The Rise of Prince 1958-1988

by Hahn, Alex

  Whatever his ambivalence about Matthews, Prince treated the Vanity 6 project with almost grave seriousness. Unfortunately, the material was dragged down by the lack of vocal talent among its members. Matthews, who handled most of the lead duties, exhibited neither range nor emotional depth, and while Bennett did display some vocal chops, neither she nor Moonsie could be mistaken for seasoned professional singers.

  Despite these problems, Vanity 6, released in August 1982, further demonstrated Prince’s ability to turn side projects into commercial successes. The album reached No. 6 on the Black Chart and No. 45 on the Pop Chart, selling nearly 500,000 units during its initial run. Prince’s team again issued a party line that Vanity 6 was an independent group and that he had not been involved, although enough hints were dropped with journalists to keep the mystery alive.

  Meanwhile, the Time’s second album, What Time Is It?, was another success. It reached No. 2 on the Black Chart and went gold in the process. The single “777-9311” became a modest hit, creating a hassle for Dez Dickerson, who had not known that his phone number was going to be used as the title of the song; when calls from strangers poured in at all hours of the night, he was forced to have it changed.

  With two side projects now well established, Prince turned his attention to his own fifth album. On Controversy, Prince had let the title track stretch out to over seven minutes. With his new material, he continued to push long-form grooves, which became the rule rather than the exception. Songs like “D.M.S.R” and “Automatic” led the listener through a labyrinth of popping bass solos, short guitar solos, impulsive screams, and esoteric sound effects. The lyrics continued to mine dark sexual themes; “Automatic” explored domination and submission, while “Lady Cab Driver” contained explicitly violent imagery.

  The material was more experimental than almost anything on the pop charts, suggesting that Prince was treating artistic considerations as paramount. And he was also stocking his own album with more challenging and less commercially accessible material than was being used for the Time and Vanity 6 projects. At the same time, he wrote an impassioned mid-tempo ballad called “Little Red Corvette” that was easily the most fully integrated pop song of his career. In an unusual display of inclusiveness in the studio, Prince asked Dez Dickerson to add a guitar solo to the song.

  When Prince presented the completed album to Bob Cavallo and Steve Fargnoli in Los Angeles, they were pleased with the material and delighted to hear an apparent hit single in “Little Red Corvette.” After digesting the work, though, the managers felt something was missing: an over-arching, thematic song in the vein of “Controversy,” which had provided a conceptual and musical foundation for that album.

  Prince, while not pleased to hear he had created anything less than a masterpiece, took their views as a personal challenge. “He yelled at us, and then he went back to Minneapolis and kept recording,” remembered Cavallo. What emerged from these efforts was “1999,” which became the title track of the album. He made a crucial decision during the mixing process. The verse vocals had been recorded as a three-part harmony featuring himself, Dickerson, and Lisa Coleman, but in the final mix, he dropped out two of the voices on each line so that each singer became a lead vocalist – Lisa on the first line, Dickerson on the second, and Prince on the third. The result evoked Sly & the Family Stone classics that used a similar baton-passing technique, including “Sing A Simple Song” and “Hot Fun In The Summertime.”

  The album was now complete. The length of the songs, however, necessitated a double album. Warner Bros. was initially resistant to this, believing it would be difficult to market. But Fargnoli was once again persuasive in presenting Prince’s arguments to the label, and Mo Ostin threw his pivotal support behind the project.

  1999, released in October 1982, was greeted with fervor by music critics, who found it a much fuller realization of the ideas Prince had explored on his previous two albums. Rolling Stone commended Prince for “keeping the songs constantly kinetic with an inventive series of shocks and surprises.” In the eyes of the critical establishment, 1999 graduated him into a full-fledged creative force, an iconoclastic figure certainly in a league with revered artists such as the Clash and Lou Reed.

