Prince Read online

  There had been a sharp warning the previous year when Prince had been booked to support the Rolling Stones, for two nights in L.A. The omens were good. Promoter Bill Graham was an industry legend; he was also the man who’d put Miles Davis on with white rock acts at the two Fillmores, East and West, heralding the trumpeter’s crossover triumph. This was exactly the trajectory being mapped out for Prince – but that was jazz; this was showbiz.

  Even if all the auguries seemed propitious, the outcome was bad and potentially disastrous. The nights of October 9 and 11, 1981, at the Memorial Coliseum were low points in Prince’s early career. Bootlegs of both nights reveal a hostile crowd, booing what was presumably an unfamiliar repertoire and an unfamiliarly black sound. There nearly wasn’t a second night. Prince fled the auditorium before the opening set was over and on the Saturday in between took sanctuary at home in Minneapolis. It took a measure of persuasion to fly him back to California for a second show that must have confirmed every one of his fears. This time, the crowd weren’t merely hostile; they were armed. As soon as Prince and his musicians took the stage, they were pelted with fruit, lumps of rotten chicken, even bottles. One hefty one apparently struck new recruit Mark Brown.

  The young bassist was the equivalent in Prince’s band of Michael Henderson who’d given Miles Davis’s fusion bands their raw, rock edge. He’d been recruited from Fantasy, another Minneapolis group, as a replacement for Andre Cymone. That relationship had taken some time to fall apart, presumably because of deep residual loyalties on both sides. Brown came in, though, at a time when Prince was changing, listening less to Twin Cities friends and much more to manager Steve Fargnoli. Like many artists convinced by their own publicity, Prince had become increasingly remote and egomaniacal.

  The studied weirdness which had fuelled the publicity campaign for Dirty Mind now ran on its own momentum. Having given interviews to anyone willing to drop a dime, Prince now refused most offers. One trusted exception was Barbara Graustark of Musician magazine, who two years later, in another publication, People’s Weekly, wrote the article that firmly cemented Prince’s status as a self-determined outsider who deliberately flouted every remaining convention. As he became a personage and a (non-speaking) spokesman for amoral outlawry the band were just having fun. They were happy to join in pre-concert prayers – and there’s every reason to think that Prince’s insistence here was sincere – but as far as his increasingly apocalyptic take on ecstatic religion was concerned they were more hesitant. The Prince gospel was something akin to partying-as-prayer; the problem was he didn’t practise it, even with his ‘Uptown’ friends. For the others, partying was enough. Prince’s growing aloofness wasn’t so much a Napoleon complex as a genuine dismay at his cohorts’ enthusiasm for a rock ’n’ roll lifestyle he seemed to profess only in metaphoric terms. They in turn can’t be criticised too harshly. After several years’ scuffling on the drab Twin Cities circuit, the band had been thrown into the big time. If they didn’t buy into the full Prince philosophy, it’s hard to imagine a group of black teenagers and early-twenty-year-olds who would.

  There’s some artistic evidence that Prince’s isolation wasn’t complete. The album that followed Controversy and established Prince as a radio-friendly crossover artist sounds much more of a band record than its predecessors, even if that impression only comes from the Sly Stone-influenced shared vocals of the title track. In 1982, it was time to party like it was already 1999.

  6

  The millennium came early to Uptown. The band stepped out like true believers to bear witness to a world turned upside-down. The sky was purple; people rushing everywhere; trying to run from the destruction; inhibitions finally overthrown in the vast carnival of hectic pleasure reflected in the soaring pop-funk of ‘1999’. It’s hard to tell whether Prince is partying so hard he doesn’t care, or whether Judgement Day really is a party.

  He’d learned early the skill of using an album’s first track to show his hand creatively: ‘For You’, the brilliant ‘I Wanna Be Your Lover’, ‘Dirty Mind’, and, less happily, ‘Controversy’. The tone this time round is brilliantly summed up by Dave Hill as ‘exquisite fatalism’ and ‘morbidly euphoric’, though those descriptions work better for ‘1999’ the track than for 1999 the album. The latter is a joyous sprawl, played out at considerable length and with a leaven of good-natured humour that could hardly be more different from the ludicrous petulance of its predecessor. Though not a concept album in the way Purple Rain was to be, 1999 feels like it might be the soundtrack to a show or an animated film, which is pretty much how Prince pitched it to Warner and to the band.

