by Matt Thorne
For You, like Bob Dylan’s and Neil Young’s first albums, is both a perfectly realised masterpiece and something of a false start. Prince admitted as much to Steve Sutherland in an interview tape that eventually got pressed up as a picture disc, in which he expressed his frustration that the executive producer Warner Brothers had forced on him didn’t teach him how to use the studio as he had hoped. Prince claims he wanted to make a record ‘bereft of mistakes’. His ambivalent attitude towards the record comes through in comments like ‘it took a long time, it was pretty painstaking’, that ‘most of it was pretty old stuff’, that ‘it was a perfect record’ but that it was ‘too scientific’, and that after he finished it he could no longer listen to it.
Prince spent longer working on it than he did on any of his three subsequent albums, not taking this much time crafting a record again until he made a successful bid for a substantial new audience with 1999 and Purple Rain. The time in the studio paid off: it has the smoothest, most complete sound of the first four records, although Prince’s lyrical skills are still developing: it is the work of a nineteen-year-old, and as such has little in its head.
Only ‘Soft and Wet’, the collaboration with Chris Moon, made it onto 1993’s hits compilation and remains in his live set, and while For You is, in places, stylistically similar to Prince’s second, self-titled album, it has otherwise little connection with his later records.
All the songs on the first two albums are addressed to ‘you’. On the multitracked title song, a chorus of Princes (in a visual version of this trick, there are three of him in the bed on the inner sleeve) make the listener an offering of Prince’s life, and throughout the record we are forced to assume the role of his various girlfriends. ‘In Love’, which was the B-side of the album’s second single, ‘Just as Long as We’re Together’, is one of Prince’s simplest songs, more basic than most of his early demos. Prince sings of restraint and chains, but not in the sadomasochistic context he’ll soon explore on 1999 and Purple Rain, instead merely suggesting that if his love is reciprocated, it will liberate the object of his affection. ‘Soft and Wet’ is the record’s most memorable track, largely because it prefigures the sexual explicitness so important to Prince’s later records.
One of the lyrical limitations of this record is that Prince has (for the most part) yet to work out how to introduce developed narratives into his songs. ‘Crazy You’ begins with the promising set-up of Prince falling in love with a crazy woman, but while the eccentricities of his female acquaintances and lovers – such as the well-built exhibitionists of ‘Raspberry Beret’ or ‘Gett Off’ – will provide him with much material in the future, here he quickly qualifies the woman’s craziness by saying love makes him mad too, and the song is over in two short minutes. It is a mark of the album’s ‘perfection’ that even a slight track like this has a fascinating (and unique) arrangement, utilising water drums and wind chimes for a complexity of sound that prefigures the later experimentation of Around the World in a Day.
Along with ‘Soft and Wet’, ‘Just as Long as We’re Together’ is Prince’s most important early song. He demoed it five times on the way to the studio – the song growing in musical ambition with each version – and as these various versions included a test pressing for both CBS and Warners to prove his ability to play multiple instruments and produce himself, it can, without exaggeration, be seen as the track that got him his deal and kick-started his career. Knowing this, it’s easy to hear the ‘look-ma-no-hands’ ambition in the music. Lyrically, it seems oddly ambivalent for a song about devotion, with Prince oscillating between singing about how he will allow his lover her freedom and wanting her near by. One of the demo versions cuts off after three minutes, and this seems the natural end point of the song, the remaining three minutes in the released version being mainly a chance for Prince to showcase his musical skills.
