Free



- 1976 -Inside The Purple Reign (84)By Jon Bream41884606755765“Midnight at the Oasis” came ringing through the vents at Central High School just about every day. Everyone knew who was playing the haunting instrumental version of Maria Muldaur’s hit song ; it was the kid sitting in the hallway with the big Afro and big acoustic guitar - Prince Nelson. Just about everyone at Central knew who he was. It was an inner city school that, in the mid-’70s, was a mixture of whites and blacks, Jews and Lutherans, poor and rich, with even the sons of the chief of surgery at the prestigious University of Minnesota Hospitals. Prince was quiet and shy and pretty much blended in with everyone else. But he could play music like no one else. On occasion he’d walk into jazz ensemble class, in which he wasn’t enrolled, pick up an instrument, take a solo and “kill it,” and then just walk out. His music teacher used to lock up the music room at lunchtime so Prince could practice in solitude. He used to sit in the hallways and play his guitar a lot even after the bell rang. “That kid,” the drama teacher told the school’s music director, “isn’t going to amount to anything.” Huh ? And to think that only a few years later, when the same kid came back to visit Central for an assembly, the students got so hysterical that Prince had to be locked in the office and never got a chance to face the student body. “He was in my office,” recalled Dannie Gomez, a Central assistant principal at the time, “and he had some of the saddest eyes I’d seen in a long time, like something had happened to him way back when.” At Bryant Junior High, Prince was pretty much a jock. At least he tried to be. He played baseball, football, and basketball. He was quick and agile and had great endurance. In fact, he was good enough in basketball that in ninth grade he made the junior varsity team at Central High, a perennial athletic power in football, basketball, and track. He was the sixth or seventh man on the team, an excellent ballhandler and a good shooter, according to coach Richard Robinson. The problem was that, at five-foot- two, Prince was too short. “Probably with a different group of people he would have been a starter,” the coach noted. “But, as they turned out, they were probably the best ball team that ever came along at Central. I knew he wanted to be starting and felt he should be starting. He was unhappy and he expressed that many, many times. He always has been a person who felt he had to do things his way.” In fact, Prince quit in midseason of his sophomore year and retreated to his music. Going from junior to senior high, he seemed to become withdrawn. He’d sit or stand by himself in the cafeteria, never eating but staring at people. He was so quiet in the classroom that some of the teachers didn’t try to get through to him. He didn’t participate much in class discussions. Oftentimes he occupied himself making artistic doodles. He never got into trouble or found himself in the principal’s office, and he got pretty good grades, seemingly without studying hard. The few people who got close to the reserved but obviously talented student - and no one claims to have really penetrated his shell - talk about his sense of humor. Sometimes it was sophisticated verbal stuff; other times it was pure pranks. In drama-reading class at Central, Prince once put a tack on the chair of an unsuspecting Ronnie Robbins, his R&B guitar rival. Some of the students were aware of it, so when the chubby victim screamed, Prince got a big chuckle. However, Prince was more likely to engage in verbal jousting with his buddies - you know, running down each other’s families the way kids do. He didn’t like being the butt of jokes as much as he liked dishing it out. But he sure had his share of nicknames, from the cruel ‘Butcher Dog” (because neighborhood kids thought his face resembled a German shepherd’s) to the taunting and obvious “Princess.” On the other hand, his humor could be sly. His ninth grade algebra teacher happened to have a pair of pants that were exactly the same pattern and style as Prince’s. “Every great while we’d end up wearing the same pants on the same day,” George Headrick said, “and he’d say, ‘That’s a nice looking pair of pants you have on.’” Prince dressed pretty much like everyone else. Some days he favored platform shoes, others track shoes. There were shirts with hoods and occasional rhinestones, and his hair was braided into cornrows from time to time. Then on the warmer days you might see him in a tank top with cutoffs, sandals, and socks. He did ask a friend, Betsy Smith, to make him a knit hat like the kind that Sly Stone wore, sort of a gladiator’s helmet with string-straps dangling with huge balls. So she crocheted him a pink and blue hat like his idol wore. Another of Prince’s idols was Carlos Santana. In fact, Prince signed Smith’s junior high yearbook, “Keep It Black, Carlos Santana.” (A few years later, after the young musician had met his idol, he told Smith he didn’t like Santana because the guitar hero was too into his guru.) Prince always seemed to have a girlfriend of sorts, but his friends never considered him a ladies’ man. He was kind of shy around women and self- conscious about his height. He did stay pretty tight with one of his girlfriends from school days - a cheerleader who was about his height - and she ended up with a small part in Purple Rain. He wasn’t too sociable, and when he did go to parties, he steadfastly stayed away from booze. He wasn’t exactly a wallflower. Ironically though, his stepbrother Duane, who was a foot taller, was voted best male dancer in their senior class. In high school, Prince was absorbed in his music. He did well in music theory, guitar class, and stage band. His music teacher, Jim Hamilton, who had played with B. B. King and Ray Charles, sensed that Prince and several other of his students at Central and North High (which Prince attended briefly during his sophomore year) had futures in music - Andre Anderson, Prince’s former bassist, who now records as Andre Cymone and produces others; Terry Lewis, who played bass in The Time and now produces records; Mark Brown, bassist in Prince’s Revolution; and Terry Casey, lead singer of Mazarati, a Minneapolis R&B band that Brown produces. “At that time,” the teacher observed, “when it came to business sense, performance, and playing, I would bet ten dollars to a penny that Andre would be the guy to make it.” In junior and senior high, Prince and Andre played in the same band - Grand Central - along with Andre’s sister, Linda, on keyboards, Morris Day (later lead singer of the Time) on drums, and William Daughty on percussion. The group favored sneaky funk arrangements of tunes by Larry Graham, Michael Jackson, Carole King, and Grover Washington, with Prince taking the horn parts on his guitar voice-bag. The songs grew into long jams and almost lost their structure as tunes. But the intros were slick, the choreography exceptional, and outfits showy, if not always matching. And Prince, the doodler, designed a logo for the group. Grand Central, from the north side, was one of three rival groups of young blacks in Minneapolis. There was Cohesion on the south side and Flyte Tyme, which later evolved into the Time. Battles of the bands at local hotels were the order of the day, and sometimes Valentine’s Day, New Year’s Eve, or a fashion show would mean a job. Prince sang in falsetto and exhibited a certain reluctance to look at his audience. Even so, he had a magic presence. For instance, one night in ‘76, Champagne, which Grand Central had been rechristened that year, was facing off against Cohesion. Prince had already left the band, but he made a guest appearance and simply blew Cohesion off the stage. Some days Prince and Andre wandered to downtown Minneapolis to Chuck Orr’s guitar store and checked out bass guitars for two or three hours at a time. Andre always did the talking, but both did the playing. Orr’s store became sort of a haven for a lot of young, ambitious players. One time the owner locked the door in the afternoon and just let a bunch of musicians jam until long after 8 P.M. ‘It was a total black happening,” Orr said. (Just a few months later Prince commissioned the shop owner to make him a guitar and a bass with white ivy vines on the fingerboard.) Prince was serious about music as a profession. There was talk of some interest from Isaac Hayes, the hot buttered soul rapper from Memphis, but Prince decided he didn’t want to go with the Shaft man. He wanted to finish school and pursue his own dreams. They were clear. In the Central High graduation program, Prince listed his post-school plans as “Employment-Music.” To that end, the youngster had taken classes from Hamilton in song copyrighting, recording, and other music business topics, but he never finished them. Still he had enough sense to contact a professional musician in New York who had married his cousin to ask about setting up to publish his songs. In school, Prince wasn’t much for sharing his music. He might light into one of his tunes and then stop after thirty seconds. But he’d pay attention to the music of other students. In fact, some players thought he was copping their ideas and incorporating them into his own music. That seemed to be his style -always absorbing. Even back then, he had this aura or mystique about him. In his own unspoken way, he always seemed to have his way. “I’m about to be a star,” he said to Ronnie Robbins one day in ‘76. Responded Robbins : “I know you are.”Chuck Orr Interview (Controversy #5 – 1987)Telephone conversation with Chuck Orr (the music store owner in Minneapolis whose shop Prince used to practice in)Mr Orr no longer has his music shop but is currently working on “a solid body bass guitar which sounds as true acoustically as the purest thing in the world. I’m just now getting it perfected. It’s different.”Q. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself ?A. Well, I’m a writer. I love to write – I’ve written for some magazines. I’ve lived in a lot of places – the Carribean, California and Minneapolis. I love to sail.Q. Were you always a musician ?A. Oh, no. I always wanted to be. So, when I came back from Vietnam, I taught myself to play guitar and became a professional for a while – folk-type music.Q. How did you meet Prince ?A. I’ve had a lot of enquiries – all kind of magazines. One magazine wanted me to pose with a photo of Prince and just stand there and smile. Seems like they were all looking for some dirt. Frankly, I have nothing to say that may be earth shaking.Q. We’re not interested in dirt, do you have any little tidbits you may like to pass on to our readers ?A. I don’t think Prince is an eccentric. I think it comes from a poor background. When I first met him (around ’74 ?) – I don’t know how he heard of me or my shop – he just walked in one day and started playing one of my basses and was absolutely confounded. He had never played anything like these and it’s because I’m so different in some of the things I do that he just kept coming back. At that time Prince and Andre were great friends and they both just liked to come into my place and play. I think one of the pictures in the book by Jon Bream showed that. All of a sudden different people stopped by my shop. One day such a crowd (who didn’t know each other) was in my shop. It was weird. They were all black, real strange. Next thing I knew we had about 14 people in there. I locked the door and we all just sat around and jammed. It was very spontaneous and turned out to be one hell of an evening. I think we all had fun. Prince never did drink. I don’t think the man ever did drugs, I really don’t and I respect him for that. He was very young at the time and what he was interested in was MUSIC. He bought a bass from me. He wanted an ivory inlaid fingerboard, which I really didn’t agree with but he wanted it. I was in the studio once listening to Prince play. I loved it. That was the first time I’d seen him like that and he definitely knew what he wanted. I don’t pretend to be a great authority but I recognize talent and, oh God, could he play. He definitely had IT, he could do darn near anything he wanted to. I think he’s a very straight and informed individual. The impression I got in those days was that he was looking for himself. I think he’s got his head screwed on pretty good. He’s looking at music a little differently from other musicians. I like his music – he’s doing it right. Near as I can tell he’s got Andre back – I think that’s the best thing that could happen. I felt kind of bad when they seemed to be somewhat estranged but that’s changed, you know. You know there really are people who cares about Prince. Maybe he doesn’t realize that. I’m not talking about the nuts, but really nice people who do care. Prince is a very reserved individual and I’m sure that some people misunderstand that. He’s not selling something like on a tv ad, but what he does he does straight from the heart. At times, I’ve felt really estranged from him, I really haven’t seen him for a long time now but that doesn’t mean that I don’t know what he’s doing. He seems to have a goal. He has excellent help, especially locally. I don’t think he arrogant or egotistical. He’s totally the opposite – very quiet but not a recluse. He’s really no different from you or me. I’m just glad to see he made it. Remember Owen Husney ? Prince brought him to me. Owen really pushed hard for him – really put himself out. I think things went a little bit strange there and I felt bad about it. When all of this notoriety happens to a person, what do you do ? What would you do ? You don’t know how to handle it – it goes so fast. I don’t listen to these tv people and their generalities. It’s tough, let alone growing up in it like Prince did. It’s kinda nuts. There’s one thing for sure, if you’ve got good friends you can do it. They help you through the rough stuff. When I knew Prince and Andre, they were ALWAYS together. I hated to see what happened between them but we can’t judge what went on. I’m just glad that’s over and they’re working together again. Prince has a way he can get across with his music. You have to give it to him ! I think the future will tell a lot as to what’s going to happen, where his mind is at – it’s going to be real interesting. If I could make a projection, I think he’s going to come up with some real good stuff. He’s going to do it – he’s working on something right now. He can play anything he wants : he could go all funk or pop. He’s an interesting person, that’s the best I can say. He’s a very complex person and I think it’s difficult for anyone to get very close to him. He has to have a private life as well. I think he’s taking care of himself in that way. I understand his new studio is really something : weird new things for sounds, wood and baffles; how you can deal with tone in a lot of ways. It’ll be real interesting to see how things turn out. There’ve been so many people digging for dirt on Prince and there isn’t any dirt ! There’s no drugs, no alcohol, no strange things I can think of in any way – the man’s just good ! The best thing I can tell you is that he’s a real clean kid. Hey, if you can let him know, I’m really glad for him. Wish I could say to him personally how proud I am of him.Early 1976 : ASI, Minneapolis - Grand Central Corporation sessions Prince / Andre Cymone / Morris Day1905011176039th St. Party (2)Grand CentralLady Pleasure 541972522225MachineWhenever (2)You’re Such A FoxDavid RivkinDavid RivkinIn early 1976, Grand Central Corporation recorded a demo at ASI Studio, a small 16-tracks studio on the north side of Minneapolis. Having spending months in writing original songs, they decided that it was time to record a demo of their material. With Morris Day’s mother paying for the sessions, they booked studio time, under the direction of David Rivkin, who will later work on several projects with Prince. With Prince handling the guitar and keyboards, Andre playing bass, and Morris behind the drums, they recorded six original songs : "39th St Party", "Lady Pleasure", "Machine", "You're Such A Fox", "Grand Central" et "Whenever".With a growing ambition on display and clearly focused beyond the Twin Cities, Grand Central drummer Morris Day recalled that bandmates “Prince and Andre were so serious minded. That was all they talked about, ‘When we make it…’ ‘When we get our deal, we’ll become famous.” Prince proved particularly astute at quickly sizing up and down the droves of ‘managers’ and ‘booking agents’ who hounded him after Grand Central shows promising the stars, but chose instead to go with an extended member of the inner family in LaVonne Daughtery, mother of drummer Morris Day, who in turn hooked the group up with local music producer Pepe Willie, who had already become a familiar source of music advice to Prince via his marriage to one of Prince’s cousins, Shauntel Manderville. As a relative and fan of Prince in the same time, Willie recalled that “LaVonne wanted somebody who was in the music industry, someone who knew what to do with (Grand Central) … I was introduced to Prince in 1974 by my fiancée’, Prince’s cousin, Shauntel. She was excited about Prince because he was a very talented musician. She knew I really knew about the business of music and she wanted me to talk to Prince. He was playing at a ski party in Minnesota when we met. I remember thinking, ‘Boy, he’s got a big Afro.’…I considered Prince (to be) family, so I wanted to tell him everything I possibly knew. They had some great ideas but their material wasn’t constructed properly. They would just start playing and singing, and then they would jam for 15 minutes. Everybody was playing together, that wasn’t the problem. The problem was they weren’t singing together. I told them to put down their instruments.” Elaborating further, Pepe Willie recalled that, not surprisingly, “Prince was the most talented guitar player, and I would have him play the chords and get them to all sing together… Of course, there was raw talent there, but when they began to sing, everyone was singing something different. Prince was singing ‘she’, André was singing ‘he’, the rest of the group was singing something else; and the name of the song was You Remind Me of Me (written by André). I couldn’t believe they didn’t take the time as a group to learn the words. So I had them put down their instruments and start learning the lyrics. You know, it was like Song Construction 101 had begun. Of course, my No. 1 student was Prince…I taught them about song construction, singing together, the best ways to rehearse together, but I didn’t have to tell Prince anything more than once.” Clearly seeing something uniquely special in Prince, Willie offered the already accomplished musician and now-aspiring recording engineer the opportunity to work as studio session player for his 94 East recording sessions at Cookhouse Studios in December, 1975, which would become Prince’s first known studio recording. Comprised of a band that included older Minneapolis session staples such as Dale Alexander on drums, Wendell Thomas on bass, back-up singers Kristie Lazenberry and Marcy Ingvoldstad, Pierre Lewis on keyboards, Prince on lead guitar alongside Lewis on guitar and lead vocals. The group’s first session produced five recordings, including ‘If We Don’t,’ ‘Better Than You Think,’ ‘Games, ‘I’ll Always Love You,’ and ‘If You See Me.’ Willie recalled of the recording session that Prince “was dependable, eager to please, and inspiring in his performance. Late at night, after a session, I remember, Prince would call me up to tell me that he…was unhappy with something he’d recorded and wanted to redo his tracks. I trusted Prince enough to let him go into the studio by himself and redo the track(s). I mean, that’s how talented he was at 16.” From the experience, Prince immediately took Andre and Morris and entered another Minneapolis studio, ASI Studio, a 16-track whole in the wall on the city’s North side, which engineer David Rivkin (a.k.a. David Z), who also engineered the session - his first with Prince of many to follow - recalled was a “just a horrible piece of junk” to lay down some demos for his own group. Newly re-named Grand Central Corporation at the urging of group manager LaVonne Daughtery - who was also bankrolling the sessions - Prince produced the demo as well as handling lead vocals, lead guitar and keyboards, while Andre and Morris Day handled bass and drums respectively over the course of demos including ‘Lady Pleasure,’ ‘Machine,’ ‘39th St. Party,’ ‘You’re Such a Fox,’ ‘Whenever,’ and ‘Grand Central.’ These demos would mark the beginning of Prince’s years in the studio…Prince Writes His First Song, ‘Machine’By Bryan Wawzenek (Ultimate Prince – 2018)What were you doing when you were seven years old ? Learning to read ? Watching cartoons ? Beginning to dress yourself ? Well, Prince was busy writing his first song. Prince Rogers Nelson’s reputation as a musical prodigy is not an exaggeration - the Purple One started early. It helped that he had been born into a musical family on June 7, 1958. His mother, Mattie, had been a jazz singer, before she gave?it up to raise Prince and his siblings. His father, John, continued to play piano and write songs after his son entered the world, although that was not his primary occupation. He worked for Honeywell in Minneapolis, but played side jobs as the leader of a band he called the Prince Rogers Trio. John named his son after a stage name he’d already been using for years. “I named my son Prince because I wanted him to do everything I wanted to,” John Nelson told A Current Affair in 1991. The boy would not disappoint. To avoid confusion between John’s stage persona and the actual Prince Rogers in the house, Mattie took to calling their son Skipper. Young Skipper’s musical awakening supposedly came in 1963, when he saw his father perform publicly for the first time. There had always been music in the house, but seeing his dad on stage had a lasting impact on the child. Later, when the event became a legend in Prince’s backstory, the details would shift. In some versions of the tale, Prince snuck out the family car to go see what his father was doing in a local club. In others, his mother took him to see the Prince Rogers Trio play at a theater. But every account seems to involve a parade of dancing girls accompanying the music. “People were screaming,” he recalled, according to Prince : Inside the Music and the Masks. “From then on I think I wanted to be a musician.” Even though the youngster had not yet learned an instrument, he began “playing” rocks, banging two of them together to create a rhythm akin to the jazz Prince had heard his father play. Before long, he had taken to banging on John’s upright piano, installed in the Nelson home. Prince would try to play and his little sister Tyka would sing along, as the siblings emulated Mom and Dad. With encouragement from his father, and plenty of practice, Prince learned to properly play the instrument. He said that the first real song that he was able to perform on the piano was the theme to TV’s Batman series, which became a big hit when Prince was seven. Not long before his death in 2016, the musician reminisced by playing the famous theme in concert during his Piano and a Microphone tour. The young man’s interest in music was insatiable from that point on. His mother recalled shopping trips to department stores in which her son would quickly rush to the music department to play on the pianos and organs that were on display. When Matte was done, she’d always know where to find Prince. Not long after Prince learned to play the piano, he wrote his first song, which he called “Machine.” There are numerous publications that claim it was titled “Funk Machine,” but that’s probably not true. It’s more likely that the “funk” was added to a subsequent evolution of the tune. Here’s why : According to multiple sources, Prince wrote this first song when he was seven. He was that age between June 1965 and June 1966. Batman - the theme of which he learned before he created his first melody - premiered in January ’66, meaning that “Machine” would have to follow sometime before the summer of that year. The reason that “funk” was probably not in the original title is that because the term hadn’t yet become widely known. Although jazz musicians - maybe even including John Nelson - might talk about putting some “stank” or “funk” into their playing, the first well-known song with the word in the title was Wilson Pickett's “Funky Broadway,” released in 1967. That same year,?James Brown?released "Cold Sweat," whose rhythm put a greater emphasis on the first beat of a measure than previously heard in African American music. Its success - reaching No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 1 on the R&B chart -?caused others to experiment with the new sound, which became defined as "funk." As a musical prodigy, Prince might have been funky, but he wasn’t a “Funk Machine” quite yet. That would happen as he became enamored with the music and performance style of the Godfather of Soul, then Sly and the Family Stone. But he wasn’t just into R&B, also listening to rock, pop and singer-songwriters on the radio. His musical talents became just as eclectic. As the young musician grew older, he briefly tried to play saxophone before learning the guitar, drums and bass. By the time he was a teenager, Prince had formed his first band with childhood pal Andre Anderson (who later called himself Andre Cymone) on bass and Prince’s second cousin - on drums. The group sometimes included other members, mostly played covers of the era’s hits at dances and went by a variety of names - most notably Grand Central, but also Phoenix; Charles, Cousin & Friends and Sex Machine. That last name might have been a nod to?the hit by James Brown or the lengthy album track by Sly Stone, or it may have come about because of a newer rendition of Prince’s first-ever song. Although Grand Central was primarily a cover band, they did sneak some originals into their sets, including Prince’s “Machine,” which by then had become “Funk Machine” or “Sex Machine.” Supposedly, when the band played the tune in the early-to-mid-’70s, the lyrics involved some graphic sexual content and compared a sexy woman to a mechanized object. Again, the Purple One started early. Through his high-school years, Prince was amassing a catalog of songs, many of them about women - both real and imagined. Even though he had become part of a successful local band as a teenager, and even done some recording sessions, he was growing frustrated at the limitations of being in a group known primarily for playing covers. In early 1976, when he was 17, it looked like that was ready to change. After Morris Day had replaced Smith on drums in Grand Central, Day’s mother Lavonne began managing the group and booked the boys some time at ASI Studio in Minneapolis. With Prince on guitar and keyboards, Anderson on bass and Day on drums, the band would record six original compositions - “Machine” being one of them - overseen by David Rivkin (the brother of future Revolution drummer Bobby Z.). Prince was so excited by the experience, he boasted about it in the high school newspaper. But the thrill was short-lived. The recordings failed to lead to what the teenage musician was dreaming about: a recording contract and the opportunity to make a debut album. If he wasn’t able to do that with this band, then he’d have to go it alone. Prince did exactly that, recording his own demo tape that got him signed to Warner Bros. Records as a solo act. He released his first LP in 1978. All these years - and hundreds, if not thousands of songs - later, the 1976 recording of “Machine” remains unreleased. Not only was it the first song that Prince ever wrote, it was one of the first recordings that was denied to his die-hard fans. Prince’s songwriting started with “Machine” and, in a way, so did his vault.Why Prince’s First Recording Session Didn’t Wow His EngineerBy Martin Kielty – Ultimate Prince (2022)Longtime Prince collaborator David “Z” Rivkin recalled his early studio sessions with the musician,?prior to his?first record deal.Rivkin’s first time in the studio with Prince was with the musician’s high school band, Grand Central. “It was Prince and Andre?Cymone and Morris Day. A trio,” Rivkin?recalled to Sunset Sound Recorders. “I didn’t think it was anything special.” Asked if Prince’s “amazing talent” had been obvious, he replied : “Not at that time,” noting that everyone involved were “all amateur back then.” Things were different after the band split. In 1976, as Prince began developing his solo career, manager Owen Husney booked him into Minneapolis’ Sound 80 Studio to track a new demo, and Rivkin was once again present. “I don’t know what happened,” he said when asked if Prince had wanted him specifically. “But I was probably one of the only engineers that knew the street and knew what was going on, and I wasn’t doing television commercials like everybody else; that’s all they did.” By that point the 18-year-old Prince was working by himself. “He had all these new songs that were great, and he had recorded every part on this little hand cassette machine. And he hummed the piano part, then he hummed the drum beat, then he hummed the guitar part,” Rivkin said. “We’d go around the room, and before he started the drums he’d listen to the drum part; same thing with the piano, same thing with the bass. He had planned it out and he was able to execute it all himself, which is really rare.” Of particular note was Prince’s ability to be “objective” over his own playing, Rivkin added. “He didn't sound like it was one guy. He managed to put different personalities in different instruments… He got so comfortable with recording that he did a lot of it himself eventually.” The demo led to the deal with Warner Brothers, and Rivkin accompanied Prince to the label’s Amigo Studios in North Hollywood, where “all the famous producers came into the room to see if Prince could actually do it himself.” While the subtext was to make a decision over which producer was to work with Prince, he famously stuck it out until they let him do it himself. While the partnership with Rivkin continued right into the Paisley Park era, the engineer noted he’d never worked FOR Prince, but instead worked WITH him - meaning he was exempt from the artist’s notoriously demanding behavior. “He tortured a lot of people,” Rivkin pointed out. “He could be very hard on people… he’d focus on one person that he didn’t think was doing the job and he’d let ‘em have it.” Describing him as “a very tough boss,” the engineer added : “I didn’t come under his wrath at all so I’m luckily [only] a witness to that. … He liked to keep people under his thumb. … He wasn’t just venting - it was a control thing. ‘Don’t tell ‘em things - let ‘em guess.’ He used to treat his band that way.”v – The Prince Podcast – Terrance Jackson (2018)(1:37) -495047253365 Prince’s Friend – Terry Jackson (2018)(0:35)Remembering William ‘Hollywood’ Doughty, who played in Grand Central with a young PrinceBy Andrea Swensson – The Current (2019)In high school, he was known as Doughty. In adulthood, he went by Hollywood. And from now until eternity, he will be known as an underappreciated architect of the Minneapolis Sound and one of the members of the legendary Grand Central band, who ruled the North Side of Minneapolis in the mid-1970s with members that included Prince, André Cymone, and Morris Day. William Astaire “Hollywood” Doughty passed away on Sunday, February 3. As soon as news of his passing began to ripple through the purple universe, his peers from the ‘70s and ‘80s R&B scene began paying their respects. “Will was the baddest percussionist I have ever heard. No theory, self taught, and purely an amazing player.” - Jesse Johnson, solo artist and member of The Time. A lifelong musician, Doughty could play several instruments and sing, and he earned a reputation at an early age for being a show-stopping, technically advanced percussionist. André Cymone (who was known then by his birth name, André Anderson) recalls first seeing Doughty jam in the North High football field after school in the early 1970s, when both young musicians were students at Lincoln Junior High. “We had a lot of neighborhood people who were really, really good percussionists,” Cymone says. “I was walking through, because you have to pass the field to get to my house, and I heard this guy, I mean, he was unbelievable. He blew me away. And I just had to stop and sit and watch him.” Cymone remembers trying to recruit Doughty to join his band on the spot, though it would take a few years to bring him into the fold. Even back in the 7th grade, Doughty was already in demand and playing with other North Side bands. Terry Jackson, who played percussion in Grand Central alongside Doughty, has memories of meeting his bandmate at an even earlier age. “I’ve known William since kindergarten, more or less,” Jackson says. He remembers attending John Hay Elementary with Doughty, Prince Nelson, and Prince’s cousin, Charles “Chazz” Smith, all of whom would go on to play in Grand Central together - and all of whom were deeply rooted in the rich musical traditions passed down to them from the elder African-American jazz and R&B musicians in North Minneapolis. “Everybody knew about William Doughty,” says Chazz Smith, who was Grand Central’s original drummer. “I’ve known him since he was in the first grade. His uncle had a barbecue place, and that was our first gig that we did, me, André and Prince -?Skip’s Bar-B-Q. That’s how Hollywood said that he’d seen us. We were just some kids, 12, 11, something like that.” Even when they were still in junior high, Grand Central - who initially called themselves the very junior high-sounding names Phoenix, Young Blood, and, ever so briefly, Sex Machine - began to turn the heads of the older musicians in the neighborhood. “We would be walking down the street, and anytime we’d hear a band, we were so bold we would just walk up and knock on the door, ‘Can we come in and listen to you guys ?'” remembers Smith. “And they’d say, ‘Who are these little smurfs ?’ Spike Moss [director at community center The Way] used to say our band should be called ‘Electric Kool-Aid.’ Because we were little, young, and we played rock groups - we would play Jimi Hendrix and Grand Funk Railroad. And they were looking at us like, ‘Who are you, what kind of kids are you ? Are you white, what are you ?'” As they gained notoriety in the neighborhood and began scoring points at area battle-of-the-bands showcases, the band began snowballing additional members and influences. The group started with Chazz, André, and Prince, then picked up André’s sister, Linda Anderson, on keys, and the Andersons’ next-door neighbor, Terry Jackson, on percussion. With the addition of both Jackson and Doughty, they were able to master some of the more complex, Latin- and jazz fusion-inspired songs that were making their way to the top of the Billboard charts in the early 1970s. “We really wanted to be like Earth, Wind & Fire, they had a double percussion set up with kalimba and timbales, and of course it was Santana’s influence,” remembers Jackson. “So that’s kind of where we took off at with William when he got in the band.” “Will had a unique instinct for making percussion the perfect accompaniment to a song.” - Linda Anderson, Grand Central. For how successful its members went on to become, it’s surprising how little is actually known about Grand Central, and how many misunderstandings persist about their history. For starters, the band was active for a few years in the early 1970s before Smith was unceremoniously excused and replaced with Morris Day, who is pictured in the iconic (and only publicly known) photograph of the band. And although one might assume that the young Mr. Nelson was leading the band on vocals and guitar, as he did throughout the rest of his career, Prince actually started out on keys before moving to guitar and would share the front of the stage with Cymone, Jackson, and Doughty, who would trade off on vocal duties and perform synchronized dance moves à la the Jackson 5. “William sang a lot of the songs back then. He was kind of our lead singer,” Cymone says. “A lot of people don’t know that. He sang a lot of good songs - songs that I wouldn’t want to sing or Prince wouldn’t want to sing. KC and the Sunshine Band, he loved that kind of stuff. He rounded out the band with his persona.” In addition to singing lead on songs like KC and the Sunshine Band’s “That’s the Way (I Like It),” the Commodores’ “Slippery When Wet,” and Tower of Power’s “Don’t Change Horses (In the Middle of the Stream),” members recall Doughty playing rhythm guitar on the Isley Brothers’ “Who’s That Lady ?” and contributing powerhouse percussion on what became the band’s signature tune, Deodato’s “Super Strut.” He also contributed a strong fashion sense, inspiring the rest of the band to step up their game. “Will just had this thing for being flamboyant - his parents named him [his middle name] after Fred Astaire, so his whole thing was about being a little showboat and flashy,” remembers Jackson. “Matter of fact, I don’t think the man ever had a pair of blue jeans. Ok ? He was a very fashion-conscious person.” And Doughty was known, by all accounts, to be something of a character. In fact, “character” is the word most people used to describe his personality - the kind of guy “you always found in the middle of a scrap,” as Cymone put it, who could be seen driving his musical equipment around Near North Minneapolis in a green vintage hearse, or strutting down the street in a fur coat and fedora. “He and Prince had that confidence, that you didn’t ever think you could measure up to them,” Smith recalls. “It was hard sometimes, like dang man, you guys won’t back down. I can tell you so many different scenarios that I’ve seen him in, and no matter what you hear, whatever you see, he was always him. He was always him. So down to earth. Man. I miss him terribly.” “William was a very close friend of mine throughout our early years as young musicians growing up 2gether in Minneapolis. He was a super talented percussionist and a super cool dude who had my back with whatever the situation was. So many great memories to reflect on ! He will be missed!! RIP Brotha Will.” —Morris Day, Grand Central and The Time. After performing in Grand Central, Doughty remained in the group as it morphed into Champagne, and then Shampayne, with Cymone, Linda Anderson, and Morris Day. He sang in a band called Power, who would perform regularly at the Riverview Supper Club in the early ’80s, and contributed percussion to Jesse Johnson’s first solo albums,?Jesse Johnson Revue and?Shockadelica - even appearing in the video for Johnson’s duet with funk legend Sly Stone, “Crazay.” In recent years, Doughty made a cameo playing percussion on Cymone’s 2016 album?1969, appearing on the track “Black Man in America,” played congas at a pair of Cymone’s hometown gigs in 2017 along with Terry Jackson, and had very recently finished recording a new 16-song album of solo material that he planned to release. Cymone says he last spoke on the phone to Doughty just days before he passed, and the two were planning to work together to release his new album. “I have to say, William passing - more so even than Prince passing, because obviously Prince is such a known figure - but with both of those guys gone, that’s like a big chunk of Grand Central,” Cymone says. He, Jackson, and Smith all say that they feel more passionate than ever about preserving Grand Central’s history, while there’s still time to have their stories heard. “It’s a responsibility, and one that obviously I really have to think about and take really seriously,” Cymone reflects. “And it’s a great story. It’s a beautiful story. It’s not just Prince - it’s about a group of people, a group of guys, that had dreams, hopes. That process of getting from that, from nothing, to where Prince got - from nothing, to where I got - you know, I saw it up close and personal. I just really want to make sure it gets its respect.”Andrea Swensson, from The Current, created a Spotify playlist with “songs that were covered by the Grand Central band (Prince, Andre Cymone, Linda Anderson, Chazz Smith, Terry Jackson, William Doughty, Morris Day) in the early- to mid-1970s.”44005502125345- Tower Of Power – What Is Hip ?- The Jackson 5 – Dancing Machine- Deodato – Super Strut- The Isley Brothers – Who’s That Lady- Earth, Wind & Fire – Keep Your Head To The Sky- Billy Preston – Outta-Space- Jimi Hendrix – Star Spangled Banner- Dr. John – Right Place Wrong Time- KC & The Sunshine Band – That’s The Way (I Like It)- Tower Of Power – Don’t Change Horses (In The Middle Of A Stream)- Santana – Soul Sacrifice- Commodores - Slippery When Wet- Billy Cobham – Stratus- Jimi Hendrix – Fire- Four Tops – Ain’t No Woman (Like The One I’ve Got)- The Love Unlimited Orchestra – Love’s Theme- Carole King – It’s Too Late17-02-1976 : Central High School InterviewNelson Finds It "Hard To Become Known" "I play with Grand Central Corporation. I've been playing with them for two years," Prince Nelson, senior at Central, said. Prince started playing piano at age seven and guitar when he got out of eighth grade. Prince was born in Minneapolis. When asked, he said, "I was born here, unfortunately." Why ? "I think it is very hard for a band to make it in this state, even if they're good. Mainly because there aren't any big record companies or studios in this state. I really feel that if we would have lived in Los Angeles or New York or some other big city, we would have gotten over by now." He likes Central a great deal, because his music teachers let him work on his own. He now is working with Mr. Bickham, a music teacher at Central, but has been working with Mrs. Doepkes. He plays several instruments, such as guitar, bass, all keyboards, and drums. He also sings sometimes, which he picked up recently. He played saxophone in seventh grade but gave it up. He regrets he did. He quit playing sax when school ended one summer. He never had time to practice sax anymore when he went back to school. He does not play in the school band. Why ? "I really don't have time to make the concerts." Prince has a brother that goes to Central whose name is Duane Nelson, who is more athletically enthusiastic. He plays on the basketball team and played on the football team. Duane is also a senior. Prince plays by ear. "I've had about two lessons, but they didn't help much. I think you'll always be able to do what your ear tells you, so just think how great you'd be with lessons also," he said. "I advise anyone who wants to learn guitar to get a teacher unless they are very musically inclined. One should learn all their scales too. That is very important," he continued. Prince would also like to say that his band is in the process of recording an album containing songs they have composed. It should be released during the early part of the summer. "Eventually I would like to go to college and start lessons again when I'm much older." Revisit pre-fame Prince’s first-ever interview in his high school newspaperBy Jack Whatley - Far Out (UK - 2020)We’re dipping into the Far Out Magazine vault to bring you the very first interview the legendary Purple One, Prince ever gave. Printed in his high school newspaper it sees a star in waiting. Prince’s affiliation with his home town of Minneapolis, Minnesota hasn’t always been a rich relationship. Despite making it his musical hub from the mid-80s onwards, the singer, like most high school kids, spent much of his formative years despising his hometown for a lack of opportunities for a talented singer such as himself. Two years before Prince would burst on to the scene in a flash of bravado and funky intent, he was, like many of us, cutting a frustrated figure in high school. Still, even in high school, he remained a figure of interest and he was asked to sit down for his first ever interview as a singer. It would show Prince Rogers Nelson as a star waiting to break free of Minneapolis’ oppressive atmosphere. The first notions of frustration come from the very off when he was asked where he was born “I was born here, unfortunately.” The singer, elaborated with verve, “I think it is very hard for a band to make it in this state, even if they’re good. Mainly because there aren’t any big record companies or studios in this state. I really feel that if we would have lived in Los Angeles or New York or some other big city, we would have gotten over by now.” In the character sketch piece, Prince also shares some notable moments in his musical formation, including starting playing the piano at age seven as well as guitar form a very young age. There’s also the subtle but poignant moment in the piece from 1976 as it becomes clear his music teachers, rather than confine the clearly talented musician, let him “work on his own”. He even reveals he’s picked up singing recently. But he doesn’t play with the band because “I really don’t have time to make the concerts.” The mercurial artist, already taken with his own musical prowess backs it up when reveals that he’s “had about two lessons, but they didn’t help much. I think you’ll always be able to do what your ear tells you, so just think how great you’d be with lessons also.” Yet he suggests to those looking to pick up the guitar, an instrument Prince would master, “I advise anyone who wants to learn guitar to get a teacher unless they are very musically inclined. One should learn all their scales too. That is very important.” Prince clearly feeling himself as the sage old mystic Senior. Before making sure his band Grand Central Corporation have their plug in place for the upcoming album, he still seems to have music as a back up plan. “Eventually I would like to go to college and start lessons again when I’m much older.” Obviously, that plan would go awry, though we’re sure he wasn’t too upset. There you have it, even one of the most talented musicians of all time started off as a frustrated high school kid before he finally made it. Ben Greenman – Dig If U Will The PicturePrince must have seemed like a perfect subject for a profile in the high school newspaper, and that’s exactly what he became, on February 16, 1976. His high school, Central High, was the oldest in Minneapolis, founded in 1860; since 1913, it had occupied a four-story Collegiate Gothic building at Fourth Avenue South and East Thirty-Fourth Street. The school colors were red and blue, which Prince would later combine to great effect. (The lyrics of the school song, not written by Prince, began, “Oh, red and blue, dear red and blue, our hearts are true to you.”) In the school paper, Prince - identified as “Prince Nelson, senior at Central” - was pictured in the music room, his wide collar flared beneath his even wider afro. The piece didn’t explore his personality, which was shy but playful (André Cymone would later say that “everybody who really knew him [knew] that he was a funny dude”). It didn’t mention his participation in a student film, in which he played a shy but playful musician competing with a muscle-bound jock for the affections of a pretty cheerleader - the musician failed repeatedly until he learned a secret kung fu move and got the girl. Rather, the piece focused mainly on Prince’s accomplishments as a musician : he had started playing piano at age seven, guitar “when he got out of eighth grade”; at the time of the article, he was also proficient on bass and drums, and he regretted having given up the saxophone, which he had played in seventh grade. He played by ear, though most budding musicians, he advised, should invest in lessons. “One should learn all their scales too,” he said. “That is very important.” He did not, the article noted, play in the school band. “I really don’t have time to make the concerts,” he said. After a brief mention of Prince’s “more enthusiastically athletic” brother Duane, a member of both the football and basketball teams, the article returned to musical matters. Prince liked the school’s music teachers - Mrs. Doepke and Mr. Bickham were especially supportive - but he felt stranded in Minneapolis. “I was born here, unfortunately,” he says. “I think it is very hard for a band to make it in his state, even if they’re good. Mainly because there aren’t any big record companies or studios in this state. I really feel that if we would have lived in Los Angeles or New York or some other big city, we would have gotten over by now.” Still, he was determined not to be marooned. Grand Central, the article concluded, was “in the process of recording an album containing songs they have composed. It should be released during the early part of the summer.” It wasn’t, though there is evidence that Prince, André, and Morris visited ASI Studios on West Broadway in early 1976 to cut a set of tracks that included “39th St. Party,” “Lady Pleasure,” “You’re Such a Fox,” “Machine,” “Whenever,” and “Grand Central.” Tom Waits, touring behind Nighthawks at the Diner, his first live album, played a show at ASI for FM broadcast about a month before Grand Central’s session. There’s no evidence he knew anything about Prince at the time, but a decade later, he would name him as one of the few popular artists who consistently impressed him : “Prince is rare, a rare exotic bird … To be that popular and that uncompromising, it’s like Superman walking through a wall.” Waits also said, “Writing songs is like capturing birds without killing them.” Triangulate accordingly.Morris Day – On Time (2019)GOOD TIMESFor the two years I played with Grand Central, it was a beautiful situation.Glad 2 hear u say that, bro. Wouldn’t want no one 2 bad-mouth that band.Wouldn’t dream of it. We were learning as we were gigging, growing as we were woodshedding, moving from wet-behind-the-ears kids to young pros who knew what it took to goose a crowd until no one sat for our set, no matter how long we played. The typical Grand Central set was off the hook. Might open with Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Shining Star.” Then Prince would sing a couple of Rufus songs. He loved Chaka Khan and sang Chaka’s leads with as much passion as Chaka herself. He’d tear up “Tell Me Something Good” and “Sweet Thing.” The Isley Brothers’ “Fight the Power.” Bootsy’s Rubber Band’s “Psychoticbumpschool.” Funkadelic’s “Get Off Your Ass and Jam.” LTD’s “Love Ballad.” We were all fans of Jeffrey Osborne, LTD’s lead singer. Sly’s “Dance to the Music.” And for sure “Ffun” by Con Funk Shun. In short, we were deep into fierce funk.U make it sound like we were a cover band.Just saying that the backbone of everything was funk. And funk wasn’t anything we invented. The great inventors - from Chuck Berry through Bo Diddley to James Brown - ’specially JB ! - were our teachers and our gurus. We loved them. We found their funk so beautiful, so irresistible, so much fuckin’ fun that we naturally copied the cats that came after Chuck and Bo and James. I’m talkin’ ’bout Sly, the Isleys, Clinton, Bootsy, Cameo, Lakeside, Graham Central Station, Ohio Players, and all the others. So yes, we were a cover band. Like most bands, we started off covering stuff. And, yes, we did it to pay our respects to our elders. But there was another reason : We did it to survive. Surviving in those clubs meant getting the party people up and dancing. And you could only do that by playing hits they already knew from the radio.All true. But also true is that I always had originals.You did. But we had to sneak those originals in between the radio hits.My originals were just as good as anything on the radio.Okay, let me just stop and reestablish a fact that can’t be reestablished enough. Everyone reading this must believe me when I say Prince possessed genius. Unprecedented genius. Think back to Elvis, the cat some folk say invented rock and roll. Elvis was cool. Elvis had a look. He sang. Worked his pelvis. Drove the girls crazy. Would never dis Elvis for borrowing from black music ’cause he publicly acknowledged his masters. He loved him some B.B. King. He respected Ray Charles. He covered Ray’s songs. But if they call Elvis the King, they’re gonna have to call Prince the World Emperor. I say that cause, unlike Prince, Elvis did not write. Elvis did not arrange. Elvis did not play killer guitar. And when I say that Prince wrote and arranged, I mean he wrote and arranged literally thousands of songs under so many different names that he forgot half of them. And when I say Prince played guitar, I mean he blended the styles of all the guitar gurus and then added a fantastic flair all his own. He did more than arrange. He created a sound that, nearly a half century later, sounds as fresh as it did when Grand Central was tearing the roofs off every school auditorium in the Twin Cities. So I praise my brother without reservation. And will continue to praise him with the last breath in my body. However…Uh-oh. I don’t like the sound of that “however.” Here comes the bad part.No bad part. Just the fact that you cloaked yourself in mystery. Mystery was your protection. Mystery was your way of clutching control with an even tighter fist. Mystery was to you the way prayers are to priests. You couldn’t live without mystery. Couldn’t operate without it. You had your own clock - your own timetable and agenda - and no one but you was allowed to see it. Prince was serious, but Prince was also funny. The way I finally broke through his heavy armor was with humor. He liked to laugh and, in that way, wasn’t all that different from the Minneapolis brothas who loved pulling pranks and cracking jokes. Prince talked street talk; he chopped it up with as much salt and swag as anyone. His lighthearted vibe was great, but it came with limits. Prince could shut it down in a hot second. And when he did, when the joking ended, brotha would slip back into his Mystery Man pose. That pose was his fallback. What it said was “You don’t really know me; no one does, and no one knows what I’m going to do next.”There u go, trying 2 understand what u can’t understand.I understand more than you want me to understand. I understand that you used mystery. But I want to say that I respect the mystery. It worked. Helped make you a motherfuckin’ superstar. All hail Mystery Man ! When Prince and I first started hanging, he was living with his mother, Mattie, and sister Tyka down the street from us. Mattie had divorced Prince’s dad - John Lewis Nelson (who, as a musician, also called himself Prince) - and married Hayward Baker. Mattie and Hayward had a son, Omarr. There was a piano in the basement, where Prince started experimenting. Prince and his stepdad had their problems. Big-time tension. Mattie was a pretty lady who didn’t say much. She’d been a jazz singer and gigged with Prince’s dad, John. Because Prince and Hayward wasn’t cool, Prince busted a move, leaving Mattie’s crib for John’s, way across Olson Highway. Like father, like son. John was also a very aloof cat. You never knew what he was thinking. Reminded me of Vincent Price. John was also a serious musician. Prince was proud of his dad, who constructed far-out stuff. Avant-garde spacey jazz. But if you listened closely, you’d catch a melody line. You’d catch a groove. John was deep into his music. When Prince moved out of his mom’s place, he figured it’d be easier to deal with his real dad than his stepdad. From what I saw, though, that wasn’t the case. John called Prince “Skipper,” pronounced “Skippa.” John was strict. “Skippa,” he said, “this is my house and you best live by my rules.” “Skippa,” he warned, “if you ain’t home by 11, don’t bother to come home.” “Skippa,” he gave notice, “if I catch you with one of your little girlfriends up in here, I’ll put your ass out.” Which brings up another subject. Girls.Don’t say more than u really know.I know what I know. I know that you loved playing sports, but, man, you also loved the ladies. Music first. Music always first. But the fair sex second. Girls buzzed around your pint-sized ass like bees around honey. Of course it helped - it helped all of us - that we were musicians playing sexy music. Helped that you was always fresh and clean. You knew how to dress. A small army of chicks saw you as drop-dead handsome. Your mysterious aura had a powerfully sensuous side. You was a playa who played by keeping the cards close to your chest. That applied to everything in your life. No one was gonna check you. Not even your dad. Funny part was if I had to say whose personality Prince most resembled, I’d say his father. Two hardheaded cats bound to bump heads. Don’t think Prince was living at John’s for more than six months when John made good on his threat : He kicked his son out for bringing girls over to the crib. That’s when Prince moved to André’s basement. The band liked that move ’cause it gave us more time to jam. For most folk, getting kicked out of the crib by Daddy is a traumatic thing. Maybe it was for Prince; maybe he was angry and furious, but I never heard him say a word except “Let’s rehearse an extra two hours tonight.” Mom had bought me a little four-track recorder that Prince would use to lay down his ideas. That was fine with us. What wasn’t fine was when he’d show up at all hours, banging on the door, saying he had to get in to record a song that had just flown into his head. Sometimes we let him in, and sometimes - like the night he wanted to barge in at 3 a.m. - we’d try to ignore him. But damn if he wouldn’t stop banging. Rather than let him bust down the door, I’d get out of bed, let the brotha in, and help him lay down the track. On other nights I’d just turn off the lights and let him bang. I was just too damn tired to make music.Or stoned.Oh, hell, yes. Which brings up another point : Prince didn’t do drugs. I wasn’t a heavy drug user in high school. I just liked weed. Weed provided a filter that mellowed me out while intensifying the music. And of course weed