Omg, I jus listened to the acoustic demo by Prince and the demo by Mazarati, I think it's criminal they didn't receive a writing credit, I mean they practically wrote the damn song.
[Edited 9/21/09 10:21am]

Yeah basically Prince gave them the demo version which was just him and an acoustic guitar. Just a blues thing then they overnight reworked it into the funk classic we all know and love.

Prince went

Claimed it back and reworked it based on their version.

A happy accident I feel.

David Z. did what you hear, not Mazarati. That's why Prince gave him some silly "Associate Producer" credit.

Again, as my post above states, David Z gets a "ARRANGEMENT" credit and only an arrangement credit. Not Producer or Associate Producer but just an arrangement credit because that's what David Z did to that song, he arranged the instruments to make it sound the way it does.

blueautumn said:

LOL! You think that's what an "arrangement" credit says?

ernestsewell said:

Well, in this case that's what Prince thinks, not really me however.

You can laugh at me, that's coo! however, to argue what that means is silly. To argue that point is just the same as arguing what a producer does, it's opinion, everyone will say something different, so laugh.

But if you must know what I think it means it's this. To arrange a song means to ME that you not only decide the layout of the song, verse-chorus-verse but it does also mean to me what instruments/sounds/vocals etc.are used where in any part of the song.

Prince on the other hand in my opinion was giving credit in the best way he could to make it look like it was more him than not.

What's your opinion? I wanna have a laugh too.
[Edited 9/22/09 13:43pm]

Basically the written credits are NOT accurate on the song, but everyone involved was happy with what they got out of it. Or are still getting. Prince is known for not accurately putting in the credits. Sometimes a name will go on as a favor, sometimes a name will get left off even if it really should be there. People who worked with him have said this in interviews.

Omg, I jus listened to the acoustic demo by Prince and the demo by Mazarati

"David Z. did what you hear, not Mazarati"
^^^^^

David Z. was behind the boards but he didnt actually lay anything down on the track. he simply created the battleplan and sent the troops into war. Mazarati created all of the music on the song.(select members such as tony christian,terry casey etc)

Z began in his usual manner by creating a beat on a Linn 9000 drum machine. “The groove began to get complex, especially the hi-hat pattern,” he says. “I ran the hat through a delay unit, set about 150 milliseconds, printed that to tape and printed the original hat to another track and then alternated between ‘source’ and ‘blend’ on the delay unit, recording those passes. It created a pretty cool rhythm that was constantly changing in tone and complexity but was still steady. Then I played some guitar chords and gated them through a Kepex unit and used that to trigger various combinations of the hi-hat tracks. That gave us the basic rhythm groove for the song.”

Session bassist Mark Brown laid down a bass part, and one of the members of Maserati recorded a piano part that Z says he copped from an old Bo Diddley song called “Hey, Man.” The group's singer put down a lead vocal track an octave lower than Prince's original tenor, and some background vocal parts were invented, based on some ideas Z says he remembered from Brenda Lee's “Sweet Nothings.” “This is what we had at the end of the first couple of days,” Z says with a sigh. “We were trying to build a song out of nothing, piece by piece. It was just a collection of ideas built around the idea of a song that wasn't finished yet. We didn't know where it was going. We were getting a little frustrated, we were exhausted, so we all went home for the night.”

That, however, would prove to be enough. At least for Prince. When Z returned to the studio the next day, he found Prince waiting for him. Sometime that morning, The Artist had apparently come into the studio, asked an assistant to put the track up and then recorded his own vocal and electric guitar part. Z was stunned.

“I asked him what was going on. He said to me, ‘This is too good for you guys. I'm taking it back.’” From that moment on, “Kiss” became a Prince record. Z remained with him in the studio as Prince took what sparse elements there already were on the track and made it even more minimalist. “He said, ‘We don't need this,’ and pulled the bass off,” Z says. The low end was filled up instead by using a classic Prince trick: running the kick drum through an AMS 16 reverb unit's reverse tube program. “It fills up the bottom so much you really don't miss the bass part, especially if you only use it on the first downbeat,” says Z. The hi-hat track was similarly dispatched, leaving only nine tracks of instruments and vocals on the record, which certainly made it easier to mix. Z recalls, only half jokingly, that the mix, which was done on an API console, took about five minutes.

[...]

The track was left as ambiently dry as it was elementally sparse. In the mix, Z says the starkness of the track actually made him a little uneasy. “I reached over and snuck in a little bit of the piano back in,” he says. A small amount of tape delay was also put on the guitar track. “Otherwise, the mix was just a matter of Prince pulling back and turning off faders. It's more than the bass that you're not hearing on that track.”

Z says he recalls being alternately fascinated and excited by this turn of events. Maserati was to be his first full production for Prince's company. (Z had recorded parts of records for Prince in the past, as well as having recorded his original demos in Minneapolis and being the engineer at the live benefit recording that ultimately became Purple Rain.) In the course of an evening, while he had been sleeping, he was now Prince's co-producer for at least one track.

