U can feel the tension between & Rick in that pic..

jdcxc said:

^^that recent pic of Susan has been posted here many times,but it's uncertain if that's really "our" Susan Moonsie

I put that pic up a couple of years ago & CRUCIFIED! I was torn completely apart & was told that is NOT her..

KCOOLMUZIQ said:

Nasty Girl video

LOVE it!!!!!

Prince's Hot Rock
1983
The secret life of America's sexiest one-man band

By DEBBIE MILLER

"Good Evening, this is your pilot, Prince, speaking"...

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A tour begun in November of last year had grossed almost $7 million before the end of March. Prince's new double album, 1999, has sold almost 750,000 copies, with its hottest single, "Little Red Corvette," closing in on the Top Twenty on Billboard's Hot 100 chart. And two groups he helped form made the black chart's Top Ten this winter: Vanity 6, a coquettish trio that performs in lingerie and whose "Nasty Girls" was a disco smash, and the Time, the tightest, funkiest live band in America.

Prince, just twenty-two, is the father of it all. But just try checking out the lineage. There isn't just a private side to Prince, there's an almost mysterious aspect. While the art of self-promotion has never been alien to rock & roll, it seems only to frustrate Prince. He was fairly outspoken until last fall, when, after his first interview to promote 1999, he walked out of the room and announced that he would never talk to the press again. "He's afraid he might say something wrong or say too much," says a former aide-de-camp.

When he did talk, he often contradicted himself. Rumors started to spread, and now his silence feeds them. Is Prince his real name? Is he black or white, straight or gay (questions he himself raised on his 1981 hit-cum-Lord's Prayer recitation, "Controversy")? Is he the Jamie Starr who produced albums by the Time and Vanity 6? Is he a shy little Prince or a despotic king?

"Prince controls the whole scene in Minneapolis," says a local musician who has worked with him. Others who've lived with him or worked alongside him say he loves to surround himself with an air of mystery, to create false identities to tangle the clues that lead to him. Cutting off all but a few close friends, Prince tends to hole up at his huge home, with its modern basement studio, on a lake twenty miles west of Minneapolis. One member of his band says he's had just one personal conversation with Prince in all the years he's known him. "He's a real 'to himself' kind of person," says Morris Day, the Time's frontman and a longtime friend.

"He doesn't like to talk," says Vanity, the awesomely beautiful leader of Vanity 6, who accompanied Prince to the Grammys in February.

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What Time Is It?

Joni Mitchell songs blare out of the PA between the sets of Prince's road show, at his request. Vanity 6, three women in lacy camisoles, open the concert. "I love lingerie," explains Vanity, the leader of the group. "I used to sneak into my mother's closet and try to wear her lingerie to school." She picked her nickname because "a girl's best friend is her pride," she says. Like her cohorts, Brenda and Susan, Vanity gave a demo tape of her songs to Prince a year ago. "He said there were a couple other girls whose minds seemed to run alongside mine," she says. Prince then arranged to bring Vanity, a twenty-two-year-old former model from Toronto, to Minneapolis to meet the other two, flying Brenda in from Boston. Soon, the three were writing songs like "Drive Me Wild" and "Nasty Girls" in which Vanity coos, "I can't control it/I need seven inches or more."

It all seems a figment of Prince's imagination, a living fantasy. "Prince and I happen to think alike," says Vanity.

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Prince did tell a reporter in an early interview with the Minnesota Daily, when he was just seventeen, that someday he would make jazz recordings under an alias. (In that same interview, Prince claimed not to be averse to choreography, but he drew the line at spins -- "I get nauseated.") So the idea of working with a fictitious name had occurred to him at the beginning of his career.

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"Let me clear up a few rumors while I have the chance," Prince told the Los Angeles Times. "One, my real name is Prince. Two, I'm not gay. And three, I'm not Jamie Starr."

"Jamie Starr is an engineer, the coproducer of our record. Of course he's real," says Morris Day, whose band now outplays whoever it was on the first Time record.

