by Matt Thorne
When Prince was ten, his parents divorced. On several occasions, including a video interview in 1999,4 Prince remarked that after this separation, his father left behind his upright piano. He had two years alone at this piano before leaving his mother and moving in with his father. Though Prince’s early life is characterised by aloofness and isolation, he was also very interested in sports – a hobby that he retains to this day, as evidenced by his recently recording a song, ‘Purple and Gold’, for his home-town Minnesota Vikings – although Nancy Hynes has no memory of organised sports at John Hay. It seems he discovered this interest, at least according to early biographer Jon Bream, at his next school, Bryant Junior High, where, Bream suggests, he became ‘a jock’,5 playing baseball, football and basketball (a photo exists of Prince as part of the school’s basketball team).
This next period in Prince’s life is usually presented as a time of turmoil. Alan Leeds, his road manager throughout the 1980s, told me: ‘Prince’s relationship with both his parents was somewhat strained. They had broken up in his formative years, and he ended up staying with his dad as opposed to his mum, which was unusual in those days.’ While with his father, Prince befriended his father’s stepson, Duane (who would eventually become part of Prince’s road crew), before going back to his aunt’s, opposite Nancy Hynes’s house.
It was at his aunt’s house that he encountered a man who would soon become an important presence in his life: Pepe Willie, who was dating Prince’s cousin, Shantel Manderville. ‘I was twenty-three, he must have been thirteen,’ Willie told me, ‘because he was just a little kid. I didn’t pay him no mind.’ But a few years later, when Prince was crashing at his friend André Anderson’s house (Prince’s warm feelings towards Anderson’s mum Bernadette are expressed in the autobiographical song ‘The Sacrifice of Victor’) and had enrolled in an after-hours course on ‘The Business of Music’, he started having phone conversations with the older man.
According to Willie, Prince considered him an important source of wisdom. Pepe Willie’s uncle, Clarence Collins, was an original member of doo-wop band Little Anthony and the Imperials, and through this access, Willie had learnt about the music business. Part of his education had come from being around the band and becoming a runner, fetching cigarettes, hamburgers and cheesecake for artists such as Chubby Checker, the Coasters, Ike and Tina Turner and Dionne Warwick. But as well as this backstage access, he also attended lunches, dinners and business meetings with his uncle and the band, educating himself to the point where he was able to explain to the young Prince about copyright, publishing and performance rights organisations. ‘He asked me, “What’s this publishing all about?”’ Willie told me. ‘I said, “When I come to Minneapolis I’ll sit down and talk to you about it.”’
Willie was also a musician of some skill. ‘When I was first started in the music business in Brooklyn, I was a drummer. And then by the time I left New York I played a little guitar.’ When Willie came to Minneapolis, he witnessed Bernadette Anderson disciplining Prince. ‘Bernadette reminded me of my own family. She was like his mom. I went to pick Prince up one time, and Prince had this girl downstairs that he was getting busy with, and he had done his business, and Bernadette walks in the door from work and asks Prince, “Did you go to school today?” And Prince goes, “No, I didn’t.” And immediately she started whipping his butt, right there in front of me, in front of the girl, everything. She busted him up. That was great, man.’
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Though he often worked on music alone, from the beginning Prince also had a band. André Anderson (later to rename himself André Cymone), Prince and Prince’s cousin Charles Smith formed a band called Grand Central and began rehearsing in André’s basement. The story of the relative freedom Prince had in this basement to bring women home and enjoy himself has become an important part of Prince’s self-mythology, but it has also been taken up by others. Indeed, Howard Bloom believes that much of the focus of Prince’s career, and what drove him repeatedly to create imaginary Utopian societies like Paisley Park in his later work, was a conscious desire to replicate the happiness he found in André’s basement.
