by Matt Thorne
Pepe Willie says the reason why this rarely happened again was because Prince got tips in performance style from jazz singer Al Jarreau (it was also at a Jarreau gig that Prince first met Sheila E, who would later become such an important collaborator). ‘Prince was asking Al how he built his vocals up, and Al said, “When you go out there on your first tour, you just turn your mike up and don’t give it your all. You build everything up, then you can give it your all.” But Prince was out there on the first gig giving everything he got. Then the second gig, he ain’t got nothing left.’
Taking two months rest, Prince and the band returned to the road for a handful of club shows, before joining Rick James’s tour as support for a fifty-date run. Chapman has particularly vivid memories of a date in Jacksonville, Florida, which she says was her ‘first experience with racial inequality and racial tension. People were quite upset with me for doing some of the things I was doing with Prince onstage, although it was all choreographed and part of the show. They’re screaming, “White bitch, get away from him.” It’s hard to ignore that when it’s a few feet from the stage. At one point in the same show, the audience started to press forward and people were getting hurt, and Prince finally did the right thing and refused to play until they backed up.’
The shows were billed as a ‘Battle of Funk’ between Prince and Rick James. Dickerson believes that Prince easily got the best response, arguing, ‘The freshness of Prince’s sound, the fact that he was being touted by the black teen mags as the next matinee idol, the sheer energy and flamboyance of the band and the show … all just added up to us destroying the audience every night, while Rick would struggle.’9 James, however, remembered things differently, writing in his autobiography: ‘At the end of his set he’d take off his trench coat and he’d be wearing little girl’s bloomers. I just died. The guys in the audience just booed the poor thing to death.’10
It seems odd that James would pick on Prince’s dress sense to ridicule him, as his own stage wear wasn’t that dissimilar: it’s not as if leather chaps, a bullet belt and neckerchief is that much more sensible than Prince’s trench coat and briefs. James was forced to admit that Prince’s performance improved during the tour, but he argued that this was because the younger artist was cribbing from his act.
The importance of pleasing the audience – such an important part of Prince’s early studio records – was even more prevalent onstage. Announcing the title of the second song, ‘Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?’, as a question before launching into it, he would change the song from a rebuke to a lover to an encouragement to an audience that was already screaming its approval. These were less rock shows than mass seductions. Before starting ‘Just as Long as We’re Together’, in a voice noticeably softer than his singing voice (or his famously deep speaking voice), he’d sweetly enquire of the audience, ‘Is everybody wet?’ It was also during this tour that Matt Fink adopted his arresting onstage uniform of green scrubs, a white face mask, hat, shades and stethoscope. Although this was in 1979, the image is as indelibly 1980s as Max Headroom: this strange, jerking figure at the back of the stage, ready to take off on a synth solo whenever Prince shouts ‘Doctor!’ – an essential part of what makes this band so visually interesting.
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The end of this particular phase in Prince’s development was marked by the departure of Gayle Chapman from the band. Previous biographies have always stated that Chapman left for religious reasons and because she was troubled with a stage act that involved kissing Prince during ‘Head’ or by the provocative costumes with which he was presenting her, but Chapman told me, ‘That’s all hogwash. For years people would write that stuff in the books, and all I could say was, “They never asked me.” It’s not like, “I served God here, now I serve Prince.” I worked for this guy, I didn’t worship him. But maybe young egotistical males want that.’
Fink was shocked by Gayle’s departure, but even in the midst of his increased success and fame, Prince already seemed to be thinking way beyond the current moment, with a game plan that those around him sometimes found strange. Pepe Willie remembers a perplexing meeting with Prince at First Avenue shortly after the release of his second album. ‘I remember him telling me he wanted to get to a place where people couldn’t find him, and I just said, “Why?”’ But Willie had witnessed Prince’s occasional discomfort with fans, and could see this was something that might grow stronger in future, and shape his later behaviour.
5
CREATING UPTOWN
Dez Dickerson believes that in spite of Lisa Coleman having much broader abilities as a musician than Gayle Chapman, Prince’s decision to draft her into the band was also due to her being younger: ‘This pattern of replacing folks with younger players would continue in the future, I believe, at least in part, due to the fact that younger folks were more pliable.’1 Prince’s interest in young collaborators has remained constant throughout his career: from 1981, when he recorded an unreleased song called ‘She’s Just a Baby’, which The Vault suggests may have been inspired by his relationship with sixteen-year-old Susan Moonsie, to 2011, when he was out on the road with a new young female independent musician named Andy Allo.
It’s easy to see the darker side of such relationships, but it seems that Prince is attracted to talent as much as beauty, and if the two are combined, so much the better. What must it have been like to have a woman with the incredible musical breadth and ability of nineteen-year-old Lisa Coleman come into your life at twenty-one? The Prince myth is such that we think of everyone who worked with him as being lucky to have that opportunity, and it’s true that many of Prince’s early records are one-man shows. But still, Coleman is arguably his most important collaborator, and clearly facilitated his musical growth from 1980 until 1986, most notably in the way she opened him up to classical music and piano-based jazz, giving him a breadth of sound that none of his competitors could rival.
