I keep reading here that people hate it for being an inconsistant, uncohesive mix of random tracks.

To be honest that was my first reaction when I opened the box-set and saw the tracklist back then. When I first listened to it I was also disappointed that 2 thirds of it was made of 90's songs, that Good Love and Crucial had been slaughtered (edited) and that A Honest Man wasn't the instrumental version from the movie, and I was not too excited about some of the tracks that I felt were ridiculously weaker than so much vault stuff I had on bootlegs (Strays Of The World, Poom Poom, DaBang). I also didn't like the fact that the songs were all mixed up: I expected a cohesive, chronological tracklist.

Well... that was on the first day.

After that I kept (of course) listening to it over and over and very soon I came to realize that I LOVED it. Against all odds I found out that the sequencing of the album's flow worked admirably well (for me) and I ended-up listening to the 3 CD's in a loop for the most part of 1998. Even the weak songs ended-up growing up on me

So I've read it all why people think it didn't work and was an artistic failure so no need to say it again here, I just wanted to know if there were other people who, like me, felt that CB worked as an album and enjoyed it as a whole besides being glad to have the tracks they liked on it.

I like it but I can see why it would bother some completists.

I love the first two discs, and think the sequences are great even better than some of his other albums. I'll never forget how surprised and happy I was that he put something as raw as "Cloreen Baconskin" on there as part of the idea of surprises.

I remember the awe of hearing the title track in such clarity, or the final arrangement of "Sexual Suicide". Both tracks had already been listened to so much on bootlegs.

3rd disc... eh... not so much.

He could've did without the pointless remixes and there was'nt a wide variety of unreleased material.If you look at that album it's really only dream factory era songs,remixes and the last of the npg songs he did'nt release with WB.

After listening to the long version(s) of Crucial again, I don't think the edit is 'slaughter'. Good Love WAS slaughtered though...

Love the remixes too, except for the hideous Tell Me..., which we'd already had on the medley single anyway.

It's also upsetting that he stuck to that ridiculous 50 min max, and then put on 11 minutes of Cloreen Bacon Skin. That would have been fine on a 80 min disc....

The flow between songs isn't any worse than a lot of later albums--my biggest complaint had to do with the Good Love edit (at the time I had the original only on vinyl and no way to play vinyl) and I could have used something besides The Continental remix (which, after all, is the boring part of the song anyway). And even though I did know many of the songs, I liked having good sounding versions (and I felt good about actually buying them from Prince, to be honest with you). And I've always like "Strays of the World."

Would I like an outtakes collection with more of the 80s? Yes. Did I dislike the one I actually got that had more of the 90s? Nope. I liked it fine. I will admit that I listened more at the time to The Truth album than to the CB discs, and I still do. I've also listened to Kamasutra (I got that version) more times than probably 90% of you combined. So, I liked the whole package pretty well.

"After that I kept (of course) listening to it over and over and very soon I came to realize that I LOVED it."

You gave it a chance, and got over your initial response, and developed an appreciation for what was really there--that's a big difference from many people, who don't hear what they want to hear in the first 30 seconds and move on.

Now, I don't know what happened to my T-shirt from that project. I seem to have lost it somewhere. I'm gonna blame Prince for that, so I'll knock the entire experience down to a 3.

[Edited 5/11/14 18:21pm]

I've always loved it.

.

For the HARD CORE fans, I can understand their frustration with it, but for someone who didn't have access to all the bootlegs at the time, it was a real treat!

.

How long it took the get the #@#!%$ thing is another story.....

Of all the kick-to-the-balls moves Prince has done to his fanbase, Crystal Ball is about the worst. 75 percent of the set consists of unnecessary edits, remixes and filler. A single strong disc would have been better. I know Prince, "Never cast your pearls before the swine". How can it be filler if Prince is featured on it? yada yada. Bring on the No-Cuss remasters, so CB doesn't have to stand alone in infamy! Though the more I think about it the Time'sUP!-time-expired-you-didn't-purchase-this-bish-you-rented-it NPG Music Club mp3's probably belong in the Hall Of Shame with CB. Anyway methinks there is about to be some WB logos soon floating around in that cesspool of bad ideas.

Atrocious. i

It instantly harmed the legacy of the orginal. He must have had a massive stroke or been strung out on drugs in the 90's to have so instantly at the flick of the switch turned from genius to hack. It was so disturbing to witness.

The sequencing bothers me and so does the unused space on the discs. But the selection of songs is rather excellent. Remixes were a big thing in the 90s, so that's probably the reason why he ended up including those as well.

If you put together the SOTT era tracks from the three discs that would be, well, one of his strongest releases as such. I think the reason why the sequencing is so random is that he didn't want to make any "statements" with the material.

It is a bit of a hot mess, but sprinkled over the discs there are a few outstanding tracks that justify the purchase completely for me. Hell, the title track alone is worth the price of purchase, one of the greatest songs Prince has ever recorded.

funksterr said:

I like quite a bit of it but it's not Top 5, or close. Just the way the whole thing was handled ruined it for most people (Print your own lyrics? Really?) Some of the mistakes he makes make it seem as if he's trying to sabatoge HIMSELF.

controversy99 said:

Crystal Ball is in my top 5 albums post-The Gold Experience. Songs that I like (off top of my head without looking at the tracklist): CB DF Hide (a guilty pleasure) 2morrow Calhoun Strays Last Heart Crucial Cloreen Lovesign (best version of that song) Sexual Suicide Good Love Goodbye

Why would Hide The Bone be a guilty pleasure? It's one of the best songs he's ever done!

