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PRINCE | A Behind the Scenes Documentary

Jun 06, 2021
he was different and he was unique and he was turning it on its head injected some life into the '80s I think he's on his own, you know him yourself, you know he used to create a he's an innovator when prints came out in the late '70s I could have imagined the power it would soon have on popular music. A unique vocalist, a dynamic performer and a multi-talented musician who rose to fame in the '80s, he brought vitality and imagination back to a tired scene. This Thing is a review of his groundbreaking, decade-defining albums, the hits that helped him go from a teenage prodigy to a global superstar.
prince a behind the scenes documentary
I think the '80s were the most critical point in Prince's career because of this confluence of times and culture, and what he was doing and what we were doing together as a band is one of the greatest of all time. Yes, absolutely yes. Prince Roger Nelson was born in Minneapolis in 1958. His father, a jazz pianist, exposed Prince to music at an early age and by high school he had formed his own band GrandCentral with his school friend. Andre Simone, even during these early years, Prince attracted attention for his abilities as a multi-instrumentalist who played guitar, bass, drums and piano.
prince a behind the scenes documentary

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prince a behind the scenes documentary...

He was also a confident vocalist. He didn't know who the main star of the group was, you know, because they were all there. talented, you know, Andre was as talented as Prince, but I always knew that this impression was always going to Linda, the keyboard player, and showing her this is what you play, you know, and then she started playing it, so when he came back to the guitar he always goes like you know, looking at him and then I say okay, then we count and then they start playing again, you know, and I said, okay, you know, seeing where this guy is coming from, you know, he He is showing everyone the whole. day and then he told Andre that he played this on the bass, you know, and you know he took the bass from Andre and played a little bit.
prince a behind the scenes documentary
Andre said yes, he's fine and then he would give the bass back to Andre. Andre would just go play. I mean, just like nothing and he was going to wait a minute. What's going on here? Who is he? Do you know who the talent is here? You know it was kind of what we would call an urban legend in the Minneapolis area. You know there were these. silent conversations about this sixteen-year-old who was the next Stevie Wonder and played all these multiple instruments in 1976. Prince had left Grand Central and begun working with Minneapolis studio owner Chris Moon, despite the strength of Some of these tracks, which Prince would develop later in his solo career, struggled to get noticed until a demo was sent to the aspiring manager.
prince a behind the scenes documentary
Owen has Lee. I have a little meter in my brain and there's a lot of music that sounds like it should be a hit. It might be a promising hit, but at the end of the day it's not really the hit, well, the little beat in my mind when after listening to the second song, the beat went all the way to the other end of the scale. And I thought this group is phenomenal, so I told Chris who the group is. This one is pretty phenomenal because the guitarist was great, the drummer was right, the drummer was working with the bassist to create an amazing rhythm section and then there.
There were keyboards on top and the vocals were great and I just said who the band is. He said, well, I'd like you to sit down. I said you know when I was Mr. Bigshot you know in those days and I said I don't sit down I'm sorry you tell me who the group is and he said well sit down I said no just tell me who it is the group, then he says, well, he's a kid, he's 17 years old, he plays everything, he wrote everything and he sings everything and I sat down immediately. Hustlin marketed Prince as a prodigy, a young Stevie Wonder, but he managed to gain the interest of several major labels in June 1977.
Prince had signed with Warner Brothers, with a six-figure contract, although Warner had big plans for his young man. signing, Prince quickly made it known that he would continue to have exclusive control of his production. Warner Brothers came to us and said, "I think we have something great." We can get Maurice White from Earth Wind and Fire to produce your first album, it's not that good and Prince and I walked out of the room and he said no one was going to produce my first album and I was like his manager and that was it. in front. from Prince, I'm thinking, I have to tell one of the biggest record labels in the world that a 17-year-old who has never made an album before is going to produce his own album and that will be the music industry that the imprints came from.
By the late 1970s it was undergoing a radical evolution, while the faded stars of the 1960s counterculture had dominated the first half of the decade, the rise of punk and disco music had once again democratized the industry. and they represented new cultures and a new ideology, but at the time that

prince

's debut for you was released, the scene was transforming once again and he failed to make an impact in this changing world, it wouldn't be long, however , before it found an audience, we have two things that are going downhill, we have disco that is doing a Dive and we have Punk that is evolving towards the new wave or has evolved towards the new wave and is about to evolve towards the New Romantics, which is something totally different.
In Britain there was the whole two-tone sound that was not exported to the UK. United States, so we have a temporary cessation of normal service on both the rhythm and blues and rock fronts and there is a window of opportunity for someone new to come in and release it in August 1979 as a single I Want to Be Your lover. gave Prince the first of many hits that reached No. 11 on the US pop charts and reached No. 1 on the soul charts in Prince's career, which now spans nearly 30 years. It has always had a great sound, but at both extremes it has not always had great songs, but I want to be your lover was a great song and it combined two strengths: one was the vocal range and it highlighted the falsetto in a way that we had lost recently when Smokey Robinson stopped having regular hits, so I needed another falsetto or male soprano voice on the roster, but I also had the funk, I had the funk like '70s funk, like George Clinton and Funkadelic and the people from James Brown's group, so he combined those elements.
I Want to Be Your Lover was just one of the songs we cut, but it had a great groove, I felt like the tempo was right, so I knew it was going to be a little bit rockin' and of course I liked that and still, I just played it. we created together with the rest of them and it didn't really come together to put the drums on the track, he basically came in and started playing with this pocket and we called it pockets, you know, you know you said a drum feel, you know like with a drum machine, they're a little hard to play anyway because they're usually right on the meter, but he basically made that change that you know in your mind when you heard him play, it was very relaxed and very synchronous with a strict meter, I thought it was really impressive that he could do that at that age and rock it like that, you know, and he knew it, being able to basically fit into that track knowing exactly what would come up, where and he had the arrangements.
