by Matt Thorne
Almost two years would pass between the second Time album and Prince’s next full-length project with a protégée, Sheila E’s The Glamorous Life (1984). In the meantime, Prince worked on tracks for the third album by The Time, Ice Cream Castle, released a month after Sheila E’s record; reconfigured the line-up of both his backing band The Revolution and The Time, axeing Terry Lewis and Jimmy Jam; recorded (and abandoned) half a second Vanity 6 record; completed the Purple Rain movie and soundtrack, alongside several songs that wouldn’t make it onto the released version of the album; recorded two songs for Around the World in a Day; recorded a number of B-sides as good as anything on his albums, including ‘Erotic City’, his first collaboration with Sheila E; recorded an early version of an album for a new girl band called Apollonia 6; and perhaps most significantly, had his biggest success to date with ‘When Doves Cry’, the first single from Purple Rain.
As with previous protégés, Prince presented Sheila E with songs that he’d already recorded, allowing her to replace his scratch vocal and then building up most songs around her percussion. ‘The Belle of St. Mark’ is another unrequited-lust song, describing Sheila’s love for a teenage Parisian. ‘Shortberry Strawcake’ is an instrumental, with Prince’s back-masked lyrics buried deep in the mix. ‘Noon Rendezvous’ has Sheila looking forward to a lunchtime assignation with a possibly older (or at least more experienced) lover. The crepuscular pace seems inappropriate for a song about a daytime sex session, and the lyrics are awkwardly phrased, but the biggest problem is that this is a ‘Purple Rain’-style epic condensed into four minutes. Prince’s own live version of the song, which took place at a rehearsal for his 1984 First Avenue birthday show, ran to fifteen minutes and transformed the track into one of his most awesomely desolate performances.
Alongside Prince’s version of ‘Noon Rendezvous’, the only track on the album that seems worth considering as an important part of Prince’s (as opposed to Sheila E’s) oeuvre is the nine-minute title track, ‘The Glamorous Life’, which gives the album its overall concept and helped fix Sheila E’s pop personality (as well as giving her a showcase for her percussion skills, particularly when played live). The album’s conceit was that it was an aural movie rather than a mere record, and along with ‘Oliver’s House’, this is the album’s most obvious story-song. It has some interesting lyrical parallels with Madonna’s ‘Material Girl’, released the following year, which takes the opposite perspective from Sheila’s insistence that money only pays the rent and it’s love which is for ever.
The Time’s third album, Ice Cream Castle, released a month later, features the two songs for which the band are now best known, ‘Jungle Love’ and ‘The Bird’ (they perform both in Purple Rain (1984)), but the first single was ‘Ice Cream Castles’, in which Morris Day drops his usual ‘bring me a mirror’ shtick to sing about falling in love with a white woman. Prince has performed all three songs live in concert.
Nothing else on side one of Ice Cream Castle is as powerful. ‘My Drawers’ is another tedious Prince song about underwear (not his worst: that honour goes to the unreleased ‘Drawers Burnin’’, one of the few Prince songs I’d be happy never to hear again), while ‘Chili Sauce’, like The New Power Generation’s much later ‘Mashed Potato Girl’, is a silly skit set in a restaurant (which Prince considers the funniest location in the world, although he usually makes the same joke: a man buying a restaurant just to sack the staff) and is hard to listen to now.
But it’s the three songs on side two that make this The Time’s most commercially and artistically successful album. ‘Jungle Love’, a simple party song, remains in the band’s set to this day. More evidence of Prince’s love of muddling concepts comes with ‘If the Kid Can’t Make You Come’, in which Day voices a character named ‘The Kid’ who seems to have no connection with Prince’s character of the same name in Purple Rain. Among the most explicit of The Time’s seduction songs, it has a long central passage in which Day removes his date’s bra, admires her breasts and makes her promise never to breastfeed, before his date, played by Sharon Hughes – an actress best known for parading around in Vanity 6-style underwear in the 1983 ‘women-in-prison’ exploitation movie Chained Heat – announces titty time. ‘The Bird’ is a celebration of yet another imaginary dance craze, and the best yet, where you can dance how you like as long as you flap your arms in the air. Prince isn’t the only Minneapolis musician to write a song about a bird-based dance craze, as before his rise the city was best known for The Trashmen and their immortal ‘Surfin’ Bird’, recently given a new lease of life by cartoon show Family Guy. But for all his love of party time, Prince’s musical experimentation with his side projects was about to get more serious, and the events surrounding his next project, The Family, would ultimately change the direction of his music, and the course of his career, for ever.
