The Rise of Prince 1958-1988

by Hahn, Alex

  An alarmed Alan Leeds moved swiftly to save the tour. Hustling to Wendy and Lisa’s apartment, he said he sympathized with their grievances but urged them to at least postpone their exits. They agreed, although it was clear that a long-term reconciliation between Prince and his two best friends was unlikely. Brown also agreed to stay for the tour only after Prince pleaded with him.

  As the tour got underway, even Prince’s longest-serving band member, Bobby Z., felt a distance growing between himself and Prince. Sheila E., whose band was the opening act on the Japanese leg of the Parade tour, often sat in with the Revolution on drums during sound checks. It was clear that Rivkin’s job might be in jeopardy.

  Most of the band found the Parade tour highly satisfying, at least from a purely musical perspective. A fifteen-date European swing put the band before a total of 120,000 people in London, Paris, Rotterdam, Stockholm, Hamburg, and other cities, and, in contrast to the regimented Purple Rain tour, these shows allowed for improvisation and variation of the set. Some of the songs took on a jazzy orientation, such as “Anotherloverholeinyohead,” which became a forum for Lisa’s piano soloing and the horn work of Eric Leeds and Blistan. The feelings of artistic connection made Wendy and Lisa wonder whether their relationship with Prince might be salvageable after all. Offstage, though, Prince’s treatment of the women was aloof, making it clear that their aborted departure before the tour had offended him. The notion that someone would leave him, rather than vice versa, seemed unthinkable.

  Beyond the music, other elements of the show – and particularly the three dancers – were more controversial among Prince’s brain trust. Steve Fargnoli, like Wendy and Lisa, had reservations about the shift from a basic pop-rock group to a sprawling funk revue. Prince’s live act had shifted from a quirky, androgynous scene dominated by him and Wendy to a more traditional spectacle of R&B showmanship. Fargnoli believed something had been lost in the transition.

  ***

  After a show in London, Prince encountered a fifteen-year-old girl named Anna Garcia, who very much fit his paradigm of seductive female beauty in the manner of Denise Matthews and Patricia Kotero. The attraction between Prince and Garcia was immediate, and they spent a long night talking together in a hotel room. But Prince, seemingly mindful of the potential consequences, made no sexual advances. He did, however, promise to stay in touch. He also held out the possibility of building a side project around her.

  The tour continued on through Europe and then headed for Japan, where ticket sales and audience responses were also strong. From all outward appearances, Prince and the Revolution were at the top of their game and remained a tightly knit unit. Behind the scenes, Prince remained physically and emotionally remote from his band members, whose grievances had continued to accumulate.

  They concluded the tour before a raucous crowd of 50,000 people at Yokohama Stadium on September 9, 1986. The band finished the set with an encore of “Sometimes It Snows In April.”

  As Prince and the band rode back to their hotel, the atmosphere in the limousine was tense and freighted with finality. Prince, a towel wrapped around his neck, appeared exhausted and said nothing. Wendy and Lisa looked at their bandleader and then at each other, still uncertain what was to happen next. After a successful tour that relied heavily on their presence, would Prince come to his senses and realize their importance to the band? Would The Dream Factory, which was sure to receive critical acclaim upon its release, further vindicate their contributions? Or would the Revolution, the backing band that had effectively become part of Prince’s persona, reach its final conclusion, bringing the album down with it?

  Alan Leeds, who had managed to keep the band together long enough to complete the tour, felt certain he knew what the answers would be, and knew there was nothing more he could do to change them.

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  Following the tour, Prince and select members of his entourage fled the coming Minnesota winter for southern California in October 1986. Just days after the move, he invited Wendy and Lisa to his rented home in Beverly Hills, ostensibly for an evening of dinner and shooting pool.

  After they ate, Prince excused himself and placed a phone call to Bobby Z. in Minneapolis, where it was two-thirty in the morning. Prince quickly came to the point: he was replacing Bobby with Sheila E. “You’re the man and you’ve done a great job,” Prince said, trying to soften the blow. “We’re gonna be friends forever. I’m gonna honor your contract.” Rivkin, tired after years of non-stop touring, accepted the decision with equanimity. “Sheila E. was one of the five best drummers in the world, in my opinion,” he said later. “I was replaced by someone who was one of a kind. And the way Prince let me go was totally admirable, totally kosher, totally man-to-man.”

