The Rise of Prince 1958-1988

by Hahn, Alex

  The downside of all this was that Prince’s music and persona gradually became less subversive and arguably less interesting. He became a modern pop icon, but to do so was forced to give up some of his edge and distinctiveness. “First you rebel against something,” noted publicist Bloom, “and then you turn into it.”

  ***

  The crushing fame brought on by Purple Rain brought on another transition: Prince became even more cloistered and remote from many of his own associates. He moved everywhere with a phalanx of bodyguards led by Chick Huntsberry. “It was ridiculous; you felt like you were going to be frisked every time you walked backstage,” said Marylou Badeaux, now a Warner Bros. president, who had previously enjoyed easy access to Prince. Gradually, it became difficult even to discuss important issues. “He just kind of shut himself off; he became a different person at that point,” recalled production designer Roy Bennett. “Between Prince and everybody else, a wall came up.”

  Upon leaving the stage each night, Prince was flanked by bodyguards and whisked away in a limousine, sometimes leaving band members unsure even whether there would be an encore. “There were two or three times where the band felt the response was so amazing that certainly he would come back, but meanwhile he was already in his car halfway back to the hotel,” remembered Badeaux. Ensconced in his room, he usually studied a videotape of the previous night’s performance or played piano, rarely entertaining guests other than female companions.

  One of the few former colleagues who stayed in touch, Dez Dickerson, felt a dramatically different atmosphere when Prince invited him and his wife Becky back to his hotel after a show in Washington, D.C. The large suite housed a grand piano that was trucked from city to city, and various handlers, including a private chef, buzzed about.

  As Dickerson and Prince became immersed in a jocular conversation, the rock star pretenses melted away; for a moment it was if they were back in Minneapolis, goofing around after rehearsal. “He was starting to kind of come back to life again, like in the old days,” the guitarist recalled. As he and Becky left, Dickerson remarked that they should all get together and go shopping in Georgetown, as they had on previous tours. Prince’s eyes lit up with expectation, but then just as quickly a sad look crossed his face. “Nah, I can’t do stuff like that anymore,” he said. “I can’t go out.” Dickerson realized things had changed irrevocably. He said goodbye and left, and although the two men would remain in sporadic contact over the years, their communications usually ran through Prince’s intermediaries. “We never really had any quality time together after that,” Dickerson said.

  Dickerson was hardly alone in feeling a drastic change. Each member of the band had at some point during recent years considered Prince a friend, but now felt they were being treated more as employees. “Prince wanted to keep it all business,” Matt Fink remembered. While Prince’s friendships with Wendy and Lisa would rekindle once the pressures of the tour abated, the closeness that Fink, drummer Rivkin, and bassist Mark Brown had once enjoyed with him would never quite return.

  ***

  Well before the circus-like Purple Rain tour lurched to a close, the man at the center of this extravaganza was in some respects ready for it all to be over. That part of Prince that craved stardom was, of course, elated by the public frenzy over the film, album, and tour. He had achieved the sort of fame that turns a name into a household word. And to a large extent, this was just what he had sought since starting his professional music career at age eighteen. But another, equally important part of Prince longed for artistic respect, the sort that he worried might be incompatible with indiscriminate public adoration. “I think he really had fears of being typecast as Mr. Purple Rain,” observed Alan Leeds. “By the time that tour was over, he was so sick of that music and that whole concept.” Add in to the mix the fact that Prince was at this point in his career no great fan of being on the road for long periods of time, and it created a situation that only exacerbated his tendency to cloister himself during off hours. “Six months was his limit; he burned out after that,” noted Matt Fink. While some band members wanted to cash in on Purple Rain by taking the tour to Europe, Prince’s goal was to finish the U.S. swing and get back into the studio.

  Mark Brown, only in his early twenties and experiencing a heady rush of fame he never could have anticipated, began drinking heavily. “For me, the whole thing was a little too much at a young age,” he said. “When life comes to you that easy, you start abusing it, it doesn’t matter who you are. If you don’t take it in perspective, you will start to burn out, and I believe that’s what happened to all of us.”