is a potent aphrodisiac. If you have to choose between making love high or sober, high wins every time. To Prince’s credit, he bucked the culture. He stayed clean. He stayed clean to stay in shape. He loved playing sports, especially hoop. He didn’t need that extra creative boost that marijuana provides. He didn’t need that elevation. He could get to the higher plateau without stimulants. He was that good. I also think Prince feared drugs, and with good reason, ’cause drugs undercut control. Prince needed control at all times. He didn’t want his vision clouded or his mind altered. His hyperactive mind didn’t require any further hype. He knew where he wanted to go and how to get there. That put him at odds with my mother. Mom was thorough and deliberate. Prince was impetuous and impatient. For a while, though, he accepted her as our manager. That’s because no one but Mom funded us to go into a studio to cut demos. No one but Mom spent her own bread to fly to New York and meet with record execs to try to seal a deal. No one but Mom made sure we had rehearsal space. Mom was also always upbeat and encouraging, assuring us that it was only a matter of time before we’d get our big-time break.Your mama never did what she said she’d do.Last thing you wanna do is go talkin’ ’bout my mom. Mom was gutsy. She was fearless. She wrangled her way into meetings with high-powered record men. She called CEOs and chairmen of the board. She forced her way into the offices of A&R cats. She had a one-on-one with Isaac Hayes, who dug our demo tape and promised to hook us up. But all this took time. You were impatient. So on the side you started dealing with a dude named Owen Husney who owned a local ad agency. Husney even got you to do a jingle for a ladies’ clothing shop called GG’s. What we didn’t know was that Husney had been shopping a record deal for you in Los Angeles. And we heard he got Warner Brothers interested based on a tape that you gave him. And that the tape was made by us - Grand Central - but the label thought it was you playing all the instruments. I could have if I’d wanted 2.That ain’t the point. Sure you could have. But you didn’t. You got a solo deal with Grand Central demos. You’d given up on trying to get the band signed. You lost patience with Mom. She was still out there looking to score for Grand Central when we found out that you had already scored - without us. In the grand scheme of things, this was a brilliant move. Most of your moves were brilliant. You saw solo Prince as a better vehicle than Grand Central. You wanted a new kind of sound. You wanted to give your funk a New Wave edge and a New Wave look. It was postpunk time. The Police, the Cars, the Cure, Boy George, and Bowie. You had a worldwide vision that didn’t include Grand Central. I only wish you had clued us in on your vision. Instead, you said nothing. Just disappeared, leaving us to scramble. Grand Central without Prince was like Desi without Lucy. So time for a Princeless chapter. This chapter turned out rough.Spring 1976 : Shampayne (aka Champagne)In spring 1976 Grand Central Corporation becomes Shampayne and continues to record, this time at Moonsound, an Eight-track studio located in Lake Nokomis, south of downtown Minneapolis. The studio was owned by Chris Moon who approached Prince and proposed a collaboration which Prince accepted. Andre Anderson continued to work with Shampayne; Andre Lewis was recruited to take in Prince's position as guitar player; the band carried on a few more month, but was finally disbanded. Moonsound - Champagne sessions-4768851295400Chris MoonPrince and André record some tracks at Moon Sound studio, an eight-track studio which, at $25 per hour, was cheaper than ASI. The studio was located by Lake Nokomis, south of downtown Minneapolis. The group struck studio owner Chris Moon as “energetic youngsters.” They impressed him as “talented, but not exceptionally talented. They seemed pretty fun-loving, clean in terms of women, pretty easy-going, happy. There seemed to be a bond against them. LaVonne Daugherty was the leader. She was a good woman who genuinely cared about them. She was organising the kids and she did have some vision for them. I had respect for her.” Moon worked at an advertising agency and occasionally as a promoter for local gigs. At his studio, Moon recorded commercials and made demo tapes for local groups. Moon had aspirations as a songwriter, having written poetry and song lyrics since he was a teenager. He was searching for a songwriting partner at the time; someone who could put music to his lyrics. After seeing Prince at work in his studio, he approached him about collaborating : “Prince would normally show up a bit earlier than everybody else, thrash around on the drums a little bit, twinkle on the piano, guitar, bass or whatever. I pulled Prince aside at the end of one session. “I’ve got an idea for you. I’m looking to put together some music that I have written. I’m looking to find an artist and provide him with studio time for free, to collaborate on some material. It’s a very simple thing, I don’t want any contracts, no paperwork, just a handshake. I will develop you as an artist. I will build a package around you, and I will try to get you out there”.” In exchange for writing and playing the music, Prince would get free studio time. The deal served both well; Moon could turn his lyrics into songs, and Prince would be able to learn about recording techniques and develop as a songwriter and musician. They agreed to split any profits made on their collaboration equally. “Prince thought about it a couple of moments, grunted in a positive way, which I believed was a general agreement,” Moon recalls. He gave Prince the studio key and showed him how to operate the control board. “We shook hands. It was a pretty bold move on my part. This was a 17-year-old kid from the north side of Minneapolis, whom I really didn’t know. I just handed over the key to everything that I own.”335089511430By the time Prince’s band booked time at the recording studios of the English-born, Minneapolis-based producer and writer Chris Moon, they had changed their name from Grand Central to the more aspirational Champagne. Moon told me that he had set up his Moonsound studio by taking a trip at eighteen to Hong Kong to buy a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and built up a name for himself by offering free recording time to local bands, while also having a day job running the recording studio at ad agency Campbell Mithun. He also ‘came up with this crafty plan to give myself credentials’ by going down to the biggest radio station in town, KQRS, and persuading them to broadcast all the top concerts in Minneapolis, including The Rolling Stones, recorded in a studio he’d set up in his van. Given Prince’s on-record admiration for the rock shows on KQRS, it seems likely he would have heard Moon’s recordings before meeting him in person, and it’s also an interesting antecedent for Prince’s later use of mobile trucks to record live performances. As well as establishing himself as a local producer, recorder and studio engineer, Moon had ambitions to write. ‘I’ve always been a writer. Ever since I was really young I’ve written poetry. So I was sitting behind the console looking at all these bands and thinking, “Most of the lyrics these guys are singing are pretty dreadful. I know I can do better than that.” But I didn’t want to be the guy singing, so I came up with this idea: maybe what I’ll do is find a band and write the material, and hey’ll produce the material and I’ll promote the band out there doing my songs. ‘So I started out on this process of figuring out who I’m going to pick. There’s a steady stream of local bands coming through the studio all the time, and I started realising that one of the big problems with bands is that there’s some chap in every band who can’t get out of bed. Right around that time Champagne comes into the studio with this matronly lady [LaVonne Daugherty] who’s the manager. She was a nice lady.’ Moon remembers there being five members of Champagne, ‘all about fifteen, sixteen years old’, but previous accounts claim the band was a three-piece at this point, and these are the three members Moon referred to by name when recalling the session. Moon remembers that during the recording ‘It was a sunny day, and right across the street from me was a Baskin-Robbins 31 Flavors ice-cream shop, and we’d been recording for four or five hours and the manager for the band said, “OK, let’s take a break before we come back and do the vocals.” So everybody took a break, and she and all the members of the band went outside and over to the icecream shop. Well, all but one. Left behind in the studio, Mr Personality-I’d-Rather-Be-By-Myself, little five-foot-four Afro-headed kid, who was more Afro than kid. And so I’m sitting there drinking a can of pop with my feet up and I look through the window and there he is on the drums. I have another little sip and go to the window in the control room a few minutes later and there he is on piano. Another five minutes go by and there he is on the bass guitar. So I cranked up the mikes in the room to see if he’s any good. He’s not bad. He seems to be confident, better on some, not so good on others, but generally confident on all of these instruments. And I realise if I only have one artist, I don’t have to worry about the drummer not showing up and screwing up the whole session.’ Moon waited until they were done with their material and then went over to Prince. ‘He was painfully, painfully shy and extremely introverted. I went over to him and told him I had a proposition for him, and he gave me a grunt. And I said, “I’m a writer and producer and recording engineer and I don’t want to be the artist, and I wondered if you’d like me to package you up and promote you and write your songs and teach you how the studio works and see if we can make something happen for you ?” ‘And he looked at me, and he was as surprised at the proposition as I was at making it because here was this kid from the north side of town I didn’t know, I’d never spoken to him before, and I’m making this proposition to him. I don’t think he said yes; he just nodded and I handed him the keys to my recording studio. That was everything I had in life. And that’s probably not something a sane person or a rational person or a more prudent person would do.’ Moon says his deal with Prince was simple : he would pay for everything, and the only thing he wanted was to be given credit for the songs he wrote. Prince was pleased with the deal, but Moon remembers the manager, Day’s mother, ‘was none too happy about it, and as I recall the band wasn’t very thrilled either because Morris Day, he was a pretty flamboyant, outrageous, strong personality even back then, so I think it struck him as difficult that the quietest person in the band had been picked over him, the front man’. Day wasn’t the only musician who would later join The Time that Moon passed over before deciding to work with Prince. ‘We did a couple of sessions with [Jimmy] Jam and [Terry] Lewis with Prince. I brought Jimmy and Terry in to work on some other material I was working on. They came in and they had a very confident demeanour that they were big-time. They played on a couple of tracks, and I always thought they left feeling I should have been a lot more impressed with them and pick them up in the way I picked Prince up. It wasn’t that I wasn’t impressed with them; just that, early on, they were so connected and such a team that it didn’t feel there was room for a third person.’ As far as Moon was concerned, Prince was the future.-438150149860Early in 1976, they changed their name to “Shampayne” : partly out of respect for?the ousted Charles Smith and partly because they didn’t want to be mistaken for a ripoff of the aforementioned Graham Central Station. As Shampayne, they cut a few more demos, though even less is known about those recordings than about the earlier sessions at ASI. In the meantime, Prince was growing restless. His dissatisfaction is palpable in his first known interview, published in the Central High student newspaper in February 1976 : “I think it is very hard for a band to make it in this state, even if they’re good,” he complains. “Mainly because there aren’t any big record companies or studios in this state. I really feel that if we would have lived in Los Angeles or New York or some other big city, we would have gotten over by now” (“Nelson”). Within a few months, he’d be working on his own music and out of the band. In retrospect, the Grand Central/Shampayne era is easy to see as an anomaly in Prince’s career : probably because it seems strange for such a notorious control freak to be a willing partner among equals, even in his teenage years. During a 1982 interview on Detroit local music show The Scene,?André – now performing as a solo artist under his stage name “Cymone” – would elicit incredulous laughs and cheers when he insisted that Morris and Prince were in?“[his] group” before they were famous. But?for all of Prince’s self-created mythology as the one-man band who can do it all his own damn self, thank you very much, it’s important to remember that he?spent almost as much of his professional life playing in groups as he spent holed up by himself in the studio. From the Revolution to the New Power Generation?all the way to 3RDEYEGIRL, he clearly took pleasure in being part of a musical unit – even if his ruthless desire for perfection and jealousy of the spotlight often made him a difficult person to be in a band with. Grand Central was only anomalous insomuch as it took place before Prince had found his voice as a frontman; it was the closest he ever came to participating in a pure democracy. And it wasn’t the end of his “humble phase,” either : just as his time in the group was waning, he’d take the next step in his artistic development by becoming, of all things, a session musician. Ben Greenman – Dig If U Will The Picture46177207439025In early 1976, a studio owner named Chris Moon hired Prince and André to record background music for an educational slide presentation. Bespectacled and bearded, Moon was also an aspiring songwriter - or rather, a poet in search of songs. He had notebooks filled with lyrics, and he noticed that Prince had a head filled with melodies. He gave Prince a key to his Moonsound studio, and Prince started to record there at night. At around the same time, Prince struck up a relationship with a veteran R&B musician named Pepé Willie. Pepé Willie came from Brooklyn, but he had spent time in Minneapolis since the early seventies as a result of his on-again, off-again relationship with Prince’s cousin, Shauntel Manderville. He had first met Prince in 1970 and over the years served as a kind of informal mentor to him. In 1974, back in Minneapolis and now married to Shauntel, he attended a ski party for which Grand Central had been hired as entertainment. He was impressed with Prince’s progress : “He would take off his guitar and go over to Linda and play the chords on the keyboard he wanted her to play. And I’m like, “Wait a minute, this guy plays keyboards too ?” Then he would take André’s bass and play like he had been doing it for twenty years, playing the funkiest lines.” By the end of Prince’s time in high school, Grand Central was at a crossroads. For starters, their name had become a liability - they were too often confused with Graham Central Station, the popular Bay Area funk band led by Larry Graham, the former bassist with Sly and the Family Stone (and a distant-future collaborator of Prince’s). When the band rebranded itself as Champagne, Prince began to distance himself from the group, first to work with a local musician named Sonny Thompson and then, with André, to support Pepé Willie and his group 94 East. Some of Prince’s earliest recordings date from this period, songs like “Lovin’ Cup,” “Dance to the Music of the World,” and “One Man Jam.” Prince didn’t sing on the tracks and cowrote only one of them, “Just Another Sucker.” Still, he was instrumental in the sessions, contributing on guitar, bass, keyboards, and drums.Morris Day – On Time (2019)SHAMPAYNEStrange spelling, but that was the name of our new band.I’d shown u that strange spelling was an attention-getter. I’d shown u how being normal gets u nowhere.You showed me a lot of shit. After you split, I tried to use that shit to keep us going. We were convinced we could make it without you. We should have known better. But we were young and hungry. Between all of us switching off, we had vocal power. We had musical power. Yet with you gone, we’d lost our star power. During rehearsals, we weren’t as tough on ourselves as you’d been on us. We’d lost our leader. Then when we lost André Cymone, we really found ourselves sputtering. No one could blame André for accepting an offer to join your new band. If I’d been given that offer, I would’ve grabbed it. But no offer came. You didn’t see me as part of your immediate musical future. Warner Brothers had given you a deal and you were gearing up to cut your first album. Shampayne fizzled out. I was despondent. I was also drifting. I’d dropped out of North High after my junior year and hadn’t developed any skills beyond music. While my music had tapered off, my love life hadn’t. I’d fallen for a young attractive woman, Jennifer Graves, who, on October 17, 1975, gave birth to our precious daughter, Tionna. I was eighteen. I lacked the maturity and responsibility that fatherhood required. But I loved this little girl and wanted to do right by her. The problem was that I had no real direction. The strongest element in my life remained Mom. As a go-getter, she never slowed down. And seeing that I was having a hard time keeping myself together, she came up with a solution. She bought herself a brand-new 1977 maroon T-top Grand Prix and we moved to Maryland. Sandy stayed in Minneapolis and Jesse went to live with his dad in Illinois. It was just Mom and me. The plan was to bring out Jennifer and Tionna once we got settled. Mom chose Gaithersburg, halfway between Baltimore and D.C., because we could move in with her best friend, Francis. Meanwhile, she could easily travel up the coast to New York and continue to try to land me a record deal. I had made other demos that, at least in my mind, were as good as the demo Prince had used to nail his Warner Brothers contract. At the same time, I had no illusions. I was not Prince. I could not play every instrument and I could not sing or write with his facility. But I could play drums, I could play a little keyboards, a little guitar, I could sing, I could write, and I had a mother who wasn’t about to give up on me. Mom worked in a beauty-supply store selling wigs before getting a good government gig at the Opportunities Industrialization Center as a job development specialist. Count on Mom to land on her feet. Count on me to keep floundering. Odd jobs here and there hardly satisfied my musical soul, so I found myself moving into a jazz community of serious players. All my friends were jazz cats. I sat in with all kinds of bands. There was no money in it but lots of artistic satisfaction - not to mention growth. I was aware of the history of jazz drumming. I knew about Basie’s big band drummers Papa Jo Jones and Sonny Payne. I knew about Louie Bellson and Buddy Rich. But until Maryland I’d never played straight-up bop in the style of Art Blakey and Max Roach. I was proud to become a decent jazz drummer who could hold his own with the heavyweight players in the D.C. area. But besides an occasional gig, my money was still funny. Mom chipped in, helping me rent an apartment for Jennifer and Tionna in the same complex where we were staying. For a while, that boosted my spirits. But the boost didn’t last long. Young as we were, Jennifer and I got in each other’s way. The relationship collapsed under the weight of my unhappiness. Jennifer and our daughter soon moved back to Minneapolis. I never gave Tionna the time and care she deserved.Got To Be Something Here – Andrea Swensson (2017)By the end of high school, Grand Central had become a dominating force in the Minneapolis teen band scene. In addition to their obvious natural talent, Terry Jackson credits a lot of Grand Central’s success to the underlying competitive spirit that seemed to push and pull the bands of his era together. “We were all athletic at the time back then, and with a lot of the school dances being on Friday nights, we couldn’t participate in the sports - because you could either do the dance or do the sports. So the music became our sport, basically. That became our competition. Instead of battling on baseball fields or basketball fields or football fields, we were battling onstage against other bands.” “Back then, everybody was in a band,” adds André. “If you weren’t in a band back then, you kind of weren’t cool.” “We ended up having a really big playlist,” says Terry. “I would say we had a good, maybe two to three hundred songs altogether, by the time it was all said and done, through the years. Like I said, from seventh grade to twelfth grade, so pretty much six years of that experience of doing that with those guys. But it was a strive for each of us to do something better than the next person. It was a competitive spirit and stuff that really put Prince on the precipice where he is today. We would go and study other bands and listen to them. We wouldn’t go just to listen or hang out. We would go to study it. ‘How are you playing that ? How are you doing this ?’” The hours of rehearsals and competitions paid off. By the time Grand Central was ready to call it quits in 1976, André says it was clear to the elders in their community that the musicians were going to go on to do something professionally as adults. They just weren’t sure what that would look like yet : “People went crazy when we were kids. Oddly enough, you wouldn’t think - just for a local thing - but it was pretty clear to most people that saw us play, that we were eventually gonna do something. People would say it all the time. I would say it because I was always bragging : “We’re the best band, period.” I was a bigmouth back then. I’ve become a lot more humble, but I used to be the band bigmouth, so I would start a lot of stuff. I would tell other bands that they couldn’t play, just to get them to let us play. I said, “We can play better than you guys. You guys ain’t - you can’t play - you don’t know how to play. You guys ain’t shit.” And finally I’d just keep going until they’d say, “Let me hear you play.”” André pauses, smirking mischievously. “Then we’d go up and steal the gig.”Chris Moon Interview (1999)- Do you recall when Prince and his group Champagne first showed up in your studio ?I was working at Campbell-Mithun in the mornings at that time. I'm supposed to be working from 8:30 to 1 p.m.. because I had told them. "I'll take the job but I'm doing my own studio too. I'll give you halftime, and I produce stuff at home and bring it to you." Of course, 8:30 no fucking way. I'm showing up at 10 and the CEO is walking through anti he's going, "Are you just arriving ?” And I said. "Yes." He's getting pissed, “Why don't you show up with everyone else ?" I said, “I could show up with everyone else, and sleep for a couple of hours, but I don't wanna steal from you so I just show up at 10:30 and work till 2 p.m. or whatever " I worked morningish to afternoonish and then came back to schedule my own studio recordings, mostly musicians who didn’t show up until 3 p.m. anyway. I got income now and visibility, a nice job and all this happy stuff. I asked myself. “Wouldn't it be fun not to get this expression out ?” By then I had graduated to more black groups, and if they didn't have money I got them a deal just because it was more interesting that sitting there listening to opera and violins. Champagne was one of many bands that came by. So Champagne is in the studio and I'm thinking. “If I'm gonna do a music thing I might as well do black music. Singers really can't play one note on any instrument. Maybe you should collaborate with someone." There really were not that many choices. I had the bright idea to find someone to partner up with. "I'll produce, we’ll get together, collaborate, do some stuff. I started to loot around, who was in the studio this week, because I had got the idea this week.- What was your impression of Champagne ? Was it obvious that Prince was the leader of the band ?They struck me as energetic youngsters. They were all pretty young, 15-16 years old. I saw them as a young, good crowd. They seemed pretty fun-loving, clean in terms of women, pretty easy going, happy. They seemed talented, exceptionally talented. There seemed to be at bond amongst them. Prince's wasn't the leader. Morris Day's mother was. She was a good woman. She was organising these kids, involved in productive things. She did have some vision for them. I had respect for her. She dealt with the business side of it straight up, no problems with the money. She seemed to genuinely care about them. She was leading the troop. And second to her, I never saw Prince as one of the stronger members of the group.- Prince and his group also recorded demos at ASI Studios in Minneapolis in 1976. What do you know about this ?ASI Studios was a 16-track studio that was on the north side of Minneapolis. It may be possible that he did some work there with Champagne. I think I recall that they had done some work over there before they had come to work with me. Prince never did anything by himself over there, it was with his group. I believe they had done a session or two, maybe. The reason I got it was because I had a better financial offering. Champagne was probably paying me 30 to 40 bucks an hour.- How come you choose to approach Prince about collaborating on songs with ?