Sorry if I made a repeat with the pictures
[Edited 4/1/10 12:14pm]

Although they hadn't yet really played together as a group in the studio, in August 1981 THE TIME performed their first live appearance at a showcase for a small group of executives from Warner Bros. Records at the S.I.R. Studio in Los Angeles, with Prince overseeing the proceedings by the soundboard. During rehearsals for the upcoming "Controversy"-Tour with Prince, THE TIME incorporated Jerome Benton into their acts to be Morris Day's on-stage valet. The band warmed-up in autumn 1981 by playing a small number of low-key gigs around the Minneapolis aera.

THE TIME made their public live debut on 7th October 1981 at Sam's, a music club in Downtown, Minneapolis, with Prince digging the show back by the soundboard again. A few weeks later they embarked as the main supporting act on Prince's 1981/1982 "Controversy"-Tour.

In an Interview [Morris Day] commented: "The black market has been starving for entertainers like us, who project a real image". What else to say ...

aPrrince4aMJlover said:

Fam what is the story behind the photo is this during a performance of Annie Christian?

OldFriends4Sale said:

Yup it's the climax of the song, just as the band comes to the end with the synths and Dez's guitar blaring, Prince ascends to the centre stage on the risen section at the back and his silohette projects the figure of a gun being aimed and then BOOM! Kicks into Dirty mind

It was taken off certain shows because I don't know if it was P's intention or outside forces that were not happy with it...

Enter Denise Matthews aka Vanity



Even as he struggled with the Time, Prince began planning another side project-an all-female group that would, again, perform his music and adopt a persona he created. Prior to the Controversy tour, 3 women were selected, rather arbitrarily:girlfriend Susan Moonsie, Wardrobe assistant Brenda Bennett(the wife of set designer Roy), and Jamie Shoop, an employee of Cavallo, Ruffalo & Fargnoli. Only Bennett had any singing experience. Prince planned to have the group, called the Hookers, wear lingerie onstage and sing sexually charged lyrics.

During the tour, plans shifted when Prince one evening at a club noticed an especially sexy young woman; she was copper-skinned, sultry, and had an overall appearance very much like Prince's own. "It's been said when they met, they both stopped in their tracks; looking at each other, it was like seeing themselves, but of the opposite sex," said Alan Leeds. A scout was sent over to ask if she wanted to meet Prince, and she agreed.

The young woman, Denise Matthews, had show business aspirations and was thrilled when Prince said he wanted to construct a band around her. Prince was also wildly attracted to her, and they quickly became involved. Over the coming weeks, he explained to her the concept for the Hookers. She was taken aback, however, by the stage name he suggested for her:Vagina, albeit with the 'i' pronounced asa long 'e.' She refused , but agreed to the name Vanity.

p 49 chapter 4 Pawns Possessed: the Rise & Fall of Prince

1982 Cntroversy "Tour
March 2 Tower Theater , New Orleans
March 3 Orpheum Theater , Philadelphia
March 5 Metro Center , Rockford
March 7 Met Center , Bloomington (SB)
March 11 Coliseum , Hampton
March 12 Raleigh, NC
March 14 Riverfront Coliseum , Cincinnati

p 48 chapter 4 Pawns Possessed: the Rise & Fall of Prince

The hostilities burst to the surface during the last show of the tour at Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati. During their opening set, the Time found themselves being pelted by eggs from offstage. Gradually, they realized that Prince and some of his band members were the culprits. The barrage increased, and, toward the end of the set, Prince and his accomplices abducted Jerome Benton, a dancer for the group, from the stage and poured honey all over him. They they pelted hims with garbage. "They tarred and feathered him, basically," recalled Fink, who did not participate and insisted to the Time members that he wanted no part of the battle.

Then, as the Time's set ended, Chick Huntsberry grabbed Jesse Johnson and hauled him to Prince's dressing room. There, Huntsberry handcuffed Johnson to a horizontal coat rack bolted into a brick wall. Prince came in and began taunting Johnson and tossing Doritos chips and other pieces of food at him."This is what you get for talking about my mama!" Prince shouted.

The various members of Prince's band and crew in the room looked on with horror as the episode continued. "It was a cruel thing to do,"observed Bennett. Fink recalled, "I just sat there and said to myself, this is getting out of hand."
Humiliated and frightened, Johnson writhed in his cuffs. Finally, to the amazement of the onlookers, he managed to rip the entire twelve-foot-long coat rack out of the wall. His hands were still cuffed to the rack, which he began swinging wildly. "Jesse was uncontrollable," Fink said. "He just lost it. Chick had to contain the situation before someone got hurt."

...
[Edited 4/6/10 9:06am]

Sex and Society


CONTROVERSY
PRINCE
Warner Bros.


BY STEPHEN HOLDEN

It should come as little surprise that on his fourth album, Prince has made his inflammatory and explicit sexuality the basis of an amusingly jive but attractive social agenda. Once you've exalted brother-sister incest (Dirty Mind's "Sister"), not to mention nearly every other sexual possibility, how else can you get people's attention?

Prince's first three records were so erotically self-absorbed that they suggested the reveries of a licentious young libertine. On Controversy, that libertine proclaims unfettered sexuality as the fundamental condition of a new, more loving society than the bellicose, overtechnologized America of Ronald Reagan. In taking on social issues, the artist assumes his place in the pantheon of Sly Stone-inspired Utopian funksters like Rick James and George Clinton. I think that Prince stands as Stone's most formidable heir, despite his frequent fuzzy-mindedness and eccentricity. A consummate master of pop-funk song forms and a virtuosic multiinstrumentalist, Prince is also an extraordinary singer whose falsetto, at its most tender, recalls Smokey Robinson's sweetness. At its most brittle, Prince's voice sounds like Sylvester at his ironic and challenging best.

