The Rise of Prince 1958-1988

by Hahn, Alex

  Prince was hardly unaware of his band members’ frustrations and their desire for more stability and creative input, but his focus remained on his personal creative vision. And he was sending a clear message: adding new members and deciding who took solos remained his prerogative.

  Prince recorded several other songs for his next project in 1984, again emphasizing an entirely different style from the guitar and rock-oriented sound of Purple Rain. “Pop Life,” with Sheila E. on drums, was a languid, agreeable funk number with an overlay of psychedelia, including sampled crowd noise reminiscent of the Beatles’ “A Day In The Life.” Another new number, “Paisley Park,” also relied on a slow tempo and utopian lyrics recalling songs like Jimi Hendrix’s “Electric Ladyland.” Even before the tour reached its peak, a grueling stretch of sixty-seven shows between December 26, 1984, and April 7, 1985, he managed to complete his new album, entitled Around The World In A Day, by flying to studios in Minneapolis and Los Angeles during breaks, and also by relying on mobile trucks that contained full recording setups.

  The final song for the project, a ballad called “The Ladder,” was created in a typical frenzy of activity. During a five-night stand of concerts at Minnesota’s St. Paul Civic Center, Prince taught the band the tune during a sound check and recorded it with them the next day at a Minneapolis warehouse. And as the homecoming concerts continued, Prince used every free moment to complete the album.

  On Christmas Eve 1984, he and the band played an emotional matinee show in St. Paul. Afterwards, engineer Susan Rogers gathered all of the tapes for the new album and drove a mobile truck to Prince’s purple house on Kiowa Trail. She waited in the driveway until he arrived after the concert, when he recorded a final vocal and then sequenced the album with Rogers’ help. They finished work after 4 a.m. on Christmas morning, with this constituting the full extent of Prince’s holiday festivities. Rogers said, “He had nobody over there for Christmas – he was mainly interested in getting his record cut together.”

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  The American Music Awards on January 28, 1985 at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles served as yet another commemoration of Prince’s remarkable 1984. Surrounded by his peers and competitors in the music industry, from Michael Jackson to Bruce Springsteen, Prince performed “Purple Rain” with his band and collected three awards: Favorite Album for Purple Rain in the black music category and the pop music category (for which the award was presented by Denise Matthews) and Favorite Single for “When Doves Cry.” He was, in many respects, the very center of attention at this key music industry fete. The only sour note was Prince’s strange obsession with security; many eyebrows were raised when, each time he was called to the podium, he brought along bodyguard Chick Huntsberry.

  After the show, Prince, along with more than forty other pop stars, had been invited to A&M studios to participate in the recording of the song “We Are The World” for a charitable relief effort called USA for Africa. The main creative forces behind the song were its producer, the legendary bandleader Quincy Jones, and Michael Jackson, who wrote the music with Lionel Richie. The session was planned for the night of the American Music Awards to maximize the number of participants. Bruce Springsteen, Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, Bob Dylan, Tina Turner, Diana Ross, Cindy Lauper all made their way to the studio.

  A line of the song had been written for Prince to sing and a space in the studio blocked out for him to stand next to Michael Jackson. But at some point during the course of the evening, he decided not to show up, and instead took a limousine to the restaurant Carlos & Charlie’s on Sunset Boulevard with Jill Jones and several bodyguards. (Primary bodyguard Huntsberry was not present). As Prince and his entourage exited the Mexican restaurant at about 2 a.m., several paparazzi descended on him, and one audacious photographer jumped into his limousine. Prince and his friends were justifiably frightened and outraged, and the bodyguards reacted by seizing the photographer’s camera and forcefully ejecting him from the car. The police were summoned, and one bodyguard, six-foot-nine-inch, 300-pound Lawrence Gibson, was arrested for battery, and the other, Prince’s friend Wally Safford, for robbery.