  Light recreational use of marijuana and cocaine among some band members and other members of Prince’s circle was not unheard of, but never became rampant. Prince himself, despite using painkillers behind the scenes for legitimate medical reasons, never participated in recreational drug use. But among members of the crew, the men and women who erected stage sets and transported the heavy equipment in trucks, cocaine use became commonplace. Always the first to arrive in a city on the day of the show, the crew undertook the Herculean task of setting up for the band’s afternoon sound check. When the show finally concluded late at night, they packed up and drove on to the next city to begin the same cycle again; under such conditions, the use of stimulants became perhaps the only means of staying awake. “There were serious amounts of drugs going on within the crew,” said Roy Bennett. “It was ridiculous, people wouldn’t sleep for days.” Added another knowledgeable source: “Almost everyone outside of Prince and the band were using coke. I sometimes think coke kept the buses and trucks afloat for those six or seven months.”

  Secluded in his hotel room or his private dressing room, Prince remained oblivious to all of this. Reports of the crew’s activities finally reached him near the end of the tour, but by this time it was too late to become outraged; the exhausted crew members would do whatever was necessary to complete the grueling swing and return home.

  ***

  With the triumph of Purple Rain, Prince had become, unquestionably, part of pop music’s elite, the handful of stars that define any given decade. His main competitors, in terms of both record sales and sheer visibility, were Michael Jackson, Madonna, and Bruce Springsteen.

  Prince’s new fame, however, would not come without a price. Some of his associates felt that he became far too identified with Purple Rain. So many stars before him, having achieved similar prominence, were soon reduced to cartoon-like status. Could a similar fate befall Prince?

  “The tour was the closest thing to ‘Beatlemania’ for Prince and his group,” said Eric Leeds. “It was really a phenomenon that was greater than Prince; the vast majority of the fans were enthralled with Purple Rain more than with what Prince was about in totality. One of the biggest mistakes he made was to think that Purple Rain was going to be the norm rather than the exception.”

  And just as the characters of Purple Rain represented divisions in his psyche, the external Prince was split over how to proceed after having become one of the most successful pop stars of his time.

  21. Backlash

  Even before Purple Rain was released, Prince had started to plan his subsequent projects and to consider new directions. Purple Rain in many respects constituted the apotheosis of techniques Prince had been exploring for years, including the use of the Oberheim synth for horn lines and the LM-1 in place of drums. But he now began to contemplate a return to analogue drum textures and also something that had long been unthinkable for Prince – the use of actual horns, a staple of R&B music that he had deliberately eschewed.

  Over the spring months of 1984, Prince had been discussing the potential use of horns with Alan Leeds, who happened to have a brother, Eric, who was a skilled saxophonist. Prince readily agreed to have Eric flown in to Minneapolis for a meeting and to hear some of the music Prince potentially wanted him to play on. Those songs were slated for a new side project to replace the Time; one of the first was “Mutiny,” whose veng
eful lyrics were directed towards Morris Day and Jesse Johnson for having left the Time.[223] Prince planned to call the new side project “the Family,” which had been the name of a Northside band that Prince’s Grand Central competed with during his high school years.

  Like the Time, the group would be nominally independent from Prince, although he planned to record the bulk of the Family’s music on his own and then piece together a band from his friends and associates. Three former Time members were recruited, including sideman Paul Peterson as the lead singer, and Prince’s girlfriend Susannah Melvoin was added as the second vocalist.

  In a significant departure from his previous work, Prince asked an outsider to add strings to his music. Prince learned from Wendy and Lisa about the respected orchestral composer Clare Fischer, who had worked with R&B artists such as Rufus. Intrigued, Prince sent him several of the Family tracks for his input even before meeting him. “Prince said, ‘I want movie music,’” noted engineer David Z. Rivkin, who contacted Fischer. “Fischer’s arrangements cut across the track like there was a movie going on, and that’s what Prince wanted. Something dissonant, something weird – the guy just sliced across the tracks sideways, independent of the music almost.” Delighted with the outcome, Prince became superstitious about the relationship and insisted upon never seeing Fischer in person, preferring to simply forward him tapes.

