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Roundup Posts The Time, 1981

Roundup: The Time, 1981

Cover art for The Time, 1981; photo by Allen Beaulieu, © Warner Bros.

Folks, it’s been a whole-ass seven months since the last roundup post on Dirty Mind–where has the time gone? Dunno, but here at least is where the Time has gone (sorry): five posts on the first album by Prince’s first and arguably most accomplished protégé act. My ranking this time is decidedly anti-climactic, since I basically organized them in ascending order of preference as I wrote. And yes, the fact that I didn’t even devote a full post to “After Hi School” should give you an idea of where it would have ranked if I had. Anyway, here goes:

5. “Girl” Only the second song I’ve written about so far (after “With You”) that I’ve actively disliked–but my dislike is really, really active. Apologies to the track’s defenders, but I don’t know which is more grating to me: Morris’ whiny lead vocal or Prince’s dog-howling-at-the-moon harmonies. I would have gladly taken an extra five and a half minutes of “Get It Up” over this.

4. “Oh, Baby” The best ballad on The Time, purely by default. I actually barely remember this song even after having written 600 words on it. But I guess no memory beats bad memories, so Number 4 it is.

3. “Get It Up” Now we’re talking. The Time’s debut is the definition of an uneven album, with half of its songs among the worst they recorded and the other half among the best; “Get It Up” belongs in the latter. The only reason it isn’t ranked higher is because it’s still missing the spark of unique personality that the remaining two songs achieve; but if there’s a version with just Prince’s vocals locked away in the Vault, I need it yesterday.

2. “The Stick” Maybe the best song about dicks ever to be co-written by a lesbian? Don’t quote me on that, but a great song nevertheless, and a tongue-in-cheek preview of the auto-erotic innuendos Prince would take to the next level with “Little Red Corvette.” Plus, any opportunity for me to reference Kenneth Anger’s Kustom Kar Kommandos earns a special place in my heart.

1. “Cool” Maybe the definitive Time song–and certainly, as we explored, the one with the longest history in Prince’s career. Without “Cool,” Jerome would have never brought Morris that mirror–truly, an alternate timeline too terrifying to contemplate.

Oh, and if you’re wondering what the average length for these Time posts was, it was my lowest ever: a paltry 833 words, barely over half of the average post length for Dirty Mind. I make no promises that I’ll be as brief in the future.

Next week is the third anniversary of d / m / s / r (where has that time gone?), so I’ll hold off on the state-of-the-blog stuff until then. In the meantime, rest assured that I’ll keep plugging away, probably until we’re all dead. Onward to (the rest of) Controversy!

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Ephemera, 1979-1981

Kiss Me Quick

The storied Vault, which looks even more like Prince's vault than I ever dared imagine; photo stolen from WCCO Minneapolis.

As I mentioned last week, one of the things I live for as a Prince fan is the sense that at any moment, some incredible, previously-unheard track could come out of nowhere–even, astonishingly, now that the artist himself is no longer with us. That happened last month with the studio version of “Electric Intercourse” and, more controversially, with “Deliverance”; but it’s happened many times before, often through less legitimate means. In late 2014, for example, bootleggers released “Kiss Me Quick”: a song whose title was familiar thanks to sources like Per Nilsen’s The Vault, but which had never been heard by the general public.

Back when “Kiss Me Quick” was just a title in The Vault, it was widely assumed to have originated from Prince’s Kiowa Trail home studio in 1981; now that we can hear it, however, it couldn’t be a more obvious product of 1979. With its galloping beat, rubbery bassline, and rapidly-ascending chord sequence, it’s certainly Prince’s most conventionally “disco” song this side of “Sexy Dancer.” But in this case, rather than self-consciously attempting to elevate the form, he just goes all-in, crafting a sparkling ideal of a disco track that could easily have made the Dance charts if its creator had bothered to, you know, put it out.