But if there is a Jamie Starr, why can't he be reached? Manager Steve Fargnoli says it's because he's "in and out of Minneapolis," because he's "a reclusive maniac" like Prince) and because "it could be months before I see him." Can he be reached by phone? "No." Well, you wouldn't need to call him over to Prince's home studio if he's already there. "Prince is Jamie Starr" says former Warner Bros. artist and fellow Minneapolitan Sue Ann (Carwell), who has been a friend of Prince's for years -- ever since he wrote and produced her first demo tape. Others who are close to Prince also say that he is Jamie Starr, but they refuse to be quoted in print. But, says one, "everybody knows who's the main man behind everything."

Testing

We could be this generation's Yardbirds," Prince's guitarist Dez Dickerson boasted to a reporter about the way everybody was splintering off Prince's musical family tree and making solo records.

Dickerson himself wrote "He's So Dull" for Vanity 6 and has done some solo recording...

So nobody made a big deal of it when Prince walked into First Avenue, a club in downtown Minneapolis last summer, a rock club where images of Grand Master Flash, the Human League, the Clash and others flash in montage on the walls. What's new? somebody asked Prince. Sheepishly, he held up a test pressing of 1999 that he had tucked under his arm. Later on, he asked the DJ to throw his new song, "Delirious," on the turntable. And then, with his hottest record filling up the enormous room, Prince took Vanity out onto the middle of the dance floor to give his own record the ultimate test. They wiggled around, they strutted, they dipped. And Prince looked happy. It had a good beat. It was easy to dance to.

April 28, 1983 (RS 394)

a Richard Avedon photograph used on the cover of an issue of Rolling Stone magazine

SoulAlive said:

work your body,make yourself sick

come on,bite the beat of the star

Don't worry,you'll still be dignified

it tastes like caviar

the Vanity 6 album has some of the most outrageous lyrics! I always say that this album was ahead of its time.

Even thought Rick James had his protege group Mary Jane Girls, Vanity 6 seems to have had the most widespread impact on female girls groups to follow

This Trio of Acts with Sexual Verve Cranks Out a New Kind of Funk

When Vanity 6 came out in 1982,there was a rumor that Susan was only 16

I knew that no parent would allow their 16-year old daughter to go onstage wearing lingerie and singing those type of songs....LMAO

That space in time is so over.

SoulAlive said:

When Vanity 6 came out in 1982,there was a rumor that Susan was only 16

I knew that no parent would allow their 16-year old daughter to go onstage wearing lingerie and singing those type of songs....LMAO

Aaliyah's did....

daingermouz2020 said:

daingermouz2020 said:

I've often wondered how things would have been different if Vanity had stayed and starred in Purple Rain. No way of ever knowing now .

It would have been an even better film with Vanity.I've seen other movies featuring Vanity and she has a charming screen presence.She and Prince would have sizzled onscreen together!

daingermouz2020 said:

I've often wondered how things would have been different if Vanity had stayed and starred in Purple Rain. No way of ever knowing now .

Just watch Vanity in the V6 videos and any concert clips. She controls it, Susan & Brenda feed off her energy. Then listen to the V6 Sex Shooter outtake then listen to the Apollonia 6 Sex Shooter.

I feel just having Terry & Jimmy in the movie would have made the Time scenes that much more interesting...

KCOOLMUZIQ said:

SoulAlive said:

When Vanity 6 came out in 1982,there was a rumor that Susan was only 16

I knew that no parent would allow their 16-year old daughter to go onstage wearing lingerie and singing those type of songs....LMAO

Aaliyah's did....

link pls

WET DREAM

My lips start shakin' when I see him walkin' down the street
Of all the boys in school, he's the only one I wanna meet
If he combs his hair, all my girlfriends start 2 scream
He's so clean, he's the number one star of my wet dream
I get so angry if I see him with another dame
I start 2 tremble and I don't even know his name
If he takes her 2 the soda shop, guess who's gonna buy the ice cream?
She gives him all her money 'cause he's the star of her wet dream

