a new movie, a world tour, new album, new band members

the Parade era was almost or just as exciting 4 Prince fans as the Purple Rain era

what was in the purple air? Romance 1600 Mazarati the Family Under the Cherry Moon great photos shoots outfits & videos

* let's share and educate on the era...Outside of the actual TOUR show

http://prince.org/msg/7/331309 Parade Tour-Shows 1986 discussion






[Edited 2/28/10 14:24pm]
[Edited 3/1/10 5:52am]

fantastic era.

i love the look of it.

oh well, you said outside of the tour, if you google prince parade for photos about 5 pages back there are tons from getty images (all from tour) but many i'd never seen. but i get the purpose of the thread...


http://s12.bdbphotos.com/...t5ep66.jpg
[Edited 2/28/10 15:41pm]

Prince is so funny looking....awesome era though.

stichdoll said:

yeah because like the PR era it's so huge that talking about the era aside from the tour let's u focus on videos, award shows, the look, the album music, the proteges, background info

http://prince.org/msg/7/331309 Parade Tour-Shows
[Edited 3/1/10 6:12am]
[Edited 3/1/10 6:13am]

OldFriends4Sale said:

Sighs I could look at these all day (drools)

love this little black material on this outfit
reminds me of pillows

Credits: Thank you to whoever it might be....!
[Edited 3/1/10 2:34am]

Credits: Thank you to whoever it might be....!
[Edited 3/1/10 2:35am]

My favourite era. Album, movie, live gigs, costumes, band..everything was just awesome!

[Edited 3/1/10 6:01am]

Original score composed by Princce & The Revolution.
Engineers include: Susan Rogers, Peggy Mac, Coke Johnson.
Principally recorded at Paisley Park Studios, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Another soundtrack that fared more favourably than the movie, 'Under The Cherry Moon', from which it came, this was also the record that marked Prince's return to the live arena. The record itself came with a high camp video and guaranteed hit in the shape of 'Kiss' (which a collaboration of Tom Jones and the Art Of Noise would later cover), a delightfully funky little number around which the world threatened to dance. Elsewhere, both 'Girls And Boys' and 'Anotherloverholenyohead' charted. While the lifting strains of 'Sometimes It Snows In April' rounded off a wonderfully whole album, nothing could quite save the film.





Tracks
01. Christopher Tracy’s Parade(2:11)
02. New Position (2:21)
03. I Wonder U (1:40)
04. Under The Cherry Moon (2:57)
05. Girls & Boys (5:30)
06. Life Can Be So Nice (3:12)
07. Venus De Milo (1:54)
08. Mountains (3:58)
09. Do U Lie? (2:43)
10. Kiss (3:38)
11. Anotherloverholenyohead (3:58)
12. Sometimes It Snows In April (6:50)





Release details
Release Date 31st March 1986
Label : Paisley Park
Produced, arranged, composed and performed* by Prince and the Revolution

(*except where indicated below)
“Kiss” arranged by David Z. Background voices by Mazarati
Orchestra composed and arranged by Clare Fischer
Recorded at Paisley Park & Sunset Sound by Susan Rogers, Peggy Mac, Coke
Johnson and 3 Davids – Z, Tickle & Leonard.
Orchestra recorded by Arne Frager at Monterey Sound
Special gratitude 2 Susan Rogers 4 her time and care
Originally mastered by Bernie Grundman
Photography by Jeff Katz
Art direction by Laura LiPuma & Jeffrey Kent Ayeroff
Collage by Ann Field
All songs Controversy Music ASCAP




Album Credits
“Girls & Boys” Background vocals by
Sheila E. & Lisa on the left
Susannah & Wendy on the right
Sheila E. plays cowbells on “Life Can Be So Nice” & Drums on “Venus De
Milo”
“Do U Lie?” Drums played by Jonathan Melvoin
Additional background vocals 4 “Parade” by Susannah
All background voices on “Anotherloverholenyohead” by Susannah & Prince
The french seduction on “Girls & Boys” is performed by Marie France
Eric Leeds plays the horn on “Girls & Boys” and “Mountains”
Trumpet by Atlanta Bliss Miko: Rhythm Guitar on “Mountains”
Little gypsy girl on “Do U Lie?” is played by Sandra Francisco

