Prince Read online

  Hendrix’s and Jackson’s success were to some degree accidents of musical history. Jimi’s style, stagecraft, and eager recolonisation of white blues rock came to notice first of all in Britain; the Experience trio was two-thirds white and they had a white manager. In a somewhat different way, Thriller filled what seemed like a creative vacuum in pop music, left since Stevie Wonder’s muse deserted him. What made Prince different was that he was also able to write and play convincingly colour-blind music. Long before the well-crafted psychedelia of Raspberry Beret, Prince was in thrall to The Beatles. He could also windmill and crash out power chords like Pete Townshend of The Who, and one of the unexpected influences of his teenage years in Minneapolis had been the ‘bicep rock’ of Grand Funk Railroad, still possibly the noisiest band ever.

  Onstage, Prince didn’t have quite the range of vocal styles available to him in the studio, but a clear and steady falsetto was one of them and, though it made reference to the peerless Curtis Mayfield, there was no mistaking in it an unlikely debt to Joni Mitchell, especially the laid-back mystery and buried tension of The Hissing of Summer Lawns. It’s an influence that can still be heard on 1987’s ‘Starfish and Coffee’ from the brilliant Sign ‘O’ The Times album, but it’s pervasive. ‘She taught me about colour’, he said to a reporter, though in this case at least he meant voice and instrumental colour rather than the industry demographics he was in the process of changing. Elsewhere, he credited Joni with shaping his understanding of space and silence. In turn, Mitchell acknowledged the impact she’d had on him: ‘Prince has assimilated some of my harmonies, which because they come out of my guitar tunings, is unusual. A lot of the time my chords depict complex emotions . . .’

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  Such eclecticism is not unusual in black music. To some degree, it defines it. So Michael Eric Dyson argues in his book Between God and Gangsta Rap, published in 1996, the year Prince’s grasp on that rich dichotomy seemed to come temporarily unstuck. To what extent Prince’s cherry-picking, not just from within the black tradition but between traditions, was new or merely different in degree is scarcely important. What is beyond doubt is that the music of the 1980s and after would have been radically different without him. His most distinctive albums – Dirty Mind, 1999, Purple Rain, Sign ‘O’ The Times, Emancipation – are all contemporary classics. Between 1978 and 1988, he matured, not just as a songwriter and musician, but also as an engineer and producer, turning the slightly fussy feel of his first two albums, the antithesis of a home-made, punk aesthetic, into product that major labels and studios couldn’t match. At the same time, his vehement reaction to corporate pressure became a model for other musicians stuck with no-win contracts or creatively restricted by the men on the twenty-fifth floor. (He put in a call to George Michael during the British singer’s battles with Sony.) Whether Prince really created a new, ‘biracial’ music or was merely a gifted eclectic, less an innovator than a brilliant assimilator who fashioned his own creative environment by plunder – sometimes rich grave goods, sometimes overlooked shards – remains the question. The background to it, if not quite the answer, lies in Prince’s upbringing in a quiet Midwestern city.

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  Minneapolis, 1997. A baby boy is playing in the dirt with a purple ball when his attention is diverted by three gold chains half buried beside him. His cries disturb a television journalist standing nearby to report on the start of a rock tour that is going to reverse ‘the low concert grossing of even the biggest of the superstar acts’. The baby jumps into his teenage mother’s arms and shows her what he’s found. ‘The young mother holds the chains to her bosom and begins to remember back, back . . . five years ago.’

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  Minneapolis, 1992. Warner Brothers release, its non-verbal emblem a combination of the astrological signs for male and female. It’s the work of the label’s most charismatic but also most troublesome artist. The album is supposed to come with a video programme that links sixteen funk songs into a narrative about a rock star and a teenage Egyptian princess. The inheritor of a sacred relic, the ‘three gold rings of Turin’, she is being pursued by the seven men who murdered her father. In an attempt to find them first, she sends a tape of her dancing to the legendary rock star. He falls in love at once, as princes are supposed to fall in love with princesses. But he fears emotional entrapment and consoles himself in sex with others. In so doing, he also destroys seven older versions of himself who are, of course, the old king’s killers. A double destiny is thus enacted. The 320-year-old pretender and the sixteen-year-old princess are mystically united.