  Consistent with these explorations, Prince resolved that his next albums would demonstrate musical growth and travel in a radically different direction. To help achieve this goal, he convened a school of sorts – an informal but intensive survey of important rock and jazz musicians of the twentieth century. As a youth, Prince had been exposed only to Minneapolis’ very limited menu of radio stations, and by the time he reached his late teen years, he was too immersed in his own music to make learning about other artists a priority. To make up for this gap in his education, Prince began encouraging members of his inner circle to share with him their extensive knowledge of various musical forms.

  His friends were well suited to the task. Bandmates Wendy and Lisa, and his girlfriend Susannah Melvoin, all steeped in the music of the sixties and seventies, played him records by the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, and others. Saxophonist Eric Leeds and his brother Alan, both jazz aficionados, exposed Prince to the canons of Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, and Charles Mingus. And percussionist and drummer Sheila E. introduced him to contemporary jazz-fusion artists like Weather Report. “I always enjoyed eavesdropping on whatever Prince might be listening to in his dressing room,” recalled Alan Leeds, who would hear everything from classic Al Green to Miles Davis’ Sketches Of Spain to early Little Richard.

  Prince’s inner circle was beginning to resemble a salon, as he found himself surrounded by stimulating, creative, and sophisticated people who were themselves bound together by musical affinities, friendship, and family ties. Both of the Leeds brothers at times served as mentor or older-brother figures to him, and twins Susannah and Wendy, so similar in temperament and appearance, also enjoyed deep personal bonds with Prince. The creative synergy among Prince, Wendy, and Lisa strengthened almost by the day. Lisa’s brother, David Coleman, and Wendy and Susannah’s brother, Jonathan Melvoin, both talented musicians, occasionally passed through the creative circuit as well and played on various songs.

  Prince absorbed voraciously the information offered by his friends, and immediately applied this knowledge in the studio. Still, his innate impatience gave his studies a rushed quality, as he rarely focused on any subject in detail. During conversations with friends, Prince would not hesitate to abruptly and rudely cut someone off the moment he began to lose interest. “There was a certain submission to the friendship, even when you were sitting around talking about Duke Ellington or Miles Davis,” recalled Alan Leeds. “He wanted to hear what you had to say, but he wanted to hear it in response to his specific questions. He didn’t want a lot of editorializing.”

  Prince’s approach to songwriting became at least marginally more collaborative, as he sometimes let his bandmates, especially Wendy and Lisa, add their voices to the composing process. A turning point in this respect was the song “Around The World In A Day,” the first draft of which was written and recorded not by Prince, but by David Coleman, Lisa’s brother. For a birthday present in June 1984, Coleman received from Prince three days of “lock-out” recording at Hollywood’s Sunset Sound, giving him exclusive access to the expensive facility for this seventy-two-hour period.

  Coleman was himself a sophisticated musician with an unusual palette of influences. Like his sister, he was impacted by his musical parents, and when he was just ten he formed a band with Lisa (called Waldorf Salad) that was signed to A&M Records. After being trained in cello, he taught himself a variety of instruments, including guitar. Through a close friendship during high school with a young woman from Beirut, he became fascinated with Middle Eastern culture, studying Arabic and learning a variety of international instruments. This influence emerged during his Sunset Sound sessions, where Coleman recorded a song using a fretless Arabic guitar called an oud, an Arabic drum known as a darbouka, and finger cymbals.

  Coleman circulated the song, entitled “Around The World In A Day,” among family members and friends, and via Lisa the song soon made its way to Prince. Both its sing-song melody and exotic instrumentation intrigued him, and the song’s psychedelic feel echoed the 1960s music he had discovered through Wendy, Lisa, and Susannah. When Coleman bumped into him at a concert in Los Angeles, Prince effused about the song and said this was exactly the sort of thing he was interested in exploring – not on the next album, but the one after that.