Much has also been made – not least by Prince – of the radio stations he listened to in Minneapolis during this formative time, in particular a station named KQRS that played a variety of white and black music that may have helped shaped his sound. But Prince was also an active concert-attender, something he has maintained to the present day, though now he focuses almost exclusively on female musicians (a recent trip to see home-town band Gayngs at Minneapolis club First Avenue was a rare exception). One of Prince’s favourite musicians and acknowledged influences, Joni Mitchell, has spoken of remembering Prince being in the audience when she toured her album The Hissing of Summer Lawns, which Prince later praised to Rolling Stone. ‘I believe it was him. Front row to the left. Quite conspicuous because he’s got those eyes like a puffin, those Egyptian eyes, those big, exotic eyes.’6 And Todd Rundgren’s former lover Bebe Buell has commented: ‘I met Prince when he was sixteen, when Todd was playing Minneapolis in 1974 – this tiny little person with huge hair standing backstage who wanted to meet Todd. And Todd did his usual “Oh, hi, kid” number, and Prince was like, “I play everything and I’m real talented.”’7
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From the start Prince was promoting himself as a prodigy, focusing on his hard work, discipline and desire to become famous. In his first interview, to his high-school newspaper in 1976, he pointed out that he had already been recording with his band, now renamed Grand Central Corporation, for two years. Pepe Willie first saw the band at Shantel Manderville’s father’s ski party. ‘I thought they were great,’ Willie remembers. ‘Prince was playing guitar, Morris [Day] was playing drums, André was playing bass, André’s sister was playing keyboard and this other guy, we called him “Hollywood”, William Daughty, was playing percussion.
‘Prince’s cousin Charles had really started the band but he was too busy playing football, so he had left the band two weeks before I got there. And he was the drummer. By the time I got there Morris Day was the drummer and his mom LaVonne was their manager, and she had bought him a seven-piece drum set. And she said, “I would love for you to work with them.” They thought I was some big-time producer out of New York.’
Willie remembers the set being made up of covers, with the band playing songs by Earth, Wind and Fire and other acts who were big at the time. ‘They didn’t play any of their original music at that ski party. I went up to the attic where they used to practise and asked them, “Do you guys have any original material?” Prince had this one song called “Sex Machine”, André had this song “39th St Party” and this other song “You Remind Me of Me”.
‘They started playing “You Remind Me of Me”, and I noticed that there was no introduction; they just started playing and all of a sudden they started singing. And I was trying to hear the words, but everyone was singing something different. And after they stopped singing they would just play music for another four or five minutes. So I stopped them and said, “OK, first of all, the construction is incorrect. You guys have got an intro, then a verse, then a chorus, and that’s the hook, that’s what people are going to remember.”
‘So we went on to Prince’s song “Sex Machine”. Prince had gone over to Linda, André’s sister, and he was telling her what to play. He put down his guitar and went over to the keyboards and showed her what to play. So then he put his guitar back on and started playing the song. Then he stopped and said, “André, let me hold your bass,” and he started playing this amazing bass line. And André was just as talented. Before Prince had even finished playing the bass line he said, “I know what you want,” and took the bass and played it exactly. Prince and André used to have contests – who could write the most songs in a day.’
Willie soon decided that he wanted Prince to come play with him in the studio. ‘I was putting my band together, 94 East, with Wendall Thomas, who was dating my wife’s cousin. Pierre L
ewis was seventeen at the time. He was a keyboard player and he played like a lot of Herbie Hancock stuff, and then his brother Dale Alexander was a drummer. He was sixteen. Later on he played in [Prince’s jazz band] Madhouse. Marcie and Kristie were two girlfriends, and we started hanging out together and I found out they could sing. And I was seeing Prince play all these instruments and I said to him, “I want you to come record with me,” and he was thrilled because he had never been in a recording studio.’
They practised for two weeks and headed over to Cookhouse, which was, Willie remembers, ‘a first-class recording studio. This was before Sound 80, which was the top studio in the Midwest. For me, just to get into that studio, I used to go and talk to the secretary every weekend, and then she would introduce me to the engineer. It took me three weeks. I was just some black kid from Brooklyn.
‘When we went in with the band, we had to go pick everyone up, because none of them had driving licences. No one had cases on their instruments; things were put together with string and tape. And, of course, I had to pay these guys, but the union told me I could do a demo-recording contract and we could pay Prince a third, like twenty dollars, and that was great.’