Also, to me I thought that was probably the deepest part of his musical ability: to be able to do that and do it so well, everything he did had rhythm. I mean, you could know a

prince

's piece when you heard it. it had signature sync licks, but it was those types of hooks and licks rhythmically that made a big difference. I had no doubt that it would have been the single, yes, and it was even at this early stage that Prince managed to imbue his music with a neuroticism and sexuality that would become a more prominent feature of his later work from the get-go, it was a very, shall we say, erotically charged performer, even when he was not being blatantly sexual when he sang I want to be your lover in that loud voice the instruments are not tuned and it is a pattern that almost represents some type of sexual arousal in other words the instruments sound As if I were being your lover is a total union of the vocal and the instrumental and was using the American style horny expression for the time.
Despite talking a lot about his musical influences, Prince's funk rhythms and theatrical performances immediately generated comparisons with James Brown, yes, although he was reluctant to acknowledge them, Prince was inspired by a much more diverse range of artists. He could hear undertones of Isley. Brothers Earth Wind and Fire Hendrix, if I may excuse the family stone, but there was a guy that everyone admired, Minneapolis in particular, and Prince idolized this person and later played with Prince for a long time, Sonny Thompson as In as far as the instruments go, this guy is a monster, if Prince idolizes him then you know this guy is great, you know he's great, I mean he plays all the instruments and there was also a sense in which you knew he was, It was something like that. recreating the music that he had grown up with, you know, and working in a style that I think came naturally to him and was something that the record industry could recognize and allow him to do, but if Prince had continued doing that now, I think he would.
I've been sort of a second-tier artist who could be included in the big military ballads of the 1980s, rather than someone who essentially defined the music of the 1980s having previously formed a backing band to translate his music. . to the live arena Prince actually recruited them to help him promote his second album, although he chose to perform numerous roles in the studio, he knew that as a live act he would need dynamic and diverse musicians to help him and thus the revolution was born. Prince chose a diverse group of people because he really believed that that was imperative to his vision of what he was trying to achieve musically and visually and everything else, and again because he also believed in mixing musical influences that was important. to mix ethnic and cultural backgrounds as well, he was obviously creating his own style, you know, and in something like that it was an amalgamation of all kinds of things, you know, the different people in the band that he was cutting, you know, let's find the stone familiar. men women black white tells a lot of that came from his main goal was to not get stuck in a genre he wanted to be able to cross and cross racial barriers and I think he did that well, he was very, very smart even at At a young age he knew he had to differentiate himself and the band in specific ways and one of the first conversations I remember having with him right after I was brought into the band was that he loved everyone in the band. have a different image and that what he was going to do was portray pure sexuality with his words and I think that is something that over time you know that he understood that that was what brought him to the party and he has been very consistent that I can remember when Prince was tired of the costumes I was making up and he sent his girlfriend to the hotel room I was in and she knocked on the door and sweetly walked in and threw in this bag of metallic multicolors.
Colorful underwear in my bra and panties on my bed basically so princes wear this or you're fired and I looked at her and said you better be kidding she says no no no yeah all that had a point and it definitely was. the image of we have it going and it's really cool to be like us, no matter what you think of us, all the great artists throughout time and in the history of pop have at one time or another done something to get attention about themselves, whether you know Elvis. Presley with his long sideburns. I remember seeing that and coming home now that he's gone too far.
They use hip movement on the Ed Sullivan show. On the second Ed Sullivan show they didn't show anything you know under his stomach because it's too suggestive to move your hips and I thought, well, he's gone too far at that point, you need something, if you're really cool, you wear a device to get attention and then what happens is people pay attention to you and if you're really good, they're going to buy your music, one of the things Prince asked us to do was if you're going to wander around the hotel , you're not going to walk around like your granola queen or in your Berkey t-shirts and stocks, you got it.
You have to dress like a rock star and I was coming down the stairs and I was in my metallic spandex pants and my body-con shirts and my boots and my coffee and my breakfast and I felt like a fool, but you know that after After a while I got used to people looking at me and I realized that you know it's all part of who he is and that's okay, he's a complete rock star, he lived the life that he is, you know, he is what he is. you see. it's what you get, yeah he's a pop star, a rock star, whatever you want to say, but that's how it is in life, you know him, he's the character you see, the character was becoming more developed in the upcoming release of dirty minds, the track and the lasImpressions of the album featured a more overtly sexual personality and a more original sound and, although it found little favor with the public, the music press was quick to identify the emergence of an increasingly unique and defiant artist regarding the song Dirty Mind and really when making that comment.
I have to say it in the context of the whole album: it wasn't a huge success, but it was kind of a turning point in terms of this enormous critical response, this wave of critical praise that hit its mark at a time when the company record label, you know, Understandably I was very nervous about the sudden change where we signed Stevie Wonder and now we have Ric Ocasek or something, what would happen for that song I think it again represented a significant turning point in terms of Rolling Stone put out this glow-in-the-dark review and so on, and that was one of the things that allowed him to continue toward the commercial success that we have.
