Genius in short
Sex-obsessed pop polymath? Jehovah's Witness? One thing is certain, the
artist known as Prince is back to his dazzling best. Catching up with
the superstar in New York and at his home in Los Angeles, Barney Hoskyns
unravels a continuing enigma
Sunday February 19, 2006
The Observer
'HEEEEEEEEEEEEERRRRE'SPRINCEY!!!!' Yes, folks, we're live tonight in
New York City for The Prince Show, complete with sidekick Beyoncé Knowles
and special guest Drew Barrymore. The set is a gaudy conflation of psychedelic
shack and beaux arts boudoir, with our host kitted out in black turban
and purple jacket. Except that he's barely deigning to speak, communicating
his thoughts and wishes through buxom Beyoncé.
Prior to the entrance
of La Barrymore there's an unscheduled appearance by a silver-haired
Frenchman claiming to be Prince's chef. He says he's
been preparing meals for His Royal Highness for many years 'but it's
an honneur to finally meet you'. Prince isn't too thrilled to see the
guy, complaining that he burned his tongue on his pancakes that morning.
Turning away from the chef he picks up an ostrich-feathered eye-mask
and contemplates himself in an ornate gold mirror.
'Prince is gazing
into the mirror of reflection,' Beyoncé intones
in a bored voice. Confused? You should be. Amused? Possibly not.
Beyoncé,
of course, isn't Beyoncé at all. This particular
night in early February, she's Saturday Night Live's Maya Rudolph,
just as the silver-haired chef is none other than Steve Martin, hosting
SNL
tonight for a record 16th time. Prince himself is being royally impersonated
by Fred Armisen, another regular on the late-night show.
Like a lot
of SNL these days, the Prince sketch isn't very funny. But it does
suggest that America still believes Prince to be mildly
insane.
You wonder what the miniature maestro himself, sitting backstage
tonight in some green room at NBC's Rockefeller Plaza studios, feels
as he
watches on a TV.
'Why does everyone think I'm mad?' he once asked
his British press person. 'Because,' the PR replied, 'you do weird
things and you don't
explain
them.'
Prince does do weird things, but he also performs live with
a stage presence and a charisma that's unrivalled in American entertainment.
Appearing
on Saturday Night Live for the first time in 25 years, 10 days
before his hotly-anticipated performance at the Brit Awards in
London, he
gives television debuts to two songs from his forthcoming album,
3121. One
of them, 'Fury', is a decimating blast of pop-rock, complete
with squealing guitar arpeggios and fabulously sexy choreography. When
the number
finishes, Prince lays his souped-up Stratocaster on the stage
and
casually upends
his microphone stand before moseying towards the exit with the
cockiest smirk you ever saw on a pop star's face.
The smirk says
'I killed 'em again' and it's an expression I've seen on Prince's face
for a quarter of a century, ever since
I watched
him play in this very city in February 1981. That night, at
the Ritz Theatre,
I saw rock'n'soul's future: a devastatingly assured set of
taut new-wave funk from a kinky genius who made Michael Jackson look
like the buppie
boy next door. I saw the smirk, too, when I went on the road
with Prince and the Revolution two years later, accompanying
the 1999
tour on several
dates through the Midwest.
A decade later when I met him again
in a hotel suite in London, it was more Mona Lisa than Cheshire Cat
- coolly supercilious,
ultimately
indecipherable.
Then, he took me to task for things other people had told
me about him, hooting uproariously at the notion that any of them
was in
a position to talk about him. The fact that one, engineer
Susan Rogers,
had sat
by his side on hundreds of occasions at his Paisley Park
studio carried little weight with him.
'You think Susan Rogers knows me?'
he asked. 'You think she knows anything about my music? Susan Rogers,
for the record,
doesn't
know anything
about my music. Not one thing. The only person who knows
anything about my
music [pause for very pointed effect] ... is me.'
I see,
I said.
As the conversation continued, Prince became progressively
tetchier. 'All these non-singing, non-dancing, wish-I-had-me-some-clothes
fools who tell me my albums suck,' he jeered. 'Why should
I pay
any attention
to them?'
Right, I said.
At the very end, his pique at a peak, Prince declared
that language was so confining that 'I might just stop
talking
again and not
do interviews'. Everything, it seemed, had come full
circle - back to
his announcement
in 1983 that he'd never talk to the press again.
