Prince Page 9
The women generally enjoyed a less stinting patronage, but again either because Prince enjoyed the idea, and still more the reality, of running a stable of beautiful starlets, and presenting them in demeaningly sexual roles, or because Jill, Wendy & Lisa, Sheila E later, and even Vanity and Apollonia allowed him to project aspects of his own femininity. Even if one veers to the former view, it’s striking how often Prince’s women are cast in sadomasochistic roles, stripping and ‘whipping’ the boss, strapping him in for some much needed discipline in ‘Automatic’ or exchanging the kind of knowing glances, as Wendy & Lisa often do, which suggests that they, not he, are in charge. Much depends on individual experience or on a settled conviction about Prince’s real nature, if there is such a thing beyond the prisms of image.
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Dolly Parton may have declined the offer of a Prince song but over the years some of his greatest and presumably most lucrative successes have been from songs performed by other artists. Even if Prince had remained an unseen songwriter, with no public profile of his own, he would still be remembered for the impact he made on the pop charts in the 1980s and 1990s. It squares very much with his idiosyncratic take on femininity – not in a form Dolly Parton would have understood or approved – that the majority of artists who dipped into the Prince songbook were women.
Unless ‘she’ really is an actual person, one of Prince’s most intriguing alter egos is ‘Camille’. The name is credited on Sign ‘O’ The Times as lead singer on ‘Strange Relationship’ and ‘If I Was Your Girlfriend’ and joint lead with Sheena Easton on ‘U Got the Look’. No one has ever seriously doubted that ‘Camille’ is Prince. ‘She’ is the only guest artist not thanked in the closing credits and there he is on the video to ‘U Got the Look’, playing out the song’s puzzling ethnic drama. Even so, it’s tempting to think that Prince or someone close to him had a hand in allowing the bootleg Camille to escape from Paisley Park, as if she had a separate existence.
Easton is a fascinating figure in recent pop history. Romantically linked to Prince, and if the tabloids are further to be believed, the recipient of a love-token in the shape of a Parisian apartment, she was already the perfect pop confection. A former trainee teacher, Easton was groomed for stardom by one of the earliest wannabe programmes of British television, Big Time, hosted by Esther Rantzen. She scored a hit with ‘9 to 5’ (not the Dolly Parton song from the film of that name, and for that reason later retitled ‘Morning Train’ in the US), in whose video she appeared as a funky young housewife, cheerily vacuuming the carpet while hubby was out at the office. It’s a wry, pre-post-feminist take on Burt Bacharach’s ‘Wives and Lovers’.
Prince clearly didn’t see Easton in this role at all, even ironically. The song he wrote for her, as ‘Alexander Nevermind’, is that very rare thing in the pop of the time, a frank exploration of female sexuality shorn of romance. ‘Sugar Walls’ is cheerfully unambiguous and coupled with press reports of their affair, if such it was, it recast Easton as a cock-loving siren. Even in retrospect, it makes Kylie Minogue’s similar makeover look tame, and it propelled Easton into an improbable new career, even at one stage playing the part of Don Johnson’s ill-fated wife in Miami Vice. She and Prince wrote some songs together during their romance, of which ‘The Arms of Orion’ from the Batman soundtrack is probably the best. Long before he married Mayte Garcia, Prince had always liked to create the impression that female band members were lovers, too. British soul singer Mica Paris, who met and worked with Prince later in the decade, suggests that most of the rumours are simply that; ‘We weren’t as good friends as the papers made out.’
He certainly was ‘good friends’ with percussionist Sheila E. The daughter of Santana percussionist Pete Escovedo, she met Prince some time during the making of For You, presumably impressing him by her closeness to one of his idols as well as by her musical pedigree. Like many of the women who came within his orbit, though more independently than most, Sheila had ambitions towards a solo career. An early pair of album projects, Sheila E in The Glamorous Life in 1984 and the later Sheila E in Romance 1600, are presented as movies, a very ‘Prince’ approach and doubly so given the carefully posed monochrome cover of the earlier record. In this case, his presence is more as influence than intervention. For the second album, Prince co-wrote ‘A Love Bizarre’, a title which would have recalled Coltrane’s A Love Supreme to two jazz-aware musicians. Otherwise, it seems to have been a relationship of equals. Sheila E later became a ranking member of Prince’s touring group, and one of his most effective stage foils.