  Predictably, the confluence of these back-to-back events – Prince’s no-show at a high-profile charitable event, and a violent incident involving his security staff – brought down a hail of negative publicity. Any nuances in either story were blurred, and Prince came off as self-centered, security-obsessed, and, most damningly, unwilling to drop his rock star pretenses for a charitable cause.

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  Warner Bros. had in early 1985 agreed to give Prince his own record label under the Warners umbrella, which he dubbed Paisley Park Records. Around the World in a Day would be the label’s first release. Prince previewed the finished album for Warner Bros. during a ceremonious “listening party” for about twenty company officials in early February 1985 in Los Angeles. Joni Mitchell and Prince’s father, John L. Nelson, were among the special guests present. Attendees were seated on the floor of a large conference room, and as the high-pitched flute that begins “Around The World In A Day” lilted from the speakers, Prince and Lisa walked in holding flowers; the whole scene was, according to one attendee, “very Haight-Ashbury.”

  After each song, the assembled executives applauded heartily. But in truth, many were surprised by the subdued, languorous feel of the disc’s first three songs: “Around The World In A Day,” “Paisley Park,” and the protracted ballad “Condition Of The Heart.” Not until the fourth cut, the infectiously melodic “Raspberry Beret” (featuring a very Beatles-like string section composed by Wendy and Lisa) did anything resembling a Top 40 hit emerge. All told, it was a strange follow-up to the hyper-kinetic Purple Rain. “He told me he could see on the faces of the Warner Bros. people that it wasn’t really working,” remembered Eric Leeds.

  Prince’s associates realized this rather downbeat album was unlikely to sell nearly as many copies as Purple Rain. Having reached the pinnacle of fame, his strategy seemingly was to trade in some of that success for enhanced artistic credibility. And, to his friends and bandmates, he seemed at peace with that decision, even if not everyone agreed with it. “I felt it was a mistake timing-wise to put something else out soon after Purple Rain,” keyboardist Matt Fink said, a view shared by many officials at Warner Bros., who believed that Prince was saturating the market with his music. But Prince, who saw Around The World In A Day as reaffirming his commitment to artistry, was relatively unconcerned with marketing issues. For at least the moment (and his feelings would certainly change in coming years) he had accepted that there would never be another year like 1984 for him. He had attained a level of fame that was neither possible to perpetuate nor, in the end, particularly worth saving.

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  Among the many celebrities who handed trophies to Prince at the American Music Awards show in January was Madonna, one of his rivals for mid-1980s fame. The parallels between the lives and careers of the two stars were notable. Madonna Louise Ciccone was born just two months later than Prince, and both grew up in the Midwest (Prince in Minneapolis, Madonna in Bay City, Michigan). Both suffered difficult childhoods, with Madonna losing her mother at age five, and Prince enduring his parents’ separation at age seven. Both sang unabashedly and graphically about sex and thrived on creating controversy to advance their careers.

  In the several months following the awards show, a romance between them unfolded. While both were involved in other, more serious relationships – Prince with Susannah Melvoin, Sheila E., and Jill Jones, and Madonna with the mercurial actor Sean Penn – this celebrity coupling generated ample publicity. They were seen at restaurants and clubs in Los Angeles and also turned up at each other’s concerts, sometimes briefly performing together, such as during a February 1985 show at the Los Angeles Forum, where Madonna banged a tambourine during “Baby, I’m A Star.”

  But while the tabloids spoke breathlessly of a red-hot romance, their personal chemistry was at best awkward. While Madonna was mesmerized by Prince
’s pure musical talent, something about his personality was too fey, delicate, and self-conscious for her – a man’s man like Sean Penn was more likely to stir her passions. “They were like oil and water,” recalled Alan Leeds. Where Prince was demure and cryptic, she was boisterous and rowdy; where he was mystical, she was concrete; and where he was sometimes remote and haughty, she was generally down-to-earth and relaxed. Prince’s road manager Karen Krattinger was startled to learn that Madonna treated her own staff in essence as friends. “She would say to her assistant, ‘Hey, I’m hungry, should we get some food?’” Krattinger remembered. Prince, by contrast, would simply issue orders.