-4572004048125Well, Champagne was in the studio. I'm looking at the group : "There's a couple of different people here that I could work with.” Prince would show up normally a bit earlier than everybody else, thrash around on the drums a little bit, twinkle on the piano, guitar, bass or whatever. Well, let's see. "He shows up early, that’s a good sign." Because in life, you have time and black time My wife is black by the way, she's not like that, but for the most part when you are dealing with musicians, there's even white musicians that are on black time. So the fact that he was early was cool, this is a very corporate sign here, dedication. The fact that he twinkled around on the other instruments, I thought, this is encouraging. The idea of having to coach other people showing up on black time to produce some tracks is going to be a pain in the ass. Let’s find someone who can knock out more than one instrument, then I won't have to go begging for favours every time I need a track done. The other thing that struck me about Prince was that he was kind of quiet. That's nice. I'm not going to have a big fucking ego to deal with. He'll be easy to work with. I had a big ego, always had. Last thing we need is two big egos together. It was at the end of one session, it must have been an afternoon session maybe three or four hours in the studio, it must have been around 6 p.m., it wasn't dark yet, for some reason I remember that. The band got all done and they left and I pulled Prince aside, told him I'd like to chat with him for a few seconds. “I've got an idea for you. I'm looking to put together some music that I have written. I'm also looking to find an artist, package an artist up, to provide him with studio time for free, to get a package together, collaborate on some material, and get the music out there. It’s a very simple thing, I don’t want any contracts, no paperwork, just a handshake, and the beautiful part is the only person that has anything to lose is me. You’ve got nothing to lose. It’s a free ride as long as you want to take it. When you want to get off you can get off.” The purpose for me was to get my lyrics out into the public. That was my motivation and I’m sure Prince had a whole different set of motivations. I always felt that contracts don’t bind people together, if anything, they break them apart. This was something that was close to my heart, and if it was going to be real, if it was going to mean anything, it was going to be done on that kind of understanding. Even if I was going to do it again today, I wouldn’t change it for a second because he knew, going in, my deal was clean. The only one who could get screwed in that deal was me. I said, “If you are interested, I've been 3712845-438150writing columns since I was 12, I'll write the lyrics, collaborate on the music, put together a package. Takes as long as it takes. And I’ll do anything I can to try and get you out there. If it goes it goes. If it don’t go it don’t go." Prince thought about it a couple of moments, grunted in a positive way, which I believed was a general agreement. I said, “OK, let’s shake on it.” We shook hands. I said, “Fine, it’s a deal,” and I handed him a key to the studio. It was a pretty bold move on my part: this was a 16-year-old kid from the north side of Minneapolis, whom I really didn’t know. I just handed over the key to everything that I own, and did it without reservation. “Let yourself in at any time you like, if you go to school you come in after school, come over and practice, if I’m not here just practice away and when I get here we work on some stuff together.” I think it probably blew his mind !From Champagne to the Moon (Sound Studios) - Spring, 1976“Prince would normally show up a bit earlier than everybody else, thrash around on the drums a little bit, twinkle on the piano, bass, guitar or whatever…” - Chris Moon (Moonsound Studios). Once Prince and company had recorded their first demos with Prince handling the majority of the tracks’ instrumentation and production, his mind appeared to have opened beyond the studio to the full range of possibilities he could infuse into his live act, such that Grand Central Corporation evolved into Champagne, with Prince recalling that after “I got my first band (Grand Central)…I wanted to hear more instruments, so I started Champagne, a twelve-piece band. Only four of us played. Eight were faking. Andre and I played saxophone. I also played piano. I wrote all the music. The songs were all instrumentals. No one ever sang.” Bandmate Andre Cymone further recalled that “think right around that time Prince had split, he had gotten a solo deal with Warner Brothers. So he split and we just changed the name. We actually changed the name before he split but, you know, it wound up being Champagne when he was out of the band.” The group soon dissolved, as Prince focused more and more on advancing his studio craft, with his next big break coming in the late Spring of 1976 upon entering an 8-track studio, Moonsound Studios, nearby Lake Nokomis outside downtown Minneapolis, to record another round of demos with Andre Cymone and Morris Day as the only hold-overs from his previous bands. Describing his initial impression of Prince and company, studio owner Chris Moon recalled that the group was “energetic youngsters…They seemed pretty fun-loving, clean in terms of women, pretty easy-going, happy. There seemed to be a bond amongst them.” Singling Prince out from the group, Moon noted that as the sessions progressed, “Prince would normally show up a bit earlier than everybody else, thrash around on the drums a little bit, twinkle on the piano, bass, guitar or whatever…Prince always used to show up at the studio with a chocolate shake in his hand, sipping out of a straw…He looked pretty tame. Then he’d pick up an instrument and that was it. It was all over.” Clearly impressed with Prince’s multi-instrumental studio prowess, Moon soon took him aside to offer a business proposition that would be Prince’s first real education in studio recording, with Moon recalling that “I pulled (him) aside at the end of one session, ‘I’ve got an idea for you. I’m looking for someone to put together some music for some words that I’ve written…I’m looking to find an artist and provide him with studio time for free, to collaborate on some material. It’s a very simple thing, I don’t want any contracts, no paperwork, just a handshake. I will develop you as an artist. I will build a package around you, and I will try to get you out there.” Prince, seeming to feel it was an opportunity he couldn’t refuse, Moon further recalled that “Prince thought about it for a couple of moments, grunted in a positive way, which I believed was a general agreement…We shook hands.” In an acknowledgement of just how much trust he was placing in Prince’s talent, Moon has later reflected in hindsight that at the time, “it was a pretty bold move on my part. This was a 17-year-old kid from the North Side of Minneapolis, whom I really didn’t know. I just handed over the key to everything I own.” In addition to trusting Prince with the keys to his studio, Moon also gave him a crashcourse on the operation of his console and related recording equipment, and settled into a routine thereafter where at day’s end he would leave Prince with different sets of lyrics he’d written for the artist to come up with musical accompaniments to. For Prince, the deal with Moon essentially ended Champagne, who’d given him an ultimatum upon learning of Moon’s proposal of him or them. Years later, Prince would explain his side of the decision to break the group up, recalling that “I asked them all what they wanted to do. ‘Do you want to stay here, or do you want to go to New York ?’ No one wanted to do it. They liked their lifestyle, I guess. I don’t think they really liked the idea of my trying to manipulate the band so much. I was always trying to get us to do something different. It was always me against them.” Adding context, Andre’s mother Bernadette Anderson also recalled that Prince seemed ready to move on from under the management wing of Morris Day’s mother, LaVonne Daughtery, explaining that “She wasn’t fast enough for Prince...He wanted her to get them a contract right away.” Once Prince had taken up recording residency at Moonsound Studios, owner Chris Moon recalled a routine wherein “he’d stay the weekend, sleep on the studio floor…I wrote down directions on how to operate the equipment, so he’d just follow the little chart - you know, press this button to record and this button to play back. That’s when he learned to operate studio equipment. Pretty soon, I could sit back and do the listening.” In terms of the music, the pair were collaborating on the creation of in the course of their deal, Moon recalled that “I would either leave new lyrics on the piano for him, or he was already working on something… I was throwing all kinds of stuff out, trying to find something he liked. Interestingly enough, he gravitated more to the lyrics that were non-conventional. Initially, no lyrics flowed from him, but after awhile, he started seeing the rhythm and the rhyme of my lyrics and the approach I was taking. The first ones came pretty difficult for him. He was more musically inclined than words (at first).” That same spring of 1976, Prince had accrued enough credits to graduate early from Central High School, allowing him to spend all of his time at Moonsound, such that his studio recording skills by this point, as owner Chris Moon recalled, were so advanced that it made Prince akin to “an octopus, because there were hands all over the place.” For his own part, Prince recalled that once his time was - quite literally - 100% free to devote to developing his own sound, “that’s when I really started writing. I was writing like three or four songs a day. I didn’t have any school, and I didn’t have any dependants, I didn’t have any kids, or girlfriends, or anything. I cut myself off from everything.” While his father seemed to approve completely of Prince’s pursuit of a career as a professional recording artist, he recalled that initially his mother Mattie “wanted me to go to school, go to college. She sent me to a bunch of different schools. I always had a pretty high academic level, I guess. She always tried to send me to the best schools, but that was pretty much my second interest.”Soon thereafter, Prince parted ways with the group, which later became known as Champagne. The name change was a way to avoid confrontation with Charles Smith, who, as a founder of the band, considered he owned the name. The other reason for this change was to avoid comparison with Graham Central Station, a group founded in 1974 by Larry Graham after leaving Sly & the Family Stone. “Because they came along afterward and everybody said we were trying to copy them,” says André. “It’s like : “No, no, no, we’re not trying to copy anybody.” So we changed it.” As it turned out, Prince’s deal with Moon effectively marked the end of Champagne. There was already a growing rift between Prince and the rest of the group. Prince was tired of the Minneapolis music scene and felt the band didn’t have much of a future if they stayed : “I asked them all what they wanted to do. “Do you want to stay here, or do you want to go to New York ?” No one wanted to do it. They liked their lifestyle, I guess. I don’t think they really liked the idea of me trying to manipulate the band so much. I was always trying to get us to do something different. It was always me against them.” Prince felt “disgusted” by his life in Minneapolis and was “ready for anything” when the chance to collaborate with Moon came about. Prince had to leave his guitar and amplifier to LaVonne Daugherty when he parted ways with Champagne. “I was there the day Prince came home without his Stratocaster,” Charles recall. “He was so mad ! It really hurt because he didn’t have any instruments when LaVonne took his guitar. It was really ugly. Chris Moon hooked him up with some gear.” Champagne tried to continue without Prince, replaced by Andre Lewis, 94 East member Pierre’s brother, but called it quits after only a few months. For a brief period after leaving the band, Prince played with The Family. With the completed Cookhouse songs in his possession, Pepé and Wendell, the bass player for 94 East, flew to New York in April of 1976 and literally beat the pavement until 94 East was signed with Polydor. 94 East had to prepare to go in to the studio and record a single. By this time, Dale Alexander had lost his position as drummer with 94 East and was replaced by Bobby "Z" Rivkin. Bobby later became the drummer for Prince's first band, the Revolution. When Prince began working on his own demo recordings at Sound 80, André Lewis, Pierre Lewis' younger brother was given the task of learning all of Prince's guitar parts.A Soldier in Prince’s RevolutionDrummer Bobby Z opens up about his close relationship with Prince and the early battles they overcame together to create a band and keep the music alive.By Jayne Haugen Olson – MPLS St Paul (2016)Do you remember the first moment you heard Prince ?I was in the drum booth [at MoonSound] and I was looking out and he was playing his piano. I never heard anything like it and I never saw anything like it. His hands were moving faster than anyone I’ve ever seen play the piano. And the amount of chords you’re hearing in between the notes - that’s music. He was a Svengali with the piano; he had his way with the piano.?So how did the Chris Moon and Owen Husney orbits intersect ?Prince is working on his demo tape, and I know Owen will want to hear it. And I kinda know the kid [Prince], so I help break the ice, and Owen is blown away by the tape and takes Prince on. My brother, David, was also brought in as an engineer to help develop a proper demo tape for Husney to shop in Los Angeles.?At this point I was 19, and I had two relationships with Prince, really. The friendship, which started out as a professional friendship, because I was working for Owen and my job was to take care of Prince - a handler of sorts. I hit destiny right in the middle of that zone where it was my job to provide for him and earn that spot on the drummer chair [for Prince’s first band], which wasn’t so easy.?We’d move the stuff out of Owen’s Loring Park office and jam until 6 am and then put the stuff back. And then I’d start my day at the agency at 10 am. So I had early knowledge that anybody that came in contact with Prince was about to be eaten alive and time-vampired to death. I was completely taken in, and I was basically 24/7 with the guy for months on end, before there was even a band. Before he got his record deal. ?07-06-1976 : High School Diploma4419600341947500Prince graduates from Central High School on his 18th birthday. Prince’s arrangement with Moon enabled him to gain valuable experience in multi-track recording as he layered instrument upon instrument by himself. After obtaining enough credits to graduate early from high school, he dedicated himself to writing and recording music : “That’s when I really started writing. I was writing like three or four songs a day. I didn’t have any school, and I didn’t have any dependants, I didn’t have any kids, or girlfriends, or anything. I had cut myself off from everything.” By now, Prince was serious about a career as a musician despite the fact that his artistic aspirations met with minimal enthusiasm from his mother : “She wanted me to go to school, go to college. She sent me to a bunch of different schools. I always had a pretty high academic level, I guess. She always tried to send me to the best schools, but that was pretty much my second interest.” Clearly, Prince had already made up his mind about what he wanted to do after school. He continued working with Moon in the studio, and spent many weekends there on his own, over an eight-month period. During this time, Prince played on some of Moon’s jingles and commercials, and did some recordings with local artist Sue Ann Carwell. Some of the demoed songs from this period were "Soft And Wet," "My Love Is Forever," "Machine," "Aces," and "Make It Through The Storm." Two of these, “Soft And Wet" (co-written with Chris Moon) and "My Love Is Forever," surfaced on Prince’s first LP in 1978.By late high school, Prince had bought “a vanilla Stratocaster identical 2 the one Jimi played at Woodstock.”v – The Prince Podcast – Kevin Fleming (2017)(1:30)Summer 1976 : Home Recordings (Anderson Household)Don’t You Wanna Ride ? (6:14)For You (1-2-3-4) (1:08 / 0:45 / 1:18 / 1:21) – For YouSpending My Time (7:20)Leaving For New-York (1) (5:52)Instrumentals 1-9 (0:40 / 0:34 / 0:30 / 0:37 / 0:52 / 1:00 / 0:58 / 0:40)Nightingale (4:16)Rock Me Lover (1) (3:51)Hey Lover (0:46)Sweet Thing (4:23)Wouldn’t You Love To Love Me ? (1) (3:53) – Taja SevelleTelephone Conversation (0:57)In addition to the tracks Prince committed on tape at Moon’s studio, he recorded many songs and musical ideas on a simple cassette recorder; his songwriting was already prolific. Some of the interesting home-made recordings from this period include “Nightingale” and “Spending My Time,” both romantic and sensitive ballads that indicate the direction of much of For You. “Rock Me, Lover” and “Don’t You Wanna Ride ?” are funkier, raunchier, and appear to be inspired by the ‘naughty implied sexuality’ concept. "For You" which later became the main title of his debut album, was never recorded at Moonsound, but Prince did several takes of this song, testing various versions. The first version of "Wouldn’t You Love To Love Me ?" was also a demo in 1976. The chorus is similar to the official release of the Taja Sevelle album in 1987, but the rest of the song differs musically and lyrically. Don’t You Wanna Ride ? contains multi-layered vocals and acoustic guitar only. The lyrics from Leaving For New-York include what is believed to be Prince’s first use of the words “purple,” “rain” and “dawn” in a song. Although it is not stated in the song why the narrator is “leaving for New-York,” it can be interpreted that Prince is singing about going there to begin his music career; Prince traveled to New York City in Autumn 1976, taking with him a demo tape to give to various record companies. Hey Lover contains vocals and acoustic guitar only, and the song title is unconfirmed, but based on the track’s lyrics. The known version of this track is brief, and is likely an embryonic version of a longer track, but it is not known if Prince ever worked on the track further. Sweet Thing is a cover of Chaka Khan and Rufus.For You For YouAll of this and moreIs for youWith love, sincerity and deepest careMy life with you I shareSeveral early versions of “For You” are circulating, at least one of which dates from the 1976?sessions in the Anderson family’s North Minneapolis basement. Though obviously primitive, these demos offer an interesting view of the song’s development over time, while also revealing a remarkably consistent melodic and lyrical core. The obviously home-recorded first version of the track begins with Prince accompanying himself on acoustic guitar, playing in the same gentle soul-folk style as on his contemporaneous song “Nightingale.” His voice is double-tracked, harmonizing with himself over the simple, benedictive lyrics : “All of this and more / Is for you / With love, sincerity, and deepest care / My life with you I share.” At the conclusion of the verse, he adds a flourish of jazzy, Spanish-flavored guitar. An electric piano also enters the mix, with Prince singing a wordless vocal coda that would be replaced on the album cut.Prince Offers an A Cappella Hello on ‘For You’By Nick DeRiso – Ultimate Prince (2017) At age 13, he was playing guitar. At 14, he added the drums. Then Prince began playing the bass, then an organ, a clavinet, and a bank of synths. But the very first song on For You, his very first album, found Prince alone without that army of concealing sounds, offering an invitation to join what would become a lengthy musical journey. "All of this and more is for you," Prince sang, displaying a raw vulnerability. "With love, sincerity and deepest care, my life with you I share." The only problem had been figuring out which label would help him get there. Neither ABC or Robert Stigwood's RSO Records were interested. A&M, meanwhile, was only offering a two-album commitment. After an in-studio audition, CBS pitched a three-album contract, but only if Verdine White of Earth, Wind and Fire came on as the producer. The strong-willed Prince held firm until he got the deal he wanted with the artist-friendly Warner Bros, which included a three-album stint and full artistic control. “While everybody was wining and dining,” manager Owen Husney said in Jason Draper's Prince : Chaos, Disorder, and Revolution, "[Warners executive] Russ [Thyret] took us back to his house, sat on the floor, and talked music with us.” Even then, Prince was firm about doing things his own way. For You would arrive in 1978 with a soon-to-be-familiar credit line on the back cover : "Produced, Composed, Arranged and Performed by Prince." He played all 20-plus instruments on the project. Only "Soft and Wet," a Top 20 R&B hit, mentioned anyone else - co-writer Chris Moon, who'd engineered Prince's initial demos at his Minneapolis-based Moonsound Studios. "I thought I knew my material better than any other producer," Prince told Right On magazine in 1979, "and it seemed like I was best suited for the job." He was said to be the youngest person to ever produce a Warner Bros. album, but only after the label staged a secret studio tryout. Before agreeing to the deal, producer Ted Templeman and A&R man Lenny Waronker actually posed as disinterested janitors while Prince took advantage of some "free studio time." "You could not only tell there was talent, but there was a vision," Waronker later told the Minneapolis Star Tribune. "He went out and played guitar, then overdubbed drums. By the time the drum part was recorded, it was clear. We didn't want to insult him by making him go through the whole process, but he wanted to finish." Still, that pain-staking approach took time - this title track for For You found Prince singing amid more than 40 other taped vocals, forming a romantic reverie - and occasionally led to some youthful overthinking. Prince ended up breaking his budget, reportedly spending the bulk of what had been allotted for the entirety of his three-album agreement. "For You" was initially recorded as a 1976 home demo, straight to cassette, then was redone at the Record Plant in Sausalito during sessions for Warners held between October and December 1977. Those massive overdubs took place in January 1978 at Sound Labs in Los Angeles. "For me, there’s nothing like working in a recording studio : It's satisfying; it’s like painting," Prince told Insider in 1978. "You begin with a conception and keep adding instruments and laying tracks down. Soon, it’s like the monitors are canvas. The instruments are colors on a pallet, the mikes and board are brushes. I just keep working it until I've got the picture, or rather the sound that I heard inside my head when it was just an idea." That attention to detail was what had initially attracted Moon and then Husney, however, and it would eventually propel the quickly maturing Prince toward wider fame. Husney, when presented with Prince's original demo tapes, memorably said : "Not bad. Who are they ?" Moon replied, "It's one 17-year-old kid." By then, Moonsound - an eight-track studio that was charging $35 an hour back in the mid-'70s - had become Prince's playground. "He'd stay the weekend, sleep on the studio floor," Moon told Rolling Stone in 1983. "I wrote down directions on how to operate the equipment, so he'd just follow the little chart : You know, press this button to record and this button to play back. That's when he learned to operate studio equipment. Pretty soon, I could sit back and do the listening." He wasn't the only one. A self-titled album arrived the next fall, nearly breaking the pop Top 20 on the way to platinum sales, and Prince was on his way. But he never forgot "For You," recording a follow-up a cappella song called "The Second Coming," using the original track as intro music before his shows at the turn of the '90s, and sampling it for "Million $ Show" on 2015's Hitnrun Phase One.v – Prince Lyrics – For You (2018)(0:22)In my introductory episode for the Press Rewind - Prince Lyrics Podcast, I spend some time explaining the premise of the show as well as discussing Prince’s very first track, “For You.”Don’t You Wanna Ride ? I met a foxy lady down in new Orleansfinest little woman that? never did seewhen I asked her "Baby, what do you do for fun ?"She said "You look young enough to be my son"Yeah Yeah yeahIt made me feel real bad, but i did not but itI just came right on out with this funky replyI said "I may be young , but would you rather me be oldMy money is still green and my love is made of gold"Yeah Yeah yeahWent to her apartement way across townSure was long way to go just to get downMy hands began to tremble once we got inside"So you wanna ride ?"She took me by the hand and lead me to her boatWe flipped a coin to see would strokeHeads ! I won so I took the oarThen I run it on until she couldn't stand it no moreYeah Yeah yeahWhen we got through sailing and couldn't sail no moreShe said "I never Been loved like this before If anybody asks you who destroyed all your prideSome golden lover did it, yes he didAnd he sure knows how to rideRide, ride, rideYour sailing days are overI done cleaned up this townDone blown your coverDon't mess with the golden loverDon't you want to ride with me babyDon't you want to rideRock Me LoverBaby girl, you've been gone for so very longBaby girl, I'm beginning to miss your sexy soundWhat you did to meGot me so sad nowI'm a junkie mamaGet it up before I dieWon't you rock me loverLet me feel your heat up next to mineWon't you rock me loverLover, won't you rock me one more timeHey baby, I say your love is sweeter than wineHey baby, I'm so doggone glad that you're mineWhen we get downIt's so cool that I screamI've done aroundLover, you sure know how to creamWon't you rock me loverLet me feel your heart up next to mineWon't you rock me loverLover, won't you rock me one more timeDon't drink too muchAll it takes is just a little tasteI'm a volcano mamaWhenever You get down on my kissLet me comme some fire115 degreesBaby, take me higherLover, won't you rock me pleaseWon't you rock me babyLet me feel your heart up next to mine Won't you rock me babyLover, won't you rock me one more time-4953004170045Though it was a major boon for his own development as a songwriter and producer, for the rest of his band, Prince’s agreement to collaborate privately with Chris Moon went over about as well as you might expect. Curiously, Moon remembers Morris Day taking the snub hardest : “he was a pretty flamboyant, outrageous, strong personality even back then,” he said to biographer Matt Thorne, “so I think it struck him as difficult that the quietest person in the band had been picked over him, the front man” (Thorne 2016). Morris, of course, was the group’s drummer, not the “front man”; it’s unclear whether Moon was speaking figuratively, or confusing him for someone else. In any case, the other members of Shampayne served Prince with an ultimatum : Moonsound, or the band. Prince?chose Moonsound – but his version of the story, at least, suggests that the decision was more complicated than simply?ditching his friends at the earliest opportunity. In Prince’s telling, it was actually his trip to New York in the autumn of 1976 that caused the rift, and it was symptomatic of a larger gap in ambition between himself and the rest of the group. “I asked them all what they wanted to do, ‘Do you want to stay here,?or do you want to go to New York ?’” he explained to Musician?magazine’s Barbara Graustark in 1981.?“No one wanted to do it. They liked their lifestyle, I guess. I don’t think they really liked the idea of me trying to manipulate the band so much. I was always trying to get us to do something different, and I was always teamed up on for that. Like, in an argument or something like that, or a fight, or whatever…it was always me against them” (Graustark 116-117).?It’s unlikely that the breakup of Grand Central/Shampayne was the inspiration for?Prince’s 1976 composition “Leaving for New York” – at least, not in the literal sense. Like most of his writing from this period, the lyrics explicitly concern themselves with?a romantic relationship : Prince’s character is off to the big city, leaving his girlfriend behind, but promises to take with him “the memories of when we made love / And all the other lovely feelings that we share.” Typical of Prince, he also notes that the girl must regret “giving up [her] virginity” to him. Frank sexual references aside, however, it’s easy to read between the lines and detect some of Prince’s feelings as an ambitious young man on the cusp of leaving his band, the closest thing he had at that point to a home and family : “Though I said I’d never leave you / This is something that I must do / But I never will forget you / Unless you forget to come into my dream.” Those lyrics could have been?addressed to Morris and André Anderson, just as easily as to one of his dream girls. Whatever “Leaving for New York” is about, musically it is among Prince’s most sophisticated early works. The delicate, ever-shifting melody and impressionistic lyrics–including, it’s been noted, the first recorded use of Prince’s favored?words?