With the completion of “When Doves Cry” in early March 1984, Prince had officially recorded all of the songs in serious contention for Purple Rain. But a minor detail like a finished album had never kept him from plying his craft before, and it wasn’t about to start now; so he continued to toil away in Studio 3 of Sunset Sound. First, on Friday, March 9, he cut a sprightly, synth-driven instrumental called “Paisley Park,” which we’ll discuss in more detail when we get to the much more famous track of the same title. Then, on Saturday, March 17–St. Patrick’s Day– he was back to work on “Possessed”: a licentious funk heater he’d first attempted at his Kiowa Trail home studio two years earlier.

The original version of “Possessed” dates from May 15, 1982, smack in the middle of the sessions for 1999. Like many of Prince’s songs from this period–e.g., “Turn It Up,” “Delirious,” “Horny Toad,” and especially, the transgressive double whammy of “Lust U Always” and “Extraloveable”–it’s the musical monologue of a man afflicted with chronic horniness. The unique selling proposition, in this case, is a dash of Christian demonology, as Prince’s narrator attributes the stirring in his loins to nothing short of infernal influence: “Something’s the matter, baby, I’m going insane,” his multi-tracked vocals quaver. “Something inside of me keeps talkin’ to my brain / Why can’t I stop this satanic lust? / I know I shouldn’t hold you, my body says I must.”

Deep as Prince’s religious convictions were, he wasn’t taking the conceit too seriously. One would expect a song called “Possessed” to crackle with sexual tension, even desperation; instead, the 1982 take has the lazy self-satisfaction of someone who’s climaxed once already and is working up to another go. The groove is relaxed and in the pocket; the vocal delivery playful and sultry, not tortured. By the latter half of the song, Prince has abandoned the demoniac pretense entirely, repeating, “I don’t wanna hold ya / But my body says I must,” only to add, “‘Cause, baby, if I don’t… You know your pussy puts up quite an awful fuss”–then going ahead and spelling out precisely what that means. This isn’t the speaking in tongues of a man plagued by devils; it’s nothing more or less diabolical than a red-blooded 23-year-old horndog spitting game.

In any case–and despite its chef’s kiss of a closing rhythm guitar vamp–“Possessed” wouldn’t make the cut on 1999: If there’s one thing that album didn’t need, it was another nine minutes of dirty talk over brittle electro-funk. But Prince hadn’t exorcised it yet. According to Prince Vault, he worked a few lyrics into his performance of “How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore” in Chicago on December 11, 1982; the following March, writes Duane Tudahl, he gave the song its proper live debut at New York’s Radio City Music Hall (and if anybody has a copy of that handy, you know where to find me).¹ At some point after returning from the 1999 tour in early-to-mid-1983, he pulled the previous year’s recording out for overdubs; but with a surfeit of strong material once again piling up, back on the shelf it went.

His next attempt came that August, during rehearsals at the Warehouse in St. Louis Park. After jamming on the song for a while, Prince decided to try recording a version with the full band, similar to the recent basic tracks for “Let’s Go Crazy” and “Computer Blue.” It’s at this point when, depending on your tolerance for superstition, things started to get a little spooky. “It was during a hot day and the air conditioning was going on full power,” recalled engineer Susan Rogers. “And for some strange reason, they kept blowing fuses, the whole building was shut down.” Eventually, “Somebody made a joke that it was because of the nature of the song, that it was the devil shutting us down, and we all laughed about that until the fuses kept blowing and kept blowing until Prince said, ‘I’m not doing this song, it is not meant to be.’”²

Somebody made a joke that it was because of the nature of the song, that it was the devil shutting us down, and we all laughed about that until the fuses kept blowing and kept blowing until Prince said, ‘I’m not doing this song, it is not meant to be.’