  With their incompatibilities clear, the romance between Prince and Madonna would peter out in late 1985. For now, the dalliance for both was a perk of fame and means of generating even more publicity.

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  Even as he reached the pinnacle of fame, Prince engaged in various charitable efforts that were unjustly obscured by his absence from the “We Are the World” session. During the Purple Rain tour he held various benefit concerts and food drives, including concerts for the hearing-impaired. And he offered to contribute a song to the We Are The World album in lieu of having participated in the recording of the title song. He cut the song, “4 The Tears In Your Eyes,” during a rare day off from the tour; the exhausted duo of Prince and Susan Rogers worked in the vast, empty Louisiana Superdome, which the day before had been filled with 70,000 screaming fans. Unable to find any food, Rogers finally scrounged up some warm cokes and stale salami sandwiches that served as their only sustenance during a long day of recording. “He put in his time for the cause in a very noble and gracious way although no one was there to see it,” Rogers said.

  Yet the incident involving his bodyguards, along with the aloof, ultra-cool image he presented through the media, solidified public perceptions of him as an eccentric egomaniac. And matters were not helped when the National Enquirer published an article, based on an interview with Huntsberry (who had recently quit his post) entitled “The Real Prince: He’s Trapped in a Bizarre Secret World of Terror.” It described Prince as (among other things) a cloistered weirdo with an obsession for Marilyn Monroe.

  Prince poured some of his frustration about these developments into a pair of brilliant songs, “Hello” and “Old Friends 4 Sale,” recorded in the spring of 1985. “Hello” was essentially a blow-by-blow description of the evening of the “We Are the World” session. Musically, the song pulsated with energy and featured touches such as a sped-up guitar solo and a harpsichord-like keyboard riff. “Old Friends 4 Sale” straddled the border of blues and jazz and incorporated strings by Clare Fischer. The song’s title seemed a direct reference to Huntsberry’s selling of his story to the National Enquirer, and the lyrics also addressed the cocaine problem that prompted the bodyguard to sell his account to the tabloid. The unusually personal words also mentioned Prince’s manager, Steve Fargnoli, by name and alluded to the angst of the post-Purple Rain period. These two strong songs, however, were deemed too personal for prominent release: “Hello” would become a B-side to “Pop Life,” the second single from Around The World In A Day, and “Old Friends” would end up far off the public’s radar screen for a long time. A version of the song would finally be released in 1999 on The Vault . . . Old Friends 4 Sale, but by that time Prince had changed many of the lyrics, making them far less revealing.

  Recording these songs seemed to help Prince put his recent media imbroglios behind him, at least from an emotional standpoint. Still, he recognized that the controversies over “We Are The World,” the bodyguard incident, and the National Enquirer article threatened to detract from the release of Around The World In A Day. Facing the media scrutiny and sensationalism that accompanies superstardom, Prince redoubled his efforts to recast himself as an artist, rather than a celebrity to be packaged, sold, and exposed.

  As the new album was readied for distribution in spring 1985, Prince handed Warner Bros.’ publicity department a series of directives that left label officials perplexed about how to market the album. Intent on the project being viewed as an integrated artistic statement, he ordered that neither singles nor videos accompany the release. Nor did Prince want a high-octane publicity campaign; in fact, he forbade the label even from running advertisements in leading trade publications. Warners officials, unable to say no after Purple Rain, reluctantly acceded to every demand and simply hoped for the best. “Everybody was having a heart attack,’” observed Marylou Badeaux. “But we ended up doing it his way.”

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  Despite Prince’s unorthodox approach to publicity, his new album debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Pop Chart after its release in April 1985, displacing the We Are The World album from this position. Yet this magnificent start was in essence an aftershock from Purple Rain; just as Warners had feared, sales of the album tapered off quickly, and Around The World In A Day exited the No. 1 slot after just three weeks.

