I just thought I'd share these 5 Rolling Stone interviews of Prince I found from throughout his career. They're really interesting!

#1: Dirty Mind Era


WILL THE LITTLE GIRLS UNDERSTAND?
By Bill Adler
February 19, 1981

Snaking out from the wings toward center stage at the Ritz, prancing like a pony with his hands on his hips and then flinging a clorine kick with a coquettish toss of his head, Prince is androgyny personified. Slender and doe-eyed, with a faint pubescent mustache, he is bare-chested beneath a gray, hip-length Edwardian jacket. There's a raffish red scarf at this neck, and he's wearing tight black bikini briefs, thigh-high black leg-warmers and black-fringed go-go boots. With his racially and sexually mixed five-piece band churning out the terse rhythms of Sexy Dancer behind him, the effect is at once truly sexy and more than a little disorienting , and his breathy falsetto only adds to his ambiguity -- for sheer girlish vulnerability, there's no one around to touch him: not Michael Jackson, not even fourteen-year-old soul songbird Stacy Lattisaw. At age twenty, Prince may be the unlikeliest rock star, black or white, in recent memory -- but a star he definitely is.

As quickly becomes apparent, Prince's lyrics bear little relation to standard AM radio floss. In addition to bald sexual come-ons and twisted love plaints, he champions the need for independence and self-expression. And one song, Uptown, is, among other things, an antiwar chant. Further complicating the proceedings are the heavy-metal moans Prince wrenches out of his guitar and the punchy dance-rock rhythms of his band (bassist Andre Cymone, guitarist Dez Dickerson, keyboardists Lisa Coleman and Dr. Fink and drummer Bobby Z.), all of whom are longtime cohorts from Prince's hometown -- Minneapolis, of all places.

"I grew up on the borderline," Prince says after the show. "I had a bunch of white friends, and I had a bunch of black friends. I never grew up in any one particular culture." The son of a half-black father and an Italian mother who divorced when he was seven, Prince pretty much raised himself from the age of twelve, when he formed his first band. Oddly, he claims that the normalcy and remoteness of Minneapolis provided just artistic nourishment he needed.

"We basically got all the new music and dances three months late, so I just decided that I was gonna do my own thing. Otherwise, when we did split Minneapolis, we were gonna be way behind and dated. The white radio stations were mostly country, and the one black radio station was really boring to me. For that matter, I didn't really have a record player when I was growing up, and I never got a chance to check out Hendrix and the rest of them because they were dead by the time I was really getting serious. I didn't even start playing guitar until 1974."

With his taste for outlandish clothes and his "lunatic" friends, Prince says he "took a lot of heat all the time. People would say something about our clothes or the way we looked or who we were with, and we'd end up fighting. I was a very good fighter," he says with a soft, shy laugh. "I never lost. I don't know if I fight fair, but I go for it. That's what Uptown is about -- we do whatever we want, and those who cannot deal with it have a problem within themselves."

Prince has written, arranged, performed and produced three albums to date (For You, Prince and Dirty Mind), all presenting the same unique persona. Appearances to the contrary, though, he says he's not gay, and he has a standard rebuff for overenthusiastic male fans: "I'm not about that; we can be friends, but that's as far as it goes. My sexual preferences really aren't any of their business. A Penthouse "Pet of the Month" centerfold laid out on a nearby table silently underscores his point.

It took Prince six months alone in the studio to concoct his 1978 debut album, because, he says, "I was younger then." Prince required six weeks. He controlled the making of both records, but notes that they were "overseen" by record company and management representatives. Dirty Mind, however, was made in isolation in Minneapolis. "Nobody knew what was going on, and I became totally engulfed in it," he says. "It really felt like me for once."

The result of this increased freedom was a collection of songs celebrating incest (Sister) and oral sex (Head) in language raw enough to merit a warning sticker on the album's cover. "When I brought it to the record company it shocked a lot of people," he says. "But they didn't ask me to go back and change anything, and I'm real grateful. Anyway, I wasn't being deliberately provocative. I was being deliberately me."

Obviously, judging by the polished eclecticism of Dirty Mind, being himself is the best course. "I ran away from home when I was twelve," Prince says. "I've changed address in Minneapolis thirty-two times, and there was a great deal of loneliness. But when I think about it, I know I'm here for a purpose, and I don't worry about it so much."
[Edited 5/27/07 14:18pm]

#2: Around The World In A Day Era


PRINCE TALKS
by Neal Karlen
April 26, 1985

John Nelson turns sixty-nine today, and all the semiretired piano man wants for his birthday is to shoot some pool with his firstborn son. "He's real handy with a cue," says Prince, laughing, as he threads his old white T-bird through his old black neighborhood toward his old man's house. "He's so cool. The old man knows what time it is."

Hard time is how life has traditionally been clocked in North Minneapolis; this is the place Time forgot twelve years ago when the magazine's cover trumpeted "The Good Life in Minnesota", alongside a picture of Governor Wendell Anderson holding up a walleye. Though tame and middle-class by Watts and Roxbury standards, the North Side offers some of the few mean streets in town.

The old sights bring out more Babbitt than Badass is Prince as he leads a leisurely tour down the main streets of his inner-city Gopher Prairie. He cruises slowly, respectfully: stopping completely at red lights, flicking on his turn signal even when no one's at an intersection. Gone is the wary Kung Fu Grasshopper voice with which Prince whispers when meeting strangers or accepting Academy Awards. Cruising peacefully with the window down, he's proof in a paisley jump suit that you can always go home again, especially if you never really left town.

Tooling through the neighborhood, Prince speaks matter-of-factly of why he toyed with early interviewers about his father and mother, their divorce and his adolescent wanderings between the homes of his parents, friends and relatives. "I used to tease a lot of journalists early on," he says, "because I wanted them to concentrate on the music and not so much on me coming from a broken home. I really didn't think that was important. What was important was what came out of my system that particular day. I don't live in the past. I don't play my old records for that reason. I make a statement, then move on to the next."

The early facts, for the neo-Freudians: John Nelson, leader of the Prince Rogers jazz trio, knew Mattie Shaw from North Side community dances. A singer sixteen years John's junior, Mattie bore traces of Billie Holiday in her pipes and more than a trace of Indian and Caucasian in her blood. She joined the Prince Rogers trio, sang for a few years around town, married John Nelson and dropped out of the group. She nicknamed her husband after the band; the son who came in 1958 got the nickname on his birth certificate. At home and on the street, the kid was "Skipper." Mattie and John broke up ten years later, and Prince began his domestic shuttle.

"That's where my mom lives," he says nonchalantly, nodding toward a neatly trimmed house and lawn. "My parents live very close by each other, but they don't talk. My mom's the wild side of me; she's like that all the time. My dad's real serene; it takes the music to get him going. My father and me, we're one and the same." A wry laugh. "He's a little sick, just like I am."

Most of North Minneapolis has gone outside this Sunday afternoon to feel summer, that two-week season, locals joke, between winter and road construction. During this scenic tour through the neighborhood, the memories start popping faster. The T-Bird turns left at a wooden two-story church whose steps are lined with bridesmaids in bonnets and ushers in tuxedos hurling rice up at a beaming couple framed in the door. "That was the church I went to growing up," says Prince. "I wonder who's getting married." A fat little kid waves, and Prince waves back.

"Just all kinds of things here," he goes on, turning right. "There was a school right there, John Hay. That's where I went to elementary school," he says, pointing out a field of black tar sprouting a handful of bent metal basketball rims. "And that's where my cousin lives. I used to play there every day when I was twelve, on these streets, football up and down this block. That's his father out there on the lawn."

These lawns are where Prince the adolescent would also amuse his friends with expert imitations of pro wrestlers Mad Dog Vachon and the Crusher. To amuse himself, he learned how to play a couple dozen instruments. At thirteen, he formed Grand Central, his first band, with some high school friends. Grand Central often traveled to local hotels and gyms to band-battle with their black competition: Cohesion, from the derided "bourgeois" South Side, and Flyte Time, which, with the addition of Morris Day, would later evolve into the Time.

Prince is fiddling with the tape deck inside the T-Bird. On low volume comes his unreleased Old Friends 4 Sale, an arrow-to-the-heart rock ballad about trust and loss. Unlike Positively 4th Street -- which Bob Dylan reputedly named after a nearby Minneapolis block -- the lyrics are sad, not bitter. "I don't know too much about Dylan," says Prince, "but I respect him a lot. All Along the Watchtower is my favorite of his. I heard it first from Jimi Hendrix."

Old Friends 4 Sale ends, and on comes Strange Relationship, an as-yet-unreleased dance tune. "Is it too much?" asks Prince about playing his own songs in his own car. "Not long ago I was driving around L.A. with [a well-known rock star], and all he did was play his own stuff over and over. If it gets too much, just tell me."

He turns onto Plymouth, the North Side's main strip. When Martin Luther King got shot, it was Plymouth Avenue that burned. "We used to go to that McDonald's there," he says. "I didn't have any money, so I'd just stand outside there and smell stuff. Poverty makes people angry, brings out their worst side. I was very bitter when I was young. I was insecure and I'd attack anybody. I couldn't keep a girlfriend for two weeks. We'd argue about anything."

Across the street from McDonald's, Prince spies a smaller landmark. He points to a vacant corner phone booth and remembers a teenage fight with a strict and unforgiving father. "That's where I called my dad and begged him to take me back after he kicked me out," he begins softly. "He said no, so I called my sister and asked her to ask him. So she did, and afterward told me that all I had to do was call him back, tell him I was sorry, and he's take me back. So I did, and he still said no. I sat crying at that phone booth for two hours. That's the last time I cried."

In the years between that phone-booth breakdown and today's pool game came forgiveness. Says Prince, "Once I made it, got my first record contract, got my name on a piece of paper and a little money in my pocket, I was able to forgive. Once I was eating every day, I became a much nicer person." But it took many more years for the son to understand what a jazzman father needed to survive. Prince figured it out when he moved into his purple house.

"I can be upstairs at the piano, and Randi [his cook] can come in," he says. "Her footsteps will be in a different time, and it's real weird when you hear something that's a totally different rhythm than what you're playing. A lot of times that's mistaken for conceit or not having a heart. But it's not. And my dad's the same way, and that's why it was hard for him to live with anybody. I didn't realize that until recently. When he was working or thinking, he had a private pulse going constantly inside him. I don't know, your bloodstream beats differently."

