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Vibe Magazine interview, August 94 I have this mag & so just thought I'd share this interesting old-school interview wit U guys. ![]() ![]() EXCLUSIVE: ![]() The man who won't be Prince speaks at last about his new name, his new attitude, and a new body of work we may never get to hear. After a yearlong chase, Alan Light catches the elusive superstar under a cherry moon in Monaco. PROLOGUE Monte Carlo May 2, 1994 "SO HOW CAN WE DO AN INTERVIEW THAT'S NOT LIKE AN INTERVIEW?" asks ![]() Those 12 months have been an especially remarkable time for ![]() ![]() Which, perhaps, is why he feels that now is the time to talk after a long silence. It seems to be part of a campaign to generally increase his visibility by appearing at events like the World Music Awards, for instance- exactly the kind of thing the reclusive Prince of old would have avoided like the plague. Or to introduce three new songs on Soul Train or publish a book- titled The Sacrifice of Victor- of photos from his last European tour that presents him much more up close and personal than he has been shown in the past. Meanwhile, he continues to move forward, exploring new, alternative outlets for his music, like an innovative CD-ROM extravaganza, ![]() "I just want to be all that I can be," ![]() ACT I San Fransisco April 10, 1993 "CAN YOU KEEP A SECRET?" These- I kid you not- are Prince's first words to me. (And since the answer is yes, all I can tell you is that you really wouldn't be all that interested.) This is back when things were simple, when Prince was still Prince, blasting through a lengthy international tour. I receive a call in New York on Friday saying that Prince has read something I wrote about the tour's opening shows. He wants to meet me in San Francisco on Saturday. The driver who picks me up in San Francisco shows me the erotic valentine his girlfriend made for him, then tells me about the work he and his wife are doing for the Dalai Lama. It's time to wonder, Is this whole thing a put-on? But no, I get to the arena and there is Prince, sitting alone in his house, watching his band, the New Power Generation, start sound check. He is fighting a cold, so we speak quietly back and forth for a while, and then he leads me onstage to continue the conversation while he straps on his guitar and rehearses the band. Mostly, Prince talks about the music- about Sly Stone and Earth, Wind & Fire. He leads me over to Tommy Barbarella's keyboards to demonstrate how he's utilizing samples onstage now (such as the female yelp in the new song "Peach," which came courtesy of Kim Basinger, though she doesn't know it yet). He sits down at the piano to play a new, unfinished song called "Dark"- a bitter, beautiful ballad. The band sounds ferocious and will sound even better at the evening's show. Prince works them unbelievably hard: A standard day on tour includes an hour-and-a-half sound check, a two-hour show, and an after-show at a club most nights. "The after-shows are where you get loose," he says. "It's that high-diving that gets you going." The NPG have gotten noticeably tighter from all this old-fashioned stage sweat, funkier than any of his previous groups. Watching him cue them, stop on a dime, introduce a new groove, veer off by triggering another sample, you can only think of James Brown burnishing his bands to razor-precision, fining them for missing a single note. "I love this band," says Prince. "I just wish they were all girls." He is talkative, with that surprisingly low voice that loses its slightly robotic edge when he's offstage. He is indeed tiny- what's most striking isn't his height but the delicate bones and fragile frame. He is also pretty cocky, whether out of shyness with a new person or the swagger needed to keep going through a tour. "You see how hard it is when you can play anything you want, anything you hear?" he asks underneath the onstage roar of the NPG. They play "I'll Take You There" at sound check, and Prince and I talk about the Staple Singers and Mavis Staples whose new album he is just completing. He leads the way to his dressing room- a blur of hair products and Evian water, with off-white mats on the floor and paintings stuck on the walls- and plays some of the Mavis album, singing along with her roof-raising voice. "Jimmy Jam is going to hear this and throw all those computers away," he says. "This is what we need now- these old kind of soul songs to just chill people out. The computers are as cold as the people are. "That's what I went through with the Black Album. All this gangsta rap, I did that years ago. 