  After hanging up, Prince returned to Wendy and Lisa at the dinner table and told them that he was disbanding the Revolution and that they too were being fired. They were surprised, if not entirely shocked; in the previous months, it had become clear that their bond with Prince was broken beyond repair.

  Although Rivkin appreciated the rationale behind his own dismissal, the ousting of Wendy and Lisa seemed less explicable, given their central importance in Prince’s personal and professional lives. “I really don’t understand, to this day, what happened when he let Wendy and Lisa go,” Rivkin said. “It’s the old expression of getting too close, I think.”

  Matt Fink, whom Prince invited to remain in the band, also considered the decision to dismiss Wendy and Lisa a mistake, believing that Lisa’s evocative piano style, in particular, would prove irreplaceable.

  Alan Leeds, while mindful of the musical consequences, was unsurprised by Prince’s decision. He knew that Prince associated particular projects with the personalities involved, and that his feelings about Wendy and Lisa had become completely negative. By breaking up the band, Prince sought to purge these emotions, and after Wendy and Lisa departed, friends and colleagues were told not even to mention their names.

  With Wendy, Lisa, and Rivkin gone, Brown quit to pursue solo success despite being asked by Prince to stay. Aside from Fink, Prince had lost or exiled a group of musicians that had been a part of his identity from Purple Rain onward. As anticipated, he cancelled the release of The Dream Factory and shelved other material he had developed with the Revolution, sending an important body of music to the cutting room floor.

  Even more broadly than the band itself, the salon of interesting musicians and loyal friends that had emerged from the Revolution period had been disbanded. After several years of exposure to various forms of rock and jazz through friends like Wendy and Lisa, and Eric and Alan Leeds, he had simply had enough. “Prince shut down the school,” Alan Leeds noted. “He had the education in Ellington, Miles, and Joni Mitchell, and he was ready to move on. He felt he had gotten out of us what he needed.”

  In Wendy and Lisa in particular, Prince had lost companions who were playful, open-minded, and opinionated – qualities that were to Prince’s benefit in his social and professional lives. “The songs we did with Wendy and Lisa,” Eric Leeds noted, “included some of the most wonderful stuff we ever did.”

  24. Masterpiece

  With the Revolution gone, Prince was intent on proving that he could thrive entirely on his own. Not two weeks after dismissing Wendy and Lisa, in October 1986, Prince returned to the familiar surroundings of Sunset Sound’s Studio 3, preparing songs for what he hoped would be a career-defining work that would silence all doubters.

  A year earlier, during the recording of Parade, the Sunset complex had percolated with the activities of his associates. But now, the core group had shrunk down to Prince and engineer Susan Rogers. When they weren’t in Los Angeles, the duo spent most of their time working in Prince’s home studio.

  Like the material from Around The World In A Day and Parade, Prince’s recordings from fall 1986 incorporated new approaches – the funky cut “Hot Thing” used a recurring keyboard embellishment that sounded simultaneously psychedelic and Middle Eastern, wh
ile the rocker “I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man” echoed sixties surf pop – and yet, this music was unmistakably Prince, bearing his trademarks of minimalism and unresolved tension.

  As Prince became more adept at using the recording studio as an instrument in itself, new sounds and textures emerged by happenstance, as he proved willing to follow wherever “mistakes” brought him. “The Ballad Of Dorothy Parker,” the first song recorded in his Galpin Boulevard home studio, got its mid-range-dominated sound as a result of a technical glitch. While Prince and engineer Rogers were working, a snowstorm caused a power outage. When the lights came back on and work resumed, the playbacks seemed to Rogers dull and murky; Prince, in a creative trance, did not notice, and Rogers was hesitant to interrupt the session. But when she checked the equipment after he went to bed, Rogers found that, as a result of the blackout, the soundboard had been running on half of its recommended wattage, robbing “Dorothy Parker” of its high end and giving the song a distant and subdued feel. Learning of the problem the next day, Prince treated it as serendipity, deciding that the offbeat sound added character.

