers lazy. After playing the LA Times journalist Ann Powers a track that had lyrical references to Santana and Jimi Hendrix, he dismissed her suggestion that these guitarists were influences, claiming instead that he tries to make his guitar sound like vocalists he admires. This is Prince’s way of emphasising how his musical abilities separate him from anyone who doesn’t know how to play, the damned masses he describes as ‘non-singing, non-dancing, wish-I-had-me-some-clothes fools’.6
When I started this book, I was prepared to take Prince’s argument that the people he’d worked with didn’t know that much about his music at face value. It’s true he’s worked with some extraordinarily accomplished people over the years, and some have experienced success without him, but it appeared the overwhelming majorit
y did their best work while in his employ. Nevertheless, as I continued my research, talking to those closest to him during various periods, including former band members, such as Matt Fink, Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman from The Revolution, it became clear to me just how important Prince’s collaborators have been at various stages in his career, and that any proper critical overview also needs to address the various configurations of his band – to take a close look at, for example, the difference between The Revolution and the various permutations of The New Power Generation. It also seemed valuable to talk to some of those who helped, in various ways, Prince become one of the most famous and successful popular musicians ever.
Throughout his career, Prince has regarded his time in the studio and his time on the road as two different things. It wasn’t until his third album that he invited a major collaboration from one of his band, and that was only on one song (‘Dirty Mind’), and it wasn’t until Purple Rain that he made a truly collaborative album, and even then he recorded four of the tracks largely solo. While The Revolution played a larger part on the two albums that followed, he has oscillated between drawing inspiration from those around him on stage or in the studio and producing work in near isolation. This means that for every album where it’s possible to talk to some of the other people in the studio about what they contributed to a record, there’s another where the only eyewitnesses are Prince and the engineer.
Prince is, most of the time, a lyricist whose work is unusually rewarding when studied closely, with most of his songs serving a larger narrative. Sometimes this is explicit – when he’s soundtracking a film, say, or writing a concept album; at other times, it’s implicit. There are many interconnections between his thousands of songs, whether something basic, like his use of colours or numbers, or something more complicated, like his take on the concept of duality or the complex personal theology he has developed over decades of song-writing. The sense of continuity in his lyrics is also emphasised by his use of what Prince fans refer to as ‘Princebonics’7 (‘2’ for ‘to’; an illustration of an eye for ‘I’; ‘U’ for ‘you’, etc.8). Dez Dickerson, who played with Prince from 1978 onwards, takes credit for this style of shorthand in his autobiography,9 claiming it was something he originated when writing set lists and stating, ‘It may have been a subconscious “borrowing” on [Prince’s] part, but no doubt it was “borrowed”, nonetheless.’10 There is also a larger psychological reason for this coherence. As Eric Leeds, who would become the saxophonist in The Revolution and remain one of Prince’s most important collaborators for several years, told Paul Sexton: ‘You have to remember that Prince looks at all of his music, in his whole life, as a movie, and everybody who’s involved with him on whatever level is a character in his movie.’11 If this book focuses more on the work than the life, it’s because my interest is in Prince’s movie, in all its forms, the giant super-narrative that he diligently adds to in a recording studio or onstage nearly every day, a work of art that remains narrowly focused on the same subjects and emotions that have driven him since day one – love, sex, rebirth, anger.
