james said:

Absolutely wrong. Reread Alan Leeds' interview on Housequake & your Per Nielsen books: it was ALL unpolished and that's actually why it was so amazing, everything from "Dirty Mind" up until "Batman" (at least) was just spontaneous and most of the time recorded within one day except for Clare Fischer and horns overdubs.

databank said:

eh. I dunno. from Lovesexy and beyond, I think he suffered from having too many toys at his disposal. things may have been done spontaneously in the moment, but on a lot of songs, especially Lovesexy & Batman, he threw in everything but the kitchen sink. with Paisley Park coming into existence, he had all the time, space, and toys in the world to overdo stuff. the building of Paisley Park is probably the beginning of the downfall of Prince's sound. pure economics and availability made him keep things simple and tight through SOTT & the Black Album (though he did use PP to spruce up the latter shortly after it opened). once he started using PP, he was like a kid in the candy shop. and he went nuts on a suger buzz, then he got bloated and his teeth rotted out.

So people actually believe that he hated those songs, and was ashamed of them... yet still happily played them on the Lovesexy tour?

And that this album was black and Lovesexy was "white"... and that's just a coincidence?

Good marketing, and a really great concept album... or double album really.

james said:

Facts at least indicate that Lovesexy was entirely recorded after the Black Album's cancelation: the marketing idea if white Vs. black was there indeed and i'm not saying that Prince didn't jump on the opportunity to make it a good marketing operation, just that it wasn't planned from scrach as some suggest. I don't think it's about hating these songs of being ashamed of them, just not wanting them being a "statement" at the time. Prince also played "Cindy C." on the NPG Radio Show on WLOL in 1989 anyway but since the Lovesexy Tour was supposed to retell Prince's "spiritual revolution" it was totally logical to play some Black Album songs alongside "Erotic City", "Dirty Mind" and "Head"...

I think an artist is often in the position where his/her personnal life, thoughts and experiences become artistic statements, therefore you end-up being in the complex position where very personnal things become a product, and then you must find an intelligent way to use them as marketing tools. I've been in that situation several times with my own work.

For exemple Prince's wedding with Mayte was used a lot as a promotion tool to create a mythos around Kamasutra & Emancipation. Now wouldn't it be a logical distortion to claim "Prince married Mayte not because he was in love but only to promote "Emancipation"? He USED his wedding as a marketing tool, but neverthless he decided to marry a woman he was in love with and THEN found ways to use it as a marketing tool. I think the same happened with the Black Album. I might be wrong, of course...
[Edited 4/21/10 2:01am]

databank said:

Well, that certainly is the best argument to it not being a conspiracy from the start!

Although I never thought When 2 R In Love sounded like it was recorded in the same session as the rest of The Black Album. It always sounded a bit wrong on there. Which makes me suspect the rest of Lovesexy, or most of it, could have been recorded earlier too.
Also, would Warner Bros. really destroy that many pressed albums on an artists whim? It must have been hundreds of thousands. Plus marketing having to be canceled.

Let's face it, only Prince knows exactly what he had planned... and maybe some Warner Execs!

james said:

Prince only knows what he hoped and planned, i'll give you that

Now there are facts (as opposed to personnal theories):
1) There was no marketing plan associated WITH the Black Album: no ads, no video, no single, no interviews... it wasn't even officially a Prince records (Warner's release schedule indicated an album named "Something" by an artist named "Somebody"). It's likely that Prince expected a critical success more than a commercial one but in any case poor sales couldn't have been much of an issue: it wasn't supposed to sell more than, say, a Madhouse album. As far as we know, 500.000 copies were printed and destroyed (http://www.theblackalbum.info/).
At least one Warner exec was quoted saying that she and her team were disappointed to have to release "Lovesexy" when they wished to have more time to promote and sell "Sign O The Times" in the USA: this tends to indicate that "The Black Album"'s release wasn't perceived by WB as being competition for Prince's "official" 1987 album and wouldn't have stopped WB from promoting "SOTT" in 1988 as being Prince's "current" album.

