by Brian Morton
5
On For You and Prince, he came across as a horny choirboy, a more than averagely talented but otherwise in every way average black pop kid hovering on the uneasy cusp between teen romance, with its aura of awkward seriousness, and adult desire. A couple of years later, Michael Jackson would negotiate the same step in his own initially successful, later disastrous way. Dirty Mind (1980), though, was the one where Prince sang about fucking his sister and coming all over a bride’s dress as she blows him on her way to the altar.
It’s also the album where Prince started running with a gang. They’re pictured on the inside sleeve, posed against a wall tagged with their graffiti names, looking like they might have been too smartly dressed for The Warriors. Prince is in his trenchcoat; Andre cops his look and moves as usual; Bobby Z is the token white boy who buys the liquor and diverts the cops; Dr Fink hides behind shades and a surgical mask and comes on less like a physician than a member of The Treatment; guitarist Dez Dickerson wears chef’s check trousers under the requisite coat; Lisa Coleman, who’d come in as keyboard replacement for Gayle Chapman, is sweet but hard. That was the touring band. Chapman, blonde and beautiful, had moved on after Prince took to French-kissing her on stage during the live set’s climactic ‘I Wanna Be Your Lover’. A devout Christian as well as a formidable player, she found the contradictions in Prince’s philosophy hard to accept, virtually guaranteeing she’d be sacked.
The irony of that group image was that of all Prince’s records, Dirty Mind was the one he really did make on his own. Lisa adds a single-line vocal to ‘Head’, while Fink plays some synth on it and the title song, where he’s listed as co-writer. Apart from that, it really was all produced, arranged, composed, et cetera, by Prince. He even fulfilled an ambition that had been thwarted at Burbank in 1978 of driving the desk as well as playing all the instruments. Engineer ‘Jamie Starr’ is just the first of many Princely pseudonyms. There was very little post-production tinkering. The album was released pretty much as demoed and in the order Prince dictated. Warner confirmed a reputation for liberal indulgence of exceptional talent by passing it on the nod – Russ Thyret and new president Larry Waronker (who’d run his eye over Prince during the For You sessions) were both supporters – and with only a minor edit to the original, apparently interminable version of ‘Head’.
Significantly, the album was made back home in Minneapolis, or as he preferred to describe it on the album sleeve ‘somewhere in Uptown’. This was a neat way of underlining the growing mystique of a solitary genius whose albums just appeared and who still wasn’t a major live act, but ‘Uptown’ was also a mythical place. The name itself suggests Utopia, though it probably also had more local and personal associations. The cover portrays Prince as a version of Norman Mailer’s hipster-hoodlum White Negro, which is very much the stylistic pitch of the music. Now drawing on punk aesthetics and New Wave philosophy, Prince passes himself off as a sociopathic pervert, living on a sexual, racial and sociological borderline. It’s worth pointing out that in black idiom, ‘punk’ still carried its prison connotation of homosexuality. A less familiar image from the Dirty Mind session sees Prince all but naked in a shower cubicle, looking like a seedy rent boy. Significantly, there’s a crucifix on the wall behind him. Almost the whole point of the inner sleeve photograph was that it didn’t depict a band, or at least not a band responsible for the music you were about to hear, but a bunch of individuals secure in their polymorphous rejection of ordinary codes and conventions. The raucous party on the track ‘Uptown’ is a carnival of opposites and oddities.
It’s ironic that at a time when Prince was decoupling himself from most of the familiar indices by which corporate labels judge marketability, Warner and the management team of Cavallo, Ruffalo and Fargnoli (mainly Steve Fargnoli) were trying to pitch him to two different audiences, black and white. It is as if they got the main point, saw its economic potential, but didn’t quite get the subtler inflections, which suggested that Prince was looking to a new constituency altogether. Something similar happened when Miles Davis abandoned his bebop and cool past and started to play rock and street funk, and found himself supporting the Steve Miller Band. Prince would eventually find himself opening for the Rolling Stones, disastrously; but that was in the future. Warner were also aware that songs about incest and spunk weren’t going to attract a lot of commercial airplay. Dirty Mind was going to depend on a different kind of visibility.
