Prince

by Brian Morton

  PRINCE

  A THIEF IN THE TEMPLE

  Brian Morton

  This edition first published in 2007 by

  Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street,

  Edinburgh EH1 1TE

  This digital edition first published in 2016 by Canongate Books

  Copyright © Brian Morton, 2007

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library.

  ISBN 978 1 78211 975 3

  Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd,

  Grangemouth, Stirlingshire

  www.canongate.tv

  Sarah, for you . . .

  . . . and for the little prince.

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Afterword

  Discography

  Index

  Acknowledgements

  In a story so much concerned with rumour, counter-rumour, carefuly confected legend, fallings-out, gagging clauses and plain nonsense, who to believe? Almost every detail of Prince’s childhood and early years is rebutted or contradicted somewhere in the record. Almost everything that happened later is the subject of endless speculation in an internet community whose size and passion is the best evidence of Prince’s artistic longevity. Special thanks to all those imaginatively handled visitors to chat-rooms and message boards, but also to those who’ve written about Prince before me, and particularly Barney Hoskyns and Dave Hill, whose books Imp of the Perverse and A Pop Life offered a useful confirmation at a later stage of writing that I wasn’t wildly off the mark. Thanks to Arthur Geffen, my virtual guide to Minneapolis, who could have been appalled to know what he was guiding me towards; to the late Colin Smith; to Robert Palmer, Mica Paris, Andrew Pothecary, Cindy Revell; to Jamie Byng, Andy Miller, Helen Bleck and Alison Rae of Canongate Books, who put up with long delays during the unhappy period after I left the BBC and changed my name to an unpronounceable squiggle and my writing style to an unreadable scrawl; to the members and ex-members of the Prince entourage who spoke (mostly) off the record but with more obvious affection and admiration than malice, and who are paraphrased rather than quoted anonymously in what follows. Thanks above all to Sarah – ‘The Most Beautiful Girl in the World’ – for putting up with endless plays of endless Prince albums, singles and bootlegs, and for being there during the SLAVE/squiggle days. And to Prince, who I met once semi-officially and from whom I got not one word of sense, except a shared admiration for Miles Davis.

  Introduction

  The story of Prince – like those of his friend and collaborator Miles Davis, and his fellow Minnesotan Bob Dylan – confirms the falsehood of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous line about there being no second acts in American lives. The myth of America is all about successive rebirth, about self-determination, about putting time into reverse and seeming to grow younger rather than older. If America is also a language experiment, then archetypal Americans – and Prince, Miles, Dylan inhabit that category – almost always take a playfully cavalier attitude to their own creations.

  It’s about time, in both the word’s senses. If Dylan can take a cherished song and put it to a reggae beat or slow it down so drastically that only a few stray lyrics seem familiar; if Miles could turn his back – as he notoriously used to do on stage – on his own part in some of the classic jazz albums and in favour of youthful street music; then Prince has followed them in treating his own astonishing body of songs – many hundreds in the public domain, countless others as yet unheard – as if they were counters on an improvisational game-field, part of an open flow of ‘work’ rather than canonical ‘works’. The hard thing for any student of Prince, but an endless source of delight and discovery for his admirers, is that the real work does not come through to us as settled ‘product’ but as a tricksterish chase after bootlegs, reworked ideas, wilful suppressions and mere rumour. It has kept him, depending on how you look at it, either ahead of everyone else, or in sole charge of his own enigmatic game.

  The time frame is important. As a very young man, Prince appeared to be the most exciting musician in America, uniquely allowed by a major corporation to make his own music exactly as he chose. Not much more than a decade later, Prince – or whatever he then called himself – was a laughing-stock, paranoid, conspiratorial, creatively burned out, broke. It’s hard to judge whether his disappearance from the scene was a personal crisis like the drug-fuelled disillusion that drove Miles Davis away from active music-making at the end of the 1970s or was part of a capriciously contrived withdrawal like Bob Dylan’s much exaggerated motorcycle accident. Whatever the truth, all three men came back, Miles and Dylan with something new in their music, Prince seemingly content to catch up with some of the unexplored dimensions of his own almost absurdly eclectic past where a single record might contain elements of jazz, funk, r’n’b, bubblegum pop, psychedelia and hard rock.

