Month: March 2021

Categories
Uncategorized

See You at #1plus1plus1is3 This Weekend!

Photo by Allen Beaulieu

When I shared the 1983 Piano Rehearsal post on social media a few weeks ago, I mentioned that March is going to be a “quality-over-quantity month” on the blog. Well, here’s why: This Sunday, March 28, I will be presenting at the latest in De Angela Duff’s series of academic symposia commemorating Prince album anniversaries. This year’s symposium, the aptly-named #1plus1plus1is3, is a three-for-one: celebrating 20 years of 2001’s The Rainbow Children, 30 years of 1991’s Diamonds and Pearls, and 40 years of 1981’s Controversy.

My presentation–on Allen Beaulieu’s infamous Controversy “shower poster”–will be part of a panel featuring Christopher A. Daniel, Steven G Fullwood, and Edgar Kruize, moderated by C. Liegh McInnis. Presenting on other panels and roundtables are longtime friends of the blog Darling Nisi, Harold Pride, Erica Thompson, Laura Tiebert, Karen Turman, and others; there will also be special guest appearances by Rainbow Children cover artist Cbabi Bayoc, Revolution keyboardist Dr. Fink, longtime NPG Records webmaster/art director Sam Jennings, music video director Scott McCullough, recording artist Nicolay, and photographer Afshin Shahidi. I can’t wait to hear from each and every one.

Like last year’s #DM40GB30 symposium, #1plus1plus1is3 is a virtual symposium–so, no masks/vaccines required–and also 100% free (though the organizers do suggest a small donation to the PRN Alumni Foundation). You can register to attend at the link below:

Free Registration: #1plus1plus1is3

I will, of course, be live-tweeting the event as it happens, and will post a summary of my thoughts early next week. Then, it’ll be back to regularly scheduled programming with what is shaping up to be a very hefty post on “Let’s Go Crazy.” Thank you all for your patience during this quiet month; I hope that the deluge of Prince content coming this weekend, from myself and so many others, will help make up for my radio silence otherwise! Last but not least, thank you to Joseph Swafford for (re-)joining the Patreon last week! There will be plenty more quality and quantity in April.

Categories
Ephemera, 1983 Patreon Exclusives

Patreon Exclusive Bonus Track: 1983 Piano Rehearsal

Photo by Allen Beaulieu; © the Prince Estate.

At this point, it’s customary to marvel at the sheer, staggering amount of music Prince recorded. His finished recordings number in the hundreds, if not the thousands: enough, to borrow a cliché that became ubiquitous after the Vault was cracked open in 2016, to fill an album a year for the next 100 years; or, to put it in more personally meaningful terms, enough to keep me working on this goddamn blog until roughly the end of my natural life. But the mind truly boggles when one considers that those “finished recordings” are only the tip of the iceberg. Beneath the surface are hundreds more hours of rehearsals and rough sketches recorded for private use–only a fraction of which are ever likely to see the light of day.

By this reckoning, the solo piano rehearsal officially released in 2018 as Piano & A Microphone 1983 is not, in itself, remarkable; it’s just one of countless other “work tapes,” as former Revolution keyboardist Lisa Coleman describes them in her liner notes, by an artist for whom making music was an avocation as much as a vocation (Coleman 3). Prince Estate lead archivist Michael Howe told Newsweek that when he found the recording–a standard, consumer-grade TDK SA-60 cassette with two tracks, “Cold Coffee & Cocaine” and “Why the Butterflies,” listed in Prince’s handwriting–it was in a box with “[l]iterally thousands” of other tapes (Schonfeld 2018). But what it lacks in uniqueness, it makes up for in historical importance: capturing, with near-unrivaled intimacy, a snapshot of Prince’s creative process on the very cusp of the career-defining success of Purple Rain.

Continue reading “Patreon Exclusive Bonus Track: 1983 Piano Rehearsal”