  To promote 1999, Cavallo and Fargnoli organized a major concert tour to begin in November, just weeks after the album’s release. The tour featured opening sets by the Time and Vanity 6, making it an extravaganza that revealed Prince’s various artistic personae. The Roy Bennett-designed stage set featured props such as motorized Venetian blinds (which served as a backdrop for the entire tableau), an elevated catwalk, and a brass bed. The song list emphasized Controversy and 1999, while also including the more obscure “How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore?,” a piano ballad released as a B-side to the single of “1999.” Prince’s confidence as a performer was in full bloom, and the audiences at the venues, which had capacities ranging from 7,500 to 10,000, were enraptured.

  Less pleasant were the offstage dynamics. Prince’s bandmates felt increasingly distanced from their leader, as Chick Huntsberry’s presence again proved intimidating. Prince traveled on a separate bus during much of the tour, accompanied usually by Huntsberry, Fargnoli, and a member of his growing complement of girlfriends. The vehicle became Prince’s hermetic universe; even after arriving in a city, he often remained cloistered in the bus until going onstage, returning afterward to record musical ideas on a portable machine or to have sex.

  Of Prince’s bandmates, Dickerson was the most disgruntled, in significant part due to his discomfort in playing Prince’s explicit songs. During the 1999 swing, Dickerson voiced his concerns directly to Prince, appealing to his own sense of spirituality. The band leader seemed sympathetic, but only to a point. “There were a few times where I really felt his heart was open, that he was seriously weighing the things I was saying,” Dickerson remembered. “But he had consciously built his notoriety on being controversial; there was a conflict between what he knew to be right and what was working in his career.”

  The guitarist seemed certain to depart after the tour. An heir apparent quickly emerged: nineteen-year-old Wendy Melvoin, Lisa’s girlfriend. She had grown up with Lisa in the San Fernando Valley, and they had known each other since childhood. Wendy was Lisa’s companion on the tour, and upon learning she played guitar, Prince invited her to sit in with the band during sound checks. Prince immediately liked her sound, which was more emotionally expressive than Dickerson’s. She was a negligible soloist, but Prince at this point was happy to be the band’s sole lead guitarist. Wendy’s tough, mildly masculine image would add to the band’s already intriguing appearance.

  Prince’s relationship with the members of the Time, meanwhile, had not healed much since the epic food fight. The band wanted to participate in the group’s second album, and being excluded from the creative process had created immense frustration. The success of an album that bore their name, but which they had in fact had no hand in, only underscored that they were essentially puppets.

  The dynamic worsened when Prince began complaining, without any basis at all, that the Time was performing weakly in concert. “He would come in and get all over their case,” remembered Roy Bennett. “He would ride them heavily, and, obviously, when you’re doing a great job and someone’s telling you you’re screwing up, you wonder, ‘What is this guy? What does he want?’ It caused major tension.”

  Unbeknownst to Prince, Lewis and Harris had started doing production work for other groups on the side, and their patience with Prince’s insistence on control was wearing thin. “I’m sure they felt that at some point he would loosen up the reins, but he never did,” Bennett observed. “They’re two very talented guys, and the last thing they wanted was to be told what to do all the time.”

  Fargnoli and Cavallo, not wanting another tour to devolve into open conflict between the bands, began seeking an experienced road manager to bring order to the swing. Among the candidates was Alan Leeds, a thirty-three-year-old music i
ndustry veteran who had worked extensively with James Brown and was an expert in funk and jazz history. Prince, when presented by Fargnoli with the names of several applicants and learning about their backgrounds, said simply, “Get the James Brown guy.”

  After quitting college at the age of twenty-two to do tour promotion for the Godfather of Soul, Leeds had become Brown’s tour manager and a confidant during a critical stretch of his career in the early 1970s. A deep thinker with a melancholy handsomeness, Leeds was indefatigable in handling the complex logistics of running tours. Perhaps even more importantly, he was adroit and gracious in dealing with larger-than-life personalities like James Brown and his new client.

