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Ephemera, 1983

Father’s Song

The Prince Rogers Trio, circa 1940s; John L. Nelson on piano, Lawrence Griffin on saxophone, and Fred Anderson (father of André Cymone) on bass. Photo by John F. Glanton, stolen from the Hennepin County Library.

Director Albert Magnoli liked to call Purple Rain an “emotional biography” of Prince: An impressionistic mélange of the star’s pet themes, anxieties, and obsessions, true to its subject in spirit if not in every detail. And of all the themes, anxieties, and obsessions Prince brought to the film, none loomed larger than his father, John L. Nelson.

John Lewis Nelson was born on June 29, 1916 in Cotton Valley, Webster Parish, Louisiana, the youngest child of farmers Clarence Allen and Carrie Nelson (née Jenkins). Not long after his birth, John’s parents divorced; the reason, according to biographers Alex Hahn and Laura Tiebert, was because Clarence had become involved with another woman (Hahn 2017 50). By the 1920 census, writes historian Kristen Zschomler, Carrie was remarried to a man named Charles Ikner and living in Webster Parish with three-year-old John and his siblings: James (born 1915), Ruby (born 1908), Olivia (born 1904), and Gertrude (born 1903) (Zschomler 9). By 1930, she was widowed, and had traveled north with Gertrude, Ruby, and their husbands and children to a rented home in Southside Minneapolis, near where Olivia had settled with her husband, Edward Mason Lewis. The now-teenaged John likely followed between 1930 and 1935 (10).

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Ice Cream Castle, 1984

Jungle Love

Maureen O'Sullivan and Johnny Weissmuller in Tarzan the Ape Man (W.S. Van Dyke, 1932); © Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Prince, as was his wont, had already moved on to his next phase by the time the 1999 tour entered its final stretch in March 1983. The centerpiece of his master plan was, of course, the untitled film project that would become Purple Rain; but he also intended to cement his musical dominance with follow-up albums by the 1999-era “Triple Threat” of himself, the Time, and Vanity 6. Much as he had a year before, he focused on the Time first: booking a few days at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles before playing the Universal Amphitheatre and San Diego Sports Arena on March 28 and 29, respectively.

The Time’s first two albums had been cut primarily by Prince and singer/studio drummer Morris Day alone; for the new project, however, Prince allowed the rest of the band to take on a more active role. “They played on a lot of the stuff,” former Sunset Sound engineer Peggy McCreary told sessionographer Duane Tudahl–though Prince remained the unquestioned “leader of what was going on” (Tudahl 2018 64). The Artist Formerly Known as Jamie Starr was even willing to share songwriting duties, basing “Jungle Love” on an instrumental demo by guitarist Jesse Johnson.

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1999, 1982

Delirious

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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Podcast

Podcast: Nothing Compares – A Conversation with Marylou Badeaux, Author of Moments… Remembering Prince

Marylou and Prince, 1979; photo from Moments... Remembering Prince by Marylou Badeaux.

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This is the last d / m / s / r podcast of 2017, and I have to say we’re going out on a high note. It was my honor and privilege to speak with Marylou Badeaux: a former Warner Bros. executive who worked closely with Prince for his 17 years with the label, and the author of the newly-released memoir Moments… Remembering Prince. You can probably tell that I was a little nervous at the beginning of the conversation, but we warmed up quickly and had a great chat about Prince and his relationship with the label that, for better or worse, defined his era of peak artistic achievement.

Now, I have one last item of business to conduct before the podcast goes on holiday break. There are actually two winners of my contest for iTunes and Stitcher reviews–one for each platform. The first is Louise Be, for her eloquent and incredibly flattering review on Stitcher; the second is Mafalda Taborda, who not only left a very nice review on iTunes, but was also the first person to review the podcast on any platform. Louise and Mafalda, if you’re reading and/or listening to this, please email me and let me know which of the two recent Prince books you would prefer me to send: Marylou’s Moments, or Duane Tudahl’s Prince and the Purple Rain Era Studio Sessions. And for everyone else who participated–and those who didn’t!–thanks for making the first year of the dance / music / sex / romance podcast such a pleasure to put together. I can’t wait to see where things go in 2018.

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Podcast

Podcast: Vous êtes très belle – Joni Todd and Karen Turman on the Salford Purple Reign Conference

Prince in French Dandy Mode, Under the Cherry Moon, 1986; © Warner Bros.

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Just under two weeks ago, I had the pleasure of speaking with two more presenters from the University of Salford’s interdisciplinary Prince conference: Joni Todd and Karen Turman, who you may know by reputation as the “esoteric French panel.” But if all that sounds too highbrow, don’t worry; we mostly talked about Prince’s impeccable fashion sense and uncompromising artistic vision, just with a lot of references to Charles Baudelaire and Marcel Duchamp. It’s probably the only Prince podcast you’ll hear that mentions both “Pussy Control” and Walter Benjamin, and that’s the best endorsement I can give.

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