At the time that dirty mind came out, I was living in Atlanta and I wanted to see Prince, he was playing at a club in town and there was something going on. Either he was out of town for the day or there was something else he could overcome. I went out and I couldn't go to the show and I just came down that night and it was like the club was like a club in a cartoon where the whole place was shaking and looked like it was bouncing. I couldn't. mixing outside in the street, you know, Prince, I think he was playing with a dirty mind, you know that riff was like propulsive, you know and yeah, that's what it feels like when you listen to it, it was completely galvanizing and everyone, what a shot to you know, because of the kind of music industry, I mean, there was a sense in which you knew what's new, I mean, things are really quite slow in the early eighties in terms of music, you know, apart from of Michael Jackson and then all of a sudden, you know, dirty mind. lit things up, it was so convincing, just brilliant, the main keyboard riff and the dirty mind, it was actually something that Matt had played and that had developed in, you know, one of our numerous, endless improvisations in rehearsal and , again, that was kind of an example. how things, the approach that Prince took to creating and expanding his, his universe and pushing the boundaries simply had to do with drawing influences from wherever Prince's genius was if it was such a mix of different types of music, it was Funk. and jazz came later, but there were probably hints of it here and there at the time, but it was also raw, very influenced by the punk scene.
You know, I really loved the clash and no, so there was all this kind of energy that was so opposite. Whatever else was going on at the time, in a sense, you know that lyrics have come so far, particularly in hip-hop, that you know it could let you know that someone is just looking at a sheet of lyrics with a mind dirty and wondering what the big deal is. It's about a song called Head, you know, I mean, you know it's an element in all hip-hop songs now, but there was something about Prince's intensity about it that was very liberating.
I think in a lot of hip-hop it's just retreaded almost like a lot of conservative things about sex, particularly between men and women, whereas at Princeton there really was this kind of sense of who's on top and who's doing what. It was a statement, and I think you know a very powerful one and maybe one you know once. The AIDS epidemic made it clear that it might have been impossible to make that statement after that, but it was almost the last moment of that feeling of oh, hey, it's all out there, yeah, take it if you want it, you know it was, you know that was part of the source of what Dirty Mine was about, I think Prince really felt when Dirty Mind was complete that it was his most honest record to date and the one that best represented what he really wanted to achieve when he started the record.
She really believed in that record and she really believed that that was who she was and that was where she wanted to go and that that was her future and she was right, as defiant as her sexually daring lyrics put her image on herself, which had evolved into becoming something very far away. more provocative and ambiguous, this is not a conventional outfit for any sexual stereotype, she is not trying to look like a woman otherwise she wouldn't be wearing a trench coat, on the other hand she is not trying to look like a man because she wouldn't wear one. bikini briefs fits perfectly with this I'm not a woman I'm not a man Am I straight or gay?
In other words, he is constructing a personal mythology. He is constructing an image of the pansexual creature that is very brave on the one hand. On the other hand, but surely commercial because no other major star had existed in October 1981, the continuation of the dirty mind controversy was released, although there are more rock-oriented album critics who hail Prince, our natural successor to Hendrix, the sails were once again disappointing. With the release of the first single, the fifth album, however, The Prince finally broke into the mainstream. 1999 exploded onto the charts in September 1982 and would eventually be regarded as one of the key singles of the decade. 1999 was an immediate explosion in the United States.
America, not Britain, but you had three big hits in America and the first one was 1999, which is a tremendously exciting record. I don't have to tell anyone that it was the topic of a millennium. How big can you get more than that with people you know? $19.99 you know people were starting to become aware of the end of the century around that time and Prince made it seem like you know it's kind of apocalyptic but also really fun that's something that he started doing. I think it's particularly good to be able to leave. in its sexual themes, even weaving in its spiritual themes or even its social themes, but also making a party album, you know, and that's what 1999 ultimately is, in many ways, the album owes a lot of its success to the exposure Prince had received.
On the increasingly influential music channel MTV, the circle had originally stalled outside the top 40, but it was the screams of the accompanying music video that eventually propelled Prince back onto the charts and into the homes of middle America. and we. Prince has an extraordinary visual sense. I mean, this guy believes in videos and he believes in images, so you know Prince and MTV's marriage was definitely made in heaven. You know you both took that to the bank. You know. It gave Prince a huge audience and you know he made MTV feel. nervous life is cake when laughing before that, MTV had never had urban artists and at the point where Michael Jackson with the beat was going on and then we were with the whole little red Corvette from 1999, that all changed, so say it.
The theme of the songs, all of those things came into play and because of this perfect storm, the songs had a kind of runway to land in the public perception that no record printed before had started working on this new material. In April 1982, unlike his previous albums, most of the recordings had been made at the prestigious Sunset Sound Studios in Los Angeles. Here he adopted new technologies and managed to create a much more sophisticated final product while maintaining control of almost every aspect of the When recording, he would start a song at the beginning of the day, either in the morning or whenever we started, and very rarely We came back to a song, we finished it that day and at the time it was practically unheard of and I think it's still kind of unheard of, I mean sometimes it was too silly.
I think Purple Rain was the first one where he really started to attract people and started to dub a lot more before it was just him and doing everything he worked 24 hours a day. He had so much energy and so much creativity just flowed out of him. The songs just came out of him. It was incredible. There were two elements that I think in the early days became synonymous with his sound. One of them is the Oberheim eight voice. analog synthesizer that was used in the same way that horns were used on Earth Wind & Fire Records or Parliament-funkadelic records; the other, a little bit later, was the linndrum, the drum machine and, honestly, I think part of that was the sound of but another part was for him as someone who had always been a one-man band and even When working with people it was very important for the band to execute the sounds that he had in his head to execute that original moment of creativity where he inspiringly heard that sound in his head that the drum machine would do exactly what he told it to do. and for many of us at that time that was like a revelation.