Special thanks 2 Clare Fischer 4 making brighter the colors black & white

Orchestral players: Violins: Isabelle Daskoff, Francine Walsh, Mari Botnik,
Pam Gates, Janice Gower, Karen Jones, Betty Moor, Irma Neumann, Assa Drori,
Bill Hymanson, Oscar Chasow, Ron Clark, Henry Ferber, Erne Granat, Ed
Green, Bill Hybel, Reggie Hill, Pat Johnson, Don Palmer, Sheldon Sanov,
Joe Schonbrun, Terry Schonbrun, Harold Wolf. Violas: Pam Goldsmith, Margot
Maclaine, Carol Mukagawa, Myer Bello, Alan Deverich, Norman Forrest, Alan
Harshman, Jorge Moraga, David Stock. Cellos: Jim Arkatoff, Ray Kramer,
Fred Seykora. Basses: Chuck Domonico, Arni Egilsson. Woodwinds: Gene
Cipriano, Don Ashworth, John Clarke, Dave Edwards, Gary Foster, Jim Kanter,
John Lowe, Dick Mitchell, Jack Nimitz, Joe Soldo, Bob Tricarico. Trumpets:
Ray Brown, Rich Cooper, Bob Findley, Larry Ford, Bob O’Donnell, Al Vizutti.
Trombones: Garnett Brown, Charles Loper, Morris Repass, Bill Watrous.
French Horns: Marni Johnson, David Duke, Joe Myer, Brian O’Connor, Calvin
Smith, Jim Thatcher. Tuba: Tommy Johnson. Tympani & Percussion: Brent
Fischer.
Love God &Prince and the Revolution ‘86

Davitt Sigerson’s April 24, 1986 review of Prince’s Parade album from Rolling Stone…

Prince Strips Down

Who but Prince fills us today with the kind of anticipation we once reserved for new work by Bob Dylan, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones? Happily, following the commercial and creative letdown of Around the World in a Day (cleverly presented as his Personal Statement record), Parade: Music from “Under the Cherry Moon” bears the weight of intense hope and scrutiny as lightly as its maker wears the satin capes he favours.

Prince has made it his task to shock us: his work sounds so inevitable we can no longer identify what it was that first surprised us. He did this on ‘When Doves Cry.’ Was it simply the omission of bass guitar or the retention of a single line of melody for verse and chorus? The answer lies in the way it was assembled; the result is that most of us can remember where we were and what we were doing the first time we heard it.

‘When Doves Cry’ and Purple Rain, the blockbuster it introduced, weren’t even Prince’s best work. That had been achieved one record before — on 1999. A febrile double album of extended dance pieces, it featured his best song, ‘Little Red Corvette,’ and an example of his musical wit, ‘1999.’ A lover of ‘60s pop, he built ‘1999’ around the central riff of the Mamas and the Papas’ ‘Monday, Monday.’ To complete this tribute-by-triangulation, Prince has now written for the Bangles ‘Manic Monday’, which bears a melody almost identical to ‘1999’ but omits the founding riff that would link it to its original source.

This is the degree of energy and intelligence we have come to expect from Prince. This is the promise he has once again kept — on Parade. Like Purple Rain, the new album is a soundtrack (for the forthcoming Under the Cherry Moon) and is preceded by the stunning ‘Kiss.’ The single has been mistaken as a return to the music of his Dirty Mind period. In fact, it is made with a sparseness and — most surprising to the ear — an absence of reverb that bespeak years of learning. Rhythmically, ‘Kiss’ is funk; harmonically, it is rhythm & blues; lyrically, it proves Prince is crossing yet another frontier, into emotional maturity.

The petulant baby — first trumpeting a purported sexuality and then expecting us to care about a so-called spiritual rejuvenation — is no more. Not that Prince wasn’t intelligent enough to say interesting things all along, between the nonsense. Usually, though, sex was his code word for a kind of achievement in which the gratification of voyeur and audience defined success. This explains the curious the curious lack of love, or even motivation, in Prince’s sex songs. Dirty Mind’s ‘Sister,’ for example, isn’t a song about making love to one’s sister; it’s a song about making love in which the female seducer is cast as the protagonist’s sister, much as a pornographer might create a fantasy to titillate his audience. ‘Sister’ is not about what it claims to be about, and neither incites nor shocks.