“purple,” “rain,” and “dawn” – are the strongest indications to date of Joni Mitchell’s influence on his songwriting. You can also hear, in the song’s unusual, jazzy chord structure, an influence from much closer to home : Prince’s father, John L. Nelson, who inspired a similar strain in his later work with tracks like the aptly-named “Father’s Song”?and “Under the Cherry Moon.” Of course, like many of the tunes we’ve discussed so far, “Leaving for New York” is clearly the work of a young, inexperienced songwriter. The lyrics are trite, the melodic movements feel grafted together, and the song as a whole seems unfinished; the last minute or so is just wordless scatting over a piano vamp. But something about the performance and the haunting, melancholy mood it evokes is far greater than the sum of its parts. Prince, an 18-year-old who’d barely?set foot outside Minneapolis?at the time of recording, manages to vividly depict the nostalgic, romanticized, almost entirely imaginary New York that (I happen to know from experience) dwells in the hearts of all creative types from the Midwest. Prince is believed?to have recorded “Leaving for New York” both at the Anderson home and at Moonsound, but only the earlier home recording is circulating. Listen closely to the previously-discussed Moonsound “piano intro,” however, and it sounds quite a bit like the first few seconds of this song – though why a false start would be?available in place of a full recording?is anyone’s guess. Intriguingly, too, Prince never seemed to revisit “Leaving for New York” after he actually, well, left for New York. It’s likely that he just didn’t see much commercial potential in the song; as we’ll see, he would fail to attract any serious label attention with his first demo tape, so his next set of recordings would focus on songs with sharper pop hooks. But it’s also possible that, like many other Midwestern kids who went to New York to chase their dreams, he found that the big city wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. It’s certainly interesting to note that Prince, the same guy who effectively broke up his band with the demand that they all pack up and go to the coast with him, would spend most of the next 40 years clinging tenaciously to his home in Minneapolis,?forcing the rest of the music industry to come to him. In the summer of 1976, however, New York unquestionably represented an escape and an opportunity for Prince. “I was ready for anything,” he told Graustark. “I felt disgusted with?my life in Minneapolis” (Graustark 118). And, even in its imperfect, possibly incomplete early form, “Leaving for New York” is a gem : a revealing window into the mind of a teenage prodigy yearning for something more, and willing?to leave behind his band and his hometown to get it.Wouldn’t You Love To Love Me ?Look into my big brown eyes Tell me what's on your mind Do U really love me Or do U just wanna make some time ? I don't really care I just want a little company I can tell by the look in your eyes That U really really want me CHORUS : Wouldn't U love 2 love me, wouldn't U ? Wouldn't U love 2 love me baby, wouldn't U ? Wouldn't U love 2 be with me alone ? Wouldn't U love 2 have me 4 your very own ? I'm really not that hard 2 get I only wanna make U see Baby, I'm not ready yet 2 give U every part of me I don't want 2 tease U I only wanna turn U on I know I can please U 'Til your rocks are gone CHORUS Wouldn't U love 2 be with me alone ? Wouldn't U love 2 have me 4 your very own ? I love U, U love me My baby, don't U wanna love me ? Baby, baby Everybody, everybody BabyWouldn't U love 2 love me, wouldn't U ? {x4}For an artist who has appeared to shape-shift so many times in his career, Prince’s influences have remained remarkably constant. On stage at Paisley Park in 2009, he reeled off the names : Larry Graham, James Brown, Stevie Wonder, George Clinton, Sly Stone, the Jacksons, Tower of Power, Miles Davis, Carlos Santana, Joni Mitchell, Rufus and Chaka Khan. Most of these influences can be found on Prince’s earliest tape of home demos – recorded, it seems, after the Champagne sessions, and either before or around the time of the songs recorded with Chris Moon – which consist of four takes of ‘For You’, the title song from Prince’s debut album; the first of several versions of a song called ‘Wouldn’t You Love to Love Me ?’; five as yet unreleased songs ; ‘Don’t You Wanna Ride ?’, an early run-through of the themes he’d later explore in ‘Little Red Corvette’, though bizarrely featuring a row-boat instead of a car; the straightforward love song ‘I Spend My Time Loving You’; what almost sounds like a show tune about splitting from Minneapolis, ‘Leaving for New York’ (his half-sister Sharon lived there); the fragmentary ‘Nightingale’; the primitive and self-explanatory ‘Rock Me, Lover’; nine instrumentals; and a cover of Rufus’s ‘Sweet Thing’. While the songs have, for the most part, substantial lyrical content, they also feature Prince scatsinging in places, presumably as a way of filling lines for which he had yet to write lyrics.2 Although sketchy, seemingly unfinished and primitively recorded, some of the songs on this tape have more complex lyrical content than Prince’s first album, and a closer connection with his later recordings. It also gives us an insight, at this early stage at least, into Prince’s method of composition: a man singing into a tape recorder with an acoustic guitar (and occasionally keyboard). But for all the primitiveness of the recording, it’s already as sophisticated as any lo-fi record put out in the 1980s or ’90s. The most significant song on the tape, ‘Wouldn’t You Love to Love Me ?’ (the title being tease, boast and invitation), adumbrates the major theme behind Prince’s early work: an explicit acknowledgement of both what he is offering and what he expects to receive. It is one of only two songs from that initial demo tape that would eventually be released, although not until 1987, and then by Taja Sevelle. The delay doesn’t seem to represent any anxiety on Prince’s part about the song, and indeed, although he held it back from the first album, he recorded a (unreleased) version with his first protégée, Sue Ann Carwell, in 1978. But maybe he felt it better suited for a female vocalist, the request too needy even for his earliest persona. As well as the Carwell and Sevelle versions, Prince has subsequently recorded the track three times, demoing it again in his home studio a year later and returning to it once more in 1987. Of all the songs on the demo tape this presents the singer in his most seemingly powerful position, teasing his lover by refusing to settle down and dedicate himself to her (it will more usually be the male protagonist in this position in Prince’s early songs). Although the song’s lyrics are sung directly to a female lover, Prince is also addressing the listening audience, revelling in the attention he will get from female fans, while avoiding being imprisoned by their devotion. The only indication that the second version, recorded between the sessions for For You and Prince, is a demo is the return of the scat-singing (albeit here deliberately worked into the song’s construction, and still there even in the Sevelle version). It’s as good as anything on the first two albums, with a full arrangement and clear sound, and although some of the physical details refer directly to Prince, by the time of the third version – one of a number of early songs Prince returned to in 1987 – it’s become clear that this is a song he wants someone else to sing. The instrumentals are brief and fragmentary. Perhaps the most significant track on the tape, though, at least in the light it shines on Prince’s creative future, is the cover of ‘Sweet Thing’, taken from a record whose arrangements were handled by Clare Fischer, who would go on to play such an important role in some of Prince’s mid-1980s music. Prince went from loving this record on his home stereo to playing it to his band, later telling band-mate Lisa Coleman that one day they would have to get Fischer to do string arrangements for them. Coleman responded by feeling jealous because they were her responsibility, but she knew that one day Prince would feel compelled to work with him, and eventually he came to tell her that he had called Fischer and asked him to work on The Family’s debut album, with Prince liking the result so much that Fischer was asked back to work on Parade.Prince’s earliest home recordings, which circulate on bootlegs as various untitled “Instrumentals,” provide a fascinating glimpse into this period. As songs, of course, they’re barely sketches. The longest, a dirgelike piece played on electric piano, clocks in at only a minute; the shortest, a fragment of an a capella?melody, is barely ten seconds long.?Taken together, however, they provide the opportunity to hear Prince experimenting with?a variety of musical styles : from acoustic blues to jazzy, high-speed guitar runs to some very of-the-time wah-wah pedal funk. Only a few of the tracks have anything approaching vocal melodies; none have lyrics. But in the vocals, too, you can hear Prince trying on different registers, seeing what fits. In one track, he harmonizes with himself, opening with an eerie lower-pitched melody, then overdubbing in a midrange and finally an ethereal falsetto counterpoint. It’s a technique he would use – to much less primitive effect – throughout his career, creating a choir out of multiple tracks of his own voice on songs like 1978’s “For You” and 1987’s “Adore.” And while it would be overstating things to suggest signs of genius amidst the juvenilia, one thing at least is for sure: even at 17 years old, Prince’s falsetto was unmistakable.“Nightingale,” another track recorded in the Anderson basement in early-to-mid 1976, is perhaps the clearest early demonstration of the “soft rock” influence on Prince’s songcraft. It’s certainly the least “Black” of any of the songs we’ve discussed so far : the acoustic guitar progression?is pure folk-pop, without the pronounced funk and blues elements found in “Rock Me, Lover” and “Don’t You Wanna Ride ?”, respectively – though Prince’s falsetto vocal embellishments retain an unmistakable soulfulness, once again calling to mind?Chaka Khan’s influence. It’s probably just the folkie arrangement and?bird-related title, but I’m also reminded a bit of the Beatles’ Paul McCartney-penned 1968 song “Blackbird“; while McCartney’s “Blackbird” was a (somewhat strained) metaphor for the African American Civil Rights movement, however, Prince’s “Nightingale” seems to be literally just about a bird. The lyrics are evocative, if again a little on the juvenile side: Prince’s?character sings directly to the titular nightingale, whose voice he hears “calling out [his] name” in the night. More than anything, the song channels an ineffable loneliness; it’s easy to picture a 17-year-old Prince Nelson lying alone on his bed in the basement, listening to the birds sing and plucking out a delicate accompaniment on his guitar. The second verse, in particular, suggests that the speaker feels a closer kinship to his songbird friend than to other people : “Nightingale, though you are different than me / I feel the same / Blues come with the rain.” Finally, on?the soaring bridge, he makes his feelings of isolation explicit, comparing the walls of his room to “prison walls” and avowing that the bird’s beautiful song “overcomes the pain.” So yes, a little juvenile – it reads for all the world like the kind of Keatsian?poem that would have gotten Prince an “A+” in ninth-grade English class – but poignant nonetheless. As he and his songwriting both matured, Prince would of course do much more impressive things with the soft rock influences he discovered on KQRS. But “Nightingale” shows that, at the very least, he was a quick and promising study.C. Liegh McInnis – The Lyrics of Prince Rogers Father’s Son“I only write from experience. I don’t plan to shock people. I write about things I guess people are afraid to talk about. The important thing is to be true to yourself, but I also like danger. That’s what’s missing from pop music today. There’s no excitement or mystery. I don’t wanna just be doing what’s expected of me” (Fudger 7, 9).“I look at creating new music like making a new friend. I’m often criticized for going too fast to try and say too much. I guess I like surprises, and hope that you do too...” (Prince, “Acceptance Speech for AMA,” 1990)-5143505659755These are just a few statements taken from a man who has I been the driving force behind a new age of creative thinking within the world of popular and alternative music. Many adjectives have been used to describe this mysterious, purposely hidden figure of a man : musical genius, sinner, confused, arrogant, and ahead of his time. But after studying the limited public access of his mentality, which is fatiguing as well as rewarding, no one can deny that Prince Rogers Nelson has always stood on the cutting edge of creativity, constantly attempting to enlighten, surprise, entertain, and stimulate us with his own brand of creative philosophy, waiting for the rest of the world to catch-up to him. Born Prince Rogers Nelson on June 7, 1958 to Mr. and Mrs. John and Mattie Nelson, entertainers themselves, Prince grew up in an atmosphere of diverse emotions, races, and many types of music, all of which encouraged creativity and individualism. Growing up in a city where the African American as population is less than three percent presents a unique experience for the African American. In a city such as Minneapolis there are | very few African American icons of reference, especially during the time of Prince’s childhood. So, the African American is left to his own to carve out a cultural existence. For Prince this would mean creating an existence which would become quite a hybrid one. With very little black radio and virtually no reference of an African decent, Prince became that little black child swallowed up by his European surroundings, left to fashion his own existence. With, for him, no obvious ties to either an African or European background, he would have to create his own world to survive. This would be a key ingredient in the creation of his strong and often dominant personality to manifest his own vision. In an interview given to Sounds in 1981, Prince remembered how he and his friends would often ostracize someone who was attempting to be like someone else. He even recounted how he hated having to-play someone else’s music and sing someone else’s songs. He could not wait until he was performing his own material, developing his own message(s), creating his own world. Probably the most noted or publicized influence upon Prince as both a person and a musician/songwriter is his relationship with his father. As recounted by his sister, Tyka Nelson, on the syndicated series A Current Affair in 1990, Prince would often sneak into the adult bars and clubs where his father would be playing just to get a peek of what he wanted his own career to be. Prince’s father, a jazz Pianist and band leader, also jammed to the beat of his own drummer. In the same interview with A Current Affair, John Nelson recounts how he was run out of clubs because his musical Style was so different. “They told me, ‘Get Out ! Go home and practice !’ ‘cause they couldn’t follow this [playing the piano]” (J. Nelson 1990). Mr. Nelson went on to further elaborate, “I named him Prince [after Nelson’s band The Prince Rogers’ Trio] ‘cause I wanted him to do all the things that I wanted to do” (Nelson 1990). Both father and son would realize their likeness and the influence it had on Prince as a person and as a musician. In a 1986 interview at the Music Television Under the Cherry Moon Premiere Show father Nelson answers after being asked what did your son get from you, “He got everything from me. I’m Prince” (J. Nelson 1986), And in an earlier 1985 interview with Rolling Stone Prince had already affirmed, “My father and me, we're one and the same. My father’s a little sick, just like I am” (Karlen, “The Prince of Paisley Park,” 26) Their relationship would be the lasting characteristic that Prince would inherit and hold stern to his heart throughout his career. But it was not just the music, but the varied emotions that went along with their father-son relationship that influenced the man and artist that Prince became. “That’s where I called my dad and begged him to take me back after he kicked me out. He said no, so I called my sister and asked her to ask him. So she did and afterward told me that all I had to do was call him back, tell him I was sorry, and he’d take me back. So I did, and he still said no. I sat crying at that phone booth for two hours. That’s the last time I cried.” In the years between that phone-booth breakdown and today’s pool game [between father and son on Mr. Nelson’s birthday] came forgiveness. But it took many more years for the son to understand what a jazzman needs to survive. Prince figured it out when he moved into his purple house. “I can be upstairs at the piano, and Rande [his cook] can come in. Her footsteps will be in a different time, and it’s real weird when you hear is something that’s a totally different rhythm than what you are playing. A lot of times that’s mistaken for conceit or not having a heart. But it’s not. And my dad’s the same way, and that’s why it was so hard for him to live with anybody. I didn’t realize that until recently. When he was working or thinking, he had a private pulse going constantly inside him. I don’t know, your bloodstream beats differently” (Karlen, “The Prince of Paisley Park,” 26). “My father left when I was seven, so music left with him. But he did leave his piano and that’s when I started learning how to play. Musicians, depending on how serious they are, are really moody. Sometimes they need a lot of space; they want everything just right sometimes, you know. My father was a great deal like that, and my mother didn’t give him a lot of space. She wanted a husband per se” (Fudger 10). After being kicked out by his father around the age of fourteen, Prince was left to face the world on his own, experiencing it first hand, growing from a child to a man in a matter of short years. After a short stint with an aunt, Prince spent the remainder of his high school years at the house of his we best friend, Andre Anderson who was later renamed Andre Cymone and became Prince’s first bassist. Being from a broken home and living in poverty had varying effects on Prince’s outlook on life. It was uncomfortable as Prince relates, “I have four brothers and four sisters, but we don’t all s have the same mother and father. It’s very difficult having a stepfather - basic resentment all the way around. Nobody belongs to anybody” (Fudger 12). Prince often chronicled his childhood as a constant state of transition and adjustment, never quite fitting in anywhere. “At thirteen I went to live with my aunt, she didn’t have room for a piano so my father bought me an electric guitar, and I learned how to play that” (Fudger 11). This sense of not belonging, along with the pain of poverty, began to shape the young lad’s attitudes, “Poverty makes people angry, brings out their worst side. I was very bitter when I was young. I was insecure, and I’d attack anybody. I couldn’t keep a girlfriend for two weeks. We'd argue. about anything” (Karlen, “Prince of Paisley Park,” 26). This constant transition and feeling of illegitimacy would become a driving force, causing Prince’s physical divorce from Society and the creation of a Utopian, fantasy world for his own comfort. Andre Anderson’s mother, Bernadette Anderson, recounted how the boys were pretty much left to their own as long as they kept up their studies. This freedom at a young age with another male trying to find his way would greatly influence the early young songwriter’s experience of trying to find his voice as an artist. It would be the ambitious Prince who would go to school an hour early to earn extra credits in an attempt to graduate high school early. His first and only passion was making music, and at an early age he was willing to do what was necessary to achieve his goal. So, it is his vast experiences that echo through his music : laments of love and pain, gospels, calls to revolution against an overly conservative society, and the comfort of God and a better place to be. Through his songs, Prince became the illegitimate child, petitioning the society for his rightful place, advocating social justice and continuing the quest for the true meaning of life and death. And at the center of Prince’s songs is his search for place and meaning, which creates great transition from album to album. Whether fact or’ fiction, early in his career Prince elaborated on his lyrical development a great detail. What can be gained is that the lyrics and subject matter of the songs are as equally important as the music. Even in the beginning, Prince wanted to say something about life. “When I got into high school, I started to write lyrics. I’d write the really vulgar stuff. I was writing things that a cat with ten albums would have out, like seven minute laments that were, y’kno, gone. I wrote like I was rich, had been everywhere, and had every woman in the world. But I liked that; I always liked fantasy and fiction. I’ve always spent a lot of time alone, in a kind of fantasy world, and this is where I wanted to be - to be listened to and taken seriously” (Fudger 11- 12,14). Prince’s early childhood disposition of otherness permeates his psychological make up and resonates throughout his art. Even if in these early interviews he was. pushing the envelope of reality, he did go on to construct a world almost separate from reality, which would allow him to create and live freely with very little opposition. He created a place where he belonged. It also seems that as he matured, his approach toward writing matured, becoming more inclusive or in touch with the surrounding physical/tangible world. In doing this, Prince became a writer who had no problems dealing with and combining fantasy and reality. He combines the two in an attempt to exercise his own demons as well as to paint an idealistic picture of what he believes life should be. He does all of this quite unapologetically. “I don’t just wanna sit in the house alone and make up these nasty vulgar songs and put ‘em out - I’d rather wait until I have something to write about...I don’t like to do things that are easy. It’s more of a challenge for me to write exactly what I feel at that particular time. If I think a certain thought and I put it down on paper exactly like I hear it in my head, that’s a challenge to me as a writer” (Fudger 25, 27). This becomes the dichotomy for Prince. On the one side, he is motivated by the intense, lingering pain from abandonment, loneliness, and isolation, which drives him to create a fantasy world. On the other side, he is motivated as an artist to say something about the outside, physical world that is the matrix for his own fantasy world. Much like Pecola of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest-Eye, Prince would walk the line of insanity and schizophrenia, creating a fantasy world to cope with the real world. Throughout his career we find Prince navigating this thin line between these two worlds, wearing the hat of a rebel, outsider to the “real” world, and wearing the hat of the conductor, leading his followers to find that other, inner world of peace and security. v – Prince Lyrics – Don’t You Wanna Ride ? / Spending My Time (2022)(0:35)I take a step back in time on episode 138 of the?Press Rewind - Prince Lyrics Podcast. A time before Prince was signed to Warner Bros. Records and a time before Prince even had a place of his own to live. I’ve journeyed back to 1976, when he was living at the Anderson home in Minneapolis, a recent high school graduate making home demos and practicing his craft. Part one of these rough around the edges home demo episodes will cover “Don’t You Wanna Ride” and “I Spend My Time Loving You.”v – Prince Lyrics – Living For NY / Nightingale?/ Rock Me Lover (2022)(0:37)I take a step back in time on episode 139 of the Press Rewind - Prince Lyrics Podcast. Part two of these rough around the edges home demo episodes will cover “Leaving For New York,” “Nightingale,” and “Rock Me, Lover.”Summer to Dec 1976 : Moonsound – Chris MoonPrince / Bobby Z / Andre Cymone5438775451485Aces – Unidentified musician : flute Baby (1)Diamond EyesDon’t ForgetDon’t Hold Back FantasyInstrumental 1 (aka Trouble) (6:22)Instrumental 2 (aka So Fine) (2:45)I’m Yours (1) – For YouJelly Jam (1) – For YouLeaving For New York (2) – Prev. Home Rec. summ 76Hey Lover (2) – Prev. Home Rec. summ 76Love Is Forever (1) – For YouMake It Through The Storm (1)Andre CymoneSince We’ve Been Together (1)Soft And Wet (1) (3:19) – For YouSurpriseOne of the first songs Prince composed by himself, both lyrics and music, was “Baby,” which materialised on For You in 1978. In addition to providing music on Moon’s lyrics, Prince recorded his jingles and commercials. Moon wrote the lyrics to the majority of the songs, but "Baby", "I'm Yours", "Since We've Been Together", "Leaving For New York" and the instrumental "Jelly Jam" were entirely Prince’s compositions. Four of the songs showed up on For You : "Baby", "I'm Yours", "Soft And Wet" and "Love Is Forever" which was released as "My Love Is Forever", using Chris Moon's original lyrics. In addition, "Jelly Jam" became an instrumental coda on "Just As Long As We're Together." The original version of "Soft And Wet" had almost completely different lyrics. It begins with "Angora fur, the Aegean Sea, it's a soft, wet love that you have for me". With a squelching guitar sound and echo on Prince’s voice, the initial attempt was more disco-influenced and ‘gimmicky’ than the released song. The pop-oriented "Make It Through The Storm" is one of the most accomplished left-overs from the pre-For You period. Prince later re-recorded the song during the For You sessions and with Sue Ann Carwell, whom he worked with on a project in 1978. She later released the song but her version didn’t use Prince’s music. Moon has described Aces as experimental in nature, lasting around 7 minutes long, with Mediterranean and Indian sections. There has been some speculation that the track was written about André Cymone, whose nickname was "Aces", but the lyrics were written by Chris Moon and were not connected with André Cymone at all. Unlike many of the other tracks recorded during these sessions, the lyrics for Diamond Eyes and Surprise were written by Prince rather than by Chris Moon, and the music was also by Prince. Similar to the track Baby, recorded during the same sessions, the lyrics of Surprise dealt with an unexpected pregnancy.Throughout the summer of 1976, Prince worked in Chris Moon’s studio. He worked tirelessly around the clock, often staying the entire weekend. “I would either leave new lyrics for him on the piano, or he was already working on something,” Moon recalls. “I was throwing all kind of stuff out, trying to find something he liked. Interestingly enough, he gravitated more to the lyrics that were non-conventional. Initially, no lyrics flowed from him, but after awhile, he started seeing the rhythm and the rhyme of my lyrics and the approach that I was taking. The first ones came pretty difficult for him. He was more musically inclined than words.” Moon helped Prince to overcome his initial shyness to sing by suggesting he lie on the floor of the studio in the dark to record his first vocal tracks, and it turned out that this approach worked. Bobby Z Rivkin597027069215“In the beginning, I brought in two or three different drummers, but Prince was frustrated by having other people playing,” Moon says. “He started working harder on drums and I encouraged him.” One of the drummers that Moon worked with was Bobby Rivkin, younger brother of David. Sometimes Robin Paster, Bobby's cousin, was there to play the bass (Paster later became Prince’s valet). Bobby Rivkin is better known under the name of Bobby Z because his grandmother used to call him "Butzie". He began early on the drums, following in the footsteps of his older brothers, David and Steve, who both played in bands, and played in various bands during his adolescence. In a restriction imposed by Kevin Odergard (who participated in the recording of Dylan’s Blood on the tracks in the Sound 80 studio in MPLS), Bobby replaced Dale Alexander on the drums for 94 East. Bobby vividly remembers the first time he heard Prince play piano at Moonsound : “Within the first 45 seconds, I knew that he was beyond gifted ! My first impression was that it was genius at work. He played the piano like no one I had ever seen. It sounded like he had four hands; he was just playing cords and filling out more chordal information on the piano than I’ve ever heard. It was the first time I think I’d seen anyone who could really, really compose without even trying. He was very mysterious and very quiet. I knew from the first second that this person was worth dedicating my entire career to !” Pretty soon Bobby started jamming with Prince and André in the studio.Got To Be Something Here – Andrea Swenson (2017)By the end of the year, Prince would also be introduced to Bobby Rivkin, whom he would rename Bobby Z and recruit as the drummer for his band the Revolution. As Bobby Z recalls it, Prince walked through those doors at Sound 80 at just the right time. “There was a lot of knowledge about how to make records, and people were really learning the craft of what it would take to get an artist from Minneapolis off the ground,” he says, citing his brother’s previous success capturing hit records by rock bands like the Chancellors, the Castaways, and the High Spirits at Kay Bank Studios for the Soma label. Bob Dylan had just visited Sound 80 in ’75 to re-record tracks for his critically acclaimed album Blood on the Tracks, and the success of that album and the fact that Cat Stevens had just utilized the space added to the studio’s allure. Although he was young and inexperienced at the time, Prince would record his first demos at Sound 80 with David Rivkin during the studio’s heyday. And he would take the money he earned recording with The Family to hop a plane to New York, tape in hand, to attempt his grand entrance into the larger music industry.The day, Moon worked at the Campbell Mithun advertising agency before joining Prince later in the day. Prince and the slightly eccentric, Afro-haired Moon seemed like an unlikely couple, but despite their vastly different backgrounds and a five-year age difference, they got on very well and enjoyed each other’s company, although Prince strongly objected to Moon’s habit of having an occasional drink and joint in the studio. “I’m sitting in the studio watching this guy trashing away on instruments,” recalls Moon. “It’s not the world’s most thrilling occupation, so I light up a joint. Prince hated that. He said : “Put that shit away ! You don’t need that.” I said : “You’re right, but I kinda like it.” Even if I just had a drink, he said : “You don’t need that.” He always tried to keep everything clean.” After several months of studio work, Moon began to look for ways of recouping his investment : “My business was dropping off because I did this stuff for free. I wasn’t out promoting it or anything, so my income wasn’t much. I started to look at Prince and the music as a product. Who’s gonna buy his music ? Teenage girls because they’re going to think that Prince is sexy. What are they thinking about ? Girls are a little more mature than boys.” Moon came up with a