Prince

by Brian Morton

  ‘Thieves in the Temple’ is an altogether simpler thing, a joggling three-chord phrase that builds, inverts and subsides on the hookline. Again, though, Prince plays games with bar-lengths and with the faintly Middle Eastern harmony. It’s effortless songcraft, effortlessly delivered. It was one of only two songs from Graffiti Bridge – the other is ‘The Question of U’ – which Prince built into the regular set-list on the summer 1990 ‘Nude’ tour of Japan and Europe. The highpoint of the itinerary was a nearly three-week residency at the Wembley Arena in London which, partly because with those few exceptions it was a greatest hits package, probably represents the post-Purple Rain highpoint of Prince’s popularity in the UK. Perversely, some of those who had criticised previous tours for their burlesquerie and sexual excesses were dismissive of the new, toned-down version and male rapper-dancers. The tour name was deliberately provocative, and played on memories of past tours’ states of undress and sexual antics but what was ‘Nude’ this time was the music, a deliberately stripped-down sound, tightly choreographed by Prince’s enigmatic shouted instructions (oddly reminiscent of Duke Ellington). It was the closest anyone came to hearing The Black Album brought to live action.

  The tour also brought to an end Prince’s association with the long-serving Matt Fink and with guitarist Miko Weaver, both of whom decided to try for solo success (or suspected that halcyon days at Paisley Park were coming to an end). For the forthcoming sessions Levi Seacer was promoted to rhythm guitar, while ‘childhood idol’ Sonny ‘T’ Thompson (who can apparently ‘play a French girl’s measurements on the bass’) takes care of the bottom end. Tommy Barbarella, no doubt recruited for his name – it was originally Elm – and now the one white face in the line-up, is put in charge of the trademarked Purpleaxe sampler. With Michael Bland on drums – and an unofficial moratorium on drum machines – the New Power Generation formula was complete.

  The first indication of a new Prince album was a limited-edition giveaway single released to club DJs on June 7, 1991, Prince’s thirty-second birthday. The track was ‘Gett Off’, a slice of dirty erotic funk laced with imaginative sexual analogies and the infamous ‘twenty-three positions in a onenight stand’ line. With Diamonds and Pearls Prince rediscovered how to make hit singles, three more aside from ‘Gett Off’, which became his most remixed track yet. It was also the single that Warner didn’t want to put out, considering it too explicit. The promo for ‘Cream’ and the show Prince put together for the album tour showed some recognition that the sparser (and pace Rosie Gaines) maler line-up of the ‘Nude’ tour was a harder package to sell. He sidelined Tony M, Kirk Johnson and Damon Dickson and called up lookalikes Laurie Elle and Robia La Morte to play the notional roles of ‘Diamond’ and ‘Pearl’. It’s the latter who’s mauled on the ‘Gett Off’ video and who’s pictured having the eponymous goo licked suggestively off her fingers on ‘Cream’. It was to be his most successful single for some time, but apart from breaking new audience regions, notably on a first tour to Australia, Prince seemed to be consolidating rather than moving forward.

  Diamonds and Pearls isn’t an album of retreads, but the group sound suggests a certain similarity to Purple Rain, even though the NPG is a palpably tighter and blacker outfit than The Revolution. Having ceded some creative responsibility to group members and thus created the open, rock sound of his biggest selling album, Prince had now constructed a group so tightly marshalled that it sounded as though he were playing all the instruments himself. He had come full circle. Almost everyone who saw the NPG perform live commented on how rigorously rehearsed they looked, how very ‘Prince’ they sounded. And how very ‘James Brown’, who used to fine band members for getting a single note wrong. The habit of playing small-scale club dates after regular concerts gave Prince’s personnel a chance to explore a more improvisatory side of the music, without the elaborate paraphernalia of the full show. For Diamonds and Pearls he went back to the big-budget spectacle of Lovesexy, but kept the critics interested with musicianly ‘secret’ gigs.