Prince pulls the T-Bird into an alley behind a street of neat frame houses, stops behind a wooden one-car garage and rolls down the window. Relaxing against a tree is a man who looks like Cab Calloway. Dressed in a crisp white suit, collar and tie, a trim and smiling John Nelson adjusts his best cuff links and waves. "Happy birthday," says the son. "Thanks," says the father, laughing. Nelson says he's not even allowing himself a piece of cake on his birthday. "No, not this year," he says with a shake of the head. Pointing at his son, Nelson continues, "I'm trying to take off ten pounds I put on while visiting him in Los Angeles. He eats like I want to eat, but exercises, which I certainly don't."

Father then asks son if maybe he should drive himself to the pool game so he won't have to be hauled all the way back afterward. Prince says okay, and Nelson, chuckling, says to the stranger, "Hey, let me show you what I got for my birthday two years ago." He goes over to the garage and gives a tug on the door handle. Squeezed inside is a customized deep-purple BMW. On the rear seat is a copy of Prince's latest LP, Around The World In A Day. While the old man gingerly back the car out, Prince smiles. "He never drives that thing. He's afraid it's going to get dented." Looking at his own white T-Bird, Prince goes on: "He's always been that way. My father gave me this a few years ago. He bought it new in 1966. There were only 22,000 miles on it when I got it."

An ignition turns. "Wait," calls Prince, remembering something. He grabs a tape off the T-Bird seat and yells to his father, "I got something for you to listen to. Lisa [Coleman] and Wendy [Melvoin] have been working on these in L.A." Prince throws the tape, which the two female members of his band have mixed, and his father catches it with one hand. Nelson nods okay and pulls his car behind his son's in the alley. Closely tailing Prince through North Minneapolis, he waves and smiles whenever we look back. It's impossible to believe that the gun-toting geezer in Purple Rain was modeled after John Nelson.

"That stuff about my dad was part of [director/cowriter] Al Magnoli's story," Prince explains. "We used parts of my past and present to make the story pop more, but it was a story. My dad wouldn't have nothing to do with guns. He never swore, still doesn't, and never drinks." Prince looks in his rearview mirror at the car tailing him. "He don't look 69, do he? He's so cool. He's got girlfriends, lots of 'em." Prince drives alongside two black kids walking their bikes. "Hey, Prince," says one casually. "Hey," says the driver with a nod, "how you doing?"

Passing by old neighbors watering their lawns and shooting hoops, the North Side's favorite son talks about his hometown. "I wouldn't move, just cuz I like it here so much. I can go out and not get jumped on. It feels good not to be hassled when I dance, which I do a lot. It's not a think of everybody saying, 'Whoa, who's out with who here?' while photographers flash their bulbs in your face."

Nearing the turnoff that leads from Minneapolis to suburban Eden Prairie, Prince flips in another tape and peeks in the rearview mirror. John Nelson is still right behind. "It's real hard for my father to show emotion," says Prince, heading onto the highway. "He never says, 'I love you,' and when we hug or something, we bang our heads together like in some Charlie Chaplin movie. But a while ago, he was telling me how I always had to be careful. My father told me, 'If anything happens to you, I'm gone.' All I thought at first was that it was a real nice thing to say. But then I thought about it for a while and realized something. That was my father's way of saying 'I love you.'"

A few minutes later, Prince and his father pull in front of the Warehouse, a concrete barn in an Eden Prairie industrial park. Inside, the Family, a rock-funk band that Prince has been working with, is pounding out new songs and dance routines. The group is as tight as ace drummer Jellybean Johnson's pants. At the end of one hot number, Family members fall on their backs, twitching like fried eggs.

Prince and his father enter to hellos from the still-gyrating band. Prince goes over to a pool table by the soundboard, racks the balls and shimmies to the beat of the Family's next song. Taking everything in, John Nelson gives a professional nod to the band, his son's rack job and his own just-chalked cue. He hitches his shoulders, takes aim and breaks like Minnesota Fats. A few minutes later, the band is still playing and the father is still shooting. Prince, son to this father and father to this band, is smiling.

THE NIGHT BEFORE, in the Warehouse, Prince is about to break his three-year public silence. Wearing a jump suit, powder-blue boots and a little crucifix on a chain, he dances with the Family for a little while, plays guitar for a minute, sings lead for a second, then noodles four-handed keyboard with Susannah Melvoin, Wendy's identical-twin sister.

Seeing me at the door, Prince comes over. "Hi," he whispers, offering a hand, "want something to eat or drink?" On the table in front of the band are piles of fruit and a couple bags of Doritos. Six different kinds of tea sit on a shelf by the wall. No drugs, no booze, no coffee. Prince plays another lick or two and watches for a few more minutes, then waves goodbye to the band and heads for his car outside the concrete barn.

"I'm not used to this," mumbles Prince, staring straight ahead through the windshield of his parked car. "I really thought I'd never do interviews again." we drive for twenty minutes, talking about Minnesota's skies, air and cops. Gradually, his voice comes up, bringing with it inflections, hand gestures and laughs.

Soon after driving past a field that will house a state-of-the-art recording studio named Paisley Park, we pull down a quiet suburban street and up to the famous purple house. Prince waves to a lone, unarmed guard in front of a chain-link fence. The unremarkable split-level house, just a few yards back from the minimum security, is quiet. No fountains out front, no swimming pools in back, no black-faced icons of Yahweh or Lucifer. "We're here," says Prince, grinning. "Come on in."

One look inside tells the undramatic story. Yes, it seems the National Enquirer -- whose Minneapolis exposé of Prince was excerpted in numerous other newspapers this spring -- was exaggerating. No, the man does not live in an armed fortress with only a food taster and wall-to-wall, life-size murals of Marilyn Monroe to talk to. Indeed, if a real-estate agent led a tour through Prince's house, one would guess that the resident was, at most, a hip suburban surgeon who likes deep-pile carpeting.

"Hi," says Randi, from the kitchen, "you got a couple of messages." Prince thanks her and offers up some homemade chocolate-chip cookies. He takes a drink from a water cooler emblazoned with a Minnesota North Stars sticker and continues the tour. "This place," he says, "is not a prison. And the only things it's a shrine to are Jesus, love and peace."

Off the kitchen is a living room that holds nothing your aunt wouldn't have in her house. On the mantel are framed pictures of family and friends, including one of John Nelson playing a guitar. There's a color TV and VCR, a long coffee table supporting a dish of jellybeans, and a small silver unicorn by the mantel. Atop the large mahogany piano sits an oversize white Bible.

The only unusual thing in either of the two guest bedrooms is a two-foot statue of a smiling yellow gnome covered by a swarm of butterflies. One of the monarchs is flying out of a heart-shaped hole in the gnome's chest. "A friend gave that to me, and I put it in the living room," says Prince. "But some people said it scared them, so I took it out and put it in here."

Downstairs from the living room is a narrow little workroom with recording equipment and a table holding several notebooks. "Here's where I recorded all of 1999," says Prince, "all right in this room." On a low table in the corner are 3 Grammys. "Wendy," says Prince, "has got the Academy Award."

The work space leads into the master bedroom. It's nice. And...normal. No torture devices or questionable appliances, not even a cigarette butt, beer tab or tea bag in sight. A four-poster bed above plush white carpeting, some framed pictures, one of Marilyn Monroe. A small lounging area off the bedroom provides a stereo, a lake-shore view and a comfortable place to stretch out on the floor and talk. And talk he did -- his first interview in three years.

A few hours later, Prince is kneeling in front of the VCR, showing his Raspberry Beret video. He explains why he started the clip with a prolonged clearing of the throat. "I just did it to be sick, to do something no one else would do." He pauses and contemplates. "I turned on MTV to see the premiere of Raspberry Beret and Mark Goodman was talking to the guy who discovered the backward message on Darling Nikki. They were trying to figure out what the cough meant too, and it was sort of funny." He pauses again. "But I'm not getting down on him for trying. I like that. I've always had little hidden messages, and I always will."

He then plugs in a videocassette of 4 the Tears in Your Eyes, which he's just sent to the Live Aid folks for the big show. "I hope they like it," he said, shrugging his shoulders.

The phone rings, and Prince picks it up in the kitchen. "We'll be there in twenty minutes," he says, hanging up. Heading downstairs, Prince swivels his head and smiles. "Just gonna change clothes." He comes back a couple minutes later wearing another paisley jump suit, "the only kind of clothes I own." And the boots? "People say I'm wearing heels because I'm short," he says, laughing. "I wear heels because the women like 'em."

A FEW MINUTES LATER, driving toward the First Avenue club, Prince is talking about the fate of the most famous landmark in Minneapolis. "Before Purple Rain," he says, "all the kids who came to First Avenue knew us, and it was just like a big, fun fashion show. The kids would dress for themselves and just try to took really cool. Once you got your thing right, you'd stop looking at someone else. You'd be yourself, and you'd feel comfortable."

Then Hollywood arrived. "When the film first came out," Prince remembers, "a lot of tourists started coming. That was kind of weird, to be in the club and get a lot of 'Oh! There he is!' It felt a little strange. I'd be in there thinking, 'Wow, this sure is different than it used to be.'"

Now, however, the Gray Line Hip Tour swarm has slackened. According to Prince -- who goes there twice a week to dance when he's not working on a big project -- the old First Avenue feeling is coming back. "There was a lot of us hanging around the club in the old days," he says, "and the new army, so to speak, is getting ready to come back to Minneapolis. The Family's already here, Mazarati's back now too, and Sheila E. and her band will be coming soon. The club'll be the same thing that it was."

As we pull up in front of First Avenue, a Saturday-night crowd is milling around outside, combing their hair, smoking cigarettes, holding hands. They stare with more interest than awe as Prince gets out of the car. "You want to go to the [VIP] booth?" asks the bouncer. "Naah," says Prince. "I feel like dancing."

A few feet off the packed dance floor stands the Family, taking a night off from rehearsing. Prince joins the band and laughs, kisses, soul shakes. Prince and three of Family members wade through a floor of Teddy-and-Eleanor-Mondale-brand funkettes and start moving. Many of the kids Prince passes either don't see him or pretend they don't care. Most of the rest turn their heads slightly to see the man go by, then simply continue their own motions.

An hour later, he's on the road again, roaring out of downtown. Just as he's asked if there's anything in the world that he wants but doesn't have, two blondes driving daddy's Porsche speed past. "I don't," Prince says with a giggle, "have them."

He catches up to the girls, rolls down the window and throws a ping-pong ball that was on the floor at them. They turn their heads to see what kind of geek is heaving ping-pong balls at them on the highway at two in the morning. When they see who it is, mouths drop, hands wave, the horn blares. Prince rolls up his window, smiles silently and speeds by.

Off the main highway, Prince veers around the late-night stillness of Cedar Lake, right past the spot where Mary Tyler Moore gamboled during her TV show's credits. This town, he says, is his freedom. "The only time I feel like a prisoner," he continues, "is when I think too much and can't sleep from just having so many things on my mind. You know, stuff like, 'I could do this, I could do that. I could work with this band. When am I going to do this show or that show?' There's so many things. There's women. Do I have to eat? I wish I didn't have to eat."