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Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman are among Prince’s most intriguing former associates. Loyal to the point of folly, they found themselves tightly woven into his harem-fantasies and yet managed to maintain an impressive independence of thought. Recognising that he had become perhaps too dependent on their input, or having absorbed it to his own satisfaction, Prince fired them midway through the recording of the abortive Dream Factory. One track, ‘Power Fantastic’, appeared on Prince’s greatest hits compilation, partly because it was already well known as a bootleg. The circumstances of recording had been bizarre, with Lisa Coleman (also shortly to go) playing her piano part in an upstairs room, while the rest of the band gathered in the studio.
Unlike many of his former male associates, Wendy and Lisa seemed to come out of the relationship relatively unbruised. They recorded three better than average albums for Columbia and Virgin, before a fourth project disappeared into the cracks in the release schedule, whereupon they became a pair of vaguely feminist fixers, appearing in some capacity on records by Joni Mitchell and Me’shell Ndegeocello, and writing film music. Their standard line now is that a reunion with Prince isn’t out of the question – he kept the lines open with a dedication on Emancipation to them – but only if he picks up the phone.
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‘Sugar Walls’ isn’t the best context for a pitch at Prince-the-feminist, but underneath the proprietorial swagger there has always been something impressively disinterested in Prince’s sponsorship of women friends and fellow performers. A similar track title appears on Jill Jones’s eponymous 1987 album, which Prince helped to write and produce. Co-written with Jones, ‘G Spot’ is a funkier, less poppy song than ‘Sugar Walls’. It may seem like further leering on Prince’s part, but his role in Jones’s career was notably generous: he even offered to remove his name from the credits entirely, not to disown the record, but so that Jones would receive full recognition for it. Even so, the whole pitch of the album, and relentless press questioning of Jones about her exact relationship with Prince – which she always maintained was professional, friendly and sisterly – guaranteed that everyone heard it, subliminally at least, as part of the Prince oeuvre.
If the possibility of a feminist Prince seems so remote as to be laughable, it is possible to claim him for post-feminism, or at least as an early influence on the sexually aware female songwriting of the 1990s. Jones’s baby-doll voice – a version of Prince’s own falsetto – is palpably self-aware, just as her presentation on the debut album’s cover as a knowing woman-child is so obviously a self-chosen pose rather than an imposed image. Jones’s album is clever, satirical (she clearly doesn’t buy the mechanical liberation of the whole G-spot debate), and musically subtle. Smart as she is, someone else has to be given much of the credit. Arguably the most convincing contemporary equivalent of Prince is Missy Elliott, whose influence in the studio and as a writer is almost greater than her performing presence.
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At the turn of the 1990s, Prince put enormous energy – and a substantial tranche of Paisley Park’s dwindling assets – into the career of Cincinatti rapper Carmen Electra. He had initially approached her with the idea of forming another girl band along the lines of Apollonia/Vanity 6 but with an eye to the burgeoning hip-hop market. What the normally astute Prince was last to appreciate was, as his marketing department and the pluggers who tried to sell her eponymous 1993 album must
have tried to tell him, that her pneumatic talents were probably better suited to the camera. Electra later became a Playboy model, calendar girl and host of an MTV dating show.
It’s ironic that an album by Rosie Gaines, who with all due respect is better served keeping her clothes on, but who can sing like Aretha Franklin, should have been shelved during Prince’s dispute with Warner. Justice might have reversed the situation, though posterity has effectively ‘disappeared’ Electra’s lame effort.
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The brightly coloured pop rainbow that followed Purple Rain was the most obvious sign of Prince’s still developing promise as a songwriter. Though there have been resurgences of interest since, the mid-1980s were a highpoint. ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ was a massive video hit for Sinéad O’Connor, with whom Prince was not on good terms. It was, though, originally written for Susannah Melvoin. In 1986, having apparently run into Prince while flying between gigs, The Bangles had a massive hit with the chipper psychedelia of ‘Manic Monday’. Ostensibly written by ‘Christopher Tracy’ (a first appearance for the character who appears on that year’s Parade), it was previously recorded by Apollonia 6, but even if it hadn’t been it’s instantly recognisable as a Prince song, based once again on the ‘1999’ riff.
