Prince

by Brian Morton

  Moon’s role is more ambiguous. Though he’s only listed as co-lyricist on one track, he later claimed part-authorship of several more – including ‘Baby’ and ‘My Love is Forever’ on For You – and money changed hands nearly a decade later to settle the matter. Moon was one of the few people in Minneapolis who ran a professional sound studio and it was there, at Moon Sound in the south of the city, that he came into contact with Champagne and with Prince Nelson. Ironically, Moon may have been the catalyst for Prince’s firing from the group, ostensibly for spending too much time on his solo projects. Either way, the tall Englishman and Skippy Nelson made an inseparable pair for a time; an unlikely pair, too, tall and short, white and black, some distance apart in age, but both sporting tall Afros and both obsessed with music.

  What exact contribution Moon made to Prince’s nascent career is now lost in the divide that opened up between them, and sealed away by the lawyers. However, it seems clear that Prince maintained an ambivalent attitude to his old collaborator, part-gratitude, part-guilt, part-anger. Dave Hill points to the curious moment in the film of Under the Cherry Moon when Prince – or rather the success-hungry ‘Christopher’ – sits up in bed looking at a piece of paper that shows a large ‘C’ and a waning moon. Release of the film and album coincided with Moon’s legal settlement with Prince and Controversy Music, so the reference is unlikely to be random.

  From here on in the Prince story, the most familiar stock character is the old friend and associate who feels he made a significant contribution to the superstar’s career, only to be snubbed and possibly stiffed out of money owed. Prince fell out spectacularly with his cousin Pepe Willie over the unauthorised (by him) release of the 94 East tapes on Minneapolis Genius, presumably forgetting that Willie didn’t have a Purple Rain flying off the shelves at the time. Other claims are less secure, like Andre Anderson’s that he had contributed in some substantial way to For You. No one else remembers him doing much, other than as a friend and supporter. Certainly there’s no sign of Andre’s popping bass among Prince’s own Orr and synth bass patterns.

  Significantly, Andre – one of the ‘heaven-sent helpers’ on the eponymous second record – isn’t thanked on the album credits, though his mother Bernadette Anderson is, just after God, Owen and Britt Husney, and just before the Nelsons – ‘My Father and Mother’. After that comes Russ Thyret, the Warner Brothers vice-president who beat CBS and A&M to the punch, signed up Prince and ultimately agreed to let him self-produce. Quite how he was persuaded is the stuff of industry legend – it seems senior production staff were asked to ‘drop by’ the L.A. studio where Prince was demoing and pronounced him well up to the task – but it didn’t stop Thyret insisting on putting someone in overall charge of the project. Tommy Vicari is listed as executive producer.

  Husney’s aim was to have made the first record in Minneapolis, home ground for Prince and unfamiliar turf for Warner Brothers high command. There’s still a casual legend that For You was somehow put together in Prince’s bedroom, a nonsense given its relatively high-tech resources and ambitious – if ultimately callow – production values. It’s also at variance with the facts. The album was largely made at the Record Plant in Sausalito, California, with Vicari and Prince vying for engineering control. There was invaluable help, too, from David Rivkin of Sound 80 Studios in Minneapolis, where some of Prince’s demos had been done. His role on the project has never been made specific, but in later years Rivkin remained a friend and associate of the increasingly solitary and paranoid Prince. His brother Bobby, known as Bobby Z, had been replacement drummer with the 94 East set-up and was to become part of Prince’s touring band, sporting the least convincing moustache on the liner photograph of 1980’s groundbreaking third album.

  Dirty Mind came along symbolically on the cusp of a new decade and with a raw new sound that was to exert a root-and-branch influence on the r’n’b and rock of the 1980s. In 1978, even with a sympathetic team in place, Prince wasn’t quite ready for the revolution.

