The Rise of Prince 1958-1988

by Hahn, Alex

  After several months of sessions, Prince and his team left for Hollywood in January 1978 to add the final touches at Sound Labs Studios. After the album was pronounced complete, cover art was quickly prepared and Warner Bros. slotted the album for release in early spring.

  For those who had observed the process, such as David Z. Rivkin, it was clear that not all had gone as planned. The excessive overdubs had led to an album that lacked emotional depth and energy, and the Record Plant’s “dead room” insulation had compounded this problem. At best, Prince had created a document of his musical skills and technical ability in the studio; he had not, however, made a particularly engaging album. If his intent had been to emulate Sly Stone and Stevie Wonder – both of whom had recently recorded records that were full of grit and energy – he had instead let his perfectionist impulses overwhelm his artistic passion.

  These problems with the record, however, were not nearly as apparent to Prince as they were to Rivkin and others. To the contrary, he was convinced that his diligence had led to the creation of a brilliant debut. Media attention and hit singles would surely follow. Anything other than this would be a shock to a young artist for whom so much had come so quickly.

  Recalled Husney, “I think that by that point he had been told so much that he was fantastic that he believed he was going to be successful right away.”

  8. Bandmates

  Sueann Carwell in Minneapolis (Courtesy Vaughn Terry Jelks and SueAnn Carwell).

  Upon returning to Minneapolis in early 1978, with For You complete but not yet released, Prince’s first order of business was to create a touring band. To replicate what he played on the album, he would require two guitars, two keyboards, a drummer and a bass player. Husney rented a rehearsal room at a local store called Del’s Tire Mart for auditions and rehearsing, and Prince began to ponder the group’s composition.

  For his bassist, Prince settled on Andre Anderson, who now adopted the stage name Andre Cymone. Despite their up-and-down history, one marked by competitive tensions, the connection between the boyhood friends remained strong.

  Prince connected with other neighborhood musicians on his return, including Terry Jackson, the former percussionist of Grand Central. Prince showed Jackson a six-figure check he had received from Warner Bros., proudly handing it to his friend to hold. Afterwards, he took Jackson to the rehearsal space and invited him to sit down behind a drum kit. The duo jammed frenetically for several hours, with Prince handling guitar duties. After the exhilarating session, it looked like Jackson had a place in the band. “I thought I was in,” he recalled.

  But Prince soon decided upon Bobby Z., who by now had been drumming with him on and off in what seemed to be the world’s longest musical tryout. “I auditioned for about 18 months against everybody in town twice,” Bobby recalled. “Persistence is a trait that Prince admires, and I certainly had that.”[179]

  Bobby had shown his ability to stretch into different styles during the 1977 Loring Park sessions, but above all Prince appreciated his ability to lay down a backbeat. His approach was almost diametrically opposite from the intricate, syncopated style of Grand Central drummer Morris Day; by now, Prince had decided that the drums in his live act should be solid but unobtrusive.

  After the choice was announced, Prince bluntly told Jackson that his management team had discouraged him from hiring neighborhood friends. Shocked that Prince would allow such considerations to hold sway, Jackson asked what had happened to their boyhood agreement about including each other in any future musical successes. Prince remained impassively silent.

  Prince did, however, leave open the possibility of his friend playing a different percussion instrument in the group. Jackson brought over his congas and continued to join in on jam sessions. Grand Central’s other former percussionist, William Doughty, was also sometimes invited to join in.

  From there, Prince wanted to diversify the band, both in terms of race and gender. In many respects, the template for what he wanted to accomplish with his live act was provided by his longtime influence Sly Stone. Sly’s large group included men and women, as well as blacks and whites, most of whom wore flamboyant attire. The group included two guitarists and two keyboardists, giving Sly a varied instrumental palette.

  Applicants for the keyboard and guitar positions were recruited via advertisements in a local newspaper. The artist was not identified, but the ads referenced the existence of a major label contract, guaranteeing a slew of applicants.