Susan Rogers

Did Prince really believe that Old Scratch himself was meddling with the fuse box? Probably not, though we’ll never know for sure; besides, both Tudahl and Prince Vault believe a full band version of “Possessed” was completed later the same month, presumably without paranormal interference. Still, it’s worth observing that he wouldn’t take another pass at the song until the following March–and when he did, it was with a radically different tone. The 1984 take of “Possessed” keeps the original’s basic premise and earworm synth hook, after borrowing the latter for “Sugar Walls” earlier that year; but its casual lasciviousness has been replaced with nervous energy and, at times, genuine-sounding anguish. Prince opens the song with a strangled moan. A jittering electronic beat kicks in–one of his few programmed on the LinnDrum, rather than its older but less powerful predecessor the LM-1; the combined effects of his Boss guitar pedals give the machine an eerie, swirling sound. As a second, heavier drum pattern drops in, he cries out again, then chokes back a sob. When he sings, his voice is a tremulous stage whisper, no longer the self-regarding smirk of a lothario waiting for us to notice his boner. As he reaches the chorus, his vocal is doubled by a louder, deeper second track: a clever tip of the hat to the old horror movie device of a bedeviled person speaking simultaneously with their own voice and that of the occupying presence.

But why this dramatic change of genre, from softcore porn to horror? The likeliest explanation was Prince’s growing sense of conflict between the spirit and the flesh, which had already begun to emerge in songs like “Love and Sex” from the previous month. A second, more worldly possibility is that he saw in “Possessed” an opportunity to jump onto the contemporary microtrend of “spooky”-themed R&B. The week of March 17, 1984, Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” was Number 6 on the Billboard Hot 100, down from its peak position of Number 4 the previous week; meanwhile, Rockwell’s “Somebody’s Watching Me”–its hook also prominently sung by Jackson–had reached its own peak at Number 3. With Prince having just finished his first real bid for the King of Pop’s crown with “When Doves Cry,” it isn’t too much of a stretch to imagine he’d also try to compete on the Halloween circuit.

If that was Prince’s intention, however, he overshot his target by some distance. “Thriller” was Jackson’s tribute to the campy Vincent Price horrors of the 1950s, while the lyrics of “Somebody’s Watching Me” reference Rod Serling’s early 1960s TV series The Twilight Zone; but “Possessed” has more in common tonally with William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973) than with this lighter fare. The difference is thrown into sharp relief beginning around the two-minute mark, as Prince portrays a startling unraveling of his mental and emotional state. Pounding out a dissonant series of chords on the electric piano, he whimpers, “Does anybody want this body?” with all the angst that had been conspicuously absent from the 1982 take. He returns to the third verse, then cries, “Gosh, I love it when the horns blow… everybody watch me dance!” in a tone that suggests manic compulsion rather than genuine joy. A few bars later, he calls out, “If you relate to the feeling, let me hear you say yeah,” but receives no response: shades of the Kid turning the First Avenue crowd against him during “Computer Blue”/“Darling Nikki.” A chorus of Prince’s multi-tracked voices harmonize over a frantic synth breakdown–the forces of heaven marshaling themselves against Satan’s power. Then the demon voice returns to spell out “P-O-S-S-E-S-S-E-D,” and a stack of synthesizers build to an earth-rending crescendo like an electrified horn of Gabriel.

In the wake of this sonic climax comes a descent into even weirder and more unsettling territory. Shifting into a new chord progression, Prince and his demonic double sing-song a pair of verses not present in the original recording: “Have you ever had the feeling / That someone was tearing you up / Into little bitty pieces / And contemplating selling you for a jigsaw puzzle? / You are like an animal / Running around inside the cage of my heart / Aren’t you due for a vacation, dirty liar?” This haunting recitation is followed by a reprise of the aforementioned synth breakdown–a frenzied St. Vitus’ Dance–while an agitated Prince chants, “Someone’s in my body, someone’s in my body, someone’s in my thoughts!” We’ve all heard stories from Prince fans who grew up in religious families that believed the Purple One was in league with the Evil One; if “Possessed” had come out in this form in 1984, let’s just say those allegations would have been harder to beat.

