Had to pay more than I'd like, but I guess that's what you gotta do. I've heard a few tracks before but I'm looking forward to digging in and hearing the rest, though I've read it's pretty up and down.

The Truth sounds great though. Don't hear Prince on acoustic guitar enough.

No real point to this topic, I'm just glad to get my hands on a copy of this.

Why not listen to it and let us know?

IMO the title track in particular, is among his very finest work.

There's some good selections on CB, even though a lot of people seem to hate it as a collection. I pretty much like the whole thing, Including The Truth CD (listened to it last night). I even like Cloreen Baconskin...

[Edited 2/22/16 12:27pm]

warning2all said:

I think he held back on content- maybe Crystal Ball was a "test" and he wanted to save better material for later? Like the "Crystal Ball 2" which never came to pass? It was nice to get some tracks that I didn't know about prior- like "Da Bang", or "Calhoun Square"....but with an album title like "Crystal Ball" I expected more awesome boots from that Era like "All My Dreams", or "In A Large Room With No Light"-- and not stuff like "So Dark", "P control Remix", or "Tell Me How U Wanna B Done". Definitely a mixed bag/missed opportunity/still cool to have

You hit it on the head. I love most of the tracks...I was disappointed when there weren't more Crystal Ball era tracks like All My Dreams....and a few too many pointless remixes. But the unknown newer tracks are killer like Da Bang and Hide the Bone. Overall a great collection.

I really love it, you get such a wide array of songs...I wish Prince would release more 'Crystal Ball' kind of box sets of unreleased material

I love "18 & over", bye now

The title track is awesome.

As another orger said it was criticized a lot for how it was released and for what it was not and until recently few people took care to notice how great a collection it was.

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If u put aside the pre-orders fiasco and the fact that half the tracks had already been released in a different form, it's a mindblowing collection. I actually revisited it a lot lately and I just love going thru that 2 hours and a half journey. After 18 years I still ain't bored with it! The sequencing in particular is epic, which was all the mroe hard to achieve that songs date back to different eras and sound quite different. To me it's just a great "private party" album, to be listened to alone and LOUD. It never fails to put me in a great mood even if I'm a bit down at the beginning. U just need to get past the fact that u r familiar with most of the tracks and then u really appreciate the ensemble for what it is: a collection of mostly top-notch material.

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True there's some stuff that "should have remained in the vault", only we hardcore fans used to pay a lot of dough at the time for lame sounding bootlegs often half-filled with subpar material. I was glad to give my money to Prince that time. Same with people moaning about 15 minutes of Cloreen Bacon Skin when those same people would pay money for rehearsal bootlegs. CBS was a private moment between Prince and Morris, a work in progress improvisation that we would never have heard had it been any other artist. I took it as a wonderful gift to the fans, allowing us to hear this unique, quite hilarious private moment.

Crystal Ball + The Truth + Kamasutra = me loving Prince again after the Batman - Come era.

Messy and underwhelming, but it does a decent job of mopping up the best of the Come/TGE era leftovers and gives the briefest glimse at what a real collection of this kind would look like with a few 85/6 gems. The rest is garbage (remixes, live, purposefully bad editing etc)

It blew my mind when it first came out. The last thing I was expecting after the three album "Emancipation" set was another three album set....even less so with a fourth bonus album of acoustic guitar material. I was unaware of all of this material at the time and even the remixes kicked my ass.

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However, for the fans that knew of the original Crystal Ball and prefer the 80s and/or loathe the 90s, I can see how this configuration was a slap in the face.

I love the entire cd set. There might be one or two songs I don't love, but for the most part, I think it's great. Love listening to CB.

NouveauDance said:

Messy and underwhelming, but it does a decent job of mopping up the best of the Come/TGE era leftovers and gives the briefest glimse at what a real collection of this kind would look like with a few 85/6 gems. The rest is garbage (remixes, live, purposefully bad editing etc)

Get Loose, Days Of Wild, The Ride garbage....?

Ripopgodazippa.... anyone? Showgirls? That's so my jam!

It's messy and unorganized,but there are some amazing songs on this set.

The only songs I'm not too crazy about are "Make Your Mama Happy" which kinda sounds like a public service announcement and "The Ride" because I'm not all that into standard blues. But they're still good tracks and the rest of the songs are fantastic!

