PRINCE | A Behind the Scenes Documentary

[Music] he was different and he was unique and he was turning it upside down he injected some life into the 80s I think [Music] he's on his own you know you by yourself you know I used to create a he's an innovator when prints emerged in the late 1970s few could have imagined the power he would soon hold in popular music a unique vocalist dynamic performer and multi-talented musician is rise to prominence in the 80s brought vitality and imagination back to a tired scene this thing is a review of his groundbreaking records that defined a decade the hits that helped him develop from a teenage prodigy to a global superstar I believe that the eighties were the most critical point in Prince's career because of this confluence of the times and the culture and what he was doing and what we were doing together as a band and is he one of the greatest ever yeah 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 for high school he had formed his own band GrandCentral with his school friend Andre Simone even during these early years Prince was drawing attention through his skills as a multi-instrumentalist playing guitar bass drums and piano he was also a confident vocalist I didn't know who was the the main star of the group you know because everybody was talented you know Andre was just as talented as Prince and but I all always know this print always going over to Linda the keyboard player and showing her know this is what you play you know and then she started playing it so as he was went back to the guitar always go like you know looking at him and then I go like okay then we counted off and then they start playing again you know and I said okay I'm you know seeing where this guy's coming from you know he's showing everybody the all day and then he told Andre know played this on the bass you know and you know he take the bass from Andre and he play a little bit Andre said yeah okay and then he'd give the bass back to Andre Andre would just go and play it I mean like that like nothing and I was gonna like wait a minute what's going on here who's you know who's the talent up in here you know he was sort of what we would call an urban legend in the Minneapolis area you know there were these hushed conversations about this you know sixteen-year-old kid who was the next Stevie Wonder and played all these multiple instruments by 1976 Prince had abandoned Grand Central and had begun working with Minneapolis studio owner Chris moon despite the strength of some of these tracks which Prince would later develop in his solo career they struggled to get noticed until a demo was sent to aspiring manager Owen has Lee I kind of have a little meter in my brain and there's a lot of music that sounds like it should be a hit that it could be a hit that it's promising but at the end of the day it really isn't the hit well the little meter in my mind when I after hearing the second song the meter went like all the way over to the other end of the scale and I just thought this group is phenomenal so I said to Chris who's the group this is this is pretty phenomenal because the guitar player was great the drummer was right on the drummer was working with the bass player to create an incredible rhythm section and then there was keyboards on top of there and the vocals were over the top great and I just said who's the group he said well I'd like it if you sat down I said you know when I was mr. bigshot you know back at those days it and I said I don't sit down I'm sorry you you tell me who the group is and he said well just sit I said no just tell me who the group is so he says well it's one kid he's 17 he's playing everything he wrote everything and he is singing everything and I just sat down immediately hustlin marketed Prince as a prodigy a young Stevie Wonder but he managed to gain the interest of several major record labels by June 1977 Prince had signed to Warner Brothers with a six-figure contract yet although Warner's had big plans for their young signing Prince quickly made it known that he would remain in sole control of his output Warner Brothers came to us and said oh we've got a great thing I think we can get Maurice white from Earth Wind and Fire to produce your first album isn't that great and Prince and I walked out of the room and he said nobody's producing my first album and I'm like his manager and already I'm ahead of Prince I'm thinking gee I have to tell one of the biggest record labels in the world that somebody 17 who's never made an album before is going to produce his own album and that's that's going to be yet [Music] the music industry into which prints surfaced in the late 1970s was going through a radical evolution whereas the fading stars of the 60s counterculture had dominated the first half of the decade the emergence of punk and disco had once again democratized the industry and represented new cultures and a new ideology yet by the time that prince's debut for you is released the scene was transforming once again and he failed to make an impact in this changing world it would not be long however before he found an audience we have two things that are going downhill we have disco which is doing a swan dive and we have Punk which is evolving into new wave or has evolved into new wave and is about to evolve into the New Romantics which is a totally different thing in Britain there was the whole two-tone sound which didn't export to the United States so we have a temporary cessation of normal service both on the rhythm and blues and the rock front and there is a window of opportunity for somebody new to come in and he takes it released in August 1979 for single I want to be your lover provided Prince with his first of many hits reaching number 11 on the US pop charts and hit in the top spot on the soul chart [Music] in Princes career which now extends nearly 30 years he has always had a great sound but at the two ends he hasn't 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 he was highlighting the falsetto in a way that we'd recently lost when Smokey Robinson stopped having regular hits so we needed another falsetto or male soprano voice in the chart but also he had the funk he had the funk like the 70s funk stirs 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 would it had a great rhythm feeling the tempo was right and so I knew it was gonna be a little bit of a rocker and of course I was into that and still em we just created it along with the rest of them and it really didn't come together to put the drums on the track he just basically came in and started playing with this pocket and we call him pockets you know like it's you know you said a drum feel you know like with a drum machine they're kind of hard to play to anyway because they're usually right on the meter but he basically made that change you know in your mind as you heard him play he was he was very laid-back and very synchronous to 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 did you know being able to basically fit himself into that track knowing exactly what would come up what where and he had the arrangements as well so to me I thought that was probably the most the deepest part of his