  The journalist Vanessa Bartholomew was played in the video by Kirstie Alley, who made her name in the cult television series Cheers. Her part was largely cut out of the final album mix. It survives in a short abortive conversation with the star – he hangs up as soon as she admits the conversation is being taped – and in her later attempt to question him about about a rumour that the crown princess of Egypt has become a member of his band, the New Power Generation. He flirts with her, pretends to be called Victor, and hangs up mid-sentence. The princess, for whom the whole elaborate story was confected, was played by a dancer-singer called Mayte. The rock star was, for now, still known as Prince.

  Their mystical union was made flesh almost five years later and almost at the date imagined in the video. On February 14, 1996, Prince and Mayte Janelle Garcia exchanged vows at a church in Minneapolis. It was a complex time career-wise for the musician. Over the previous year, he’d taken to appearing in public, most notoriously at the Brits Music Awards, with the word SLAVE written in eyebrow pencil on his cheek. (So iconic a moment was this that some time later a member of Blur appeared at the same event with DAVE pencilled on his cheek.) At the start of 1996, Prince had parted company with his enslavers Warner Brothers, the record company which had made him a star with unprecedented control over his own music, by dashing off in just ten days a contract-fulfilling final album before he launched his own NPG imprint on EMI. Slight it may have been, but that year’s well-named Chaos and Disorder still sold substantially better than Mayte’s own Children of the Sun album, a solo project written and produced by Prince.

  In November 1996, just before the launch of a triple set significantly called Emancipation, Mayte gave birth to a premature baby boy. Gregory was fated never to find gold chains in the dust. The infant was diagnosed as having a medical condition known as acrocephalosyndactyly, more commonly as Pfeiffer’s syndrome or ‘clover-leaf syndrome’ after a distinctive deformation of the skull. In what has to be seen as an emancipation for a child fated never to see, hear, taste or smile, the boy died a fortnight later, after his life support system was switched off. To everyone’s astonishment, Prince went ahead with release plans for the new album, threw a lavish party and fulfilled video and press commitments. The rumour mill suggested that the baby’s uterine heartbeat could be heard on Emancipation. The rumour mill also picked up on a line in the seemingly autobiographical ‘The Sacrifice of Victor’ which suggested Prince had suffered from epilepsy in early childhood. Did this explain his small stature – five foot two to five foot four depending on your source – and did it maybe suggest that Gregory’s problems were hereditary? There were more surprises to come. On Oprah, he denied that there had been anything wrong with the child. On a slightly later occasion, three weeks after the boy’s death, Prince told assembled journalists that he was ‘enjoying fatherhood’.

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  It may have seemed, and might seem now, just one more self-consciously bizarre pronouncement in a career marked by the most profound self-consciousness imaginable, but there is a recurrent twist to Prince’s references to fathers and sons. An Oedipal strain is never far from the surface, and neither is the romantic presumption that the child is wiser than the man.

  For much of his career, Prince has played the knowing child-man, and turned that enigmatic image against an industry which began as nurturing and permissive and became increasingly denying and censorious. The lo
ss of Gregory was followed by separation from the label that had launched his career with an unprecedented emancipation from corporate control. If the first album was a joyous whirl in a hand-held spotlight, Warner expected something different of their artist’s creative adolescence, and the infamous (though in retrospect rather innocuous) Black Album was said to have been made behind closed doors, the musical equivalent of whacking off in the bathroom. Then the sulks and rages, then the inevitable parting.