7
ROYAL JEWELS
As if in acknowledgement that his band was starting to become more important to his studio processes, the cover of 1999 featured the partially obscured words ‘anD thE rEVOLUtioN’ written in mirror-writing in the ‘i’ of Prince’s name (here produced as a ‘1’). Matt Fink has no memory of where the name for the band came from, but Dez Dickerson told me it was possibly the representation of a development in Prince’s thought processes that had been going on for some time. ‘It was always part of the rhetoric. He wanted a movement instead of just a band. He wanted to create that kind of mindset among the fans.’ But Bobby Z has commented that at this time, Prince may have still felt some ambivalence about crediting a group, ‘because there was discontent among some of the members. But he was setting the public up for something that was yet to come.’1
This reluctance might also have stemmed from the fact that 1999 was still essentially a solo effort, with the band (and assorted others) in the main merely providing backing vocals. 1999 is one of Prince’s finest records, and perhaps closest in his oeuvre to Sign o’ the Times, the two essentially solo records bookending a period in which The Revolution would begin to play a role in his composition process. Prince still plays much of the album live, and it showed him beginning to latch onto the more mainstream rock sound that would ensure his success throughout much of the 1980s and provide the bedrock for his legacy ever since. As Howard Bloom remembers: ‘Steve Fargnoli, Bob Cavallo and I mounted a crusade to get Prince out of the black ghetto at Warner Brothers and demonstrate that Prince was as much an FM artist – which was all-white radio – as he was a black artist.’
A double album, it has more breathing space than Purple Rain, and its more peculiar corners reportedly troubled Warner Brothers at first, and possibly even his management. Bloom remembers that Prince’s management team were not always sure where his head was at, and would occasionally come to him for advice. ‘Bob would call me and he would say, “Howard, you don’t know that I have the lyrics to Prince’s album. I never told you that, right? If somehow by some miracle these lyrics show up in your office tomorrow morning, can you tell me what Prince is thinking?” And the answer was, yes.’
The first song to be written (and introduced live) from 1999 was ‘All the Critics Love U in New York’, which Prince performed at his home-town club First Avenue, telling the audience that the song might not appear for another year (or, he threatened, six). This live version was much harder than the album version, with notable solos from Dr Fink (‘Let him out of his cage!’ Prince demanded), a doomy electro-funk enlivened by the sort of synth noise that bands like Black Dice would later turn into a career, coupled with a half sneer–half celebration of the blasé attitudes of New York critics that somehow sounded less like provincial anxiety than a rallying call for experimental futurism.
From the mid-1980s onwards, jazz would become an important part of Prince’s sound, but in both the live and eventual studio version of this song, Prince makes it clear that his new direction follows the death of jazz, the style of music that, however proficient or not he might have been at it, meant most to his
father. The line might also have been directed at his band. Matt Fink remembers: ‘After I joined Prince, I went back to study more jazz piano. I played jazz piano between the ages of thirteen and a half and my senior year, and I decided to return to this after joining Prince’s band. And he asked me what I was up to, and I told him I was having jazz lessons, and he said, “What are you doing that for?” He said he didn’t want a jazz sound coming into the band. I told him I wasn’t planning to do it for that reason, but because it would improve my technical chops. But later he got more into it.’