  When he joined up with the 1999 tour, Leeds was at first roundly ignored by Prince and had to communicate through Huntsberry. But Prince soon opened up, interested in learning more about Leeds’ years with James Brown. Leeds joined Huntsberry in shadowing Prince virtually everywhere he went.

  Another important arrival on the scene was the duo of Vaughn Terry Jelks and Louis Wells, two experienced and imaginative clothing designers who had worked with Earth, Wind & Fire and others. At first, they received the same wordless treatment as Leeds had, and it was unclear whether their presence was welcome. But one evening hanging out backstage, Jelks noticed that his jacket had gone missing. “I looked around, and there was Prince wearing it,” he recalled. “That’s when I knew he liked what we were doing.”

  From there, Prince began to exchange ideas with the duo, and they began to formulate visual ideas for his next project. But a degree of tension quickly emerged between Prince and Jelks, primarily because Jelks’ mellow charisma and flamboyant attire caught the attention of many women within the entourage, including some Prince also fancied. “I was like, ‘You can have any woman in the world, can’t I at least have one?’” Jelks recalled.

  Such jealousies aside, the arrival of the Jelks/Wells team, along with Leeds, brought a greater sense of professionalism to the tour. Yet, the rivalry between Prince’s band and the Time persisted, with the opening act again upstaging Prince in some cities. Finally, Prince showed his insecurities by booting the band from the bill during appearances in important cities such as New York and Los Angeles. But this tactic essentially backfired, as crowds thinned out somewhat when fans learned that the Time, who had become extremely popular in urban communities, would not be on the bill.

  Money remained another point of contention. Morris Day, believing that his stage presence was key to the group’s success, frequently had heated discussions with Prince about compensation. The response was always the same: since he wrote all of the music, neither Day nor anyone else in the band deserved anything extra. Adding to the unfairness was the fact that the Time’s instrumental members also served as the backing band for Vanity 6, performing behind a pink curtain; they received no compensation for these sets.

  Vanity 6’s sets were enhanced by the Time’s shrouded presence as its three members soldiered through the songs Prince had written for them. Brenda Bennett, a tough-minded Bostonian, gamely handled her ill-suited role as a damsel in lingerie, and Moonsie clearly enjoyed being onstage, dancing with abandon and flaunting her white teddy. But for the supposed bandleader, Denise Matthews, the entire exercise was strained and inorganic; her thin vocals failed to cut through the mix and her charisma failed to translate to the stage.

  The morass of pressures that Matthews found herself stuck in – an uncomfortable role as a front person, her romantic competition with Moonsie and Jill Jones, and the intoxicating whiff of fame around the tour – proved overwhelming, and she began to drink to dull her emotions. While fans thought of her as Prince’s leading lady, he had given up on this idea rather quickly; she remained a sexual option for him, but only one of many. “He juggled the affairs on a day-to-day basis – some nights Vanity would disappear with Prince, then some nights Jill Jones would end up on the Prince bus, leaving Vanity in the hotel stewing,” said tour manager Leeds. “He seemed unfazed by the resultant drama, but it clearly affected everyone else.”

  Matthews’ bandmate Moonsie, who for several years had been the closest thing to Prince’s true girlfriend, refused to tolerate these shenanigans and withdrew from the romantic sweepstakes. “She was never frantic about him,” said Roy Bennett. “She knew who he was, what he was up to, and she wouldn’t take his shit.” And rather than playing the wounded ex-lover, Moonsie forged a friendship with Matthews and sought to comfort her during what was nearing a public meltdown.

  All told, despite the quality of the music emanating from the stage each night, the 1999 tour was a chaotic and unpredictable affair, involving many outsized personalities and multiple conflict points. Prince and the Time were again locked in combat; Prince’s girlfriends were stepping on each other’s toes; and Prince was engaged in jealous rivalries even with his own clothing designer. As Vaughn Terry Jelks put it, “The whole thing was one big smorgasbord of attitude and vibe.”