TheBoneRanger said:

The only songs I'm not too crazy about are "Make Your Mama Happy" which kinda sounds like a public service announcement and "The Ride" because I'm not all that into standard blues. But they're still good tracks and the rest of the songs are fantastic!

Guess we know what you think about "Hide The Bone."

i love the album!! one of my favs

Pentacle said:

NouveauDance said:

Messy and underwhelming, but it does a decent job of mopping up the best of the Come/TGE era leftovers and gives the briefest glimse at what a real collection of this kind would look like with a few 85/6 gems. The rest is garbage (remixes, live, purposefully bad editing etc)

Get Loose, Days Of Wild, The Ride garbage....?

Well they're not amazing, no. What I mean is including random remixes and live tracks in a collection like this is wasted space - not that any of the discs are exactly crammed full. With literally hundreds of unreleased songs, Get Loose, P.Control and Love Sign remixes wouldn't even feature in my top 500 of tracks I wanted to see get an official release. That to me, is garbage.

NouveauDance said:

Pentacle said:

Get Loose, Days Of Wild, The Ride garbage....?

Well they're not amazing, no. What I mean is including random remixes and live tracks in a collection like this is wasted space - not that any of the discs are exactly crammed full. With literally hundreds of unreleased songs, Get Loose, P.Control and Love Sign remixes wouldn't even feature in my top 500 of tracks I wanted to see get an official release. That to me, is garbage.

They're amazing to me, but I get what you're saying. If Prince had filled the discs to 80 minutes, then we'd have less complaints. (But apparently the pyramids had shrunk since Emancipation's 60 minutes each.)

NouveauDance said:

Pentacle said:

Get Loose, Days Of Wild, The Ride garbage....?

Well they're not amazing, no. What I mean is including random remixes and live tracks in a collection like this is wasted space - not that any of the discs are exactly crammed full. With literally hundreds of unreleased songs, Get Loose, P.Control and Love Sign remixes wouldn't even feature in my top 500 of tracks I wanted to see get an official release. That to me, is garbage.

While the 50 minutes length for each disc appears somewhat arbitrary, it's pretty obvious that behind the apparent randomness Prince thought hard to make the album flow well and to make it a cohesive ensemble - in other words, a proper album and not just a random collection (in a way a chronological collection spanning 1978-1996 would have been much more random). Keeping that in mind and regardless of each listener's individual appreciation of each track -including remixes- the concept of "wasted space on a disc" is as irrelevant as saying each and every album released since the advant of CD's should be 80 minutes long and that any shorter album is a rip-off. If Prince felt that 2 hours and a half was the accurate length and that the separation of the ensemble in 3 "chapters" was making sense, we must respect that as an artistic vision, which is better than filling CD's for the sake of filling CD space.

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As for the remixes being a waste of our time and money I'd say the same as I said above regarding people complaining about Cloreen and buying costly rehearsal bootlegs: if those remixes had been released on overpriced maxi-singles earlier, as were the remixes of TMBGITW, Space or Letitgo for example, any fan who was fan enough to buy CB would have bought all those maxis and no one would have thought of complaining about their purchase.

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Now I respect anyone's opinion when it comes to how they feel about the content or the cohesiveness of the ensemble, but I do not believe the fact that some songs were remixes or that the CD's weren't all 80 minutes long are valid arguments.

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However it's nice to read at long last some praise for CB. I've noticed that of late certain albums that were panned for a long time such as CB, NPS or GN get some recognition at long last It shows that time plays in their favor

databank said:

While the 50 minutes length for each disc appears somewhat arbitrary, it's pretty obvious that behind the apparent randomness Prince thought hard to make the album flow well and to make it a cohesive ensemble - in other words, a proper album and not just a random collection (in a way a chronological collection spanning 1978-1996 would have been much more random).

I can't say I really agree - I don't think they flow like albums at all. IMO, they flow like what they are - a hodge-podge of odds n sods thrown together and of course heavily weighted in more recent offerings rather than the material he knew people actually wanted and expected from a set with such a title. A similar thing happened again with the NPGMC, where the first preview was what, Splash, and then we got what, a load of 2000-era pap.