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  For You isn’t a shocking record, but it is a surprising one. The angular grind of later sets isn’t yet in evidence and the mood is romantic rather than blatantly erotic. It begins with Prince a capella, singing the almost prayer-like title track, over a vast choir of subtly multi-tracked Princes. ‘All of this and more is for you / With love sincerity and deepest care, / my life with you I share’. His falsetto establishes the album’s vocal characteristic from the start, but it also instils a mood that combines many things that contribute to the Prince enigma: beautifully faked sincerity, a childlike combination of seriousness and play, desire expressed as gift rather than command. Dave Hill says of the brief track, little over a minute in duration, ‘It is, at root, a display of devotion and personal sacrifice – a thoroughly Christian gesture.’

  How many of its first listeners heard that opening benediction while looking at the other liner photograph? Multi-exposure is an obvious visual rhyme with Prince’s multi-tracked studio style but the image is more than that. It shows Prince – or rather, three Princes – naked but for a large-bodied acoustic guitar, sitting cross-legged on a pile of quilts that seems to be floating in space. The light above him could be a nimbus or it could be the illuminated panel of a Wurlitzer jukebox. He looks less like the Holy Trinity than the avatars of some fierce and erotic young Hindu deity.

  There is always a danger with an artist as self-conscious as Prince of reviewing the imagery rather than the music, but it’s clear here more than anywhere in Prince’s work that the visual context provides a strong clue as to how the record should be heard. In that regard, Hill’s observation is very shrewd. There is something oddly sacrificial about For You, a very different mood to the erotic aggression of Dirty Mind. Even the adolescent sleaze of ‘Soft and Wet’ (which earned a ban on more sensitive radio stations) lacks absolute conviction. But then, it is a record made by a twenty-year-old, only technically still a teenager as the label and some of the press were anxious to convey.

  It is quite patently a summing up of everything Prince knew to date, a record made with the kind of obsessive care that suggests he might have worried whether there really would be a follow-up, as the Warner contract provided, or whether he’d flop. Musically, it’s no masterpiece, and for all Prince’s attempts to clear his head of other sounds (even allegedly banning Stevie Wonder records from the studio speakers during breaks), it’s still largely derivative. It’s also said that Prince ran into his idols Sly Stone and Carlos Santana during the making of the record, and slipped back into fan mode. Even so, For You does point the way forward and its structure is subtler than first appears. The longer side one is full of barely suppressed sexual desire. ‘In Love’ ripples with innuendo, while on the other side of ‘Soft and Wet’, the record’s sparsest track ‘Crazy You’ is punctuated by hissing breaths that suggest jerking off rather than actual love-making; from a less prurient perspective, it’s also a good early example of Prince’s genius as a rhythm guitarist, slapping out chords on that big acoustic, and as a fine rhythm technician, using cymbals, chimes and water drums to give the track its oddly disembodied feel.

  The dramatic turn of the original LP is lost on CD. Side one ended with a change of pace and mood. ‘Just as Long as We’re Together’ is the album’s longest track, edited for single release (b/w ‘In Love’), and a change of pace from throbbing techno funk to soundtrack jazz. Turn the record over and what you have is one of the songs disputed with Chris Moon. ‘Baby’ is a tale of unwanted pregnancy, bordering on sentiment but sung with real drama and accompanied by a backing that for the first time shows the full range of Prince’s instrumental mastery. It also shows how he managed to avoid a generic ‘with horns’ sound by reproducing horn parts on keyboards. The tech spec has Prince doing all the voices, acoustic and electric guitars, acoustic and Fender Rhodes piano, Orr bass, Mini-Moog, Oberheim 4-Voice, Arp Soloist, orchestra bells and drums. For the first time on the record, he doesn’t sound like a kid loose
in a music store, but more like the visionary musician he was to become.

  The next two tracks, ‘My Love is Forever’ and ‘So Blue’ (which was the flipside to the first single), are a partial return to the mannered funk of ‘In Love’. The final track is a surprise, or would have been to an r’n’b audience. ‘I’m Yours’ is thematically the musical bookend to ‘For You’. It’s no less of a studio confection, except that this time Prince attempts to replicate the live, guitar-dominated sound of AOR. It’s the most explicit nod to the white acts that played such a part in his musical education. Heard cold and out of context, it might sound like a slice of bland poodle-rock, but it is subtler than that, the beginnings of a synthesis and a first gesture in the direction of musical biracism. It also provides the format for the guitar-orgasm of ‘Purple Rain’, a few years down the line.

