Tag: delirious

Onedayi’mgonnabesomebody

Onedayi’mgonnabesomebody

(Featured Image: Lil’ Morris Day and Prince Nelson, in a still presumably from the cancelled Morris Babies TV series; photo stolen from Morris Day and the Time’s Facebook.)

The first four tracks recorded for the Time’s second album were all good to great: “The Walk,” “Gigolos Get Lonely Too,” “Wild and Loose,” and “777-9311,” each a highlight of the group’s overall catalogue. So, to truly live up to the legacy of their 1981 debut, they were long overdue for some filler. Recorded around the same time as “777-9311” in late Spring 1982, “Onedayi’mgonnabesomebody” was exactly that: a slight, palate-cleansing trifle to fill out the first side of the album.

But it isn’t just its throwaway nature that makes this track feel like a callback to the early days of the Time. It’s also the sound: retro rock’n’roll with a dash of New Wave kitsch, not dissimilar from one of Prince’s formative influences for the group, the BusBoys–and, of course, more than a little reminiscent of his own contemporary material. In particular, “Oneday”’s squiggly main synth line recalls “Horny Toad”–another song recorded around the same time and later released as the B-side for “Delirious”–with all of the rough edges and, frankly, most of the appeal buffed away.

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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!

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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Press Rewind: “Ronnie, Talk to Russia”

Press Rewind: “Ronnie, Talk to Russia”

(Featured Image: Back cover of Controversy, 1981; © Warner Bros.)

Over in these parts, I’m still focusing on my written explorations of Prince’s recorded catalogue; but I’ve kept my hand in the podcast game thanks to Jason Breininger’s Press Rewind podcast. This time, we’re talking about what I think may still be my least favorite song on the Controversy album–though I will say it’s an interesting discussion nevertheless:

Press Rewind: “Ronnie, Talk to Russia”

If you’re someone who misses the days when d / m / s / r had its own semi- regular podcast, remember that that’s my current stretch goal for the Patreon and we’re about halfway there–so, if you’d like to see me start recording monthly podcasts again and you haven’t become a supporter, please do consider tossing a buck a month my way. This will not only allow me to justify the hours spent recording and (especially) editing these podcasts, but it will also help me to pay for the software that allows me to edit in all that legally-dubious music:

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If It’ll Make U Happy

If It’ll Make U Happy

(Featured Image: Prince and Dez Dickerson onstage at First Avenue, March 8, 1982; photo by Michael Reiter, available for purchase on Etsy.)

The majority of Prince’s sessions at Sunset Sound, like the majority of his studio sessions in general, were solo affairs; but while recording at Sunset in early April 1982, he was accompanied by his touring guitarist Dez Dickerson. Dez, as noted previously, played drums on the Vanity 6 track “3 x 2 = 6,” recorded on April 5. He was probably also in the studio for the tracking of “Extraloveable” on April 3: at one point, Prince can be heard taunting, “Hey Dez, don’t you like my band?”–an aside that has been widely interpreted as referring to Dickerson’s departure from the group the following year, but was more likely a simple case of good-natured, competitive ribbing. Last but not least, Dickerson’s backing vocals are clearly audible on “If It’ll Make U Happy,” recorded on April 6.

Between these sessions, the guitarist later recalled, Prince also gave him studio time to work on some of his own music (Dickerson 201). This was almost certainly meant as an olive branch, as tensions had emerged between the two bandmates. Like André Cymone before him, Dickerson had no intention of spending his entire career as a sideman; and, like Gayle Chapman, he’d begun to find that Prince’s sexual boundary-pushing was at odds with his own beliefs.

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