  The comeback wasn’t quite overnight. Prince signalled his intention to be part of the new millennium with 2001’s jazz-inflected Rainbow Children, which seemed to be largely concerned with his becoming a Jehovah’s Witness. Two years later, and this time on the nomadic NPG imprint which allowed him to preserve some degree of creative if not distributional independence, he released N.E.W.S., a set of rough jams that didn’t sound like a finished record at all. A year further on, though, an artist who had seemed creatively and commercially down and out was again the biggest gross earner in the music business. Neither 2004’s Musicology nor 2006’s 3121, his first album for Universal, were anything other than professional, generic Prince records. He seemed to have defied an iron law and to have cheated time. Pushing fifty, Prince had renewed himself.

  He’s always talked about in terms of a Zeitgeist, one which he either expressed to perfection or actually created and inhabited alone. Prince is often spoken of as an enigma, which is rarely a helpful designation. There is, though, a paradox at the heart of his work and reputation. Recent commercial recognition might suggest that Prince was ahead of his time and the market has only now caught up. Prince, though, enjoyed enormous commercial success when still very young – 1984’s Purple Rain is an industry benchmark – and was only critically marginalised when his behaviour and his music became erratic in the latter part of the decade. He enjoyed greater freedom than any comparable artist in the corporate system and yet presented himself as a ‘SLAVE’, another African-American whose creative identity was in thrall to the system. He seems to represent a definite moment in cultural time, and yet when one thinks of 1978 or 1979 or the turn into the following decade, it isn’t Prince who sums up those years and it isn’t Prince who has left a host of successors. For all its apparent attachment to a supposed cusp in American popular culture, Prince’s work is about itself, driven by its own rules, prodigal enough to seem even more expansive than it actually was.

  To adapt the James Thurber cartoon: what did Prince want to be enigmatic for? The answer is that it was very good for business. He chose his collaborators carefully, didn’t always treat them with gratitude but almost always with an element of paranoia; he understood the music business brilliantly – and particularly the importance of publishing, the main term of his ‘enslavement’ – but at the price of having always to work outside its mainstream. In this regard, he more closely resembles
a jazz musician, for whom a measure of marginality is almost inevitable given the imperatives of the culture and the nature of improvisation, and he most closely resembles the older Miles Davis with whom he had a brief on-off friendship and collaboration after Miles’s return to performance in the 1980s. Working with his own capriciously evolving circle of collaborators – recruits from the classical world and from Stevie Wonder’s band, influences as far apart as Stockhausen and hip-hop – the trumpeter had enjoyed huge commercial success, but at the same cost. The price of creative independence is a certain distance from the mainstream. Unquestionably Prince learned from Miles Davis’s example and brokered a unique position for an African-American artist. He made, lost and remade a fortune by giving the public exactly what it wanted, while pretending to refuse such accommodation. For a black man in America, it was a subtle and risky strategem.

  Prince’s second act was arguably an anticlimax but it was no longer the farce that had fallen in between. Every stage of the Prince story fascinates. Nothing is ever quite clear. Every emphasis seems to entail its opposite. Story-telling is as important as the details of the narrative.

  1

  London, 1988, and the auditorium of an old theatre, not quite West End, not yet sleazy. It’s not the obvious setting for a rock concert and unusually the curtains are down. The audience feel uncomfortably like voyeurs. From behind the red plush curtains, a deep carnal throb. Then a dark slit opens up, its edges lit from behind, crimsoned in excitement. Caught in the same rear spotlight, a tiny figure in purple, improbable clash of colours, unmistakably raw symbolism. Not dancing, not running, but sprinting in place; head forward, legs flashing out behind, high-heeled boots like satyr’s hooves pounding the stage; face caught in an expression that could be lust, fear, anger, delight, or all of them. Tantrum child and exhibitionist: Look at me, Dad! . . . Mom!