Prince’s ‘new direction’ was not as drastic as some of the changes he would pursue later, but there was definitely an increased ambition evident on the album. While Controversy felt like Prince consolidating the success of Dirty Mind by producing a slightly watered-down sequel, this new album showed him making a definite creative progression, both in the sound of the music and the ambition of the lyrics. But as would be the case with almost every subsequent Prince album, the record would come together first through a gradual accumulation of songs, before the process picked up speed and turned into a coherent concept, with the title track written last. It’s this song that hints at the precision-tooled tracks of Purple Rain; the rest of the album is much looser, jam-based, and though always poppy and easy on the ear, experimental.
Prince’s desire to create other outlets for his creativity had almost begun to overwhelm the work he was writing for himself. The next two songs to emerge for this project – ‘Let’s Pretend We’re Married’ and ‘International Lover’ – were both recorded in the midst of the large amount of tracks he was preparing for Vanity 6 and The Time (see Chapter 6), with the latter originally intended for Morris Day. Both songs see Prince moving forward from the wronged or frustrated lover persona he adopted in his early lyrics – literally so in ‘Let’s Pretend We’re Married’, in which Prince tells his new lover Marsha he needs a killer blow job if it’s going to help him forget the woman who just left. Although it’s not clear whether Prince got as far as getting Day to sing ‘International Lover’, the lyric floats midway between the boasting and banter of the Time tracks and the wooziness of ‘Do Me, Baby’.
Once Prince had begun to conceive of the record as a complete piece and started working on it in earnest at Los Angeles’s Sunset Sound studio, he recorded his finest expression of vulnerability, ‘Something in the Water (Does Not Compute)’, protesting about his own uniqueness like a neglected child, and ‘Automatic’, the video for which features backing vocalist Jill Jones, her hair bleached blonde as she dances in her black underwear, lighting Lisa Coleman’s cigarettes.2 After five minutes Jones and Coleman join Prince on a bed. The two women strip Prince to his waist and tie him to it, whipping him as he twists and kicks. That it is Prince being tortured by Coleman and Jones rather than the other way round highlights how at this stage he was still toying with the more submissive persona found in the earlier records and witnessed rarely in his later releases.
But while Prince was publicly portraying himself as a masochist, unreleased tracks from this era reveal that he was simultaneously indulging his more sadistic side. ‘Extra Loveable’ and ‘Lust U Always’ might have caused controversy if they had made it onto the album, as both tracks feature Prince threatening rape. If we are troubled by the songs, then does the fact that having recorded them Prince has (so far) exercised self-censorship and withheld them from a wide audience excuse their content? The notion of Prince’s home studio being like a laboratory has been overplayed in criticism, but it’s true that he constantly refines his sexual persona throughout his career, and he does this through relentless experimentation. Part of his development was clearly a reflection of his changing status – especially the movement from sexual submissiveness to dominance that accompanies his increased power – but there’s also a conscious artistic ambition and development, and in order to write later songs like ‘Computer Blue’, ‘Darling Nikki’ or ‘When Doves Cry’ (all brilliant explorations of sadomasochism), it’s easy to argue convincingly that he needed to visit these artistic extremes.3
It’s also true that both songs are demonstrations of disturbed mental states (indeed, with his references to a therapist and the acknowledgement that this is a dramatisation of sexual monomania, it seems clear that the singer of ‘Lust U Always’ is mad); and in both cases the music seems to comment on the lyrics. ‘Extra Loveable’ is the more troubling, mainly because, with his shout-outs to band members, it’s impossible to take this song as being in character. But Prince’s threat to rape the woman he’s addressing (his use of the second person ‘U’ gains a new and unwelcome power here) is at odds with the bouncy music, although it does become more frenzied when Prince’s mood turns.