Still, it’s hard to begrudge him for leaving “Kiss Me Quick” in the Vault (or the Closet or Shoebox or whatever he was using in 1979): because, as good a song as it is, it’s not necessarily a great Prince song. It’s too conventional-sounding to have fit on the track listing of his second album; the sexual persona he inhabits is too innocent and demure for the libertinish “Spandex kid” he became in the transitional phase before Dirty Mind. Indeed, it’s likely that “Kiss Me Quick” was never meant to be a “Prince song” at all: according to biographer Matt Thorne, Pepé Willie recalled it being intended for his off-and-on protégée, Sue Ann Carwell (Thorne 2016). It thus makes sense that when Carwell left Prince’s orbit, the song would go back on the shelf, replaced by any number of the endless hits and almost-hits he was cranking out with assembly-line consistency.

And in a way, the thing that makes “Kiss Me Quick” interesting, more than anything else, is the possibility of those other songs. If this little gem could go from a title in a book to actual, audible music, then who knows: in a few short years, we could be hearing “Aces,” or “Machine,” or “Neurotic Lover’s Baby’s Bedroom,” or any other early song that exists now only as an intriguing name and a stub page on Prince Vault. Whatever else we might say about Prince’s handling of his music in life, he certainly left a lot of surprises behind; and the fact that we’re still able to look forward to “new” Prince songs is the one silver lining of his tragic and premature death.

Tomorrow, I’ll be back with the last full episode of my podcast with Jane Clare Jones. Then, next week, it’s on to 1980 and Dirty Mind! See you soon.

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Ephemera, 1979-1981

Hard to Get

The “Spandex kids” backstage at the Roxy Theatre, November 26, 1979. Back row, L to R: Tim Devine, Warner Bros. product manager; Lou Wills, West Coast promotion/Black music marketing; Cortez Thompson, national promotion director/Black music marketing; J.J. Johnson, KDAY Los Angeles radio; Bobby Z. Middle row, L to R: singer Randy Crawford, Prince, Mo Ostin, Matt Fink, Gayle Chapman. Bottom row, L to R: André Cymone and the disembodied head of Dez Dickerson.

By August of 1979, with a new management team, a second album of material, and untold hours of rehearsal under their belts, Prince and his band were ready for a second chance at live performance. Rather than scheduling another tryout date in Minneapolis, however, Warner Bros. staged a pair of private showcases for label reps and media at Leeds Instrument Rentals in Los Angeles. This time, drummer Bobby Z told biographer Per Nilsen, the band was “a hundred times tighter and Prince was a hundred times more confident.” “His aura was just incredible,” Marylou Badeaux, at that time a marketing exec in W.B.’s “Black Music” division, told Nilsen. “I walked out of there feeling I could move mountains for this… I think most Warner Bros. people walked out of there feeling they had encountered something very special” (Nilsen 1999 59).

Along with the increased confidence and polish came a whole new look for the group. The ramshackle, aesthetically mismatched crew from the Capri Theatre in January had “morphed into the Spandex kids,” guitarist Dez Dickerson recalled to the Minneapolis Star Tribune. “We were trying to dress as outrageously and outlandishly as we could” (Star Tribune 2004). Their new, cohesive image–glam rock meets porn chic–was calculated and deliberate; early in her tenure with the band, keyboardist Gayle Chapman remembered coming to Prince’s house and seeing him “videoing a woman modeling in a leather jacket with her breasts hanging out. He was working out how things came across on screen and starting to blur the line between his reality and his fantasy” (Azhar 14). This transformation was reflected in the music, with a much heavier emphasis on the “rock” side of Prince’s funk-rock equation.

