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Chicago Tribune - November 21, 1985
"Morris Day Striving To Be A King Instead Of A Prince In The Land Of Funk"
Written By - Steve Morse

The pouty star Prince has been said to have an iron grip on the Minneapolis funk scene, but one artist who slipped away was Morris Day. Prince's hit movie "Purple Rain" established co-star Day as a marketable singer and actor last year, then he jumped ship for a solo career.

Day had been lead singer of the Time, a group produced by Prince and long employed as his opening act. The two also had been friends since their teenage years when they were in the same bands, Grand Central and Champagne, the latter managed by Day's mother.

"I won't say Prince was intentionally holding me down," Day said, when interviewed at his new home in Los Angeles. "But things weren't moving at the pace I wanted them to. And it had gotten to the point where I could do something about it. So you either do something or you complain."

Their relationship changed with "Purple Rain," in which Day played a zoot-suited smoothie who competed for Prince's girlfriend, Apollonia Kotero. Day dazzled with his street-smart wit (often getting better reviews than Prince himself) and with a performance of "Jungle Love," which became a major radio hit after its movie exposure.

Suddenly, Day was a star in his own right.

"The interest in me seemed to be almost too sudden," he recalled of his "Purple Rain" breakthrough. "I thought it should have been there all along. I mean, don't start to believe in me just because all of a sudden I'm doing well."

His split from Prince also sparked rumors of a feud, which Day denied.

"It was just that there was just no room for me to grow as an artist. I wasn't able to express the things I needed to express," he said. "I didn't have complete creative control."

In many ways he still remains grateful to Prince.

"It's the old saying," he noted, "you have to crawl before you can walk to get into the business. You have to sometimes make sacrifices. I think of it like school. I learned a lot from Prince about how to work in a studio and how to be a performer. And, of course, I had a good crutch with Prince writing and doing all the production, or most of it."

Asked whether he's now treated like a leper by what he terms Prince's "Paisley Park camp," he said, "I really don't know. I'm not that much in contact. I do know some people feel I might have let them down, but in this day and age you've got to think about yourself.

"This is an important time in my life," he added, "because you don't know how long your creativity is going to last. And I don't want to have to blame anybody but myself if something goes wrong."

The middle of three children whose mother who was a nurse and father a Minneapolis bus driver, Day had a fairly tranquil youth compared with his rebellious friend, Prince.

"I'd say I was lower-middle-class," he explained, "but as a kid, what is that? That's just a statement people put on someone's life, but I always felt rich."

Despite his extroverted image in "Purple Rain" and on stage, where he's been known to primp in a mirror and dab his face showily with a kerchief (he'll appear Nov. 21 at the Auditorium Theater), Day was quite shy as a boy.

"I kept lots of things sort of locked in," he said. "Sometimes I'd want to say something loud or whatever, but I'd always hold it in. And if I wanted to get crazy, I wouldn't."

What turned the tide? "When I got into music. Musicians always seem to go against the grain, and so did I."

He always had a sense of fashion, however, and today this is one of his keenest trademarks. He admits to having not one but two wardrobe closets in his Beverly Hills home. And as for pairs of shoes: "I've lost count." And for suits: "That's an impossible question, too, but plenty.

"I love clothes. I love to be clean. That's when I'm really at my peak, when I dress up and spend time in the mirror and get all the curls right and put my suit on. It really brings out an extreme side of my personality."

Day went on to describe himself as "sort of famous, kind of rich and not bad looking."

Asked about his age, he laughed, "About 25, but you know, it's rock 'n' roll. Once you get in this business, you start lying about age so much that you have to really think to remember how old you are."

Concerning his daily schedule, he said, "It's pretty much music . . . and dating, of course, but that has tapered off. It's dangerous out there these days with all those terminal things going around. It's like gambling with your life. It's better to look."

Pressed about his treatment of women, he joked, "Well, I don't throw them in the garbage can," a reference to an alley scene in "Purple Rain" in which he did just that after being provoked.

On a less frivolous note is the verse about romance in his new Prince - less album, "Color of Success." In the song, "The Character," he describes someone as having "open arms but scared of love." That person, he confessed, is himself.

Most of the album is lighter on the soul. It's a dance-floor record, teeming with computer drum programs and funky synthesizers picking up from where the Time's "Jungle Love" left off. It features an all-L.A. cast of musicians, notably two members of Earth Wind & Fire--synthesist Larry Dunn and guitarist Roland Bautista.

There's no traditional drumming on the album, even though Day was a drummer in those early Minneapolis bands with Prince. "Drummers are tapering off and drum machines are taking over," he said, offering a personal opinion. "I'm not necessarily sad about it, because I can still be a drummer for a hobby."

Nor is there any electric bass now; bass parts are played by synthesizers. "It's a move I decided to make. I wanted it to sound high-tech. The usual bass guitar with the plucking sound sort of dates it as far as I'm concerned."

The album's initial single is "The Oak Tree," a propulsive tune named for a new dance step he's invented. A video for the song even shows Day instructing 300-pound prison inmates how to do the movement.

"Just imagine a tree in a high wind," he said humorously. "Your hands are up in the air, and sometimes you shake your leaves and sometimes you don't. It's hard to describe."

How did it come about? "It just happened on stage. I named it after watching a videotaped concert of myself. I looked at the video and said, 'I look like an oak tree!' "

Beyond dance steps and albums, Day plans to make more films. He has a three-movie deal with 20th Century-Fox but nothing specific yet. "There's been a variety of scripts. Some are more serious, and some are along the lines of what I played in 'Purple Rain.' "

But films will have to wait, since his main priority now is rehearsing 12 hours a day to ready a nine-piece band, including two female back-up singers, for his first tour since leaving the Prince entourage.

"I'm going to do some of the old Time stuff and not just songs from my album, but things will be more unique because of the approach of the guys in my band," he promised. "Most of the cats are young and haven't done this before, so they're real aggressive."