Wow, I can actually program this machine and it will play. exactly what I want, whereas if I try to explain to a drummer what I'm trying to do, he'll probably play my idea his way and it won't be the same as the success of the single and the exposure that MTV had brought copies that greatly benefited to the album. The 1999 LP was the best-selling album Prince had released to date and by the end of 1983 he had sold over a million copies in the US alone. The 1999 album was the seismic shift where all the things that were They tried, all the things that were pointed out through the records that preceded it, came together in this kind of perfect storm and the sudden magic formula to be avant-garde and ahead of the curve, but at the same time be commercial. and having big radio hits, it all came together at the same time in 1999 as an album that was made for '80s radio, you know, I mean, I think if you go back and listen to Dirty Mind, for example, you'll know that those songs really sound strange, there's a lot of space.
You know there's a kind of emptiness in them that's really intriguing, you know, but they're not great radio songs, songs that aren't from 1999 are perfect for radio, there's something going on all the time, you know, Prince had learned a lot. As a producer, I had learned a lot. so you could shape his own music and I think I understood what it would take to bring him a bigger audience. So if you listen to the little red Corvette, certainly, if you listen to 1999, you know you just listen to you know the big bright sound of the 1980s, you know he was one of the guys who, if you found him, there were dimensions to his writing. that were starting to reveal themselves that I don't think they had been there before, the songs were a little more sophisticated, not only lyrically but musically I mean, when you think of a little red Corvette, it's just a classic pop song that was and always will be for me the horniest song ever made and was talking about slipping the topic past the censors when he was talking about how she had a pocket full of trojan horses some of them used now the images are fantastic we are all familiar with the trojan horse what a lot People in Britain don't know what the number one condom was in America at the time it was called Trojans so to get past the radio censors he used the image of the Trojan horse instead of saying condom and then the disgusting line that some of they used, reinforced by his newfound fame, Prince surprised many by following in 1999 a semi-autobiographical film project, Purple Rain, in which the heroes co-wrote and starred in showed that he had finally achieved his goal an ambitious spectacle was the perfect vehicle for Prince the performer and Prince the musician and the soundtrack sold over a million copies within days of its release it was almost like he had a The epiphany at that moment was wild and it was all this that came out of nowhere and it was just genius, total rock and roll and Hollywood genius tying together both the Purple Rain album and the movie, you probably already know, the Prince commercial. peak and in many ways a very serious artistic peak, also the summer of 1984, when everything that was happening, you know, that was Prince's summer, you know he owned it, when the doves cry, it was the first single that was released from Rane's Purple album and ushered in Prince.
First Us was the number one hit in the summer of 1984, staying at the top spot for five consecutive weeks and selling over 2 million copies in the UK. It was a breakthrough single, the first of Prince's albums to enter the top 10 and would pave the way. for continued success in Europe throughout the decade. I remember when he did it, it was a normal song, it was a beautiful song, but it was a normal song and he looked at the final passes of the mix, he brought out the bass and he said no one is going to believe this and it was true, no one could believe it and it became in a great success.
Everyone loved that song. My sister. My sister called me and said: I love this song. It's like oh, and people really sat up and realized that he was different. he was unique and he was turning what was normal in this business upside down. I appreciated it that way, he injected some life into the '80s. I think he had an ear for a hook in those days, it was like the keyboard that they think they think was like it was a hit. He didn't have to listen to a bass. He didn't have to listen to anything else.
I didn't care if he sang about birds or sang to thebirds, none of that mattered. the keyboard part was a hit, the cry of the doves just shot up the charts, I mean, listen, that's a cliché, but it's just amazing how that record. I think about certain records in my life where the day they went on the radio, my phone lit up. 'cause all my friends called and said, Have you heard James Moran's Cold Sweat? Have you heard what's going on with Marvin Gaye? Well, have you heard this dove song by Prince? It was at that level of impact, right out of the box.
Like, my God, it was like every local band in the world had to go back to the woodshed and start rehearsing again because the vocabulary had changed. It was like the way you made music in the '80s changed overnight once you heard that song, everything you wanted. updated it's not often you get lyrics from a number one hit like maybe I'm like my father too forward maybe you're like my mother she can't be satisfied you know that idea of ​​someone talking about you you know this kind of edible drama in their lives, which is an element in all the threesomes in the prints and in Purple Rain and there is something here that I think you know is really there and in all its erotic charge. the animals make curious poses they feel the heat the heat between you and me I mean, that's a really interesting line, it's like all of nature is responding to this tension here between us and then you know it includes the mother and father thing. .
Yeah, I mean it's kind of raw. Prince's second single, Purple Rain, Let's Go Crazy, also reached number one in the US. predator for the first time to Prince and the Revolution, would become a perennial concert favorite. We go crazy with or without the opening sermon, but I love the opening sermon. Hit everything Prince does. He sounds like he comes from a unique perspective and that's what made him so distinctive, it could only have been him, let's go crazy. I thought it was the quintessential opening song. I think he had managed for the first time in his career to write a signature song that every time someone bought a ticket. to a prince show what was going to come to mind is man, I hope they play that song first, obviously it was also a very memorable moment in the movie that element of just jumping on the bikes and going, you know, that's What we're going to go crazy about is about you know, this is going to the club and having a good time.
None of the final songs Prince recorded for the album and the third single to be released is the title track, Purple Rain, these power ballads are again credited to Prince and the. Revolution reached number eight in the UK charts and number two in the US. Trust me, you usually don't want to spend 8 and a half minutes of your life listening to anything by American Pie, okay Don McClane, great, a couple of things, but not too many, it's a big investment of your life, but Purple Rain deserves. Purple Rain actually used a remote truck and recorded it.