Some years later, a flagging career (or possibly two) was given a substantial fillip when the redoubtable Tom Jones collaborated on a version of one of the standout tracks from Parade. So important a part did ‘Kiss’ play in Jones’s revival as a credible rocker that The Art of Noise’s role in the single was quickly forgotten. It remains a surprisingly rare example of a male artist picking up a Prince song. Apart from The Time (whose subordinate status is underlined by the title of their third album Ice Cream Castles, the Joni Mitchell reference very much a Prince gesture) and the by then estranged Andre Cymone, who used ‘The Dance Electric’ on his ill-starred solo A.C., little of Prince’s work for others was given a male voicing. He did, however, form The Family as a front band. Again either selflessly or mischievously, Prince credits all the songs on the ‘group’’s eponymous 1985 debut to Jerome Benton, Jellybean Johnson, Eric Leeds and Susannah Melvoin (all identified simply by the first names) and casting Paul ‘St Paul’ Peterson as the lead singer. Nonetheless, the songwriting is unmistakably his and he plays virtually all the instruments.
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There have always been stories and rumours about possible Prince collaborations. Michael Jackson – or producer/arranger Quincy Jones – apparently offered him a lead vocal spot on Bad, but Prince turned it down, largely because he wasn’t having his greatest rival snarl ‘Your butt is mine’ at him in the very first line of the title song. He also seems to have backed out of a suggested pairing with Miles Davis, who perhaps remembering his abortive association with Jimi Hendrix spent his last decade scouting pop and soul concerts for fresh material and new faces. Miles apparently regarded Prince as the real thing – his ‘Duke Ellington of the ’80s’ is a shrewd characterisation – and responded enthusiastically when he was sent some instrumental tapes and a vocal coyly entitled ‘Can I Play With U?’ (also included was a note signed ‘God’, which would have tickled the trumpeter). Miles overdubbed his own trumpet part and had the track slated for inclusion on Tutu, when Prince recalled it, ostensibly because he wasn’t satisfied with its quality. Shortly before Miles died, he played at Prince’s Glam Slam club in Minneapolis, but the proprietor refused to go on stage. The two did play together on Chaka Khan’s CK album and did once appear together at Paisley Park, but the audience were wealthy Christmas party-goers raising money for underprivileged children.
Prince has also flirted with Madonna, who with Jackson is the only other star of comparable magnitude in the period, but compared to both of them a model of career longevity. It seems she suggested some merger of Paisley Park with her own Maverick operation. He has also recorded, but not released, a cover of her ‘Like a Prayer’. Prince was doubtless fascinated by Madonna’s unabashed but carefully airbrushed take on sexuality. Working with women and on ‘female’ themes continued to be his staple, though mostly with singers who didn’t threaten his ascendancy.
In 1983, he co-wrote ‘Stand Back’ with Stevie Nicks for her album The Wild Heart, and a decade later ‘Why Should I Love You?’ for Kate Bush’s The Red Shoes. However, once Prince had established Paisley Park and its business arm PRN – for Prince Rogers Nelson – he was much freer to sign acts and shape their careers in the way he had The Time and The Family. PRN is a famously reticent organisation but it has made a notably generous contribution to not a few musical careers, promoting acts who never seemed likely to be more than musically interesting loss-leaders. Given how domineering a producer/A&R man he could be, there is an impressive level of disinterest. Even when there was a whiff of nepotism, Prince put his considerable creative presence behind the project, as when he wrote and produced nearly all of future wife Mayte’s Children of the Sun (coyly switching the gender on ‘The Most Beautiful Boy in the World’). He made a Paisley Park star out of gospeller Mavis Staples and expanded the label’s eclectic jazz-funk-fusion roster with former DJ Taja Sevelle, who’d had a walk-on part in Purple Rain and contributed a backing vocal to ‘The Ladder’. Perhaps remembering his own precocious debut, he also gave a leg-up to thirteen-year-old Tevin Campbell who in a familiar analogy had been identified as the new Stevie Wonder and the new Michael Jackson, a potent trading line at a time when the present Michael Jackson was looking and sounding a bit shop soiled. Others include Elisa Fiorillo, Ingrid Chavez and Paula Abdul, all relatively undemanding singers. More complex was Parliament guru George Clinton’s association with Paisley Park. Though he shared some of Prince’s lineage – James Brown and Sly Stone – but with the cosmic theatre of the Sun Ra Arkestra thrown in, Clinton took a much more political view of black funk and was mystified, not to say disturbed, by Prince’s apparent quietism.