  He’s conspicuously absent from the front cover this time, though the name and title are both given in his own exuberant graphic, part childish graffiti, part Mati Klarwein nightmare, with a distinctly phallic cast to the numeral 1. On the back cover, there he is with his paintbox and a sketchpad, naked under a satin sheet in a seducer’s neon fantasy of a bedroom (with a ‘C’ moon peeping in the window). Prince stares suggestively at the camera, though this time the suggestion is that he might be about to draw the viewer rather than seduce her/him. Unless he already has; either way, it’s a disturbingly intimate image and the fluorescent tubing round the room threatens to advertise the intimacy far and wide.

  1999 was the album where Prince’s technical skills caught up with his ambition. He has finally mastered his musical paintbox. The marriage of soul romance, r’n’b seduction and heavy metal apocalypse is consummated over eleven tracks of remarkable consistency. Gone is the fussy cross-brushing of the debut record and no place now for the raw, straight-from-demo feel of Dirty Mind. Even given the leeway he’d claimed from Warner, it was rare for black artists to be allowed to make double LPs. In fact 1999 is only three tracks longer than its predecessors and only really a single LP on which the longer cuts – ‘D.M.S.R.’, ‘Automatic’ and the epic ‘Lady Cab Driver’ – are spared an edit. When it failed to make much impact in Britain, it was reissued as a single disc, with three tracks dropped – ‘International Lover’, ‘D.M.S.R.’ and ‘All the Critics Love U in New York’ – rather than shortened. And yet, part of the album’s success is its duration. Prince had always known how to ride a groove, James Brown-style; now he knew how to deliver it as well.

  There are signs throughout that his approach has acquired a new sophistication. Though still largely dependent on drum machines, on ‘Lady Cab Driver’ he lays down a simple snareline instead, giving the rhythm a spanking physicality and suggesting that the eponymous heroine has shrewdly left the meter running as she’s brought to orgasm by her passenger: a relatively undemanding vocal spot for another new protégé, Jill Jones. Prince had encountered her when she sang back-up vocals for Teena Marie, one of the support acts on the Rick James tour. Though later to be a tough-minded star in her own right, for the moment Jones’s main duty was to sing side-stage on tour while Vanity 6 warmed up for Prince and The Time with a touch of burlesque.

  It’s hard to spot on the CD reissue and a casual glance at the original cover won’t reveal it, largely because the writing is printed in reverse, but 1999 is for the first time attributed to Prince and the Revolution. Friends and associates – including Jimmy Jam and Dr Fink – remember their amazement when Prince came in carrying a tape, apparently put down only the night before, which turned out to be the instrumental for ‘1999’. This time, he opted not to multi-track his own vocals but to share the lead. This was not the original conception. A careful listen reveals that the melody changes with each line. This is because Prince had originally recorded a unison vocal, with himself leading and the others harmonising. In another intuitive decision, he decided to split the vocal, so what one hears from Jones, Dickerson and Lisa Coleman is actually a backing line promoted in the mix. Sharing the lead was a new approach for Prince, but it helped place the new single’s apocalyptic message in a familiar rock context.

  Backed with ‘How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore’, it reached number four in the
rock and pop chart, his best showing since ‘I Wanna Be Your Lover’, three years earlier, and even made a preliminary dent on the British singles market, reaching number twenty-five. There were other strong contenders for single release on the album. ‘D.M.S.R.’ – Dance, Music, Sex, Romance – is a piece of engaging nonsense and might well have worked in edited form. Likewise, the longer still ‘Automatic’, though its clever dissection of sexual identities probably only works at full length. Prince asks us to consider whether love is glandular or spiritual, delivers his declaration in the same monotone he once applied to the ‘Lord’s Prayer’ and does so over a machine beat which is the aural equivalent of coitus interruptus or abrupt abstention. The ambiguity of the title is powerful and funny: are love and desire merely galvanic responses? Or, are our emotions merely ‘automatic’, rote reactions influenced by the conventions of popular song: ‘U ask me if I love U; it’s automatic / Cause everytime U leave me I die / That’s automatic too.’ As to the now familiar synthesis of sex and religion, the only uplift on offer here is take-off in a plane with the stewardesses (Lisa and Jill) coming on like a pair of dominatrixes. A similar take-off-and-landing conceit runs through ‘International Lover’, the album’s final track and the climax of the 1999 . . . show (a better term than live set), during which Prince scaled a high onstage bed and fucked an unseen partner, if he wasn’t merely pleasuring himself, which is equally possible given the album’s narcissistic turn. 1999 saw him negotiate a complex transformation from lover to lover-and-beloved, an obscure object of desire as well as a walking phallic symbol.