  Among the local musicians who saw the notice was St. Paul native Dez Dickerson. Good humored and boisterous, he was also emotionally centered, well spoken, and had a keen intellect. Interested in fashion, social trends, and subcultures, he also followed a traditional Midwestern code of morality and trust.

  For some months, he had been hearing rumors around the Twin Cities area of a local musical genius – supposedly still just a teenager – who was the next Stevie Wonder and had recorded an entire album on his own. Conversations took place in hushed tones at local record stores, creating something of an urban legend that Dickerson had hoped to get to the bottom of.[180] Now, Dickerson inferred that the wunderkind must have been behind the advertisement, and threw his hat into the ring.

  Weeks later, as he was about to leave town for a gig, Dickerson received a surprise phone call for an immediate audition. After hustling to a local warehouse where the tryouts were occurring, Dickerson jammed with Prince for only 15 minutes before the session was abruptly concluded. Prince then took the guitarist outside for a lengthy conversation in the parking lot. “He asked me deep, long-term-oriented questions,” Dickerson recalled. “I could tell he was a thinker – he wasn’t just saying, ‘Gee whiz, we’re all going to be rock stars.’”

  No definitive offer was made, but Dickerson was invited back and made a regular part of the rehearsals. Soon, one of Prince’s representatives handed him a check, thus solidifying Dickerson’s status. A musical and personal bond quickly developed between Prince and his new guitarist. Dickerson’s technical skills were reasonably strong, but his great strength was the sheer joy he took in playing. His style when soloing was not dissimilar from Prince’s, but Dickerson’s sound was warmer and looser, a contrast to Prince’s more studied fretwork.

  Meanwhile, Terry Jackson, feeling that he and William Doughty were duplicating each other on congas, decided to bring over his timbales, which he had played in Grand Central.

  “What are you doing?” Prince asked Jackson curtly.

  “Man, I’m setting up,” his friend responded.

  “I don’t like timbales,” Prince responded. “They’re not going to be part of the future of R&B music.” Prince then turned away from his friend.

  Jackson, hurt and also frustrated after months of being strung along relative to a place in the band, packed up his equipment and left.[181]

  ***

  As the nucleus of Prince, Andre, Bobby Z., and Dickerson formed, the band’s sound took a definitive turn away from the gossamer-thin R&B that dominated For You. Dickerson, a fan of hard rock groups like Led Zeppelin as well as a follower of punk and new wave, brought a heavy guitar sound into play. Andre’s bass work was also oriented more towards rock than R&B.

  Auditions at the warehouse continued, and Gayle Chapman, a quiet young woman and a devout adherent of a Christian sect called The Way, was tapped for the first keyboard slot. Chapman’s playing was unobtrusive, but she had an innate sense of how to use the space between notes to create rhythm. Finding a second keyboardist took longer, with Prince finally settling on Matt Fink, an acquaintance of Bobby Z. With four of the group’s members – Prince, Andre, Dez, and Fink – all being aggressive and intense musicians, the group’s sound became raw and rough as each of them vied for space within songs. Prince and Dickerson sometimes played guitar solos simultaneously, and Fink laid down wild keyboard solos influenced by jazz-fusion artists like Jan Hammer and Keith Emerson. For now the group was almost comically unpolished, but the outlines of a power
ful rock-funk ensemble could be seen.

  While usually cordial with his band members, Prince was at first more reserved than friendly. “If he didn’t know you well, he came across as very shy, and sometimes people would read it as being anti-social,” Dickerson observed. Bobby Z., meanwhile, noticed that Prince used silence as a means of exerting control in social and professional settings alike. “He talked to you or he didn’t talk to you,” Bobby Z. recalled. “You felt honored if he did and you felt shunned if he didn’t.”[182]

  Still, his new colleagues also influenced his development in various ways. Chapman’s religiosity was intriguing to Prince, especially given her frequent remarks that God had endowed him with unique gifts. “She did tell him he was blessed, and he did eat it up,” recalled Bobby. Dickerson, meanwhile, wore colorful, sometimes outlandish attire that caught Prince’s attention. Indeed, image was very much on Prince’s mind; when Husney told him how the Beatles had shocked a generation by wearing haircuts that touched their ears, he seemed drawn to the idea of visual sensationalism.