He was doing a live benefit concert for a dance company in Minneapolis and we recorded it live with a remote truck and it was the first time he used Wendy and Lisa together. He made all those songs. New, no one had heard it before. Purple Rain, come on, let's go crazy. I would die for you. All those songs that no one had heard, so no one really clapped after each song and it was very strange because there, it was new. You know, people don't. It sounds familiar sometimes, but Purple Rain was a live recording at First Avenue.
The kind of level of emotional honesty and nakedness in Purple Rain is something that I think is often overlooked. Know? This kind of feeling of hurting someone and just wishing you weren't. I don't do it while you're doing it, this is wishing for a place, you know the Purple Kingdom, that could just wash all that away somehow and get I allow you to have the connection without the pain, it's deep, you know, I remember when it was happening one time. about a divorce and just listening to that song I started crying, you know, in a very indirect but very deep way, I think he brings out those types of emotions, you know, what went wrong here, there's no way to fix it.
It's better, I know I may even be to blame, you know, but something can't save us from this and you know that kind of giddy quality at the end of the song when he sings in that falsetto voice and plays this is just amazing. part of the guitar is just let's go to another world, let's get to a place where we can go beyond all this somehow, that's what Purple Rain is about because the impressions can seem, I mean, almost cartoonish, sometimes you know that the People don't associate it with that kind of thing. of emotional seriousness, but he can go, man.
I mean, you certainly went there on that song and you know it's hard to find other songs that convey such complicated feelings so powerfully, you're just not missing anything. The song Purple Rain for me is his masterpiece. In terms of marrying commerciality and emotion, it's one of those songs that when you listen to it you remember where you were the first time you heard it, you know what I mean, it makes your endorphins and serotonin release in your brain and again it was a real step ahead for him in terms of his evolution as a commercial artist, but it's still a different artist, you know it's him but at the same time it's a classic song that you know you'll hear in 20 years, they'll still hear it.
Being classic, the album and film solidified My Prince's position as a global phenomenon, while at one time its appeal had been considered relatively limited, it had now demonstrated its ability to appeal to a mass audience and its potential to influence tastes. dominant and in popular culture itself began to grow. We realized that he embodied a change in our culture that, in retrospect, seems inevitable, but he was riding that wave before many of us recognized what was coming and I think that's really what it came down to, listen, now We all have cable television. and we all listen to more than one radio station and anyone with any common sense is opening their mind and opening their eyes and ears and recognizing that there is a bigger world in my neighborhood, whatever the neighborhood may be that may be rich, poor, white , black, who cares what the world is like? bigger than your neighborhood and he just embodied that and led people along with him no matter what their background was, just based on the promise that I'm not going to turn my back on you because it's about all the music and everyone. welcome and in fact we are not going to fight we will get along here and I think that was part of the magic of the purple rain because I think the purple rain became the extension of that policy, he would leave and then I work with others people and they said to me, oh, you work with Prince, he's sir, he's that one or he, you know he's leaving tomorrow or whatever, but there were very respected musicians who came up to me and told me I was a genius and I thought yes. they get it, they get it because she loved his music, she really loved her music and I know a lot of people criticized her and tried to fire him and then with Purple Rain they couldn't fire him anymore, he was there and he was there to stay if his reputation was now established.
Prince's father strengthened his control over both his production and finances by financing Paisley Park's records, although this venture allowed him to work with other artists such as Sheila E Taja Savelle and George Clinton, his biggest chart hits being The Records themselves. by Prince and the first of which were released in April 1985, the album Around the World in a Day was a marked departure from Purple Rain and its first single, Raspberry Beret, continued Prince's string of hits, Raspberry Beret. One of the little known facts is that The Song was written while I was still in the band and I have very, very clear memories of being in the back of the tour bus, you know, with guitars and these little portable guitar amps. , you know, working on the chord changes, the vocals and the elements. of that song while we were on tour, so that song for me has a special place because I was there in its early stages, I was there in the prototype stage and hearing the final version and seeing it be one of those hits again. that's very connected to him as an icon, it's cool to play with impressions when we were recording, we had to experiment and a lot of times he would take the first take even though maybe there were mistakes that we thought he said no, he wants to. the feeling that there was something about the first emotion that he wanted or your first impression of the song that he wanted and he mixed it and you say everything because when you're doing it you say oh, I know I can do it better. let me refine it because at that time everyone was making sterile music where you do 20 takes of one thing and he didn't work like that, there are beautiful tunes like Raspberry Beret where you don't realize how intricate those chord changes are.
Then you listen to him sit down to play the piano and nothing compares to you. I mean, those are really intricate orchestral songs compared to the basic funk music that he did in the beginning like controversy and you know, dance music, sexual romance, I mean, those are. quite a different style, well as I said it has many personalities, the personality that Prince decided to reveal to the whole world in one day had one foot in the past, while in 1999 and Purple Rain Prince had been advancing with the technology to produce An original and very modern sound with this album paying tribute to the innovators of the 60s and in particular to the Beatles.
I think he had a lot of respect for the music you know, the British Invasion and the things that came from the '60s, that was if anything. that humbled him, that might have been the only communication between Prince and Rolling Stone for a while and at one point he asked for a bunch of back issues and he wanted all the Beatles covers and all the Joni Mitchell top stories and and covers and it was interesting that there was this kind of '60s fascination on his part, as he was seen as a new artist. Prince said that he was a big fan of Joni Mitchell and that he would love Joanie's unique vocal lyricism and her silences on Doudna.
