It was a Friday night , I was getting ready to go out for a night at a club in London and I heard what I thought was something so different and so muted in it's power! The DJ on Capital Radio gave no warning he just gave a traffic update then said "stop what you're doing and check this out!" How I wish Prince would do that again!

I was sitting around one night listening to the radio when the DJ said "Coming up,we have the new Prince song".I immediately grabbed a blank cassette tape and recorded it.I loved this song from the first time I heard it.

yup, i was at home spinning the 7" vinyl single that i'd gotten at the neighborhood wrecka stow the day it came out (i completely forget how i knew when new prince stuff was coming out back then - lord knows there was no internet).

Anxiety said:

Indeed! I used to stand in Tower Records scanning any music mag/paper for news or wait desparately for the next issue of the dearly departed Controversy mag!

clarityman said:

i think i got all my info from rolling stone, of all places. that, and the guys in the neighborhood wrecka stow were familiar with me and they'd hip me to new upcoming releases sometimes.

In Holland Radio 3 had announced the entire day that they had the new Prince single at 8 o'clock!
So I had my tapedeck ready. I was SO filled with anticipation but NOTHING prepared me for what came outa the speakers.
They played the 7" versions of STT AND La, La, La, He, He, Hee.

Instant love affair.

Oh, God--I'm never going to hear the end of this, but I was actually sitting on a tractor.

Imago777 said:

It explains alot, it does.


[Edited 8/4/05 4:41am]

Imago777 said:

did you have wellies on?!! lol - but seriously folks I think what we are seeing here is as I thought, the song was so groundbreaking and sonically sparse that it just cut straight into your head forever!

clarityman said:

Actually my friend was completely stoked by the song. I listened to it and found it kind of boring. But I liked the fact that it sounded more mainstream than the stuff on PARADE.

Over the next week the song finally grew on me and when I finally got my hands on the album I was in love. The radio station I listenned to was very pro-Prince and "If I was Ur GirlFriend", "Hot Thing", "Adore", "I could never take the place of your man", and "SOTT" were all in heavy rotation, believe it or not.

That was a good two year streek.

I remember it being an exlusive on Radio 1 in the UK, and they built it up the whole day saying the new Prince single was going to be played later on in the day. So I primed my tape recorder (remember them?) and sat there listening to it. I thought it was amazing and spent the rest of the night playing it over and over again.

it was February of 1987,it was cold outside.
I was in a recording studio taking a break between cutting tracks.
We had the radio on in the control room,it was about noon.
The dj announced that he had just received the new Prince single and he was gonna spin it after the break,I immediately slipped a blank cassette into the jambox and waited.
He played the single version(fades out).
I remember being mystified by the sound of the drums first,then the bass line-after I played it over and over all day long I realised that this was my favorite song!
Knowing(back then),that Prince always released a longer version on 12'.i sprung into action at around midnight.
I called all the local fm top 40 stations and finally found the dj who did have the album version,he played it for me!
I was overwhelmed at the extended section with the guitar solo and electronic drums going crazy!
I could not wait for the whole album to come out.
Sign O' The Times would prove to be my favorite Prince record of all time.period.

lol..it seems that many of us grabbed out cassette tapes and recorded it from the radio.I guess we're showing our age,huh?

a cool idea would be to pull out our old cassettes in which we taped Prince stuff off the radio and upload them somewhere so we could all check this stuff out.
I know I have a handfull of tapes like that still!
I have a "radioscope" episode from jan. 1987 that previews the black album,this was right before it was cancelled and the dj's played a few seconds from each tune!
I also have the debut broadcast of the entire around the world in a day album.
maybe we could do something like this,I would love to hear everybody;s old tapes!

That's the exact same way it went down with me. I heard the radio DJ announce it so I immediately recorded it. I played it over and over and then thought "I hope the album is better than this". The album was better, but once again, the "old Prince" had not returned, except for the song "It", so I was pissed.