[Prince] said, ‘Get me a harp[’]… He picked it right up. He’s a natural.

Peggy McCreary

Despite the overall higher creep factor of “Possessed” Mark II, Prince did make one concession to more delicate sensibilities: downgrading the earlier version’s “satanic lust” to a mere “demonic lust,” having apparently decided that the archfiend himself was surplus to his requirements. It wouldn’t take long, though, before he’d backed away from the rest of the lyrics as well. Before the release of 2017’s expanded edition of Purple Rain–and probably after, for that matter–the version of “Possessed” most people had heard was the instrumental mix that plays in the film during the scene where Morris tells Apollonia about his “brass waterbed.” It makes sense that Prince would salvage the track for this purpose; whatever his misgivings about the subject matter, the arrangement was one of his most inventive to date. Of particular note: It may be the only extant recording where we can hear him play the harp.

Prince’s first, abortive attempt at incorporating the classical stringed instrument into his sound had taken place back in January, during an overdub session for “Oliver’s House.” According to Sunset Sound engineer Bill Jackson, Prince had asked him to find him a harp player; so, he’d dutifully booked a musician from the local American Federation of Musicians roster. “About an hour later, this woman shows up in this nice, plush van,” he told Tudahl. “And she is someone who looks like she’d play harp in the church and not in a rock band… So she sits down, and Prince said, ‘I’m going to play this and I’ll just point at you, and I want you to play this [harp type] sound, glisten on the strings.’ So she sat up and the song went by and she does this very strict kind of glistening and Prince says, ‘Let’s try this one more time. Be fluid.’”³ After a few more attempts, Prince “said, ‘Well lady, it ain’t killing me,’” and the harp part was nixed.⁴

Rather than risking a repeat of this experience, for “Possessed” Prince decided to take matters into his own hands–literally. “[H]e said, ‘Get me a harp,’” recalled engineer Peggy McCreary, and she and her colleague Stephen Shelton were tasked with tracking one down to rent. They settled on a “non-pedal Gothic harp”–not “one of those huge [concert] harps,” McCreary explained–and “he went ahead and learned whatever he needed to learn about playing the harp,” Shelton told Tudahl. As McCreary recalled to Musician magazine later in 1984, “He picked it right up. He’s a natural.”⁵ So adept was Prince at the new instrument, in fact, that he also recorded a harp part for a second song–the still-unreleased “Blue Love”–during the same session. Beyond that, who knows what other sick harp jams are still languishing away in the Vault?

The instrumental “movie version” was Prince’s last known attempt at “Possessed” in the studio, but he would grant it a brief afterlife on the concert stage. First, it capped off Prince and the Revolution’s short set at the 4th Annual Minnesota Music Awards on May 21, 1984. Prince “strutted up and down the runway of the Las Vegas-style showroom” at the Carlton Celebrity Dinner Theater in Bloomington, “pranced across the stage, did spins and splits, and stole the evening before it was half over,” wrote Jon Bream for the Minneapolis Star Tribune. After playing both sides of his newly-released single–“When Doves Cry” backed with “17 Days”–“he basked in the darkness, waiting for the fans to insist on more… Then he added an unplanned third song to his steamy twenty-minute set”–“Possessed,” natch–“and disappeared.”⁶

A few weeks later, “Possessed” made another public appearance during the encore of Prince’s 26th birthday show at First Avenue, coming right after the furious live debut of 1983 B-side “Irresistible Bitch” and boasting a “new” intro repurposed from “Love and Sex.” This time, he and the Revolution kept the furious pace of the version recorded at Sunset Sound in March, but paired it with the loose funkiness of the original recording; also of note, Prince’s lust was no longer deemed either “satanic” or “demonic,” but merely–and hilariously–“Italian.” Further distancing himself from the horror elements of the second studio version, after formally announcing the “jam” portion of the song, Prince started up a chant of, “I just love big ol’ soul sisters / When they wear red, ‘big ol’ soul sisters / Give me that head, big ol’ soul sister / 300 pounds, big ol’ soul sisters / I’m in love, big ol’ soul sisters.” Whether this new addition to the song was also demonically inspired is best left to the imagination.