As with The Doors’ ‘The End’, ‘Extra Loveable’ also has an Oedipal theme, albeit reversed, with Prince suggesting that the object of his desire is so sexy and skilled that she will turn his mother lesbian and make his dead father (another clue that the song is fictional) return from the grave to have sex with her. The lyric also includes lines about bathing together which recall ‘The Ballad of Dorothy Parker’, but while the shared bath in that song sounded like the most fun date ever, here he’s threatening to drag an unwilling partner into the tub to violate her.4
Bathtub-related trauma also occurs in the unreleased ‘Purple Music’5 – the lyrics of which suggest that it might have been designed to follow ‘Lust U Always’ on 1999 or some other proposed Prince album – in which Prince’s valet (somewhat oddly) asks him what he wants to bathe in and (even more oddly) is severely distressed by Prince’s (unheard) response, a surreal sadism worthy of De Sade (or American postmodernists Robert Coover and John Hawkes). Bath time will remain a preoccupation for Prince throughout his career, the most famous example being the video for Purple Rain’s ‘When Doves Cry’, which begins with Prince bathing, an interest that would continue in the live show, where he would ask the audience if they wanted to have a bath with him and climb into a tub onstage.6
Aside from ‘Lady Cab Driver’, another car-and-sex song which works as a much angrier version of ‘Little Red Corvette’ and in which Prince makes up for all the social, biological and economic injustices meted out on him through the power of a transformative fuck (performed as a playlet, with Jill Jones – as J.J. – playing the chauffer role), the remainder of the album was made up of lighter material: ‘Delirious’, a rockabilly song which had the closest musical connection to Controversy and worked as a perfect pop single; ‘D.M.S.R.’, which appeared on the soundtrack to Risky Business, the movie which broke fellow 1980s icon Tom Cruise; and ‘Free’, a more optimistic cousin to ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’. And it should be noted that it wasn’t just dark, sexual stuff that Prince was secretly demoing; other notable unreleased songs from the era include the aforementioned ‘Moonbeam Levels’, a very pretty song that combines creative inertia with anxiety about an impending apocalypse, and the simplistic but very appealing rockabilly tracks ‘No Call U’ and ‘Turn It Up’. Playing ‘D.M.S.R.’ in rehearsal Prince would change the vocals – ‘Everybody say Dance, Mark,7 Sex, Hamburgers, Hot Dogs, Pizza, Root Beer, Pussy … that’s a perfect weekend’ – before working in lines from Talking Heads’ ‘Once in a Lifetime’8 and talking about New York nightclubs, suggesting that he had the dance floor in mind for this song from the beginning.
But the real move forward into fully-fledged popular success and mass consciousness came thanks to the album’s first two singles, ‘1999’ and ‘Little Red Corvette’, the perfect culmination of the ‘seduced by an older lover’ strand of Prince’s music that had been evident since his earliest demos in songs like ‘Do You Wanna Ride?’. Both songs were recorded at the end of the sessions. Dez Dickerson remembers Prince introducing him to the new material via demos of the songs, both of which he would appear on. According to H. M. Buff, the engineer who was later given access to the original tapes of ‘1999’, the song initially contained a Latin section similar to one in the later reworking th
at was edited from the original recording. Given Prince’s later interest in Latin music and his long-term collaboration with Dr Clare Fischer, this is an intriguing strand of his development, suggesting for all Prince’s focus on electro-funk and rock during this period, the seeds of his later sound could have been sown sooner.
‘1999’ is now so fully established as one of Prince’s most celebrated hits that the fact that it failed to reach the top forty on its first release is almost forgotten. It wasn’t until the song was re-released following the success of the album’s second single, ‘Little Red Corvette’, that it gained the recognition it has retained to this day. ‘Little Red Corvette’ is and remains a signature song. Looking at how Prince managed the crossover from minor pop artist to household name, past commentators have pointed to how well his music and persona were suited to MTV. His use of explicit sexuality ensured the videos for these songs hit big on the music channel, and it remains relevant – given that Prince is an artist who works best when his music is considered not in isolation, but also by looking at the videos, live performances and myth-making that accompanied each release during his most highly regarded era – that it took the heavy rotation of his visual iconography to really push him to the masses. But these clips weren’t appreciated by everyone. As 1980’s video producer Sharon Oreck later commented: ‘Prince’s “1999” and “Little Red Corvette” were just smoke, then Prince’s face, then smoke, then Prince’s butt … they were, like, porn bad.’9