I worked for prince as an engineer for years. This song was a simple 1-4-5 blues progression strumed in a pattern similar to the Springsteen / Pointer Sisters song "Fire", until David Rivkin mixed it.

The guitar track on tape was run through a Keypex gate and the 'key' input patched from the hi-hat track (track 4 on the master tape). The kick augmented with an AMS RMX-16 reverb's "Nonlin" program.

David Rivkin was a staff songwriter at Irving Music, the publishing arm of A&M Records, when he met Gram Parsons in 1971. Together they co-wrote "How Much I've Lied," which appeared on GP (Reprise, 1973). Rivkin is miscredited as "Pam Rifkin" on the LP and elsewhere has been called "Joshua Rifkin."

By the '80s, Rivkin had moved to Minneapolis and was working with Prince under the name "David Z." Rivkin is credited with recording several songs on Purple Rain (Warner Bros., 1984) and as one of several who recorded the songs for Parade (Paisley Park/Warner Bros., 1986). More importantly, he is credited with arranging that album's hit single, "Kiss." Rivkin has also produced for Prince's Paisley Park Studios, working with such artists as the Fine Young Cannibals, the Bo-Deans, and Jody Watley.

At this stage, the project was turned over to David Rivkin as Prince realised he was not going to have enough time to complete it on it’s own. He felt Rivkin could spend more time and care with the record.

A sing from 1980, "Too Rough," which had also been considered for The Family’s album, was updated with new vocals by Jill, as well as with a saxophone part by Eric Leeds. Likewise, Jill replaced Prince’s vocals on "All Day, All Night." which was recorded live with The Revolution during Prince’s 1984 birthday concert at First Avenue. The first configuration of Jill’s album was compiled in late February 1986, but it would take another year before the record was completed. "Prince decided it needed more work or songs," says Rivkin. "We didn’t go ‘what?’ We went ‘yes, OK.’ That’s why it took so long."

[...]

Rivkin and Jill continued work on the album in the summer of 1986 at the Electric Ladyland studios in New York, to where Jill had moved. Using seasoned New York studio musicians and Steve Stevens, guitarist with Billy Idol, they recorded a version of Prince’s "With You" and two songs that Jill wrote herself that became B-sides, "77 Bleeker St." and "Baby Cries (Ay Yah)." "That was great," says Rivkin of recording in New York. "I got all the players. Steve Stevens was a friend of Jill’s and he was terrific. He came in and played anything you wanted him to play. He was really terrific!"

[...]

Rivkin and Jill put the album together at Electric Ladyland and sent a tape to Prince, but he was still not completely satisfied. According to Rivkin, "Prince went, ‘This song need this, that song needs that,’ so we went and remixed and re-recorded over some of the stuff." After additional work, the album was finally deemed finished in early 1987. "That poor album took such a long time to do," says Susan Rogers. "Jill was really patient with Prince through all those years. She’s infinitely patient. It was one of her greatest qualities."

And is it Wendy or Susannah palying Sophie to Prince's Saul?

David Z deserved a co-producer credit for this at the very least, if not a producer credit entirely. But you know, if he was happy with the arrangement credit, which he seems to be, then no worries.

What it does prove, IMO, is that Prince could really use relinquishing a bit of control sometimes. In this instance, it was a happy accident and resulted in possibly the biggest hit of his career. I've met people that can't name a single Prince song other than "Kiss" from all around the world. That song transcended possibly more than anything else he's ever done.

For the record, David Z is an absolutely integral figure in the Prince canon IMO and it's criminal that he doesn't get the respect he deserves.

When what would eventually become “She Drives Me Crazy” made it into Z's tape recorder, the melody got his immediate attention. However, the song — then titled “She's My Baby” — wasn't the band's favorite by a long shot. “I called them up and said I love this melody and I could create a great groove for it,” says Z. “They said they were ready to throw it away. But I wanted to try it. So they started rewriting the lyrics to something they liked better, starting with the title, which immediately made a huge difference. ‘She's My Baby’ is kind of a nebulous sentiment — it's something you say, but it doesn't hit home. ‘She Drives Me Crazy’ — now there's something that every guy in the world has said at least once in his life with conviction.”

[...]

The band went into Studio B at Paisley Park, Prince's recording complex in Minneapolis. The room had been designed with Z in mind and sported a DiMideo-modified API console, modeled after the one Z and Prince had used at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles. “Only this one had an even bigger, fatter low end,” says Z. Z started the session for “She Drives Me Crazy” as he does most productions he's part of, by creating a groove loop on a drum machine, in this case a Linn 9000. Musically, the song is a celebration of space between parts, and the parts are all designed to be tight and funk-like in their precision but with rock-edged sounds, such as the distorted guitar that works as a counterpoint to the vocal melody and Gift's floating falsetto. But if “She Drives Me Crazy” is remembered for anything, then it is for its snare sound, which Z created that first day of tracking.