  For a heart-racing minute the beat and the volume increase. And then someone steps out from the shadows and hands him an instrument that seems to sum up every Cultural Studies module on ‘The electric guitar as phallus’, except that this one seems also to represent a question mark, an infinity sign and the astrological symbols for male and female. The curtains swing fully back and the lights plunge and sweep over a stage littered with keyboards, drum risers and propped guitars. There are other musicians on the stage, looking momentarily startled, like tomb-raiders caught in a burst of sunlight.

  * * *

  Seven years earlier, in the New York Times of December 10, 1981, the critic Robert Palmer had published a story headed ‘Is Prince Leading Music to a True Biracism?’ Questions in NYT headlines are invariably rhetorical. In the article itself, Palmer rather more carefully voiced the growing consensus that a twenty-three-year-old from Minneapolis – not a moving and shaking town in music terms – had overturned a basic industry nostrum about audience colour, and in the process answered the old question about how to take the black and white out of popular music without leaving it grey or beige. In three albums, or rather in the third of his three albums to date, Prince had restarted the faltering progress of black rock.

  His own sense of history is impressive, not just because he claims a prominent place in it but also because he displays an eclectic knowledge of what went before. On that night in London, more than half a controversial decade after Palmer’s essay, words like ‘protean’ and ‘mercurial’ seemed insufficient.

  * * *

  It’s unusual to see closed curtains at a rock concert, but Prince has always occupied the place where music blurs into theatre and theatre blurs into exhibitionism. In that sense, he is the heir of Little Richard, whose piled-up hair, gigolo moustache and falsetto shrieks resurfaced in Prince. Perhaps only Madonna has pushed harder the idea of pop as illicit spectacle.

  Indeed, she was to follow him to London on an earlier visit in 1984. He was touring Purple Rain, a quasi-autobiographical album-cum-movie soundtrack that was eventually to shift 13 million copies. The fact that his breakthrough album was tied in to a certain mythology about his upbringing and emergence in Minneapolis was deeply significant. The movie is an adolescent wish-fantasy. What makes it different and clever is the way Prince and director Albert Magnoli manage to weave together themes of display, abandon, secrecy and forbidden longing with cross-threads of responsibility, guilt and self-control. The Kid’s motorcycle is laughably phallic, but doesn’t he ride it with impressive care and road sense? And isn’t there something unexpectedly tender, almost husbandly, about his seductions?

  * * *

  There was nothing remotely uxorious about his horny, blatant onstage persona, which had moved on from the black panties, boots and bandanna phase, but in 1988 still hadn’t quite yet reached the stage where Prince disported on a heart-shaped bed with one of his dancers. Fans of Prince have a tendency to conflate many concert appearances into one climactic gig. In the same way, Miles Davis’s comeback tours in the 1980s – equally spectacular in the wardrobe department, though inevitably cooler in demeanour – all seem to blend together into one continuous performance.

  I have false memories of that first gig, which has become a kind of composite. Clothes, songs and other guitars from earlier and later in Prince’s career seem to be part of it. The curtain wasn’t sensuous velvet, but an ordinary fire-curtain pressed into dramatic service. The supporting personnel shifts, combining the adolescent-male pack behaviour of the early groups with the weird mix of exploitation and feminism of later line-ups; like singer Robert Palmer, Prince was capable of presenting women as cloned sex-objects, but he also operated an impressive gender democracy, giving the likes of Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman a prominent role in the Revolution group and putting his production and songwriting weight behind a whole series of female acts. Again, much like Miles Davis’s last decade, conscious, fact-checked memory will yield one set of impressions (mostly of impressive band members and evolving repertoire) while a more primitive recall narrows the focus to just the leader and what appears to be a single, ongoing, history-of-black-music guitar solo.