The song about pregnancy that did make the record, ‘Baby’, is, whatever Moon’s concerns, the album’s most lyrically sophisticated track and is somehow more touching than any of the songs Prince wrote for 1996’s Emancipation, when he was actually expecting a child. What’s most impressive about the song is its economy and its lyrical sure-footedness. In relation to Prince’s career as a whole, it also sees him touching on two themes that will reoccur several times throughout his body of work: money and contraception. Although the press and biographers have made much of the occasions when Prince appears to have had brief money difficulties, from his first deal onwards he has experienced near constant financial freedom, and it is only in his relatively early songs that he sings about impoverishment,9 here worrying about whether he will be able to support his child and if he should marry his girlfriend.10
‘My Love Is Forever’ and ‘So Blue’ are lyrically similar in that both songs are about lifetime devotion (although it’s worth remembering that in the later ‘Let’s Go Crazy’ there is something beyond for ever). Both are lyrically generic (‘So Blue’ being the second song on the album in which Prince observes that the sun shines, although given the weather in Minneapolis maybe this is excusable) but as musically appealing as the rest of the album, Prince’s acoustic guitar on ‘So Blue’ already far more measured and sophisticated than it is on his home demos. Far better is ‘I’m Yours’. There is only one recording from Prince’s first tour in circulation – which doesn’t feature the song – so it’s possible he may have played it at some point during that run,11 but the song didn’t return until thirty-one years later, when Prince played it as part of his set at the Conga Room in Los Angeles. That the song slipped easily into the set seems somehow terrifying, indicating that no matter how long Prince lives, he’ll never get to do full live justice to his recorded work (although it would help if he retired some concert chestnuts). But he did make a significant change to the lyrics, skipping the verses from the original version in which he claims to be a virgin. As with ‘Do You Wanna Ride?’, this is a song in which Prince approaches a more experienced woman, but this time there is a distinct absence of braggadocio, and it’s among Prince’s most submissive songs, though the musical bombast hides some of the sentiment.
The interviews Prince gave to promote his debut were unrevealing. Cynthia Horner’s interview for Right On! is typical, Prince rebuffing each question with silly or contradictory answers, telling her he hates clothes, that his favourite foods are mashed yeast and Bubble Yum and that he doesn’t want to get married until 2066. Curiously, he complains about the late hours rock musicians have to keep, and his late-night sessions, which seems odd given that for most his life he has seemed almost completely nocturnal.
After the release of For You, Prince bought his first house and set up a primitive studio in the basement, beginning the practice of private demoing and recording that he would maintain for ever afterwards. Six short instrumentals, five unreleased songs and another version of ‘Wouldn’t You Love to Love Me?’ have emerged from this era. ‘Down a Long Lonely Road’ is a catchy chorus without a song, ‘Baby, Baby, Baby’ is little more than the title, a pretty-but-barely-there sketch, and ‘Miss You’ is even more minimalist than the songs on the debut. Two songs about girlfriends, real (‘Nadera’) or, I assume, idealised (‘Donna’) don’t really tell us much about these women, other than that they’re pretty and unobtainable (‘Donna’) or cool (‘Nadera’). Either way, neither the women nor the songs stuck around long. He was moving on.
Still, for a while, at least, Prince didn’t forget Pepe Willie or Chris Moon. As Willie remembers: ‘We got dropped from Polydor before our record even came out, and Prince and André and myself were hanging out in Minneapolis and he was so heartbroken that he said to André, “We got to go back into the studio with Pepe.” So André says, “Sure, let’s go,” and I’m going, “Well, where’s this money coming from?” I didn’t know. [But] I booked the time at Sound 80 and me and Prince wrote this song called ‘Just Another Sucker’, and me and my other friend wrote ‘Lovin’ Cup’, and then I wrote this other song called
‘Dance to the Music of the World’, and we went and recorded those three songs, and Prince played drums and keyboards and guitar and I played acoustic guitar and André played bass. I was feeling real good because I had support from Prince and André. For me, they were the two best musicians in Minneapolis.’12
Prince remained friends with Willie, letting him house-sit while he was away in Los Angeles in the summer of 1978. Willie found that being left alone in Prince’s home studio was inspiring. ‘He had this four-track recorder in his house. So I was housesitting and I started writing. When I was in Minneapolis hanging out with Prince and all these guys, I’d started playing keyboard and a little bass. When I was at his house, he’s got all these instruments here. I turned on the recorder and started playing guitar and keyboards and wrote these songs, ‘Love, Love, Love’ and ‘You Can Be My Teacher’. And then Prince came in from LA and I played it for him, and he played bass and some other things on it. And that was at 5,215 France Avenue, here in Minneapolis. That was fun.’13
A short time after the success of the first album, Chris Moon remembers, ‘I get a phone call from Prince. He’s with Warner Brothers now. He says, “Being famous is kinda lonely. It’s hard to know who your friends are. I’m calling to ask you for a favour. I want you to do for my dad what you did for me. Can you make him famous?” I said, “Prince, I’ve never even met your dad.” A couple of days later, I get a phone call. “This is Prince’s dad, my son says you can make me famous.” So he came by, and he was an older guy, a little weathered. He came with a case, and he opened up the case and took out an accordion. I’m thinking, “Oh my god, there is a limit to my capabilities.” He left unhappy and I never heard from him again.’