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  It was the moment when Russ Thyret’s gamble finally paid off. Released on April 7, 1978, For You represented only a modest return on Warner’s investment, peaking at a below-the-radar 163 in the Billboard pop chart; doing better, but not spectacularly, in the black chart. It peaked there at twenty-one, but the fact that it stayed in the chart for nearly six months suggested that the r’n’b audience was slowly wakening to this weird-looking kid from a place no one had heard of, who apparently played all his own instruments.

  Not until August 1979 did Prince score a number one single in the black chart, a feat he wasn’t to repeat until the massive crossover success of ‘When Doves Cry’ five years later. ‘I Wanna Be Your Lover’ is the first genuine musical epoch in Prince’s career, almost as original as ‘Doves’ in its blend of black funk and white pop, though not yet so boldly subversive in form. It has a bass-line, for a start, though interestingly its absence wouldn’t rob the track of all its drama. The other components are equally familiar, vocals, guitar, synth, drums, but Prince was already experimenting with new ways of driving a song other than hanging it on the bass. One of them was to establish a tense, yearning dissonance in the very opening bars and then sustain it through the whole track. Guitar, synthesizer and drums do the bulk of the work; the bass is secondary and not so much structural as functional. What associates called his ‘mubadib’ or ‘blubalip’ style on the bass was not much more than a percussive slapping, doubtless influenced by Larry Graham’s work with Sly Stone and similar to Bernard Edwards’ with Chic, but far less subtle. It might be argued that of the twenty-six instruments Prince can play, the one he has mastered least confidently is the one that usually anchors black funk and soul. It can equally be argued that his musical vision was based on something rather different, an approach to harmonic tension and release that is almost physical, carried on the rhythm guitar (on which Prince is a – possibly the – unquestionable master) and which has less need for a strong bass.

  It’s a formula that comes more obviously from white pop, and notably from The Beatles. The final ‘Yeah’ of ‘She Loves You’ is ambiguous in the way much of Prince’s harmonic organisation is ambiguous, though its intent rarely is. So carefully conceived and crafted is ‘I Wanna Be Your Lover’ that only if you switch off the stereo and read the lyric instead – ‘I ain’t got no money / I ain’t like those other guys you hang around’ – is it possible to hear it as a conventionally romantic expression. No hearts and flowers; the song embodies lust and physical longing in every measure, which is why it became a dancefloor favourite that sold a million copies.

  It was also chosen to preview and head off the sophomore album, which interestingly was self-titled, as if both Prince and Warner recognised that they had to start over and this time sell the star as much as the product. Prince (1979) built on a minor legend, probably better known within the industry than with the audience, still virtually unknown to live audiences outside the Twin Cities. Prince himself was in no doubt of his priorities. He told a reporter from the Los Angeles Times that he ‘had put himself in a hole with that first record. I wanted to remedy that with the second album. I wanted a “hit” album.’ It was a short-term ambition for an artist who explicitly didn’t want the kind of fickle audience who only turned up to hear reruns of past hits, but for the moment that was the audience he had.

  Prince also helped to establish his reputation as a songwriter for other people. Later years would see him contribute songs under a bizarre array of aliases, and for (mostly female) singers as diverse as Sinéad O’Connor, The Bangles and Sheena Easton, but also Kenny Rogers; another country icon, Dolly Parton, declined a similar offer, thus denying pop possibly one of the most bizarre creative partnerships imaginable. Chaka Khan had made her LP debut the same year as Prince, in 1978; then, just as Purple Rain signalled his apotheosis, she had a number three hit with what had been the penultimate track on Prince, a song originally written for jazz pianist and solo performer Patrice Rushen, with whom Prince was said to be in love.