When I met Coleman, a charming and self-effacing woman, in Los Angeles, she went out of her way to play down her influence on Prince, admitting that she ‘kind of’ introduced him to classical music but being wary of taking full credit for this, semiseriously suggesting that it was her car that he truly coveted. ‘He considered me a source for that [sort of music], and sometimes he would ask me to bring some records around. I had a great car, my pink Mercury, which had a really cool sound system in it. He’d take rides in my car and borrow it. I always had classical-music tapes, Dionne Warwick and stuff, and yeah, we turned each other on. To impress him I’d play some Mozart on the piano when he “wasn’t listening”. I turned him on to lots of different composers – Vaughan Williams, Mahler, Hindemith, Bill Evans and Claus Ogerman. Symbiosis. He was blown away.’
Soon after Coleman came into Prince’s life, he wrote a song with her name. But Coleman doesn’t believe that the unreleased (but much loved) song ‘Lisa’ is necessarily about her, saying that ‘there are other girls named Lisa’ and that ‘it was just a girl’s name that he used in a song’. She remembers the song as being recorded at a soundcheck. One song that she is certain is about her, however, is the unreleased ‘Strange Way of Saying I Love U’, written after the two of them had a serious argument. ‘I left the house feeling kind of droopy, and when I came home later that night he was like, “I wanna play you something,” and he was really sweet and cute and said, “I’m sorry I hurt your feelings.” And the chorus goes, “I guess I have a strange way of saying I love you.” And I was like, “Thank you,” and we had a little hug and a kiss and everything was OK. That song I knew was for me for sure.’
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Prince’s creative processes have remained consistent throughout his career, although as his income has increased, so have his facilities. From the very beginning, Prince had gone between demoing songs at home and then working on them in the studio, but now that he had a new band, songs started to come from those sessions. Matt Fink contributed the keyboard part to ‘Dirty Mind’ and remembers the song coming out of a 1979 rehearsa
l at which Gayle Chapman was present. As would start to happen more frequently over the next few years, the song came out of a jam that was part of the band’s usual warm-up and rehearsal process. Prince noticed the chords Fink was playing and told him to remember them for a later session. They rehearsed the song until midnight and then, after Fink had gone home, Prince continued working on it, showing up the next day with a finished song that would point to the direction for the rest of the album.
Fink was surprised but not concerned by the graphic content of the album that grew out of that first song, finding the finished record ‘really brilliant’. Although Dirty Mind’s credits clearly state that the record was ‘produced, arranged, composed and performed’ by Prince, with Dr Fink contributing synth to ‘Dirty Mind’ (on which he gets a co-writing credit) and ‘Head’ – featuring Lisa’s backing vocals – his full touring band is pictured on the inner sleeve, dressed in their stage outfits. It’s surprising that he would bother to tell us their names, unless it was an ad for the upcoming tour, but this can be seen as the beginning of a period when he would move more towards collaboration.
Three other songs on the album allegedly also had outside input. Fink and Coleman contributed to ‘Head’, and Dez Dickerson writes in his autobiography that ‘“Uptown” was built on a bass groove that André wrote in rehearsal’. Dickerson also contends that ‘the most clear-cut “borrowing”, though, came in the form of the song “Partyup”. That song was originally written by Prince’s friend (ever present in the summer of ’80 rehearsals) Morris Day.’2 It seems from other accounts, however, that Dickerson slightly overstates Day’s ownership of the song: if it was a collaboration, it seems likely that Prince considerably reworked the track, particularly the lyric.
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For all the qualities of the first two albums, it was with Dirty Mind that Prince truly determined his future, producing a record that was so much more than the sum of its influences and which made a mainstream impact. Describing the record to Steve Sutherland of the NME, Prince seemed to hint that it was autobiographical, but that could be as much tease as truth: while Prince was grumpy in the same interview about being considered homosexual, this was a period where he preferred more to provoke than explain. Beginning in his ‘daddy’s car’, the album’s title song sets up the persona for this album, a man so fixated by sex that nothing – social taboos, conventional morality – can get in the way of his pursuit of it. And yet the record is so charming that this seems less like obsession than the ideal way to live. It helps that Prince is constantly being rejected or humiliated by women as sexually free-spirited as him. There are more synths than guitars on the album, but it’s the sparse guitar that gives the most impact and makes Dirty Mind feel like Prince’s first rock record – particularly on ‘Partyup’, ‘Sister’, and most obviously ‘When You Were Mine’, one of his greatest and most enduring singles, and which Prince says he wrote ‘in a hotel room in Birmingham after listenin [sic] to John [Lennon] sing’.3 (If this is true, it might have been on the Alabama date in April shortly before sessions for Dirty Mind began in earnest.) Invariably, ‘Head’ would be the highlight of all those early live performances, a song that relies heavily on the Oberheim – the synth that Prince would use on this album, Controversy and 1999, and which Lisa played during sessions for Purple Rain. It’s an album that moves between sulky boasts (‘Do It All Night’) and revelling in rejection (‘Gotta Broken Heart Again’), but which is most notorious for ‘Sister’, a seemingly pro-incest song that is the most provocative track Prince ever recorded. Among the many ecstatic notices, Robert Christgau, the self-appointed ‘dean of American rock critics’, put it best, in a review that would still be being quoted when he left the Village Voice twenty-six years later: ‘Mick Jagger should fold up his penis and go home.’