94 East recorded five songs at Cookhouse – ‘Games’, ‘I’ll Always Love You’, ‘If We Don’t’, ‘Better Than You Think’ and ‘If You See Me’. ‘We did five songs in four hours,’ recalls Willie. ‘We just counted it off, bam-boom, and started playing.’ But Prince wasn’t entirely happy with the speedy experience. Willie remembers: ‘The next day Prince called my house and said, “Pepe, I have to go back into the studio. I made a mistake.”’ Willie was already happy with the song but nevertheless persuaded the studio to let Prince back in to correct it while he went off to play golf.
This early example of Prince’s perfectionism is, Willie says, audible on the recording. ‘If you hear the part that he changed on “If You See Me”, which is also titled “Do Yourself a Favor”, you can hear what he did differently. The guitar part that he was playing, he did the same part when that part came up again, but the EQ was different because after our session they had another session, and for them to get it exactly the way they had his guitar set up was impossible.’8 Willie would use the demos to get a deal for 94 East with Polydor, but they were dropped after recording a first single, and the songs didn’t come out until almost a decade later.9
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Looking at Prince’s early musical career – by which I mean the period from when he first joined a band, at fifteen, in 1973, to the release of his second album, Prince, in 1979 – what’s most striking is how hard he worked to be liked. There are plenty of provocative songs along the way, and it was in the period that followed this (1980–4) that he truly learnt how to capture mass public attention, but the overwhelming impression from these early years is of a young musician out to woo the world. From his very early childhood to the present day he has worked extremely hard, but still, he seems to have had a surprising number of people along the way who were not only prepared to help him with his ambitions, but also immediately recognised the enormous talent they were witnessing. There was no true striving in the wilderness to build up Prince’s character. Part of this enthusiasm can be explained by the fact that so many of the musicians (and businessmen) of Minneapolis were looking for a break. And, unlike in Los Angeles or New York, where there was endless opportunity for the talented, this was not something easily achieved in Prince’s home town. As Willie remembers: ‘All these other musicians and band members had heard what we were doing. We were the talk of the town. Prince was in the studio, everyone knew who he was, and playing around town we had [legendary music producers] Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. They had this bus called Flyte Time that they used to drive around in and do gigs, and Prince and those guys played the same gigs sometimes. I was the only one who was telling them about the music industry, because people didn’t know about it here. The only people that was doing anything was Bob Dylan and maybe Kenny Rogers and the First Edition, but no black acts were doing anything in Minneapolis.’
Pepe Willie wasn’t the only person to pick up on Prince’s talent. By the time Prince’s band booked time at the recording studios of the English-born, Minneapolis-based producer and writer Chris Moon, they had changed their name from Grand Central to the more aspirational Champagne. Moon told me that he had set up his Moonsound studio by taking a trip at eighteen to Hong Kong to buy a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and built up a name for himself by offering free recording time to local bands, while also having a day job running the recording studio at ad agency Campbell Mithun. He also ‘came up with this crafty plan to give myself credentials’ by going down to the biggest radio station in town, KQRS, and persuading them to broadcast all the top concerts in Minneapolis, including The Rolling Stones, recorded in a studio he’d set up in his van. Given Prince’s on-record admiration for the rock shows on KQRS, it seems likely he would have heard Moon’s recordings before meeting him in person, and it’s also an interesting antecedent for Prince’s later use of mobile trucks to record live performances.
As well as establishing himself as a local producer, recorder and studio engineer, Moon had ambitions to write. ‘I’ve always been a writer. Ever since I was really young I’ve written poetry. So I was sitting behind the console looking at all these bands and thinking, “Most of the lyrics these guys are singing are pretty dreadful. I know I can do better than that.” But I didn’t want to be the guy singing, so I came up with this idea: maybe what I’ll do is find a band and write the material, and they’ll produce the material and I’ll promote the band out there doing my songs.
‘So I started out on this process of figuring out who I’m going to pick. There’s a steady stream of local bands coming through the studio all the time, and I started realising that one of the big problems with bands is that there’s some chap in every band who can’t get out of bed. Right around that time Champagne comes into the studio with this matronly lady [LaVonne Daugherty] who’s the manager. She was a nice lady.’ Moon remembers there being five members of Champagne, ‘all about fifteen, sixteen years old’, but previous accounts claim the band was a three-piece at this point, and these are the three members Moon referred to by name when recalling the session.
