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Publication: Pop Magazine [Swe]
[Translated from Swedish by Fredrik and Pernilla Glimberg, December 1996] His name was Prince and he was funky. Together with Madonna and Michael Jackson the little guy with the a-little-too-high heels was one of the Eighties' unreal superstars. On his 35th birthday he changed his name to a squiggle that was unpronounceable. But most of all he is perhaps the James Brown of our times, a funky squiggle in the entertainment business. It is the funk that we will remember him for. POP met the artist and was at a liberation party at Paisley Park. Chanhassen, Minneapolis, November 14th. The Interview is done. The party is over. Outside of Paisley Park at 7801 Audubon Road a taxi is waiting. Taxi Driver - Did you meet Prince? the driver asks. I nod and he tells me that he used to work for Paisley Park, Prince's studio and second home, for as long as he can remember. He claims to have been a childhood friend of Prince's. Taxi Driver - I used to ice-skate with Prince, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis when I was 14-15. Prince wanted nothing else but to become a hockey pro. That was his big dream. And he would not quit, until he realized that he wouldn't grow either taller or wider than he already was. Then he started chasing girls instead. And that worked out pretty good. There is a saying that goes that truth is told by children and taxi-drivers... He takes a detour to show me where Prince and his wife Mayte live. Taxi Driver - You can hardly see it from here, he says while pointing to a dark fenced-in house. From what you can see from here it seems to look like what you can imagine a ranch out on the ice-cold Minnesota prairie would look like. But the house is actually purple with yellow corners, the driver laughs while backing out on Highway 94 and driving on to St. Paul Airport. He keeps telling little stories during the whole trip. How Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis were much better hockey-players than the little Prince, that they have better taste, prettier houses and that they certainly know how to control their funds, and that they are, deep inside, as opposed to Prince, still down-to-earth people who'd gladly sit in the taxi's front seat and chat with the driver. Taxi Driver - You cannot believe that they have produced and written Janet Jackson's latest albums, he says. And then he goes into grading some of all the girls he has picked up over the years at the airport for a ride to Paisley Park. He brags about how he was part of luring the American tabloids into believing that Prince and Mayte were to marry in Paris when the wedding actually took place in downtown Minneapolis. Chanhassen, Minneapolis, November 12th. Outside of Paisley Park nobody calls Prince anything else but Prince. To his great discomfort. Anyone who chose to celebrate their 35th birthday by changing their name to an unpronounceable squiggle, a squiggle that in addition looks silly, must be prepared to take some abuse. When Cassius Clay changed his name to Muhammad Ali that was at least pronounceable. What I'm saying is, what does Prince expect us to call him? Should we look at the symbol and intuitively feel how to pronounce it? Would he prefer it if we called him say, Gjoo? I have no idea. But Paisley Park employees refer to him as The Artist. And that is in every way more merciful than The Artist Formerly Know As Prince. But, The Artist? That sounds kind of silly, too. Prince himself refers to Prince in the third person.
Paisley Park is located in Chanhassen, a small town just East of Minneapolis. It was not very easy to find it though. Waiter - Paisley Park? Just continue West along the highway, says a waiter at a Taco Bell in the outskirts of Chanhassen. Waiter - You can't miss it. Paisley Park lies by the road and looks like a pharmaceutical plant. It's a big chalk-white building with little glass triangles on the roof. It's winter in Minnesota. And outside Paisley Park's well-guarded gates, about a hundred little Prince-fans are standing, shivering in the dark. They are standing there waiting, I don't see any parked cars nearby, we're in the middle of the Minnesota tundra, it's five or six degrees Celsius below zero and one can not help admiring their dedication. Paisley Park has set a huge buffet which goes through all the rooms in the studio. Alcohol is neither served nor sold. And smoking is strictly prohibited on the entire premises. Outside the main entrance a few cold Italian journalists are chain-smoking. At one table there's hundreds of Cap'n Crunch packages, Prince's favorite breakfast cereal. He even sings about breakfast cereals on one track, "Joint 2 Joint", on his new triple album Emancipation. Surrounding the cereals are stars such as D'Angelo, parts of Goodie Mob, Boys II Men and Naughty By Nature, Mavis Staples, the designer Donnatella Versace and -- someone who knows about local celebrities tells me -- both the Minneapolis and the St. Paul mayors, Sayles Belton and Norm Coleman. James Brown is also said to be in the house and the PA calls Tom