'Cause if you're gonna do something, go all the way in. But there's no place to go past the samples. You can only, y'know, unplug them!" There's a knock on the door, and a bodyguard says that someone named Motormouth wants to see Prince. He laughs and waves the visitor in- turns out to be an old Minneapolis DJ, a neighbor for whom Prince used to baby-sit. The gentleman lives up to his name; Prince listens politely and giggles softly, as Motormouth talks about his ex-stripper wife and his daughter and the days back in Minnesota. Prince desperately wants to play a club show after the San Francisco gig, but his throat is too sore. Instead, there's a party at the DV8 club. He arrives with a phalanx of bodyguards, clears out half the room, and sits alone on a sofa. One of the security guys grabs me and sits me on the couch. Prince hands me a banana-flavored lollipop. "I would have brought you a cigar, but I didn't think you smoked," he says. He pours us each a glass of port ("I learned about this from Arsenio"). Occasionally, acquaintances manage to make their way through the wall of security, but he is wary of touching them. "I don't like shaking hands," he says. "Brothers always feel like they got to give you that real firm handshake. Then you can't play the piano the next day." We chat about the new contract he signed with Warner Bros., which was reported to be worth as much as $100 million. He says the deal is nothing like it is being reported, and though he wants most of the conversation to remain "just between us- I just wanted to talk about some of these things," he makes a few mysterious comments that will prove crucial to the next stage of his continual metamorphosis. "We have a new album finished," he says conspiratorially, "but Warner Bros. doesn't know it. From now on, Warner's only gets old songs out of the vault. New songs we'll play at shows. Music should be free, anyway." Before he heads off into the night, Prince lifts his glass of port and offers a toast. Leaning closer, he whispers, "To Oz." INTERLUDE June 7, 1993 HAVING ANNOUNCED HIS RETIREMENT from studio recording on April 27, Prince takes the occasion of his 35th birthday to inform the world that he is changing his name to ![]() Some in the industry combine the two announcements and speculate that changing his name might be a way to finesse his way out of his Warner's contract. With 500-plus finished songs in the vault, is Prince, or ![]() ACT II Chanhassen, Minn. July 12, 1993 PAST THE CHANHASSEN DINNER THEATRE, past the American Legion post where a Little League game is in progress, after miles of fields and open spaces lies the gleaming, towering Paisley Park, the studio and office complex that houses Paisley Park Enterprises. There are dozens of people on the Paisley staff- an entire industry build around one man in heels- working to keep the studio and the songs and, mostly, the person at the center of it all humming an creating at their maximum potential. There's a lot that seems like star-tripping inside ![]() ![]() Tonight ![]() The NPG and gospel singers the Steels play brief opening sets. ![]() He has asked me to fly out for his show, but we never speak. After the performance, his publicist says that ![]() What really happened tonight, though, was ![]() INTERLUDE Fall/Winter 1993-94 ON SEPTEMBER 14 PRINCE RELEASES The Hits/The B-Sides, which sells steadily, if unspectacularly for such a long-awaited retrospective. Two new singles "Pink Cashmere" and "Peach"- the last he will issue under the name Prince- are released; "Cashmere" grazes the pop charts, "Peach" doesn't even do that well. It is subsequently announced that his label, Paisley Park Records, is being dissolved, leaving Mavis Staples and George Clinton temporarily without a home and putting an album by former backup singer Rosie Gaines on permanent hold. In the winter, ads turn up in several national magazines saying, "Eligible bachelor seeks the most beautiful girl in the world to spend the holidays with," and asking that photo be sent to the Paisley Park address. On Valentine's Day, ![]() "Beautiful Girl" climbs to No.3 on the U.S pop charts, the biggest hit for ![]() ACT III Monte Carlo May 2, 1994 SCENE I So how do you pronounce it? "You don't." And is that ever a problem when people around you want to address you? "No." A very final, definite no. But what becomes clear is that there are reasons for the name change, and after sitting with ![]() The man born Prince Rogers Nelson goes on to explain, "I'm not the son of Nell. I don't know who that is, 'Nell's son,' and that's my last name. I asked Gilbert Davidson ( ![]() But as always, what it really seems to come down to is the music. Prince decided that it was time to close the book on one stage of his musical development and find a way to move