  Later, when at Sunset Sound to record the avant-garde funk number “If I Was Your Girlfriend,” Rogers committed a rare technical error that caused Prince’s vocal to distort on certain words. “I thought he was going to rip my head off,” Rogers remembered. But when Prince came into the control booth to hear the playback, he seemed to like the results. Yet another studio mishap shaped “Forever In My Life,” a ballad comprising nothing more than several tracks of vocals, a percussion pattern composed on the Linn LM-1, and sprinkles of acoustic guitar. Before singing, Prince asked Rogers to mute his previously recorded backing vocal; upon playback, it was apparent that he had begun late, and that his lead vocal thus lagged behind the rest of the music. Again, Prince found the results of the blunder worth keeping.

  Along with the new material he was developing at Sunset Sound and in his home studio, Prince had a cache of strong songs culled from the shelved Dream Factory album. Although he wanted to avoid releasing numbers that featured input from Wendy and Lisa or other band members, he planned to use several of his solo compositions from the discarded album. The arsenal was full for the masterpiece Prince wanted to uncork.

  The exact nature of the album, however, remained up in the air, and Prince played with various concepts. Further exploring the studio technique of speeding up his voice that he had used on “Erotic City,” Prince conceived of an alter-ego named “Camille” based around this concept. During a nine-day period at Sunset Sound, he recorded five songs for an album called Camille. Over cocktails at Tramps, a Los Angeles nightclub, Prince told saxophonist Eric Leeds of an idea for a film in which Prince would play two characters, one being the “evil Camille.” At the end of the film it would be revealed that the two were one and the same, and that the protagonist had a split personality.

  Although the film concept was nebulous at best, the notion of a “Camille” album was more concrete, and he rapidly sequenced a record that included only tracks using the speeded-up vocal sound. But he soon discarded that idea and planned something even more outlandish: a three-album set. “He knew that just having the balls to do three records would create a big bang,” Alan Leeds said. And he would do it as a one-man band, playing nearly every instrument on one of the longest albums of all time.

  Prince remained in virtual lockdown mode at Sunset Sound as he worked to complete the project. Among his next efforts were “Adore,” a gospel ballad comparable to the best of Al Green, and the punkish “Play In The Sunshine.” And other new influences emerged. Prince had been listening to the ethereal, highly melodic compositions of Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel, becoming particularly enthralled by Bush’s signature composition “Cloudbusting.” In July, he recorded a haunting ballad called “Joy in Repetition” that displayed Bush’s influence and ranked with the strongest of the new songs.

  Another notable new composition was the lengthy, suite-like “Crystal Ball,” which Prince conceived as one of the most profound statements of his worldview and a showcase of his musical range. The lyrics touched on war and political extremism, and the musical passages ran the gamut from funk to reggae. As he had done with songs for The Family project in 1984, Prince sent “Crystal Ball” to orchestral composer Clare Fischer for extensive overdubbing. He included a note explaining the importance of the song. Fischer, along with his writing partner and son Brent, used a sixty-piece orchestra including eight French horns to sprinkle dramatic flourishes across the 10-minute song. In its ambitious construction, the song very much evoked the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” and seemed certain to be greeted by critics as a major leap forward for Prince as an experimentalist.

  As his bold new album took shape, Prince began previewing it for friends, who quickly realized they were hearing some of his strongest material ever. “He just loved playing music for people when he had their undivided attention,” recalled Alan Leeds. “You would get in his car with him, maybe drive to a Dairy Queen and get an ice cream, and then just sit and listen to the sequence of a new album.” In the past, Prince often seemed open to feedback on minor issues like track sequence, but not in the case of Crystal Ball. “His attitude was, ‘Don’t mess with me, this is it!’” Leeds recalled.

  With the album nearly finished, Prince took a rare night off to celebrate Thanksgiving with Susannah Melvoin, who remained his girlfriend even after the departure of Wendy and Lisa. Susan Rogers, whom Prince also invited, arrived at his rented Beverly Hills house expecting a large, festive crowd; she found no one but a tired Prince and his girlfriend. “After dinner we watched some videos, and he fell asleep on the couch,” Rogers remembered. “That was Thanksgiving.”