You probably mean Strays Of The World - it's embarrassing yet entertaining

Pentacle said:

There's some awesome material on there for me. I could do without the remixes and the utter waste of space that is Cloreen Bacon Skin but the rest of the set more than made it worthwhile. Standouts for me are:

Crystal Ball

Acknowledge Me

Ripopgodazippa

Hide The Bone

Interactive

Da Bang

Calhoun Square

What's My Name

Days Of Wild

Poom Poom

She Gave Her Angels

18 & Over

The Ride

Get Loose

Goodbye

And then there's The Truth, which would be worth the price of the whole set if everything else was utter shit anywyay.

[Edited 5/13/14 3:36am]

instead of people lovin whats there...they bitch and moan ....about whats NOT there and what COULDVE been there

brookinz said:

I've always loved it.

.

For the HARD CORE fans, I can understand their frustration with it, but for someone who didn't have access to all the bootlegs at the time, it was a real treat!

.

How long it took the get the #@#!%$ thing is another story.....

Exactly.

At the time Crystal Ball came out, the only bootleg I'd ever owned was The Black Album (a horrible transfer on a cassette that had died long since). So that set was like getting another Emancipation - full of stuff I'd never heard before (both good and not-so-good).

Plus, I bought mine at Best Buy, so I was blissfully unaware of the SNAFU involving phone orders. I didn't get Kamasutra in my set, but when I heard it years later, I realized what a blessing that was.

[Edited 5/13/14 11:38am]

I'll always have a positive thang for Crystal Ball as it arrived online around about when I first met the Internet at University.

Not sure if I still have the dot-matrix receipt printout anywhere, but even the absurd waiting time was as nothing as it arrived to the halls of residence post collection point thankfully only a couple of weeks before we were all out of there the following May.

By that point we'd moved the large speaker purchased from the back of a dodgy London van to a spare room window and played Red Hot Chilli Peppers and Daft Punk until the wardens arrived (like some future family guy cutaway).

[redacted]

Favourite tracks - dancing on a double matress trampoline on ecstacy to Crystal Ball (the track), not getting the irony in Dream Factory, witnessing an actual performing and recording musician's enjoyment of Da Bang, crying at Goodbye (and singing the words to Goodbye over the intro to McCartney's Band On The Run every time it's played). I think I may have sat on the special plastic case at some point. Pissing myself laughing at the inclusion of Loose remix now that I think about it, that is definitely up there with Lotus Flower (by Thom Yorke as waste of stage time), ugh

owf! happy memories. I don't recall being too disappointed that Empty Room did not appear on the lineup - having spent an entire year being haunted by the intro video from the Gold Experience tour, current bootlegs like The Dawn only serve to accustom the ears to the mixing desk settings in which every track was recorded, and the desperate lengths some editors go to to fill out time in order to achieve some easily observable numerologic whole.

So I'm guessing peak orders were at 20.10.1997 then. Kerching!!!

Yeah awesome, fantastic. HTML frames were innovative. There was only excite and metathing. Love it. Only criticism I have is that modern web browsers now automatically block popups! And don't run Java applets

[Edited 5/13/14 15:02pm]

mrsquirrel said:

singing the words to Goodbye over the intro to McCartney's Band On The Run every time it's played

EddieC said:

The flow between songs isn't any worse than a lot of later albums--my biggest complaint had to do with the Good Love edit (at the time I had the original only on vinyl and no way to play vinyl) and I could have used something besides The Continental remix (which, after all, is the boring part of the song anyway). And even though I did know many of the songs, I liked having good sounding versions (and I felt good about actually buying them from Prince, to be honest with you). And I've always like "Strays of the World."

Would I like an outtakes collection with more of the 80s? Yes. Did I dislike the one I actually got that had more of the 90s? Nope. I liked it fine. I will admit that I listened more at the time to The Truth album than to the CB discs, and I still do. I've also listened to Kamasutra (I got that version) more times than probably 90% of you combined. So, I liked the whole package pretty well.

"After that I kept (of course) listening to it over and over and very soon I came to realize that I LOVED it."

You gave it a chance, and got over your initial response, and developed an appreciation for what was really there--that's a big difference from many people, who don't hear what they want to hear in the first 30 seconds and move on.

Now, I don't know what happened to my T-shirt from that project. I seem to have lost it somewhere. I'm gonna blame Prince for that, so I'll knock the entire experience down to a 3.

[Edited 5/11/14 18:21pm]

To be honest it's always been like that: there's been cases of "love on first sight" but most of the albums I totally love now and listened hundreds of times r albums that didn't impress me so much on the first (and sometimes subsequent) listen. It's extremely rare that I erase an album the first time I listen to it: it really has to be something I really feel uncomfortable with or that belongs to a genre I dislike totally, and I try to listen to 2 new albums every day. Either albums will slowly grow on me after a few to a dozen times listening to them or sometimes I will listen again to something I've only lsitened to once or a few times a long while ago without being impressed and it'll be the right time and I'll be "wooooow this is BRILLIANT, how did I not realize it the first time?!".

.

Altogether I don't really understand those people who discard albums or songs the first time they listen to them. Either they're people for whom music is a very minor hobby to which they don't devote much time so they don't have time to "waste" listening to something more than once, but in this case I wonder what they're doing on a music forum, or even if they're entitled to have an opinion about music at all if they don't know so much about it.

.

And if music is truly a passion and people have time to spend on it, I really feel bad for those who won't listen again to something they're not entirely convinced with, because as I said if I did that I probably wouldn't have had any love affair at all with an easy 80% of what are now my favorite albums of all time.

I loved the set, except for the re-mixes. Like others here, I found them a bit pointless and would have been happier to have more vault/rare tracks in the set. But having pristine copies of the likes of the title track and others was a treat.

Furthermore, "The Truth" CD was the real highlight of the package. Stunning and I wish there was more "unplugged" Prince like this!