4
STILL WAITING
It wasn’t long after the release of For You – which was respectfully reviewed and did well enough to establish Prince as a presence midway up Billboard’s Soul Chart, but didn’t break out to a mass audience – that Prince stopped wanting to just be Stevie Wunderkind and set his sights on besting Sly and the Family Stone too. Dez Dickerson suggests that right from the very beginning Prince ‘had a definite vision for the make-up of the group. He wanted a multiracial, rainbow-coalition kind of band’. Dickerson’s book provides a touching account of the frustrations and joys of those early days, suggesting that for all his early success, and deliberate separation from the band, at this point at least Prince was looking for a gang, auditioning players in Los Angeles but eventually bringing together a band made up entirely of Minneapolis musicians: his close friend André Cymone, the man he’d been practising with from the beginning, Bobby Z, Dez Dickerson, Gayle Chapman and Matt Fink. In the process of assembling this team, he also came across four people who would later return to his orbit: Paul Peterson (of The Family)’s brother Ricky, Jimmy Jam, Morris Day and Sue Ann Carwell.
Gayle Chapman remembers that she met Charles Smith, Prince’s cousin and the original drummer in Grand Central, through ‘some friends of his, and those friends were into Prince’s music, his first album at the time. Apparently they knew Prince, but they didn’t tell me that Charles was his cousin. They introduced me to Charles, and Charles would come over and we would jam together. We spent many hours just playing together. One day I was alone in my home listening to For You as loud as I could, and it was late at night and the stereo was cranked and I couldn’t have heard anything aside from the music, except I heard this voice, and it came through the ceiling and shot through my head and went out the other side. All it said was: “In order to tour he’s gonna need a band.” And I turned the music down and I went, “What?” I’d never had such a clear thought; it wasn’t my head speaking. So I asked Charles if he knew anything about it, because I knew these other people that we knew also knew him. And he said, “Well, Prince is my cousin.” And I said, “Why didn’t you tell me?” And he said, “I thought you were already playing with someone.” And I said, “I’m playing with you in my living room. Get me involved!”’
Of those auditions, Chapman remembers: ‘I showed up at his house at Edina on France Avenue. I was wearing a blue Jean Shrimpton dress and I had wild, kinda crazy hair. I looked like the Granola Queen, a hippy chick. I showed up and sat on the couch with all these other girls and some guys, and they all looked dressed for the part. And I’m thinking, “Well, maybe not.” And I went downstairs, and these guys all gave me the rude eye. I descended the stairs, and there was Bobby Rivkin, André Cymone – or Anderson, as his name was then – and Prince. They had a keyboard down there and said, “OK, we’re gonna jam.” And I thought, “I hate jamming. Can’t we just play something?” But no, they had to jam and see if I could “hang”. So I jammed and I didn’t think that I did very well, so I said, “OK, so if you guys can do that, then you follow this.” So I started one, and they were like, “So now we have to follow this? OK.” I left and I didn’t feel real good about it. I went home and I moved to another place further away from downtown Minneapolis and waited three months. By that time I wasn’t even thinking about it. Then one day – it was the end of summer, in September – I was taking a nap, nice fall day, sunny out, I was depressed, I think, and the phone rang and this monotone voice said, “Hello, Gayle, this is Prince, what are you doing? Can you make it to rehearsal in an hour?” And I said, “Sure.” I loaded up everything, stuck it in my VW and made it in forty-five minutes.’
*
The best account of these early years of development can be found in Dez Dickerson’s 2003 autobiography, My Time with Prince: Confessions of a Former Revolutionary, the only book written by a member of Prince’s band. I also interviewed Dickerson, but over the phone he displayed a caution that is not so apparent in his revealing, but respectful, autobiography. What’s striking about the accounts of almost all the members of Prince’s early band is how they were immediately struck by the quality of his work. Chapman wasn’t the only one who’d been cranking up Prince’s first album. Dickerson had, by his own admission, a little more adolescent arrogance than Matt Fink, but after borrowing his younger sister’s copy of For You he was equally impressed.
