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Prince
His name was Prince, then it wasn't, then it was again. One of
the most fascinating artists of the Eighties, the pocket sized
legend was born Prince Rogers Nelson in Minneapolis in June 1958.
He was named after his father's Minneapolis-area band, The Prince
Rogers Trio, in which Prince's mother Mattie was occasionally
featured as vocalist.
At the age of seven, Prince began to teach himself piano (at
age thirteen, guitar; at age fourteen, the drums) and compose. He
ran away from his mother and step-father's home, drifted from
friends to his real dad for a few years - playing in bands through
junior high and high school. By the time he graduated at the age
of sixteen, he had already been the driving force behind the
Minneapolis-local 'Uptown' sound, along with his band Flyte Tyme,
which included drummer Jellybean Johnson, bassist Terry Lewis and
singer Alexander O'Neal.
A year later, in 1976, a studio engineer named Chris Moon
offered him recording time in exchange for a little piano session
work, and with Moon's guidance, Prince cut a three-track demo
that wowed Warner Bros. record executives. So at the age of
nineteen, he was offered a long-term contract and for his first
record, a budget of $100,000 and total artistic control. He played
every instrument on this funk-pop debut album, called For You.
It took five months to produce and went lavishly over-budget -
little did the Warner Bros. boys know, that would probably be the
least of their Prince-induced headaches.
The record wasn't a big success, but it was certainly enough
to get the ball rolling. His self-titled second release had two
hit singles - Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad? and I
Wanna Be Your Lover, which went to number one on the R&B
charts. He assembled a touring band at this point, with Andre
Cymone on bass, Gayle Chapman and Matt Fink on keyboards, Bobby Z
on drums and Dez Dickerson on guitar.
Prince hit his commercial stride when his third album Dirty
Mind appeared in 1980. This was the same year that Ronald
Reagan won a landslide victory in the US presidential elections; a
time when America was engulfed in a wave of 'hard work',
'responsibility' and 'God-fearing family values' sponsored by
the Moral Majority. Into this climate came Prince - a man who sang
about sex with his sister and sex with just about everybody else,
telling us all he wanted to do was take off his clothes and party.
The album's title was not exaggerated.
One of the few songs that wasn't too naughty for the radio, Uptown,
did well on the R&B charts. This is the record that When
You Were Mine comes from, incidentally, which wasn't
released as a single at the time, but would go on to become his
most widely covered song (Mitch Ryder and Cyndi Lauper among its
coverers). For this tour, Lisa Coleman replaced Gayle Chapman on
keyboards, and after it, Cymone left to go solo.
These were the shows in which Prince's onstage, sexually
explicit . . um, histrionics, were coming into full effect. He had
plenty of fans, but he also had plenty of people who had no idea
what to make of him. When, for example, he took the stage as an
opening act for The Rolling Stones in a trench coat and black
bikini briefs, the dumbfounded Los Angeles fans promptly booed him
off the stage.
Prince followed up this success with Controversy;
another album that guaranteed the eyes of the world would be
firmly fixed on his crotch area. A year later he released 1999
which gave him two major hit singles - Little Red
Corvette and the infectious title track - and a huge
cross-over audience. Prince sold over three million copies of the
album and plastered video-waves on the just-emerging MTV. For the
1999 tour, he and his band, The Revolution, were supported by two
other Prince creations: The Time, made up of old Minneapolis
cronies from Flyte Tyme, and Vanity 6, a three-girl protégé
group whose album he produced under the pseudonym 'Jamie Starr.'
When Doves Cry , the brilliant first single from Purple
Rain stayed at the top of the US charts for six weeks in July
1984. It was also his biggest success in Britain, and as the Purple
Rain album went ten times platinum, it also pulled the two
year old 1999 back to the charts. In exemplary 80's
audio-visual fashion, the movie sold the music, the music sold the
movie, and the video sold both. Prince was a megastar!
The Purple Rain album also won Prince the attentions
of one Tipper Gore, who was inspired enough by the lyrics of Darling
Nikki to launch her Parents Music Resource Center - which led
to Senate hearings, which led to the record industry's eventual
'album-stickering' warning policies. So, as only The Beatles and
Elvis had done before him, he had the raised eyebrows of parents -
and all this by the way, at the ripe old age of 26.
He continued doing what he does best - making music, leaving at
the end of the year on a 100-date US tour, accompanied by the
latest of his female discoveries, Sheila E (daughter of Santana
percussionist Pete Escovedo).
Prince used the millions he earned from Purple Rain
to build his legendary Paisley Park studio complex on the
outskirts of Minneapolis, never leaving the city because the cold
"keeps the bad people out". After enjoying a creative
partnership with backing band The Revolution until 1986, he
disbanded the group and holed himself up in this concrete
building, living and breathing his work. He followed Purple
Rain with Around The World In A Day in 1985, Parade
- Music From Under The Cherry Moon in 1986, Sign O' The
Times in 1987, Lovesexy in 1988 ('The Black Album'
was also recorded that year but was recalled by Prince after being
pressed after the artist experienced a religious epiphany and
proclaimed the album "evil") and the soundtrack to the
the movie Batman in 1989. He also found time to write
songs for Sheila E, Apollonia, Wendy and Lisa, Sheena Easton, The
Bangles, Chaka Khan and Sinead O'Connor.
Graffiti Bridge, a quasi-sequel to Purple Rain,
also hit the screens in 1990, and with a new band called The
New Power Generation, he released 1991's Diamonds and Pearls;
its single, Cream, went to number one.
In 1993, Prince announced his retirement from studio recording
and on his 35th birthday, changed his name to an unpronounceable
glyph - an amalgam of both the male and female gender symbols
which endlessly frustrated Warner Bros. and his friends in the
fourth estate. When a British journalist dubbed him "The
Artist Formerly Known As Prince", the long moniker
thankfully stuck - anything was easier for typesetters than that
rascally glyph.
The AFKAP went head-to-head with Warner Bros. about possession
of his master tapes and about not letting him release as much
music as he wanted to. He then appeared at an awards show and in
photo sessions with the word "Slave" written on his
face, and vowed never to record new material through the label
again. The dispute finally wound down in 1994, when he released
two albums, The Gold Experience and Chaos and
Disorder, to fulfil legal obligations. To commemorate his
exit from the Warner Bros. legal quagmire, he released the
declaratively-titled triple album Emancipation, in 1996.
Lest you think he's too intense, in 1997 he guest starred on
the season opener to The Muppets Tonight (Raspberry
Beret became Raspberry Sorbet). See, Tipper - not
all the lyrics are nasty.
He sold a forty-track box set of unreleased material called Crystal
Ball, first on the Internet and then in stores; he
re-released the remixed 1999 (The New Master) for the
millennium, largely because his old friends at Warner Bros. were
trying to cash in on the old 1999; and he signed with
Arista and released RaveUn2 the Joy Fantastic in 1999.
So we've got albums, movies, production and writing credits
for himself and for many, many others; we've got the
'Minneapolis Sound' from the early days, and his hybrid
funk-pop-rock-soul from the rest of the days; we've got angry
politicians, delighted Muppets, and a staunch fight for all
artists' rights; fans who have been mesmerised at his live shows
and mesmerised at home, with just the headphones on and hopefully,
the aforementioned break-out show of dance; we've got overt sex
and overt spirituality and everything in between.
There are a lot of musicians who won't get out of bed unless
they're compensated, but it's written that to see Prince perform
is to see a guy who would be playing even if you, the fan, were
nowhere near.
The Artist Formerly Known As Prince/Glyph/Squiggle eventually
began using the name Prince again and became a Jehova's Witness.
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