on the to the next. "Prince did retire," says ![]() He is, quite simply, fixated on one thing: He has too much music sitting around, and he wants people to hear it. As ![]() So what's a ![]() ![]() From almost anyone else, the whole thing would seem like a scam; from someone with a legitimate claim to having wrested the Hardest-Working-Man-in-Show-Business title from James Brown, it starts to sound a little more reasonable. Reasonable, that is, to everyone but his bosses at Warner's. "I knew there would come a phase in my life when I would want to get all this music out," he says. "I just wish I had some magic works I could say to Warner's so it would work out." ![]() "Did you see The Firm?" he asks. "I feel like the music business is like that- that they just won't let you out once you're in it. There's just a few people with all the power. Like, I didn't play the MTV Music Awards; suddenly, I can't get a video on MTV, and you can't get a hit without that. I've come to respect deeds and actions more than music- like Pearl Jam not making videos." What ![]() ![]() "Shouldn't it be up to the artist how the music comes out?" he asks, shaking his head and staring at the floor of the spartan Sporting Club dressing room. Several times, he points to George Michael's lawsuit with Sony Music U.K. over "restraint of trade" as an example of how twisted things have gotten in the biz. "They're just songs, just our thoughts. Nobody has a mortgage on your thoughts. We've got it all wrong, discouraging our artists. In America, we're not as free as we think. Look at George Clinton. They should be giving that man a government grant for being that funky! "People think that this is all some scheme. This isn't a scheme, some master plan. I don't have a master plan; maybe somebody does." He shakes his head again. "I just wish I had some magic words," he repeats. "It's in God's hand s now." SCENE II There are three DO NOT DISTURB signs on the door. A desk and a white upright Yamaha piano face the floor-to-ceiling windows with a breathtaking view of the Mediterranean Sea. A bowl of Tootsie Pops and assorted sweets sits on a coffee table. Tostitos, Sun Chips, and newspaper lie scattered in the corners. 7Up fills the bar, and various colored cloths are draped over all the furniture in the room. ![]() ![]() First comes the Prince album, which includes "Endorphinmachine" and "Come" and a fleshed-out version of "Dark," complete with a slinky horn arrangement that completes the sketch I heard a year before. ![]() The Gold Album is another matter. He lets the songs run, playing air guitar or noodling along at the piano. The songs are stripped-down, taut, funky as hell, full of sex and bite. "Days of Wild" is a dense, "Atomic Dog"-style jam with multiple, interlocking basslines. "Now" (which he debuted on Soul Train this same week) is a bouncing party romp; "319" is rocking, roaring, and dirty; and "Ripopgodazippa" is just dirty. This album is more experimental, more surprising structurally and sonically. Hearing the two albums back-to-back, it's clear that the Prince album may be more commercial than ![]() ![]() ![]() That night, the songs take on even more life at a late gig at a Monte Carlo "American blues and sports bar" called Star's n Bars. The occasion is a private party for Monaco's Prince Albert. Earlier in the evening, ![]() ![]() "Much props to Prince Albert for having us in his beautiful country!" are his first words onstage, and he later refers to Albert as "the funkiest man in show business." After the show, the autographs a tambourine for our host, inscribing inside, "You're the real Prince!" The NPG are lean and in prime fighting shape, trimmed down to just Morris Hayes on keyboards, Sonny Thompson on bass, monster drummer Michael Bland, and dancer/visual foil Mayte. No more rappers, extra dancers, or percussionists, "This band is just beginning to play to its strength," ![]() They storm through 11 new songs, winding things up at 3 a.m., a pretty early night by ![]() ![]() Well, as real as people get in Monaco, anyway. Before the band starts, at around 1:30, talk of international finance and the restaurant business fills the air. You could choke on the Chanel in here, and the number of coats and ties makes it feel like a boardroom instead of a barroom. But let me tell you: People in Monaco are ready to party. Soon they're dancing three and four to a tabletop, screaming along chants, soul-clapping straight outta Uptown. "Days of Wild" goes on four 20 minutes, and an obviously impressed ![]() They don't respond as much to the slower songs, though, not even to a drop-dead knockout version of "Dark," a reminder that this man has the most emotionally complex falsetto