Can't help it, can't help it, can't help it
Ooh honey, honey, boy he's so fine
I can't help it, can't help it, can't help it
Ooh honey, honey, gotta, gotta make him mine

My body starts 2 quiver when I think of his next 2 mine
I know he could deliver the dam 2 the river anytime
He's so good lookin', he's the cutest dude I ever seen
He's my little lover, number one star of my wet dream

Can't help it, can't help it, can't help it
Ooh honey, honey, boy he's so fine
I can't help it, can't help it, can't help it
Ooh honey, honey, gotta, gotta make him mine

Oh yeah
Make my body scream
You're the star of my wet dream

Somebody, somebody, somebody help me sing
You're my little lover, make my body scream
You're my little lover, number one star of my wet dream
(Everybody sing 2gether)
You're my little lover, you make my body scream (Make my body scream)
You're my little lover, number one star of my wet dream {repeat phrase}
Yes you is
(Everybody sing 2gether)
Yeah, yeah
(U're my star)
Oh honey, honey, honey, honey, uh
My wet dream, my wet dream, my wet dream
I can't help it, can't help it, can't help it
(U're my little lover, number one star of my wet dream)
Yeah, ooh ooh ooh
I can't help it, no, I can't (Make my body scream, yes U)
Honey, honey, honey, honey, honey, honey, honey
You're my little lover, you make my body scream

While specific recording dates are unknown, initial tracking took place in Summer 1981 at Prince's Kiowa Trail Home Studio in Chanhassen, MN, USA (during the same set of sessions that produced Make-Up, Drive Me Wild and I Need A Man). The tracks were intended for an album titled The Hookers, which was abandoned in Fall 1981, and which later evolved into Vanity 6. Vocal overdubs by Vanity and Brenda Bennett were added in Spring, 1982, when the band had evolved into Vanity 6.

A later track, planned for a projected second album by Vanity 6, was titled Wet Dream Cousin due to its similar musical feel to this track; the two are otherwise unrelated, however; see Wet Dream Cousin for details of that track.

-PrinceVault

SoulAlive said:

tongueinthecrease said:

jdcxc said:

Vanity's beauty was mesmerizing. Does anyone have a recent picture of Susan? What is Jamie Shoop doing these days? I bet they both have great stories to tell.

This was posted on tumblr and probably reposted on here before.

As soon as I read the comment asking about where Susan is now, I knew this pic would get posted.

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That woman is NOT "the" Susan Moonsie. Brenda B has even said it isn't her.

LET’S GO CRAZY!

The tour ran through the 1981 holiday season and, after a nearly month-long break, began again at the end of January in 1982. Brenda enjoyed her various jobs and was having a great time being out on the road with her husband, but she had begun to feel a little restless music-wise and wondered if and when she’d get back to making her own music again. And that’s when fate stepped in. Or, to be more precise, that’s when Prince stepped in!

The tour resumed after the holidays and it was about to become a pivotal moment in Brenda’s musical history and career. As wardrobe attendant and organizer to Prince, during this one afternoon, she was setting up his make-up station and getting his clothes ready for that night, the first show of the new year at a university in the Midwest. As she moved about the room, Prince came in, sat down at the make-up station and began to style his hair in preparation for the show. He put a cassette tape into his player on the table; it was a rough mix of the song “Stand Back” by Stevie Nicks. Stevie had contacted him sending him the tape for suggestions and his critique in the hopes of collaborating on a song together. Brenda began unconsciously to sing along as she was working not realizing that Prince had stopped what he was doing and was listening. Prince told her he didn’t know that she could sing and remarked that she could be the other “hooker.” When she asked what he meant by that, he explained that he was putting together a female group and that he thought she’d be just right for the project. Prince envisioned the group as a trio and he and Brenda discussed the idea with Roy who thought it was a great idea. Brenda accepted the offer.