A few minutes later, he drops me off at my house. Half a block ahead, he stops at a Lake Street red light. A left up lake leads back to late-night Minneapolis; a right is the way home to the suburban purple house and solitude. Prince turns left, back toward the few still burning night lights of the city he's never left.

-----

THE INTERVIEW

Why have you decided that now is the time to talk?

There have been a lot of things said about me, and a lot of them are wrong. There have been a lot of contradictions. I don't mind criticism, I just don't like lies. I feel I've been very honest in my work and my life, and it's hard to tolerate people telling such barefaced lies.

Do you read most of what's been written about you?

A little, not much. Sometimes someone will pass along a funny one. I just wrote a song called Hello, which is going to be on the flip side of Pop Life. It says at the end, "Life is cruel enough without cruel words." I get a lot of cruel words. A lot of people do. I saw critics be so critical of Stevie Wonder when he made Journey through the Secret World of Plants. Stevie has done so many great songs, and for people to say, "You missed, don't do that, go back" -- well, I would never say, "Stevie Wonder, you missed." [Prince puts the Wonder album on the turntable, plays a cut, then puts on Miles Davis' new album.] Or Miles. Critics are going to say, "Ah, Miles done went off." Why say that? Why even tell Miles he went off? You know, if you don't like it, don't talk about it. Go buy another record! Not long ago I talked too George Clinton, a man who knows and has done so much for funk. George told me how much he liked Around The World In A Day. You know how much more his words meant than those from some mamma-jamma wearing glasses and an alligator shirt behind a typewriter? Do you hate rock critics? Do you think they're afraid of you? [Laughs] No, it's no big deal. Hey, I'm afraid of them! One time early in my career, I got into a fight with a New York writer, this real skinny cat, a real sidewinder. He said, "I'll tell you a secret, Prince. Writers write for other writers, and a lot of time it's more fun to be nasty." I just looked at him. But when I really thought about it and put myself in his shoes, I realized that's what he had to do. I could see his point. They can do whatever they want. And me, too. I can paint whatever picture I want with my albums. And I can try to instill that in every act I've ever worked with.

What picture were you painting with Around the World in a Day?

[Laughs] I've heard some people say that I'm not talking about anything on this record. And what a lot of other people get wrong about the record is that I'm not trying to be this great visionary wizard. Paisley Park is in everybody's heart. It's not just something that I have the keys to. I was trying to say something about looking inside oneself to find perfection. Perfection is in everyone. Nobody's perfect, but they can be. We may never reach that, but it's better to strive than not.

Sounds religious.

As far as that goes, let me tell you a story about Wendy. We had to fly somewhere at the beginning of the tour, and Wendy is deathly afraid of flying. She got on the plane and really freaked. I was scared for her. I tried to calm her down with jokes, but it didn't work. I thought about it and said, "Do you believe in God?" She said yes. I said, "Do you trust him?" and she said she did. Then I asked, "So why are you afraid to fly?" She started laughing and said, "Okay, okay, okay." Flying still bothers her a bit, but she knows where it is and she doesn't get freaked. It's just so nice to know that there is someone and someplace else. And if we're wrong, and I'm wrong, and there is nothing, then big deal! But the whole life I just spent, I at least had some reason to spend it.

When you talk abut God, which God are you talking about? The Christian God? Jewish? Buddhist? Is there any God in particular you have in mind?

Yes, very much so. A while back, I had an experience that changed me and made me feel differently about how and what and how I acted toward people. I'm going to make a film about it -- not the next one, but the one after that. I've wanted to make it for three years now. Don't get me wrong -- I'm still as wild as I was. I'm just funneling it in a different direction. And now I analyze things so much that sometimes I can't shut off my brain and it hurts. That's what the movie will be about.

What was the experience that changed you?

I don't really want to get into it specifically. During the Dirty Mind period, I would go into fits of depression and get physically ill. I would have to call people to help get me out of it. I don't do that anymore.

What were you depressed about?

A lot had to do with the band's situation, the fact that I couldn't make people in the band understand how great we could all be together if we all played our part. A lot had to do with being in love with someone and not getting any love back. And there was the fact that I didn't talk much with my father and sister. Anyway, a lot of things happened in this two-day period, but I don't want to get into it right now.

How'd you get over it?

That's what the movie's going to be about. Paisley Park is the only way I can say I got over it now. Paisley Park is the place one should find in oneself, where one can go when one is alone.

You say you've now found the place where you can go to be alone. Is it your house? Within the family you've built around yourself? With God?

It's a combination of things. I think when one discovers himself, he discovers God. Or maybe it's the other way around. I'm not sure...It's hard to put into words. It's a feeling -- someone knows when they get it. That's all I can really say.

Do you believe in heaven?

I think there is an afterworld. For some reason, I think it's going to be just like here, put that's part...I don't really like talking about this stuff. It's so personal.

Does it bother you when people say you're going back in time with Around The World In A Day?

No. What they say is that the Beatles are the influence. The influence wasn't the Beatles. They were great for what they did, but I don't know how that would hang today. The cover art came about because I thought people were tired of looking at me. Who wants another picture of him? I would only want so many pictures of my woman, then I would want the real thing. What would be a little more happening than just another picture [laughs] would be if there was some way I could materialize in people's cribs when they play the record.

How do you feel about people calling the record "psychedelic"?

I don't mind that, because that was the only period in recent history that delivered songs and colors. Led Zeppelin, for example, would make you feel differently on each song.

Does your fame affect your work?

A lot of people think it does, but it doesn't at all. I think the smartest thing I ever did was record Around The World In A Day right after I finished Purple Rain. I didn't wait to see what would happen with Purple Rain. That's why the two albums sound completely different. People think, "Oh, the new album isn't half as powerful as Purple Rain or 1999." You know how easy it would have been to open Around The World In A Day with the guitar solo that's on the end of Let's Go Crazy? You know how easy it would have been to just put it in a different key? That would have shut everybody up who said an album wasn't half as powerful. I don't want to make an album like the earlier ones. Wouldn't it be cool to be able to put your albums back to back and not get bored, you dig? I don't know how many people can play all their albums back to back with each one going to different cities.

What do you think about the comparisons between you and Jimi Hendrix?

It's only because he's black. That's really the only thing we have in common. He plays different guitar than I do. If they really listened to my stuff, they'd hear more of a Santana influence than Jimi Hendrix. Hendrix played more blues; Santana played prettier. You can't compare people, you really can't, unless someone is blatantly trying to rip somebody off. And you really can't tell that unless you play the songs. You've got to understand that there's only so much you can do on an electric guitar. I don't know what these people are thinking -- they're usually non-guitar-playing mamma-jammas saying this kind of stuff. There are only so many sounds a guitar can make. Lord knows I've tried to make a guitar sound like something new to myself.

Are there any current groups you listen to a lot or learn from?

Naah. The last album I loved all the way through was [Joni Mitchell's] The Hissing Of Summer Lawns. I respect people's success, but I don't like a lot of popular music. I never did. I like more of the things I heard when I was little. Today, people don't write songs; they're a lot of sounds, a lot of repetition. That happened when producers took over, and that's why there are no more [live] acts. There's no box office anymore. The producers took over, and now no one wants to see these bands.

People seem to think you live in an armed monastery that you've built in honor of yourself.

First off, I don't live in a prison with armed guards around me. The reason I have a guy outside is that after the movie, all kinds of people started coming over and hanging out. That wasn't so bad, but the neighbors got upset that people were driving by blasting their boxes or standing outside and singing. I happen to dig that. That's one reason I'm going to move to more land. There, if people want to come by, it will be fine. Sometimes it gets lonely here. To be perfectly honest, I wish more of my friends would come by.

Friends?

Musicians, people I know. A lot of the time they think I don't want to be bothered. When I told Susannah [Melvoin] that you were coming over, she said, "Is there something I can do? Do you want me to come by to make it seem like you have friends coming by?" I said no, that would be lying. And she just put her head down, because she knew she doesn't come by to see me as much as she wants to, or as much as she thinks I want her to. It was interesting. See, you did something good, and you didn't even know it.

Are you afraid to ask your friends to come by?

I'm kind of afraid. That's because sometimes everybody in the band comes over, and we have very long talks. They're few and far between, and I do a lot of the talking. Whenever we're done, one of them will come up to me and say, "Take care of yourself. You know I really love you." I think they love me so much, and I love them so much, that if they came over all the time I wouldn't be able to be to them what I am, and they wouldn't be able to do for me as what they do. I think we all need our individual spaces, and when we come together with what we've concocted in our heads, it's cool.

Does it bother you that strangers make pilgrimages to your house?

No, not at all. But there's a time and a place for everything. A lot of people have the idea that I'm a wild sexual person. It can be two o'clock in the afternoon, and someone will make a really strange request from the call box outside. One girl just kept pressing the buzzer. She kept pressing it, and then she started crying. I had no idea why. I thought she might had fallen down. I started talking to her, and she just kept saying, "I can't believe it's you." I said, "Big deal. I'm no special person. I'm no different than anyone." She said, "Will you come out?" I said, "Nope, I don't have much on." And she said, "That's okay." I've lectured quite a few people out there. I'll say, "Think about what you're saying. How would you react if you were me?" I ask that question a lot. "How would you react if you were me?" They say, "Okay, okay."

It's not just people outside your door who think you're a wild sexual person.

To some degree I am, but not 24 hours a day. Nobody can be what they are 24 hours a day, no matter what that is. You have to eat, you have to sleep, you have to think, and you have to work. I work a lot, and there's not to much time for anything else when I'm doing that.

Does it make you angry when people dig into your background, when they want to know about your sexuality and things like that?

Everyone thinks I have a really mean temper and I don't like people to do this or do that. I have a sense of humor. I thought that the Saturday Night Live skit with Billy Crystal as me was the funniest thing I ever saw. His imitation of me was hysterical! He was singing, "I am the world, I am the children!" Then Bruce Springsteen came to the mike, and the boys would push him away. It was hilarious. We put it on when we want to laugh. It was great. Of course, that's not what it is. And I thought the Prince spaghetti commercial was the cutest thing in the world. My lawyers and management are the ones who felt it should be stopped. I didn't even see the commercial until after someone had tried to have it stopped. A lot of things get done without my knowledge because I'm in Minneapolis and they're where they are. It's a good and a bad thing that I live here. It's bad in the sense that I can't be a primo "rock star" and do everything absolutely right. I can't go to the parties and benefits, be at all the awards shows, get this and get that. But I like it here. It's really mellow.

How do you feel when you go to New York or L.A. and see the life you could be leading?

