by Hahn, Alex
26. Don’t Buy The Black Album
On December l, 1987, Prince entered Rupert’s, a Minneapolis dance club, armed with a test pressing of The Black Album, whose planned release was a week away. As he often did before releasing albums, he played the new music over the system without fanfare to see how club-goers would react.
As the music played, Prince mingled with the crowd and eventually became involved in a detailed conversation with a singer-songwriter-poet in her early twenties named Ingrid Chavez. An attractive brunette with a serious and reflective air, Chavez had moved to Minneapolis several years earlier to work on music with a friend. But that collaboration had soured, and since then she had been working alone on her poetry and spoken-word pieces.
Prince and Chavez seemed fascinated by each other despite an apparent lack of sexual chemistry, and, after a while, they drove back to the recently completed Paisley Park studio complex. They continued a lengthy and intense conversation about spirituality, love, and life fulfillment, but Prince eventually excused himself, saying he had a stomachache. Waiting to see where the strange night would go next, Chavez stayed put while Prince disappeared elsewhere in the complex.
At about one-thirty a.m., Karen Krattinger received a phone call from Prince. Speaking with uncharacteristic emotion, he apologized for having been so hard on her, said he had trouble expressing his feelings, and that he loved her.
At about the same time that night, Susan Rogers also got a phone call from Prince, asking her to come to Paisley Park. After four years as Prince’s engineer, she had resigned that post shortly after the completion of The Black Album in October 1987, and the call was unexpected. Somewhat concerned, she agreed to go to the studio. Arriving in the rehearsal room, Rogers found it dark, save for a few red candles that cast shadows across the walls. Out of the gloom, she heard a woman’s voice.
“Are you looking for Prince?”
Rogers, who would later learn this was Chavez, answered, “Yes.” “Well, he’s here somewhere,” Chavez replied.
Abruptly, Prince emerged out of the darkness, looking unlike she had ever seen him before. “I’m certain he was high,” Rogers said. “His pupils were really dilated. He looked like he was tripping.”
As he had with Krattinger, Prince became uncharacteristically emotional. “I just want to know one thing. Do you still love me?” Rogers, startled, said she did, and that she knew he loved her.
“Will you stay?” Prince asked.
“No, I won’t,” she said, and left the complex, shaken by Prince’s behavior and the eerie scene.
Inside Paisley, Prince continued to react intensely to the drug, and became overwhelmed with negative emotion. The target of his fears, he explained to Chavez and bodyguard Gilbert Davison, was The Black Album. The album, he told Chavez, represented an evil force that needed to be eradicated. It was, in effect, the devil working through him.
The next morning when Prince encountered Krattinger, he appeared embarrassed and made no reference to the strange phone call of the night before. But it became clear to her and others in the coming days that Prince believed that he had experienced a spiritual and moral epiphany that night at Paisley Park. He felt that Chavez, serving as a guide and muse, had led him to a greater connection with God. The Black Album, he decided, was entirely inconsistent with this transformation.
Days after the drug trip, Warners’ Mo Ostin received an anguished call from Prince. As a complete about-face from his demands of just weeks earlier, he insisted that The Black Album be scrapped. “Prince was very adamant and pleaded with Mo,” recalled Marylou Badeaux. What Prince was asking, Ostin reported, was an expensive logistical nightmare. Five hundred thousand LPs – which now needed to be destroyed – had been pressed, and were on loading docks ready for shipment to stores.
Prince insisted that he would reimburse Warners for its manufacturing costs and also for the destruction of the albums. It was clear that Prince not only wanted the release cancelled, but effectively wanted The Black Album wiped from existence.
Warners did destroy the vast majority of records, but saved around one hundred. Inevitably, some of these leaked to journalists, which were in turn duplicated and shared with friends. Within months, The Black Album quickly became available on the bootleg market, with fans selling and trading cassette duplicates of widely varying fidelity.