  It’s an image reinforced by Prince’s diminutive stature, by the fatal glamour of momma’s clothes closet, and in the music itself by his addiction to switches and pedals that could switch between a falsetto vocal and a deep parental growl that sounded like the voice of the superego and sometimes like God himself. In that abortive interview with Vanessa Bartholomew, Prince explains why he sounds different on the telephone: ‘It’s a tongue box . . . I use it to disguise my voice.’ It was part of his genius to recognise that the voice is the truest self but also the most cunning disguise. Much of his singing in this period is in borrowed voices: camp squeals that might imitate a mother’s or a girlfriend’s fussing, the soulful bleat of a preacher, a pervert’s heavy breathing or the kind of voice that tells you the kid is safe and where to leave the money. Few artists are more instantly recognisable for not sounding like themselves. What makes a Prince album distinctive is how the music is put together.

  There’s a corollary to that in the received view of who and what Prince is. He wouldn’t be the first pop star to rewrite his own biography, lie about his age and about his parents; Jim Morrison of The Doors used to pretend that his mother and his father, an admiral in the US Navy, had been killed in a car wreck, when both were inconveniently and bemusedly alive. What’s interesting about Prince, as Dave Hill points out in his 1989 biography Prince: A Pop Life, is the star’s collusion in the lies and fabrications of other people, childhood friends, ex-friends, Minneapolis hangers-on with a hook into a free lunch or a tip-off fee. It seems scarcely to have mattered to Prince whether the invention was his own or not. As in his work, which plunders all up and down the coastline of black American music, he appropriated anything and everything said about him, as if that was his reality. ‘Image’ – that treacherously inclusive word – was less important than the latest carefully confected persona or alter ego. It was as if every time he looked in the mirror Prince expected to see someone other than himself and certainly someone who did not remind him of his father.

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  For all his fantasies of reincarnation and royal blood, Prince’s version of the ‘family romance’ is relatively modest. It’s not unusual for children – and not just self-mythologising rock stars – to imagine that their real parents are dead, or that they are being raised by other than their blood parents, who are, of course, far more high-born and exotic. In the original treatment to the film Purple Rain, then simply known as Dreams, he explored just such a possibility, but for the moment his self-mythologising took a more modest turn. In February 1981, just after Controversy was released, Rolling Stone announced that Prince was the son of a half-black father and an Italian mother. It was a genealogy that from the magazine’s unshakably white middle-class point of view obviously made some sense of Controversy’s new brand of carnal funk and its otherwise indefinable difference from earlier bump-and-grind acts like the Ike and Tina Turner Revue, Millie Jackson or Rick James, for whom Prince was to open on tour that year.

  Unfortunately, the lineage was twice wrong. The idea had got around some time previously that Prince was the son of a black mother and Italian father, and that could be traced back to an interview he gave (when he was still giving interviews) to the Los Angeles Times. He’d said that both parents were light-skinned blacks, there was a sprinkle of Italian blood on the paternal side and a poorly researched Native American connection on the maternal. Though common enough, these were important marks of exception, of a potentially exotic lineage, and Prince may well have exaggerated at least one aspect of his descent.

  What they were was probably less important than where they met. Mattie Shaw was a girl from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who like many before her had left the South in search of whatever version of a better world she dreamed of: less prejudice, brighter lights, greater economic opportunity. Unlike most, drawn to New York City, Detroit, Chicago, or – the short hop – Washington D.C., Mattie and her sister Edna Mae came to live in Minneapolis, possibly the least black of all the major American cities. There, her singing caught the attention of a local jazz pianist, who asked her to sit in with his group. In June 1956, twenty-two-year-old Mattie became John L. Nelson’s second wife; he was a fellow Louisianan and eighteen years her senior. By day John worked for Honeywell Computers. By night, though, he continued to indulge the showbiz side of his nature, an aspect which surfaced whenever in later years he appeared in his son’s entourage with ever-younger and more glamorous girlfriends. He was the front man of the ‘Prince Rogers Trio’.

  Spurious aristocratic titles are part of jazz mythology. Count Basie and Duke Ellington are only the most famous members of a jazz lineage that in places reads like the Almanach de Gotha: kings, earls, more dukes and counts, and princes, too. The only difference about this otherwise obscure Minneapolis group, which played mostly lounge gigs, reportedly in the smooth manner of the Ahmad Jamal group, was what it bequeathed to pop history.