  Most of the album’s songs were either too subtly ironic or too dependent on elaborate staging to work as singles, even with supporting visuals. In 1983, thanks to MTV’s tacit colour bar, video still wasn’t a priority for black acts. Prince also helped to change that. His choice of follow-up single was brilliant not just because it was a slice of unapologetic innuendo, but because it also turned him into a rock star and opened up the long-dreamed-of ‘biracial’ audience.

  You don’t need to have read twelve volumes of Sigmund Freud to understand ‘Little Red Corvette’, though the possibility that the singer is female makes for some interesting ambiguities. The song’s cheerful amorality – ‘It was Saturday night / I guess that makes it alright’ – is wrapped around a slightly prissy disgust with the kinds of thing lust leads you to and the people it leads you to do it with. ‘I guess I must be dumb / Cuz U had a pocket full of horses / Trojan and some of them used’, ‘Guess I should have closed my eyes / When U drove me to the place / Where your horses run free / Cuz I felt a little ill / When I saw all the pictures of the jockeys / That were there before me . . .’ White rock ’n’ roll generally avoided any hint of sexual anxiety, let alone references to used Trojans. Whatever the exact nature of the little red Corvette – cock or pussy – it was a far cry from Chuck Berry’s wearily salacious ‘My Ding-a-Ling’, a feature of his stage act long before, somewhat edited, it became a surprise hit single.

  Backed with the enigmatic ‘All the Critics Love U in New York’, which could almost have been written by a young black Truman Capote, ‘Little Red Corvette’ was a smash. It helped to break down the MTV barrier, only the second video to breach the station’s unstated colour line. That was largely because Prince abandoned the oddly lumpy dancing of earlier promos and presented the Revolution as a real-life rock band, albeit one that had lifted the rock ’n’ rollers’ loud-stated ban on chicks. Prince and Dez cavorted like Mick and Keith, sharing a mic on the choruses, wielding guitars like true born axemen. Whatever audiences heard on 1999, on ‘Little Red Corvette’ they saw a new rock god in the making.

  Prince, though, aspired to the singleness of Jahweh; there were to be no other gods besides him, which meant that the writing was on the wall for Dickerson, as for most of the original entourage who had seen him through the difficult early years and the Stones debacle. The only exceptions were the female members of the group, presumably no threat to Prince’s sexual vanity and a useful focus for his cross-dressing persona. Wendy Melvoin (daughter of jazz pianist Mike Melvoin) was drafted in on guitar to replace the departed Dez Dickerson, and another white girl, Lisa Coleman, had been brought aboard on keyboards. Both were accomplished musicians, with strong family backgrounds in pop. Later, Wendy’s percussionist brother Jonathan would become part of the operation while twin sister Susannah joined as vocalist and enjoyed a passionate fling with the boss. Like Gayle Chapman, they brought a classical seriousness and a touch of glamour. They were also no immediate threat to Prince’s leadership.

  More important still to the Prince image was the all too accurately named Vanity 6, a female trio who gave a new and ironic twist to the term ‘warm-up act’. Through no fault of Prince’s, but thanks largely to unusually tramlined thinking at Warner, what might have been an interestingly satirical sidebar to the Prince phenomenon – the Chiffons’ ‘He’s so Fine’ reworked as ‘He’s so Dull’ – ended up looking dull and exploitative; Vanity 6’s ‘Nasty Girl’ is one of the low points in the royal canon. On stage, the trio was pure burlesque and you didn’t have to be Andrea Dworkin to find their presentation offensive. By contrast, the suggestion that Wendy and Lisa – or ‘Wendy & Lisa’ as they came to be known inseparably when working as an independent unit – might have a Sapphic side was handled with infinite subtlety. Compared to the blatancy of Vanity and Apollonia, they played the game of sexual ambiguity almost as well as Prince himself. And there was no doubting their importance to his creative vision. Fictionally, at least, they were to be cast as creators of his most famous song.