Flash
back a quarter of a century to the doldrums of the early Eighties:
flouncy-haired synthkids, fading
AOR veterans,
flocks
of seagulls
and hosts of Haircut 100s. Vapid and sexless, pop was
little more than
a Smash Hits remake of American Bandstand three decades
earlier. Who were
Howard Jones and Nik Kershaw if they weren't blow-dried
throwbacks to Fabian and Frankie Avalon?
'What's missing
from pop music is danger,' Prince proclaimed in November 1982. 'There's
no excitement and mystery
- people sneaking
out and
going to these forbidden concerts by Elvis Presley
or Jimi Hendrix.'
Danger is an overly mythologised
quality in pop, but at the dawn of that decade Prince embodied something
so thrilling
and so
category-smashing that within five years he'd all
but
turned pop on its head. Of
the four
stars who bossed the Eighties - Michael Jackson,
Madonna, Bruce Springsteen, Prince - the 5'2" prodigy
from Minneapolis was the only true maverick in
the pack.
'Maybe I'm just like my father, too bold,'
he sang
memorably in the heartrending 'When Doves Cry'.
'Maybe I'm just
like my mother,
she's
never satisfied
...' He was an oddball and an introvert from his
earliest days as a child prodigy, the son of jazz
bandleader
John Nelson
and a Louisiana-born
mother, Mattie Shaw. Brilliant but unhappy, he
found a sanctuary in
music
that he couldn't find in a home where his parents
often fought.
He played in covers bands but was
happier working alone, overdubbing himself with primitive tape
recorders in
the basement of his
friend Andre Anderson's house. Adopted by studio
owner Chris Moon and
manager Owen
Husney, he began plotting his route to a record
deal, cultivating a canny air of mystique while
playing
up to an X-rated
image he'd developed
after
an early immersion in pornography.
If Husney was
astounded by Prince's talent, he was also mildly alarmed by a teenager
who seemed
considerably
older than
his years. 'At 17
he had the vision and astuteness of a 40-year-old,'
Husney
told me. 'He
was the kind of guy who could sit in a room
with you and absorb everything in your brain and know
more than
you
by the time
you left the room.
Prince might hang late, but it was all for
music. He wasn't looking to get high
with the guys.'
His first big hit, 1979's 'I
Wanna Be Your Lover', was irresistibly catchy: black pop
with a funk-lite
guitar
riff and a playfully
androgynous falsetto
vocal: 'I wanna be your lover/Wanna be
your mother and your sister too ...' Coming at
the tail end
of disco,
it didn't
sound like
anything else
on black radio. Black media approved but
found him as hard to pigeonhole as white media did.
Warner Brothers, which
had given
him unprecedented
license to produce himself, understood that
he was
as
much a mercurial, Todd Rundgren-esque rock
boffin as a strutting
funk
god.
In 1984 he went for broke: a self-mythologising
movie based on his own life and on the friendly
competitiveness
of
the 'Uptown'
scene
he'd spawned
in Minneapolis. Cheap but oddly charming
for all its puerile sexism, Purple Rain was
the
pop sensation
of
the year,
its soundtrack album
shifting over 18 million copies and keeping
'When Doves Cry' at number one for
six weeks. 'In some ways Purple Rain scared
me,' Prince later confessed. 'It's my albatross
and
it'll be hanging
around
my neck as long
as I'm making music.'
Twenty-two years later,
Prince may have finally shaken off his purple albatross. In 2004
he was the highest-grossing
live performer
in
America, netting a cool $56.5 million.
His influence, moreover, could he heard
in the music of everybody from Beck to
Basement Jaxx via Alicia Keys (who had a huge hit
with 'How Come
You Don't
Call Me Anymore?',
one
of Prince's great Eighties ballads).
A string
of masterpieces followed Purple Rain: the Beatle-esque Around
the World in a Day (1985), the
funked-up Parade (1986) and 1987's
Sign O the Times. Recorded at the new
Paisley Park studio he had built in
1986 on the outskirts of Minneapolis,
Sign was devilishly eclectic, travelling from
the doom-saying
title track
- an unsettling
mix of hypnotic electro
rhythm, bluesy guitar and fragile, semi-rapped
lyric - to the Philly rhapsody of 'Adore'
via the frantic
power pop
of 'I
Could Never
Take the Place of Your Man'.
The follow-up,
Lovesexy (1988), felt, however, like a disappointment, and with
the dismal
critical reception
accorded the Graffiti
Bridge movie (1990), Prince for the
first time tasted failure.