concept he termed ‘implied naughty sexuality,’ sexually suggestive lyrics that used teasing word-play and metaphors so that they could be interpreted different was. Using this approach, he wrote the lyrics for a song called “Soft And Wet” : “I explained about the double entendre idea to Prince. He sat in front of the piano and I noticed that we were on the same track on this one.” Moon then suggested that Prince drop his surname Nelson and just use the name ‘Prince’ : “It set him apart. He started to practice signing his name with a small heart over the ‘i’ in ‘Prince’.” Prince eventually completed 14 tracks at Moonsound. “We wanted to put together an album’s worth of material, that’s why we did 14 songs,” Moon explains. “I think the tape represented Prince faithfully. It had some diversity; we did things with flutes, rock guitars, some melodic songs, some funk etc…” Make It Through The StormSo now U want 2 leave me, but why U will not say Then don't tell me why, just tell me that U'll never go away Oh, don't give up now, girlWe've been through so much more Oh, can't U see U're the only thing that I'm living 4 The world's a cold and empty place Without a love 2 keep U warm Oh, hold me in your arms 2night Don't U know we'll make it, make it through the storm Our love is pain and pleasure but I keep holding on Cuz I never want 2 lose your loveGotta help me make it strong Just hold me tight, I'm yours 2nightYour love will keep me warm Hold me in your arms 2nightWe'll make it through the storm The world's such an empty place Without a love 2 keep U warm Oh, hold me in your arms 2night Don't U know we'll make it, make it through the storm Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah {x2} (We're gonna make it, we got 2 make it) (We're gonna make it) {repeats in BG} Make it through the storm The wind, the wind, your heart is so cold I can make it Make it through the storm Your love, your love, your love is pain and pleasure U, it's U, it's U I'll always treasure We'll make it through the storm {x2}500 Prince Songs?: #394 : Make it Through the StormUnreleased (1976)The thing I love most about Prince’s music is that his tendrils delve into all genres and styles, subverting and recreating along the way and pushing things in interesting and never before heard directions. The variety is what makes a list like this possible. No sane person could ever write a 500 or even a 100 Greatest Ramones Songs for example. Sometimes though, especially early on, Prince would create just a perfect pop song with no peculiar features, boundary pushing or experimentation. Unchallenging, expertly crafted, Vaseline-lensed, radio-friendly pop. Make it Through the Storm is such a song. One of his earliest but sung in a lower voice than his usual For You falsetto. The lyrics tread familiar water – the protagonist pleading a deserting love to stay, because, you know, warmth ! They weren’t even written by Prince but obviously made an impression as the imagery would repeatedly echo over his career. The Max and Grafitti Bridge also describe a “cold, cold world” and the phrase “a world so cold” is found in both When Doves Cry and The Holy River. The storm regularly crops up too, but in The Cross and Thunder the love that now sees him through the “black day, stormy night” is one for Jesus. Prince must be the only person that has ever made Christian Rock seem cool.Soft And Wet Hey girl, I found the Agean SeaIt's a soft wet love that U have 4 me Beyond the stars, beneath the sea There's so many things that U do 2 me Ooh baby All I want 2 see is the love in your eyes And all I want 2 hear is your sweet love sighs (I want 2 be deep in your thighs) I'm hit with the arrow, I'm feelin' the pain Tell me, tell me baby, that U feel the same Tell me that U feel the same way I do Tell me that U love me girl If this is lust then I must confess I feel it everyday If this is wrong, then I long 2 be as far from right as I may Everytime I'm with U, U just love me 2 death Ooh wee baby, U leave me without breath Ooh baby, ooh yeah U're just as soft as a lion tamed And U're just as wet as the evening rain And I really dig it when U call my name Your love is driving me, U're driving me insane I'm crazy baby, oh girl Crazy about your love Soft and wet U are soft and wet Your love is soft and wet Ooh, soft and wetLike most great works of popular music, “Soft and Wet” came into being through a combination of sexual and chemical indulgence and cynical commercial calculus. Moon, who started out writing the lyrics for most of his and Prince’s collaborations, recalled the song’s inspiration thusly : “I had Sundays off, and that particular Sunday I had a fortunate experience with more than one girl. It was a late-night party, and these girls had come back to my studio,” he told biographer Matt Thorne. “And I think I’d drunk a little too much rum because the next morning I felt like hell and had to go to work.” Moon locked the door of his office at Minneapolis marketing firm Campbell Mithun (now part of McCann Worldgroup), “recovering from this wild night before and…replaying in my mind some of the highlights” (Thorne 2016). Ever the adman, he’d been toying with a “marketing theme”?to help sell his new protegé to an audience of teenage girls, which he famously summarized as “implied naughty sexuality” (Nilsen 1999 28). At that moment, sitting in an office building at ten in the morning, “tired, a little bit hungover,” Moon wrote the “anchor tune that would summarize this marketing concept”?(Thorne 2016). Moon’s story is, to be frank, more than a little self-aggrandizing. For one thing, he’s effectively claiming to have invented the concept of double entendre in popular music: an assertion with which I’d imagine scads of earlier artists, from Robert Johnson to?Julia Lee?to the Ohio Players, would take issue. But he is right in considering “Soft and Wet” to be one of the fundamental keys to Prince’s musical persona; it’s just that it took Prince a few tries – and, it’s worth noting, a lyrical overhaul – to get it right. The Moonsound version of “Soft and Wet” is an amusingly frothy slice?of pop-funk, but it isn’t much more than that. The opening keyboard riff is in place: a stop-start, staccato funk pattern that sounds to these ears like the kind of thing the late Bernie Worrell would have played for?Parliament-Funkadelic. Most of the basic structure is there, as well : introduction, first verse, second verse, bridge, synthesizer solo, third verse, a reprise of the first verse, then finally ending on the chorus. But Prince’s constellation of influences hadn’t yet coalesced into something definably his, and as a result the song feels cobbled together – particularly the bridge, which pairs?a Stevie Wonder-esque electric piano line with a low-register?harmony vocal that is pure Larry Graham. Finally, with all due respect to Chris Moon, his lyrics are entirely too precious, crammed with distracting references to Greek?mythology that are less “naughty implied sexuality” than “sexually frustrated Classics major.” In particular, the opening lines Moon?dreamt up in his office at Campbell Mithun would have been some of the most portentous this side of Jim Morrison had they been released as written : “Angora fur, the Aegean Sea / It’s a soft, wet love that you have for me.” Nothing gets 4076700-457200those teens going like the Aegean Sea ! Moon’s lyrics were still intact when Prince re-recorded “Soft and Wet” in the winter of 1976-77 at Sound 80 Studios, with “David Z” Rivkin – who you may recall as the engineer for?Grand Central’s first demo, as well as the older brother of future Revolution drummer Bobby – behind the boards. The sound is much improved, however, with the requisite jump in fidelity that comes when one moves from a?semi-professional eight-track studio in a converted hair salon?to a state-of-the-art 16-track setup. Prince’s arrangement is also less tentative, more assured, with the tempo slightly increased for an extra jolt of energy. He opens the song with the familiar gasp that helps distinguish the final version, providing a nice counterpoint to the later line, “leave me without…breath.” His synth solo is more developed, with a stronger melodic line and a fuller-bodied sound – thanks, in large part, to the Oberheim Four Voice?he reportedly “borrowed” from Pierre Lewis of local band the Lewis Connection, then “wouldn’t give it back” (Riemenschneider 2013). All in all, the Sound 80 version of “Soft and Wet” sounds more like the work of a singular vision than the earlier Moonsound demo. Prince’s influences remain clearly identifiable – those deeper vocal harmonies?still unmistakably evoke Larry Graham – but their specific application is far less heterogeneous. This was, according to David Z, no small effort on Prince’s part : “He did all the instruments. He had a little cassette machine into which he’d hummed each part,” he told the?Minneapolis Star Tribune?in 2004. “The horn part, the guitar part – he had it all separated. It was really evolved.” Aside from the lyrics, the only real flaw of this early pass is a detectable hesitancy in Prince’s vocals : “When anybody?came in the studio while he was singing, he wanted me to turn the light off because he didn’t want anybody to look at him,” Rivkin recalled. At one point, the engineer’s wife “came in while he was singing ‘Soft and Wet,’?and he was a little embarrassed. He got over that shyness, that’s for sure” (Star Tribune?2004). Indeed, all the pieces would finally fall into place?on the released?version of “Soft and Wet,” recorded?at the Record Plant in Sausalito, California sometime in late autumn 1977. The word “lubricous” keeps coming to mind : from that opening gasp to the?last vocal flourish, the whole thing feels slick – not in the sense usually employed by pop critics, meaning overproduced (though other songs on?For You?certainly fit that bill), but in the more literal sense, meaning slippery. With “Soft and Wet”’s third and final iteration, Prince took the “implied naughty sexuality” of Chris Moon’s lyrical conceit and extended it to the music : I don’t know how he did it, but the whole song feels sexual – vaginal, even – leaving no doubt as to what particular “soft, wet” thing the title is referencing. Prince’s new lyrics, too, add some much-needed immediacy to the innuendo. His revised opening line dumps?Moon’s self-consciously elevated symbolism for brash direct address : “Hey, lover !” – a phrase he may have borrowed from the?fragmentary home recording? circulating under that name. The verse continues in equally bold fashion, with a series of genital “entendres” that are single-and-a-half at best : “I got a sugarcane / That I wanna lose in you / Baby can you stand the pain ?” And at the point in the verse when Moon is going on about being a “roaming traveler on a bended knee,” Prince just tells it like it is : “There’s so many things that you do to me.” I don’t know about y’all, but if I was a girl, my bikini area would be a lot softer and wetter after hearing the latter. Of course, when compared with his work to come, even Prince’s more eyebrow-raising lyrics for?“Soft and Wet” come across as a little tame. That’s definitely what Chris Moon discovered upon?the release of?Dirty Mind?in?1980, after which he recalled having the following phone conversation -4572006035040with Prince : “I said, ‘I see you’re still staying with the “Soft and Wet” theme. But you’re making it a little more blatant. What is this I hear about “Head” ?’ And he goes, ‘Yeah, well, I decided to make it a little more straightforward so that everyone would get it’” (Miller 1983). Call me crazy, but I’m pretty sure we “got it” loud and clear the first time.The Beautiful Ones (2019)These two versions of the lyrics to “Soft and Wet,” Prince’s first single, find him establishing relative patterns he’d maintain throughout his career. First, the production of multiple handwritten drafts of his lyrics, each one a refinement of the last; second, the use of playful pseudonyms to distance himself from his work. Here, he uses “Percy,” a name he’d return to throughout the seventies, sometimes in conjunction with “Bagonia.” Another notebook saw him list such false names as “Dexter Cunningbowl,” “Alfred Horkelsby,” “Seymou,” and “Harriet Tubman.” Prince wrote “Soft and Wet” no later than the summer of 1976. He cowrote the lyrics with Chris Moon, the founder of Moon Sound, an eight-track studio in South Minneapolis where Prince recorded much of his earliest work. Warner Bros. released the finished single, taken from For You, on June 7, 1978, Prince’s twentieth birthday. It reached #92 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, and #12 on their Hot Soul Singles chart.Prince Summer : “Soft And Wet”?(1978) – Andresmusictalk (2016)Prince’s debut?For You is one of my favorite albums by him. This viewpoint continues to evolve with time. What probably impressed me most is that it’s probably the most instrumentally full and orchestral example of Prince’s Minneapolis Sound - which of course replaced horns with polyphonic synthesizers. Mixing an ethereal style of instrumentation with heavy soul and funk flavors is no easy task. And personally, this debut album really pulled it off better than many give it credit for. It also represented Prince’s own coming of age from teenager into an adult. He recorded his first demos for this debut in 1976 with local producer Chris Moon. He then bought the demo tape to a local business man Owen Husney. He and Prince moved out to LA were the 17 year old signed with Warner Bros. Prince stayed at Husney’s house-working tirelessly on his debut at the Record Plant, and developing an affinity for Husney’s scrambled eggs so it’s been said. On April 7th, 1978?For You?finally came out. The first single released, and consequently Prince’s first hit song, was written and played by Prince with only Moon writing the lyrics. This song was “Soft And Wet”. Prince panting starts out the song as…almost a vocal kind of hi hat cymbal. Prince plays very break heavy Afro Latin type drum solo. The main melody consists of three keyboard solos. One is a high polyphonic synth solo, the other a lower one and a synth bass line giving it the funky phat. In between these lines, there are interludes of space funk synth effects. On the vocal parts, the mix reduces to mainly the bassier lines.?There are two choruses-one of which is actually an instrumental bridge. On the first chorus, Prince is playing a highly rhythmic synth bass to his own vocal. When it comes to the song’s second chorus, he’s playing a hard bop jazz style chordal walk-down synth solo improvisation of his original vocal line. On the last few verses of the song, Prince is singing the song title to the high pitched synth brass and calculated drum breaks - all before his falsetto vocal up-scaling bring the song to a dead stop. Each time I listen to this song, it emerges just how much it showcases Prince’s funk at some of its instrumentally dense. His layering of the Oberheim 4 and 8 voice polyphonic synths with the drum breaks alone make this a major funk breakthrough for him. First time I heard this song on Prince’s first compilation?The Hits/The B-Sides, it clued me in that its accompanying album?For You was just the funk I might’ve been looking for at that time. That proved very good thinking. “Soft And Wet”’s majestically funky sonic layering of synths, falsetto vocals, jazzy breaks and solos showcase that Prince was not only basing his music in heavy funk. But also that his funk was going to be presented uniquely - quite different than most of the brass based bands of the day. In the end, this song provided a strong?window into how Prince would instrumentally approach his funk.39700202426970Teenage Prince Finds His Name and His Voice With ‘Soft and Wet’By Keith Creighton – Ultimate Prince (2017) “Soft and Wet” sounds like the name of the world’s least popular brand of toilet paper, so it’s not too surprising parts of the song were written in the office of an ad agency. The lyrics were co-written by Chris Moon, an ad executive and studio owner who was instrumental in developing Prince as an artist and setting his legendary career in motion. Moon owned a Minneapolis studio, Moonsound, where Prince’s first professional recordings were laid down in 1976. It was a deal Prince couldn’t refuse : set some of Moon’s lyrics to music, and in return, have free reign of the studio while Moon was working at his day job. “I started looking at Prince and the music as a product,” Moon told Per Nilsen for the book DanceMusicSexRomance Prince : The First Decade. “Teenage girls because they’re going to think of Prince as sexy.” But graphic songs could not get onto the radio or into Casey Kasem’s American Top 40, so Moon proposed the concept of “implied, naughty sexuality”. Prince liked it, and the angle that clearly positioned Prince against Michael Jackson and Rick James worked ... eventually. Chris Moon later recounted the origin for the song’s racy lyrics to Matt Thorne for the book Prince : The Man and His Music. “What I’d been trying to was come up with the anchor tune that would summarize this marketing concept, and so I wrote ‘Soft and Wet’ sitting in ad agency Campbell Mithun after this wonderful evening (one that included dalliances with two women), tired and a little bit hungover.” The original lyric included this passage “Angora fur, the Aegean sea / It’s a soft, wet love that you have for me.” One of the lines that made it into the final song, “I really dig it when U call my name”, sets up a different story. Moon had a hand in shaping Prince’s stage name as well. Moon tells Thorne that Prince was hesitant about recording these racy songs under his Christian name. Prince told Moon, “It’s gotta be Mr. Nelson”, but Moon replied, “Mr. Nelson ? Look, let me break it down to you this way. There’s this white guy named Willie. Maybe you’ve heard of him, maybe you haven’t, but we don’t want to be confused with Willie Nelson.” According to Nilsen’s book, Prince almost immediately started practicing his signature with a heart dotting the “i”. “Soft and Wet” went through several re-recordings before landing as the third track on Prince’s debut album, For You. It was released as his first single on Prince’s 20th birthday, June 7, 1978. The song would peak, much later, on Nov. 25, 1978, at No. 92 on the Billboard Hot 100. It wasn't the last time Prince released new music on his birthday. In 1991 he sent a 12" single of "Gett Off" to select DJs, then followed that up the next year by doing the same with "Sexy M.F." His 1994 CD-Rom Interactive was also released on June 7, and in 1996 subscribers to the Prince Family Newsletter were sent a cassette single of "Dinner With Delores." Much later on, in an unforgettable scene in the M. Night Shyamalan thriller, Unbreakable, Audrey Dunn (Robin Wright) tells her husband David (Bruce Willis) that “Soft and Wet” is her favorite song.v – Prince Lyrics – Soft And Wet (2018)(0:18)On Episode 3 of the Press Rewind - Prince Lyrics Podcast, I dive into For You’s third track and the most well-known song from Prince’s debut album, “Soft & Wet.” Prince pushes the envelope, for 1978 at least, by including such a blatant sexual metaphor throughout the song. Also, I totally get the lyrics wrong (no thanks to the internet). Prince clears things up for us after I recorded, after the release of The Beautiful Ones memoir, & I correct my mistakes with some listener help on a future episode.BabyBaby, what are we gonna do ?I'm so in love with you (doo-wah)Baby, what are we gonna do ?I know you're in love with me to (doo-wah)Should we go on living together ?Or should we get married right away ?Whatever you decide,I'll still love you, babyAnd we'll grow stronger everydayBaby, what are we gonna do ?I barely have enough money for 2Baby, what are we gonna do ?I don't want to regret what I've done to youI never would've thought that this would happenTo a very careful man like meBut baby, pretty baby, we're gonna work it out, yeahI love you... I love you, can't you see ?Baby, baby, babyIt's you, 'said it's you that I truly adoreOoo, baby, baby (baby, baby)Ooo, baby, babe...I hope our baby has eyes just like yours (just like yours)As with “Soft and Wet,” there are earlier versions of “Baby” circulating among bootleg collectors; unlike that song, however, the arrangement stayed remarkably consistent between the versions recorded at Sound 80 and at the Record Plant later in 1977. The main difference?in the final version is the more prominent string section :?performed on the demo by the WAYL radio orchestra and arranged by Prince himself then re-arranged on the album by violinist and recording artist?Charles Veal.?Interestingly, Prince would also revisit sections of “Baby” much later?in his career, lifting?the three-chord turnaround after the line “we’ll grow stronger everyday” for the main riff in “Eye Hate U” from 1995’s?The Gold Experience. Arguably the most remarkable thing about “Baby,” however, is the song’s subject matter. While the title suggests the usual romantic slow-jam platitudes, it’s actually much more literal than that : the lyrics find Prince’s character and his girlfriend confronting an unplanned pregnancy, initially with dismay,?then ultimately giving way to warmth and?hopefulness. That’s unusual thematic territory for a romantic ballad, to say the least – though apparently not for Prince; Chris Moon recalled another song from the era, “Surprise,” dealing with much the same scenario. “I don’t know if this was something he was worried about or wary of,” he?said to biographer Matt Thorne, “but I told him I think we want to stay away from babies because that’s not something young girls are going to want to be thinking about” (Thorne 2016). Of course, Prince’s teenage preoccupation with unexpected?pregnancy does sort of beg the question of whether he was writing from experience; and for at least a few weeks this year, it looked like that might have been a possibility. Once?it became evident that Prince had passed away without leaving a will, a number of people claiming to be his illegitimate children predictably emerged from the woodwork. One of them, a 39-year-old man from Kansas City, Missouri named Carlin Q. Williams, said he was born after his mother had unprotected sex with Prince at a Kansas City hotel in July of 1976. The question of what Prince was doing in Kansas City in 1976 notwithstanding, the math would have checked out for little Carlin to have been the inspiration for “Baby” and/or “Surprise.” But alas, it was not to be : Williams submitted to a DNA test, and it came back negative. I guess we’ll just have to assume that Prince wasn’t?writing what he knew, so much as he was writing what he was mortally afraid of; thinking back to when I was young and fairly new to being sexually active, I can certainly relate.The Violet Reality (2019) “Baby” - For You, 1978“I barely have enough money for two” Prince’s debut record had a few lowkey trinkets, but nothing as chart breaking as his eponymous sophomore album’s “I Wanna Be Your Lover” the following year. For You was quietly noticed by critics when it was released. And while there was a buzz around this prodigy from Minneapolis, his debut felt underwhelming; yet the talent couldn’t be denied. I say underwhelming in the best way possible, as his only trajectory was up. There are treasures on the record, and it’s worth exploring. It’s not the usual in-your-face funk acrobatics, later labeled as the Minneapolis sound that we’d come to know Prince for over time. It’s a soft and radio-friendly yacht-rock quasi-funk worthy deluge of an R&B and pop hybrid. One wonders if he would have enjoyed any semblance of known success had he continued to make the type of music on For You or Prince. Thank heavens he didn’t. Tucked into the middle of For You, “Baby,” is a questioning song about getting his girlfriend pregnant before either of them planned on it, layered with lush vocal feats doing their flips above then-lavish production. He questions whether they can support a child since he has no money (a statement he declared later in “I Wanna Be Your Lover,” “I ain’t got no money”), but also expresses no regrets in finding out he accidentally got her pregnant. He is still firmly a teenager, thinking they were above nature and science, “I never would have thought that this would happen/2 a very careful man like me”. Whether he was political or not (likely, he wasn’t), the song is a pro-choice stance on single motherhood, giving her the choice what to do and he’ll be supportive of her decision.Should we go on living 2gether ? / Should we get married right away ? / Whatever U decide, I’ll still love U baby / And we’ll grow stronger every dayIt acts as a precursor to Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach,” expressing the same “yeah, but” when learning she’s with a child. Madonna pleads with her father not to expel her from the family home, saying she’s keeping her baby, extolling her baby’s father’s marriage proposal and a seemingly new life ahead.He says that he’s going to marry me / We can raise a little family / Maybe we’ll be all right / It’s a sacrificePrince seems to have taken a similar role promising to find a way to build a family with the mother of his child instead of ejecting himself from the situation. It’s equally pro-life and pro-choice and a much more positive spin on unwed mothers in the 70s. (Madonna’s song and its existence balked at an 80s Reagan-era conservative headset.) Prince takes his responsibility for their sexual hiccup but equally questions their future, as she does.Baby, what are we gonna do ? / I barely have enough money 4 2 / Baby, what are we gonna do ? / I don’t want 2 regret what I’ve done 2 UFor a teenager, it’s very forward thinking. Then again, when one is a teenager, anything seems logical and perfectly viable; it almost seems easy. There’s no doubt that it stems from the dynamics in Prince’s own family and his father leaving when he was a very young child. The familial thread would weave itself through the fabric of Prince’s music throughout his entire career. It stands to note that Prince would upcycle the lush-factor of this song seventeen years later. “Baby”’s instrumental accent break at the 1:12 mark - and the only time it happens in the song - would be used as the main hook for “Eye Hate U,” from The Gold Experience. His glistening vocals and swirling orchestration surround the break in this song, and remains relatively unchanged on The Gold Experience, albeit replayed with newer instruments and production value. His tender falsetto offers an air of fragility and unsureness to the song’s content, conveying a one-step-a-time approach to solving their problem. “Baby” is a tender song about a tough choice young adults face every day. It makes one wonder if it weren’t written from a real experience Prince had with a girl. PS They had a boy.v – Prince Lyrics – Baby (2018)(0:23)On Episode 6 of the Press Rewind - Prince Lyrics Podcast, I take on the heavier subject matter of For You’s sixth track, “Baby.” Prince fools you into thinking the song is only about love before adding a deeper story of a young couple facing some serious choices.Love Is ForeverYou're always on my mind Day and night, baby, all the time (all the time)You mean so much to meA love like ours just had to beYou're the wind and the rainYou've got a river that takes away my painAnd the sky that's oh-so-blueYou're everything girl, don't you know I need you (need you)U R the only thing that keeps me goin'U R the only thing that keeps my love aliveU R the only thing that I'll ever needU don't have to worry, you see, my love is foreverAw, sugar, I don't have to dreamCuz' you give me what I wantGirl, you know what I needForever until my love is throughI...I will love you (love you)Oh, what does it take to make you seeThat you are the only one for meI'll never, never stop loving youI'll never, never stop wanting youI'll never, never get enough of youLove is foreverU R the only thing that keeps me goin'U R the only thing that keeps my love aliveU R the only thing that I'll ever needU don't have to worry, my love is forever-4857756115685In the case of “My Love is Forever,” the lyrics Moon had written were actually quite personal : “that song was about a girl that I slept with for a year, and we never had sex,” Moon claimed to Thorne?