  Although it had seemed that Prince was prepared for a return to a more modest level of fame, the reality of seeing Around The World In A Day fade so quickly proved disconcerting. Suddenly ambivalent about his minimalist promotional strategy, he agreed to rush out a single and video of “Raspberry Beret,” both of which performed strongly on their own but failed to turn Around The World In A Day into any sort of blockbuster. (The single’s B-side, the blistering rock cut “She’s Always In My Hair,” written about Jill Jones, had more sheer power than anything on the album itself.) With the album stalling, Warners searched the album in vain for an instantly accessible pop hook that might turn things around; the second single, “Pop Life,” reached No. 7 but failed to boost album sales significantly.

  Adding to Prince’s frustration was that the album was not universally greeted as a masterpiece by music critics. While some applauded his efforts to incorporate new influences into his sound, many in the same breath concluded that he had fallen somewhat short of the mark. In comments that must have seemed particularly biting, some critics ridiculed his efforts to emulate the spirit and style of the 1960s, finding these excursions strained and overly literal; Jim Miller of Newsweek, for example, called the record “an eerie attempt to recapture the utopian whimsy that characterized the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper.”

  Prince, who had not given an interview since 1983, undertook efforts to repair his image. An extensive conversation with him appeared in the September 1985 issue of Rolling Stone, and his image graced the cover with the headline “Prince Talks.” He used this platform to defend Around The World In A Day and to argue that he had made a conscious choice to target the album at serious fans, rather than the millions who casually purchased Purple Rain. “You know how easy it would have been to open Around The World In A Day with the guitar solo that’s on the end of “Let’s Go Crazy?” he said. “That would have shut everybody up who said the album wasn’t half as powerful.” He also denied that the music or styles of the 1960s had swayed him. “The influence wasn’t the Beatles,” he asserted. “They were great for what they did, but I don’t know how that would hang today.”

  Prince also made a deliberate effort to soften and demystify his persona, inviting Rolling Stone into his purple house. The story portrayed his digs as surprisingly modest, and issued an almost point-by-point rebuttal of the National Enquirer article: “No,” reporter Neal Karlen wrote, “The man does not live in an armed fortress with only a food taster and wall-to-wall, life-size murals of Marilyn Monroe to talk to.”

  Notwithstanding Prince’s belated publicity campaign, which also included broadcast interviews with MTV and a Detroit radio station, the commercial fortunes of Around The World In A Day did not improve. The multi-platinum album was not a failure (it sold three million copies in the United States alone), but it almost seemed like one next to the unrealistic benchmark of Purple Rain, which moved more than 11 million units in the States during its initial run. Something fundamental had changed; Prince could no longer claim the mantle as the most commercially su
ccessful artist in popular music.

  In many respects, however, this was beside the point. Around The World In A Day if anything increased Prince’s stature as an artistic figure; although some critics were dissatisfied with the album as a whole, they also applauded him for trying to challenge himself and his audience. And as he prepared for his next project, Prince was prepared to continue – and indeed, to accelerate – his artistic growth.

  The Purple Rain Tour (Paul Natkin)

  Clothing designers Terry Wells and Vaughn Terry Jelks with Prince’s bodyguard Chick Huntsberry (courtesy Vaughn Terry Jelks)

  Terrance Jackson, percussionist for Prince’s first band, Grand Central (courtesy Terry Jackson)

  Purple Rain tour (Paul Natkin)

  Birthday party, 1984 (Paul Natkin)

  At a Sheila E. concert, the Ritz, New York (Paul Natkin)

  22. Prince and the Counterrevolution

  While the Beatles and other sixties rock bands were the primary influence on Around The World In A Day, Prince soon began exploring other genres, including the jazz fusion compositions of Miles Davis and others. Influenced by Miles’ rich textures and by the ethnic allusions in the music of Duke Ellington, Prince continued to move in new stylistic directions, for the first time in his career integrating saxophone and trumpet into his music.