Same here. It wasn't the kind of Prince music I was hoping for but it was OK. If it had been more like "Parade", I was going to be through with Prince.

on the flip side to vainandy's comments-I would have been pissed if the album did sound like his old stuff!
at this point,in 1987-I was ready for something new,Prince delivered!
There were sooo many people copping the minneapolis sound,it was time to move on.

All the more reason to stick around and show them how it's really supposed to be done.

I first heard SOTT after I bought the single. The "big disease with a little name" line was dead serious for me (I'm not sure, but I think I already knew two of my gay friends were seropositive, plus a "straight" couple), and it made me even more transfixed than I already was by the starkness of the song. On a lighter note, I was confused by the pictures on the single, especially the one at the back. I thought Prince himself had decided to done a dress.`

SOTT is, with Kiss (Love or Money) and When Doves Cry (17 days), one of my most satisfying experience with a single. To this day, I still don't have Love or Money, which frustrates me to no end.
[Edited 8/4/05 7:23am]

vainandy said:

I "grew up" (as an adult) with Prince. At first his music was the soundtrack to my hedonistic ways, then it was "sex isn't everything" and then, with SOTT, "be careful!". Frankly, I might be dead now if I had not started to take AIDS more seriously. At the time, where I was living, it was a big city disease and many men did not bother with condoms. It took Rock Hudson's death and songs like SOTT (plus thousands of ads) to spread the message.

1987.. ups truck pulls up at 9:30 am with a box from Warner/Wea of product... i open it, and low and behold a promo 12' of Sott

standing on 34th street in NYC in front of this cheap ass store called conways...a car was driving down the street blasting our radio station for modern r&b and soul/funk back then...98.7 kiss fm i heard this sorta strange sparse track and then suddenly i heard my DADDY's voice...CLEAR AS DAY !!!!
"in france a skinny man died...."
i felt like chasing the car down 34th street just to hear the rest of this jam... ahhhhh the memories...

So,is anybody down to upload our tapes somewhere?
It would be a blast to hear some of this stuff again!
I suppose there are places that can host audio files for free?
anybody know more about doing something like this?

I saw the video on MTV when it first premiered. 2 b honest, I didn't much care 4 it when I 1st heard it. Needless 2 say, it grew on me.

prettymansson said:

OMG, I remember Conways and the one on 34th! Is that store still there? Anyways, I remember hearing the song on the radio but I didn't realize it was Prince till I got SOTT later that summer. I didn't love it but I didn't hate it. Now I love it. It's still a timely song for where we are now. More proof why Prince is the master of his game.

purplecam said:

i guess its still there i live in copenhagen denmark now...

prettymansson said:

LOL I'm out in San Diego. I have to check that out when I go back. Great memories though.

Wow, yeah I remember:

It was my senior year of high school. I was after school one day, painting some banners with some kids and the radio was playing. "SOTT" came on and I stopped everything to listen to it. I thought it was cool. I thought the part "We'll call him Nate, if it's a boy" was weird.

I was on the interstate, riding home with my dad and brother, my best friend and his dad, and we had just seen "Nightmare on Elm Street 3:The Dream Warrior". The movie had kicked ass and we were all excited about that. About halfway through the song, which oddly I didn't recognize as Prince (even though I had been a fan for two years) and I said "who is this?" My friend, who knew I was a P. fan, said, "It's Prince, kid, you don't recognize it?" My friend had said they played the song on the radio a lot but I hadn't heard it. We went bowling after and I heard it again, all the way through, and they may have been the point that I changed from being a P. fan to a fan for life.

clarityman said:

I totally recall it, Friday night 'bout 9:00 p.m. I remember thinking, this sounds diff. than Parade (just I thought Parade sounded diff. than ATWIAD and so on...). I was super stoked when I heard it. It was through the video on MTV. Never a fan of the video, but I was immediately hooked. Who'd know that this album would contain my favorite P song of all time, "Strange Relationship." (I totally dug this entire album back then, even the songs I don't particularly care for now.)

Now, can we talk about the first time we heard "Alphabet St."? Good Lawd, was I in love!