Flying engines, there's a song so loud it alters time. I think it's one of the most encouraging examples of an artist citing an influence that wasn't obvious that he's ever heard. Despite these influences and very healthy sales, the album was considered a disappointment after the release of Purple Rain. I thought that Around World Today was really a transitional record, it was important for Prince not to do anything that was overtly redundant with Purple Reign. and I think if there was a theme for Around the World in that day it would be that it's the anti-Purple Reign record, you know, it's easy to see the influence of the Beatles, particularly in things like raspberry puree, but I don't want to say that it was invented , but it was a record that had an agenda if only because I was determined to do it. something dramatically different so that he couldn't be accused of riding on top of Purple Rain, was to evoke an era he hadn't been in and didn't do as well as the people who had been there to begin with.
I think it's the safest thing, so thank God for us, Beret Beret, it was good and it was a success. Prince returned to the big screen the following year with Under the Cherry Moon, which he also directed as opposed to Purple Rain; However, the film was rejected by critics and ignored by audiences and failed to break even at the box office. However, with his soundtrack album Parade, Prince returned to his funk roots on several tracks and, although the The album again showed a decline in sales, the single Kiss would provide another number one in the United States.
The time parade came and under the cherry moon, he was quite successful, he had made millions and millions and I think he just wanted to pursue a film career and he wanted to make a soundtrack, most of that record is designed as a soundtrack for the movie. The song Kiss came about completely accidentally. I mean, I was doing a band called Maserati in one room at Sunset Sound and he was in the other room completing that soundtrack record and he gave us this song on acoustic guitar called Kiss and we tried to change it. on something and we prepared all night trying to figure out what to do with it, we made the track and the next morning I came back around 9:30 and he was already in and I told him where my tape is and he said it's too good to You guys aren't going to remove it, so he had already put his vocals on it, he already put his guitar on it BAM and then there was a bass part, didn't you know he removed a lot of the stuff that was there?
This was the first song that they were going to credit me on besides just being an engineer and they also changed my name to David Z because that wasn't my name on the first four albums, so, you know, I was speechless, but then I talked to one of the people at Warner Brothers on the phone and they said oh no, we're not going to publish that, we don't like it. I said what is that and they said no, it sounds like a demo, there's no bass, there's no reverb, it sounds like a demo it sounds like we did it in your basement and I was devastated andluckily he, like I said, was successful and had enough power at the time to say you put that out first or I won't give you another single and a year. later they were just trying to sign things to sound like that, that tells you where the music is supposed to come from.
I remember the first time I heard the song kiss and I really felt like he had managed to recapture some of that kind of raw R&B emotion from some of his earlier music and even going back to some of the stuff that you know he had written for that moment, but at the time at the same time because he already mastered the business elements and knew how to be himself, but at the same time. writing hits I just thought it was a master song the sparseness of it the melodic elements of it the poignancy of the voice I thought it was a master song the guitar in kiss the rhythm guitar was closed through a door to synchronize it with the hi-hat in the drum machine and no one can play that's just an electronic trick dad I'm just playing open chords and it's making that beat but you know we would try everything on anything and don't you know it was so much fun and so creative and when there are no rules like that, you don't have to do what someone else did.
This is the kind of song that is perfect without news, as they say in other words, if the journalist finishes and says more. At 7 or 35° did he eat it, did he eat it, did he eat it in a kiss? I mean, it's perfect, it changes a mood, it changes tempo and you're in the song in 5 seconds, it's so well constructed, you see, and it uses silence and pauses. Wonderfully, most people are afraid to leave pauses and silences because they think people will lose interest in a second, but Prince knew that you could use pauses and silence to create suspense, create impact and kisses, a perfect example.
From that, go to your record collection now. Listen to it from that point of view and you think, oh yeah, he's using these little pauses, these little silences and it's all very dramatic and it's sucking me into the record. It's great for album tracks that functioned as more conventional musical score. Prince looked outside his immediate circle for information about the arrangements the musician he discovered became the first person to contribute to Prince's music without interference the album stopped introduced another dimension in Prince's way of making albums in that arranger Claire Fisher was a collaborator and it was unique because Claire is someone who was completely outside Prince's camp, someone who Prince had no overt influence on and, in fact, didn't even They had met face to face and it was the proverbial case of sending tapes back and mailing and being interested enough to hear what he would do left to his own devices.
I've recorded pop albums. I have recorded jazz albums. I have recorded laugh albums and am known in many different categories. and then suddenly poppers showed up and wanted me to write a reference for them. I said, well, I mean, I wasn't averse to it, but it was a different dimension. The first thing Prince noticed was that he was free, he didn't. interfere with what you did and I thought it was wonderful, unfortunately most people don't understand what arranging is so they think that if they have their recording with the vocal and rhythm section, all they would like to have is what they would do . just write, they don't know how to write, so they called me in later years.
Prince sometimes gave him some kind of cryptic instructions. I want this kind of thing on this track, but never too specific because there was a huge respect for Clara's ability and her own creativity as an artist and I think Prince was also curious to see what he would think. There was a part of him that wanted to be surprised by what Claire would do, and of course, Claire. To this day he is known for his very creative string and sometimes trumpet arrangements that go against the grain. I mean, this is the guy who marches into his own drummer's world the same way Prince does and while he certainly has a personal stamp on everything he does.