Though Prince’s band included Prince’s childhood friend André Cymone and long-term associate Bobby Z, from the beginning Dickerson felt he in particular had a special creative affinity to Prince, believing that at this stage in his career Prince was still listening to those around him as he shaped his sound and persona. As Dickerson told me: ‘In the early days I really was closest to Prince. We had a different relationship than he had with some of the others. He’d come over and we’d work through things.’ It seems that what they worked through was not only music, but also burgeoning fame and the pressures of being in a band.
Dickerson’s musical tastes were in some ways closer to Matt Fink’s than Prince’s. Fink says his were broad, but that he had a particular fondness for rock, including Fleetwood Mac, The Beatles, The Who and the Stones. Dickerson and Prince shared an interest in Grand Funk Railroad, but otherwise Dickerson was much like Fink, though his tastes ran to new wave and metal rather than classic rock, with particular favourites being The Cars and Van Halen (after Dickerson left Prince’s employ, his next most high-profile gig was playing with Billy Idol). So it was unsurprising that when the band first played live, though the show was based around For You, they produced more of a rock sound than Warner Brothers – who, after all, had signed a sweet-voiced child protégé singing love songs – were expecting.
The rehearsals had been intense. At first the band practised in a building called Del’s Tyre Mart, which Chapman says ‘was an old tyre shop that was owned by Bonnie Raitt’s brother Steve in Seven Corners. It was a kinda dark, dingy place, and all this stuff was in there already set up. Everybody was there and I was the last person to walk in.’
Pepe Willie, who had lent Prince his speakers, remembers the reason for abandoning this rehearsal space. ‘Either he left the door open to Del’s Tyre Mart or somebody broke in. I think he forgot to lock the door. Somebody went in there and took every
thing. The only thing they didn’t take was my speakers. And so I said, “OK, that’s it, move everything to my house in south Minneapolis.”’
When they got there, Willie recalls the band rehearsing ten hours a day. During these rehearsals, Chapman remembers, improvisation was not particularly welcome. ‘He would tell us what he wanted us to play. There was one part on “I Wanna Be Your Lover” where he was really specific about what he wanted, and I think he always has been. I knew I was working with somebody completely knowledgeable of what he wanted when he would come over repeatedly and stand there behind me, kinda like my mom did, and say, “Not that, this. Play it for me.” And it would be just milliseconds different than what I was playing. But it was a feel he wanted it to have. I tolerated it from him much better than from my mother.’
Of Chapman, Willie says: ‘Gayle was real cool for a white girl. She used to like to eat that Brie cheese, and I hated that because it made her breath smell.’ For her part, Chapman remembers: ‘Pepe was an asshole. As far as I’m concerned, he always will be. He thinks he’s the reason I was in the band. I never met Pepe until we moved to his basement, which was several months later. Pepe wasn’t at the original audition. I’ve heard all the stuff about he was persuasive in my getting into the band. I never met him until I was in the band and we were hiring Matt Fink. But Pepe seemed to be a misogynistic fella that had talent in his own right. Whatever he did for Prince, God bless him, but we didn’t hit it off at all.’
Chapman says Bobby Z was very reserved. ‘I never really got to know him. I think because I was the female in the band and got preferential treatment on hotel rooms none of the guys really liked me. They had a discussion once and said, “You always get this,” and I said, “I wasn’t asking for it.” I was the chick in the band. “Look, I’ll room with you guys, but you’re gonna have to give up the bathroom for a little.” Matt Fink and I have remained friends throughout the years. We’re not close, but if I’ve ever wanted to talk to him about anyone or anything, I could call him. He talks to me. I don’t know what Dez thought. Dez is a different character. These were my band-mates, we weren’t friends. We were all young, egotistical and in it for ourselves, and we realised that once you’re in Prince’s band, you’re in it for Prince, whether you wanted it for yourself or not.’ Fink also remembers Chapman with fondness. ‘Gayle is a wonderful person and an excellent keyboardist.’