L.A. is a good place to work. And I liked New York more when I wasn't known, when I wasn't bothered when I went out. You'd be surprised. There are guys who will literally chase you through a discotheque! I don't mind my picture being taken if it's done in a proper fashion. It's very easy to say, "Prince, may I take your picture?" I don't know why people can't be more humane about a lot of the things they do. Now when I'm visiting, I like to sneak around and try stuff. I like to sneak to people's gigs and see if I can get away without getting my picture taken. That's fun. That's like cops and robbers.

You've taken a lot of heat for your bodyguards, especially the incident in Los Angeles in which your bodyguard Chick Huntsberry reportedly beat up a reporter.

A lot of times I've been accused of sicking bodyguards on people. You know what happened in L.A.? My man the photographer tried to get in the car! I don't have any problem with somebody I know trying to get in the car with me and my woman in it. But someone like that? Just to get a picture?

Why isn't Chick working for you anymore?

Chick has more pride than anybody I know. I think that after the L.A. incident, he feared for his job. So if I said something, he'd say, "What are you jumping on me for? What's wrong? Why all of sudden are you changing?" And I'd say, "I'm not changing." Finally, he just said, "I'm tired. I've had enough." I said fine, and he went home. I waited a few weeks and called him. I told him that his job was still there and that I was alone. So he said that he'd see me when I was in New York. He didn't show up. I miss him.

Is it true that Chick is still on the payroll?

Yes.

What about the exposé he wrote about you in the National Enquirer?

I never believe anything in the Enquirer. I remember reading stories when I was ten years old, saying, "I was fucked by a flying saucer, and here's my baby to prove it." I think they just took everything he said and blew it up. It makes for a better story. They're just doing their thing. Right on for them. The only thing that bothers me is when my fans think I live in a prison. This is not a prison.

You came in for double heat over the L.A. incident because it happened on the night of the We Are The World recording. In retrospect, do you wish you would have shown up?

No, I think I did my part in giving my song [to the album]. I hope I did my part. I think I did the best thing I could do.

You've done food-drive concerts for poor people in various cities, given free concerts for handicapped kids and donated lots of money to the Marva Collins inner-city school in Chicago. Didn't you want to stand up after you were attacked for We Are The World and say, "Hey, I do my part."

Nah, I was never rich, so I have very little regard for money now. I only have respect for it inasmuch as it can feed somebody. I can give a lot of things away, a lot of presents and money. Money is best spent on somebody who needs it. That's all I'm going to say. I don't like to make a big deal about the things I do that way.

People think that you're a dictator in the studio, that you want to control everything. In L.A., however, I saw Wendy and Lisa mixing singles while you were in Paris. How do you feel about your reputation?

My first album I did completely alone. On the second I used André [Cymone], my bass player, on Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?. He sang a small harmony part that you really couldn't hear. There was a typo on the record, and André didn't get any credit. That's how the whole thing started. 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. The reason I don't use musicians a lot of the time had to do with the hours that I worked. I swear to God it's not out of boldness when I say this, but there's not a person around who can stay awake as long as I can. Music is what keeps me awake. There will be times when I've been working in the studio for twenty hours and I'll be falling asleep in the chair, but I'll still be able to tell the engineer what cut I want to make. I use engineers in shifts a lot of the time because when I start something, I like to go all the way through. There are very few musicians who will stay awake that long.

Do you feel others recognize how hard you work?

Well, no. A lot of my peers make remarks about us doing silly things onstage and on records. Morris Day [former lead singer of the Time] was criticized a lot for that.

What kind of silliness, exactly?

Everything -- the music, the dances, the lyrics. What they fail to realize is that is exactly what we want to do. It's no silliness, it's sickness. Sickness I just slang for doing things somebody else wouldn't do. If we are down on the floor doing a step, that's something somebody else wouldn't do. That's what I'm looking for all the time. We don't look for whether something's cool or not, that's not what time it is. It's not just wanting to be out. It's just if I do something that I think belongs to someone else or sounds like someone else, I do something else.

Why did Morris say such negative things about you after he left the band?

People who leave usually do so out of a need to express something they can't do here. It's really that simple. Morris, for example, always wanted to be a solo act, period. But when you're broke and selling shoes someplace, you don't think about asking such a thing. Now, I think Morris is trying to create his own identity. One of the ways of doing that is trying to pretend that you don't have a past. Jesse Johnson [former guitarist for the Time] is the only one who went away who told what happened, what really went down with the band. He said there was friction, because he was in a situation that didn't quite suit him. Jesse wanted to be in front all the time. And I just don't think God puts everybody in that particular bag. And sometimes I was blunt enough to say that to people: "I don't think you should be in the frontman. I think Morris should." Wendy, for example, says, "I don't want that. I want to be right where I am. I can be strongest to this band right where I am." I personally love this band more than any other group I've every played with for that reason. Everybody knows what they have to do. I know there's something I have to do.

What sound do you get from different members of the Revolution?

Bobby Z was the first one to join. He's my best friend. Though he's not such a spectacular drummer, he watches me like no other drummer would. Sometimes, a real great drummer, like Morris, will be more concerned with the lick he is doing as opposed to how I am going to break it down. Mark Brown's just the best bass player I know, period. I wouldn't have anybody else. If he didn't play with me, I,d eliminate bass from my music. Same goes for Matt Fink [the keyboard player]. He's more or less a technician. He can read and write like a whiz, and is one of the fastest in the world. And Wendy makes me seem all right in the eyes of people watching.

How so?

She keeps a smile on her face. When I sneer, she smiles. It's not premeditated, she just does it. It's a good contrast. Lisa is like my sister. She'll play what the average person won't. She'll press two notes with one finger so the chord is a lot larger, things like that. She's more abstract. She's into Joni Mitchell, too.

What about the other bands? Apollonia, Vanity, Mazarati, the Family? What are you trying to express through them?

A lot has to do with them. They come to me with an idea, and I try to bring that forth. I don't give them anything. I don't say, "Okay, you're going to do this, and you're going to do that." I mean, it was Morris' idea to be as sick as he was. That was his personality. We both like Don King and get a lot of stuff off him.

Why?

Because he's outrageous and thinks everything's so exciting --even when it isn't.

People think you control those bands, that it's similar to Rick James, relationship with the Mary Jane Girls. A lot of people think he's turning all the knobs.

I don't know their situation. But you look at Sheila E. performing, and you can just tell she's holding her own. The same goes for the Family. You and I were playing Ping-Pong, and they were doing just fine.

After all these years, does the music give you as much of a rush as it used to?

It increases more and more. One of my friends worries that I'll short-circuit. We always say I'll make the final fade on a song one time and [Laughs, dropping his head in a dead slump]. It just gets more and more interesting every day. More than anything else, I try not to repeat myself. It's the hardest thing in the world to do -- there's only so many notes one human being can muster. I write a lot more than people think I do, and I try not to copy that. I think that's the problem with the music industry today. When a person does get a hit, they try to do it again the same way. I don't think I've ever done that. I write all the time and cut all the time. I want to show you the archives, where all my old stuff is. There's tons of music I've recorded there. I have the follow-up album to 1999. I could put it all together and play it for you, and you would go "Yeah!" And I could put it out, and it would probably sell what 1999 did. But I always try to do something different and conquer new ground. In people's minds, it all boils down to "Is Prince getting too big for his britches?" I wish people would understand that I always thought I was bad. I wouldn't have got into the business if I didn't think I was bad.
[Edited 5/27/07 14:54pm]

#3: Graffiti Bridge Era


PRINCE TALKS
By Neal Karlen
October 18, 1990

THE PHONE RINGS at 4:48 in the morning.

"Hi, it's Prince," says the wide-awake voice calling from a room several yards down the hallway of this London hotel. "Did I wake you up?"

Though it's assumed that Prince does in fact sleep, no one on his summer European Nude Tour can pinpoint precisely when. Prince seems to relish the aura of night stalker; his vampire hours have been part of his mad-genius myth ever since he was waging junior-high-school battles on Minneapolis's mostly black North Side.

"Anyone who was around back then knew what was happening," Prince had said two days earlier, reminiscing, "I was working. When they were sleeping, I was jamming. When they woke up, I had another groove. I'm as insane that way now as I was back then."

For proof, he'd produced a crinkled dime-store notebook that he carries with him like Linus's blanket. Empty when his tour started in May, the book is nearly full, with 21 new songs scripted in perfect grammar-school penmanship. He has also been laboring over his movie musical Graffiti Bridge, which was supposed to be out this past summer and is now set for release in November. Overseeing the dubbing and editing of the film by way of dressing-room VCRs and hotel telephones, Prince said, has given him an idea. "One of these days," he said, "I'm going to work on just 1 project, and take my time."

Despite his all-hours intensity, the man still has his manners. He wouldn't have called this late, Prince says apologetically, if he didn't have some interesting news. He'd already provided some news earlier in the week, detailing, among other things, a late-night crisis of conscience a few years back that led him not only to shelve the infamous Black Album but also to try and change the way he wrote his songs -- and led his life.

The crisis didn't involve a leap or a loss of faith, Prince has said, but simply the realization that it was time to stop acting like such an angry soul. "I was an expert at cutting off people in my life and disappearing without a glance back, never to return," he'd said. "Half the things people were writing about me were true."

But what's never been true, he felt, was what people have written about his music. Until, that is, just this minute. It seems that a fresh batch of reviews of the soundtrack of Graffiti Bridge were faxed from Minneapolis to the hotel while Prince was performing one of his 15 sold-out concerts in England.

What Prince has read in the New York Times has astounded him. "They're starting to get it," he says from his phone in the Wellington Suite, which he has turned into a homey workplace with the addition of some bolts of sheer rainbow-colored cloth, film equipment, a stereo and tacked-up museum-shop posters of Billie Holiday and Judy Garland. "I don't believe it," he says again, "but they're getting it!"

They, in this case, are members of the rock intelligentsia who have alternately canonized and defrocked Prince. In the past, he has derided his professional interpreters as "mamma jammas" and "skinny sidewinders." Two days ago, it became obvious that his epithets, but now his feelings, had tempered concerning those who would judge him.

"There's nothing a critic can tell me that I can learn from," Prince had said earlier. "If they were musicians, maybe. But I hate reading about what some guy sitting at a desk thinks about me. You know, 'he's back, and he's black,' or 'He's back, and he's bad.' Whew! Now, on Graffiti Bridge, they're saying that I'm back and more traditional. Well, Thieves in the Temple and Tick, Tick, Bang don't sound like nothing I've ever done before."

But hadn't he been cheered by the album's almost uniformly rave notices? "That's not what it's about," Prince had said. "No one's mentioning the lyrics. Maybe I should have put in a lyric sheet."