The cover photograph was taken by Minneapolis commercial artist Allen Beaulieu. It shows Prince all but naked under his trenchcoat, wearing nothing but tiny black briefs and with a cowboy bandanna round his neck. The back cover photograph reveals him in black stockings. Beaulieu thought the image would be more arresting, certainly more fleshly, in colour, but Prince shrewdly thought different. The cover hasn’t the scuzzy, headachey approximate focus of many punk albums of the time, but it is visually unsettling, not least when you recognise that Prince is posed against what look like abstract spirals and diamonds but turn out to be bedsprings. As a declaration of intent and as a way of detourning the usual presentation of sexy black singers as boudoir Romeos, it couldn’t be much rawer.
* * *
Such was Warner Brothers’ commitment to their young and potentially difficult rising star that there was never any question of cancelling his contract or compromising his freedom of movement, even after the modest returns on his first two albums. However, the label was not convinced that Prince, or more fairly, Prince and his band, were ready to be launched as a major touring act. It isn’t clear whether it was ever suggested that he be teamed with a more experienced group, either seasoned session men or recruits from existing units with a strong market profile. It’s inconceivable that the idea never came up, and it’s to Prince’s eternal credit that he resisted it out of loyalty to his Minneapolis friends (the upside of his ‘Napoleon syndrome’).
The Warner hierarchy had come to the Twin Cities in January 1979, nine months after the release of For You, to watch the second of a three-show residency at the old Capri Theatre on Minneapolis’s West Broadway. It was probably optimistic to think that a one-record act without a strong fan base even at home could fill the former cinema even on a benefit night, but it wasn’t so much poor attendance as the chaotic nature of the gig that convinced the men in suits that Prince needed another record at least to establish a presence. They were, however, surprised, possibly shocked, by his stage presence, the absolute antithesis of the almost pathologically shy and reticent youngster they’d been dealing with through Husney and his brief replacement Don Taylor. Taylor came to Prince after working with Bob Marley, and left as quickly, convinced that the kid from Minneapolis was higher-maintenance than the reggae superstar.
In career terms, Prince was a less significant consolidation than the growing confidence of the touring band. Given that much of Prince’s work wasn’t radio-friendly, even before Dirty Mind (‘Soft and Wet’ had been too explicit for many stations), his reputation would build round the live act. A studiedly unpredictable approach to interviews didn’t seem to be hurting Prince’s visibility, either, but capriciousness, by definition, isn’t a controllable strategy.
The Stones tour imbroglio in 1981 was an attempt, possibly misguided, to break Prince with a white rock audience. The final signifier on the Dirty Mind cover was a lapel button with a checkerboard background reading ‘RUDE BOY’. It had been issued by the British 2-Tone label, who at the time were having chart success with multiracial bands like The Specials and The Selecter who played a blend of white pop, ska and reggae. Prince would certainly have heard songs like ‘A Message to You, Rudy’ on Minneapolis radio, but the ‘rude boy’ label, originally applied to Jamaican hoodlums, fitted the bill. In 1980, he was booked to tour with another, briefly successful crossover artist who’d co-opted a quasi-Rastafarian look and stance to his own blend of funk and rock.
Rick James also grew up away from the music mainstream, though Buffalo was near enough to New York for
James to absorb some of its melting-pot eclecticism. James sported a version of dreadlocks in a stage act that resembled something of the cartoon character of George Clinton’s P-Funk, though without its superb musicianship and subtle parodic layers. His presence on the scene is another indication that Prince didn’t emerge entirely in a vacuum. James’s Stone City Band, with its obvious reference to Sly’s outfit, made an impact on Prince’s later Revolution and New Power Generation line-ups, while Rick’s clownishly lascivious manner chimed with his own.
There are various reasons for the rivalry which developed between them on their 1980 tour. They were perhaps too similar to be comfortable with one another. More important, Prince was unmistakably on the way up, young and full of energy, while the twenty-eight-year-old James had had his moment in the spotlight and was beginning to fade. Finally, and stereotypically, Prince stole his girl. At some point during the tour, Denise Matthews came over to Prince’s bus and never left. A year or two further on, she had changed her name to Vanity and was fronting Vanity 6, one of his new stable of acts. The rolling stone from Minneapolis was gathering no moss, but he was picking up a caravan of followers.