What really shocks, of course, is the aural landscape of records like ‘When Doves Cry’ and ‘Kiss.’ We all may have dirty minds, but few of us are visionaries. In the arrangements on Parade, it is Prince’s vision to that is paraded: a simple Weillen waltz like ‘Under the Cherry Moon’ proves an excuse for all manner of orchestral invention; when Prince says on ‘New Position,’ “You’ve got to try my new funk,” believe him. In ‘New Position,’ on ‘Kiss’ and above all in the sensational ‘Girls & Boys,’ Prince conceives a clean, diamond-hard style that could spawn years of imitations.
Far from the funk of Dirty Mind, this style springs from an understanding of orchestration, rather than the innate ability to jam on rhythm instruments. On Parade, all sounds — snippets of guitar, horn, percussion, voice — are treated equally, erasing the line between ‘basic track’ and “sweetening”. Prince has achieved the effect of a full groove using only the elements essential to a listener’s understanding — and so has devised a funk completed only by the listener’s response.

Thanks to Under the Cherry Moon, we get the title song, ‘Sometimes It Snows in April’ and ‘Christopher Tracy’s Parade’; thanks to shooting in France, we get the French touches in ‘Girls & Boys’ and ‘Do U Lie?’ But the growth in Prince’s lyrics isn’t because maturity is written into the film script. On Parade, sex and love sound real, and perhaps for the first time, they sound related. He’s made the adult discovery — or is it an admission? — that the people you care about can be the people who turn you on the most. ‘Kiss’ even offers something of a manifesto: in lines like “Women not girls rule my world”, “U don’t have 2 watch Dynasty 2 have an attitude” and “U can’t be 2 flirty mama I know how 2 undress me”, Prince smiles at his old ways. On another track, he serves notice that he’s “got 2 try a new position”.

If Parade harks back to Dirty Mind, it is less in the surface similarities of the falsetto funk style than in its freedom from thematic pretensions. Prince has given us three successive concept albums — first the unintended masterpiece 1999; next the Cinerama extravaganza Purple Rain, where his exertions occasionally drowned out his intentions; and finally the con job Around the World in a Day, when he summoned craft and packaging to bridge the creative chasm he faced. Having gathered enough laurels on which to rest comfortably forevermore, Prince wants to have some fun with music, or as he puts it, to “go fishing in the river, the river of life.” What better time for a new baptism?


Davitt Sigerson

My favourite album by some distance.

The first concert I ever went to.

The first Prince album I recieved as a birthday present.

His best videos

The yellow suit!

He grinned more in this time than I think ever before or since.

I was a very happy boy in 1986

Definatley Prince's most slickest & stylish period - in both music & fashion

OldFriends4Sale said:

I'm lovin this thread

I loved the videos from Parade. The end of Girls and Boys when Prince says "Boo" and Jerome starts laughing and calling out the band as they walk off the set...PRICELESS!!!

motherfunka said:

anyone have in clear pics from this?

January 27. 1986
Shrine Auditorium Los Angeles
American Music Awards
Prince Presents awards to Huey Lewis & The News








[Edited 3/3/10 7:27am]

April 14. 1986
Mountains Video Shoot

The blue floral tele picured here is a custom job made by Roger Sadowsky

His Royal Badness has quite a few Hohner teles, all destinguishable from each other in detail and purpose. Hohner also supplied him with new examples during the "Purple rain" and "Parade" tours. All of them in that translucent ocher yellow with the leopard pickguard. http://www.photopix.ch/gu...e&Itemid=2

But Prince also owned a special one off.

http://www.photopix.ch/gu...7&Itemid=8

Prince started using this guitar in 1980. Its unmistakeable funk rhythm sound has graced just about every Prince recording since. Amazing when you take into account the fact that this guitar was a cheap alternative to Fenders Telecaster model.

Prince fell in love with its quirky looks and honking funk tone and has never let it out of his sight for long. He has several of these guitars, most of which have had the necks replaced over the years due to the fact that he has worn them out!

Even some of the guitars with replaced necks are starting to look worn – a clear indication of just how much Prince loves these guitars.

In recent years Prince has changed the pickups in his Hohners, he now has Australian made "Kinman" pickups (these are noiseless pickups but are still passive and retain that vintage sound). But for a long, long time the pickups were standard. With the Hohner being a ‘cheap’ guitar, the pickups weren’t exactly quiet. Noisy pickups combined with Prince’s love of ‘Boss’ effects pedals made for a sound engineers nightmare !