The mystery around the cancellation, and the shocking nature of some of the lyrics, made it a hotly sought after item. And the reactions of the hardcore fans who managed to get hold of copies were largely positive; The Black Album was seen as representing a refreshing new direction, and a kind of improvisational counterpoint to the more schematic Sign O’ The Times. That it had not been officially released became irrelevant to the fans who excitedly discussed the album at nightclubs, coffee shops, and record stores.
Perhaps the only unfortunate part for fans was that Prince had become so disenchanted with it. But for the label that released his albums, the project had been nothing but trouble. Prince’s lurching back and forth between first insisting upon The Black Album’s release and then on its destruction caused further frustration and doubts about his career direction.
***
New Year’s Eve 1987, by outward appearances, was a festive night for Prince. He and the band performed a rousing version of the European tour show for a benefit concert at Paisley Park. Miles Davis guested and played solos on a thirty-four-minute, jam-filled “It’s Gonna Be A Beautiful Night.” Some band members – particularly Eric Leeds and Matt Blistan – seemed to forget exactly whose band they were in. “We were just so absorbed with Miles that the whole band missed a cue that Prince gave,” recalled Eric. “And Prince kind of yelled at us, like “Hey, remember me?” We all had a laugh.
In truth, the year had been a tremendously frustrating one, and he started to take it out on others. His treatment of employees, such as when he had asked Karen Krattinger to cancel her Thanksgiving plans to perform a non-essential task, veered towards callousness. “You are not my family,” she responded in refusing his request.
Engineer Susan Rogers had developed similar feelings over the course of the year, ultimately prompting her to quit. “He was in such a bad mood all the time and a lot of us were reaching a burnout phase with him,” said Rogers, who after four years with Prince had made her decision and left. “It just wasn’t a good feeling in the air.”
But had Prince, in shelving The Black Album, experienced a spiritual rebirth that would put all of the negativity of the past two years aside? Associates had their doubts. At the very least, when employees bumped into their boss at the now-completed Paisley Park complex, he tried hard to be cheery. “This was a guy who had an awakening and made a major decision that he was going to change his focus, be it temporarily or permanently,” said Alan Leeds. But for some, the notion of a personal transformation seemed dubious. “It was a facade,” said Karen Krattinger. “It was evident to me that he still wasn’t happy with his life.”
27. Not Confused Anymore
Within days of The Black Album being pulled from the market, Prince threw himself into the recording of his next album, Lovesexy, which he conceived as a document of the awakening he had experienced at Paisley Park with Ingrid Chavez. While the tension between carnality and spirituality had been central to Prince’s music since Controversy, he now presented these two forces as not in conflict but in harmony. His mission became in essence to synthesize the sexual freedom he’d famously espoused throughout his career with a reverence for a higher power, and to present these things in a unified work of art.
Prince worked mostly by himself, although Sheila E. played drums on several tracks. One of the first songs recorded was “The Line,” a stately mid-tempo rocker with religious lyrics inspired by a Chavez poem, which was planned as the album’s centerpiece. Prince, Boni Boyer, and Sheila E. shared vocal chores for the musically and lyrically complex number. He was surprised, however, when associates seemed lukewarm about the song. “Prin
ce felt he was really onto something with ‘The Line,’ but he wasn’t getting the reaction he wanted from the people he played it for,” recalled Joe Blaney, who engineered the session. “He kept retouching the song, adding more overdubs.”
Prince eventually discarded “The Line” but continued to emphasize religious themes as he developed material. He retooled a Crystal Ball castaway called “The Ball” into “Eye No,” which showed Prince wrestling with good and evil in a dark night of the soul, and welcoming listeners to something he called the new power generation.
Musically, he explored labyrinthine arrangements and dense instrumentation that at times threatened to sink the songs under their own weight. “I thought Lovesexy was going to be a great album, but when I heard the final mixes, I was very disappointed,” said Eric Leeds, who added saxophone to various songs and felt that Prince’s overdubbing had become excessive.