Moon remembers that during the recording ‘It was a sunny day, and right across the street from me was a Baskin-Robbins 31 Flavors ice-cream shop, and we’d been recording for four or five hours and the manager for the band said, “OK, let’s take a break before we come back and do the vocals.” So everybody took a break, and she and all the members of the band went outside and over to the ice-cream shop. Well, all but one. Left behind in the studio, Mr Personality-I’d-Rather-Be-By-Myself, little five-foot-four Afro-headed kid, who was more Afro than kid. And so I’m sitting there drinking a can of pop with my feet up and I look through the window and there he is on the drums. I have another little sip and go to the window in the control room a few minutes later and there he is on piano. Another five minutes go by and there he is on the bass guitar. So I cranked up the mikes in the room to see if he’s any good. He’s not bad. He seems to be confident, better on some, not so good on others, but generally confident on all of these instruments. And I realise if I only have one artist, I don’t have to worry about the drummer not showing up and screwing up the whole session.’
Moon waited until they were done with their material and then went over to Prince. ‘He was painfully, painfully shy and extremely introverted. I went over to him and told him I had a proposition for him, and he gave me a grunt. And I said, “I’m a writer and producer and recording engineer and I don’t want to be the artist, and I wondered if you’d like me to package you up and promote you and write your songs and teach you how the studio works and see if we can make something happen for you?”
‘And he looked at me, and he was as surprised at the proposition as I was at making it because here was this kid from the north side of town I didn’t know, I’d never spoken to him before, and I’m ma
king this proposition to him. I don’t think he said yes; he just nodded and I handed him the keys to my recording studio. That was everything I had in life. And that’s probably not something a sane person or a rational person or a more prudent person would do.’
Moon says his deal with Prince was simple: he would pay for everything, and the only thing he wanted was to be given credit for the songs he wrote. Prince was pleased with the deal, but Moon remembers the manager, Day’s mother, ‘was none too happy about it, and as I recall the band wasn’t very thrilled either because Morris Day, he was a pretty flamboyant, outrageous, strong personality even back then, so I think it struck him as difficult that the quietest person in the band had been picked over him, the front man’. Day wasn’t the only musician who would later join The Time that Moon passed over before deciding to work with Prince. ‘We did a couple of sessions with [Jimmy] Jam and [Terry] Lewis with Prince. I brought Jimmy and Terry in to work on some other material I was working on. They came in and they had a very confident demeanour that they were big-time. They played on a couple of tracks, and I always thought they left feeling I should have been a lot more impressed with them and pick them up in the way I picked Prince up. It wasn’t that I wasn’t impressed with them; just that, early on, they were so connected and such a team that it didn’t feel there was room for a third person.’ As far as Moon was concerned, Prince was the future.
3
WOULDN’T YOU LOVE TO LOVE ME?
For an artist who has appeared to shape-shift so many times in his career, Prince’s influences have remained remarkably constant. On stage at Paisley Park in 2009, he reeled off the names: Larry Graham, James Brown, Stevie Wonder, George Clinton, Sly Stone, the Jacksons, Tower of Power, Miles Davis, Carlos Santana, Joni Mitchell, Rufus and Chaka Khan. Most of these influences can be found on Prince’s earliest tape of home demos – recorded, it seems, after the Champagne sessions, and either before or around the time of the songs recorded with Chris Moon – which consist of four takes of ‘For You’, the title song from Prince’s debut album; the first of several versions of a song called ‘Wouldn’t You Love to Love Me?’; five as yet unreleased songs; ‘Don’t You Wanna Ride?’, an early run-through of the themes he’d later explore in ‘Little Red Corvette’, though bizarrely featuring a row-boat instead of a car; the straightforward love song ‘I Spend My Time Loving You’; what almost sounds like a show tune about splitting from Minneapolis, ‘Leaving for New York’ (his half-sister Sharon lived there); the fragmentary ‘Nightingale’; the primitive and self-explanatory ‘Rock Me, Lover’; nine instrumentals; and a cover of Rufus’s ‘Sweet Thing’.1