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In terms of flow, he set out to (and I think he actually used this phrase at the time) "beat the bootleggers" [at their own game] - which accounts for the random mix of eras, bad editing and inclusion of random live tracks, as some sort of meta-commentary on bootlegging. Ironically, by this time labels like Moonraker were already releasing 3 CD sets of their own with better artwork, credible liner notes and more thought put in to their contents. The only thing Prince trumped them on, of course, is sound quality - which might be debately given how loudly the album is mastered.

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Again, none of this has anything to do with the individual songs quality, which is definately more good (often great) than bad, but I'm never going to listen to Good Love followed by Strays Of The World, or Last Heart sandwiched inbetween a badly edited live track and Poo(m) Poo(m). Thank god for playlists.

purplethunder3121 said:

TheBoneRanger said:

The only songs I'm not too crazy about are "Make Your Mama Happy" which kinda sounds like a public service announcement and "The Ride" because I'm not all that into standard blues. But they're still good tracks and the rest of the songs are fantastic!

Guess we know what you think about "Hide The Bone."

-

Well, it ain't exactly Housequake, but I still enjoy it.

"Hide The Bone" is a funk masterpiece!! that song is my shit! I keep insisting that this jam should have been the opening track on TGE instead of the dumb,silly "P Control".

NouveauDance said:

I can't say I really agree - I don't think they flow like albums at all. IMO, they flow like what they are - a hodge-podge of odds n sods thrown together and of course heavily weighted in more recent offerings rather than the material he knew people actually wanted and expected from a set with such a title. A similar thing happened again with the NPGMC, where the first preview was what, Splash, and then we got what, a load of 2000-era pap.

.

In terms of flow, he set out to (and I think he actually used this phrase at the time) "beat the bootleggers" [at their own game] - which accounts for the random mix of eras, bad editing and inclusion of random live tracks, as some sort of meta-commentary on bootlegging. Ironically, by this time labels like Moonraker were already releasing 3 CD sets of their own with better artwork, credible liner notes and more thought put in to their contents. The only thing Prince trumped them on, of course, is sound quality - which might be debately given how loudly the album is mastered.

.

Again, none of this has anything to do with the individual songs quality, which is definately more good (often great) than bad, but I'm never going to listen to Good Love followed by Strays Of The World, or Last Heart sandwiched inbetween a badly edited live track and Poo(m) Poo(m). Thank god for playlists.

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The problem for me when Prince mixes eras isn't just the difference in quality of the writing (due to a completely different mindset) but also the difference in technical sound quality of the recordings. These two factors together make both eras seem as different as day and night. I mean I literally associate the happy, fun, all-inclusive 80s with the brightness of sunshine, whereas the ugliness of the war with Warner Brothers and the "slave" labeling (then later the hyper religiousness) tends to leave the 90s cloaked in the darkness of night (even when he's just goofing around with stuff like Poom Poom). And the 80s in general just seemed like a happier decade (more like the roaring 20s), while the 90s overall tended to take a much darker turn.

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But there's a certain sound to the 80s recordings which he abandoned in the 90s for a more advanced technical approach, so it's jarring to me when he seesaws back and forth (even though I enjoy the 90s just as much and sometimes more). It's also why updated tracks like Tick Tick Bang, Extraloveable, and In a Large Room With No Light can't really be considered official, definitive versions. I think it's interesting to hear updated versions, but he can't really recapture the original sound and mindset when he first recorded them in the 80s....I really don't think that's possible. And the fans from the 80s were the most responsible demographic of fans for elevating him to the realm of "living a fantasy life of wealth and fame," so the honorable thing to do would be to reward all of you with high quality, uncensored versions of his 80s recordings from the vault (along with remasters and such) instead of dangling it over your heads year after year like an ungrateful prick tease.

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TheBoneRanger said:

And the fans from the 80s were the most responsible demographic of fans for elevating him to the realm of "living a fantasy life of wealth and fame," so the honorable thing to do would be to reward all of you with high quality, uncensored versions of his 80s recordings from the vault (along with remasters and such) instead of dangling it over your heads year after year like an ungrateful prick tease.

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CHURCH!

I agree with you Soul.."Hide The Bone" would have made a great opener!