2) There is little (if any) reason to doubt the information that's been collected by Per Nielsen, Alex Hahn and other researchers about recording dates in the 80's and early 90's: their sources are quite reliable: sound engineers, ex-musicians and other people that were directly involved in Prince's business at the time.
[Edited 4/22/10 9:30am]

To be honest, all that info in Point 1, about there being no marketing plan and Warners wishing to carry on promoting SOTT leads me even more to believe it was never going to be released!

Point 2, well those guys certainly know there stuff, and I'm sure those recording studio sessions happened, but who knows how finished those tracks may already have been? Perhaps he continued to re record and tweak, right up to release?

I'd love to hear it from Prince, it's my favourite era for his music and creativity.

james said:

No, that's nonsense you made up.

james said:

Yeah, they pressed 500,000 copies for shits & giggles.

STOP MAKING SHIT UP. Listen to the grown-ups. Don't cherry-pick the facts.

james said:

THEY KNOW. They WERE THERE. IN THE STUDIO. Working with Prince. Like they did FOR YEARS.

STOP MAKING SHIT UP. Listen to the grown-ups. Don't cherry-pick the facts.

james said:

He'd lie. He always lies.

So nice to have an intelligent conversation on here. Thanks Databank



....

Brofie said:

you have a bootleg

BartVanHemelen said:

he apologized for the black album twice. I would say that is grounds to assume Prince was ashamed of it.

I've seen so many boots, I don't know what is real!

OnlyNDaUsa said:

Are you for real?

BartVanHemelen said:

why would he apologize twice if he did was not ashamed?

OnlyNDaUsa said:

the "apologies", to me, seemed more about working his fans up about an album he pulled a week before release than the actual content of it

BorisFishpaw said:

No they weren't... The first batch went quite cheap...
The first batch of circulating LP's came from an employee who stole 2 boxes and firstly sold some to radio DJ's in Germany, France, Great Britain and Holland as far as I know, then he shopped them around in 1988 during Prince's LoveSexy tour...
The guy sold them from the trunk of his car at the LoveSexy gigs in Germany and Holland for 100 guilders (50 Euro's nowadays) a piece, most people who saw the batch didn't believe them to be real or didn't know what it even was...

Prince had his own, very limited, copies pressed in the US and took some to clubs to have the DJ there spin it and Prince then to check out the reactions of the clubbers.
I don't know exactly how many he had pressed but it seems at least everyone in the LoveSexy band had a copy of a US pressed vinyl (without a black cover of course just a plain white sheet with white label...)

Neversin.

I bought might original copy for £150 in March 1988. I was in two minds at the time, as the rumour was that the album was going to get a late 88 release.

databank said:

I saw an original copy of it back in the day but I can't remember if it was a retail or promo copy. If I remember right Prince had recalled it and the owner of a local dj pool record store had gotten an advanced copy but displayed it only for about a week behind the counter,

Wow,I didn't realize that original copies from 1987 were so easy to obtain! I paid a small fortune for a lame bootleg copy.

databank said:

Has anyone seen said release schedule? That would be a pretty cool collector's item!

billymeade said:

I heard the same thing too.

Many of the airings on radio, including Mojo and Radioscope originated from Bootlegs.
[Edited 4/26/10 16:21pm]

Neversin said:

Well, I must admit I never saw them being sold that cheap (not doubting your
word or anything. But I would still dispute that they were 'easy' to get...
unless you happened to be in the right place at the right time.).

I remember keeping my eye out for a copy as soon as it got pulled in December
'87. It wasn't til Spring 88 that genuine copies started to appear on the
collectors market in the UK and US, and by then they were selling for around
$300+.Which doesn't seem much now, but back then that pretty much made them the
most expensive Prince record there was. Plus this was at a time when there
were still rumors of it getting an official release. By the 90's, the price
for a genuine black album LP had gone from the 100s into the 1,000s.
[Edited 4/26/10 16:38pm]