since Al Green but plays the baddest guitar this side of Eddie Van Halen. But when he takes the tempo up, they can't get enough. "Don't you got to work tomorrow?" he asks. "Oh, I see. I'm in Monte Carlo- everybody just chills." Finally, at 3:30, he closes with "Peach" ("an old song"), and everyone puts their heels and sweat-stained blazers back on and calls it a night. He has played 14 songs, and- other than snippets of John Lee Hooker's "I'm in the Mood" (a longtime jamming favorite) and Sly Stone's "Babies Makin' Babies"- no one had heard a note of them before. No one was calling out for "Little Red Corvette". No one seemed to mind. Earlier, I asked if the idea of never playing all those Prince songs again made him sad at all. "I would be sad," he replied, "if I didn't know that I had such great shit to come with." SCENE III At the Monte Carlo Sporting Club, ![]() ![]() But then, if your tolerance for tackiness is low, the World Music Awards is no place to be. The nominal point here is to honor the world's best-selling artists by country or region, plus some lifetime-achievement types. The presenters and hosts- the most random aggregate of celebrities imaginable- seem to have been chosen based on who would accept a free trip to Monaco. Ursula Andress? Kylie Minogue? And in clear violation of some Geneva convention limit on cheesiness, Fabio and David Copperfield are both here to present awards. Honorees include Ace of Base, smooth-sounding Japanese R&B crooners Chage & Aska, Kenny G (who annoys everyone backstage by wandering around tooting on that damn sax), and six-year-old French sensation Jordy (who runs offstage and kisses Prince Albert in mid-performance, which somehow does not create an international scandal). Whitney Houston wins her usual barrelful of trophies, and the whole thing is almost worth it to hear Ray Charles sit alone at the piano and sing "Till There Was You". ![]() "It's cheating!" he says backstage, adding slyly, "Lip-synchers, you know who you are. See, if I would lip-synch, I'd be doing backflips, hanging from the rafters, but to cheat and be tired..." I ask if he thinks people feel too much pressure to live up to the production quality of their videos. "Concerts are concerts and videos are videos. But I'm guilty of it myself, so that's going to change. "Concerts, that whole thing is old, anyway. To go and wait and the lights go down and then you scream, that's played. Sound check is for lazy people; I want to open the doors earlier, let people hang out. Make it more like a fair." In his room, he has a videotape of the stage set he's having built for the next tour- a huge, sprawling thing, something like an arena-size tree house. But still, the first thing ![]() And that's what it always comes back to. There is only the music. Look at him, putting more into a sound check than most performers put into their biggest shows. Laugh at his ideas, his clothes, his name. But look at what he is doing: He's 15 years into this career, a time when most stars are kicking back, going through the motions. But he is still rethinking the rules of performance, the idea of how music is released, the basic concepts about how we consume and listen to music, still challenging himself and his audience like an avant-garde artist, not a platinum-selling pop star. And we still haven't alked about his plans for simulcasts and listening booths in his Glam Slam clubs in Minneapolis, L.A., and Miami, or about the 1-800-NEW FUNK collection of other artists he's working with for NPG Records, or his thoughts on music and online and CD-ROM systems, or the two new magazines he's started... Of course, from where it stands, Warner Bros.' objections to his ambitious (some would say foolish) plans make conventional business sense: Would the increase in new music, coming from so many media, create a glut and cut into the sales of all the releases? Is it financially feasible? But these kinds of questions seem to be the furthest thing from ![]() "There's no reason for me to be playing around now," says ![]() THE END. [Edited 12/2/07 14:32pm] ![]() Stuck like glue! ![]() | |
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great read,thanks for the post! Like a Gb Major with a E in the bass | |
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God, I can't believe that was 13 years ago. I remember buying that issue and getting so excited for all the new stuff we were gonna hear... ha, and the bit about using "real instruments", then a year later ditching Michael B for Kirky J and his electronic drums... ha. Prince loves to change his mind, eh? | |
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Thanks so much for posting! Are there any more pics?