Some bandmates had trouble relating to the religious messages, and also wondered why Ingrid Chavez was playing such a crucial role. When his confidants were confused by the lyrics of the title track, he re-recorded it to make the meaning ring out more clearly. It still didn’t work. “I did not understand what the term ‘lovesexy’ was supposed to mean,” Eric Leeds said. “People weren’t getting it.”
Still, there was at least one moment when Prince, as friends had hoped, laid bare his emotions to deliver the monumental “Anna Stesia.” The song explored Prince’s feelings of loneliness and his hopes for redemption. Based around a simple piano motif, the song also featured lush instrumentation that in this instance enhanced rather than detracted from its overall impact.
With the recording process complete, Prince presented the album to Warner Bros. along with cover art that he viewed as an essential part of Lovesexy’s overall message. Based upon a photo by Jean-Baptiste Mondino that had been touched up to look like a painting, it showed a nude Prince sitting with his hand on his heart, his right leg raised slightly to cover his genital area. The background of oversized flowers and ferns included a flower stamen resembling a semi-erect phallus.
When Warners’ marketing department passed around the cover during a meeting, several worried aloud that retail outlets would refuse to carry the album. Warners requested alternative art from Prince, which he quickly deemed out of the question. His conception of Lovesexy as a unified whole also prompted his refusal to “index” the compact disc version, meaning that consumers who bought the CD could not flip from song to song, but had to listen to the album in its entirety. The CD medium was just becoming widespread when Lovesexy was released, and Warners worried that consumers would be frustrated if they couldn’t navigate to their favorite songs.
He dropped another bombshell: there would be no music videos for the album, including for the lead single, “Alphabet Street.” He insisted to Warners’ stunned marketing team that the absence of a video would distinguish him from other pop stars, as well as create a sense of mystery about the album.
On all of these points – the cover, the indexing of the CD, and the lack of videos – Warners ultimately gave in, not wanting to repeat the ugly fight that had ensued over Crystal Ball. And on the positive side of the ledger, Prince was clearly invested in the project in a way he had not been with Sign O’ The Times. As a planned May release date approached, Warners officials prepared a publicity plan and crossed their fingers.
***
On a blustery day in late March 1988 in the Minneapolis suburb of Eden Prairie, Alan Leeds was happy to have a day off from the hectic and exhausting routine of being one of Prince’s closest aides. It was warm inside, a sporting event was on TV, and Leeds was home with his family.
The phone rang, and Leeds heard Prince’s voice upon picking up. “I want to shoot a video,” he said without saying hello. Leeds had to press to find out exactly what this meant. Did he want to make a clip for “Alphabet Street,” after all? Prince said yes, and Leeds asked if he had spoken to Steve Fargnoli about this. No, Prince responded, he wanted to shoot without meddling from the managers or Warners. Leeds cautioned that Prince would have to pay for the video himself; didn’t it make more sense to contact Warners first, which would readily provide financing?
No, Prince said. He wanted to do it on his own.
“Okay, when?” Leeds asked.
“Today,” Prince responded.
An incredulous Leeds tried to convince Prince to hold off at least until the coming week. Snow was beginning to fall, and it was already mid-afternoon. No respectable team of filmmakers could be assembled on such short notice, particularly in Minneapolis where, as Leeds reminded Prince, there was not a film crew on every block. Even if a crew agreed to do the shoot, it was unlikely that adequate equipment could be rented and that everyone would make it through the snow to the set.
“Sounds to me like that’s your problem, not mine,” Prince retorted.
Leeds realized he would have to placate Prince by placing some phone calls. Although the local film community was not large, Leeds knew several skilled directors. Predictably, they refused the assignment. Working through his Rolodex, Leeds called filmmakers whom he considered “B-list,” and began to worry that even if someone agreed to take the job, the end result wouldn’t be worth the time, effort, or money. As Leeds waited for callbacks, Prince continued to hector him with periodic phone calls. “When are we shooting?” he asked repeatedly, undeterred by Leeds’ warnings that no top-flight filmmakers were available.