(Thorne 2016). But in Prince’s hands, they became pop-universal : with its sprightly, confectionary arrangement, one would never suspect the song had been written for an actual person. Both the original Sound 80 recording and the final album cut?begin with a cheery glissando – synthesizer on the demo, electric piano on the album – followed by a silky, muted rhythm guitar pattern and Prince’s “doo-doo-doo” vocalizations. With its bright Oberheim synth embellishments and relatively light bass, the sound of the song is pure Minneapolis : a nascent, slightly disco-fied version of the hybrid style Prince would take to the top of the R&B charts early in the next decade. There’s even a?touch of hard rock in the guitar leads that come in after the chorus – though, as was typical of Prince’s early guitar work, the clean, heavily-processed tone is a lot closer to the AOR of studio groups like Boston or Toto than the rawer,?more “live”?sounds of Grand Funk or Santana. Pleasant and frothy,?if?not especially memorable, “My Love is Forever” is Prince at his most self-consciously commercial. Chris Moon may have been inspired to write the lyrics from personal experience, but they also seem crafted to suit the heartthrob persona he was shaping around his collaborator, rarely straying from pop clichés of eternal romantic devotion.?If nothing else, Prince’s breathy, intimate?vocal performance feels precision-engineered to make teen girls melt – and this, too, was reportedly thanks in part to Moon’s intervention. When they’d first commenced working together, Moon told Thorne, Prince’s singing voice was so soft and high that the microphones at Moonsound struggled to pick it up;?so?Moon attempted to create a more conducive atmosphere in the studio, dimming the lights and instructing Prince to lie down on the floor. “So he’s there in the dark, on the floor, with the microphone halfway down his throat, pillows under his head, and over the course of the next few days I coaxed vocals out of him,” he recalled. “A little, high, falsetto voice. Sweet, kind of reminiscent of Michael Jackson” (Thorne 2016). It’s a technique Prince is said?to have recreated on his own for future recordings, most notably 1981’s “Do Me, Baby.” But while teen heartthrobs are expected to sing other people’s words and receive extensive vocal coaching, teen musical prodigies are not; and so it was that, while “Soft and Wet” showed up on?For You?credited to both Prince and Moon, “My Love is Forever” was attributed to Prince alone. By this time, Moon had left the Prince fold: they’d amicably parted ways at the end of 1976, with Moon affirming that “the only thing that you have to do is make sure that my interests are protected, and everything goes down the way it should be.” Needless to say, Moon’s idea of his interests being protected did not include Prince taking full credit for songs he’d co-written; so in 1986, according to Dave Hill, he reached a settlement with Prince’s publishing company, Controversy Music, selling his interests in the songs for an undisclosed sum (Hill 35). The following year, Hill wrote, Moon produced a single for Twin Cities vocalist Cynthia Johnson, best known as the voice of “Funkytown” performers Lipps, Inc. On the back sleeve was a “special thanks” to “Skippy Nelson” (36). The irony of all this is that in many ways, Moon planted the seeds for his own short-shrifting. He was, again, the first to coin the description of Prince as “the next Stevie Wonder,” and he admitted to Per Nilsen that he thought of his teenage?protégé as “a product” – or, in today’s parlance, a brand. Moon even claimed to have been the first person to encourage Prince to drop his surname and go by his regal-sounding given name alone : “It set him apart,” he explained. “He started to practice signing his name with a small heart over the ‘i’ in Prince” (Nilsen 1999 28). In this sense, writing Moon out of the back story was just the next logical step in transitioning from Prince Rogers Nelson to “Prince” : the Young, Mysterious Musical Genius from Minneapolis?. These days, of course, consumers of pop music have an interpretive framework through which to understand the?apparent contradiction of an artist who?works in close collaboration with others, but whose artistic vision is nevertheless highly individual and personal :?see, for example, the legitimate (if sometimes controversial) critical acclaim afforded to creator-brands like Kanye West and Beyoncé. In 1977, however, in order to claim the title of musical?auteur, one needed to actively play the role. And so, from?For You until 1984’s?Purple Rain –and frequently later, as well – Prince’s records all came with the same, infrequently-asterisked inscription on the sleeve : “Produced, Arranged, Composed and Performed by Prince.” It was the little white lie that?landed?Prince a lucrative record deal, mere months after recording?“My Love is Forever.” But it also ensured that the dispute with Moon was only one of many authorship squabbles in the years to come.v – Prince Lyrics – My Love Is Forever (2019)(0:17)On Episode 7 of the Press Rewind - Prince Lyrics Podcast, I cover one of my personal favorites, the underrated seventh track on For You, “My Love Is Forever.” A hallmark card put to music that brings joy to listeners with its upbeat musical composition.I’m Yours I took one look at youAnd all the things that we could doDance within my head.Never have I ever made love beforeNever have I wanted to till nowLover, can't you see I want you more and moreTake me baby, yeah... I'm yoursI'll give you what you wantBut please love me nowI'll do anything U wantU're the teacher show me howNever have I ever made love beforeNever have I wanted to till nowLover, can't you see I want you more and moreTake me baby, yeah... I'm yours “I’m Yours” starts out as another funk song, with a syncopated drumbeat?and some distinctly Larry Graham-influenced slap bass. After just a few measures, however, the song morphs abruptly into pure arena rock; its fiery, multi-tracked guitar riff sounds more like it belongs on an early Foreigner?record than on the debut album from?“the next Stevie Wonder.” The effect is jarring, but not in a bad way : listening to?For You?in retrospect, this is one of the few moments when Prince’s genre-bending?later persona comes into sharp focus. Certainly, Prince seemed to recognize the rock-inflected sound of “I’m Yours” as his future musical direction. In the years to come, he would shift further and further away from conventional R&B, finally breaking through to the rock market with 1980’s?Dirty Mind. All of which is not necessarily to say that fans of hard rock?in 1978 would have dug “I’m Yours” if they’d had the chance. You’ll notice that the group I referenced for comparison was Foreigner, who have never exactly been?synonymous with raw heaviosity. At the same time, even those listeners who’d bought that band’s self-titled 1977 debut (or similar M.O.R. rock records of the era, such as the debut albums by Boston and Toto) probably would have found Prince’s riffage a bit too heavy, and his vocals – still the same fragile falsetto as on ballads like “Baby“ – excessively light in the loafers. The fact is, Prince was doing something that hadn’t been done before, blurring the lines of both race and gender presentation; most listeners in the late 1970s would have lacked the proper aesthetic framework to make sense of it. Even today, opinions seem split on whether “I’m Yours” works or whether it’s a muddled, awkward attempt at blending two discrete genres. I, if you can’t already tell, fall firmly in the “works” camp. Yes, as a hard rock fan I find Prince’s guitar playing a little mannered for my tastes, on this track and on several others. But he makes it work for him; because here, as ever, he’s presenting himself as a softer, more feminine take on the classically phallic guitar god. It’s striking that, while it couldn’t be more musically distinct from its bookend on the other side of the album, “I’m Yours” is expressing an idea remarkably similar to “For You.” Prince’s lyrical persona is offering himself up to us – as listeners and as romantic/sexual subjects – in ways that most male rock artists, Black or white, simply do not do : “Take me, baby, I’m yours.” Hell, at one point he even claims to be?a virgin, singing, “Never have I ever made love before” – just try and find a song by, say, KISS that takes on that position. With “I’m Yours,” Prince turns a style that is typically used to express blunt, macho sexual dominance into an act of blissful submission – and he still makes it rock. The result is disarming, subversive, and sexy. And while Prince would?sound?better in a hard rock mode in the future – see, for example, 1979’s “Bambi” – I’m struggling to think of?a time when he did so without also succumbing to the genre’s more regressively boorish?lyrical impulses. One last?thing to note about “I’m Yours,” which will become more important as we continue, is the minor dispute over the song’s authorship. According to former Grand Central drummer Charles Smith, the aforementioned Larry Graham-style bassline was actually developed by Prince’s friend and former/future bandmate, André Anderson. In fact, Smith told biographer Per Nilsen, “André’s vibe is all over that record… I saw them rehearse the songs before Prince cut the tracks. They did the basic work, the ‘skeletons,’ for the album in André’s house” (Nilsen 1999 41). Smith’s story certainly fits the known timeline of the song, which was initially demoed at Moonsound in 1976, while Prince was still living in André’s basement. And, as we’ll see,?André was indeed heavily involved in the early formation of the artistic persona that tends to be attributed to Prince alone. Whether he played a major role in crafting “I’m Yours” – or the rest of?For You, for that matter – is tough to say with any certainty. It seems clear, however, that the seeds of discord that would?come to a head between Prince and?André in the early 1980s were planted early in both men’s careers.v – Prince Lyrics – I’m Yours (2019)(0:20)On Episode 9 of the Press Rewind - Prince Lyrics Podcast, I cover the audacious rock n’ roll of “I’m Yours” from Prince’s debut album, For You.Two?instrumentals from the Moonsound sessions are in circulation, each in their own way attesting to Prince’s one-man band aspirations. The first, which circulates under the title “Piano Intro,” is pretty much as described: about 35 seconds of acoustic piano flourishes and?glissandi?that proves, if nothing else, that Prince had been brushing up on his keyboard skills since his home recordings earlier that year.?But the more significant of these lesser-heard Moonsound recordings is the second: a seven-and-a-half minute jazz-rock-funk fusion piece, which may or may not have been titled “Farnborough.” While the song itself is nothing particularly memorable, it’s here that Prince’s aforementioned vaunting ambitions – as multi-instrumentalist and genre-shifting polymath – come into their sharpest focus yet. The song begins with some soft, pastoral acoustic guitar strumming, recalling the folkie underpinnings of “Nightingale” with just a dab of lite psychedelia. Accompanying himself on bass and?(to my knowledge) drums with brushes, the arrangement builds to a dreamy descending piano line, then mutates into a smooth, bossa nova-inspired groove. The influence of Larry Graham?on Prince’s funk?bass style is readily apparent; he would later readily admit that he taught himself the instrument by playing along with Larry on Sly and the Family Stone records. A second jazzy, descending riff –this time on guitar and bass – and we’re back to the introductory passage. Rinse and repeat, but with more pronounced musical embellishments and solos. Again, “Farnborough” (or whatever it’s called) isn’t some lost classic. Like a lot of Prince’s early music, it goes on too long for what it is; in 1976, he hadn’t yet mastered the art of engineering a truly hypnotic groove out of minimalist components. View it in context, however, as the sole work of an unsigned 17-year-old from Minnesota with all of a few weeks’ studio experience, and the potential it reveals is staggering. Even the range of influence alone is impressive : I hear Stevie, of course (that bossa nova section could have fit right in on?Fulfillingness’ First Finale), but I also hear a lot of the aforementioned Todd Rundgren, who was ploughing a similar (albeit much more manic) furrow of?soft rock-meets-prog-meets-jazz on albums like 1974’s?Todd. Like I’ve already said many times before, Prince would improve radically on the template he developed in his teens. But the fact that he was already so far along in developing that template was a fascinating achievement in itself.For almost a year, Prince would come over from the north side of Minneapolis to the south on the bus after school, getting to Chris Moon’s studio around lunchtime, with Moon joining him later in the afternoon. Moon remembers : ‘The night before he would show up I would sit down and write three sets of lyrics for him to choose from and leave them on the piano. And his job when he showed up was to come in and if he liked one, work on it, and if not, tear it up and tell me, and I’d come up with another set. By the time I would show up, he would have worked out a guitar track or some kind of basic rhythm to one of the sets of lyrics that I had left with him.’ In time, Moon also taught Prince how to find his way round the studio so he could also record and produce himself while Moon was at the ad agency. Everything was working well, as far as Moon was concerned, until it came to the vocals, which Prince was singing so softly and so high that the microphone couldn’t pick up his voice. Worried about freaking him out or making him withdraw further, Moon went back into the studio and laid pillows on the floor. ‘And I said, “Lie down and get really relaxed.” And I take the microphone and I bring it down and stuff it in his mouth and turn all the lights off. So he’s in there in the dark, on the floor, with the microphone halfway down his throat, pillows under his head, and over the course of the next few days I coaxed vocals out of him. A little, high, falsetto voice. Sweet, kind of reminiscent of Michael Jackson, and he had always said that Michael Jackson was his hero.’ Among the songs that Moon and Prince worked on together was ‘Aces’, about which Moon remembers : ‘I wrote that song because I wanted to really start playing with techniques, backward tracks, an experimental process, so I needed a song that would form the foundation for that. It was designed to be very experimental in nature, much longer too – seven minutes – not necessarily a really rounded set of words, but something that would give Prince an ability to step in many different directions – Mediterranean, Indian, all these different feels I envisioned him experimenting with.’ This song was one of four on Prince’s first demo tape, and the only one from that tape that wasn’t reworked for his debut album. Though it has been suggested by past sessionologists that ‘Diamond Eyes’ was written by Moon, he told me that ‘it was one of the first songs Prince wrote the lyric to’, after he had started to worry that Moon would be writing all of his songs, and that more of the recording of this song was done in the control room than the studio as Moon taught Prince how to record. Ironically, Moon has forgotten about ‘Don’t Forget’, a song they did ‘that no one got that excited about’. Nor does he recall the details of ‘Don’t Hold Back’. Moon recalls that in an early example of the recording process Prince has adopted for the whole of his professional career, most of the songs were worked on late into the night. Only one song, ‘Fantasy’, was recorded during the day and was, he remembers, accordingly much brighter than the rest of the tracks. He also says that ‘Surprise’, another song previously credited to him, was actually a Prince-penned lyric and that it came in response to thinking about Prince’s potential career. ‘I had told Prince, “We’ve got to think about how we’re going to market you.” What I had learned in the ad agency was that when you had a product, there had to be a theme to the product and a marketing direction, and so I was applying this to Prince. I said, “We’ve got to figure out our audience, and for you old teenagers are not going to be buying your stuff, this is going to be for young girls. You’re cute-looking, you dance and jump around, so we need to have a marketing theme in the songs that speaks to them. Young girls, they’re coming of age, they’re becoming aware of their sexuality. I think that’s probably the most powerful force that we can speak to, and if we can anchor the music to the strong new feelings they’re having, we might really be able to gain some traction and connect with the audience.”’ Moon says that while he was ‘playing with songs that were of a general sexual nature, Prince was playing around with songs around the concept of getting pregnant’. ‘Surprise’ was one of these songs; ‘Baby’, also demoed during these sessions and later included on For You, was another. ‘I don’t know if this was something he was worried about or wary of, but I told him I think we want to stay away from babies because that’s not something young girls are going to want to be thinking about.’ Instead, Moon suggested that Prince work with sexual suggestion. Past commentators have suggested that he gave Prince the concept of ‘implied naughty sexuality’ or ‘naughty sexual innuendo’, but Moon says he now remembers very clearly that ‘double entendre’ was, in fact, ‘the exact phrase I used with Prince. I’ll never forget it. The way this all came about was I had Sundays off, and that particular Sunday I had a fortunate experience with more than one girl. It was a late-night party, and these girls had come back to my studio and it had been one of those pleasant, memorable experiences. And I think I’d drunk a little too much rum because the next morning I felt like hell and had to go to work. So I locked the door, and I’m lying there recovering from this wild night before and I’m replaying in my mind some of the highlights and this song comes to mind, “Soft and Wet”. What I’d been trying to do was come up with the anchor tune that would summarise this marketing concept, that would deliver the positioning of this artist to the audience in just the right way. And so I wrote “Soft and Wet” sitting in ad agency Campbell Mithun after this wonderful evening, tired, a little bit hungover, it was ten o’clock in the morning, and the original version was: “Angora fur, the Aegean sea, it’s a soft, wet love that you have for me.”’ With this song, which Prince liked and immediately started working on, Moon felt he’d hit on a template for their planned album. ‘It was the first song where Prince introduced a break into the music. The words were so short and it was a lot more punctuated and a lot more staccato and abbreviated than anything we had done before.’ There were a few more songs, penned by Prince, that were lost on the way to the debut album : ‘Since We’ve Been Together’, three instrumentals – one of which, ‘Jelly Jam’, became part of ‘Just as Long as We’re Together’ – a revised version of ‘Leaving for New York’ and the Moon-penned ‘Make It Through the Storm’, which Prince later recorded with Sue Ann Carwell. But at the end of the session Prince produced a four-track demo tape containing ‘Baby’, ‘Soft and Wet’, ‘Aces’ and ‘My Love Is Forever’. Before sending it out, Moon says he had a little more work to do with Prince, who, he claims, didn’t want to release his records under his Christian name. ‘He said, “It’s gotta be Mr Nelson.” I said, “Mr Nelson ? Look, let me break it down to you this way. There’s this white guy named Willie. Maybe you’ve heard of him, maybe you haven’t, but we don’t want to be getting confused with Willie Nelson.”’Chris Moon (2018) : I wrote Prince’s first hit song Soft & Wet with the idea of it being a marketing song that would launch his career using implied sexuality as a theme for him musically. I remember the first time he looked at the lyrics, he got this naughty boy smile and looked up at me asking me what is this song really about. A couple years later my very “proper” British mother asked me the same question after hearing the song on the radio repeatedly … I looked at her, smiled and said “Mum, it’s about a kiss”. Whew that was close !When I was helping Prince to find his voice it seemed very helpful to him when he sang without being able to see anything. I discovered this the first time I recorded him singing and for a while after that played with blindfolding him or having him sing in the dark. It worked and brought out more emotion and I also got him to sing louder this way. It was just one of a number of things I did with him in the studio that were a bit unusual … but fun.When I was recording and producing Prince, I was always trying unusual things with him as I loved experimenting with crazy ideas and seeing how they affected the music being made. I was playing with the idea of how a background voice would sound if it went thru a Leslie (organ) speaker but didn’t have a Leslie around at the time so the closest I could get to that idea was singing thru a vacuum hose while swinging it above the head. I had Prince try it on the song ACES but he couldn’t swing the hose fast enough to get the effect to work. We also had trouble while doing this session as we were both laughing our heads off.WHY PURPLE ?When I first started working with Prince, I was also running the recording studio at Campbell-Mithun the largest ad agency in MN. They had many very large national and International clients and I would learn how advertising campaigns and product image was developed by watching the ad execs develop them. In the process, I sat in on a color review meeting one week when the ad agency worked on selecting a single color for a new company image and this is when learned how color was used in advertising. I shared this story with Prince when I was working to develop his image for him and explained how linking a color to a product or artist created another way for the audience to identify them. We had gone through a lengthy process of settling on his name (another story for another day) so during one of the next steps in the marketing and packaging process I proposed to Prince this idea of picking a color for his identity. I suggested the one we should use for him be Purple as it was a color directly associated with royalty which would help cement the Prince name in the minds of fans. I told him if we always used purple on everything associated with him, then as an artist eventually he would own that color and no other artist could use it without it reminding the audience of Prince … that it would be HIS color. He liked the idea and he liked the color purple so we agreed from that point on this would be HIS color.Chris Moon Interview (1999)- Do you know why Prince and Champagne parted ways ?Prince called me up that evening, or the following evening. He had told the band that he had got this deal with the guy at Moonsound, and they were pretty uncomfortable with that. They put some pressure on him and said, “You or the band. Which is it going to be ?” Prince said to me, “This is really tough. They are forcing me make a decision.” I said, “I can't tell you what to do. You have to decide for yourself. Do you wanna hang with the band, don’t worry about me, I’m fine, I understand, just let me know." So, they split because of jealousy : one of the members of the group had been singled out, and given a key to the studio. The others had to pay 30 to 40 bucks an hour, and this guy got it for zero for as many hours as he wants. Prince called me back a couple of hours later, “I’ve decided that I’m gonna go with you.” I said, “I’m glad from my stand-point, I’m unhappy that it was difficult with the rest of the group. But as long as you’re cool with it, I’m cool with it. I gotta work with the ad agency tomorrow, I’ll leave lyrics on the piano and three or four different songs on the piano. You come in and take a look at them and if you like any on them, work on them, or if you don’t like them, tear them up and throw them on the floor.” I came in the next day, and he’s working on one of the sets of lyrics. And that was the kind of the modus operandi that we went on from that point in time. I either leave new lyrics for him on the piano, or he was already working on something. The very first lyrics, I was throwing all kinds of stuff out trying to find something he liked, some love stuff, boogie, deep meaningful stuff from my perspective. And interestingly enough, he gravitated more to the lyrics that were non-conventional, because I always put up a mix of lyrics, conventional, less conventional, a bit more out there. One of the things we started working on was his vocals. We finally put some music together, got him up on the mike: I see his lips moving, but my VU-meter is not moving. I crank everything up, but my VU-meter is not moving. I’m getting no meter deflection. I realised at that point that we had a gentle lyric singer. It might as well have been the limitations of my equipment, because once I got the maximum gain, hiss was overcoming everything else. Partly because of equipment limitations, partly because he was a quiet singer. I said, “I can’t record you. I can’t get your voice on tape.” He had to sing louder and we went through a number of things to get it to work right. I told him to lie down on the floor. I got him a pillow under his head. “Let’s just listen to the track for a while, stuff the microphone, turn off all the lights in the studio. Don’t sing just listen.” It turned out that this approach, for some reason, worked ! We got meter deflection, and from that point on, we were up and rolling on vocals. - How was it working with Prince ?We virtually lived together. Neither he nor I are really big socialisers. I enjoy people and when I’m with them I have a good time, but I don’t go out and do the social thing. I don’t really go to parties, I’m really more to myself. He and I had got very much in common. So what you basically had was two people that were both looking down the same road, let’s go there together. In terms of working together, it was just the way it should have been. There was a change that took place. In the beginning, it was much more the quiet, shy, more reserved Prince. If he had an opinion, he would express it. I had to find neutral resolutions when we had conflicts. Overall, it was a pretty respectful kind of relationship. He knew what I was going through for the deal, he knew that my name wasn’t going on the package, first and foremost at the end of the game. There wasn’t a whole lot of problems that I had with him. Towards the end, he would be more vocal, more demanding from time to time. And I think he may should have been. That was a part of the process. And truthfully if he hadn’t started exhibiting some of that behaviour, he wouldn’t have had power to able to stand alone. At the time I would have an occasional joint. I’m sitting in the studio watching this guy trashing away on instruments. It’s not the world’s most thrilling occupation, so I light up a joint. I had been working all morning, all afternoon, and now it’s 9 p.m., so this was a way of getting entertainment into the work. Prince hated that. He said, “Put that shit away ! You don’t need that.” I said, “You’re right, but I kind of like it.” Even if I just had a drink, he said, “You don’t need that.” He always tried to keep everything clean. We didn’t have any big confrontations, other than he was pretty vocal about telling me I was off track in that area. - Can you expound on the ideas behind the “implied naughty sexuality" and how it came about ?On a particular night I had some girls over, and we were out all night long, may have been my first threesome or something. It was really unusual as we were not in the studio recording. I had a party, but then I had to go to work. I dragged my sorry ass to Campbell-Mithun, I walk into my recording studio. So I’m up here in this skyscraper in downtown Minneapolis, locked in this studio. Picked up a piece of paper and I started writing “Soft And Wet.” It’s almost automatically because I’m barely conscious. What had happened before “Soft And Wet” got written that morning, about a week beforehand, I had sat down as I realised I needed to be serious about this. I’ve spent all this time, I’m making no damn money, just sitting here recording songs being happy as little busy beavers. I need to have some kind of strategy for how to turn all this work effort into something meaningful. “We have to come up with some kind of marketing strategy, who the buyer is, who’s gonna buy the product, what’s the demographics of that group.” Because of all this experience I’ve had in these marketing programs I’ve had I understood the process of analytical analyses of marketing. I started to look at Prince, not as a person, but as a product, and the music as a product. We needed to structure the music from marketing standpoints, so it was targeted and focused firstly at a particular group. I said to myself, “I have a 17-year-old, afro-headed, five-foot, black guy, who sings with a high voice. Who’s gonna buy his music ?” 