"SO HOW CAN WE DO AN INTERVIEW THAT'S NOT LIKE AN INTERVIEW?" asks prince, as he spoons a dollop of jam into his tea. is this some kind of local custom in Monaco? ![]() we're like two petals from the same flower, baby... | |
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planetChar said: Thanks so much for posting! Are there any more pics?
"SO HOW CAN WE DO AN INTERVIEW THAT'S NOT LIKE AN INTERVIEW?" asks prince, as he spoons a dollop of jam into his tea. is this some kind of local custom in Monaco? ![]() That sentence stuck out to me too. It's wierd. ![]() | |
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planetChar said: Thanks so much for posting! Are there any more pics?
U're welcome, thanx. Yeah there's more, but I can't find em. Maybe I'll scan em later. ![]() If U wanna read more Prince interviews, articles & reviews then click here:http://princetext.tripod.com/ planetChar said: "SO HOW CAN WE DO AN INTERVIEW THAT'S NOT LIKE AN INTERVIEW?" asks prince, as he spoons a dollop of jam into his tea.
is this some kind of local custom in Monaco?
![]() I dunno. ![]() [Edited 12/2/07 18:41pm] ![]() Stuck like glue! ![]() | |
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That's a really interesting article, thanks for posting it! Maybe it was honey? Jam?? yuck ![]() | |
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Jeffiner said: That's a really interesting article, thanks for posting it! Maybe it was honey? Jam?? yuck
![]() honey ![]() | |
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thx - nice article X | |
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I think I'll get back to this one.
Thanks for the posting of this article though, I will definitely read it. | |
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From now on, Warner's only gets old songs out of the vault. New songs we'll play at shows. Music should be free, anyway.
o rly now? ![]() | |
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planetChar said: Thanks so much for posting! Are there any more pics?
"SO HOW CAN WE DO AN INTERVIEW THAT'S NOT LIKE AN INTERVIEW?" asks prince, as he spoons a dollop of jam into his tea. is this some kind of local custom in Monaco? ![]() Actually, it´s a local custom in some parts of Russia. I do that too, sometimes ( though I´m not Russian ![]() Tastes great when you use plain black tea with strawberry jam. " I´d rather be a stank ass hoe because I´m not stupid. Oh my goodness! I got more drugs! I´m always funny dude...I´m hilarious! Are we gonna smoke?" | |
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KoolEaze said: planetChar said: Thanks so much for posting! Are there any more pics?
"SO HOW CAN WE DO AN INTERVIEW THAT'S NOT LIKE AN INTERVIEW?" asks prince, as he spoons a dollop of jam into his tea. is this some kind of local custom in Monaco? ![]() Actually, it´s a local custom in some parts of Russia. I do that too, sometimes ( though I´m not Russian ![]() Tastes great when you use plain black tea with strawberry jam. hmm... very interesting... i drink lots of tea and am up for trying something new! how much flack will i get from friends if they find out that a prince interview has influcenced my tea-drinking habits?! ![]() we're like two petals from the same flower, baby... | |
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OK, found the magazine pics:
![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Stuck like glue! ![]() | |
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Such a long read... but interesting!
...There are dozens of people on the Paisley staff- an entire industry build around one man in heels ... why did they have to say that? ![]() ![]() ..."Hearing the two albums back-to-back, it's clear that the Prince album may be more commercial than ![]() ..."committed a faux pas that received international coverage when, dressed in see-through gold brocade and toting one of those lollipops, he left a royal reception before Albert did." ... ![]() | |
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