  One of the oldest tracks on the set, ‘I Feel For You’ cements the album’s blatant emphasis on physical desire over romance: ‘It’s mainly a physical thing . . .’, ‘I’m physically attracted to you . . .’ The tiny purple heart that dots the i of his name on the cover is just there for show. The harmonic tension of ‘I Wanna . . .’ flags up what the rest of the album then confirms: Prince wants to be your lover, in the most basic and unapologetic way. But not necessarily in an obvious or conventional way. What is striking about Prince is the way it plays with sexual roles and stereotypes. ‘Sexy Dancer’ has him lusting after some lap-and-pole girl: ‘you got my body screamin’ . . . you got me just-a-creamin’ . . .’, a playground rhyme that perfectly fits the adolescent thrust of the song. ‘When We’re Dancing Close and Slow’ masquerades as a tender love ballad, but Prince isn’t afraid to admit that even as they slowly rotate under the glitterball ‘Sex-related fantasy is all that my mind can see’, and he isn’t bothered that his hard-on is becoming obvious: ‘Can’t you feel my love touching you?’

  There’s more to it, though. In ‘Still Waiting’, frustration tips over into self-loathing. Prince parodies a classic 1950s crooner with ‘People say that I’m too young / Too young to fall in love’. He’s sick and tired of being alone, feeling that life hasn’t ended, it hasn’t even begun. Where ‘Baby’ was a self-conscious injection of social seriousness on the first album, ‘Still Waiting’ injects a measure of emotional realism on the second, an element of Prince’s songcraft and approach to album-building that’s often overlooked. It also sounds remarkably like a country song, which makes the later Rogers/Parton connection seem less unexpected. He does something similar in emotional terms on the track that became the second – less successful – single. ‘Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?’ reads like the plaint of an older man, no longer able to satisfy his woman, put bluntly – ‘You used to love it when I’d do you / You used to say it was the best you’d ever had’ – but with genuine pathos.

  This time round, he put his rock anthem in the middle of the set, rather than at the end. ‘Bambi’ is an astonishing song, not least because it’s addressed to a lesbian – ‘Bambi, it’s better with a man’ – but also because the lyric is so at odds with the roaring, guitar-laden instrumental track, the most full-on before ‘Purple Rain’. What adds a certain piquancy to the track is that ‘Bambi’ is also thanked in the credits, suggesting Prince may have been venturesome in his private life as well as in the studio.

  He was giving nothing away, however. A notorious television appearance on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand had begun a reputation for extreme reticence. Clark got nothing but nods and shakes (anticipating the days when ‘Prince’ would turn up for interviews in a beekeeper’s veil and relay monosyllabic answers via an intermediary), and a casually gestured ‘4’ when Clark asked him how long he’d been playing. It was as uncomfortable a clash of styles and personalities as The Doors’ encounter on Ed Sullivan, when Jim Morrison refused to change the ‘higher’ reference in ‘Light My Fire’. Different versions exist. Some suggest Prince had decided in advance not to play ball; others
suggest he was offended by a slighting comment about Minneapolis. Either way, he was no more prepared to talk about his music than he was to talk about his sexuality and beliefs.

  Unless, of course, you accept that Prince ‘Produced, Arranged, Composed* and Performed by Prince’ is autobiographical, albeit in the way that Purple Rain was to be autobiographical, which is to say selectively at best. What it is, certainly in comparison to the first album, is a beautifully confected pop artefact, not yet revolutionary in style, still very dependent on a grab-bag of musical influences, but emotionally inflected and satisfying as a whole. Marvin Gaye’s fight with Motown had been over their insistence that a record album should consist of two hits and ten tracks of filler. Prince is no What’s Going On?, not least because the second single limped no higher than number thirteen in the black chart and made no impact on pop sales, but it is a carefully conceived and executed work that deserves more attention than it gets.

  The Prince that looks out from the cover this time is more vulnerable. Again naked but only seen quarter-length, fully lit and unguarded, his hair is arranged in a deliberately feminine style that chimes awkwardly with the moustache. A diamond stud sparkles in his right ear. The album’s better known image has him naked and blurred with movement astride a winged white horse. If the one suggests a certain adolescent purity (and confusion), the other hints at a messianic complex. Neither of them hints at a dirty mind, and nothing on the album more than hints at what was going to come on Dirty Mind.