777-9311

777-9311

(Featured Image: Dez Dickerson shoots Prince a bemused look, not for the last time, at the 1982 Minnesota Black Music Awards while Brown Mark looks on; photo stolen from Housequake.)

When he wasn’t busy upgrading his home studio and recording his first Top 10 hit, Prince spent the better part of May 1982 soaking up some long-awaited hometown acclaim. On May 12, he attended the inaugural Minnesota Black Music Awards at the Prom Ballroom in St. Paul, where he was honored in the “Rhythm & Blues” category alongside protégés the Time and fellow-travelers including Enterprize, Pierre Lewis and the Lewis Connection, and Sue Ann Carwell. According to biographer Per Nilsen, his acceptance speech was delivered “in such low tones that no one could hear him” (Nilsen 1999 100).

Two weeks later, on May 24, he was back at the Prom–which, the Twin Cities Music Highlights website ominously notes, “refused to turn on the air conditioning”–for the second annual Minnesota Music Awards, sponsored by the alternative weekly City Pages. Prince was nominated, either himself or by proxy, in eight categories: Best 45 or EP (“Controversy,” the Time’s “Get It Up”), Best LP (Controversy, The Time), Best New Act (the Time), Best Electric Guitar (Dez Dickerson), Best Male Vocalist (himself), Best R&B/Funk/Soul/Band (the Time), Best Producer (himself, for Controversy), and Musician of the Year (himself). The night’s big award went to him; this time–maybe because he’d just recorded “Little Red Corvette” four days earlier–he accepted it with a little more swagger, asking, “When do they give the award for best ass?”

Memorable quips aside, Prince didn’t actually perform at the Minnesota Music Awards ceremony; but the Time did, making their first public appearance since the end of the Controversy tour two months earlier. Seeing his side project in action again–and watching them take home the R&B/Funk/Soul award–may have been what prompted Prince to get back to work recording their second album, which he’d left in a state of suspended animation since his sessions at Sunset Sound in January. Those sessions had produced “The Walk,” “Gigolos Get Lonely Too,” and “Wild and Loose,” all of which made it onto the final track list; as well as “Bold Generation” and “Colleen,” which did not. An early version of “Jerk Out,” which the group would ultimately re-record for their 1990 album Pandemonium, was also mooted and discarded around the same time. But it was “777-9311,” recorded in late May or early June at Kiowa Trail, that gave the nascent album its linchpin.

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Patreon Exclusive: Preliminary Thoughts on the New 1999 Reissue

Patreon Exclusive: Preliminary Thoughts on the New 1999 Reissue

(Featured Image: The very shiny cover of the new “Super Deluxe” edition of 1999; © Warner Bros./NPG Records.)

When I saw yesterday’s official announcement of the long-rumored deluxe reissue of 1999–the album, to state the obvious, which I’m currently working through on the blog–I realized that my private goal to get started on Purple Rain by the end of the year had become, to put it mildly, complicated. If I’m going to hit a scheduling snag, though, a compilation with two new discs of previously-unreleased material is pretty much the best possible way for that to happen. If you’ve been reading my posts this year, you already know that 1999 is one of my favorite Prince albums: easily in the top three. So it goes without saying that I am very, very excited by this release, and have already spent money I don’t technically have to get my paws on that frankly excessive 10-LP configuration.

But I’m also a blogger, which means that I am duty-bound to turn this exciting new announcement into content. So, much like I did with the deluxe Purple Rain reissue over two years ago, I’ve written down some quick thoughts on the (very, very long) track list, which you can now read on the d / m / s / r Patreon:

Preliminary Thoughts on the New 1999 Reissue

Speaking of Patreon, thanks to Freek Claassen for becoming my 18th patron this week! If you’re interested in joining Freek and supporting the blog for just a dollar a month (or more!), you can sign up from the link above. It really does help me make time for writing, has massively increased my productivity, and starting this week, it will also allow you to read my song posts a week ahead of when I release them to the public! If you don’t care to become a patron–and seriously, no hard feelings if that’s the case–you can also support the blog by preordering 1999 Deluxe using these Amazon affiliate links for the CD, 2-LP, 2-CD, 4-LP, 5-CD/1-DVD, or 10-LP/1-DVD versions of the set. If you (quite reasonably) don’t want to line Jeff Bezos’ already well-laden pockets, that’s fine too; I appreciate all of you just for reading. Patrons, look forward to “777-9311” by Friday night; everyone else, see you next week!