  ‘Nude’’s greatest hits format had underlined how substantial the Prince canon had become, but with it came a certain inertia of expectation that made it harder – chart hits notwithstanding – to break in new material. There’s little on Diamonds and Pearls beyond the singles that would merit automatic inclusion on a ‘best of’ set – the title track, ‘Cream’ and ‘Gett Off’ are on different volumes of 1993’s The Hits – but perhaps the most substantial track in terms of substance is ‘Money Don’t Matter 2 Night’, apparently co-written with Rosie Gaines. Her style has always contained an element of social engagement and here she registers a protest, formulaic but sincere, about the first Gulf War. It’s a solitary and mild protest gesture in an album dedicated to a new brand of melodic soul-funk, but it stands out sharply from the rest. Gaines is said to have had a torrid time with NPG, all but ostracised by the band and ignored by Prince. She did, however, remain an on–off member until 1996 and Emancipation. Her initial replacement was a young Hispanic called Mayte Garcia.

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  Given his productivity and given how long he’d been obsessively shapeshifting, changing direction, changing back, changing gender, no one could have grudged Prince a moment to mark time, put out a modest record, put on a good show. The problem was that Diamonds and Pearls came right before the most turbulent and difficult period of his life. Not only would he fall out terminally with his record company, but he would announce his own death and resurrection, not as Prince but as an unpronounceable astrological sign that would stump fans, interviewers, fellow-musicians, writers, editors, even his future wife for the next seven years.

  13

  When Mayte Janelle Garcia made her wedding vows on Valentine’s Day 1996 she never once spoke her new husband’s name. At the appropriate point in the ceremony – ‘I, Mayte, take thee . . . to my lawful wedded husband’ – she merely pointed to an unusually shaped gold pendant hanging round her neck. For the past two and a half years, the man she was marrying had refused to acknowledge his birth name and insisted on being identified only by an unpronounceable symbol.

  It soon transpired that this was not just a simple, albeit eccentric, act of deed poll. Had Mayte been unwise enough to plight her troth to ‘Prince’, she would have found herself a widow avant le fait, for ‘Prince’ had died on his thirty-fifth birthday. His album Come, issued the following year, gave what appeared to be birth and death dates – half a biblical lifespan, 1958–1993 – and posed him in grainy black and white in front of what looked like a mausoleum. After that dark and brooding release, mostly reworked scratchings from the studio floor issued to fulfil his contract but by no means his least interesting record, the name Prince disappeared from his records for the better part of a decade. For the time being, bewildered journalists and editors learned to render his new ‘name’ in regular ASCII text as O(+>. Since the word from the man himself was that ‘it doesn’t pronounce, it just is’, they got used to calling him The Artist Formerly Known as Prince, or TAFKAP.

  One talk-show hostess, perhaps alert to the possibilities of rhyme, addressed him as ‘Taffy’. A bantering concert crowd tried out ‘Mr Nelson’, which he acknowledged with a smile. Real fans tried to get by with ‘Symbol’; sceptics dismissed him as ‘Squiggle’; cynics took a double shot at his stature and petulant demeanour with ‘Symbolina’; the truly desperate had little cards printed up with the emblem and held them aloft every time the sacred name was mentioned. One hopes that somewhere in his long, sour battle with the label that had fostered him and given him his creative freedom, found a moment to smile, even if only at all the free publicity.

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  The symbol itself made its first appearance on Come’s immediate predecessor, a 1992 album known variously as and Love Symbol. Its predecessor can be seen dangling from Prince’s ear on the cover of Graffiti Bridge and standing in for the ‘t’ in ‘Graffiti’. In that form, it’s basically a combination of the astrological signs for male and female, an em
blem of Prince’s androgynous creative personae. He had apparently been experimenting with similar graphics since his teens, scribbled in the scruffy notebooks that are never far from his side. (This mania for sketching is something else he shared with Miles Davis, whose magic marker ‘art’ now commands thousands of dollars.) Some of his custom guitars were already made in unlikely shapes; a version would soon follow. The new symbol adds just one element to the Graffiti Bridge version, giving it some of the characteristics of a crucifix and an ankh. Michael Bland’s Egyptian-styled costumes – which made him resemble a charter member of the Sun Ra Arkestra – often incorporated the same device.