  A number of the songs slated for Crystal Ball had been directly inspired by Susannah. “The Ballad Of Dorothy Parker,” recorded after a fight between the couple, related how Prince consoled himself through an anonymous affair with a waitress. “If I Was Your Girlfriend” found Prince wishing for the relaxed intimacy enjoyed by female friends, flowing from his observations of Susannah and Wendy. And “Forever In My Life” captured his relationship with Susannah at a pivotal moment, with Prince promising that he was tired of meaningless sexual encounters.

  In truth, Prince’s relationship with Susannah continued to be poisoned by his many affairs. This also upset Karen Krattinger, who by now had become general manager of Prince’s production company. Susannah was one of her best friends; knowing this, Prince still ordered Krattinger to perform odious tasks like installing her in an apartment after Prince banished her from his new home. After years of backbreaking hours (which included almost single-handedly organizing Prince’s sprawling business files into a functional state), Krattinger began to wonder how long she could continue. “Prince put me in the middle of his relationship way too much,” she said. “I saw him throwing away and hurting the most wonderful woman I felt he would ever know.”

  Prince made little secret of his dalliances with other women. While one-night stands were a frequent occurrence, there were also steady companions in the form of Jill Jones and Sheila E., whose importance as a musical collaborator continued to grow. A tense and unpleasant dynamic developed between Susannah and Sheila, who encountered each other not infrequently as a result of their intersecting musical and personal relationships with Prince. And Sheila’s emotions, like Susannah’s, were affected by her shifting fortunes. Krattinger, who dealt with frequent requests from all members of Prince’s entourage, recalls Sheila as humble and cordial when on the outs with Prince, but haughty and disdainful when the romance was flourishing. “It was as if she thought that when she was going out with him, she should be treated exactly like him,” Krattinger said.

  Each of Prince’s “girlfriends” had something in common: their willingness to accept, although not always entirely without protest, his insistence on maintaining multiple relationships. And while few of his serious romantic interests were complete pushovers – Sheila E. was a stunn
ingly talented musician, and Susannah hailed from a sophisticated, musically inclined family – they were disinclined to challenge his behavior. Conversely, his affairs with more headstrong women, such as Madonna and the New York artist-singer Carole Davis, tended to be very short-lived. “I don’t think he actually wanted to be around anyone more worldly or knowledgeable than himself for very long,” observed Leeds. “He gravitated to more simple women who’d settle for staying in his house, sharing popcorn and movies and not challenging his comings and goings.”

  His romantic life, while bountiful, was not allowed to detract from his music. One of Prince’s favorite tasks was sequencing albums, and arranging the many strong tracks of Crystal Ball was a particularly satisfying exercise. The album had shaped up as exactly the magnum opus he had hoped for, bristling with energy and experimentation, and yet coherent and structurally sound as an overall body of work.

  The task of getting Warners behind the ambitious project fell to Steve Fargnoli. Fargnoli hoped that just as Mo Ostin and Lenny Waronker ultimately supported 1999 as a double album and put the full force of their offices behind Purple Rain, they would embrace an album that would be greeted a masterpiece.

  This assumption proved to be wrong. While Ostin and Waronker still viewed Prince as an unstoppable creative force, they had developed concerns about his business judgments, believing in particular that he released albums too frequently. Since Purple Rain, Prince’s album sales had tapered off consistently, due in part to questionable projects like Under the Cherry Moon, which had spun out of control, harming the performance of Parade. Wendy and Lisa were gone, along with the valuable trademark that had been the Revolution.

  With Crystal Ball, Prince faced an additional problem: no one in his inner circle, including Fargnoli, was entirely supportive of the concept of a triple album. Alan Leeds, while enthusiastic about most of the material, feared that such a sprawling release could be perceived as a display of arrogance rather than a defining accomplishment. “A backlash among fans and critics was certainly possible,” he noted. “Besides die-hard fans bathing in an orgy of new material, there were few upsides.”