* * *
If Prince was too black a year or two later for the Rolling Stones crowd (and there’s no point dwelling on the irony of that) he was too white for the Rick James fans. Certainly too white for James himself who later accused his young rival – or ‘little science fiction creep’ – of turning his back on people of colour. The point was that in 1980 it was increasingly hard to tell where Prince’s musical loyalties lay or where he sat in the market.
One of the new songs previewed on the tour was the now notorious ‘Head’. It stands as a robust answer to James’s carping. The beat is pure black funk, as is ‘Do It All Night’, on which Prince shows that he can do a bassline with the best of them. Dirty Mind kicks off with the title track, co-written with Matt Fink and significantly the most straightahead cut on the set. It establishes a certain mood, lewd, priapic, determinedly unsubtle, but as always Prince knows how to establish and then puncture listeners’ expectations. Straight after it comes ‘When You Were Mine’, the kind of thing the Jackson Five might have been doing a few years earlier, a delightful piece of bubblegum soul that makes you think you’re maybe not going to have to listen on cans after all. ‘Do It All Night’ and ‘Gotta Broken Heart Again’, the album’s weakest cut, complete the first side and continue the game-playing.
Side two goes for the jugular. ‘Uptown’ celebrates Prince’s new constituency, not yet Rainbow Children or even a Rainbow Coalition, but a kind of night-world in which all the cats are grey. The title might also be another of his unconscious, possibly guilty, associations, since Pepe Willie’s house on Upton Avenue had been an important location when the group was rehearsing for the road. The song was to cause another slippage in Prince’s worsening relations with another old friend and collaborator; Andre Cymone always claimed he’d had a hand in the writing. There is another, unsubstantiated story that the album’s last cut, ‘Partyup’, was actually written by Morris Day, but that Prince took credit for it in exchange for a support slot for The Time on upcoming tours. If the story is true, it was an arrangement that rebounded badly on Prince when he took Controversy – and The Time – on the road in 1982.
Steered by Warner, Prince did a huge amount of publicity for Dirty Mind, much of it on the telephone, and used it to start building the mythology that would follow him in one distorted form or another for the rest of his career. At the time, almost everyone was asking what the girl on ‘Uptown’ asks him: is Prince gay? The remainder of side two of Dirty Mind – all ‘real life stories’, said the star – suggests that if he was sexually perverse, it was polymorphously so. ‘Head’ is an epic, while ‘Sister’ gains its impact from being as brief as the singer’s underwear. It is difficult to reconstruct now just how shocking and unexpected these songs were on first release. Pop stars had always talked dirty. There was the mumbled smut of the Kingmen’s classic ‘Louie Louie’ and Little Richard’s exuberant innuendo, but Prince brought something new and unnervingly direct. As ever, the shock value of the lyrics and their presumed autobiographical element usefully diverts the listener from the sheer artifice of the instrumental tracks, but with the passage of time it also helps refocus the listener on how shockingly new the instrumental components are. Despite that momentary concession to black funk bass, the key element again is the rhythm guitar. Dirty Mind is as harmonically subtle as it is verbally blatant. The real sucker punch is in the arrangements, though as yet ‘Jamie Starr’’s engineering skills aren’t quite up to the composer’s ambitions. Technically, it’s still the work of a clever child, full of inchoate badness and shock for shock’s sake.
* * *
That Controversy, which followed almost exactly a year later in 1981, represents a companion work is evident from the cover. The same studded trenchcoat and RUDE BOY button, but this time Prince is clad and in colour, looking like a cross between a riverboat gambler, charismatic frontier preacher and judge. No bedsprings behind him, either, but a splash of front pages from The Controversy Daily, the imaginary news sheet of Prince’s imaginary ‘Uptown’ constituency. Some of the headlines smack of high-school mock-ups from a civics class: PRESIDENT SIGNS GUN CONTROL ACT, FREE FOOD STAMPS FOR GOOD SAMARITANS, ANNIE CHRISTIAN SENTENCED TO DIE! Some have an element of cut-up: PRESIDENT DECLARES UPTOWN NEW U.S. CAPITOL (sic), TOURIST INVASION OF UPTOWN FAILS, 89 BEHEADED! One simply reads: *JONI*. Of the others, three stand out: THE SECOND COMING, LOVE THY NEIGHBOR, DO YOU BELIEVE IN GOD.
