Tag: parade tour

Categories
Dream Factory, 1986

Now on Patreon: Witness 4 the Prosecution (Version 1)

Prince by Jeff Katz, circa 1987; © the Prince Estate.

Note: I’m still in the midst of prep work for the next “chapter” of Dance / Music / Sex / Romance, but in the meantime, I thought writing about the recent official release of “Witness 4 the Prosecution” would make a fun warmup. It’s currently available on the Patreon for easy access; I’ll be posting it here a week from today!

As has become tradition for Warner’s posthumous Prince collections, last month’s Sign “O” the Times Super Deluxe announcement was accompanied by the release of a “new” song from the Vault. “Witness 4 the Prosecution (Version 1)” was recorded on March 14, 1986–one of the first recordings at Prince’s new home studio at Galpin Blvd. in Chanhassen, where he had moved in November of 1985. The stripped-down blues-rock number featured Prince on all instruments, including live drums and some decidedly Hendrixian guitar.

Lyrically, “Witness” finds Prince in a metaphorical courtroom, testifying against a “heinous love affair” in which he claims to be “guilty of nothin’ but always wantin’ you to be there.” “Whatever it is you think that I did,” he argues passionately, “You’re wrong, I wouldn’t even dare.” Susan Rogers, Prince’s home studio engineer from 1983–1987, told Per Nilsen’s Uptown fanzine that the song was written “as a direct result” of his tumultuous relationship with Susannah Melvoin, his live-in partner at the time and the twin sister of Revolution guitarist Wendy (Nilsen 1999 214). “He had gone further with her than anybody else,” Rogers recalled. “She was wearing his ring, he loved her and didn’t want to lose her, but he didn’t think that he could carry out his commitment. They were fighting a lot, and it was sort of over nothing” (195).

CONTINUE READING ON PATREON
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
1999, 1982

Automatic

Jill Jones and Lisa Coleman act out Prince's sapphic S&M fantasies in the too-hot-for-TV "Automatic" video; © Warner Bros.

By the beginning of May 1982, Prince had recorded more than enough quality new material to fill a single LP; but he was still only a little more than halfway finished with the album that would become 1999. “I didn’t want to do a double album, but I just kept writing and I’m not one for editing,” he later explained to Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times. “I like a natural flow. I always compare songwriting to a girl walking in the door. You don’t know what she’s going to look like, but all of a sudden she’s there” (Hilburn 1982).

The “girl” that walked in the door of Sunset Sound on May 2 was “Automatic”: the third–and, at nine and a half minutes, longest–of 1999’s extended electro-funk jams. Like its siblings “Let’s Pretend We’re Married” and “D.M.S.R.,” “Automatic” unfolds over a rigid, knocking Linn LM-1 beat and a deceptively simple synthesizer hook–in this case, a sing-song four-note pattern perfectly honed to penetrate the cerebral cortex. But with its lyrical themes of emotion as technology, the song is ultimately closer in spirit to its more introspective neighbor on the album, “Something in the Water (Does Not Compute).” The key difference is that, while “Something in the Water” is all about (perceived) malfunction, “Automatic” finds both pleasure and unease in the machine working exactly as designed.

Continue reading “Automatic”
Categories
1999, 1982

D.M.S.R.

DJ Steve Holbrook in the booth at the Taste Show Lounge in Minneapolis, circa 1983. Note the Time poster on the right. Photo by Charles Chamblis, stolen from the Minnesota Historical Society.

Beginning with his third album in 1980, Prince had been steadily building up a mythology–occasionally bordering on a philosophy–for himself. Dirty Mind had “Uptown,” a clarion call for hedonism that eradicated all racial and sexual boundaries. 1981’s Controversy, of course, had its epic title track, a declaration of selfhood through the negation of fixed identities; as well as “Sexuality,” a return to the themes of “Uptown” with a new quasi-religious fervor. For his fifth album in 1982, he offered something even more blunt and to the point: a musical manifesto based around the four words, “Dance, Music, Sex, Romance.”

Though it was never released as a single–and was, in fact, left off 1999’s original CD release due to space constraints–“D.M.S.R.” holds a privileged position in Prince’s discography. Dance Music Sex Romance was of course the title of Per Nilsen’s 1999 biography and session chronicle, long considered definitive by fans of Prince’s mid-’80s imperial phase. It’s also, obviously, the title of this very blog, because I figured if Per’s not going to use it anymore, somebody’s got to. Its attraction to writers on Prince is self-evident: as Dave Lifton writes in his post on the song for Diffuser’s 365 Prince Songs in a Year series, “Dance. Music. Sex. Romance. Add God into the mixture and you’ve more or less got the formula for every song Prince released in his life” (Lifton 2017). Way back when I first started d / m / s / r in 2016, I posited that it would make a great title for a career-spanning collection like Johnny Cash’s Love, God, Murder, with a disc devoted to each theme.

Continue reading “D.M.S.R.”
Categories
Podcast

Podcast: New Power – A Conversation with Takuya Futaesaku, Author of Words of Prince

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Android | RSS

(Featured Image: Japanese newspaper coverage of Prince’s arrival in the country, September 1986.)

I gave myself a little hiatus from the dance / music / sex / romance podcast after Celebration 2018, but now we’re back in business with guest Takuya Futaesaku, author of the book Words of Prince. Takki and I talk about his book and his experiences as a Prince fan in Japan; it was a pleasure to speak with him, so hopefully it will be a pleasure to listen, too!

You can check out my review of Words of Prince here on the d / m / s / r blog. You can also subscribe to the podcast on your aggregator of choice (iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play), and consider leaving a review to help spread the word. Special thanks this episode go to Crystal for helping me track down the Japanese shows you’ll hear during the podcast! I’ll be back soon, hopefully next week, with another blog post.

Continue reading “Podcast: New Power – A Conversation with Takuya Futaesaku, Author of Words of Prince”