Parade Outtakes

Tracklist:
01. Little Girl Wendy's Parade 2:07
"Christopher Tracy's Parade" was originally recorded as this outtake. The song is basically the same but with a reference to Wendy's guitar (rhymes with "car" in the next line) as opposed to Tracy's piano. Incidentally, Prince sings "little girl Wendy's parade" in "Kiss" right before the third verse.

Everyone come behold little girl Wendy's parade
The show will proceed unless it should rain strawberry lemonade

02. New Position 2:16 Originally from the Controversy era
03. I Wonder U 1:33
04. Under The Cherry Moon 2:51
05. There's Others Here With Us 2:38
*Prince's experimental frame of mind is evident on this track, a dark, strange number with a stark instrumentation made up of tribal-like drumming and various sound effects, such as someone weeping. Prince's vocals are harsh and confused, matching the nightmarish lyrics mentioning death and suicide. Recorded during the Parade sessions, it confirms Prince's belief the spirit lives on after death.

It's strange how your mind works when Love is in power
One learns 2 care and appreciate a flower
What makes others want 2 change your mind?
All the things I've seen, life is so sublime

06. Life Can Be So Nice 3:08
07. Sometimes It Snows In April 6:41
08. Old Friends 4 Sale 3:30


* Old Friends 4 Sale can b heard when christopher comes home 2 a drunk tricky

*This slow bluesy classic is one of Prince's most autobiographical songs in which he sings about Steve Fargnoli, Wendy Melvoin, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, and the late bodyguard Chick Huntsberry. A somber mood is established from an eerie slightly discordant synth with a piano the main accompaniment. Recorded during the Parade sessions, two versions exist, with one including Clare Fischer's orchestra. It was revised in 1991.

The sun set in my heart this afternoon
4 2 friends of mine got stuck in the snow
In Uptown when winter's alarmin',

This song I originally heard a few times on 104 WDKX back in 85, it was played as a PROMO. I really believe Prince might have released it as such, instead of it being 'leaked'
I had it on tape the same time I added the Black album boot to when it was 'leaked' to the underground. I love(d) this song, it's so personal, so much feeling and history behind it versus the version released on the Vault cd which is so overworked/destroyed impersonal and just not enjoyable. Like Hello, Old Friends 4 Sale is recounting some experiences that happened near the end at the end of the Purple Rain era/tour. His 1st real move toward a jazz feel. Piano, bass, drums with use of the brush and some strings.

Old Friends 4 Sale
Get em while their still hot
Watch out they'll kiss U till they get what U got
And they'll show U the friends that their not
Old Friends 4 Sale

09. All My Dreams 7:12

Welcome, this is where I live
This is where I dream my dreams

10. Girls & Boys 5:37
11. Love Or Money 4:10 Sung in Prince, not Camille, voice

Nothing comes 4 free now
If U want 2 be with me now
What's it gonna be now?

12. Heaven 7:04
*12. Heaven (recorded in France summer '84), this whimsical track was recorded in May of 1985 but was never placed on any configuration of Parade. Prince plays the main "carnivalesque" theme on the organ, alternating with a different figure, played on synth sounding like a harp. The lyrics reflect Prince's belief that heaven can be a place on earth.

Heaven will be here on earth
If we just try 2 love

13.- An Honest Man Complete instrumental version of the song, from Under the Cherry Moon movie & an accapella lyrical version

14.- Neon Telephone Parade outtake later given to Three OClock 3:52

Sometimes her pride is like a big tall building
It hides the street that leads 2 a sweet mystery

15. It's A Wonderful Day

* It's A Wonderful Day is when the infamous butterscotch vs chocolate scene

Everybody makes suggestions but the words don't rhyme
Decisions they don't have 2 live by are easy ones 2 make
Why can't they love me 4 what I am

"It's A Wonderful Day" is a fairly nondescript uptempo number, and may have been intended to be replaced at a later time, according to Susan Rogers. Recorded in January, 1986, the song is a positive and upbeat number and features prominent vocals from Lisa and Wendy. Although discarded, some of the song may have been inspiration for Camille track, "Good Love".


[Edited 3/8/10 8:54am]

I've said it many times, if I had only one album/musical era to pick as a fave from Prince, it would be Parade.To me he was about as high as one could go musically speaking. The expanded Revolution, the jazz like tones, weird yet organic sounds, quirky yet melodic funk, classical colorings, it's all there and then some. Love all the extended mixes and b-sides as well. I never tire of this period.

be right back
[Edited 4/5/10 11:24am]

He's never looked better.