At its worst, Controversy is preachy and judgemental. Strictly speaking, at its worst, it’s very bad indeed. ‘Jack U Off’ is almost self-parody, while the short ‘Ronnie, Talk to Russia’ and the weird, robotic ‘Annie Christian’ fail as satire, and make for uncomfortable listening. Annie – an obvious reference to the Antichrist who gave her name to a Scottish indie band of the 1990s – is intended as a symbol for all that has gone wrong with an America defined by murder and assassination, a spirit of violent misrule whose perverse rationale and sole motivation is to make the tabloid headlines. There were those who dared to think Prince came closer to autobiography here than he strictly intended.
For all his references to public events, including the still recent shooting of John Lennon and the Atlanta child murders, he came no closer than before to coherent politics. The gesture was there, however. Controversy (a title also adopted for his publishing company) marked the end of Prince as guiltless fucker and the beginning of Prince the spokesman for a brand of sexual licence that is not so much libertarian as libertine, commingled inexplicably with religious redemption. Prince was no longer just a musician offering routine thanks to God, but a Musician with a Message. The difficulty was in telling what the message was: sex is good; sex is God; violence is bad, and thus the very Devil. Or perhaps the difficulty was just in telling who Prince now was: an avatar, a rebel who turned out to be a divinely appointed messenger; or maybe just part of the Spectacle.
If it was all intended as a sign that he was growing up as an artist (and that was hinted at in the opening track ‘Controversy’ itself, where he drops his trademark falsetto), all it proved was how much growing up he had to do. It’s a curious and muddled album, partly redeemed by the title track’s definitive blend of guitar and synthesizer with a new group vocal sound that anticipated the Sly Stone-influenced shared front line of ‘1999’ almost two years later; redeemed, too, by such gems as ‘Do Me, Baby’ (nearly eight minutes of pure pop delight) and ‘Private Joy’, a title that by this point hardly needs decoding.
With Prince, a certain self-consciousness came as standard, but thus far nothing like the sulky pout of the cover picture or the petulant whinny of ‘Controversy’, which basically takes the media to task for their reaction to Dirty Mind, all that prurient copy about his race and sexuality. Nothing more hapless than a celebrity who courts publicity and then complains of it. If we were expected to take ‘Princ
e’ as a fictional character, the way ‘Uptown’ is an imaginary place, the blurring of documentary fact and PR mischief could have been better handled, the play-acting more securely staged in a fantasy world rather than a Minneapolis North Side suddenly invested by music hacks looking for the scuttlebutt on pop’s most enigmatic new star. With Controversy, the Thurber question again comes into play: what do you want to be enigmatic for, Cynthia?
When, on ‘Controversy’, he recites the Lord’s Prayer in the deadest, flattest voice imaginable, is he being blasphemous or is he so tired of the whole schtick – the murderous world of ‘Annie Christian’, the endless humping that follows in ‘Do Me, Baby’ – that rote religion is his only weary solace? If it goes any deeper than that, why put it first on the album, rather than as its destination, and why then immediately revert to the priapic thump of ‘Sexuality’?
More questions than answers, then. In career terms, Controversy did no more than play into the media’s hands and because the media’s grasp on a collective cultural unconscious is always stronger than any individual’s, even one who produces, arranges, composes, performs and drives the publicity, it saw Prince’s self-created image take on an awkward momentum of its own; ever after, he struggled to control how the media and the music business saw him. In a curious way, though, the album was more damaging and less significant to his long-term reputation than the tour that promoted it.
* * *
Controversy was Prince’s first major sortie as headliner, and it was undertaken under all sorts of pressure. For a start, Dirty Mind had sold less spectacularly than the eponymous debut album of Prince protégés The Time, who proceeded to upstage him night after night on the road. (There is a pretty complete consensus about this.) The band in the number two dressing room were garnering many of the best reviews. As with Rick James, the roots of Prince’s deteriorating relationship with Morris Day – later dramatised in Purple Rain – were compounded by professional rivalry and a growing animosity towards anyone who did not see things his way. For Prince, for Warner, and for Steve Fargnoli’s management team, the Controversy tour was a gamble against what looked like the most promising market demographic around, a melding of the r’n’b audience drawn to Day’s group and a substantial white rock audience, a still uneasy coalition of heavy rock and guitar fans, punks and post-punks.