  The timetable quickly accelerated. Coleman had expected little more to come of Prince’s interest, but shortly after the Los Angeles encounter he received a phone call from Steve Fargnoli’s office asking him to bring tapes of the song and all of his Middle Eastern instruments to Minneapolis. In mid-September 1984, Coleman and his musical partner Jonathan Melvoin (who would tragically die of a heroin overdose in 1996 at age 34) met Prince at a Minneapolis warehouse to rerecord the song. As Prince explored the array of exotic instruments Coleman and Melvoin had on hand, the session quickly took on a playful energy. When Coleman broke out Saudi Arabian “fireman cymbals,” Prince got into the spirit by exuberantly banging on them while blowing a police whistle. Coleman recalled Prince, who had over that same summer become one of the biggest stars in the world, as an engaging, unpretentious collaborator with an almost boyish enthusiasm. “He was just so charming and unassuming,” Coleman remembered.

  The finished song did not differ greatly in feel or sound from Coleman’s original demo, save for Prince’s singing and the LM-1 pattern he added. Prince altered Coleman’s lyrics but retained the title and chorus phrase. “Around The World In A Day” set the tone for Prince’s next project: it would have a decidedly experimental tinge and would showcase new influences, particularly sixties oriented psychedelic rock. It would seemingly also make some allowance for collaborative songwriting.

  Exactly how group-oriented the project would be, however, remained an issue of contention. As Prince focused his energies on his own songwriting, an undercurrent of tension developed between him and the rest of the Revolution, who had a number of simmering grievances. In one sense, it was the headiest of times for Wendy and Lisa, Matt Fink, Mark Brown, and Bobby Z. Rivkin, who remained awash in popular adoration as a result of Purple Rain. Seeing themselves on movie screens and televisions was the stuff of childhood fantasies come true. Still, less pleasant realities also intruded. First, there was money: Prince had become a multi-millionaire almost overnight, and they had not. Mark Brown recalls that he and the others were making about $2,200 a week, and that at the end of the tour, each Revolution member received a mere $15,000 bonus. “It was a slap in the face. We had grossed him over $80 million,” said Brown, who nonetheless says he blames Prince’s accountants and managers more than the bandleader himself. (Prince would later give band
members a much larger bonus, said to have been in the range of $1 million each, as a thank you for Purple Rain, but by that point Brown had left the group).

  The band members also felt that Prince, by stealing away to recording studios without them (as he often did during the tour), slighted their contributions. The one thing they had to hang onto was that they were part of the Revolution – an entity that Prince, throughout the making of Purple Rain, had insisted was an integral part of his identity. The band members considered themselves part of perhaps the most distinctive and influential pop group of their time. “They pretty much felt they were the second coming of the Beatles as a band,” said Alan Leeds. “They had an enormously inflated sense of their importance to the project.”

  But to Prince, regardless of what he had told his bandmates to motivate them during preparations for the film, the Revolution was ultimately a backing group whose membership he could change at will. This was underscored when midway through the Purple Rain tour, Eric Leeds showed up backstage. On the second evening of a three-night stand in Greenville, South Carolina, Prince asked Eric if he had brought along his saxophone. Having rarely played anywhere larger than a nightclub, Eric jumped onstage for the climactic “Baby, I’m A Star.” At one point during the lengthy jam, Prince cut off the band and let Eric solo in front of the 15,000-person crowd.

  Prince liked what he heard, and invited Eric to join the tour. He began taking prominent solos, which diluted other members’ time in the spotlight. The affable saxophonist was hard to dislike on a personal level, but other band members resented his intrusion into their private fraternity.

  Eric’s time in the spotlight was particularly difficult to swallow for Wendy, who throughout the tour had felt her star rising as female fans, in particular, reacted wildly to her presence onstage. Wendy’s time to shine was “Purple Rain”; she began the song with shimmering guitar chords and, after the rest of the band joined in, was usually given several minutes to solo before Prince began singing. But at a show in Santa Monica, California, just before the band came out for an encore, Prince gathered them and issued a last-minute change; this time, Eric would play the solo. In an instant, Wendy’s signature moment had been stolen from her, and it showed in her eyes the moment she left stage. “Wendy was whiter and paler than I’ve ever seen her before,” said Alan Leeds. “Just crushed.”