It's not a straightforward model and it's not going to sound like anyone else's work except Claire Fisher and in that sense Claire's efficient impressions are a perfect match, while Kiss was at number one on the US charts. Prince He was also enjoying success through a song given to the all-female group the Bangles, highlighting his skills as a pop composer. The song Manic Monday launched the band's career and reached number two on both sides of the Atlantic. We had worked until I don't know how. three or four in the morning we were both exhausted and he called the session probably for 6:00 in the afternoon, when we trained late, he usually called it for six and I received a call at 9:00 in the morning and He told me he was coming and I wasn't very happy and he knew it when he came in I wasn't very happy and he said I told him if I was dreaming of course I was going to come in and I said do you dream your songs and he said yes sometimes and we went in and cut Manic Monday from start to finish and that eventually a winter vanity six, but then David Leonard and David Kahn were working on the bracelets and they asked him for a song and he gave that song to the bracelets and they had a pretty decent hit with it, so That was the song I had dreamed of.
That morning, isn't it interesting that Prince wrote so well for women, his greatest hits by women, his variety in attitude suited the female voice and Manic Monday is a great pop record? This was neither the first nor the last time that other artists had success with Prince's songs, Chaka Khan had a big hit with a cover of I Feel for you from her second album and Scottish singer Sheena Easton relaunched her career in mid of the 1980s with an album composed and produced by Prince that somewhat hinted at his ability to move seamlessly between R&B and pop and rock.
Sometimes he didn't do the best versions of his songs, besides all the ones that were hits for him, some of them were good songs, but he hadn't done them himself. You made them very commercial and it took someone else's agreement to make them commercial, of course the most famous is nothing compared to you who is an all time classic billionaire seller of Sinead O'Connor in the original purchase, the family He is poor now. cutting most of his ties to the revolution during 1986, the prince was in an astonishingly prolific creative period. Their next step was to present a triple album called The Crystal Ball, which was to be a 22-track work incorporating several different aspects, but Warner Brothers felt uneasy after the lukewarm reception of the previous two releases and ultimately cut the album. to a two-disc set renowned as a sign of the times.
It was really one song a day coming out of the studio at his house and then into our rehearsal warehouse where he set up the equipment and it was any day you'd come to work and he'd play another brilliant new song, but I mean, it was just seeing endless concepts. Four albums came to him almost as quickly as the songs. He was documented where he was. he was there as a songwriter, as an instrumentalist, as a bandleader because the band played on a few tracks back then, not all, but some, and almost all the creative aspects of the Princeton musician were represented and updated, it was a sign of the times .
The album's title track was released as a single in February 1987 and reached number three on the US charts. Sunshine of the times, the song seems to me to be exactly what it says, you know, it's this, it's Prince kind of scanning the social environment. and sort of reporting on the 70th year of him, your dad is playing a game called disciples high on crack until the machine gun. Seeing him look that way on himself was powerful and then the song itself doubled down, there's an element of seriousness to it that makes a big impact. I think a lot of times you hear a song that says weird and then the third time you're like, oh, I love it, it's not something you can explain, it's a gift that he has and you just wish that a songwriter could be like that and you wish for everyone. the means that it may be so, but it is not so.
Some music grabs you immediately. Some music takes a little getting used to, but that's the kind of thing you can't let go of. I guess it's a deep hook, but that's the complex thing: the hooks are buried so deep that it takes you a while. To find out, Sign of the Times I thought was his most creative foray in a long time, the song Sign of the Times and it managed to be both totally creative, totally unique and hooky at the same time, which doesn't happen very often. . I know you might have to go back to being like Gary Numan on cars before you come up with something like that, but I really admired that record because it really made me listen to the sounds and the tracks and wait, how did he do that? that snare sound is so different, how did you get that?
You know, for me, I hadn't been that impressed with any of this for a while, but along with this seriousness, they were all such classic Prince pop numbers, the track you have a duet with Sheena Easton would become the biggest Prince's success in the United States since Kiss reached number two on the Billboard charts despite its commercial appeal; However, it was still far removed from pop conventions, and Prince's experiments with accelerated and distorted vocals marked him as something of an anomaly. He was part of a lot of that experimentation. We used to joke that we would put the guitars under water if we had to and we did everything from playing the bass part and the song with pedals or the organ instead of a bass, obviously just slowing down the tape. and putting his voice in and just hitting it, it sounds like a munchkin singing and we do that and we do all kinds of stuff, you get the look, it's a fabulous record, they have this vocal exchange in the middle of the record, which is unique when he goes ladies and gentlemen the world series I love love and she says oh please what no one would have thought of putting something like that on a record but let's put it on a record and it was hilarious in the middle of being financed you guys I realized it was just a great kind of rock and song, I mean, in the duet with Sheena Easton, you know, it had this kind of erotic charge, you know, and it was fun, you know, it was like Prince. letting loose and you know it's some kind of cirrhotic quality and you get the feeling that it was just one of those tracks that you know was a big Prince dance track, it was after this, don't feel like his next album lovesexy and En In particular, his standout single Alphabet Street, released in 1988, was a spiritual report on the dark undertones of the Black Album that Prince had retired late the previous year in Europe.
House and hip hop music and fusions had not emerged. For the previous two years and he loved sexy, he fit well into this new music culture in the US, however, sample-based music was still underground and Prince's more minimalist sound failed to light up the charts, he He became a semi-regular fixture at the club. scene in both London and Paris and that influenced this music that emerged from him. He tended to see Love Sexy as an album that he didn't know what he wanted to be, thank God for Alphabet Street, this is like everyone else. of the day and raspberry beret you have a great song that saves it and gives it oxygen for another year.