Dowd to a phone call at the reception. But I don't see anyone of them there. And later I'm told James Brown never showed up. The reason for the buffet, all the guests and the hundred or so shivering enthusiasts outside this pharmaceutical building's gates is that Prince wants to celebrate his new album and his newly acclaimed freedom from the record contract that made him scrawl "Slave" every morning for several years on one of his cheek's with a black pencil before he even got out of bed. At 11:00 PM, local time, he will enter the Paisley Park stage with his four-piece band The New Power Generation for a concert that's to be broadcast live over half the globe. One minute past 11 the voice of reverend Martin Luther King's classical speech "Free at last! Free at last!" echoes through the chalk-white room where all monitors, podiums, speakers and walls are wrapped in fluffy white fabric. And onto the stage comes the little man with high heels, strapping on his squiggly-shaped golden guitar and straight away it becomes clear that it's the Napoleon of funk that's up there. With small, well-rehearsed gestures he motions instructions to his musicians and at the same time smiles smugly doing pirouettes by the microphone, playing the guitar and singing, better than ever. His confidence is radiant, almost disturbingly so. The audience resembles the kind of crowd one sees in the kind of American movies in which Michael J. Fox plays covers of Chuck Berry. No mass-hysteria, people remain on their seats, dance a little, sing softly along with the chorus and flash their lighters during the slow numbers. Except for that hundred or so who were outside the gates earlier. Now they are in here, up front with sparkling eyes. At least I hope it's them. And Prince is fantastic. Suddenly I remember why I used to ruin myself on tickets every time Prince came to Stockholm in the mid-eighties. The tour following Sign O' The Times was incredible. I saw him two nights in a row at Isstadion, Stockholm. And those two nights are up there with Springsteen 1981, The Clash the year before that, Fugees at Gino and Oasis at Maine Road. When you see Prince on stage the name The Artist does not seem so far fetched anymore. There is not one I can think of who in 1996 radiates the same natural artistry that he does this night at Paisley Park. His clothes, the sculptured hairdo, the dance steps, the way he uses his voice as if it were an instrument and even during the longest of guitar solos the groove is irresistible. It's a show that is so damned good that you are just standing below the stage with your mouth open. And afterwards I feel like I have just witnessed a piece of history. I have a vague memory of having had that same feeling of witnessing the Last Artist when walking out of Isstadion after Prince's gigs... He performs "The Most Beautiful Girl In The World", "Jam Of The Year", a few bars of "Sexy MF" and Joan Osborne's "One Of Us". He invites some of the more musical members of the audience up on stage and they are just fooling around. The music, the funk, it's all coming from Prince, whether or not he is playing the guitar, only wailing a ballad in falsetto or letting his band take over while he is dancing like a thin James Brown in high heels. Even the short version of "Purple Rain" sounds like Sly Stone tonight. When he goes into pure swing jazz, it is perfectly natural. It is a part of Minneapolis black inheritance. Jazz has always existed in the funk from Minneapolis. Miles Davis only laughed when somebody called Prince a soul singer. Miles considered Prince to be one of the greatest jazz musicians of our times. Some hours later he finishes with a squeakingly scorching "The Cross", and it sounds as if the Velvet Underground had suddenly understood funk -- or vice versa. Chanhassen, Minneapolis, November 14th. Prince walks around inside Paisley Park among us common mortals in a purple suit with a incomprehensibly long sued tie under his jacket. He keeps his beige fake fur on all the time and his trousers are just bell-bottomed enough so that you are not supposed to notice the purple boots with fifteen- (possibly twenty-)centimeter high stiletto heels. But it is hard not to look. The Artist is no more than three apples tall. Put him behind a bottle of Heineken on a bar and, pop!, the little squiggle has disappeared. And now he is sitting on the other side of the table in a secluded conference room and he is staring right in my eyes. It is a bit of a tricky situation. Prince does not allow tape recorders, he believes that you will remember what is important. The last time he spoke to the press he even forbid journalists to take notes. This time he has no objections. When he talks about his long-going -- and by this time pretty well documented -- feud with his former record company, Warners, which has released all Prince records since the debut in 1978, he adopts a quiet voice, an intonation that is both pedagogical and business-like. And now and then he seems completely obsessed with all the bureaucracy that his success has meant. Then he answers questions with oneor two words and he also