Shortly after the “Controversy” tour wrapped up in April, Brenda found herself in Chanhassen, Minnesota to begin working on an album for Prince’s girl group project. By the time she’d arrived, the other two women, Susan Moonsie and Denise Matthews, were already there, Denise had been rechristened “Vanity,” and the group had been christened “Vanity 6.” Vanity had been pegged as the group’s principal vocalist and focal point, their frontwoman, but this was not to be a typical setup like Diana Ross & The Supremes with Ross singing all the songs and Mary Wilson and Florence Ballard providing backing vocals and Berry Gordy pulling all the strings.

(To set the record straight concerning Prince’s use of the word “hooker,” he originally intended to call the group The Hookers and had enlisted Susan Moonsie, who was then his girlfriend, and his high school friend Jamie Shoop and was looking for a third woman to complete the lineup. Around the time he offered the opportunity to Brenda, Jamie dropped out of the project to get involved in the business end of things and was replaced by Denise and the Hookers name was retired.)

Prince encouraged the three women to get fully involved in the creative process and they began writing and rehearsing with members of Prince proteges The Time and Dez Dickerson. Pre-production went smoothly and in swift order, the group was in the studio with The Time as the backing band and Prince co-producing with the group.

Brenda made major contributions to the album. She has cowriting credits on three of the albums eight tracks, “Wet Dream” credited to the group, “If A Girl Answers (Don’t Hang Up)” by the group and Terry Lewis of The Time, and “Bite The Beat” composed by Brenda and Time guitarist Jesse Johnson. She is the lead singer on “Bite The Beat” and shares the lead vocal on “If A Girl Answers” with Vanity. Recording wrapped up quickly and the women began a whirlwind of pre-release business, promotional and public relations activities. Prince’s label, Warner Brothers, snapped up the master and their A&R department set up photo shoots and planned a promotional tour which would include a couple of their first live performances. For publicists, they signed with the William Morris Agency, the biggest and most powerful operation of its kind in the world. The group was poised for success before they ever set foot on a stage and succeed they did!

The album took right off reaching #6 on Billboard’s R&B chart and #45 on their Top 200 Albums chart and earned the group a Gold album. Warner Brothers went four deep into the album for singles, all of which performed well. “He’s So Dull” did well at radio and introduced their sound to the masses. “Nasty Girl” went to #7 on the Hot Black Singles chart and all the way to #1 on the Hot Dance Club Play chart (and was a #9 smash in the United Kingdom). “Drive Me Wild” also did well at radio, but failed to chart. The last cut culled from the album was “Bite The Beat,” another club favorite which also failed to chart, but is significant as it marks Brenda’s first time at bat as lead vocalist on an internationally released single.

“Vanity 6 was very well received. The summer of 1982 found us on an American promotional tour for the album as well as one in Europe covering numerous cities and countries. There were performances on television shows, on radio, magazine and newspaper interviews as well as more photo sessions wherever we went. Everything was moving quickly and the excitement was incredible. I was happier than a clam at high tide to be a part of it all. To be able to work in music in such a capacity and to be able to work in the same organization as my husband Roy was a plus. We were truly a couple that seemed to have it all.”

After their return from Europe, Vanity 6 headed out on the road along with The Time as the opening acts on Prince’s “1999” tour. The excursion was wildly successful and reviews along the way singled out Vanity 6 as one of the highlights. On the road, as the only one of the group’s members who came into the project as a professional musician with national touring experience, Brenda became the trio’s de facto leader. She managed to keep the others in tow and in line (Susan was only sixteen) and things went, for the most part, smoothly. The tour wound down after six months and Prince gave everyone some time off while he began planning his next project: a movie.

OldFriends4Sale said:

After their return from Europe, Vanity 6 headed out on the road along with The Time as the opening acts on Prince’s “1999” tour. The excursion was wildly successful and reviews along the way singled out Vanity 6 as one of the highlights. On the road, as the only one of the group’s members who came into the project as a professional musician with national touring experience, Brenda became the trio’s de facto leader. She managed to keep the others in tow and in line (Susan was only sixteen) and things went, for the most part, smoothly. The tour wound down after six months and Prince gave everyone some time off while he began planning his next project: a movie.

so she really was only 16?!