  ***

  Despite his incessant erotic encounters with women, it was a physical, albeit non-sexual, encounter with two other men during the tour that had perhaps as much lasting impact. One evening backstage, clothing designer Louis Wells, a strong and athletic individual, encountered Prince’s bodyguard Chick Huntsberry and struck up a conversation about professional wrestling. They soon began playfully wrestling against each other, quickly drawing a crowd from others backstage. Surprisingly, Wells managed to pin down Huntsberry and lock up his arms, drawing cheers from the onlookers.

  Out of nowhere, Prince emerged from his private dressing room and made a beeline for the fight. He jumped on Wells, joining in the boyish fun. Wells now found himself improbably sandwiched between the massive Huntsberry and the diminuitive Prince. Flexing his powerful frame, Wells easily cast Prince off; he then picked up the bandleader and threw him on a nearby couch.

  This defeat provoked not anger but cackling laughter from Prince, who seemed to have enjoyed the experience as much as anything else that happened on the tour. “For a week after that, he talked about nothing besides our free-for-all,” Wells recalled.

  Wells had stumbled upon a spontaneous, authentically joyful side of Prince that rarely showed itself. The encounter resembled the fantasy renditions of pro wrestlers Mad Dog Vachon and Verne Gagne that Prince had enjoyed with his friend Paul Mitchell during high school, when he had felt free to engage in childlike play. For this brief moment with Wells and Huntsberry, Prince was no longer an aloof rock star, but just another one of the guys.

  ***

  In late 1982 and early 1983, as the tour marched on across the country, Prince achieved several commercial breakthroughs. MTV, the cable television channel that played exclusively music videos, began airing the video for “1999,” making Prince one of the few black artists in rotation on a channel that dominated the music industry. The racial divides that had characterized pop music throughout the seventies and into the early eighties were finally coming down, and Prince became one of the pioneers in introducing African-American styles to vast numbers of white consumers.

  In February 1983, the release of “Little Red Corvette” brought Prince his first big hit, shooting to No. 6 on the Pop Singles Chart. The melodic pop song demonstrated conclusively that he was not simply a funk musician with a cult following, but a budding songwriter capable of working in different styles. These developments all boosted 1999, which would sell three million copies in its first year. Additional tour dates were booked, this time into arenas with capacities of over 10,000 people.

  After the tour wrapped in Chicago in April 1983, a calm of sorts settled over the Prince camp. Dez Dickerson quit and was replaced by Wendy Melvoin, a shift that eliminated a source of tension within the band but also robbed it of a major talent. Wendy moved in with Lisa at the Residence Inn in Eden Prairie, a complex that provided long-term housing mainly for corporate clients. Alan Leeds also relocated to the Minneapolis area, maintaining close contact with Cavallo and Fargnoli in Los Angeles as he han
dled Prince’s day-to-day affairs.

  Prince worked to rebuild the atmosphere of community within his team that had been eroded by the arrival of Huntsberry and the struggles with the Time. Bandmates and associates were invited over for cookouts and to watch videos. He gathered everyone for bowling nights, basketball games, and afternoons of softball. While these activities were generally pleasant and diverting, Prince’s hypercompetitiveness sometimes reared its head. “In softball, someone would obviously be out, and Prince would say ‘No, he was safe!’” Leeds said. “Well, what are you going to do? If you protested, he was gonna take his bats and gloves and go home.”

  When not acting as an umpire, Prince worked on new material. Bob Cavallo, during his visits to the purple house in Chanhassen, was enthralled when Prince would spontaneously sit down at a piano and begin singing. “It was as if he had a direct line to the heavens,” the manager recalled. Similarly, Alan Leeds had concluded that in terms of pure songwriting ability, Prince was the most talented figure he had encountered. “The music was just pouring out of him,” Leeds recalled.

  Indeed, Prince was so prolific that, at the age of 24, he had created a small music empire consisting of himself and two alter-ego acts. 1999 had been a commercial breakthrough and also an artistic achievement, one of the most adventurous albums by a rising pop artist in years. And after a successful tour, as well as ample radio and television exposure, he had become an internationally known star.