He made a minor rap star out of Carmen Electra, before she went on to fame as a centrefold and calendar girl, and gave saxophonist Candy Dulfer a secure footing for her pop-jazz approach with the touching imprimatur ‘When I want sax I send for Candy’. And he continued to use songwriting for others as an outlet for some transgressive role-playing. Songs like ‘Baby Go-Go’ (another ‘Joey Coco’ composition) helped give Nona Hendryx’s Female Trouble disc that same ambiguously gendered quality Prince was projecting in his own work. But they also demonstrated how much more comfortably he inhabited different song styles – bubblegum pop, soul, soul-rock, r’n’b – when those styles didn’t have to sit shoulder to shoulder on a Prince album. Having gone multi-platinum and in the process broken down a deep and long-standing racial split in the pop audience, Prince had to wonder where his own records were going to head next.
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If Prince’s utopian/dystopian Uptown was originally conceived as a dark urban stew, defined by aggressive libertinism and ghetto politics, the next album transformed it into a curious psychedelic paradise called Paisley Park. The change of location and mood, which must have alarmed the Warner executives who attended the tapes’ ritual unveiling, is marked by a new sound-world, into which flute, violin, oud and darbuka all make an unexpected entry, and which dispenses to a degree with the synthesized drums which had been such a distinctive aspect of Prince’s music. For the first and only time in Prince’s career, the electric guitar is not emphasised, sometimes omitted in favour of piano, and rarely distorted. The atmosphere is muted, and wry rather than sardonic, the eroticism low-key, the politics utopian rather than apocalyptic. In production values and sound-world, it might almost be a Beatles album.
Released in April 1985, Around the World in a Day is not just the first record to be released under his own Paisley Park imprint (still part of the Warner family) but ironically given later statements the first record on which the members of The Revolution play a full collaborative part. That’s partly because much of the material was worked up, not by Prince alone in his Lake Minnetonka fortress, but by the whole band dur
ing rehearsals for the marathon Purple Rain tour. The chronology is important. Talking to Rolling Stone, Prince suggested that moving on to the new album so quickly was in retrospect a smart move: ‘I didn’t wait to see what happened with Purple Rain. That’s why the two albums sound completely different.’ Had he or The Revolution known then how unprecedently successful the album and tour were going to be (a gross of $22 million in the latter case), there might have been more pressure to make Purple Rain Mk II. Might have been, were not the leader gripped by a hex that insisted on unpredictable novelty: ‘It’s almost like a curse 2 know U can always make something new,’ as he expressed it later. Consciously or unconsciously, Prince was echoing Miles Davis’s often-quoted (and in his case misleading) claim, ‘I have to change. It’s like a curse.’
Like Miles, Prince often signalled a new direction with a radical shift in his cover art. Doug Henders’s surreal montage marks a 180-degree turn away from Allan Beaulieu’s stark monochrome but also from the steam and neon of Purple Rain. The Revolution are portrayed as a gentle tribe, living out an idyll under cotton-candy clouds. The female form is celebrated, but this time almost subliminally in the outlines of an anthropomorphic landscape. The brutal nihilism of past records is replaced by a gentler transcendence: a stepladder rises out of a wave-lapped pool and into the sky. This was the symbolism Prince chose to clothe himself in when he turned to video direction for the first time. ‘The Ladder’ is also there among the songs, a quiet, gnomic harbinger of the plainer religiosity of ‘The Cross’ on Sign ‘O’ The Times.