begins his long, well-articulated, well-rehearsed monologues about his newly won musical freedom. And, sure, in the same way Martin Scorcese should have free hands to create exactly whatever film he wants to, anytime and anywhere, so should an artist like the little sly dog across me be allowed to create his music and pour it over us as much as he likes. When he leaves the business talk and talks about his music, about his guitar and his band or about Prince, whom he refers to in third person, he sounds like the way he looks when he is on stage. Then he sounds like a "bad to the bone" funky guy with a-little-bit-too-high heels who has sold some hundred million records. "Had I let Prince live longer, then I know exactly what the future would have been," he explains when the name change is discussed. "It would have been so predictable. But if I changed my name, what was going to happen then? Then it suddenly got interesting again. I was baptized Nelson, but who is Nell? I have never meet or even heard of Nell. So why should I be called Nelson? It felt like it was time to move on. I only chose a beautiful name and since then I have no idea what will happen. The only thing I know is that it will be beautiful." The name change is a pretty unavoidable subject when you have spent almost two entire days at Paisley Park. That symbol is everywhere. You can not take one step without stumbling over it. Even on the second floor the bird cage where Prince's two white doves whom he named Divinity and Majesty cozily lie is covered with small gold colored symbols. A.L. - But what does your wife call you?
A.L. - You seem very pleased with Emancipation?
The first single from the album is a cover of The Stylistics' "Betcha By Golly Wow!" written by Thom Bell and Linda Creed. Furthermore he does the same song-writing duo's "La La La Means I Love U" which was originally recorded by The Delfonics. Both of which are excellent examples of the symphonic doo wop which Bell and Creed wrote and produced for uncountable vocal groups and artists in Philadelphia during the first half of the seventies. A.L. - Why did you choose to record these particular Philly ballads?
A.L. - It is the first time that you recorded someone else's songs.
A.L. - She is not as successful today as she was twenty years ago?
Now I am in a position where no one controls what I am doing any longer and I can finally begin paying back to the artists who inspired me. A.L. - But you have tried before. You gave both Mavis Staples and George Clinton record contracts when nobody else was interested in them?
Sometimes it is difficult to get hold of what he is talking about, it tends to get a bit unstructured. He often puts formulations like "love is God" in the middle in a sentence when his talking about something completely different... A.L. - That you have listened to Sly Stone a lot has always been rather obvious.
And then he gets quiet, shrugs his shoulders and signals that he prefers not to talk about Sly. Prince seems genuinely upset over that fact that Sly Stone has been mentioned and swiftly changes the subject.
A.L. - Did you give her a name?
A.L. - How important has James Brown been for you?
That he mentions a musician in Ohio Players, this colossus of funk from the seventies, is interesting. Because their big band funk was, together with Sly & The Family Stone, George Clinton's Parliafunkadelicment and James Brown, one of the greatest source of inspiration for the music that Prince danced to in his late teens. The music that he both tried to imitate and surpass with his first albums and that still is the backbone of everything he does. The inspiration from funk groups like The Fatback Band, Earth Wind & Fire, Zapp, Slave, Rufus, Brick, Mass Production and Faze-O is an inevitable chapter that one needs to understand why Prince sounds like he does in 1996. Many of these are forgotten today, the late seventies funk never really got its breakthrough outside "black" USA and the bands often had so many members that they could not afford touring. Most of the groups died. The end of their days of glory coincided with Prince's first two albums and that music has left an unerasable influence. The Commodores' "Brickhouse" is still one of the little man's absolute favorite songs, a song he always comes back to when he with his band invades a scene in some club and jams for half the night. The same thing goes for Funkadelic's "Flash Light" and a number of James Brown's seventies grooves. "My name is Prince and I am funky", he sang on his first underrated album with the New Power Generation. And all the way from the start of his career he has always been best when he held himself close to the funk. Purple Rain may be his most appreciated album but with the exception of the electro-funky "Darling Nikki" and "When Doves Cry", the aerobic hits "Let's Go Crazy" and "I Will Die 4 U" sounds very dated. Similarly, most of the slightly psychedelic pop songs on Around The World In A Day that critics loved all over the world sound dated, almost incomprehensible. While the mechanic funk that he, like a modern Sly Stone or James Brown, builds