musical ability was was to be able to do that and do it so well everything he did had groove I mean you could tell a prince piece when you heard it the timing he had signature timing licks but it was those types of hooks and licks rhythmically that made a huge difference there was no question in my mind that would have been the single yeah and it was even at this early stage Prince managed to imbue his music with a neuroticism and sexuality that would become a more prominent feature of his later work right from the word go he was a very shall we say erotically charged performer even when he wasn't being blatantly sexual when he sings I want to be your lover in that high voice the instruments go didn't in tune and it's it's a pattern which almost represents some sort of sexual excitement in other words the instruments sound like he's being your lover it's a total union of a vocal and instrumental and it was to use the American expression horny for the time despite really discussing his musical influences princes tight funk grooves and stage performances immediately drew comparisons with James Brown yes although he was reluctant to acknowledge them prince was inspired by a far more diverse range of artists [Music] I could hear shades of the Isley Brothers Earth Wind and Fire Hendrix if you may sly in the family stone but there was one guy that everybody kind of looked up to a Minneapolis in particular and Prince idolized this one person and he later on played with Prince for a long time Sonny Thompson as far as instruments is concerned this guy is a monster if Prince idolizes him okay then you know that this guy is great you know he is great I mean he plays all the instruments also there was a sense in which you know he was he was kind of recreating the music he had grown up with you know and and working in a style that I think both came naturally to him and was something that the record industry could could recognize and let him do but if Prince had continued doing that now I think he would have been a kind of second-tier you know kind of artist that you might include on you know the great army ballads of the 1980s you know rather than somebody who essentially defined the music of the 1980s having previously formed a backing band to translate his music to the live arena Prince really listed 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'd need dynamic and diverse players to assist him and thus the revolution was born well Prince chose a diverse group of people because he really believed that that was imperative for what for his vision for what he was trying to achieve musically and visually and everything else and again because he also believed in in sort of mixing musical influences that it was important to mix ethnic backgrounds 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 sorts of stuff you know the different people in the band I was slice you know let's find the family stone men women black white counts a lot of that came from his main purpose was so he wasn't stuck in one genre he wanted to be able to cross over and cross racial barriers and I think he did it well he was very very savvy even at an early age and he knew he had to differentiate himself and the band in specific ways and one of the earliest conversations I remember having with him right after I had been you know brought into the fold into the band was that he wanted everybody in the band to have a distinct image and that what he was going to do was in his words portray pure sexuality and I think that that's something that over time you know he understood that that was kind of what brought him to the party and he's been real consistent with that I can remember when Prince was tired of the costumes that I was coming up with and he sent his girlfriend down to the to the hotel room I was in and she knocked on the door and she sweetly came in and dumped this bag of metallic multi colored underwear on my on my bed bra and panties basically and so princes wear this or you're fired and I looked at her and I said he better be kidding she says no he's not yes there was a point to all that and it was definitely the image of we got it going on and it's really cool to be like us no matter what you think of us all great artists throughout time and in pop history have at one time or another done something to call attention to themselves whether you know the Elvis Presley with his long sideburns I can remember watching that and going home now he's gone too far he's them use swinging his hips on the Ed Sullivan Show the second Ed Sullivan Show they wouldn't show anything you know below his stomach because way too suggestive to swing your hips and I thought well he's gone way too far at that time you need something if you're truly great you use an attention-getting device and then what happens is then people pay attention to you and if you're really good they're gonna buy your music one of the things Prince did asked us to do was if you're gonna wander around the hotel you're not gonna wander around like your granola queen or your in your t-shirts and Berkey stocks you got it you've got to dress the part of a rock star and I'd walk downstairs and I'd be in my spandex metallic colored pants and my body tough shirts and my boots my garter coffee and breakfast and I felt stupid as hell but you know after a while I got used to people staring at me and realized you know it's all part of it's all part of what this is and it's okay he's a full-on rock star he lived the life he is you know he is what you see is what you get yeah he's a pop star rock star whatever you want to say but it is it's it is that life you know you he is the character that you see character was becoming more developed on the next release on dirty minds the track and the album prints presented a more overtly sexual persona and a more original sound and although it found little favor with the public the music press were quick to identify the emergence of an increasingly unique and challenging artist regarding the song dirty mind and really in making that comment I have to say it in context with the whole album it was not a huge hit but it was the the sort of tipping point in terms of this huge critical response this tidal wave of critical acclaim coming his way at a time when the record company you know understandably was very nervous about the sudden change we signed Stevie Wonder and now we've got you know Ric Ocasek or something here what would happen so that that song I think was again it represented a significant tipping point in terms of rolling stone coming out with this glow-in-the-dark review and so on and that was one of the things that enabled him to kind of continue on toward the commercial success [Music] we're at the time that dirty mind came out I was living in Atlanta and I I wanted to see Prince was playing a club in town and there was something I was either out of town during the day or I was there was something else I could knock it out and I couldn't get to the show and I just went down that night and it was like the club was like the club in a cartoon where the whole place is just shaking and I could just seemed like it was bouncing I couldn't blending outside on the