I love this thread, its amazing, thank you so much

Its the earliest and most mysterious part of his career.
As for the concert, I would buy the deluxe ticket for $8.50 to see Rick James and Prince in 1980.

OldFriends4Sale said:

This is an excellent thread-best thread that I've ever seen on the org Just magnificent

Prince, the Pauper

Piece together Prince's story from his own partial accounts, and you come up with sort of a musical Wild Child, an untamed loner who raised himself and taught himself how to survive among the wolves. Patch together the history told by the people close to him, and you get a version like this:

The first notes of the Minneapolis sound were heard in a big brick house in North Minneapolis, an aging, primarily black section of town that draws outsiders only to the Terrace Theater, a movie house designed to look like a suburban backyard patio, and the Riverview Supper Club, the nightspot a black act turns to after it has polished its performance on the local chitlin circuit. North Minneapolis is a poor area by local standards, but a family with not too much money can still afford the rent on a whole house. It was there that Bernadette Anderson, who was already raising six kids of her own by herself; decided to take in a doe-eyed kid named Prince, a pal of her youngest son, Andre.

The thirteen-year-old Prince had landed on the Anderson doorstep after having been passed from his stepfather and mother's home to his dad's apartment to his aunt's house. "I was constantly running from family to family," Prince has said. "It was nice on one hand, because I always had a new family, but I didn't like being shuffled around. I was bitter for a while, but I adjusted."

His father, John Nelson, was a musician himself -- a piano player in a jazz band by night, a worker at Honeywell, the electronics company, by day. Nelson is black and Italian; his ex-wife, says Prince of his mother, "is a mixture of a bunch of things." Onstage, the father was called Prince Rogers, and that is what he named his son, Prince Rogers Nelson.

John Nelson moved out of the family home when Prince was seven. But he left behind his piano, and it became the first instrument Prince learned to play. The songs he practiced were TV themes -- Batman and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. "My first drum set was a box full of newspapers," he has said, explaining how he came to play a whole range of instruments. "At thirteen, I went to live with my aunt. She didn't have room for a piano, so my father bought me an electric guitar, and I learned how to play." But the aunt wasn't keen on the noise, and she threw him out. It was then that Prince turned up at Andre's.

Hardly into their teens, Prince and Andre (who uses the surname Cymone) had already formed their first group. Prince recalled, "I got my first band. I wanted to hear more instruments, so I started Champagne, a twelve-piece band. Only four of us played. Eight were faking. Andre and I played saxophone. I also played piano. I wrote all the music. The songs were all instrumentals. No one ever sang. When I got into high school, I started to write lyrics. I'd write the really, really vulgar stuff."

Andre, on the other hand, claims the first band had Prince playing lead guitar, Andre himself on bass guitar, his sister Linda on keyboards and the Time's Morris Day on drums. The group was called Grand Central, later renamed Champagne. The musicians all wore suede-cloth suits with their zodiac signs sewn on the back (Prince, born on June 7th, 1960, had Gemini, the twins, on his). For a time, they were managed by Morris' mother, which didn't make Prince very happy. "She wasn't fast enough for Prince," says Mrs. Anderson. "He wanted her to get them a contract right away."

The band practiced in Andre's basement, where Prince had established a bedroom of his own. "It sounded like a lot of noise" says Bernadette Anderson. "But after the first couple of years, I realized the seriousness of it. They were good kids. Girls were crazy about them."

Andre -- whose father had played bass in the Prince Rogers Band -- says that although the family was poor, Prince "dug the atmosphere. It was freedom for him." There wasn't enough money to buy records, but there was a family friend -- a reclusive black millionaire, says one source -- who gave the kids the money to go to a local studio to record a few songs. The studio they picked was called Moon Sound.

Moon Sound was an eight-track studio that charged about thirty-five dollars an hour back in 1976, when Prince and Andre and the rest of Champagne walked in the door. The owner, Chris Moon, was a lyricist looking for a collaborator. "Prince always used to show up at the studio with a chocolate shake in his hand, sipping out of a straw," Moon remembers. "He looked pretty tame. Then he'd pick up an instrument and that was it. It was all over."