I love sexy, it's not something people listen to again, but Alphabet Street is a very poppy funky song and of course another great song. Starting off one of the interesting aspects, one of the interesting trajectories in princess's career is the evolution of her ideas about sex, you know, because initially it was accepted as you know, this kind of sexual liberator, you know, is he white or black, is it a man or a woman? you know, it's something that's beyond the category, you know you have that Black Album movement that was kind of an extension of that whole kind of perverse polymorphous sexuality in love, sexy, you know, in love as a kind of spiritual love. , You know.
That's what's sexual, you know, that's where the erotic charge comes from. I think that was the first moment where he moved away from the kind of wild controversy style sexuality that, in many ways, brought him this large audience and I think, personally, I started to feel uncomfortable with that and then spiritually and, well, You know, certainly and for a while, effect of what his music was like, where his prints had paved the way as an innovative artist during the 1980s. Things were changing, hip-hop finally began to emerge from the underground in the US. . , sometimes a giant record, yes, but it's not in the mainstream, it's in the mainstream and once these terrible '90s hip-hop songs emerge, it's relegated to the background because it's not going to talk about misogyny or homophobia, he won't go there, he won't talk about gun crime or jewelry, these are not his topics, so one would say thank heavens for Batman, one of the blockbusters that ultimately defined the decades.
Tim Burton's Batman films were both a great production and a clever exercise.of marketing in which he was asked to record a song to promote the film, he instead delivered a full album, dismissed by some upon its release as a mediocre hodgepodge containing songs that Prince had discarded earlier in the decade and revived for this company; However, it became one of his most commercial successes. hit albums that sold 11 million copies worldwide also netted him an award in the US. The number one single, Matt Dance, obviously by the very nature of it being a Batman movie and the first in a long time not to go to do a series of these things, but yeah, let's stick with it and Bat Dance is wonderful, I mean.
I don't even want to know how long it must have taken him to do that, there are so many samples from the soundtrack, there are so many lyrical references to the things that happen in the movie, it's very clever editing, but boy, is it skillful. and especially if you talk about the whole six minute song, but I was a very important moment in his career and kept him on top even when the scene was going in a strange direction, he keeps breaking, we have three years of work for Prince. that he's just been sending us different songs and we've been adding orchestral backgrounds to them without really knowing what they were going to be used for and also knowing that he had a predilection for sometimes wanting to take some of these backgrounds, maybe individual tracks. or maybe the whole orchestral background to separate it from the track we had made the arrangement for and put it on something else, use it as background music for your movie

scenes

or put it on a completely different tune and this was the case with Batman and the rest.
We didn't even realize we were involved in it until we got a call from the record company saying they were going to send us a check for the new use of the music, I mean Bat Dance as the theme song for the Batman movie. Yeah, there was so much hype about that movie and you know, the big movie and Everidge was excited about it and it seemed more exciting that Prince was doing the theme song. I mean, for me, it wasn't really that great. song, you know, I think it was just, you know, it was driven by, you know, everyone's good feeling, we're going to go to the movies, we're going to have a good time, we're going to like it, you know, we want to like it.
You know, it was fun to see Prince doing something that seemed fun and you didn't seem so serious, oh, you know, the bat dances, you know, there was kind of an element of, you know, let's get after this, so You know, comparing the bat dance to Purple Rain as a song. I mean, there's no comparison. I mean, Purple Rain is, I would say, deep, you know? It's a great theme song for a great summer movie. I think Prince got to the point that all career artists get to where just with the sheer chronology of everything you're going to hit some sort of flat spots where there's sort of a confluence of what's going on, the culture, what's going on. in the industry, what happens in radio, whatever the case may be, and where you are and where you've been don't necessarily line up as perfectly as they did during the 1999 era, but I think ultimately he was the master at being an artist first and being a person first and a live performer, so people would come out, shows would sell out throughout that era and it would all happen again at that time, in the late '80s, every Those who were even remotely interested knew it. that he was a killer performer who wasn't a person who just made music to be famous or acted to be famous this was a guy who lived inside music who voluntarily spent time in the recording studio made more music than he could release I wasn't cut out to be able to go to work at Burger King or McDonald's, you couldn't handle it, you wouldn't know what to do or how to function in that kind of life and I found out from the tracks that this was the only thing that was going to make it or wasn't going to be there, there's a whole host of black artists, everyone from Terence Trent d'Arby to Living Color to Lenny Kravitz to a lot of ways Prince is really nice.
He paved the way for these kind of white artists, I mean these black artists who were interested in rock and roll and saw that as part of his bag of tricks, you know, Prince paved that path, so I mean , Prince was huge, he was huge. Not only was he hugely successful, but he was influential, he's the number one artist on this planet bar none because he was on the cover of a guitar magazine, he was on the cover of a drum magazine, he was on the cover of a keyboard magazine and was on the cover of bass magazine no other artist in the history of this music industry can do that he has done it in many ways the music of the eighties was full of styles that prince rejected as soon as he moved on from something that everyone else took and He had the remaining amount of hits left to that sound that because Prince lost interest in it, he moved on to something else: the combination of the element of who and what Prince is as a unique, once-in-a-lifetime artist with a particular moment. period and the gangs he surrounded himself with during that period.
I don't know if anyone's ever reproduced that we've seen him evolve over the years, not just as a musician but as a man, and sometimes I wonder when you look back on the past. stuff like I've seen a lot of in the last 24 hours to prepare for this, do you look back at old, edgy stuff and want to part with it? Well, you know, when you're 20 years old, you're looking for the shelf, you know, you want to see how far you can take everything and as an artist, I just went there just to find it and then you make changes, you know, 30 years ago, there's a lot of things that I didn't I do now that I do. 30 years ago there are some things they still do, yes.

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