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The Dirty Mind tour began with a month’s worth of dates in December, before a three-month break and a downsizing of venues. During that break Prince performed ‘Uptown’ on Saturday Night Live. The band had grown in confidence, with Prince, Dez and André cocky punks in trench coats and Dr Fink in his scrubs. Prince ended the performance by knocking over his microphone and running from the stage, quickly followed by the rest of the band, looking more like a street gang than they ever had before.
After a rehearsal at the Shea theatre in Buffalo, New York, Prince met with Howard Bloom, who had taken over his publicity campaign and ran the most significant PR company of the late 1970s and ’80s, the Howard Bloom Company. Recently, Bloom has become a prominent author dealing largely with metaphysics, and indeed, having come from a scientific background, considered working with musicians and helping them win over mass audiences as a form of field experiment in mass culture.
‘Prince is normally afraid of men,’ he told me. ‘You can understand why. Imagine how he must have been treated in school – it must have been brutal. He’s most comfortable around women. He let me into his life for three years and then he became afraid even of me, and for me that was a punishing loss.’
Prince’s manager Bob Cavallo had come to Bloom because, Bloom says, at that time ‘no one knew who Prince was. I had spent seven years fighting to bring down racial barriers within record companies. They were intense.’ Cavallo assumed Bloom hadn’t heard about Prince, but Bloom remembers that ‘before Bob and I spoke about Prince I’d watched his album on the R&B charts. His record went platinum – something stunning was going on here. He was a goddamn fucking phenomenon.’
Alan Leeds, Prince’s later road manager, shares with Bloom the belief that it was hard for a black artist to win a mainstream audience. ‘Throughout the ’80s one of his biggest challenges was to sidestep the categorisation that the media at that time would put on you as being a black artist. If you happened to be African-American, you were immediately cast into that African-American ghetto in the industry and somehow challenged to work your way out of it. Earth, Wind and Fire had managed to do so, but George Clinton, for example, had not. Prince was steadfastly determined from the beginning not to be typecast because of how restrictive the radio formats were. It wasn’t the audience that was restrictive, it was the media.’
Howard Bloom had a tactic for getting an artist to a mass audience. He believed that in order to promote an artist he needed to see them in their own environment for between one and three days, interview them extremely intensely and discern their passion points. This is what he did with Prince after that rehearsal in Buffalo. ‘At 2 a.m. in the morning we went backstage to a dressing room by ourselves and I interviewed Prince from two until nine in the morning and I found his imprinting points.’ The first was seeing his father onstage, which Bloom says was a more personal version of what he encountered with most of the rock stars he interviewed, who were usually inspired by having watched Elvis Presley or The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. The second was his time with André Cymone in Bernadette Anderson’s basement. Bloom worked with Prince to come up with material he could use in interviews, and Prince began doing press again for the next two years, before beginning a long period of not speaking to the media.
Bloom believes that he and Bob Cavallo were an essential part of Prince’s success. ‘Prince had two fucking geniuses working for him. He didn’t just have ordinary human beings. I was a scientist in disguise. I was as much a child prodigy as he was.’ Cavallo, in turn, believes Bloom deserves more credit for having established Prince’s profile. ‘He would tell people, “Prince sees sex as salvation,” and then you’d see that in the Washington Post, the New York Times … He comes up with that phrase and then ten writers use that phrase.’
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Mick Jagger’s interest must have been piqued by Robert Christgau’s ‘penis’ comment – especially coming from a hard-core Stones fan who could even find something nice to say about Dirty Work – as he showed up to watch the young pretender when he played one of the Stones’ favourite venues, New York’s Ritz club, on 22 March 1981. But another of the old guard, fellow Minnesotan Bob Dylan,
had already attended an earlier date on the tour – a home-town show at Sam’s in Minneapolis.
Channelling Dorothy, Prince had opened the show by repeating, ‘There’s no place like home,’ and there wasn’t: his home-town shows were often the site of his most significant transformations, with a friendly audience that he would use to road-test new ideas and directions. That night Prince played two songs which still remain unreleased, ‘Broken’ (a sort of epilogue to ‘Gotta Broken Heart Again’, which he’d also do in New York) and, as an encore, ‘Everybody Dance’, a short version of the extended robotic improvisations he would later favour in rehearsal. When fans fantasise about which concert recording they’d most like Prince to release officially, the show at Sam’s in 1981 always ranks near the top of the list.
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Prince would later loosen up his stagecraft on the Sign o’ the Times and Lovesexy tours, but with all the early line-ups, including The Revolution, the band would be carefully positioned on stage, the two keyboard players, Dr Fink and Lisa Coleman, on either side of the drummer, with Prince up front and centre stage, flanked by Dez Dickerson and André Cymone (soon to be replaced by Mark Brown). At this stage, the choreography was simple and 1950s-influenced, with funny routines like ‘The Walk’, a dance step that he’d later turn into a song for The Time.