  At 6.17 p.m. on June 7, 1958, Mattie Shaw Nelson gave birth to a boy at Mount Sinai Hospital in Minneapolis. It was the child’s first stroke of luck that his father didn’t play with the Swinging Dixie Cups or the Minneapolis Three because John Nelson decided to name his new son after the band. The birth certificate actually gives the child’s name as ‘Prince Roger Nelson’. It may be that the dropped ‘s’ was deliberate, a concession to Mattie’s preference for a more familiar boy’s name; a clerk’s haste seems equally likely.

  Talking to the Los Angeles Times in January 1981, he said, ‘I think my father was kind of lashing out at my mother when he named me’, but typically provided no explanation or context for the remark. John Nelson may have lashed out in other ways as well. If Purple Rain is even notionally autobiographical, it was a sometimes violent household. Some of Prince’s closest associates have hinted at a history of abuse. The artist himself has remained reticent on the subject, beyond a few rumour-fuelling hints in songs like ‘Papa’ on the desperate 1994 Come album, which includes the unexpectedly naked line ‘Don’t abuse children or they turn out like me’. There is more of the same on ‘The Sacrifice of Victor’, the final track on the so-called Love Symbol Album (1992), and on ‘Da, Da, Da’ from Emancipation (1996). It requires no great effort to comprehend that this was genuinely an issue for Prince.

  It’s no more than a happy coincidence that a certain uncertainty and fluidity of names was part of Prince’s story from the very start. Later, he tried to abandon the name altogether, overtly to neutralise Warner branding, but maybe to escape his father’s embarrassing self-advertisement, or simply because he didn’t like it. There was more to it than that, though. The Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa used umpteen creative personas to express different parts of his creative personality or different creative personalities. Prince can’t claim quite as many heteronyms, but he has also worked as Alexander Nevermind, Camille, Joey Coco, Christopher Tracy, Jamie Starr, Tora Tora, Victor and the evil Spooky Electric, disguises which only fooled the uninitiated.

  The uninitiated sometimes included childhood friends, sections of the press and of the music business. On the South Side streets and at high school, kids would see him coming and call him ‘Princess’. To those tabloids mystified and irritated by the look, the sound and the attention-grabbing antics he became ‘Ponce’ or, recalling his most celebrated album and film role, ‘the Purple Pain’. Perhaps John Nelson was lashing out not at his wife but at the child who would far outstrip his modest fame.

  As always with Prince, it’s virtually impossible to separate real events from legend, but in Barney Hoskyns
’s Imp of the Perverse there is a small anecdote that adds a convincing detail to the Oedipal drama. Prince recalls sneaking in the back door of a club to watch his father play. He is maybe five years old, certainly no more than nine or ten, standing hidden in a service area, looking at the lights, listening to the jingle of ice in glasses and soft feminine laughter at darkened tables. There he’s found by one of the club dancers, a beautiful girl, scantily dressed, on her way outside for a cigarette. Mock-angry and liking his looks and his sass, she takes the boy outside to wait for his father. Maybe she flirts with him and he precociously flirts back. There might even be a kiss on his cheek or, to embarrass him, on the mouth. Even if it’s invented rather than a genuine primal memory, the story is nicely constructed to fit into Prince’s psychological profile. An illicit act in an inappropriate place, above all an illicit act of looking; an older woman, but not a conventional ‘older woman’ and certainly not a mother figure; precocious desire met with an odd mix of adult denial, gentle humiliation, and permissiveness.

  Light, costume, glamour, sex – the only element missing from the picture/memory is the one in which Prince was seemingly fated to spend the rest of his life. What music was John Nelson playing? Was it his father’s performance rather than that conveniently archetypal dancer’s attentions that turned Prince on? However ambivalent he felt about Nelson, the boy seems to have related to his father’s performing and went to extraordinary lengths to surpass it.