Little Red Corvette

Little Red Corvette

(Featured Image: Sales brochure for the 1982 Chevrolet Corvette; stolen from the GM Heritage Center.)

Upon his return to Chanhassen from Los Angeles in May of 1982, Prince’s first task was to upgrade the basement studio in his home on Kiowa Trail: replacing the original 16-track console with a new 24-track Ampex MM1200 machine. According to biographer Per Nilsen, this project took about two weeks, overseen by Prince’s go-to home studio tech and engineer, Don Batts. Astonishingly, within hours of the new studio’s setup, Prince had recorded the basic track for one of his most enduring songs, “Little Red Corvette.” “It was incredible to build the studio in that short time and then come up with that tune so quickly,” Batts recalled. But, as he also acknowledged, “That’s how fast it generally went” (Nilsen 1999 100).

Indeed, much about “Corvette” seemed to emerge with almost supernatural ease, as if Prince had merely plucked it from the ether fully-formed. According to legend–and like other 20th-century pop standards, the Beatles’ “Yesterday” and the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction”–the song first came to him in a dream, while he was dozing off in the front seat of keyboardist Lisa Coleman’s 1964 Mercury Montclair Marauder. “I bought this vintage pink Mercury at a car auction,” Coleman told The Guardian in 2008. “It was so bitching-looking that Prince used to borrow it and dent it, which I’d make him feel bad about. He slept in it one time and came up with ‘Little Red Corvette’… even though it was a pink Mercury” (Elan 2008). Prince wrote in his unpublished liner notes for the 1993 compilation The Hits that he “always considered the song a dream because it was written between 3 or 4 catnaps and he was never fully awake” (Dash 2016).

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Press Rewind: “Jack U Off”

Press Rewind: “Jack U Off”

(Featured Image: Prince jacks off at the Palladium in New York, December 1, 1981; photo by Waring Abbott, stolen from WIRED.)

Apparently I’ve found my niche on Jason Breininger’s Press Rewind podcast, because after guesting on his episodes for “Head” and “Sister” in June, I came back to talk about “Jack U Off.” Not much more to say than that, to be honest–just tune in for some decent dad jokes and way more analysis than the average person has ever thought to apply to a goofy rockabilly song about mutual masturbation:

Press Rewind: “Jack U Off”

I also am happy (and a little surprised!) to announce that we’re now 87% of the way to meeting our Patreon goal to bring back the d / m / s / r podcast–so who knows, by this time next month, I could be promoting a new episode of my own! Big thanks to our latest patron, Robin Seewack, for her generous support. If you want to join Robin and the 16 other patrons who are helping me keep d / m / s / r regularly updated, please consider clicking the link below:

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Delirious

Delirious

(Featured Image: Courtship rituals of early ’80s French rocker gang the Del Vikings; photo by Gilles Elie Cohen, stolen from VICE.)

After a string of songs exploring, to various degrees, the darker side of his emotional spectrum, Prince capped off his late April and early May 1982 sessions at Sunset Sound with something light and frothy. Sonically, “Delirious” is cut from the same cloth as most of its predecessors on the album that would become 1999: from the driving Linn LM-1 beat to the sparse, but infectious synth line. Yet where songs like “Automatic” and “Let’s Pretend We’re Married” assemble these building blocks into complex, ever-shifting structures, “Delirious” offers more straightforward pleasures: it’s a simple eight-bar blues, as pure and elemental as Leiber and Stoller’s “Hound Dog” or Jesse Stone’s “Shake, Rattle and Roll.”

With its solidly retro foundation, “Delirious” is arguably the pinnacle of Prince’s brief, but intense infatuation with 1950s rock ‘n’ roll: an “obsession,” according to guitarist Dez Dickerson, that began when the band caught a show by rockabilly revivalists the Stray Cats while in London on the Dirty Mind tour. “We were all blown away with them,” Dickerson told Nashville Scene magazine in 2014, “the look, [singer] Brian Setzer’s amazing sound, just the sheer authenticity of it.” The experience inspired a handful of songs–most famously “Jack U Off” from 1981’s Controversy, but also tracks like the unreleased “You’re All I Want.” Perhaps even more notably, according to Dickerson, it also inspired both him and Prince to style their choppy punk hairdos into Little Richard-style pompadours (Shawhan 2014).

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