  It’s usually suggested that Prince’s decision to change – or abandon – his name was a sudden one, a whim or a furious flounce at Warner’s intransigence. It was, in fact, signalled some way ahead. The irony is that /Love Symbol begins with the most explicit declaration of his old identity yet. On ‘My Name is Prince’, he emulates a rap aesthetic drawn from graffiti in which ‘putting your name up’ is the essential component. Intriguingly, the new hip-hop was the one branch of black music which seemed to resist Prince’s colonising urge. His rapping was never better than lame, and usually handed over to someone else in the NPG; it’s Tony M who delivers the ‘U must become a Prince before U’re a king anyway’ line. For all its vividly interlocked accompaniment, ‘My Name is Prince’ could seem like a dreary, repetitive chant, delivered in a throaty Springsteen bellow. Which may be an important clue. Just as there was endless debate about whether the redneck philosophy of Born in the USA, album and song, was genuinely felt or ironic, and whether Bruce was wrapping himself in the flag or subverting patriotism (answer: both, and very profitably), so it wasn’t quite clear whether Prince expected this flagrant self-display to be taken seriously or to be seen as part of some witty sloughing of identity.

  Once you accept there’s a level of playful irony to the song, its boastful overkill – ‘he ain’t leaving this town till he’s had your daughter, on the first day God made the sea but on the seventh he made me’ – and its orgasmic yelps, male and female, its position on the album and in Prince’s new agenda becomes more obvious. It’s bracketed on the album with a song called ‘The Sacrifice of Victor’, which brings his old identity full circle. It’s the journalist Vanessa Bartholomew’s challenge to him to ‘tell me the truth’, looped and echoed, that cues up the song. In it, Prince seems to rehearse much of his youth and upbringing – violence at home, Bernadette Anderson, being bussed to school in 1967 – before setting his feet to the road that will lead him out of that past and see him re-emerge, like some Bunyanesque pilgrim, as ‘Victor’. Other matters arising out of the song are more enigmatic: for instance, was Prince really ‘epileptic till the age of seven’? On the lyric sheet, the word ‘TRUE’ is written in backward script at this point. The video to ‘7’, which predicts a very different, more explicitly biblical apocalypse to the one described on 1999, showed Prince and Mayte destroying his old selves. This is meant to be the prelude to a new identity (and the destruction of the seven killers who have destroyed the princess’s father), but it’s also very simply the kind of thing you do when you genuinely fall in love for the first time: throwing away the address book, the trinkets and gifts, old associations. may be a ritual of self-transformation, but, despite the fact that he is having phone sex with Kirstie Alley/Vanessa on the intro to ‘The Sacrifice of Victor’, the whole album, like Emancipation three years later, is an extended love song to Mayte.

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  And Mayte almost deserves a book of her own. Mayte Janelle Garcia (some sources give ‘Jannell’) was a military child, born in Puerto Rico on November 12, 1973, but fated by her father’s postings to live life on the move. While he was stationed in Egypt, Mayte began to study belly dancing and became the world’s youngest professional belly dancer at the age of sixteen. Later, in Germany, she added classical ballet to her repertoire, and it was there that the teenage Prince fan – apparently first attracted by the Arabic feel of ‘Thieves in the Temple’ – managed to smuggle a show-reel to her idol backstage. Prince apparently fell in love (not with the video of her dancing but with the photograph on the front) and claims to have told Rosie Gaines on the spot that this was the girl he was going to marry. Ironic, given that Mayte – no singer – would replace Gaines in the NPG and have more attention lavished by Prince on her Children of the Sun album than Gaines received on her Closer than Close. The cynical but realistic riposte is that Mayte’s project needed all the help it could get.