into magic melodies sounds timeless. And it has always sounded pretty much the same. The records he wrote for The Time pretty much built the base for the Minneapolis funk the way it sounds today, particularly on Emancipation. The Time was Morris Day, Jesse Johnson, Monte Moir, Terry Lewis and Jimmy Jam. The group was merged from the shambles of Prince's first band Grand Central Corporation and Jam & Lewis' band Flyte Tyme. Alexander O'Neal was involved at an early stage but was fired. Prince wrote the music, they toured together and everything was fine. Until some egos grew too strong and Jam & Lewis started the SOS Band. Even today there is still a friendly rivalry between Jam & Lewis and Prince which, according to that cab-driver, started about 23 years ago on a hockey rink. On Emancipation, Prince sometimes excesses in cleverness which is not far from Frank Zappa or Carlos Santana. I can't stand that. It's really Prince's falsetto and his melodies I am after, that characteristic high cry he has put into his songs here and there over the years, that high cry which is as typical for Prince as Little Richard's "ooh's". And the funk. But that is there anyway. No matter what he does. Like James Brown, who by the way is the only artist comparable to Prince, Prince is often told that that he is no longer relevant, that the hip-hop revolution has since long passed his funk to the musical scrap-yard. He does not care the least.
Between 1968 and 1975 James Brown persisted in releasing three or four albums each year. Sometimes more, a few were double LP's and when he released a double LP he took the chance and released a double live LP at the same time, while he was still at it. And in that way he continued the following seven years. He had to get the music out there, he wrote continuously and he did not allow anyone to start talking to him about marketing plans or anything else. The music industry was of course different in 1973 but the arguments remain the same, as well as the creativity. And Prince is without doubt our times' equivalent of Little Richard, James Brown, Sly Stone, Jimi Hendrix and Todd Rundgren in one and the same little sly dog. And even Todd Rundgren once recorded a version of Bell and Creeds' "La La La Means I Love You". But the most interesting comparison is with James Brown. When Brown released masterpieces such as The Payback or Hell -- both were double LP's -- they didn't sound like anybody or anything else. But they sounded pretty much like those double LP's he had released a few years back. It has taken twenty years for most people to appreciate that James would not let anybody stop him or his music. Today every song that he recorded during this period sounds fantastic, timeless. The fact that most of Prince's albums recorded during the nineties, at first glance, sound like they were recorded during one and the same week in 1987 or 1988 may have bothered some people who still hold Purple Rain, Around The World In A Day or Parade closest to their hearts. But that's a marginal opinion. It will soon be forgotten. The double LP Sign O' The Times is still his most perfect work, but not necessarily for the same reasons today as it was eight years ago. On DJ Shadow's album Endtroducing, which was released just a few months ago, he thanks James Brown for inventing the modern music. One day the same thing will be said in bold letters, about Prince at the end of the credits on the year 2017's equivalent to DJ Shadow's debut album. I'm completely convinced of that. And the reason for that will hardly be the more pop-like albums he recorded in the middle of the eighties. It is rather in songs like "Sexy M.F.", "Joint 2 Joint", "Jam Of The Year", "Housequake", "Space" and "Cream" where you will find the essence of Prince's mission. His version of funk will always be better than "Raspberry Beret", "I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man" or "Purple Rain". Today already, "Batdance", the leading theme for Tim Burton's film with Michael Keaton as Batman, sounds like an exhilarated Funkadelic jamming with Coldcout or La Funk Mob. When it was released seven years ago I thought that it was unbearable. But the memory of the gigantic marketing that followed the film's footsteps has faded and the collage of sounds of Prince's strictly arranged choirs, the slow guitar riff he uses when everything is so funky that it really does not need anything more, the sampled dialogue and the way too fast electronic lines running through the entire song is absolutely brilliant. It is right now a pure pleasure to listen to Prince's collective production, because a lot of it that you remember as irrelevant now sounds shockingly great. The only ones that sounds dated are those songs you thought would live forever. The hits which everyone knows by heart, which everybody danced to at a school party, at a company party, in the shower or where ever you happened to be dancing in the mid-eighties. Those rock songs. It is only "Kiss" that I am not quite sure what I think about. Funky as hell, but completely overplayed. One seldom hears anyone mention Prince as their favorite