12 to 15 year-old girls are the audience ! What are they thinking about ? Girls are a little more mature than boys. I know, innuendo, double entendre : we could mean this and we could mean that. A double entendre gets into your head, whirls around, you keep messing with it. This is a good way to tie an audience to a particular theme, because it really implants that message and the music is floating around up here. With this concept in mind, I sit down and “Soft And Wet” comes out. Why “Soft And Wet” came out ? I was recounting my previous evening, but it was also pulling together this innocence and sexuality at the same time. I get the song done and I explained the double meaning approach to Prince, “If you think that concept makes sense, I just happen to have a set of lyrics, my first attempt treating this approach.” He sat in front of the piano, and I noticed we were on the same track on this one. That’s how “Soft And Wet” came into being. Not a particular glamorous story. After “Soft And Wet” was on the way, I focused on some of the other issues. For example, I said, “Prince, we now have got the marketing theme, we have the philosophy behind how we’re gonna put you out there, what you are, who the audience is.” It struck me as innovative thinking, most people didn’t think about music this way. They just kind of did their thing and it did work or didn’t work. I said, “Let’s think about how you’re gonna sign your name. Sign your name. It needs something.” Then he started practising signing his name putting a heart over the “i,” all these different versions of signatures. “The problem that I’ve got here is that I don’t see putting you out as Prince Nelson. It just doesn’t work for me.” Prince said, “That’s my name !" I said, “I know it is your name, but we don’t need Nelson. No one has ever come out with the name Prince, it has never been done before. It sets you apart all by itself. Anything before or after it only diminishes the impact of the word. Now we’ve got to think about the steps, how you move.” So he’s running around, singing, dancing, signing his name. There’s a whole concept to what’s going to happen. I think I needed it to validate all this time and money I was investing. I'm not Tyme (1976)sure Prince needed it initially, I think what it did was it served to really help him tune in and focus. Before it was kind of abstract for both of us. Throughout this process, I was doing all the engineering and recording. The problem with it was that I was trying to maintain some babes and Prince was trying to get me not to maintain any babes, not to drink, not to smoke. I told him, “What you want is a minister to do the recordings. I’m not your man, because I have other needs besides this musical thing. I’m going out of town for two or three days for the weekend, but rather than have everything stopped I bring you up to speed on how to work the equipment.” I wrote out several pages of instructions. “You get the key, you get instructions, the electricity is on, knock yourself out, I’ll see you in two-three days. Bye !” When I came back, he was really interested in all of this. He had stayed the whole weekend at the studio. I realised that the more I taught him how to produce and record himself, the more slack I would get cut. - How quickly did Prince learn to operate the board ?He learned it within a reasonable time frame. He had a fascination for it, so that drove his interest. He was not getting heavy technical explanation. All you need to know is when you see the one with the “T,” that’s treble, turn it and it gets brighter. He was getting some really basic explanations from me, because that’s the way I communicate with people. He was getting it quickly. He looked like this octopus because there were hands all over the place. I’m turning things up, he's turning things down, the console should be smoking from the heat. - To what extent was Prince also writing the words to the songs ?Initially no lyrics flowed from Prince, and I think that after the 438th set of lyrics that I set up on the piano, he started seeing the rhythm, the rhyme, the approach that I was taking with my lyrics. I said to him, “Look, I can’t write all the lyrics for you. I think you’re more marketable if you can write some on your own. You need to sit down and hammer out a song or two, lyrically, so this package has some of your own lyrics. You are worth more if you can play the instruments and write some lyrics. You don’t have to write them all, but some of them, that’s important.” This was several months down the road. The first ones came pretty difficult for him. He was more musically inclined than words. “Baby” was one of the early ones.Did you also bring in other musicians to play on the songs ?In the beginning I had one or two people in to play drums. I think I brought in one or two people. I don’t think it was anyone in the group, I think it was someone else that I brought in. Prince was clearly frustrated by the thought of having other people playing his stuff. He started working harder on drums. And encouraged him. I would leave lyrics for him on the piano, and when I came home he would say, “OK, I’ve got something on this, and something on this.” So he played whatever he had and I go, “OK, I don’t like this one so much, but this one.” Initially, what I was doing was kind of sorting out what I liked. I was very involved in terms of what was going to happen musically with the pieces that we were working on. I said, “What happens if we go like this, ba-ba-ba-ra-ra-ra ? What happens if we change this a little bit ?" There was a lot of that activity going on all the instruments. I had to least to say about bass. I had the most to say about melody.- Did Prince work up the songs from scratch in the studio or was he bringing in home tapes to work from ?There may have been some rough cassettes on a little mono cassette player. Once in a while, he would come in and say, “I worked out a couple of tracks last night. Here it is and what do you think ?“ Liked it or not, he had to go through me, if I didn’t like it I wasn’t going to sit down and spend the next X number of hours producing it. That was frustrating to him too.Books on Prince suggest that it was your idea to drop the surname and push back Prince's age a year or two. Is that pretty much correct ? What was the motivation ?I didn’t come up with the idea of lying about him. I felt he was remarkable enough, the package was remarkable enough at 18, 17, whatever he was when we came out. I thought he was more marketable by being a little bit older, so he didn’t seem so immature.- We understand that Prince and you completed 14 songs for the demo tape. Can you verify this ? What can you tell us about the material ?Yeah, there were 14 songs. And out of that 14, three or four I had written the lyrics to. I wanted to put together an album’s worth of material : 14 songs. I wanted enough diversity in the material and have three or four really strong songs. “Baby” and “Soft And Wet” were amongst the strongest songs. I think the demo tape represented Prince faithfully. It had some diversity. We did things with flutes and rock guitars. The diversity that we explored in the studio was reflected. There was the melodic and the less melodic stuff. “Fantasy” was an interesting song because we used flute. I brought in someone else to play flute on that. “Surprises” was a very strange song, too. “Diamond Eyes“ was one of mine. “Make It Through The Storm” is my lyrics. Sue Ann Carwell ended up doing her version of it. The track “Farnborough” was for an air show in England, which my father was involved with. I produced the soundtrack for it. Prince played on it.- Is it correct that you sold the songs to Prince's Controversy Publishing in 1985 ?40195507162800Yes, Prince ended up with the rights to all the songs.- To what extent was Prince playing on other people's demos ?What isn’t known, while I'm working at Campbell-Mithun, I’m bringing Prince in to do jingles. I was producing a variety of music for their clients. And Campbell-Mithun was paying him for music tracks.Prince had been plotting for fame before anyone knew his name.Most people chase celebrity, but fame chased Prince. Both Cymone and Husney remember instances of Prince practicing for life as an elusive star long before he was a household name. Cymone says that when Prince was 18 and had yet to put out his first album, he would often refuse to go into the local 7-11 with Cymone because he wanted to prepare for when he would no longer be able to go anywhere without being recognized. Naturally, Cymone mocked Prince’s prima donna behavior and would tell everyone in the store what Prince was up to, much to Prince’s annoyance : “I told them you didn’t want to go in because you’re gonna be famous one day.” Husney recalled a similar situation around the same time, pre-fame, when Prince’s car broke down and he came to pick the singer up. While taking a look at Prince’s car, Husney noticed that Prince had abruptly started to run away. Prince’s explanation ? “I can’t let my fans see me like this.” Several years later, Husney learned that Prince never even returned to the repair shop to get his car back.Prince was a lousy driver anyway.Because Prince never had a father figure, Cymone says he was the one to teach Prince how to drive. And it’s not that Prince was bad at it; just that, with everything in life, Prince didn’t follow the rules. Cymone says Prince would disregard street-parking orders and never move his car when he was supposed to. One night, they came back to find Prince’s car on the front lawn of Cymone’s home flattened like a pancake. No one knew what to do, so they just left it there until one day someone took care of it. Miraculously, Cymone says the car was somehow able to be salvaged.Brown Mark – Vulture (2017)“Mine’s not a funny story, but it’s important to me : my very first encounter with Prince. I was a cook at the Pancake House when I was 14 years old. At that time, in 1976 or so, Prince was dating a waitress there named Kim Upsher. And one day, I’m flipping pancakes in the kitchen, and I see a little guy with a big Afro walk into the restaurant. I was young, but I was already playing in bands, and I’d heard about Prince and looked up to him. So when this little guy with the big Afro walked in, I was sure it was him - I was freaking out. So Kim comes running into the kitchen and says, ‘I need you to cook the best doggone pancakes you ever made !’ And I was like, ‘Is it for Prince ?!’ Let me tell you, I cooked some absolutely delicious pancakes for that man. Much later on, at a rehearsal after I’d been in the band for a while, I told him about the pancakes. Then he said, ‘You made those pancakes ?’ and just started laughing so hard.”BrownMark – How Can You Just Leave Me Standing (2021)Can you take us back to meeting Prince for the first time ? Did you sense even then that he was a bit different ?Definitely. The way he dressed alone, you know this guy. First time I met him, he walked into a restaurant that I was cooking at. I was young, I had to be 15 or 16 and I was cooking in the restaurant, and he was dating Kim Upsher who was one of the waitresses, and so you know, he shows up of course to pick her up or to come see her, and she comes running to the back. Now I didn't really know who he was. I had heard that, you know this guy had put out an album, but I never heard it yet at that time. I had never heard it but I heard he had a song out called Soft and Wet, and I heard that he did all the instruments himself, and you know, so I was pretty excited when she told me it was him, that was out there in the restaurant and so, I had the privilege to cook pancakes for him. And years later me and him had a big laugh about that because he had no clue. That was me behind the counter there cooking his food. But that was my first encounter with him. And I mean I remember when I looked at him, he was just the weirdest looking dude. I mean just weird. I mean in a good way, I mean funky weird, you know, he looked like a rock star. So that kind of blew me away. I was just trying to figure out what a rock star was supposed to look like. So I was in the early stages of it.What was Minneapolis like in the late 1970s, early 1980s for a young black teen growing up there ? Can you describe that experience? ?It was interesting, you know, depending on the person you talk to, you'll get a different answer. Um, but for me, growing up in Minneapolis, it was very, very segregated, even though it was diverse and blacks and whites were living together. There was still this sense of segregation in the sense that we didn't share the same clubs, we didn't share the same music venues and it was very different for us. Like I would go to a club just to get a feel for it and I would get removed from the club because they would say I was harassing the females or something. I didn't even talk to any females back then, you know, so it was always an excuse. Heck, I couldn't go to the bathroom without a security guy following me in there, you know ? And all I would do is go in there and lean up against the wall because I'm just, you know, soaking in the vibes and so this was the norm and so it got really uncomfortable to go to some of these clubs and so I would stick with, like the Macarena, the Elks club, the Fox trap, you know, some of the clubs where black people frequented rather than go to the white clubs. And it's a shame that back then you had black clubs and white clubs. It's a shame, but that's the way it was. Rolling Stone (2016)Inside Prince's Funky First Recording SessionsPepé Willie looks back on inviting teenaged Purple One to record with 94 EastBy Kory Grow April 26, 2016 After we did our session, I went to New York for about six months to shop those tunes, to try to get a deal, and when I got back Prince had told me about how he'd met [Prince manager] Owen Husney and [Prince demo producer] Chris Moon. So I met with them in their studio. Prince was 17 at that time. I know they said he was 16, but he was 17. They were nice.Numero GroupPrince : Moonsound manLate in February, 1977, University of Minnesota students Larry Falk and Lisa Henrickson traveled to Chris Moon’s Moonsound Studios on assignment for campus paper The Minnesota Daily. Falk, the photographer, and Henrickson, the reporter, had been briefed on a project in which a teenaged local musician - younger even than themselves - was singlehandedly tracking his own demo, performing on a multitude of instruments as he went. Owen Husney, the phenom’s manager, gently directed Falk’s photo shoot, leading the student journalists through Moonsound’s live room, where Prince Nelson kept hard at work. Henrickson came off as confident as Nelson in her report for the Daily : “This kid wants to be a major national recording star....He’s got his program pretty well worked out and the wheels are in motion. From where he and his manager are sitting, it’s only a matter of time.” One of Falk’s images - depicting Prince Nelson on Stratocaster and in full afro, turtleneck, and bellbottoms, flanked in Moonsound’s tracking room by mic stands and a dormant Fender Rhodes - seemed to predict even more. Prince Nelson had come to Moonsound by way of Grand Central, the quintet he formed in high school that included bassist Andre Anderson and his keyboardist sister Linda, drummer Morris Day, and percussionist William Daughty, which had sought out the Lake of the Isles facility for its agreeable rates. At the time, though, Grand Central were wholly unpolished kids, portrayed by one faded consumer Kodak print as a motley basement Santana in hooded sweatshirts and polyester slacks: latter-day icons of dress André Cymone and Prince as Kmart-clad kids. The British-born Chris Moon arrived in Minneapolis as a teen. He’d begun his career in recording at 17 as an agent of vocational training firm Wilson Learning, where he worked fulltime duplicating educational and instructional cassettes. Moon spent lunch breaks logging time with house engineer Alan Herman, who tracked, mixed, and edited hours of stultifying workplace seminars. When Wilson Learning relocated in 1970, Moon was there to disassemble and rewire the entire facility from the ground up. Moon’s father was Vice President of Advertising for Minneapolis-based Northwest Airlines. The perk for Chris - still a minor, just barely - was complimentary airfare through his 18th birthday. Just shy of that milestone, Chris booked a trip to Hong Kong, where he purchased a TEAC 4-channel reel-to-reel and a Topcon 35mm camera. After setting up the multitrack recorder in his basement at 28th and Portland in South Minneapolis, Moon took to tracking groups for free - requiring only that they show up with a reel of tape under their arm. His clientele leaned rock, but within a year he’d begin combing clubs on the fringes of town for more diverse fare. As his local stock rose, Moon invested in more sophisticated equipment for his facility, christening Moonsound Studios in 1970, and raising his rates in $5 increments until his services and revenues rivaled those of other area firms. Moon, not a musician himself, was eager to collaborate with his clientele. Maridi Holmes - a Gary, Indiana, transplant who’d landed in the Twin Cities in 1972 to fill a keyboard position with St. Paul’s Midwest Express - was an early client at Moon’s studio. “Moon was the person that - okay, you’ve got the song done, it’s 99% complete, and you just need that 1% to top it off. Chris could bring that 1%,” Holmes said. “He was kind of a quiet genius in that way.” An ideas man, Moon judged most of his customers lyrically underwhelming; he’d pen replacement lyrics for them, though one condition applied: Should any resulting song gain attention outside Moonsound’s confines, both parties would split the proceeds. During Moon’s active search for capable conspirators, Grand Central exchanged their after-school earnings for hours at Moonsound. When one session broke for ice cream at a nearby 31 Flavors, Nelson stayed behind; from inside the booth, Moon caught the big-haired talent waxing proficient on each of the live room’s instruments. As Grand Central packed up, Moon pitched Nelson on a bargain : Moon would exploit the teen’s musical dexterity for commercial work at Moonsound, while Nelson would get free reign in the studio. Then and there, Chris Moon handed a 16-year-old wunderkind the keys to his studio. In Nelson, Moonsound got a one-man rhythm section; in Moonsound, Nelson got unfettered access to invaluable tools. Chris Moon typically left three sets of lyrics on the piano bench every morning before work, encouraging Nelson to cobble from the words as he saw fit. In the winter of 1976, Moon contacted ad-man Owen Husney, expressly to put Nelson’s emergent reel on his radar. In the dozen years or so since his garage rock debut with the High Spirits, Husney cultivated and maintained a number of industry ties in addition to founding a successful firm in The Ad Company. Snowed by the one-man jams, Husney signed on to manage Nelson. Only months later, he’d dial up The Minnesota Daily about his new client, now going by just one name. “No last name, and please, no ‘the’ prefix,” Henrickson clarified. “Just Prince.” Moonsound’s increased gravity pulled in Aura, a group whose personalities and tastes had changed considerably in the two years since their self-released 45 under the Cohesion banner. Moon and Aura cohered instantly : “Ronnie Robbins was this big, jovial guy, really a lovely fellow,” Moon said. “Rocky Garrity was this short, compact cat. He was the Fonz. John Rivers was thoughtful, and handled the business side...just an easygoing guy.” They arrived at Moonsound toting the Ronnie Robbins composition “Taste Of Love,” which exuded a sophistication not hinted at by their Sound 80 suite. Emma Jean Rivers, newly wed to bassist John, stepped in vocally to counterpoint Ronnie’s savory tenor. After tracking a version with the original Cohesion horns, Moon sought a more unified brass section. He brought in the Westwood Horns (saxophonist Bill Gaskill and trumpeter Terry Halvorson), alongside future New Power Generation trumpeter Dave Jensen, to putty up “Taste Of Love.” With a functional pass on tape, Moon brought Robbins and Rivers in to A/B the old and new results. Aura would coalesce around Robbins, Rivers, drummer Garrity, and the Westwood Horns, backing the likes of Alexander O’Neal and Sue Ann Carwell on a series of Moon-tracked demos. “Taste Of Love” and the Gaskill-penned “Baby” were relegated to Moonsound’s dark side. “Because of my success with Prince,” Moon said, “people would walk through my door and say, ‘Package me up !’” The studio had generated much buzz locally among groups and individuals looking to tread in Nelson’s footsteps. Even so, the brilliant lights of a sound to come - many of which Moon and Moonsound helped deflect light toward - lurked for a time in relative shadow. As late as 1977, fashion-show club photography snapped by local photojournalist Charles Chamblis unknowingly caught the ripening André Cymone on bass, Morris Day on drums, and Prince Nelson nestled meekly behind his Farfisa, deep in the frame’s background, while anonymous models hustled slick menswear and melon-hued finery upstage. But sheer talent on the periphery was hardly content to stay sidelined. Moonsound boosted a litany of Minneapolis musicians; it reverberated furthest in assisting Prince Rogers Nelson, who’d unlock no less than a new era of Midwest pop with his preternatural gifts and a spare set of studio keys. Le Cygne Noir – Alexis Tain (FR – 2017)Until the summer of 1976, under the impulse of Pepé Willie, Grand Central, soon renamed Champagne, recorded new songs, notably in the studio of a certain Chris Moon, publicist and concert promoter, who aspired to become a songwriter. This Englishman distinguished himself by persuading the biggest local white radio station, KQRS, the same one that Prince listens to after the black frequency was taken off the air, to record and then broadcast the big local concerts. This is how Chris Moon sets up a studio in his van to record a Rolling Stones concert in Minneapolis. From this kind of mobile studio, Prince may have had the idea to record his own concerts. At the same time, Frank Zappa released albums (Roxy & Elsewhere, Live in New York) that mixed public and studio recordings. On Purple Rain the album, a third of the tracks were recorded live at First Avenue, on August 3rd 1983, by a "mobile truck". Chris Moon recalls, "After four or five hours of recording, the manager stops the session and says, "Okay, we're taking a break now." Everyone obeys and goes out for ice cream. All but one." Left alone in the studio was a little guy with frizzy hair "who looked more Afro than little guy. There he is, settling in on the drums. I walk away for a moment and when I come back, he's at the piano. Five minutes later, he starts playing guitar. I turn on the mics to hear how he's doing. He's not bad. Better at some instruments than others, but generally speaking, he's very confident on all of them. And now I realize that with just one musician, I wouldn't have to worry about the drummer being absent or the guitarist being in a bad mood." Fascinated by this elf who could switch from one instrument to another with equal ease, Chris Moon, who saw Prince as his alter ego, offered him the use of the studio as he saw fit in exchange for his songwriting talents. "He looked at me, surprised that I would make such an offer to a young guy from the North Side, who was unknown to me and to whom I had never spoken before. I don't think I remember him saying yes. He just nodded and I gave him the keys to my recording studio.” The deal cast a pall over a band in which Prince was not the natural leader. It was Morris Day, the flamboyant, loud-mouthed one, who led the way. His mother's manager didn't like the fact that the little scoundrel was succeeding where her charismatic son had failed. Among the members of rival bands trying to join Chris Moon's stable, there are also Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. All to no avail. Why bother with a multiple when the elementary one does the trick ? It was in this studio that Prince, now the only master on board, familiarized himself with recording techniques and recorded his first professional demos, track after track, on tape, in the middle of the 1976 heat wave. While Prince worked tirelessly and without any real obstacle on the instrumentals, putting his voice down was not without difficulty. He was clearly not at ease and what came out of the first sessions was far from conclusive. One afternoon when Prince went to the studio, he spotted a bed of cushions on the floor. What face does he make when Chris Moon invites him in a soft voice to lie down and relax, before installing a microphone at just the right distance from his vocal organ? Prince, once he was confident, let himself go and successfully recorded new vocals. Falsetto will be his tone, like that of his hero, Michael Jackson. If Prince masters the instrumental game, writing lyrics is less spontaneous for him. The author of the couple, it is Chris Moon, who does not miss an opportunity to enrich, he will claim, his grammar. Is the young man so much prisoner of his impulses that Chris advises him to put them on paper ? Sex quickly became Prince's writing subject, a theme that his mentor suggested he refine by writing double-entendre lyrics. Words where sex appears in hollows, a hidden meaning which is sketched out at the second reading, the first interpretation, literal, having to remain beyond any suspicion. From these sessions will be born the first single of Prince, "Soft & Wet", whose lyrics are signed Chris Moon. The work proved to be sufficiently successful for Prince to raise his ambition to a higher level. The small provincial was frustrated by the lack of opportunity in Minneapolis, which he found "pretty sad.” Without much conviction, he tried to convince his Champagne cronies to leave town. "I think they didn't really like the idea of me handling the band, when I was always trying to make sure we were moving forward." So it was on his own, with his demos in his pocket, that he flew to New York in September, with the glint of fame in the apple of his "big, exotic eyes" that he didn't believe would ever escape him. "When I was 16, I was broke, and I set out to find a job," he once told American news anchor Arsenio Hall. “I opened up the yellow pages and found that nothing appealed to me. So I decided I would work as hard as I could to become a musician and be the best.” "I was only sixteen, but I don't think that's an excuse," he'll sing in "Sister" in 1980, a song he won't cover tonight on his solo piano, or ever again since 1988. In New York, Prince stayed with his half-sister Sharon, "thirty-two years old, beautiful and liberated". A twisted fantasy of a musician who understood that, in this nascent decade, explicit sex would be his ticket to success and/or a truly autobiographical song, the account of his stay in New York remains a masterpiece of provocation : "My sister never made love to anyone but me. She is the reason for my, um, sexuality. She showed me where it's supposed to go... I was sixteen, I was half a man, my sister didn't care." "Sweet sixteen," Iggy Pop would scoff. Rastignac walks his spleen in the streets of New York, and asserts himself, already, inflexible. After several meetings, he is spotted by a French producer, Danielle Mauroy, who offers him to sign a book for nothing. No way : the little Prince had dreams of greatness. Enter a guy who, for some unknown reason, could be seen smoking a cigar. He is not, however, the expected great producer. He's an ex-musician who hasn't made it, and has become the boss of a local advertising agency. The epiphany took place while Prince was in despair in New York. Owen was touched by grace when he heard a demo recorded by Prince and let it be known. This enthusiasm contrasted with the lukewarm reception in New York and decided to return. Back in the promised land, Owen Husney, kneeling on the ground, pledged his allegiance to the young man. "My Lord, let me light your way to success" or something similar, was probably formulated at this solemn moment. In short, Owen Husney signs an exclusive management contract with Prince and pampers his young colt. New demos were recorded, under the guidance of local producer and engineer David Z. He recalls that Prince's motivation was "to make movies, to be number one, and to produce other bands.” The idea of a follow-up. A room was set up where Prince rehearsed with drummer Bobby Rivkin (David Z's cousin and future Bobby Z of The Revolution) and André Anderson, the son of Saint Bernadette (and future André Cymone of The Rebels). Prince was given a salary of 50 dollars a week and the management bought him new instruments. Although still unknown, the city was buzzing with rumors about this freak genius who was already being compared to Stevie Wonder for his ability to play a multitude of instruments. But before building the legend, you have to know how to tell the story. Owen Husney's job is advertising. Owen's agency produces a press kit that accompanies the demos and sets them apart from the crowd. He encouraged Prince to use this mysterious aura and to make his age even younger to mythologize himself as a little prodigy. ................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download