I've been wanting to find this out for a while now. My earliest memories of Prince onyl go as far back as 1984. And at that point that was when he became a superstar. But how important was he before that? Was he a cult figure? Was he force in the music industry even before the hits like "1999" & "Purple Rain"? Or was he only this new cat that only the Funk/Soul cats can appreciate?

I want some stories from some of you old folks too.

If, "For You came out" in 1978, then he was probably working on it for several years prior to that as he learned the guitar. So, about ten years.

It was really the breakthrough of 1999 and Little Red Corvette on MTV in 1982 that put Prince over initially. Before that, he'd had some impact on the Black charts, but very little mainstream success.

Once When Doves Cry came out in '84 (about a month before the movie), his stardom was pretty much assured.

Prince was not appealing to every type of crowd when he first came out he was to wired up and weird for Black audiences here in the states and that may be why he prefers european audiences,they accepted him first.But The rest of the world soon followed.

wlcm2thdwn said:

-----
He was blowing up in the black communinity. Before LRC was a single he managed to sell out Joe Louis Areana in Detroit. A really big venue for an RnB star

wlcm2thdwn said:

WHAT???? You've got that so wrong!

Thanks to DJ's like the gentleman named in my signature and Prince opening for Rick James, songs from For You, Prince, Dirty Mind, Controversy, and 1999 we're all over Black radio, in our hearts and on our minds, long before Europeans knew who or what the hell a Prince Rogers Nelson was!!

He didn't get too weirded out for most of his Black audience until ATWIAD!

He was a huge star on R&B radio....one of the biggest. He and Rick James were the baddest things out there. As great as 1983 and 1984 was, exposing Prince to the pop world was the worst thing that could have happened. I remember bitching when I saw "Little Red Corvette" on pop video shows for the first time because I knew what happened to R&B stars once they got a pop audience. Prince didn't exactly sellout like Lionel Richie but he gained a large enough audience that he could afford to become "experimental" and "artsy/farsty".

EXACTLY!

You've got it totally backwards. The Black American audience was the first to accept him. The Europeans were the ones that kept him from going bankrupt in the mid to late 80s. That's why Prince constantly had his ass overseas touring during that time because he had pissed off a lot of people over here beginning with "Around The World In A Day".
.
.
[Edited 10/1/07 22:14pm]

well back in the day my mom would always hear about him before 1999 and stuff. Like where is he playing proubly because she went to school with his sister at North High School and she always told me that the minortys never really liked him. It more the well white people to be blunt.

Prince get's down n dirty on the Controversy tour (1982)

*Unknown venue - any further info on this pic please contact Bananacologne or Ben*

Uploaded on 2004-06-03 17:55:46 by

Copyright Corbis
.
.
[Edited 10/2/07 13:14pm]

vainandy said:

Most of the people in that picture look Black to me. So that kind of refutes that only white people liked him before 1983. I think it was just the opposite.

In early 1980, "I Wanna Be Your Lover" was a pretty big hit -- one spot away from Top Ten and also #1 R&B, knocking out Mijac's "Off The Wall" off the top of the charts. I remembering Willis dancing to it in the television show, Diff'rent Strokes. In early '82, I remember hearing "Controversy" quite bit on the radio. And then the videos started to play on MTV over and over again, "1999," "Little Red Corvette," and sometimes "Sexuality" and "Controversy" too. And "D.M.S.R." was featured rather prominently in the blockbuster movie, Risky Business.

Well, that's what I remember anyway, growing up in the "white" Pacific Northwest.
[Edited 10/2/07 13:24pm]

NWF said:

being one of your "old folks" i was trying t rack my (degenerating) brain as to what we were listening to in the late seventies - somehow Prince went under our radar - i can remember Zappa, Genesis, Zeppelin and all the usual suspects but not Prince - how I knew all the words to the songs at his latest concert i have no idea

I think this thread shoulda been tittled "'How important was Prince before 1982?"

Okay, though I haven't a clue on the official status of that time.
All I can say is that he must have been making an impact in the industry back then because he was played quite a bit in rotation here in my little city of SD, which even then didn't acknowledge top (r&b at least) till they were played out everywhere else. Had he not been on the radio here I wouldn't have known about him since I didn't have any other outlets for music at the time. "Let's Work" was the "Palisade" skate jam, back in the day.

Lovesexy82 said:

yeah im talking before that. they use to call him the litte "yellow man"
[Edited 10/2/07 15:52pm]

Pretty important, at least in an "underground/up and comer/protegy/punk" sort of way. Truthfully, I never heard of him until "Little Red Corvette" was all over MTV and then worked my backwards through his catalog. Critics liked him and he charted on R&B lists a few times, but I'm not sure anyone outside of the musician/hipster/critic circles and R&B listeners really viewed him as "important". Rolling Stone touted him as "Best New Artist" or some such thing after "Dirty Mind" (1983), and certainly his sexual audacity and androgyny turned the right heads and played well back then.