He also began to regard his career
differently. If the Nineties began
with the big hits
'Cream' and
'Diamonds and Pearls',
the next few
years were dominated by his battle
with Warner Brothers, the label that
did
so much to nurture his talent through
the early stages of his career.
'The
reasons that he felt the contract was unfair had little to do with
money,' lawyer
L. Londell
McMillan would later
claim in
his
defence. 'His interior life revolves
around music, its creation and performance.
But with Warners he didn't own his
own creations, the
masters of his recordings.'
The sight
of Prince with the word 'SLAVE' daubed on his cheek will
always be
associated with
the period in which
he chose
petulantly to be known
as The Artist Formerly Known As
Prince. Then on 7 June
1993, it
was announced that Prince had changed
his name to because he had been
dispossessed 'in perpetuity' by
his record company.
Three years later he finally severed
his ties with the label, instead
forming his
own New
Power Generation
label
for the
purposes of
releasing the triple CD Emancipation.
Released as a celebration of Prince's
marriage to dancer Mayte Garcia,
the album
was also intended to herald the
arrival of the couple's baby boy.
Tragically
the child, Gregory, died in October
1996 from
a rare skull
disease called
Pfieffer's Syndrome.
The baby's
death marked the beginning of a profound change in Prince's
worldview. Towards
the end
of the decade,
with his marriage
to
Mayte over, he struck up a friendship
with
one of his musical heroes, the
former bassist with Sly and the
Family Stone. Larry Graham had
recovered
from a life of drugs and violence
through
being born again as a Jehovah's
Witness.
'Larry goes door to door
to tell people the truth about God,'
Prince told me.
'That's why I told
myself, I
need to know
a man like him.
He calls me his baby brother.'
By 2001 Prince
had himself become a Jehovah's
Witness, his new-found faith
reflected in the arcane, for
hardcore-fans-only
album The Rainbow
Children,
which went
some way to laying the
ghosts of dire contract-fillers
such as Come (1995) and Chaos
and Disorder (1996). He had also remarried,
to former Paisley Park assistant
Manuela
Testolini,
and committed himself to a
new life of monogamy.
Gone were the X-rated lyrics
that had dominated so many
of his songs
from
Dirty Mind to
the Black Album.
Instead
the
new record
- released
through NPG - pursued a narrative
about 'the Wise One' and his
struggle with
'the Banished
Ones'.
'When I went back to
the name Prince and released Rainbow
Children, that was the
beginning of
where I am now,'
he told Ebony magazine.
'But you
have to do the work ... That's
what independence is. It's
my catalogue,
my dynasty.'
Three days after the Saturday
Night Live taping we are
at a private
party that
Prince is hosting
at
his palatial
Beverly
Hills home
to launch 3121.
To describe the singer's
stately pleasure dome as
Paisley Park
West would be to undersell
it: as LA pieds-a-terre go,
this
marbled movie-star
crib
takes some beating.
For the
new record he has teamed up with Universal/Island,
just
as he signed
a
one-album deal with Columbia
for 2004's Musicology.
The
onus
is on the world's biggest
major to prove it can keep
the upward
momentum
of Prince's
'comeback'
going.
Asked about
'jumping
aboard the biggest
slavery ship of them all',
he has insisted that
'I got a chance to structure
the agreement the way I
saw fit
as opposed
to
it being the other way
around.'
We are here to get
a first listen to the album and then
to watch
His Nibs
perform
in the comfort
of
his own living
room
- sorry,
make that
ballroom. When the album
comes on we're instantly
launched
into one
of those
patented Prince
jams, dirty and grinding
with deep
funk
bass and
sped-up 'Camille' harmony
voice. Moving through a
smorgasbord of Prince turns,
we jump from
pop to
rock to Latin
to viciously pounding
funk.
The switch from the Latin
croon
of 'Te Amo Corazon' to
the brutal industrial
groove of 'Black Sweat'
is typical.
That last song
is an affirmation of black
pride - a reminder
that when
Musician
magazine's Pablo Guzman,
in an overview
of 'black
rock' from
Hendrix to Rick James,
once asked him if he
was competing with Devo
or the Clash, Prince sneered:
'Maybe, but
those guys can't
sing.'
Unlike Rainbow Children,
3121 seems pitched
at the mainstream
- some
of it is Prince
on autopilot,
but
there are moments
that prove
there's
still fire in the guy's
belly. 'Fury', its keyboard
riffing
redolent of
'1999' or 'Let's
Go Crazy',
kicks like a
mule. 'Satisfied'
is smoochy soul with one
foot in Sly's There's
a Riot Goin'
On.