Now, in predawn London, he's called to say he was wrong. "They're starting to get it," he says 1 last time, unbothered by the fact that the Time's article trashes his lyrics. "That's okay", he says, "because they're paying attention." Sounding more amazed than pleased, Prince hangs up the phone and goes back to his dime-store notebook.

FIVE YEARS HAVE PASSED since Prince opened the passenger door to his 1966 Thunderbird and took me on a 3-day schlep around the hometown he has never left. When I finally got out, I felt like Melvin Dummar, the doofus milkman who claimed to have driven through the Nevada desert with a surprisingly human Howard Hughes. No one had believed Melvin, and no one, I thought, would believe Prince was a being orbiting so close to planet Earth.

Not that Prince hadn't shown some signs of unease with his still-new superstardom. Alone, he's been animated, funny and self-aware. But out in public, even walking into places as hospitable as Minneapolis's First Avenue club, he would palpably stiffen at the first sign of a gawk, his face set in granite, his voice reduced to a mumble.

Now Prince seems more open and comfortable, less likely to slip into stridency. "You have a few choices when you're in that position," he says, remembering the first year after Purple Rain. "You can get all jacked up on yourself and curse everybody, or you can say this is the way life is and try to enjoy it. I'm still learning that lesson. I think I'll always be learning that lesson. I think I'm a much nicer person now."

This isn't to say that Prince has turned into Dale Carnegie -- he still has the hauteur of a star. But something has changed; his philosophy no longer seems to hinge on things like the size of one's boot heels. "Cool means being able to hang with yourself," he says. "All you have to ask yourself is 'Is there anybody I'm afraid of? Is there anybody who if I walked into a room and saw, I'd get nervous?' If not, then you're cool."

Many things, however, have stayed the same. Prince is still very funny. ("You can always renegotiate a record contract. You just go in and say, 'You know, I think my next project will be a country & western album.'")

He can still play the cocky rocker. "I don't go to awards shows anymore," he says. "I'm not saying I'm better than anybody else. But you'll be sitting there at the Grammys, and U2 will beat you. And you say to yourself, 'Wait a minute. I can play that kind of music, too. I played La Crosse [Wisconsin] growing up, I know how to do that, you dig? But you will not do Housequake."

His grasp of history and current events remains quirky. Prince can cite chapter and verse from biographies of Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis, but he seems genuinely unaware that his own life story was turned into a book by an English rock critic. He knows, blow by blow, the events in the Mideast, relating the crisis to everything from the predictions of Nostradamus to the drug-interdiction policy of George Bush. But he hasn't yet heard of 2 Live Crew.

There is still some residue of emotional pain. "What if everybody around me split?" he asks. "Then I'd be left with only me, and I'd have to fend for me. That's why I have to protect me."

Prince's detractors might diagnose these words as the classic pathology of a control freak. His high-minded supporters might say those are normal protective feelings for somebody who was kicked onto the streets by his beloved father at age fourteen. Prince himself, however, echoes Popeye more than Freud as he analyzes just who he is. "I am what I am," he says. "I feel if I can please myself musically, then I can please others, too."

Finally, there is 1 more philosophy unchanged with the years. "I play music," Prince has said. "I make records. I make movies. I don't do interviews."

So what are we doing? "We're just talking," he says. Hence, his decision not to be taped or allow notes to be taken or even a pad of questions to be brought out. That would inhibit him, he says; that would mean doing the thing that he just doesn't do.

No, Prince vows, he isn't trying to be a purposeful pain. What he says he simply wants to avoid is "that big Q followed by that big A, followed by line after line of me either defending myself or cleaning up stories that people have told about me."

No matter what he might say in a traditional interview, Prince continues, he'd only end up looking ridiculous. "Some magazine a little while ago promised me their cover if I answered five written questions," he says. "The first one was 'What are your exact beliefs about God?' Now how can I answer that without sounding like a fool?"

True. But isn't he afraid of being misquoted? No, he says softly, staring at the holstered tape recorder on the table before him. When Prince says no, with pursed lips and a slight shake of the head, it carries a certain finality.

Still, in the coming days he addresses just about everything short of Kim Basinger ("I really don't know her that well") or anybody else he's dating ("I never publicize that. My friends around town are surprised when I introduce them to someone I'm seeing").

"And you really would feel better having your words taken down the second you say them?

"No."

Okay.

A COUPLE OF NIGHTS LATER, Prince is dealing with the painstaking minutae of piecing together his almost-finished movie. "People are going, 'Oh, this is Prince's big gamble,'" he says, sitting on the floor of his London hotel room, fast-forwarding a video version of his most recent cut. "What gamble? I made a $7 million movie with somebody else's money, and I'm sitting here finishing it."

Prince stops the tape at a point when gospel queen Mavis Staples is leaning out of a window in Minneapolis's Seven Corners, waxing wise on the night action down the street. The movie appears to be set in the 1950s, when Seven Corners was a Midwestern hotbed of clubs and hipsters. The Seven Corners set, raised on the Paisley Park sound stage, resembles the kind of backdrop used in Gene Kelly musicals. "Yeah, cheap!" says Prince with a laugh. "Actually, that's okay. It's like how we did Dirty Mind. But man, what I'd do with a $25 million budget. I'll need a big success to get that, but I'll get it, I will get it.

Film-speak is now part of his vocabulary; the first director Prince mentions he admires is Woody Allen, "because I like anyone who gets final cut." Movies have also worked their way into his philosophical references. "If you're making your moves in life because of money or pride," he says, "then you'll end up like that dude who got beat up on the grass at the end of Wall Street. He'd been wheeling and dealing, then 'Oomph!'. That's what time it was."

He's been studying, he says, and learning from his own film failures. "I don't regret anything about Under The Cherry Moon," he says. "I learned that I can't direct what I didn't write." Participating in Batman, meantime, allowed him to spy on the making of a megaton hit. Composing songs on locations, Prince mostly stayed on the sidelines and just watched. "There was so much pressure on [director] Tim Burton," he says, "that for the whole picture, I just said, 'Yes, Mr. Burton, what would you like?"

Burton had hired him on the recommendation of Jack Nicholson, a longtime Prince fan. Prince, who'd never met Nicholson before, found the inspiration for Partyman when he first saw the actor on the set. "He just walked over, sat down and put his foot up on a table, real cool," Prince says. "He had this attitude that reminded me of Morris [Day] -- and there was that song."

Prince says he'll survive if Graffiti Bridge is less than a blockbuster. "I can't please everybody," he says. "I didn't wanna make Die Hard 4. But I'm also not looking to be Francis Ford Coppola. I see this more like those 1950s rock & roll movies."

Unfortunately, rumors have swirled for months that better comparison might be the 1959 howler Plan 9 From Outer Space. "I don't mind," says Prince. "Some might not get it. But people also said Purple Rain was unreleasable. And now I drive to work each morning to my own big studio."

Originally, Graffiti Bridge was going to be a vehicle for the reborn Time, with Prince staying behind the camera. But Warner Bros. wouldn't go for it, so Prince wrote himself into a new movie. Later, visitors to Paisley Park saw a version of a script that was allegedly obtuse to the point of near gibberish. "That was just a real rough thirty-page treatment I wrote with Kim," Prince says. "Graffiti Bridge is an entirely different movie."

As in Purple Rain, the plot features Prince as a musician named the Kid. Willed half-ownership of a Seven Corners club named Glam Slam, the Kid must share control with Morris Day, once again playing a comic satyr combining Superfly smoothness and Buddy Love sincerity. It's a fight of good versus evil, and band versus band, for the soul of Glam Slam.

Then there's the unknown Ingrid Chavez, Prince's first female movie lead who doesn't look like she was ordered out of a catalog. Throw in the talents of Staples, the reborn Time, George Clinton, and the thirteen-year-old Quincy Jones protégé Tevin Campbell, and you've got, Prince says, "a different kind of movie. It's not violent. Nobody gets laid."

It's impossible to judge Graffiti Bridge from just a few selected scenes. Still, they were very good scenes. Prince fast-forwards to a sequence in which Day tries to seduce Chavez on the fairy-tale-looking Graffiti Bridge.

When Prince is amused, which is almost every time Morris Day comes on the screen, he slaps his hands, shakes his head and throws himself back in his seat. "I hope Morris steals this movie," he says, recalling the charge made after Purple Rain. "The man still thinks he can whup me!"

Prince pushes rewind, searching for a scene with the Time. Waiting, he reminisces about the old days, when he oversaw the band. For a tutorial on the proper onstage attitude, Prince remembers, he showed the Time videos of Muhammed Ali trouncing, and then taunting, the old champ Sonny Liston. "To this day," he says, "they're the only band I've ever been afraid of."

At first it seems strange for to hear Prince talking in such fond and nostalgic terms about Day and the band. Day left the Minneapolis fold right after Purple Rain, with some nasty words about the boss's supposedly dictatorial ways. Now, Prince says, "I honestly don't remember how we got it together again."

Day's old charge of overbossing, however, brings a quirkier and crosser memory. "That whole thing came from my early days, when I was working with a lot of people who weren't exactly designed for their jobs," Prince says. "I had to do a lot, and I had to have control, because a lot of them didn't know exactly what was needed."

The most often-told tale involves Prince firing the then-unknown Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis from the Time in 1982. Jam and Lewis, all parties now agree, left a Time tour on a day off to produce their first record for the SOS Band. A freak snowstorm in Atlanta grounded them for an extra day, and the two missed a gig. When Jam and Lewis returned, they were summarily fired. Jobless, the two missed Purple Rain, so they set up as producers and went scrounging for clients. In the years since, they've produced everyone from Janet Jackson to Herb Alpert, becoming the other superpower on the Minneapolis music scene.

"I'm playing the bad guy," says Prince, "but I didn't fire Jimmy and Terry. Morris asked me what I would do in his situation. Remember, it was his band."

Despite the rap, Prince says, he harbors no ill will toward the now-famous producers working across town from Paisley Park at their Flyte Time studios. "We're friends," he says. "We know each other like brothers. Jimmy always gave me a lot of credit for getting things going in Minneapolis, and I'm hip to that. Terry's more aloof, but I know that." And their music? "Terry and Jimmy aren't into the Minneapolis sound," Prince says. "They're into making every single one of their records a hit. Not that there's anything wrong with that, we're just different."

With this, Prince cues up the Graffiti Bridge movie to the sequence in which the Time performs Shake!. The scene looks like something Busby Berkeley would have cooked up if he had choreographed funk.

The Time, Prince says, is proof of the good that can come from a group dissolving and eventually coming back together. "They broke up because they'd run out of ideas," he says. "They went off and did their own thing, and now they're terrifying."