  Prince sent her a song and asked if she could choreograph it. She was hired before the next album was complete and it is her exotic features which look down from the clouds above the New Power Generation (‘introducing Mayte’) on the liner photograph to. She also appears on the cover, standing with Prince in a futuristic cityscape, but ringed by ten little girls. They look like music counsellor and den mother from some nightmare summer camp. It’s not clear whether Mayte, inspired by her brief sojourn in Egypt, first floated ideas of reincarnation, but if he didn’t initiate it Prince very quickly bought into the idea, and the notion that he and Mayte were connected at some distant point in the past, as brother and sister – or as one and the same person, which he implies on ‘And God Created Woman’ – became the album’s fantasy scenario and the basis of a new media spin.

  As ever, Prince builds in a level of irony. When Vanessa Bartholomew takes his return call – voice and identity unconvincingly disguised as Victor – she’s dismissive of his attempts to come on to her and makes it clear that if he doesn’t give her a story, she’ll simply make one up. If the rumours are true and the sixteen-year-old crown princess of Cairo has joined the New Power Generation then Vanessa is surely way too old, even for a 320-year-old avatar? (Mayte was actually eighteen but why get in the way of a good cradle-snatching storyline?) Vanessa’s sarcastic debunking leaves the listener wondering whether the whole thing really is just a publicity stunt confected by the ever-knowing Prince. But then one remembers Alley’s well-publicised commitment to Scientology, which hangs on an even more elaborate mythos, and Prince’s knowingness takes on yet another dimension. As ever, he is ‘a box, in a box, in a box’.

  During their brief ‘interview’, Vanessa mentions his new ‘opera’. Though later that year eleven Prince songs were built into an interactive musical theatre piece called Ulysses, premiered in August 1993 at his Glam Slam West club, the only track on that sounds remotely operatic is the preposterously overcooked ‘3 Chains o’ Gold’, a song with Phantom of the Opera pretensions that touches on love, loss, death and misunderstanding, and in turn sets up the album’s bizarre identity-shifting climax.

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  Prince’s apparent determination to go under a new name was reinforced by his collaboration with black-and-white photographer Terry Gydesen on a book called The Sacrifice of Victor. Concert crowds who shouted the name, though, got even shorter shrift than when they called him Prince. Some of the pictures appeared on the cover of Come. It was to be his last album as Prince until 2000 and was mainly reworked instrumentals from the vault, including some that had been aired in Ulysses. For nearly a decade and a half Prince had answered to the siren call of complete artistic independence and had found himself on the rocks; the one-eyed monster of profit-and-loss was catching up with him at last.

  Relations with Warner had been strained since the enigmatic Around the World in a Day reversed what seemed to be an unstoppable market trend with what record executives considered the most perverse sequel in popular music history. After that, things went from bad to worse. After, the label shut down the Paisley Park imprint and insisted that if Prince wanted to release ‘The Most Beautiful Girl in the World’, which he wrote the day after receiving the bad news from Warner, he would have to foot the bill himself. Perversely, it was a massive hit, and his first number one single in the UK. That hit convinced Prince that he could survive very well without Warner; they could release old stuff from the vault until they
released him from his contract, while new songs would be aired in clubs and at concerts. He also established his own retail outlet, a mail order label known as 1-800-NEW-FUNK, and though contractually forbidden to record for any other label, it was widely – and understandably – believed that he was as much involved in NPG’s 1994 Gold Nigga album as in his own official work and as he had been in Time and Family side-projects.

  Warner were – equally understandably – determined to claw back some of their generous investment in an artist who threatened to become a liability. In 1993, they released two volumes of hits, which were also available as a double set with a bonus disc of B-sides. There were two new singles, ‘Peach’ and ‘Pink Cashmere’, which were the last new tracks he released as Prince; he regarded the Hits/B-sides issue as confirmation that his old performing self was dead. He was, however, still in contractual thrall to Warner and wouldn’t be free of his contract until the summer of 1996 and the release of Chaos and Disorder, an album cobbled together with members of the (old) New Power Generation which returned disastrous sales, a mere 100,000 copies. By that time, he was officially known as or The Artist Formerly Known as Prince and had taken to writing the word SLAVE on his cheek in eyebrow pencil. It appears again as a song title on the joyous Emancipation, an album again devoted almost entirely to his love for Mayte: ‘Friend, Lover, Sister, Mother/Wife’.