Leeds doggedly continued his efforts and finally found a director, Michael Barnard, who was willing to take on the assignment. But the question remained: could the director locate a facility and equipment? The afternoon dragged into evening, and the snow kept falling. Prince’s barrage of phone calls to the Leeds residence continued. Finally, Barnard called: the shoot was a go. The location would be a drab building owned by a cable TV company, and he obtained only basic equipment that was typically used to film local city council meetings. Leeds, not surprised that matters had come to this, called Prince and told him the news.
By 11 p.m., with most of the city under snow, the shoot finally began. Prince had rounded up Sheila E. and Cat Glover to participate. The video was shot against a blue screen, and the resulting footage looked amateurish. During the post-production process, Prince had Barnard jazz up the video by having various textual phrases dart across the screen, including “Don’t buy The Black Album, I’m sorry,” and “Ecstasy.” Ultimately, the clip looked more like an excerpt from Sesame Street than a professional product. From Warners’ perspective, it was better than nothing – but not by much.
***
Critical reaction to Lovesexy upon its release in May 1988 was divided. Some saw the album as both heartfelt and experimental, and a logical extension of Sign O’ The Times in its musical complexity. Others found it simultaneously narcissistic and unfocussed. “Prince’s chaff is inevitably more interesting than most artists’ wheat,” commented Rolling Stone, “[But] some of the songs are uncharacteristically ordinary.” Added David Hiltbrand in People, “There’s too much autoerotic noodling going on ... There is virtually no evidence of Prince’s patented fine-boned funk.”
U.S. consumers were also underwhelmed; the record sold only 750,000 copies, Prince’s worst commercial showing since his debut record. For the first time in years, Prince had failed to deliver a record that achieved platinum status. Fortunately, critical and consumer reaction was much stronger in Europe, where Prince’s popularity had continued to grow and was now comparable to his standing in America during the Purple Rain period. Lovesexy moved a healthy 1.9 million copies overseas.
Very few hardcore fans were alienated by the album; while not necessarily a classic, it contained a solid handful of strong numbers and plenty of interesting experimental touches. “Anna Stesia,” “Alphabet Street,” and “Positivity” were all seen as meaningfully adding to Prince’s canon.
To bolster the album in the U.S., Prince began planning an elaborate summer tour. Bursting with ideas a
bout a show that would document his spiritual awakening, he conceived an elaborate stage set that would be the costliest of his entire career, and which incorporated design elements of the now-infamous Jean-Baptiste Mondino album cover.
At first, Steve Fargnoli was open to the idea of an epic-scale tour, believing that it could boost Lovesexy’s commercial performance. He joined in the planning, and some of his suggestions were incorporated into Roy Bennett’s set design. But as costs escalated, the manager’s business sense took over, and he recommended scaling the production back. The advice was ignored, and in the end the set became arguably the most grandiose touring production of the 1980s, with an expansive 70- by 80-foot stage, including sophisticated hydraulics, a basketball net, and swing set. The most dramatic element was a Thunderbird automobile that would circle the stage at the beginning of the show, from which Prince would exit to manic applause. This element alone cost $250,000 – more than the entire set for the European Sign O’ The Times tour. “Prince kept adding things and saying, ‘Can I have this?,’” Bennett recalled. “The car was a big deal, but Prince wanted to have this car.”
When Prince insisted on yet another pricey element – a massive water fountain that would sit in front of the stage, creating a Vegas-like spectacle – Fargnoli objected. He argued to Prince that the tour could not turn a profit with so many costly visual elements, and urged that at least the waterfall be dropped. Prince refused, and Bennett was ordered to build it. Later, Prince changed his mind, concluding that the presence of cascading water near so much electrical equipment constituted a safety hazard. The waterfall was sent to storage and never used.
Fargnoli, miffed that his advice had been so blatantly disregarded, and already stressed to the breaking point, started having spats with Prince during their phone calls. Soon, they ceased to communicate directly, and Alan Leeds was squeezed into the uncomfortable role of middleman between his bosses, who each relied on him to deliver heated messages.