  Prince himself had long since abandoned the panties and bandanna look in favour of sci-fi dandy, an extension of Jimi Hendrix’s electric gypsy persona; it sat well with the rock stuff, and with the weirdly courteous rudeness of ‘Let’s Pretend We’re Married’: ‘I want to fuck the taste out of your mouth’. It also gave a certain edge to the Oscar Wildeism of ‘All the Critics Love U in New York’. More than one observer has pointed to the influence of Little Richard not just on Prince’s piled-up bouffant hair (successor to his stature-enhancing Afro) but also on his projection of a confusingly aberrant sexuality. The dandy image also cements the curious amalgam of charm, violence, glamour, snobbery and lèse-majesté which fuels ‘Lady Cab Driver’. In keeping with his gender-switching obsession, Prince reverses the roles in a familiar urban situation: female passenger has no cash, pays for trip with sexual favours. Prince takes his chauffeuse on the back seat and as she moans her way to climax, he dedicates each breathless thrust to someone or something in his personal demonology, including a brother lucky enough to have been born handsome and tall – Duane perhaps? It’s an extraordinary performance, much as the coition seems to be, made all the stranger by the appearance on his moral shopping list of God and money, or rather the real biblical radix malorum, the love of money.

  Cash was a constant issue, as it would be with Michael Jackson, who was about to upstage Prince with the success of Thriller, an album and video that helped to recalibrate music industry expectations later the same year as the 1999 tour. Prince kept his hinds on short commons. That was perhaps the only way he could control the burgeoning success of The Time, but he also applied it to loyal subjects like Denise/Vanity, who decided to quit at the end of the tour, disingenuously complaining that the boss was seeing other women but in reality convinced that she could make more money on her own. Her replacement was a lookalike Californian called Patricia Kotero. In his usual proprietorial way, Prince named her Apollonia (having presumably ruled out Lust, Greed and Envy as suitable stage-names) and, as if to underline the continuity, formed a group round her. Apollonia 6 was basically a rerun of Vanity 6, with the sacred/profane balance tweaked fractionally to the former. (No one has ever been clear why two trios were so named; the cynics’ guess was that it referred to the number of nipples onstage, though one relatively informed observer suggests that the girls were presumed to have shadow-selves, sexual daemons representing the
ir ‘other’ side.)

  It was clear to all, and was made increasingly explicit by Prince himself, that they were starring in the movie of his life. As 1983 went on, it became clearer that the fantasy was about to be realised. Prince was now in a position to live his dreams. His new road manager was a direct link to one of his idols; Alan Leeds had been James Brown’s guy; his brother Eric Leeds later became an important part of Prince’s sound. After the histrionics (and for once the word means exactly what it should) of the 1999 tour, the logical next step was for Prince to become a movie star. His ambivalence about stage performance, honed by the Stones experience, sharpened by wayward musicians and technical gremlins, evaporated at the thought of multiple takes, perfect lighting and costume, and a firm directorial hand.

  With 1999 Prince reinvented himself as an apocalyptic auteur. If Ike Turner and Erich von Stroheim had had a lovechild, he would have been the Prince of 1983. Withdrawn and cruel by turns, preaching freedom – the faux-gospel ‘Free’ is the forgotten track on 1999 – but wilfully denying it to his most loyal supporters, generous and mean by capricious turns, he was outwardly a success and inwardly trapped in the prism of his own ego. One line from ‘Free’ stands out in hindsight: ‘Never let that lonely monster take control of U’. Lisa, Jill, Vanity and new keyboardist Wendy Melvoin all contributed to the backing vocals, possibly wondering if it applied to the man in front of them. The artistic licence of the Warner contract was coming home to roost. The tragicomedy of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, another big influence, was being acted out for real.