Prince said this formula was just what he had in mind when, in short order, he broke up the Revolution. "I felt we all needed to grow," he says. "We all needed to play a wide range of music with different types of people. Then we could come back eight times as strong.

"No band can do everything," he continues. "For instance, this band I'm with now is funky. With them, I can drag out Baby I'm A Star all night! I just keep switching gears on them, and something else funky will happen. I couldn't do that with the Revolution. They were a different kind of funky, more electronic and cold. The Revolution could tear up Darling Nikki, which was about the coldest song ever written But I wouldn't even think about playing that song with this band."

The breakup of the Revolution apparently didn't go down easy. Today, Prince's relationship with his onetime best friends Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman is somewhere between uncomfortable and estranged. "I talk to Wendy and Lisa, but it's like this," Prince says, moving his hands in opposite directions. "I still hear a lot of hurt from them, and that bothers me. When I knew them, they were two spunky, wonderful human beings. I honestly don't know what they're hurt about."

So far, Prince says, the two women haven't listened to the few tidbits of advice he has offered. For their first video, Prince recommended that they try to announce themselves by making a splash, by "doing something like jumping off a speaker with smoke pouring out everywhere. Something." When he saw the video, however, Wendy was sitting in a chair, playing her guitar. "You can't do that when you're just getting established -- kids watching MTV see that and they go click,"Prince says, miming a channel being changed. "They'd rather watch a commercial."

Still, Prince's pronouncements seem proffered more in mourning than in malice. "Wendy and Lisa are going to have to do some more serious soul-searching and decide what they want to write about," he says sadly and shakes his head. "I don't know what Wendy and Lisa are so hurt about. I wish I did, but I don't."


IT'S A BROILING SUMMER AFTERNOON IN NICE, FRANCE and Prince is performing before an almost completely empty soccer stadium. It's a sound check, and Prince and his band have been going for over an hour, segueing from John Lee Hooker's I'm In The Mood to the freeform jamming in Respect.

After the check, Prince retreats to the bowels of the stadium to wait for night. Camped out in his dressing room under a gaucho hat, Prince plugs in a tape bearing some early versions of some songs he's written on tour. Prince says the first song, called Schoolyard, is about "the first time I got any." Funny and funky, the song is an inner-city Summer of '42 that tells the story of a fumbling sixteen-year-old-boy trying to seduce a girl to the strains of a Tower of Power album. "I think that's something everybody can relate to," he says.

Still, that probably wouldn't prevent the song from getting a parental-warning sticker. "I don't mind that," Prince says. "I think parents have a right to know what their children are listening to."

At first it seems an unlikely sentiment coming from the man who once wrote about the onanistic doings of a woman sitting with a magazine in a hotel lobby. But Prince hasn't turned into a bluenose, he insists -- he's just changed his outlook on how to present his still eros-heavy creations.

The change, he says, came soon after he finished The Black Album in 1987. The reason the album was pulled from release had nothing to do with record-company pressure, he insists, or with the quality of the songs. Rather, Prince says, he aborted the project because of one particular dark night of the soul "when a lot of things happened all in a few hours." He won't get specific, saying only that he saw the word God. "And when I talk about God," he says, "I don't mean some dude in a cape and beard coming down to Earth. To me, he's in everything if you look at it that way.

"I was very angry a lot of the time back then," he continues, "and that was reflected in that album. I suddenly realized that we can die at any moment, and we'd be judged by the last thing we left behind. I didn't want that angry, bitter thing to be the last thing. I learned from that album, but I don't want to go back."

By the time of the album Lovesexy, Prince says, he was a certifiably nicer human being -- and a happier creator. "I feel good most of the time, and I like to express that by writing from joy," he says. "I still do write from anger sometimes, like Thieves In The Temple. But I don't like to. It's not a place to live."

He's been angling for a different effect on each album he has made in the last few years. "What people were saying about Sign 'O' The Times was 'There are some great songs on it, and there are some experiments on it.' I hate the word experiment -- it sounds like something you didn't finish. Well, they have to understand that's the way to have a double record and make it interesting."

Lovesexy, Prince says, was "a mind trip, like a psychedelic movie. Either you went with it and had a mind-blowing experience or you didn't. All that album cover was, was a picture. If you looked at that picture and some ill come out of your mouth, then that's what you are -- it's looking right back at you in the mirror."

The Graffiti Bridge soundtrack, a couple cuts of which have been floating around for a few years, "is just a whole bunch of songs," he says. "Nobody does any experiments or anything like that. But I still want to know how it stands up to the other albums. I'm always going forward, always trying to surprise myself. It's not about hits. I knew how to make hits by my second album."

Not that Prince is above appreciating a good old Number 1 with a bullet -- especially when he wrote it. "I love it, it's great!" he exclaims when asked about Sinead O'Connor's version of Nothing Compares 2 U, which Prince wrote in 1985 for the Paisley Park act the Family. Is he sorry he didn't get to sing the song before O'Connor? "Nah," Prince says. "I look for cosmic meaning in everything. I think we just took that song as far as we could, then someone else was supposed to come along and pick it up."

While being so productive on his own, Prince has also found time to produce such disparate talents as Mavis Staples, George Clinton and Bonnie Raitt. "The best thing about producing is that there are so many really talented people who just never got that push over the top," he says. "Without that push, they just get lost."

Raitt was perhaps his most talked-about reclamation project. "Oh, those sessions were kicking!" Prince says. But nothing was ever released -- a fact which Prince takes the blame for. "There was no particular reason it didn't come out," he says. "I was just working on a lot of things at the same time, and I didn't give myself enough time to work with her. I used to do that a lot -- start five different projects and only get a couple done. That's the biggest thing I'm working on: patience and planning."

What Prince listens to on his own time is a grab bag. He likes rap: he's recently signed rappers T.C. Ellis and Robin Power to record on his Paisley Park label but denies that he'll be producing songs for M.C. Hammer. "I like his stuff a lot," Prince says. "We've talked but not about working together." He also gives highly favorable mentions to the likes of Madonna, Michael Jackson, Patti LaBelle and Bette Midler. "I'm not real into Bruce Springsteen's music," he says, "but I have a lot of respect for his talent."

Prince and Springsteen occasionally exchange notes; in recalling a Springsteen concert he saw from backstage a few years back, Prince displays the respect of a general reviewing another man's army. "I admire the way he holds his audience -- there's one man whose fans I could never take away," he says with a laugh. And how does he compare their stage tactics? "I'm not sure," says Prince. "But at one point, his band started going off somewhere. Springsteen turned around and shot the band one terrifying look. You know they got right back on it!"

For his own enjoyment, however, Prince just relies on himself. "I like a lot of people's music, and I'm interested in what's going on," he says, "but I don't listen to them. When I'm getting ready to go out or driving in the car, I listen to my own stuff. Never the old stuff. That's the way it's always been."

Prince walks back over to the stereo and plays with the cassette of his latest creations until he finds a number featuring Rosie Gaines, the band's unknown keyboardist and vocalist, who may be the next big star to come out of Prince's camp.

"Terrifying," says Prince, shaking his head. "Simply terrifying."


IT'S ANOTHER SWELTERING AFTERNOON in another soccer stadium, this time in Lucerne, Switzerland. It's as tame as a church picnic in the dressing rooms; drugs have long been a firing offense, and even cigarettes have been forbidden from the entire area.

Killing time in the hallway, the members of Prince's band seem more like the kind of winning, good-natured characters in a script for the television show Fame than jaded road warriors. Gaines is doing her imitation of Daisy Duck as a soul sister. "Be quiet, boyfriend!" she quacks. "What's happening, baby?" goes a squawk directed at fellow keyboardist Matt "Doctor" Fink.

Fink, the only member of the Revolution still playing with Prince, has just read in the USA Today of a 2 Live Crew parody made by a group called 2 Live Jews. Shticking in his own estimable Jewish-man voice, Fink begins rapping: "Oy, it's so humid!" Over in the corner, Michael Bland is poring over a purple copy of The Portable Nietzsche. A corpulent twenty-year-old drummer, Bland is probably the most fearsome-looking band member. Actually, he's a scholarly innocent who still lives with his parents in Minneapolis and still plays drums in his Pentecostal church. "Nietzsche's cool," Bland says, putting down his book. "But Schopenhauer -- now there's a brother with no hope!"

Also lolling in the hall are Miko Weaver, a hunkish guitarist, and Levi Seacer, Jr., a thoughtful bass player, who has been entrusted with speaking to the European press about this roadshow. The Nude Tour is a greatest-hits production with lean arrangements and none of the Liberace-on-acid costumes and special effects of the Lovesexy tour.

Prince, hanging out behind a closed door a few feet away from his band, makes no apology for the show's programming. "Kids save a lot of money for a long time to buy tickets, and I like to give them what they want," he says. "When I was a kid, I didn't want to hear James Brown play something I never heard before. I wanted to hear him play something I knew, so I could dance."

For now, Prince has no plans to bring his tour to the states, The main reason, he says, is that he wants to get back to Minneapolis and the studio. Prince also says that Warner Bros. is pouring increasingly large amounts of cash into Paisley Park Records, which means he must "put in some serious time behind the desk." It was only a couple of years ago that Prince was rumored to be in financial straits. But Forbes Magazine that in 1989, Prince earned $20 million in pretax profit, and the New York Times recently reported that his Paisley Park empire was quite solvent. "We're doing okay" is all that Prince will say.

He has other reasons for wanting to get back home. Prince wants to get rolling an a screenplay he has been working on with Gilbert Davison, his best friend, his chief adjutant and the owner and proprietor of the soon-to-open Minneapolis nightclub Glam Slam.

Prince has lent the club his full endorsement as well as its name, the motorcycle from Purple Rain and some of his more-historic guitars. "Glam Slam's gonna kick ass," Prince says. "It'll be one of those joints that's remembered! I've always just wanted to have a place where I knew I could just show up and my stuff would be there, so I wouldn't have to jump onstage with equipment meant for Dwight Yoakam."

The point of helping Davison, Prince says, goes far beyond nepotism. "Glam Slam will be another thing to center Minneapolis in the national eye," he says. "People talk about the Minneapolis sound or the Minneapolis scene, but they don't really know what the place looks like or means. I want it to mean something."

For Prince, the place still mostly means home. "It feels like music to me there," he says. "You don't feel prejudice there. I know it exists, but you don't feel it as much. I can just drive around the lakes or go into stores without bodyguards or just hand out."

Nursing a cold and chewing on Sudafed, Prince excuses himself to rest up for the show. The next time he appears in the doorway, his intimidating game face is on. The band comes in for a last-minute huddle; Paisley Park costume designer Helen Hiatt fixes a crucifix necklace big enough to scare off Nosferatu.