With the playback concluded,
its creator takes the makeshift
stage
with his
band but stays
off to one
side as protégée
Tamar and foxy twin sisters
Mya and Mandy shake and
shimmy their way through
hooky
originals and infectious
covers.
'Support real musicians,'
Prince mutters after Tamar
has torn
the heart out
of 'When a Man
Loves a Woman'.
'Ain't
a loop
on this
stage.'
Tonight Prince confines
himself to the role of
sideman, occasionally
sauntering out to
fire
off a splintering
guitar solo. Halfway
through the set, Prince's
former drummer Sheila E
arrives to
add timbales
to the sturdy beats supplied
by the impressive
Cora Coleman Dunham.
What
remains awesome after all these years is Prince's
command
of pop
history, that
effortless ability
to reach into a personal
tote-bag
of songs and riffs from
rock, soul, television.
At one
point he teases
us
with the intro to 'When
You Were Mine'; at another
he wittily picks out
the theme to The Beverly Hillbillies.
The guy's
charisma is
undiminished, his pocket-size
physique unchanged in
28 years.
By 3am it's all over.
The Prince who 20 years
ago
would have
jammed until
dawn
thanks us
for coming,
sweeps
out of the
ballroom, and
retires for
the night.
As I exit Prince's
LA Xanadu and head out into
the balmy
California night,
I ask
myself how
much he
actually cares
about being
a superstar again.
Did he strike the Universal
deal because he genuinely
wants to
compete
with
the Kanye Wests
and Mariah
Careys of the
world, or is he actually
quite content - and
certainly wealthy enough - to have
the kind
of funky fun he had
backing up Tamar tonight?
'A strong spirit transcends
rules,' he told me
back in 1999. 'As
RZA of Wu-Tang
said: "I ain't
commercial, it's y'all
who tell me whether
I'm commercial or not".'
Purple reign: 10 essential
albums
Prince (1979)
His debut album, For You,
had appeared a year
earlier, but
songs such
as 'I Wanna
Be Your
Lover' first
suggested the
brilliance
to come.
Dirty Mind (1980)
A collection of demos
that Prince decided
to release
as a proper
album: stripped
back, and
intended
to strip off
your
clothes.
Purple Rain (1984)
His first US number
one. Stylistically
promiscuous,
often filthy,
it peaked at seven
in the UK but sold
18 million
copies worldwide.
Parade (1986)
Just pipping Around
the World in a Day (1985)
and Lovesexy (1988),
this
was
Prince at the
peak of
his powers .
And it featured Kiss.
Sign O'the Times (1987)
But this double-disc
remains the pick
from this dazzlingly
fecund
period.
And at first
the 29-year-old
singer
wanted this to be
a triple-album!!
Diamonds and Pearls
(1991)
The daring had gone,
but half a dozen
pop gems such
as 'Cream'
and the
title track
still shamed
his rivals.
The Black Album (1994)
Prince at his funkiest.
Intended as the follow-up
to Sign
O' the Times,
it was originally
pulled
from release
before
he
belatedly recanted.
Emancipation (1996)
This was a triple
album but stuffed
with filler
material.
Nonetheless,
his happiness
at marriage
to Mayte was
evident for all to
hear.
The Rainbow Children
(2001)
Most likely Prince's
strangest album,
musically adventurous
and concerned
with arcane matters
of faith.
3121 (2006)
Released in March,
this will be Prince's
24th
album in
a career spanning
28 years. Singles
'Te Amo
Corazon' and 'Black
Sweat'
are crackers.
Lovesexy:
his women
From the start of his
career on songs such
as 'Soft
and Wet', Prince'
s
interest in
the fairer
sex
has been evident.
His
rumoured conquests
include pint-sized
Scot Sheena Easton,
drummer
Sheila E,
actress Kim Basinger,
Bangles vocalist
Susanna
Hoffs, future
Baywatch
star Carmen
Electra and even Madonna.
He has also been married
twice,
the first
time
to actress
and former bellydancer
Mayte
Jannell Garcia. The
pair met
when she was 18; then
she became a member
of his
group the NPG
between 1992 and
1996. They
were
married on
Valentine's Day that
year, and
she bore him his first
and only child who
died from
a rare skull
disease
shortly afterwards.
Mayte and Prince
were
divorced
by
June 2000. Prince
went on to marry Manuela
Testolini in 2001,
18 years his junior.