He had a buzz, to an extent, and great things were expected. Insiders knew about the recording contract he'd signed and how much control some 18 year old kid had managed to wrestle away from the record execs. He wasn't even on my radar until I saw him on MTV, Purple Rain happened and I never looked back.

herb4 said:

You mean 1980, right?

vainandy said:

You're just never gonna let that go are you? Can't a negro experiment sometimes? Jeez, do they have to sound the same every record so that they'll get stale easily?

I'm proud of him not being confined to just one category, for that has influenced me as a Black artist to be free to go into every musical direction I want to. We know that Prince has the Funk. But Funk isn't everything dammit.

Anyways, interesting to see how my peoples caught on on to our purple hero first before he went thru to Pop/Rock door. But I'm sure that was at a time where Black artists were able to break some rules and push boundaries. That was at the same time of Punk and New Wave , so many folks, Black and White, picked on the DIY spirit and vibe of that.

Rinluv said:

I could've said that, but I believe that 1983 was the jumpoff for him. Especially since that was the year "Little Red Corvette" and "1999" became mega hits for our hero.

NWF said:

Prince has always been important

Where is blackguitaritz?

Yeah, "I Wanna Be Your Lover" came out during the disco era when everyone, both black and white, listened to R&B music. This was the era in which I discovered Prince.

After disco's "death", the majority of white listeners went to new wave or rock, hated disco, and vocally expressed their hate for disco for years to come. Some still hate it. It was white people that blew up those disco records in that baseball stadium that year that sparked the death of disco. Over the years, I can count the black people on one hand that I have met that vocally expressed their hate for disco until the shit hop era began.

Since Andy never lets a good thing go and refuses to see it end, I switched to R&B radio after disco's death because funk was the closest sounding thing to disco at the time. Prince also remained on R&B radio but wasn't played on pop radio again until "Little Red Corvette". What I found hilarious, was that I knew so many white people who had been in the skating rinks during the "I Wanna Be Your Lover" era but didn't remember Prince (the same ones that shitted on disco years later). When they heard "Little Red Corvette" for the first time, they thought Prince was a new artist. I almost pissed in my pants laughing when I heard a white girl in 1984 (after the "Purple Rain" blowup) asking another classmate....."Have you heard Prince's brand new song, When You Were Mine".




"Controversy" and "Sexuality" were already old when they started airing those videos. Actually, R&B radio had already moved on to several other songs from the "1999" album when pop audiences discovered Prince for the first time with "Little Red Corvette". I had bought the original "1999" 45 before the album came out. It was in a plain purple sleeve. When the pop world discovered it late, Prince had to re-release it after the "Little Red Corvette" single and it was in a cover with the famous negative picture. The pop fans thought it was his "new" single but this whole process of going backwards slowed us R&B fans from moving ahead with more singles....many of us thought "Lady Cab Driver" or "D.M.S.R." was going to be the second single from the album instead of "Little Red Corvette". We used to place bets and all of us lost.

If you have any bootleg video, go back a year before that to the "Dirty Mind" tour. That audience was 90% black also. Go back even further a year before when Prince opened for Rick James' "Fire It Up" tour. The only white people in the entire arena were probably Prince and Rick's band mates and roadies.

I remember reading a review of Prince's "Dirty Mind" tour in "Right On" magazine back in 1980. They said that Prince would probably still be around performing in the 2000s and they were right.

Cynthia Horner at "Right On" magazine was a big supporter of Prince. He even listed her in the thank you section on his "Dirty Mind" album.

[quote]

NWF said:

Hey, I'm simply stating facts on how it all went down. I can't help it if I happen to agree with huge droves of R&B fans being pissed at him for doing a complete style change beginning with "Around The World In A Day". It's fun rubbing it in the facts though.

vainandy said:

And you do it so well too!

vainandy said:

Back in the late 70's, before the malls and their chain record stores, the local mom and pop record shops always had P records and yes, we surely knew who he was, even from Soft and Wet. P was like MJ to us ol' skool fans back in the day, two brahs doing their thang. Back then there was probably only ONE black station that you could catch on the radio in your area, and I dont give a damn where you were! Even in NYC, WBLS was the only one that I can remember! And even though we could receive only one R&B station back then, P was still all over it. And when LRC dropped, it was no surprise to us, nothing new, just another hit from tha MAN! The Time albums, Vanity 6, I didnt know P was connected at that time, kinda suspected it, but they all had that SOUND. When the PR movie came out, the music was expected, we all went to see it just to see if P could really talk, since none of us had seen him do it before. I can remember when MJ and Thriller were domintaing THE WHOLE WORLD, asking myself, "Where the hell is P, and when is he gonna drop a record and do something about Mike?" Purple Rain did the trick. But when he dropped ATWIAD, most of us ol' skool, original fans were like WTF x's 10!!! And aside from SOTT its been pretty much the same for me ever since. But in answering your question, yes P was very important before '83 and very well known among us.

vainandy said:

He became really popular in Europe with Parade.