"It's raining," Davison says to Prince. "It's raining" is Prince's mumbled reply, accompanied by a thousand-yard stare. Moments later, an army of damp and screaming Swiss teenagers hear the first beats of 1999.

The oldies come, as do some nifty hommages beyond the requisite James Brown footwork. Prince sings Nothing Compares 2 U with a Wilson Pickett wail, the song ending with him crucified on a heart. Blues, sung with Rosie Gaines, hearkens to Otis Redding and Carla Thomas doing Tramp. Baby I'm A Star last 24 minutes, and after two encores, Prince is whisked to a backstage BMW that is gone well before the fans stop screaming for more.

Soon after, the band bus is being rocked in the parking lot by highly non-neutral Swiss. "We're the Beatles!" says Michael Bland, giggling and waving to the fans.

"Oy, it's so humid," raps Dr. Fink.


AT FOUR IN THE MORNING, flying into their third country in the past 24 hours, the band and the entire entourage of about thirty are sacked out in what looks like the sleep of the dead. Everybody's unconscious on this charter, including one of the flight attendants.

There's movement, however, up in Row 1. Prince's headphoned head is bopping against the back of his seat, his arms pounding the armrests. From the back, it looks like a prisoner is being executed in an upholstered electric chair.

Earlier in the day, Prince had refused to make any predictions about his future. "I don't want to say anything than can be held against me later," he'd said with a laugh. "Mick Jagger said he hoped he wouldn't be singing Satisfaction at 30, and he's still singing it. Pete Townshend wrote, 'Hope I die before I get old.' Well, now he is old, and I do hope he is happy to be around."

And himself? "When I pray to God, I say, 'It's your call -- when it's time to go, it's time to go.'" Prince had said. "But as long as you're going to leave me here" -- he slapped his hands -- "then I'm going to cause much ruckus!"

Now, while his band mates and support staff snooze around him, Prince keeps air-jamming beneath the glare of his seat's tiny spotlight. Listening to a tape of his own performance that day, Prince stays up all night, all the way to London.
[Edited 5/27/07 15:23pm]

Thanks raveun2thejoy....I remember being a Prince fan pre the internet and the only way to find out what he was like was reading articles like these..so it was as exciting when an article or interview with him was in a major magazine as when an album came out.

I have that 1990 RS thanks to a friend.

#4: Emancipation Era


WITH A LOVING WIFE, A BABY ON THE WAY, AND A "SLAVE" TO WARNER BROS. RECORDS NO MORE, IS FEELING DOWNRIGHT GIDDY ABOUT HIS NEW, THREE-DISC LONG EMANCIPATION
by Anthony DeCurtis
November 28, 1996

"We still all right?" asks , with a maniacal grin on his face. "Let me know when I start boring you."

Not any time soon. leaps off the arm of the couch where he had perched and bolts across the room to his CD player. He presses a button to interrupt his lovely version of the Stylistics' 1972 hit Betcha By Golly Wow!, and then selects a fiercer, guitar-charged track called Damned If Do.

It's the sort of scene you've been in a hundred times: A music-crazed friend ricochets between his seat and the stereo, torn between the song he's playing and the greater one you've just got to hear, between explaining what you're listening to and just letting you listen to it. Two exceptions distinguish this situation: First, this isn't one of my friends, this is ; second, the songs he's playing are amazing.

Of course, no such scenario would be complete without someone in the role of the indulgent girlfriend. Cast in that spot is 's gorgeous and very pregnant wife, Mayte, 22. Wearing a short black dress with white trim, the word Baby stitched across her chest in white above an arrow pointing to her stomach, Mayte sits quietly and smiles, shaking her head fondly at 's uncontrolled enthusiasm.

"I'm bouncing off the walls playing this," says, acknowledging the obvious. His sheer white shirt, lined with pastel stripes, is open to the middle of his chest and extends to his knees. The shirt, open below his waist as well, contrasts starkly with 's tight flared trousers. Black-mesh high-heeled boots complete the ensemble.

, who is now 38, is previewing tracks from his upcoming triple CD, Emancipation, which is set for release on November 19. We're in the comfortable apartment-style office quarters within 's Paisley Park studio complex, in Chanhassen, Minnesota, just outside Minneapolis, his hometown.

Eager to reassert his status as hitmaker, is verbally riffing in a style that recalls one of his heroes, the young Muhammad Ali. "I ain't scared of nobody," he exclaims at one point, laughing. "I wanna play you da bomb. You tell me how many singles you hear -- I wanna read that. The only person who kept me down is R. Kelly, and when I see him, he's gonna pay a price for that!"

Producer and songwriter Jimmy Jam, whom fired from the funk band The Time, in 1983, also comes in for some of 's good-natured rivalry. Jam, along with his partner, Terry Lewis, has produced gigantic hits for both Michael and Janet Jackson, as well as many other artists. Like , Jam has remained based in Minneapolis. But the town isn't big enough for both of them: sees the days of Jam's chart reign as numbered.

As Get Yo Groove On booms out of the speakers, screams over the sound: "You can tell Jimmy Jam I'm going to roll up to his driveway with this playing real loud! Honk! Honk! What do you think he's gonna say about that?"

's energy is so high because he is finally negotiated his way out of his contract with Warner Bros., for which he had recorded with since his debut album, For You, was released in 1978. In his view, he is now free at last -- hence the title of his new album. When I comment on the relaxed, easygoing groove of the new song Jam Of The Year, smiles and says simply, "A free man wrote that."

"When I'm reading a review of my work," he adds, referring to some of the negative comments garnered by his previous album, Chaos And Disorder, this is what I'm listening to. They're always a year late."

's struggles with Warner Bros. have wreaked havoc on his career in recent years. He could see no reason why the company could not release his albums at the relentless pace at which he recorded them. Meanwhile, Warner Bros., which had signed to a hugely lucrative new deal in 1992, believed the singer should put out new material only every year or 2, thus allowing the company to promote his albums more effectively and, it hoped, to recoup its enormous investment.

Matters deteriorated to the point where, in 1993, disowned the work he had recorded for Warner Bros. as Prince and adopted his new, unpronounceable name. He later scrawled the word slave across his cheek in frustration over his inability to end his relationship with the company and to put out his music the way he wanted to. Such moves have caused many to question not only 's marketing instincts -- his album sales have plummeted -- but his sanity.

For Emancipation, which will be released on his own NPG Records, has signed a worldwide manufacturing and distribution agreement with Capitol-EMI. While neither he nor Capitol-EMI would disclose financial terms, such an arrangement typically means that the artist delivers a completed album to the company and assumes the cost of recording it. For , those costs are relatively minimal, since he plays virtually all the instruments on his albums and owns Paisley Park, the studio where he records.

Capitol-EMI receives a fee for every copy of the album it manufactures, with the costs of the initial pressing possibly absorbed by the company in lieu of an advance to . In addition, the company will assist in promoting and publicizing the album, which should retail for between $20 and $25. If Emancipation sells well -- mind you, a triple album is a risky commercial proposition -- will make a great deal of money. There can be no question that he is determined to do all he can to make sure that the album finds it's audience: is abandoning his reclusive ways and planning a live global simulcast from Paisley Park and a November 21st appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show. He will also launch a 2-year World Tour early in 1997.

is clearly stung by the skeptics who believe that he will never again achieve the aesthetic and commercial heights he scaled with such albums as Dirty Mind (1980), 1999 (1982), Purple Rain (1984) and Sign 'O' The Times (1987). At one point, as we stroll through Paisley Park, he gestures toward a wall of gold and platinum records.

"Everything you see here is not why I created music," says. Every human being wants to achieve clarity so that people will understand you. But when the media tell somebody what success is -- #1 records, awards -- there's no room for intuition. You've put words in their heads. For me, the album is already a success when I have a copy. Lovesexy is supposed to be a failure, but I go on the Internet and someone says, 'Lovesexy saved my life.'"

As for people making fun of his name change -- "The Artist People Formerly Cared About," in Howard Stern's priceless slag -- and his branding himself a slave says, "The people who really know the music don't joke about it. A lot of black people don't joke about it because they understand wanting to change a situation that you find yourself in."

has erased "Slave" from his face, and he now sports a neat, carefully trimmed goatee. Blond streaks highlight his brown hair, which is slicked back. He is delicate, thin and slight, almost spritelike -- you feel as if a strong gust of wind would carry him across the room. But far from seeming shy or skittish, as he's often portrayed, he burns with a palpable intensity. He looks me in the eyes when he speaks, and his thoughts tumble out rapidly.

It is indicative of the idiosyncratic way 's mind works that he does not permit journalists to record interviews with him because he is afraid of being misrepresented. His fear isn't so much that he will be misquoted as that he will be trapped within the prison house of his own language, frozen in his own characterization of himself. For an artist who has built his career -- and, to some degree, unraveled a career -- by doing whatever he felt like doing at any particular moment and not looking back, that fear is deep.

Still, is sufficiently concerned about saying something that will damage the truce he's struck with Warner Bros. that he initially requested that a court stenographer be present during our interview. Sure enough, when I arrived at Paisley Park, the stenographer was sitting in the reception area, transcription machine at the ready. But after came out to greet me and took me on a tour of the studio, he felt comfortable enough to abandon the idea. The stenographer was sent away.

"It's hard for me to talk about the Warner Brothers stuff because I start getting angry and bitter," explains before beginning to play some of the songs from Emancipation. "It's like, to talk about it, I have to get back into the mind state I was in then. It's frightening."

Making a triple-album set, it turns out, was one of 's long-standing ambitions -- and one of his difficulties with Warner Bros. Sign 'O' The Times was originally called Crystal Ball and was supposed to be 3 albums," says of the double album he released in 1987. 'You'll overwhelm the market,' I was told. 'You can't do that.'"

"Then people say I'm a crazy fool for writing on my face," he continues. "But if I can't do what I want to do, what am I? When you stop a man from dreaming, he becomes a slave. That's where I was. I don't own Prince's music. If you don't own your masters, your master owns you."

As part of the deal to end 's relationship with the company, Warner Bros. retains the right to release two compilations of the music that the singer recorded while under his contract with the label. In addition, has provided Warner Bros. with an additional album of music from the thousands of hours he has in his own vaults; this album would be released under the name Prince. "The compilations don't concern me," says dismissively. "They're some songs from a long time ago -- that's not who I am."

Despite all the bad blood that has flowed between them, insists he bears no grudge toward his former label. He views his battles with the company as part of a spiritual journey to self-awareness "What strengthens is what I know," he says. "It was one experience -- and it was my experience. I wouldn't be as clear as I am today without it. I don't believe in darkness. Everything was there for me to get to this place. I've evolved to something -- and I needed to go through everything I went through.