street you know Prince I think was playing dirty mind you know that that riff was just like propulsive you know and yeah that's what it that's what it felt like to when you heard it it was just completely galvanizing and we all what a shot to the you know for the kind of music industry I mean there was a sense in which you know what's new I mean things are really pretty slow in the early eighties music wise you know apart from Michael Jackson and then suddenly you know dirty mind just ignited things it was it was so compelling just brilliant the main keyboard riff and dirty mind was actually something that that Matt had played that had kind of been developed in you know one of our numerous endless jams in rehearsal and again that was kind of an example of how things the approach that Prince took to creating and expanding is his his universe and pushing the envelope just had to do with drawing influences from wherever the thing were great about Prince was if he was such a mixture of different kinds of music it was funk and jazz came in later but there was probably hints of it here and there at that time but it was also raw very influenced by the punk scene you know I really loved the clash and no so there was this whole kind of energy that was so opposite from anything else had been going on at that time in a certain sense you know lyrics have gone so far particularly in hip-hop that you know it might make you know somebody just looking at a lyric sheet of dirty mind just wondering well what's the big deal a song called head you know I mean you know that's an element in every hip-hop song now but Prince's intensity about it there was something that was very liberating I think in a lot of hip-hop it just retreads almost like a lot of conservative aspects about sex particularly between men and women whereas in Princeton there was really this kind of sense of who's on top and who's doing what it was a statement it really was and I think you know a very powerful one and maybe one that you know once the AIDS epidemic became clear it might have been impossible to make that statement after that but it was like almost the last moment in which that sense of oh hey it's all out there yeah take it if you want it you know that was you know that was part of the font of what dirty mine was about I think that Prince really felt when dirty mind was complete that it was his most honest record to date and and the one that most represented what he was really out to accomplish when he started the record you really believed in that record and he really believed that that was who he was and that was where he wanted to go and that was his future and he was right as challenging as his sexually risque lyrics was puts his image itself which had evolved into something far more provocative and ambiguous this is not conventional garb for any sexual stereotyping he's not trying to look like a woman otherwise he wouldn't be wearing a trench coat on the other hand he's not trying to look like a man because he wouldn't be wearing bikini briefs it fits right in with this I'm not a woman I'm not a man am i straight or gay in other words he is building a personal mythology he is constructing an image of the pansexual creature which is very brave on the one hand but it surely is commercial because no other major star had been that out there in October 1981 the follow-up to dirty mind controversy was released although there's more rock orientated album critics hailing Prince's our natural successor to Hendrix the sails were again disappointing it was with the release of the first single phase fifth album however the Prince finally broke into the mainstream 1999 exploded onto the charts in September 1982 and over time it would become regarded as one of the key singles of the decade 1999 was an immediate explosion in the United States not in Britain but you had three big hits in the States and the first was 1999 which is a tremendously exciting record I don't have to tell anybody it was the theme of a millennium how bigger can you get than that [Music] having people you know $19.99 you know people were beginning to become aware about the end of the century sort of around that time and prince made it seem you know it's kind of apocalyptic but also a lot of fun that's something he began doing I think particularly well being able to leave in his sexual themes even weaving his spiritual themes or even his social themes but also kind of make a party record you know and that's what 1999 finally is in a lot of ways get the record owed much of his success to the exposure that Prince had received on the increasingly influential music channel MTV the circle had originally stalled outside of the top 40 but it was the screaming of its accompanying music video that eventually propelled Prince back into 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 believes in visuals so you know the marriage of Prince and MTV was definitely made in heaven you know they both took that to the bank you know it it gave Prince a big big audience and you know made MTV feel edgy [Music] life is the pie when to laugh prior to that MTV never had urban artists on and at the point where Michael Jackson with beat it was on and then we were on with with the whole 1999 little red Corvette thing all that changed so to speak to the issue of the songs all of those things came into play and because of this perfect storm the songs had a sort of a runway to land on in the public perception that no prints record before that it had prints had started working on this new material back in April 1982 unlike on his previous records the majority of the recordings had taken place at the prestigious Sunset Sound Studios in Los Angeles here he embraced new technologies and managed to create a far more sophisticated end product while still maintaining control of nearly every aspect of the recording he would start a song in the beginning of the day whether it be in the morning or whenever we started and that very rarely did we come back to a song we finished it that day and in that time that was pretty much unheard of and I think still unheard of I mean sometimes he would over dumb I think Purple Rain was the first one that he really kind of started bringing people in and started over dubbing a lot more before it was just him and he did everything he worked around the clock he had so much energy and so much creative just it just flowed from him songs would just come out of him that was amazing there were two elements I think that in the early days became very synonymous with his sound one of them is the the Oberheim eight voice analog synthesizer which was used in the same way that that horns were used on Earth Wind & Fire Records or parliament-funkadelic records the other a little bit later on was the the linndrum the drum machine and honestly I think part of it was the sound of it but in another part of it was for him as someone who had always been a one-man band and even in 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 heard inspirationally heard that sound in his head that the drum machine would do exactly what he told it to do and for a lot of us in that era that that was like a revelation wow I can actually program this machine and it will play exactly what I want it to whereas if I try to explain to a drummer what it is I'm trying to do he's probably gonna play my idea his way and it's not going to be the same thing the success of the single and the exposure that MTV had brought prints benefitted the album enormous ly the 1999 LP was the biggest selling record that Prince had so far released and by the close of 1983 it had sold over a million copies in the US alone the 1999 album was the seismic shift where all of the things that that were attempted all the things that were pointed toward through the records that preceded it came together in this sort of perfect storm and the the the sudden magic formula for being edgy and and being a bleeding edge but at the same time being commercial and having huge radio hits all came together at the same time 1999 as an album that was made for eighties radio you know I mean I think if you go back and listen to dirty mind for example you know those songs really sound strange there's so much space in them you know there's a kind of emptiness that's really intriguing you know but they're not big radio songs the songs not 1999 are perfect for radio there's something going on all the time you know Prince had learned a lot as a producer learned a lot as so you could shape his own music and I think understood what it would take to to bring him a bigger audience so you know if you listen to little red Corvette you know certainly if you listen to 1999 you know you just kind of hear that you know big bright sound of the 1980s you know he was one of the guys who if find it [Applause] there were dimensions to his writing that were beginning to reveal themselves that I don't think had been there before the songs were a little more sophisticated not just lyrically but musically I mean when you think a little red Corvette it's just a classic pop song which is was and always will be to me the horniest song ever ever done and talked about slipping subject matter past the censors when he was talking about she had a pocket full of horses Trojans some of them used now the imagery is fantastic everyone's familiar with the Trojan horse what a lot of people in Britain aren't aware of which was the number one condom in America at that time was called Trojans so to get past the radio censors he used the image of the Trojan horse rather than saying condom and then the disgusting line some of them used bolstered by his newfound fame Prince surprised many by following 1999 with a feature film project yet the semi-autobiographical Purple Rain which heroes co-wrote and starred in proved that he had finally hit his stride an ambitious spectacle it 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 as if he had an epiphany at that point it was wild and it was just this whole thing that just came out of nowhere and it was just genius total genius rock and roll and Hollywood coming together both the album and the movie Purple Rain just are probably you know certainly Prince's commercial peak and in many ways a very serious artistic peak as well the summer of 1984 when all that was happening you know that was Prince's summer you know he owned it when doves cry was the first single to be released from the purple Rane album and marked Prince's first u.s. number-one hit in the summer of 1984 it remained on the top spot for five consecutive weeks and sold over 2 million copies in the UK it was a breakthrough single the first of prince's records to enter into the top 10 and it 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 over on the final passes of the mix and took the bass out and he said nobody's gonna believe this and it was true nobody could believe it and it became a huge hit everybody loved that song my sister my sister called me up and said I love this song it's like oh and people really did sit up and take notice he was different and he was unique and he was turning it upside down on what was you know normal in this business I appreciated him in that way he he injected some life into the 80s I think I did have an ear for a hook in those days it was like the keyboard that they think they think it was like that's a hit I didn't have to hear a bass I didn't have to hear anything else I didn't care if he was singing about birds or singing to the birds none of it mattered the keyboard part was a hit [Music] [Music] doves cry was just it just raced up the charts I mean you hear that's a cliche but it's it's just astounding how that record I I think of certain records in my lifetime where the day they went to radio my phone lit up because all my friends called and said have you heard cold sweat by James Moran have you heard what's going on by Marvin Gaye well it was have you heard this dove song by Prince it was on that level of impact just right out of the box it was just like oh 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 how you did music in the 80s had changed overnight once you heard that song everything you did was updated it's not often that you get lyrics on a number-one hit like maybe I'm just like my father too bold maybe you're just like my mother she can't be satisfied you know this idea of somebody talking about you know this kind of edible drama in their lives which is you know an element in into all of the threesomes in prints and and and in Purple Rain and here's something that I think you know is really there and in all of its erotic charge to you know animal strike curious poses they feel the heat the heat between me and you I mean that's that's a really interesting line it's like all of nature is kind of responding to this tension here between us and then you know you get the mother and father business thrown in yeah I mean that's raw stuff Prince's second single off Purple Rain let's go crazy also hit the number one spot in the u.s. predator for the first time to prince and the revolution it would become a perennial concert favorite let's go crazy with or without the the sermon at the beginning but I love the sermon of the beginning it's whacking at everything that Prince does sounds like it's coming from a unique perspective and that's what made him so distinctive it could only have been him [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] let's go crazy I thought was the quintessential like opening song I think he had managed for the first time in his career to write a signature song that every time somebody bought a ticket to a prince show the thing that was going to come to mind is man I hope they play that song first it was also obviously a very memorable moment in the film that element of just like let's just jump on the bikes and go you know that's what let's go crazy is about you know this is go to the club and have 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 this power ballads credited again to prince and the revolution reached number eight in the UK charts and number two in the u.s. believe me you don't usually want to spend 8 and 1/2 minutes of your life listening to anything American Pie okay Don McClane great a couple of things but not too many that's a big investment of your life but Purple Rain deserves it Purple Rain we actually used a remote truck and recorded it he was doing a live concert benefit 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 did all those songs were brand new nobody had heard him before Purple Rain let's go let's go crazy I would die for you all those songs nobody had heard so nobody really applauded after the after each song and it was very strange because they there it was new you know people don't take familiarity sometimes but Purple Rain was a live recording in first Avenue [Music] the kind of level of emotional honesty and nakedness in Purple Rain is something that I think is often overlooked you know this kind of sense of of injuring someone and just really wishing that you weren't doing it as you're doing it this this wishing for a place you know the Purple Reign that 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 I was going through a divorce one time and just listening to that song I was just started crying you know in a very indirect but very profound way I think he gets out those kinds of emotions of you know what what went wrong here there's no way to make it better I know I may even be at fault you know but can't something just save us from this and you know that that kind of soaring quality at the end of the song when he sings in that falsetto vocal and is playing this just astonishing guitar part it's just let's go to another world let's get to a place where we can get beyond all this somehow that's what Purple Rain is about because prints can look like I mean almost cartoonish sometimes you know people don't associate him with that that kind of emotional seriousness but he can go that man I mean you certainly went there in that song and you know it's hard to find other songs that get it feelings that complicated that powerfully well 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 hear it you remember where you were the first time you heard it you know what I mean it causes your your endorphins and the serotonin to be released in your brain and again it was a real step forward for him in terms of his evolution as a commercial artist but yet a distinct artist you know that it's him but at the same time it's a classic song that you know you'll hear it 20 years from now they'll still be classic the album and the film solidify my prince's position as a global phenomenon whereas at one time his appeal had been considered relatively limited he had now proven that he could attract a mass audience and his potential for influencing mainstream tastes and popular culture itself began to be realized he embodied a change in our culture that in retrospect seems like it was inevitable but he was riding that wave before a lot of us recognized that coming and I think that's really what it boiled down to was like listen we all have cable TVs now and we all listen to more than one radio station and anybody with any sense is opening their minds and opening their eyes and ears and recognizing that there's a bigger world in my neighborhood whatever neighborhood that might be rich poor white black who cares what the world is bigger than your neighborhood and he just simply embodied that and kind of 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 all about all the music and everybody's welcome and in fact we're not gonna fight we're gonna get along here and I think that was part of the magic of the purple rain thing because I think purple rain became the extension of that politic he would go away and then I would work with other people and they'd say oh you work with Prince he's sir he's that or he's you know he'll be gone tomorrow or whatever but I had really respected musicians coming up to me and saying he is a genius and I thought yeah they get it they understand because I loved his music I really did I loved his music and I know that a lot of people criticized it and tried to dismiss him and and then with Purple Rain they couldn't dismiss him anymore he was there and he was there to stay if his reputation now established Prince father strengthened his control over both his output and his finances by funding Paisley Park records although this venture allowed him to work with other artists such as Sheila E taja Savelle and George Clinton its greatest chart successes were Prince's own records and the first of these was 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 that 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 the chord changes and the vocals and and and the elements of that song out while we were touring so that song for me kinda has a special place because I was there in its early stages I was there in the prototype stage and to hear that the final version and to see it be again one of those hits that's very much connected with him as an icon that that's kind of cool [Music] playing with prints when we were recording we got to experiment and a lot of times he would take the first take even though there were maybe mistakes that we thought he said no he wants the feeling he there was something about the first emotion that he wanted or your first impression of the song that he wanted and he mixed into it and you go all because when you'd be doing it you go oh I know I can do it better let me perfect it because in that era everybody was kind of doing the sterile music where you do 20 takes of one thing and he didn't work like that there's beautiful melodies like raspberry beret that you don't realize how intricate those chord changes are so you hear him to sit down playing on a piano it's 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 sex romance I mean those are quite a different style okay he's like I said got a lot of personalities the personality that Prince decided to reveal on around the world in a day had one foot in the past whereas with 1999 and Purple Rain Prince had been forging forward with technology to produce an original and very modern sound with this album he paid homage to the innovators of the 1960s and in particular the Beatles I think he had a lot of respect for music that you know the British Invasion and things that came from the 60s that was if there's anything that made him humble that might have been the one thing there was communication between Prince and 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 of Joni Mitchell's major stories and and covers and it was it's interesting that there was this kind of 60s fascination on his part since he was seen as such a new artist Prince said he was a great fan of Joni Mitchell and he would love Joanie's lyricism vocal uniqueness and her silences the Doudna flying engines there's a song so loud and it scrambles time [Music] I think that's one of the most encouraging examples of an artist citing an influence that wasn't obvious that I've ever heard despite these influences and very healthy sales the album was regarded as a disappointment after the revelation of Purple Rain I thought around the world today was really a transitional record it was important to Prince that he not do anything that's overtly redundant a Purple Reign and I think if there was a theme to around the world in the day was that it's the anti Purple Reign record you know it's easy to note the Beatles influence particularly in things like raspberry