singer, which is strange. He is one of pop history's greatest falsetto singers. Other singers, particularly in the golden age of the doo wop era, may have sounded more angelic-like, but few molded as much personality in their falsetto as Prince has. Curtis Mayfield, Al Green and Smokey Robinson are some of the few whose bright vocals have become as familiar as Prince. But their falsettos broke a long time ago and we already know that they have their best albums and vocal achievements far, far behind them. We do not yet have the same perspective on Prince. Even though he recorded his first album eighteen years ago -- and already then there was a brilliant a capella example on his falsetto -- his voice only gets more and more personal and stronger with every year that passes. That you so seldom hear anyone talk about the singer or guitarist Prince probably depends on the fact that he is so strongly connected with the eighties. And that is why he is far too often looked upon as a songwriter, a hit maker and a superstar. But he, together with Madonna and Michael Jackson, personified that decade's most commercial American dance music. Prince does not really exist, does he? He is like a cartoon character, locked in his studio in Paisley Park, he sits like another Charles Foster Kane and collects songs in a pile. And like all other artists that got a little too big for their own good
during the eighties he is nowadays never allowed to be bigger than his
latest hit. Prince does not care one bit. Today he is a free man.
A.L. - Do you listen much to new music?
A.L. - Why is it that you are still staying here?
A.L. - There is a lot of jazz influences on Emancipation.
A.L. - When you were fighting with your former record company you released "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World" on your own label and let a small company, Bellmark, owned by Al Bell, who used to be in charge of Stax, distribute it. Why is that?
A.L. - But that Al Bell ran Stax and because of "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World" suddenly made money again sounds like just what you were talking about earlier, that you have to take care of the pioneers and the heroes? Prince does not say anything, he just sits and twists the knee long purple suede tie and looks at me in the eyes. At that same moment his manager knocks on the door and finishes the conversation. Prince does not shake hands, he only nods, says bye and thanks me for travelling across half the world to meet him. He buttons his fake fur and I go downstairs to Paisley Park's large reception while Mayte trips along with me, going up the staircase. Much later, a week after I got home, I am reached by the news that Prince's and Mayte's son -- who was born October 16th with severe brain damage -- had died only a few days later. When he was celebrating Emancipation, performing in Paisley Park and gave this interview his son's death was still a well-kept secret, even though he had passed away three weeks earlier. During the interview I asked Prince how his music had been influenced by becoming a parent. It was one of the questions he did not give an real answer to. He started to talk about how "love is God", that Mayte made him feel a stronger presence of God, and then he got stuck in a rather incomprehensible monologue about his fascination with Egypt, pharaohs and pyramids. Tape recorders were prohibited so I can not go back and listen to his answers again. And the notes, which I have gone through over and over again, do not tell me anything else than that he gave one of his really odd answers. But I really wanted to talk to him about the music, so after all maybe that did not belong here. Somehow I believe that Prince agrees with me. Had his son been alive he would probably not have wanted to talk about him anyway. His family do not have anything to do with his artistry and I had not planned on poking in it anyway. If had I known about this, the trip to Minneapolis would most likely have been less pleasant. But when I got into the taxi outside Paisley Park I was happily ignorant. I had only heard vague rumors that Prince's son was "in a pretty bad shape" (for an infant). And nobody near him had had a single thought of confirming that rumor. So it is not even something I am thinking about when the taxi driver starts telling the story of a small fifteen year old boy that rather than anything else wanted to become a hockey player. [Sidebar Article:] Two C60-tapes Prince, please! We had planned to do one of those POP-goes-through-all-records-that-this P-man-has-been-involved-with and with little tiny convolutes and so on. Don't be sad now: but we did not have the strength. We remembered that the man has written seven songs for Martika's album Martika's Kitchen and those of you who remember Martika maybe understand why we were content with these two tapes with Andre's 28 favorites by this P-man. Then there wasn't any room for more... GIGOLOS GET LONELY TOO (Vol. I)
Side A
Side B GIGOLOS GET LONELY TOO (VOL.II)
Side A
Side B |
- Prince was dope. He did some cool shit, he says during the interview
a few days later.