  In general, Prince remained especially receptive to anything that would distinguish him from other R&B artists. In many respects, his first album fit squarely in the tradition of singers like Al Green and Smokey Robinson, who wrote primarily love songs and rarely challenged their audiences with new musical directions. Already, though, Prince was considering how to break out of this mold. “He was very clear that he wanted the band to be an amalgam of rock and R&B,” Dickerson remembered.

  Rehearsals took place between four and five days of the week, and typically lasted several hours. For Dickerson, the schedule was demanding but hardly backbreaking, and it was clear that some of Prince’s attention was elsewhere. Among other things, Prince also continued to visit local clubs, both as a means of checking out the local competition and assessing further candidates for the band.

  One evening, Andre took him to see a group known as Enterprise, fronted by a sixteen-year-old singer named Sueann Carwell, whose astonishingly powerful voice had been winning talent shows around Minneapolis. As Andre had expected, Prince was stunned by her skill. Far from simply considering her as an addition to his group, Prince quickly formulated the idea of building a side project around Carwell.

  The notion was audacious and potentially even counter-productive; Prince’s new album had not yet hit the streets and his live band was still jelling. Constructing a project around a young, unproven singer could be costly and time consuming. But Prince didn’t care, and merely days after seeing Carwell perform, he visited her at her mother’s home and described his plans.[183]

  Like so many talented young musicians in Minneapolis, Carwell had a musical pedigree; her father Bobby was a noted percussionist and drummer, and went by the nickname “Sticks.” But he – like far too many other jazz musicians during the 1950s and ’60s – succumbed to a heroin addiction that eventually landed him in prison. Emerging from the shambles of these events, Carwell ran away from home at age ten and grew up primarily in foster homes.

  She and Prince, in addition to sharing difficult childhoods, discovered a family parallel; Sticks Carwell had gigged with Prince’s father John Nelson in the Minneapolis jazz scene, as had Andre’s father Fred.

  As Prince explained his plans for the Carwell album in the coming weeks, it became clear that the project would have few genuinely collaborative elements. Prince would not only write the material and play all of the instruments, but would also record guide vocals for her to sing over. He would then present a finished demo to Warner Bros., presumably resulting in a record deal.

  Prince by now had moved into a rental home at 5215 France Avenue in the Minneapolis suburb of Edina, and brought with him a four-track, reel-toreel machine. This allowed Prince to copiously record new ideas without the technical limitations he had faced in the Anderson basement, and he now began active work on Carwell’s project.

  Although Carwell often spent entire nights with Prince working on material, the relationship never took a romantic turn. “I was young and sexy and could sing, but he said he would never mix personal with business,” Carwell recalled.

  As he wrote for her, he consciously sought to adopt a female perspective, both in terms of the lyrics and the sound. The coy and bouncy “Wouldn’t You Love To Love Me?”, for example, was sung from the viewpoint of a woman being pursued by a male suitor. In truth, the song had been re-configured for the purpose of Carwell’s project; it was one of Prince’s earliest original songs, having been initially recorded in the Anderson basement using the tape-to-tape technique.

  Prince also spoke to Carwell about the business aspects of music. His roadmap for success remained tentative, and Carwell became another person to test out ideas with. “He had a vision, but not a plan,” Carwell recalled. Above all, Prince made emphatically clear the importance of forging an independent path from other R&B artists. “He would always say to me, ‘Whatever you do, go the other way – go against the grain,’” Carwell recalled.

  Between sessions, Prince occasionally sat in with Carwell’s group Enterprise, a group led by renowned local musician Sonny Thompson. The group performed for almost entirely black audiences in rougher parts of the city, including at the legendary Nacerima Club. “We played in front of pimps and robbers,” Carwell remembered. The band included old friend Morris Day and veteran guitarist Jeffrey McRaven, who also played with the iconic local funk group Band of Thieves.