puree but I don't want to say it was contrived but it was a record that had an agenda if only because it was determined to do something dramatically different so that he couldn't be accused of riding the crest of Purple Rain it was evoke an era where he hadn't been and he didn't do it as well enough as the people who had been there to begin with I think that's the safest thing to say so thank God for us berry beret which was good and was a hit Prince returned to the silver screen the following year with under the cherry moon which he also directed unlike Purple Rain however the film was dismissed by critics and ignored by audiences and failed to break even at the box office yet with its soundtrack album parade Prince returned to his funk roots on several tracks and although the record again showed a decline in sales the single kiss would supply him with yet another us number one by the time parade and under the cherry moon came around he was quite successful he had made millions and millions and I think he just wanted to pursue a movie career and he wanted to do a soundtrack [Music] [Applause] most of that record is geared as a soundtrack for the film the song kiss came about totally accidentally I mean I was doing a group 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 turn it into something and set up all night trying to figure out what to do with it we made the track and the next morning I came back about 9:30 and he had already come in and I said where's my tape and he said that's too good for you guys isn't taking it back so he had already put his voice on it he already put his guitar on it BAM and then there was a bass part on it didn't you know he removed a lot of the stuff that was on there this was the first song that I was gonna be credited other than just an engineer and he also renamed me David Z because that wasn't my name on the first four records so you know I I was sort of speechless but then I talked to one of the people at Warner Brothers on the phone and they said oh no we're not putting that out we don't like it I went what that's like what and they said no it sounds like a demo there's no bass there's no reverb it sounds like a demo sounds like we did it in your basement and I was devastated and luckily enough he like I said was successful and he had enough power at the time to say you put that out first or I'm not giving you another single and a year later they were only trying to sign things to sound like that so that tells you where the music's supposed to come from [Music] I remember the first time I heard the song kiss really feeling that he had managed to recapture some of that sort of raw R&B emotion from some of his earlier music and even going back to some of the stuff you know that he'd written for the time but at the same time again because he had by now mastered the commercial elements and knew how to be himself but at the same time write hits I just thought that that was a masterful song the sparseness of it the melodic elements of it the soulfulness of the vocal I thought that was a masterful song the guitar on kiss the rhythm guitar was gated through a gate to make it synchronize with the hi-hat on the drum machine and nobody can play that it's just a it's a electronic trick dad I'm just playing open chords and it's doing that rhythm but you know we'd try everything in anything and not you know it's it was very fun and very creative and there's when there's no rules like that you don't have to do what somebody else did this is the kind of song which is perfect out of news as they say in other words if if the news man ends and says more at 7 or 35° did it eat it eat it eat it in kiss I mean it's perfect change a mood change of tempo and you're in the song within 5 seconds it's so well constructed you see and and and he uses silence and pauses so wonderfully most people are afraid to leave pauses and silence because they think that people will lose interest in one second but Prince knew that you could use pauses and silence for suspense for building for impact and kisses a perfect example of 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 the tracks on the album that worked like a more conventional musical score Prince looked outside of his immediate circle for input on the arrangements the musician he discovered became the first person to contribute to Prince's music without interference the parada album introduced another dimension to Prince's mo of album making in that arranger Claire Fisher was a contributor and it was kind of unique because Claire is somebody who was completely outside the prince camp someone that Prince didn't have any overt influence on and in fact hadn't even met face to face and it was the proverbial case of sending tapes back and forth through the mail and just being interested enough in hearing what he would do left to his own devices I've recorded pop albums I've recorded jazz albums I've recorded laughing albums and I'm known in a whole lot of different categories and then to suddenly have poppers come along and want me to write a reference for them I said well I mean I wasn't averse to it but I it was a different dimension the first thing about Prince was man he was free he didn't interfere with what you did and I thought that was wonderful unfortunately most people don't understand what arranging is so they think if they've got their recording with the voice and rhythm section everything that what they would like to have on is what they would write only they don't know how to write so they called me in later years Prince would sometimes give him some kind of cryptic instructions I want this kind of a thing on this track that's on this track but never too specific because they there was an enormous respect for Clara's ability and his own creativity as an artist and Prince also I think had a curiosity to see what he would kind of think there was there was a part of him that wanted to be surprised by what Claire would do and of course Claire to this day is known for very creative string and sometimes horn arrangements that go against the grain I mean this is the guy who marches to his own drummer in his world much the way Prince does and while he certainly has a personal stamp on everything he does it's not cookie cutter and it's not going to sound like anybody else's work except Claire Fisher and in that sense the Claire efficient prints are a perfect match while kiss was at number one in the US charts Prince was also enjoying success through a song given to the all-female group the bangles highlighting his gifts as a pop composer the track Manic Monday launched the band's career and reached number two on both sides of the Atlantic we had worked until about I don't know like three or four in the morning we were both exhausted and he called the session for probably 6:00 in the evening when we worked out late he usually called it for six and I got a call at 9:00 in the morning and said he's coming in and I was not too happy and he knew it when he came in I was not too happy and he said I said if I dreamed of course I was coming in and I said you dream your songs and he said yeah sometimes and we came in and we cut Manic Monday start to finish and that eventually a winter vanity six but then David Leonard and David Kahn were working on the bangles and asked him for a song and he gave the bangles that song and they had a pretty decent hit with that so that was the song that he had dreamed that morning [Music] [Music] isn't it interesting that Prince wrote so well for women his big hit covers of by women his range in his 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 major success with a cover version of I feel for you from his second album and Scottish singer Sheena Easton relaunched her career in the mid-1980s with an album ko composed and produced by Prince it kind of hinted toward his ability to seamlessly kind of move back and forth between R&B and pop and rock sensibilities sometimes he did not do the best versions of his songs in addition to all the ones that were hits for him some of them were good songs but he himself hadn't made them very commercial and it took somebody else's arrangement to make them commercial of course the most famous is nothing compares to you which is an all time classic multi-million seller by Sinead O'Connor in the original buy the family is poor [Music] [Music] having now severed most of his ties with the revolution during 1986 prince was in a staggeringly prolific creative spell his follow-up to parade a triple album called the crystal ball was to be a 22 track opus incorporating several distinct strands yet Warner Brothers were uneasy after the lukewarm reception to the previous two releases and eventually reduced the album to a two disc set renamed sign of the times it was really a song a day coming out of the studio in his house and later at our rehearsal warehouse where he had gear installed and it was just any given day you'd show up for work and he'd be playing another new brilliant song but I mean it was just seeing never ending concepts four albums were coming to him almost as quickly as the songs were it kind of documented where he was at as a composer as an instrumentalist as a bandleader because the band played on a few tracks on then I mean not all of it but some of it and and just about every creative aspect of Princeton musician was represented and updated was sign of the times the album's title track was released as a single in February 1987 and reached number three in the US charts Sun of the times the the song seems to me just exactly what it says it is you know it's it's this it's Prince kind of scanning the social environment and sort of reporting on what he's 70 you daddy is beating a game called the disciples high on crack till the machine-gun Prince doesn't often seem to be looking outward elfin seems to be working in his own kind of inner terrain but to just kind of see him look out in that way in itself was powerful and then the song itself kind of doubled that there's a it's an element of seriousness in it that that makes a big impact I think a lot of times you listen to a song go that's weird and then about the third time you go oh I love that it's it's not something you can explain it's a gift that he has and you only wish that a composer could be like that and you wish all means it could be like that but it's not some music grabs you right away some music takes a while to warm up to but that's the kind of stuff you can't let go I guess it's a deep hook but that's what's complex about it is the hooks are buried so deep that takes you awhile to figure it 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 at once to be totally creative totally unique and hooky at the same time which doesn't happen very often you know you might have to go back to like Gary Numan in cars before he can kind of come up with something like that but I really admired that record because it really had me listening to the sounds and the tracks and going wait how did he get that that snare sound is so different how did he get that you know which for me I hadn't been struck that way with any of this stuff for a while yet alongside this seriousness they were all so classic Prince pop numbers the track you got the look a duet with Sheena Easton would become Prince's biggest US hit since kiss reaching number two on the Billboard charts despite its Commercial Appeal it was still removed from pop conventions however and Prince's experiments with sped up and distorted vocals marked it out a something of an anomaly [Music] [Music] I was a part of a lot of that experimentation we used to joke that we put guitars underwater if we had to and we did everything from play the bass part and the song on pedals or the organ instead of a bass guitar just obviously slowing down the tape and putting his voice on and just beat it up he sounds like a munchkin singing and we do that and we do all kinds of things you got the look is a fabulous record they have this vocal interchange in the middle of record which is unique when he goes ladies and gentlemen the world series I love love and she goes oh please what it wouldn't have occurred to anyone to put anything like that in a record but let's put it in a record and it was hilarious in the middle of being funded you got the look it was just a great kind of rock and track I mean in the duet with with Sheena Easton you know it just had this kind of erotic charge to it you know and it was fun you know it was just kind of like Prince just cutting loose and you know it's kind of a cirrhotic quality and it's you know just a sense it was just one of those tracks that you know it was a great Prince dance track it was post this don't feel further on his next album lovesexy and in particular its standout single alphabet Street released in 1988 the record was a spiritual report to the dark undertones of the Black Album which Prince had withdrawn at the end of the previous year in Europe don'ts music and fusions of house and hip hop had emerged over the previous two years and loved sexy fitted well into this new musical culture in the US however sample-based music was still underground and prince's more minimal sound failed to ignite the charts he became a pretty-pretty semi regular fixture on the on the club scene in both London and Paris and that's influenced this music that came pouring out of him I tended to look at love sexy as a album that didn't know what it wanted to be thank God for alphabet Street this is just like with around the world of the day and raspberry beret you have one great track that saves it and gives him oxygen for another year I love sexy isn't one that people go back and listen to but alphabet Street is a very poppy funky song and of course again another great beginning one of the interesting aspects one of the interesting trajectories in in princess career is his evolution of ideas about sex you know because initially he was embraced as you know this kind of sexual liberator you know is he white or black is he male or female you know it's you know sort of beyond category you know you have that move from the Black Album which was kind of an extension of all of that kind of you know polymorphous perverse sexuality into love sexy you know into love as a kind of spiritual love you know that's what sexual you know that's where the erotic charge comes from that was I think that