The missing link, for both approach and execution, was a 12-day, full-band recording session in July 1979 at Mountain Ears Sound Studios in Boulder, Colorado. It’s unclear exactly what Prince intended to accomplish with the project, which circulates under the name “the Rebels.” Curiously, Jay Marciano, the Colorado concert promoter who recommended the studio, recalled the idea originating with one of Prince’s handlers, Perry Jones: “Perry wanted to pull more rock-oriented music out of him,” Marciano told Nilsen, and “wanted to get Prince away from Warner’s influence. He said, ‘I need to find a place that will give me some studio time and then, if it is any good, I’ll take the tapes to WB and get them to pay for the sessions” (Nilsen 1999 58). But Prince had been toying with the idea of cutting a side record with his backing musicians for almost as long as he’d had backing musicians in the first place. “I really like working with this band,” he told Martin Keller of the Twin Cities Reader soon after their debut, “and I’m gonna do an album with them where everyone writes and I’m just there playing with them” (Keller 1979). 

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Prince, 1979

Still Waiting

Sam Cooke by Michael Ochs, 1959.

In late 1979, an interview with Prince appeared in the African American teen magazine Right On! The interviewer, Cynthia Horner, was one of the up-and-coming artist’s earliest champions in the media, yet even she was not spared the usual quirks of his interactions with the press; to her growing exasperation, Prince spent most of the article deflecting her questions with flirtatious evasions. But then, just as Horner seemed about to give up and asked him the hoariest teen-mag question in the book–does he have a girlfriend?–Prince gave a response that feels disarmingly real: “I had one but she left me. I wrote some songs about it on the album.” At her expression of disbelief–“Do you know how many young ladies would love to fill her shoes?”–he replied,  “That’s why she left me” (Horner 1979).

It’s perhaps a tribute to Prince’s growing facility as a pop songwriter that I never suspected the songs of love and heartbreak on his second album were inspired by real women; they feel much too universal in their vagueness, like the dozens of songs for imaginary girls by Lennon and McCartney. Yet, Prince suggested to Horner–and the various biographies agree–that several of his songs from around this period were inspired by his early girlfriend, Kim Upsher. Upsher, you might recall, was probably Prince’s first “serious” relationship; when he moved into his house on France Avenue, she was the one who helped decorate and made it feel like a home, rather than a glorified studio space. Due to the deliberate fudging of Prince’s age around this time, she’s often assumed to have been his high-school sweetheart; biographers Alex Hahn and Laura Tiebert, however, have clarified that they didn’t begin dating until around the time he signed to Warner Bros.–though he did apparently nurse an intense crush for her in high school, while she was seeing his close friend Paul Mitchell (Hahn 2017).

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Prince, 1979

Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?

Prince and André Cymone, 1980; photo by James Tarver, stolen from prince.org.

Like its predecessor, Prince’s second album was recorded almost entirely solo, with the singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist serving as his own producer. Also like the first album, though, the liner note credit “Produced, Arranged, Composed and Performed by Prince” was a slight exaggeration. Just as he had on the For You sessions, Prince’s bassist and longtime musical partner André Cymone accompanied him to California–along with his second most veteran bandmate, drummer Bobby Z. And while their full contributions to the album are unclear–they’re listed in the liner notes as “Heaven-sent Helpers,” whatever that means–it does seem that André played a significant role in shaping one song in particular: the second track–and, in early 1980, second single–“Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?”

Years later, after André had left the band and revealed his contributions to this and other Prince songs, his old friend did give him some credit–albeit with his usual mix of deflection and pique. “He sang a small harmony part that you really couldn’t hear,” Prince told Rolling Stone’s Neal Karlen, but a “typo” kept him from receiving any credit. “I tried to explain that to him, but when you’re on the way up, there’s no explaining too much of anything. People will think what they want to” (Karlen 1985). Charles Smith, Prince’s and André’s former Grand Central bandmate, offered an alternative explanation: “Prince started shaping the second album when he moved to the house on France Avenue,” he told Per Nilsen. “I watched Prince and André do the work for the album, ‘Bambi,’ ‘Still Waiting,’ and all that stuff. André came up with the end of ‘Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?’ and a lot of the bass lines were André’s” (Nilsen 1999 54-55).

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