Prince soon agreed to work with Moon, and the studio owner handed the seventeen year-old a set of keys to the studio. "He'd stay the weekend, sleep on the studio floor," Moon says. "I wrote down directions on how to operate the equipment, so he'd just follow the little chart -- you know, press this button to record and this button to play back. That's when he learned to operate studio equipment. Pretty soon, I could sit back and do the listening."

One person who heard Prince's early recordings was Owen Husney, who became his first manager. Husney put together an expensive package that included a demo tape of three twelve-minute songs on which Prince sang and played all the instruments, and he went off to L.A. to make a pitch to the record companies. Three labels -- CBS, Warner Bros. and A&M -- eventually made offers. Prince finally signed with Warner Bros., where, says an executive, they "were taken with the simplicity of his music and a future that looked wide open," and where he was offered a firm three-LP contract, unheard of for a new artist.

Lenny Waronker, then head of A&R and now president of the label, was impressed enough to allow Prince to act as producer of his debut album. "I met him when we first signed him," Waronker recalls. "[Producer] Russ Titelman and I took him into the studio one day, much to his chagrin. So we said, 'Play the drums,' and he played the drums and put a bass part on, a guitar part. And we just said, 'Yeah, fine, that's good enough.'"

Sales of the first Prince album, For You, released in 1978, weren't so hot, but the fact that the kid was a one-man band -- and his own producer -- got a lot of attention. Then, in 1979, the single "I Wanna Be Your Lover" from his eponymous second LP went to Number One on the soul charts. But the age of innocence was almost over. Prince was back in Minneapolis putting together a band a straggly mix of blacks and whites, all recruited locally. His old friend Andre Cymone was among them, playing bass.

There was a lot of pressure from my ex-buddies in other bands not to have white members in the band," Prince has said. "But I always wanted a band that was black and white. Half the musicians I knew only listened to one type of music. That wasn't good enough for me."

The band, with its double keyboards, learned to reproduce the music Prince had been creating alone in the studio. The synthesizers, often playing horn lines, are a hallmark of the Minneapolis sound. The guitar signature is edgy rock, but the beat reins in any long guitar solos. "Around here, if it's not synthesizers, it's nothing," says a local Minneapolis musician. "This is a keyboard town. It's simplicity. If you listen to a lot of Prince or the Time, it's simple. It's direct and straight to the point. And it feels so good."

With a band to spread the word on the road, Prince was ready, in 1980, to unleash Dirty Mind, his bawdy third album. 1999 wasn't very far away.

THANK YOU!
[Edited 5/3/10 14:01pm]

So Blue
I had everything I needed
But now my life is so blue
U meant the world 2 me
But now U're gone and I'm so blue

Even though the sun is shining, oh woo
I spend my day, I spend my day cryin' over U, yeah
I will spend my day cryin' over U

Oh I, oh I feel just like the sky
Oh, I'm so blue

Now baby, don't U know?
Baby, don't U know?
I spend my nights all alone talking 2 myself
I am so blue

And everyday the feelin' gets stronger, oh woo
And who's 2 say just how much longer
I can spend my nights all alone
Talking 2 myself and just a-cryin' over U
I guess I'll just spend my life so... so blue

© 1978 Ecnirp Music Inc. - BMI

I Wanna Be Your Lover

I ain't got no money
I ain't like those other guys U hang around
It's kinda funny
But they always seem 2 let U down
And I get discouraged
Cuz I never see U anymore
And I need your love baby, yeah
That's all I'm living 4, yeah
I didn't wanna pressure U, baby
But all I ever wanted 2 do...

I wanna be your lover
I wanna be the only one that makes U come... runnin'!
I wanna be your lover
I wanna turn U on, turn U out
All night long, make U shout "Oh lover, yeah!"
I wanna be the only one U come 4

I wanna be your brother
I wanna be your mother and your sister, 2
There ain't no other
That can do the things that I'll do 2 U
And I get discouraged
Cuz U treat me just like a child
And they say I'm so shy, yeah
But with U, I'll just go wild, ooh
I didn't wanna pressure U, baby ... no
But all I ever wanted 2 do...

I wanna be your lover
I wanna be the only one that makes U come... runnin'!
I wanna be your lover
I wanna turn U on, turn U out
All night long, make U shout "Oh lover, yeah!"
I wanna be the only one U come 4, yeah

© 1979 Ecnirp Music Inc. - BMI