  * * *

  The other word, after ‘protean’ and ‘mercurial’, routinely applied to Prince is ‘seminal’. Ever a man to push his metaphors with excessive literalism, Prince used to feign ejaculation over the first few rows, jerking a milky liquid from the neck of his guitar. (I have no false memory of being so showered, and would seek immediate counselling if I had.) What does come back is how aggressively Prince had plundered the tombs and temples of American music, and how adroitly he personalised the masks and trappings. And how comically: if subsequent chapters fail to deliver a convincing account of the humour in Prince’s art, that’s because it is so wryly and ironically embedded in otherwise serious things.

  He’d been widely touted as the reincarnation of Jimi Hendrix. In reality, Prince’s guitar style has little to do with the blues and owes far more to the sustained, almost mystical tonality of Carlos Santana. He was eager to oblige, though, playing behind his head and picking strings with those strange pointy teeth he prefers to keep hidden during interviews. There were subtler echoes, not least that just about every song turned into a long, loose, electronic jam, but turning his back on the audience for long minutes seemed an echo of Miles Davis’s most ambiguous gesture, which some said was contempt for whitey, others claimed was a sign of his concentration and empathy with the band. In Prince’s case, it may have been no more than a tease, a way of showing off his ass, but he knew where it had come from. Prince deeply admired Miles’s working methods – taping hours of ‘rehearsal’ in a bid to push himself and his fellow musicians beyond comfortably familiar idioms – and often alluded to the trumpeter’s phenomenal workrate as a model for his own hyperactivity. As Prince left the stage, the band played a rocked-up version of the bebop classic ‘Now’s The Time’, by Miles’s one-time employer Charlie Parker, whose shambolic lifestyle masked and eventually foreshortened a brilliantly intuitive talent. Prince reportedly still keeps photographs of both men on his desk at Paisley Park.
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  That night in 1988 Prince duck-walked like T-Bone Walker and Chuck Berry, wailed righteously like Little Willie John, mugged and flounced like Little Richard. One minute he was stock-still, hypnotised by a version of Stevie Wonder’s lateral jazz-soul; the next he was doing endless splits to a relentless funk groove that even James Brown and the JBs would have felt had been taken too far. He sang an intense gospelly song that inescapably recalled Al Green, who took very literally black soul’s sometimes easy, sometimes contradictory blend of sacred and profane by becoming a church minister (albeit a minister who cheerfully ogles pretty girls during his warm-up addresses). British audiences wouldn’t have been so quick to spot references in the stage act to Rick James’s marriage of soul and live sex show; James, with whom Prince toured in 1979, never really made it this side of the Atlantic. They would, though, have recognised the debt to Sly and the Family Stone, primed by the shared vocals of ‘1999’ (one of his first British hits), by a slew of references in the Purple Rain movie, and by the faux-illiterate spelling of songs. In 1970, Sly had released ‘Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)’ with a Larry Graham bass groove that influenced everyone from Prince to Michael Jackson. Though Prince stopped short of calling his first album 4 U he’d adopted the street shorthand style, which in those days came from graffiti and school slambooks rather than phone-texting. As well as 4/fors and U/yous, his liner notes were littered with eye/I graphics, hearts and squiggles, something he’d done since schooldays. It wasn’t to be very long before he adopted an unpronounceable squiggle as his name.

  What complicated Prince’s clever referencing of black music and prompted journalist Robert Palmer’s rhetorical headline was his parallel interest in white rock and white songwriters. There was a working assumption in the industry that black musicians didn’t – or couldn’t – rock, and neither did black audiences; r’n’b, soul, funk, perhaps a leaven of jazz, but a fundamental resistance to the basic backbeat of rock’n’roll. There were other, concurrent efforts to inject some life into what sprouted capital letters as Black Rock (notably Vernon Reid’s Living Color) but it was Prince who smudged the distinction and desegregated pop demographics. Jimi Hendrix had shown the way in some regards (and was Reid’s role model) and, of course, Michael Jackson’s Thriller had attracted huge sales with an audience who didn’t usually buy r’n’b.