  The Carwell sessions shifted between the humble home studio and the sleeker Sound 80 in Minneapolis. At the latter location, Prince was enthralled by a vocal melody that Carwell improvised before the tape machine at the studio had started running. At the next session, Prince became surprised and angry when she was unable to recreate the improvised part.

  “You sit there until you remember it,” Prince fumed. Predictably, this did nothing to help Carwell recall the part. This prompted an enraged Prince to end the session – and perhaps, the project itself.

  “I’ll bring you home,” he told her angrily and hustled Carwell into a car.

  Carwell left in tears, and become even more disconsolate when Prince did not call for two weeks. The sessions eventually resumed, but the psychic cost of working with Prince was now clear to Carwell, and their work had been drained of much of its vitality. But Prince remained invested in the project, and sent the completed demo to Russ Thyret at Warner Bros.

  Thyret’s response, perhaps predictably, was that the album sounded too much like Prince’s music to constitute an independent project. If Prince’s hope had been to create a fascinating parallel project that bore no traces of his fingerprints, it had not been realized. And while Carwell’s vocals were impressive, Prince’s heavy hand had stifled her creative energies.

  Apparently sympathetic that Carwell’s big break had not materialized, Prince sought to integrate her into the band as a percussionist. Former Grand Central percussionist William Doughty was called back to the rehearsal space to tutor Carwell, and she began rehearsing with the group.

  For Carwell, a tertiary role in a sprawling ensemble was hardly what she had hoped for at the beginning of her dealings with Prince. But her fortunes abruptly shifted again; Owen Husney, who had been managing her career as well as Prince’s, obtained a sight-unseen deal for Carwell at Warner Bros., one that would involve another producer. The prospect of a career breakthrough again loomed for Carwell, and she excitedly prepared to move to Los Angeles to begin recording.

  Upon hearing of these plans, Prince flew into a rage and made clear that her departure would be considered a betrayal. From his perspective, he had supported and mentored her and was now being abandoned. That Carwell stood to lose a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity if she stayed in Minneapolis was not in his mind a relevant factor.

  Shortly before Carwell left for Los Angeles, another twist occurred. A local group called Lipps, Inc. wanted her to sing lead in the studio on a song called “Funkytown.” The opportunity interested Carwell, but Owen Husney warned that this m
ight make waves at Warner Bros. before work on her album had even started. Frustrated, she told Husney he would have to pay her something for foregoing the opportunity.

  “What do you have in mind?” Husney asked.

  “How about $75?” Carwell responded with the first figure that popped into her head. Husney readily agreed.

  Carwell was asked by Lipps, Inc. if she knew of another good singer, and she suggested Cynthia Johnson, who was part of the local group Flyte Time. Johnson soon performed a memorable vocal on “Funkytown,” which would become one of the biggest disco hits in history, charting at No. 1 in 28 different countries. Meanwhile, Carwell’s debut album, Sueann, unfortunately did little to boost her career after its release in 1981; she came back to Minneapolis exhausted, emotionally depleted, and essentially broke. “I felt so hopeless after that album,” Carwell recalled.

  Shortly after her return in 1981, Carwell bumped into Prince at the First Avenue Club in Minneapolis. He strode up, his face a mask of anger. “I hate everything on your album,” he said. He then paused. “Everything except ‘Company,’” he added, referring to a cover of a Ricki Lee Jones song on the album.

  This was a particular twist of the knife – the only good thing on her album was a song Carwell had not written. Clearly, Prince’s grudge from nearly three years earlier remained fresh.

  Another strange epilogue to their collaboration would occur. After the lacerating encounter at First Avenue, Carwell had not expected to hear from Prince again. She was thus surprised when, about a year later, she received an out-of-the-blue phone call from Prince, asking if she wanted to open for him and his side project the Time at a local concert. Hoping that bygones were finally bygones, and anxiously seeking a career boost, Carwell happily agreed. At the show, she performed songs from the very same album that Prince had a year earlier disdained. Not only did he seem to enjoy the show, but he handled mixing duties from a backstage soundboard.