Controversy's version of One Nation under the Sheets is hip, funny and, yes, subversive. In the LP's title track -- a bubbling, seven-minute tour de force of synthesized pop-funk hooks -- Prince teasingly pants, "Am I black or white/Am I straight or gay?" This opening salvo in a series of "issue"-oriented questions tacitly implies that since we're all flesh and blood, sexual preference and skin color are only superficial differences, no matter what society says. But Prince eventually brushes such things aside with hippie platitudes. Along the way, "Controversy" flirts with blasphemy by incorporating the Lord's Prayer. The number ends with the star's punk-libertine chant: "People call me rude/I wish we all were nude/I wish there was no black and white/I wish there were no rules." Though hardly inspiring, it's fitting that the Constitution of Prince's polymorphously perverse Utopia should be written in childish cant.

The strutting, popping anthem "Sexuality" elaborates many of the points that "Controversy" raises, as Prince shrewdly lists gadgets (cameras, TV, the Acu-Jac) that cut us off from each other. "Don't let your children watch television until they know how to read," he advises. Who would disagree? "Ronnie, Talk to Russia," a hastily blurted plea to Reagan to seek disarmament, is the album's weakest cut. "Let's Work," a bright and squeaky dance song, and "Private Joy," a bouncy pop-funk bubble-gum tune with baby talk in the verses, show off Prince's ingratiating lighter side. "Jack U Off," the cleverest of the shorter compositions, is a synthesized rockabilly number whose whole point is that sex is better with another human being than with a masturbatory device.

Prince's vision isn't as compelling as it might be, however, because of his childlike treatment of evil. "Annie Christian," the one track that tackles the subject, turns evil into a bogeywoman from whom the artist is forever trying to escape in a taxicab. Though the song lists historical events (the killing of black children in Atlanta, Abscam and John Lennon's murder), it has none of the resonance of, say, "Sympathy for the Devil," since Prince, unlike the Rolling Stones, still only dimly perceives the demons within himself.

After "Controversy," the LP's high point is an extended bump-and-grind ballad, "Do Me, Baby," in which the singer simulates an intense sexual encounter, taking it from heavy foreplay to wild, shrieking orgasm. In the postcoital coda, Prince's mood turns uncharacteristically dark. He shivers and pleads, "I'm so cold, just hold me." It's the one moment amid all of Controversy's exhortatory slavering in which Prince glimpses a despair that no orgasm can alleviate.

Despite all the contradictions and hyperbole in Prince's playboy philosophy, I still find his message refreshingly relevant. As Gore Vidal wrote in The Nation recently: "Most men, given the opportunity to have sex with 500 different people, would do so gladly. But most men are not going to be given the opportunity by a society that wants them safely married, so that they will be docile workers and loyal consumers."

Prince, I'm sure, would agree.

ROLLING STONE, JANUARY 21, 1982

Do Me, Baby

Here we are in this big ol' empty room
Staring each other down
U want me just as much as I want U
Let's stop fooling around
Take me, baby, kiss me all over
Play with my love, ooh
Bring out what's been in me 4 far 2 long
Baby, U know that's all I've been dreaming of

Do me, baby, like U never done before
Ooh, give it 2 me 'til I just can't take no more
Come on and do me, baby, like U never done before
Ooh, I want U now, I just can't wait no more, can't wait, oh

Here we are looking 4 a reason
4 U 2 lay me down
4 a love like ours is never out of season
So baby, please stop teasing me
Ooh, what U do, I can never love no other
U're the best I ever had, ooh
Whenever we're not close 2 one another
I just want U so bad

So do... (do me, baby) do me, baby, like U never done before
Ooh, give it 2 me 'til I just can't take no more
Come on, do me, baby, like U never done before
Ooh, I want U now, I just can't wait no more

I said, "Ooh... ooh... ooh... ooooh!" (Do me, baby)
Yeah (Do me)
Do me, baby, honey, yeah (Oh, give it 2 me)
Oh, oh, oh, oh! (Do me, baby)
(I want U now)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, ...!

(Do me, baby)
(Oh, give it 2 me)
(Do me, baby)
Do me, baby, don't wanna do it all alone (I want U now)
Yeah!

(Do me, baby)
(Oh, give it 2 me)
Oh yeah
(Do me, baby)

This feeling's 2 strong
U make me wait 2 long
(I want U now)

Oh, U ain't leaving me no choice
OK, what are U gonna do?
U just gonna sit there and watch?
Alright, ooh, mm
Are U sure U don't wanna close your eyes?

Well, isn't it supposed 2 take a long time?

I'm not gonna stop until the war is over
Ooh! Help me! Oh! Ooh!
There... OK... OK
Uh... oh!
I'm so cold
Just hold me, oh

© 1981 Controversy Music - ASCAP

Sometimes I miss Prince so very much.
I can only hope and pray he's in a better place than that pod-Prince he left us with.

OldFriends4Sale said:

This picture looks like a screen cap from a video or something. Where is it from? Some unreleased footage like a backstage interview? The Second Coming?? Private backstage footage?
[Edited 4/17/10 10:46am]