"And that's why I love the folks at Warner Bros. now," he says with a laugh. "You know that Budweiser ad -- 'I love you, man'? I just want to go there with them!"

Asked about the concept behind Emancipation, says, "It's hard to explain in sentences." The album is based on a complicated -- not to say incomprehensible -- sense of the relationship among the pyramids of Egypt, the constellations and the dawn of civilization. Each CD is exactly an hour long and contains 12 songs.

"Recently I thought about my whole career, my whole life leading up to this point -- having a child helps you do that -- and I thought about what would be the perfect album for me to do," says. "People design their own plans. That's when The Dawn takes place. The Dawn is an awakening of the mind, when I can see best how to accomplish the tasks I'm supposed to do. I feel completely clear."

's marriage to Mayte and the impending birth of their child were two of the important inspirations. for Emancipation. It's no coincidence that what describes as his "divorce" from Warner Bros. has occurred right around the time of his marriage and Mayte's pregnancy. "I don't believe in coincidence," he says flatly.

Along with covers of such smoochy ballads as Betcha By Golly Wow! and the Delfonics' La-La Means Love U, Emancipation is filled with what sheepishly calls "sentimental stuff." Discussing how he has been affected by the prospect of fatherhood, he says, "You'll definitely hear it in my music." For the song Sex In The Summer, which was originally titled Conception, sampled his unborn baby's heartbeat. "Of course, that's a tempo," he says. "The nothing baby set the groove for this song. Mayte always smiles when she hears it."

may have used his baby's ultrasound as a rhythm sample, but he and Mayte did not ask to know which sex their child is. "It doesn't matter, " says. "We all have the male and female with us, anyway. We'll be happy with whatever God chooses to give us." And just as has no intention of once again taking the name Prince -- the people around him refer to him simply as "The Artist" -- he says, "The baby will name itself." As he prepares to preview a song called Let's Have A Baby, turns to Mayte and says, "You're gonna start crying -- you better leave." Then he explains to me, "I got my house fixed up and put a crib in it. Then I played this song for her, and she started crying. She had never seen my house with a crib in it before." Let's Have A Baby, the lyrics run. "What are we living for?/Let's make love." As for the song's sparse arrangement, described by as "bass, piano and silence," he says, "Joni Mitchell taught me that. If you listen to her early stuff, she really understands that."

He points to a portrait of Mayte that is framed in gold. "I can't wait for my baby to look up and see Mayte's eyes," he says, his voice filled with wonder. "Look at those eyes. That's the first thing the baby is going to see in this world."

has transformed Paisley Park in anticipation of the birth of his child. What had been a modern industrial park has become more playful and vibrant, like the psychedelic wonderland implied by its name. And it would warm the heart of even Tipper Gore, who was inspired to found the Parents Music Resource Center when she overheard one of her daughters listening to the masturbatory imagery in the Prince song Darling Nikki, to hear the singer talk about how he now sees things through the eyes of a child.

"When I looked at some of the artwork around here from that perspective, pfft, it was out of here: 'Those pictures got to go,'" says. "I also wanted to make this place more colorful, more alive. This place was antiseptic -- there's life here now."

The memory of the violence that his father introduced into the household when was young preys on his mind. "How do you discipline a child?" he asks. "You have to imagine yourself as one of them. Would you hit yourself? You remember the trauma you suffered when you suffered that."

For all of the drama he has created around himself, is about music. The only time he seems completely relaxed is when he is jamming with his band, the New Power Generation, in a rehearsal space at Paisley Park. The band, including Kathleen Dyson on guitar, Rhonda Smith on bass, Eric Leeds on saxophone and Kirk Johnson on percussion -- sets up in a circle, with facing the indomitable Sheila E., who is sitting in on drums.

Playing his -shaped guitar, the singer smiles and leads his crew through a series of funk-rock improvisations. He roams the room calling for solos, pointing at whichever player is taking the music to a higher plane so everyone can follow on that journey. They goof around with a James Brown riff. Then, when Sheila E. introduces a syncopated Latin groove, blasts off on guitar in the roaring style of Carlos Santana.

"We don't really know any songs yet; we're just recording everything," explains to me at one point, nearly apologizing. But the music just seems to course through him, and he fairly shimmers with happiness as he drifts from guitar to bass to keyboards as his mood dictates.

During a short break, asks Leeds to play the theme of John Coltrane's immortal A Love Supreme. As Leeds articulates the line, , sitting at the keyboards, crumples with joy. "It's that one note," he says, laughing, isolating the highest-pitched tone in the sequence. "That's what tells you a madman wrote it."

's identification with Coltrane -- a driven musical genius and spiritual quester who seemed intent on playing himself out of his skin -- is plain. had spoken about the saxophonist earlier in the day. "John Coltrane's wife said that he played 12 hours a day," he had said. "I could never do that, play one instrument for that long. Can you imagine a spirit that would drive a body that hard? The music business is not set up to nurture that sort of spirit."

"Let's see," he continued "According to some people, I'm bankrupt and crazy. I woke up one day, and the radio said I was dead. People say, 'He changed his name; he doesn't even know who he is.'"

The very notion that could be perceived that way seemed painful to him. But then his spirit ascended. "I may not be like Muhammad Ali -- I ain't predictin' no rounds," he said, looking at me directly in the eyes. "But I'm pretty well-focused. I know exactly who I am."
[Edited 5/27/07 15:45pm]

Thanks for posting these!

#5: Musicology Era


BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE: PRINCE HAS STILL GOT THAT RED-HOT MAGIC
By Anthony DeCurtis
May 27, 2004

"Hammering! That's the word. That's it!" Prince folds over in laughter and stamps his high-heel boots on the floor. Those heels, as it happens, are clear plastic, and lights twinkle within them. It's a perfect metaphor for the electricity that seems to be coursing through the singer at the moment.

Prince is responding to a description of the torrid version of D.M.S.R. -- a jam from 1999 touting the virtues of "dance, music, sex, romance" -- that he and his backing band, the New Power Generation, unleashed earlier that evening at the sold-out Gund Arena in Cleveland. It was a full-on funk stomp that got the house up and shaking. Hammering only begins to convey the performance's pulverizing rhythmic assault. "Pulverizing! That's good, too," Prince says, laughing again. "What you see is people responding to what this band is -- and what we're doing."

It's just twenty minutes after the show, and, at a time when most performers would be just beginning to cool down, Prince is utterly composed. He's crisply dressed in a purple tunic and black pants and looks as if he has spent the evening relaxing in his living room rather than burning down a 20,000-seat house. But that's how effortless things seem to be of late for the forty-five-year-old musician. Everybody in the Prince camp -- most definitely beginning with Prince himself -- bristles when anyone suggests that the current wave of Princemania constitutes a "comeback." The official line is that he never went away. From a strictly literal standpoint, of course, that's true. He's been as busy as ever, using his own label and his website, the New Power Generation Music Club, to release CDs such as The Rainbow Children (2001) and N.E.W.S (2003), as well as the DVD Prince: Live At The Aladdin Las Vegas. But whether or not you buy the message that Prince never left, it's clear that many of his millions of fans had gone somewhere in recent years, and now many of them are staging a comeback of their own. Suddenly, liking Prince doesn't feel like such a chore; in fact, it's fun. His stripped-down, pleasingly straightforward new album, Musicology, delivers on the promise of his spellbinding performances earlier this year on the Grammy Awards broadcast and at his induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. His live shows have become ecstatic parties, sweaty, two-hour romps through the likes of Controversy, U Got the Look, Take Me With U and a sizzling version of Sam & Dave's classic Soul Man. Nearly a recluse before, Prince is now all over the media, chatting on talk shows, posing for photographers, being interviewed by reporters.

It's like an old friend has returned. Indeed, the spring of 2004 is beginning to feel like the summer of 1984, when Purple Rain made Prince one of the biggest rock stars in the world. When he sings, "Don't you miss the feeling that music gave you back in the day?" in Musicology," he might as well be speaking about his own music. After abandoning his name for an unpronounceable symbol, after painting the word "Slave" on his face as part of a battle with his record label, after disowning decades of his own work, Prince is enjoying himself again. And, as always, his enthusiasm is irresistible.
"I had an epiphany last night," Prince says about his appearance in Columbus, Ohio. He's sitting on a couch in his dressing room, shortly before taking the stage in Cleveland. The room is warm and humid, to keep his throat and nasal passages clear and his vocal cords supple. Candles burn on every available surface.

"I was offstage, listening to Michael Phillips take his solo," he continues, alluding to the instrumental portion of the show in which the saxophonist takes a long, atmospheric excursion during God while Prince changes clothes and takes a break. "I was thinking, 'Wow, listen to those people responding, and all he's doing is playing a saxophone.' They can feel that what he's doing is real. So many shows now, they have pyrotechnics, pre-taped vocals and musical parts, and it's so dead. But here's one man breathing into an instrument, and the whole room feels alive. It made me want to rise up to that level when I came back onstage."

Part of the goal of the Musicology album and tour is to connect audiences once again to the power of live music. "Take your pick -- turntable or a band?" Prince challenges on the album, and his concerts are like a clinic in inciting the sort of pandemonium that only a band can create. That's true even for the players themselves. "This is school for me," says Phillips, 27. "Every night I watch how he connects his gift to the crowd. I've spoken to him about it. He told me that playing a solo is like making love. You have to pay attention to the things that make your partner respond -- and space them out so they come at exactly the right time. It's one big, long orgasm."

these interviews are great. though my eyes hurt from staring at the comp 4 so long. can u still buy backissues of these magazines? cause i looked once on the magazine's site and i didn't find nething.

Cool! Thanx 4 sharing!

That's wonderful, thank you!

"It's just so nice to know that there is someone and someplace else. And if we're wrong, and I'm wrong, and there is nothing, then big deal! But the whole life I just spent, I at least had some reason to spend it"

That's the side of Prince's spirituality i like. Not that dogmatic crap.

Oh well

tznekbsbfrvr said:


Go 2:
http://usedmagazines.com/.../other.cgi

And click on:
Rolling Stone 1981
2/19/81 (issue #337) for "Dirty Mind" Era issue

Rolling Stone 1985
9/12/85 (issue #456) for "ATWIAD" Era issue

("Graffiti Bridge" Era issue is unavailable)

("Emancipation" Era issue is unavailable)

Rolling Stone 2004
5/27/04 (issue #949) for "Musicology" Era issue


[Edited 5/29/07 19:59pm]

raveun2thejoyfantastic said:

u are SO cool! many thanks. hope they don't cost 2 much.

Thanks, for posting!!!
Very interesting!!!

that symbol era was just wierd

These are awesome, thanks muchly for posting!

raveun2thejoyfantastic said: