<img class="size-full wp-image-25781 " title="Eric Leeds in the Madhouse (Prince) promo photo (original photo B&W)." src="http://www.waxpoetics.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Web_Madhouse_EricLeeds-final.jpg" alt="" width="620" height="460" srcset="http://www.waxpoetics.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Web_Madhouse_EricLeeds-final.jpg 620w,

Eric Leeds in the Madhouse promo photo (original photo B&W).

<img class="size-full wp-image-25783 " title="Madhouse 8 detail" src="http://www.waxpoetics.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Spread-Madhouse-final.jpg" alt="Detail of "Madhouse 8" back cover with Maneca Lightner, Prince’s then girlfriend, photographed by Richard Litt." width="620" height="460" srcset="http://www.waxpoetics.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Spread-Madhouse-final.jpg 620w,

Detail of “Madhouse 8” back cover with Maneca Lightner, Prince’s then girlfriend, photographed by Richard Litt.

• • •

“I remember it started with him calling me one afternoon and asking if I would like to come over to his house and ‘play some jazz,’ ” Eric Leeds remembers, reflecting on that fateful Friday. “I think he said his father was there also, though by the time I got there, his father had left. Prince had some tracks already recorded. We sat at the piano and worked out the melody lines, which were mostly his, and the harmonic changes for the solos. Then we went in the studio, and I started playing. We recorded the entire album over the course of three days.”

Done from September 28 to October 1, 1986, at the basement studio of Prince’s ranch-style mansion in suburban Chanhassen, Minnesota, Madhouse’s 8 was in stores by January ’87. Eight instrumental tunes—entitled “One,” “Two,” “Three,” etc.—made up the thirty-eight-minute album. Portuguese eye candy Maneca Lightner adorned the sleeve wearing a two-piece, 1950s-style polka-dotted swimsuit with a red wide-brim sun hat. Picture the buxom Lightner on a beach, hand on her hip, between a sandcastle and a Yorkie begging on its hind legs for the red ball in her other hand. On the jacket’s flipside, she lifts her doggie for a kiss. They saved the back shot (you knew there’d be one) for the single, “Six,” Miss Lightner standing on the sand with her booty facing photographer Richard Litt’s camera.

“I honestly don’t remember, because that was my first time in L.A.,” Lightner says now from Los Angeles, trying to remember the location of the shoot. “Most beach areas look alike, and I’m sure they told me back then, but I can’t be certain. If I had to guess, I would have to say somewhere in Malibu, but I’m simply not sure.” Richard Litt confirms: “The first shooting was in Malibu, and the following day, I shot in a studio in downtown Los Angeles. The dog was rented from an agency.”

Imagine the surprise Prince’s demo tape stirred up for Warner Bros. execs in the ’70s when they realized the teen wonder was rocking every instrument Stevie Wonder style. 8 carries the same shock. Jazz, even the fusion derivative of the mid-’80s, is rooted in improvisation. Jazzman Prince layering his piano and keyboards on top of his own bass, on top of his own drums, continuously reacting to himself as a stranger from a musician’s point of view, is Prince earning his musical genius reputation.

“I did all the sax and flute, and Prince played everything else,” Eric Leeds confirms. “Much has been said about his insistence on not letting it be known that he was involved with the project. His motives are his own, but as I remember it, he wanted the music to be related to on its own merits, and perhaps was concerned that if it was released as a ‘Prince jazz album,’ it would draw more attention to the idea that Prince would play jazz than to the value of the music itself.

“The jazz community can be pretty brutal in its regard for the idea that a pop musician would have the arrogance to consider himself a jazz musician. By the ‘jazz community,’ I mean the writers and critics. Ironically, many jazz musicians that I know really dug the album and were convinced that Prince was behind it from the very start.”

Saxophonist James Carter, cause of the greatest buzz in modern jazz since the début of Pulitzer-winning trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, remembers 8 fondly. “Man, Madhouse brings back memories of a high school talent show in which we performed ‘Six’ as an instrumental,” says Carter, recalling his Northwestern High days in Detroit. “I always dug Eric Leeds’s sparse baritone sax work throughout the piece. Prince lays down one of the funkiest grooves in D minor; Eric jabs like a boxer.”

You could visit certain hipsters in 1965 and be guaranteed to find John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme in their living rooms. Fast-forward to ’73 and we’re talking Head Hunters by Herbie Hancock. Aside from being landmark albums in jazz, the records were badges of cool for their time (and even now), tchotchkes that revealed as much about the buyers’ sophistication as their tastes in music. Believe it or not, 8 became one of those records in 1987.

The album 8 didn’t even go gold (marking 500,000 copies in sales). Anyone owning a copy in the late ’80s was either 1. a Paisley Park fanatic, or 2. a young somebody searching for an entrée into contemporary jazz, introduced to Madhouse by a diehard Prince lover. Even now, mere mention of Madhouse’s 8 works as a password into a Skull and Bones–like secret society, separating true Prince followers from the wannabes.

For a jazz album without any vocals, 8 is a vividly describable record. For starters, Prince is a sexy beast on the drums. These aren’t his trusty LinnDrum beats; these are all-the-way-live crash and splash cymbals, toms, bass, snare, and hi-hat drums. But it’s the little idiosyncrasies that turn 8 into a charming, descriptive record. The Beatleseque quirks in his music were always equally as responsible for Prince’s cult following as the music itself: backwards guitar solos, hidden messages revealed by spinning the vinyl counterclockwise, self-referential in-jokes. 8 contains enough of these eccentricities to keep things patently Prince.

“Two,” for instance, is a mid-tempo number (no pun intended) that slowly builds up to a climactic keyboard solo at the end. But the entire song runs over a comical conversation you can never quite hear clearly. “My theory behind playing the saxophone is very easy,” someone says at the beginning. “Blow in one end.” Later on, the same joker questions, “Can I get sued for plagiarism? Everybody shut up and listen to me. Where’s the melody?” You have to strain to hear punch lines like, “That’s why I get paid by the note,” until the tune ends gently with the delayed tsss of a cymbal. What the hell were they talking about? We’ll never know.

A series of eleven phone-conversation samples runs through “Five.” Prince starts a leisurely funky drum pattern that builds in speed and gets measured out by drum-machine handclaps. Meanwhile, snatches of “Five Star Restaurant, can I help you?,” “Hi, Mom, this is Jimbo,” and “How ya doin’, sexy?” keep floating by, sometimes accelerated Kanye West–style, sometimes slowed to a drawl. In less than two minutes, the drums hurtle to a climax and the song finishes with the loud voice of an irate dad: “Hello, son, what took you so long to call?”

Then there’s the orgasm. “Six” segues into “Seven” with some unaccredited ecstasy from Vanity, a snippet from the unreleased, heavily bootlegged Vanity 6 gem, “Vibrator.” Loading her body massager full of (ten!) fresh batteries, Vanity pleasures herself for nearly two minutes at the song’s close; Prince cuts and pastes some of her peaking at the end of 8’s “Four,” and as the transition from “Six” into “Seven.” (He used it again years later for the Come track, “Orgasm.”)

“Eight” begins with the repetitive, electronically altered voice of Prince saying what sounds like “hum” over soothing synthesizer atmospherics and flute from Eric Leeds. The title track builds for about eight minutes with saxophone and keyboard solos, until finally ending with two minutes of calm, Brian Eno–like ambient chords. Prince later lifted the closing emotional tones of “Eight” for the introduction to “U Got the Look” that December. Warner Bros. released Sign o’ the Times two months after 8, making the “U Got the Look” opening recognizable right away to ardent fans, another of his in-the-know nudge-winks.

• • •

“So 8 had been released; they had hired the band to tour,” says keyboardist Matt Fink, via his home in Minneapolis. “They had a keyboard player by the name of Billy Carruthers, a wildly talented jazz keyboardist. And maybe three weeks before the tour was supposed to launch, he made the decision—I don’t know why—to not be in the group. They were gonna cancel Madhouse being a warm-up act at that point. So I spoke to Eric and said, ‘Well, what do you guys think if I were to step in? Do you think that would work for you?’ ”

Madhouse’s 8 peaked on Billboard’s Black Albums Chart at number twenty-five, and the band—that is, the “band”—was slated to open for Prince on the Sign ’o’ the Times tour kicking off May 8 in Stockholm. Eric Leeds handled several magazine and radio interviews perpetrating the membership of Madhouse as some old acquaintances from Atlanta: pianist Austra Chanel, bass player Bill Lewis, and drummer John Lewis. But Prince charged Leeds with formulating a real Madhouse to support his European tour after 8 scored some commercial success. So the saxist put together Billy Carruthers, bassist Levi Seacer Jr., and drummer H. B. Bennett as the true Madhouse. Two weeks into rehearsals, half the band needed replacing.

“We [then] formed a working Madhouse group of myself, Matt Fink, Levi Seacer, and Dale Alexander on drums, an old friend of Prince’s,” Leeds recalls. Minneapolis drummer Dale Alexander’s funkier beats proved a better fit for Madhouse than the jazzier approach of Bennett, a member of Leeds’s old Takin’ Names outfit from Pittsburgh.

“Madhouse was the opening act on the tour, and we also played several club dates in Europe,” Leeds says. “As we continued to work as a group that summer; we added new material to the book. ‘Sixteen’ was one of them, composed primarily by Prince and myself.” From early May to late June 1987, Madhouse typically opened the Sign o’ the Times tour with “Two,” Three,” and “Six,” and “Mutiny” by the Family. The quartet, shrouded in black hooded robes, occasionally added “One” to its brief set list, along with “Nine,” “Eleven,” and the manically energetic “Sixteen.”

“They used to get a volunteer female from the audience to walk onstage before the show and hold up the numbers to the songs, like in the rounds of a boxing match,” Matt Fink says. “She’d walk out in skimpy clothes—shorts, high heels, and a tight shirt—and cross the front of the stage, hold[ing] the number one, the number five. It was very cute.”