moment the first moment where he turned away from the kind of wild controversy style sexuality that that in many ways you know brought him this big audience and I think personally he began to feel uncomfortable with it and then spiritually and you know and it certainly and for a time effect of what his music was like where his prints had led the way as an innovative mainstream artist for the duration of the decade by the end of the 1980s things were changing hip-hop finally began to emerge from the underground in the US and brought with us of culture in which Prince would find no place although he would remain a major player his appeal would become more marginal in the coming decades after sign of the times he does not have consistent top 40 success occasionally a giant record yes but he is not in the mainstream he's in the prince stream and once these terrible themes of 1990s hip-hop emerge he's relegated to the sidelines because he's not gonna talk about misogyny or homophobia he's not gonna go there he's not gonna talk about gun crime or bling these are not his subjects and so one would say thank heaven for Batman one of the blockbusters which eventually defined the decades Tim Burton's Batman films was both a huge production and a shrewd marketing exercise asked to record a track to promote the film print instead delivered an entire album dismissed by some on its release as a lackluster mishmash containing songs that Prince had discarded earlier in the decade and revived for this venture it nevertheless became one of his most commercially successful albums selling 11 million copies worldwide it also provided him with a u.s. number-one single Matt dance obviously by the very nature of it being a Batman film and the first in a long time he's not going to be doing a series of these things but yeah let's hang on to this 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 things going on in the movie it is a very clever assembly but boy it's a skillful one and especially if you talk about the full-length six minute track but I was I was a very important moment in his career and kept him on top even when the scene was going in a weird direction [Music] [Music] keep busting we have three years of working for Prince that he has just been sending us different songs and we've been adding orchestral backgrounds to them not knowing really what they were going to be used for and knowing also that he had a penchant for wanting to sometimes take some of these backgrounds maybe individual tracks or maybe the entire orchestral background to separate from the track that we had done the arrangement for and put it on something else use it as background music for his movie scenes or put it in a completely different tune and this was the case with Batman and so we didn't even realize we were involved in that until we got a call from the record company saying that they would be sending us a check for the new use of the music I mean bat dance as a theme song you know to the Batman film yeah there was such a hype about that movie and it was you know the big movie and Everidge was excited about it and it just kind of seemed more exciting that Prince was doing the theme song I mean to me it wasn't really that great a song you know I think it was just you know it was propelled by you know everybody's good feeling we're gonna go to the movies we're gonna have a good time we're gonna we're gonna like it you know we wanna like it you know it was fun to see Prince doing something that seemed like fun and you didn't seem all that serious oh you know the bat dance you know it there was a kind of element of you know let's just get behind this as far as you know comparing bat dance to Purple Rain as a song I mean there's no comparison I mean Purple Rain is I would say profound you know that des is a great theme song to a big summer movie I think that Prince reached the point that all career artists reach where just the sheer chronology of it all you will come to some sort of flat spots where sort of the confluence of what's happening the culture what's happening in in the in the industry what's happening on radio whatever the case might 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 first an artist and being first a persona and a live performer so that the people were coming out the shows were selling out all through that era and it all comes back around again by that time the end of the eighties everyone who was remotely interested knew that he was a killer life performer that he was not a person who just made music to be famous or acted to be famous this was a guy who lived within music who spent time voluntarily in the recording studio made more music than he could release you are not built to be able to go 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 type of a life and I picked up on that from prints that this was the only thing he was either going to make it huge or he was not going to be around there's a whole series of black artists everyone from you know Terence Trent d'Arby to you know to Living Color to Lenny Kravitz and a lot of ways Prince really kind of broke the path for them these kind of white artists I mean these black artists who were interested in rock and roll and saw that as part of their bag of tricks you know Prince broke that ground so I mean Prince was huge he was a huge it was not just hugely successful but he was usually influential he's the number one artist on this planet bar none because he's been on a cover of guitar magazine he's been on the cover of drum magazine he's been on the cover of keyboard magazine and he's been on the cover of bass magazine no other artist in the history of this music industry can do that has done it [Music] in a lot of ways the music of the eighties was littered with styles that prince rejected as soon as he moved on from something everybody else grabbed it and had the remaining amount of hits left to that sound that because Prince lost interest in it it was on to something else the combination of the element of who and what Prince is as a unique and once-in-a-lifetime artist with the particular time period and and the bands that he surrounded himself through that period I don't know if anybody ever reproduced that we've watched it evolve over the years not only as a musician but as a man and I wonder sometimes when you look back at old material like I've looked at so much in the last 24 hours to prepare for this do you look back at old stuff risque stuff and and want to separate yourself from it well you know when you're 20 years old you're looking for the ledge you know you want to see how far you can push 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 I don't do now that I did 30 years ago there are some things they still do yeah [Applause]

Channel: Music Documentaries & Concerts

Views: 2,252,891

Rating: 4.7478528 out of 5

Keywords: watch, music, band, documentaries, VH1, Classic, Albums, free, online, full, length, episodes, documentary, the, clash, queen, david, bowie, beatles, led, zeppelin, concert, behind, mtv, prince, purple rain, interview, final, lost

Id: uKCuh_MRXzE

Length: 76min 4sec (4564 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 27 2017