“Possessed” would attain its final form early the following year, in the latter days of the Purple Rain tour. Now fully yoked to “Irresistible Bitch” as a medley, and with the Revolution bolstered by Eric Leeds on saxophone, the song was recast as a full-blown tribute to James Brown, complete with a direct lyrical riff on his 1968 single “Licking Stick – Licking Stick.” So overt was the homage that, when a recording of the March 30, 1985 show at Syracuse, New York’s Carrier Dome was released on home video as Prince and the Revolution Live, the credits dedicated “Possessed” to Brown–as if to affirm that these days, the only malign spirit inhabiting Prince was that of the Godfather of Soul.

Once Prince had filed down its sharper edges, “Possessed” appeared to relax its hold on him. Its last recorded concert appearance was at his 27th birthday show, the “Around the World in a Day Masquerade Ball” at the Prom Center in St. Paul; in a setlist stacked with equally furious funk workouts (e.g., “A Love Bizarre,” “Mutiny,” “Holly Rock,” and the ever-reliable “Irresistible Bitch”), it barely made an impression. But its potent combination of dark subject matter and proximity to Purple Rain ensured it would remain an object of fascination for decades of fans. I first heard the 1982 version as a bootleg, alongside similarly formative recordings like “Moonbeam Levels,” “Purple Music,” and the aforementioned “Extraloveable.” Its presence in this clandestine sub-canon, and absence from the official discography (aside from the Syracuse version on the then-out-of-print Live), invested the song with an added layer of significance, giving it the air of a sealed confession. That it also provided the title for Alex Hahn’s unofficial 2003 biography only enhanced the sense that it was a receptacle for some kind of hidden–i.e., occult–knowledge.

With every studio version of the song now officially released (aside from the 1983 overdubbed version and possibly-aborted Warehouse take), I wonder if “Possessed” holds the same power for younger listeners. In researching for this post, I was struck by how little it seems to figure in the current Prince mythology, warranting only offhand mentions in the two most recently published books on my shelf (Prince: All the Songs by Benoît Clerc and Prince and Purple Rain: 40 Years by Andrea Swensson). Part of me wonders if the slow opening of the Vault since 2017 has made “Possessed” seem less like a transmission from the underworld (literal or otherwise) and more like just another good-to-great outtake. But for me, at least, it still has that old black magic; and if nothing else, its central tension between all-consuming lust and the promise of salvation would serve as the crux of Prince’s oeuvre in the latter half of the 1980s. He may have finally cast out the demon that was “Possessed,” but the turmoil behind the song would prove harder to shake.

(Featured Image: Oliver Reed and Vanessa Redgrave succumb to unholy desires in The Devils, Ken Russell, 1971; © Warner Bros. Thanks to my informal Prince brain trust of C. Liegh McInnis, Harold Pride, and Arthur Turnbull for helping me gut-check a couple of details. Thanks also to sunspot42, a poster from an old Ken Hoffman Music Forums thread I found while researching this post, for drawing the line between “Possessed” and the spooky R&B hits of 1983-84–a smart connection I’d never have thought to make myself!)

Footnotes

1. Duane Tudahl, Prince and the Purple Rain Era Studio Sessions: 1983 and 1984 – Expanded Edition (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), p. 84. ↩︎
2. Ibid., p. 133. ↩︎
3. Ibid., p. 221. ↩︎
4. Ibid., p. 222. ↩︎
5. Ibid., p. 294. ↩︎
6. Jon Bream, Prince: Inside the Purple Reign (Collier Books, 1984), p. 81. ↩︎