Tag: 1983

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Apollonia 6, 1984

A Million Miles (I Love You)

Prince and Sheila E, circa 1984; © Ebet Roberts/Redferns.

Like its predecessor Vanity 6, the Apollonia 6 album was something of a community effort, with contributions from Prince’s touring bandmates and others from his circle. One of the most notable new additions to that circle was percussionist Sheila Escovedo, better known as “Sheila E.”

Sheila had actually been on Prince’s radar–and he on hers–for years before they ever set foot in the studio together. Her father, Mexican American percussionist Pete Escovedo, first told her about the “young kid… playing all the instruments and producing and writing by himself” in 1977, while he was recording with Santana and Prince was working on his debut album at the Record Plant in Sausalito. The following year, she told Billboard’s Jem Aswad. “I walked into a record store and saw a poster of him and was like, ‘Oh my God, he’s beautiful’” (Aswad “Sheila” 2016).

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Purple Rain, 1984

Take Me with U

© Warner Bros.

Production on Purple Rain officially wrapped in late December 1983; but as the film’s chief composer as well as its star, Prince remained on call through the post-production phase. Just about a month after the end of shooting, his services were once again required: Director Albert Magnoli wanted a song for the sequence where the Kid and Apollonia ride through rural Henderson, Minnesota on his motorcycle. So, at Sunset Sound on January 22, 1984, Prince started work on “Take Me with U.”

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Ice Cream Castle, 1984

Ice Cream Castles (Old and Ignant)

Night falls on Ice Cream Castle; L to R: Jellybean Johnson, Jerome Benton, Paul Peterson, Morris Day, Jesse Johnson, Mark Cardenas, Jerry Hubbard. © Warner Bros.

After the completion of “My Drawers” on January 12, 1984, the Time had five new songs in the can–enough to form the core of their third album. But they were still missing the pièce de résistance. For this, Prince turned once again to a half-finished song by Jesse Johnson: a funky jam called “Old and Ignant” which the guitarist had demoed with singer Morris Day. “Prince kept telling me[,] ‘It’s so cool how you played the bass on the AND instead of the 1,’” Johnson shared on Facebook in 2014. “[G]reat compliment[,] even though at that time I didn’t know what he was talking about” (Johnson March 21).

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Ice Cream Castle, 1984

My Drawers

Morris and Jerome dispose of a "Beautiful Babe" (Sandra Claire Gershman) in an infamous scene from Purple Rain (Albert Magnoli, 1984); © Warner Bros., photo stolen from The Conflicted Film Snob.

The widening gulf between Prince and Morris Day only continued to grow during shooting for Purple Rain–a kind of accidental method acting technique for two old friends cast as bitter rivals. “Prince and I didn’t have to re-create the competitive fire between us,” Day writes in his 2019 memoir. “It was boiling hot. Even when he saw that he needed my humor for the film to work, he stayed on my ass for being a minute late. In one instance when I came on set behind schedule he was beside himself. He actually shoved me. I was about to lay him out when [Time drummer] Jellybean [Johnson] grabbed me just as [bodyguard] Big Chick [Huntsberry] grabbed Prince. The last thing this picture needed was two stars with black eyes” (Day 88).

While it may sound grandiose for Day to describe himself and Prince as equal “stars” of the film, he kind of has a point. Upon Purple Rain’s release in mid-1984, the critical buzz was that Day had stolen the show: The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael, for example, touted him as a “full-fledged young comedian” who “suggests a Richard Pryor without the genius and the complications” (Kael 1984). As a matter of fact, he did have at least some of the complications: In his memoir, Day credits a non-negligible part of his performance to his mounting cocaine addiction. “I’m not advocating drug use for singers or actors,” he writes. “That shit will kill you–and it damn near killed me. But I do have to report that in that dead of winter in 1983, I used my altered state to slip into a role that was both me and not me” (Day 88).

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Ephemera, 1984 Lacunae

Lacuna: The Dawn

Sunset Sound Studio 3, where Prince recorded "The Dawn" on January 7-8, 1984; photo stolen from Wax Poetics (no longer online).

While shooting Purple Rain in the last two months of 1983, Prince had uncharacteristically little time to spend in the studio. But as production wound down in late December, he dove back in, returning to Sunset Sound to work on new material for his manifold projects. On December 27, he recorded the basic track for “The Glamorous Life”–originally intended for Apollonia 6, but later given to (and made famous by) Sheila E. The following day, he added vocals and cut another track that would end up on Sheila’s album, “Next Time Wipe the Lipstick Off Your Collar”; as well as a song yet to be released anywhere, “Blue Love.” The day after that, he completed his first version of “She’s Always in My Hair.” Finally, on December 31, he rang in the New Year with an enigmatic new number, listed on the studio work order as “The Dawn.”

As readers of Duane Tudahl’s Prince and the Purple Rain Era Studio Sessions are no doubt aware, though, the last song Prince recorded in 1983 was not “The Dawn.” It was, in fact, “We Can Fuck,” a title deemed too explicit for an official Sunset Sound document; it would also be known by the euphemisms “Moral Majority” (not to be confused with the actual recording by that title) and, anecdotally, “Sex” (also not to be confused with the 1989 song later released as the B-side for “Scandalous”). But Prince clearly thought the dummy title was too good to waste on an act of self-censorship; because just a week later, on January 7-8, 1984, he recorded a new song bearing the same name.

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