Tag: elvis presley

Categories
Podcast

Podcast: All the Critics Love U – A Conversation with Jack Riedy, Author of Electric Word Life

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Android | Pandora | iHeartRadio | Stitcher | RSS

As promised/threatened, we’re back to a monthly schedule on the D / M / S / R podcast! For this month’s episode, it was my pleasure to speak to music writer Jack Riedy (Pitchfork, GQ, VIBE) about his new book Electric Word Life: Writing on Prince 2016-2021. It was a really fun conversation, running through each of the pieces collected in his book and covering everything from Prince’s influence on Chicago house to the degree to which the Batman album goes (spoiler: it’s hard). Check it out, and if you’re so inclined, get yourself a copy of Jack’s book! It’s a great read and highly recommended.

By the way, I caught this too late to mention it “on air,” but thanks so much to cittalente for their review on Apple Podcasts! If you’re interested in reviewing D / M / S / R on your podcast service of choice, please do, and I will read it on the next episode–which, if all goes to plan, should be dropping next month.

Continue reading “Podcast: All the Critics Love U – A Conversation with Jack Riedy, Author of Electric Word Life”
Categories
Purple Rain, 1984

Baby I’m a Star

1999 tour, circa 1983; photo stolen from Prince Off the Record.

“The MUSIC segues into a fierce BEAT.
The CROWD lets out a ROAR! Prince
strips off his guitar, streaks center-
stage. The Band launches into ‘Baby,
I’m A Star.’

“…And the CROWD laughing, dancing,
shouting and loving. The CLUB is ALIVE!

“And the MUSIC continues…forever…”

Draft screenplay for Purple Rain by Albert Magnoli, 1983

In the spring of 1983, Prince’s contract with managers Cavallo, Ruffalo, and Fargnoli was up for renewal. They had, on the face of it, little reason to worry: the 1999 tour was selling out arenas, “Little Red Corvette” was in the Top 10 of the pop charts, and 1999 was well on its way to Platinum certification by the RIAA. By the end of April, Prince would make the cover of Rolling Stone: a coveted opportunity for which his managers had netted a Richard Avedon photo shoot without granting an interview. “I thought we did an incredible job, we had a creative relationship, I’m sure he’s gonna sign another contract,” Bob Cavallo later told music journalist Alan Light. But Prince sent his main handler, Steve Fargnoli, back to Cavallo with a surprising ultimatum: “he won’t sign with us again unless we get him a movie” (Light 51).

Continue reading “Baby I’m a Star”
Categories
Uncategorized

Press Rewind: “Horny Toad”

An actual horny toad, a.k.a. the Texas Horned Lizard; photo stolen from the Dallas News.

I was focused on finishing up my “Lady Cab Driver” post when it came out last week, so I’m a little late in sharing my latest appearance on Jason Breininger’s Press Rewind podcast, talking about one of my biggest guilty pleasure B-sides from 1982:

Press Rewind: “Horny Toad”

And speaking of 1982, there are only two official posts left before d / m / s / r leaves that year behind and moves into 1983! I was initially planning to go straight into “1999,” but I decided to take a short detour into “No Call U” first: partly because I already know “1999” is going to be a huge, time-consuming post to write, and partly because I think it will end up making a little more “narrative” sense. So you can expect “No Call U” at the end of the week on Patreon/late next week on the blog, with “1999” following at the beginning of February. I also may try and sneak a Patreon exclusive on one of the 1999 Super Deluxe bonus tracks in there, too. We’ll be starting in on the Purple Rain era before you know it! I’ve also got a few ideas cooking for the podcast relaunch, so stay tuned for that. Later!

Categories
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).

Continue reading “Delirious”
Categories
Ephemera, 1975-1976

If You See Me (Do Yourself a Favor)

94 East, circa 1975, from the cover of their 2013 7" release of "If You See Me"; Pepé Willie is second from right. © Numero Group.

Visit the website of Pepé Music Inc. and you’ll find an entire subpage dedicated to what they call the “Prince Connection.” “We want to set the record straight!” the copy reads, and proceeds to outline the “enormous contributions” made by a man named Pepé Willie to Prince’s success: presenting its claims alongside a large and byzantine flow chart that purports to illustrate “the intimate involvement” between Willie and Prince, but, to be frank, only manages to dramatize a confusing intersection of music industry and family relationships. Yet the “Prince Connection” page also makes a trenchant point about its subject–one that will become something of a recurring theme in the early years of Prince’s musical progression. “No one,” the copy declares, “makes it completely on their own!”

Willie’s own career is a testament to that adage. He made his entrée into the music industry via his uncle, Clarence Collins, a founding member of the Brooklyn Rhythm & Blues vocal group Little Anthony and the Imperials. During his teen years in the 1960s, he worked as a valet and road manager for the Imperials in New York and Las Vegas, where he encountered the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, and Elvis Presley; he also learned a little about the business and craft of songwriting. After a stint in the armed forces, Willie then moved out to Minneapolis in the early 1970s and married a woman named Shauntel Mandeville–who happened to be the first cousin of Prince Rogers Nelson.

Continue reading “If You See Me (Do Yourself a Favor)”