It's April of 1985.

The Purple Rain Tour has finally wrapped up. And what a year it had been for Prince! A HUGE #1 album, #1 singles, a coast-to-coast sold out tour, a year where the Minneapolis Maestro was arguably the #1 pop star on the planet. Thoroughly spent creatively and physically, Prince sits on his tour bus outside the Miami Orange Bowl stadium and listens to his recent recordings. They are decent, solid pop songs, for sure...but something is missing...

Frustrated, Prince celebrates The Revolution and the tour team at the after show. As he hands out $1,000,000 checks to each band member he instructs them on a whim to reconnect in 'early 1986 in Minneapolis", right after the New Year. Confused, but thoroughly used to their leader's whims, the band mates knock back champagne until the early morning, happy that they are now millionaires, happy for what looks to be some well-deserved time off.

But Prince never rests. He barely ever sleeps. Before midnight, Prince books a direct red-eye flight to Los Angeles. On the flight Prince writes the names of certain musicians and fellow artists on single sheets of purple sticky notes. At his hotel he summons his LA-based management team to the Beverly Wilshire Hotel early the next morning. Handing out the sheets of sticky notes Prince asks them to contact the names on the list and also to book solid chunks of time at Sunset Sound Studios. As his management team scurries away Prince turns towards the piano in his suite and between sips of chamomile tea starts to write a new song...the basic chords roll around the room...the skeletal framework of something promising...of something beautiful and mysterious....

The next morning, Prince arrives at Sunset Studios at 8AM and instructs the resident sound engineers to start setting up for group recording. An hour or so later, as if summoned by a Bat Signal, the first guests start to arrive...

The first one in is local up-and-coming singer-songwriter Maria McKee. Confused beyond belief, and dazzled at being in the presence of the world's biggest pop singer, the locally-based alt-country rock gingerly sets down her acoustic guitar case.

"Umm, this must be a mistake..." Maria lets out, a bright flush spreading across her face as she looks at Prince sitting at a piano.

"Why do you say that?" Prince asks, his deep and rich baritone oddly incongruous coming from one so diminutive and – well – pretty.

"Cause I'm here," she replies. "I loved your first album,"

Prince says. "You have a beautiful voice."

Then shifting gears, Prince asks Maria to listen to the song he's been writing. After a quick go-through, Prince hands her a sheet of paper with lyrics on it, hand-written in his now familiar looping scrawl.

"You got verse two, okay?" he says as he starts the second go-around. As their voices merge Maria realizes that something magical is happening. That the surging, urgent torch ballad, titled "ScarLover" from the top of the lyric sheet, is beyond amazing. Even better than the song Purple Rain from the year before.

Before the song is over Maria looks up and almost chokes seeing the scarecrow frame of Texan blues guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan enter the studio and doff his hat theatrically.

"Damn, that song is tight!" Vaughan shouts as Prince's final chords melt away.

"Hello, Stevie," Prince says. "You bring your axe?"

"Don't you know it?" Stevie says in return.

"Get yo' axe plugged in, then!"

A couple more invitees come in. They are, Toto drummer Jeff Porcaro, mercurial but brilliant bassist Jaco Pastorius, keyboardist and pianist Bernie Worrell, and multi-instrumentalist and percussionist Steve Scales, both of whom played for the Talking Heads year before on the legendary Stop Making Sense Tour - a tour that Prince evidently saw numerous times over the years before in between his own manic touring.

The last musician to arrive, apologizing profusely for being late as he was in Boston the day before his summoning, was saxophonist Brandon Marsalis.

"Damn, Prince...Sting is PISSED!" Marsalis says as he sets up his gear. The jazz musician was already a legend and had spent most of the previous year working with the ex-Police front man on his album. That morning, Marsalis informed the British singer that he was not going to tour behind the record and instead was going to "do something with Prince". "$^#% you!" Sting reportedly spat out on the phone. "You thing you aren't replaceable?" "Hey, everyone is replaceable. That is, except Prince." Marsalis said in return.

For the next couple of months, at a feverish pace, the band (now called Will O' Wisp) records over twenty tracks, one of which 'ScarLover' is pegged to be the first single. The songs are bold and experimental, full of lush melodicism and lyrical whimsy and humor. The players really let loose, Vaughan's guitar in particular cutting through the tracks adding a grit previously unheard on Prince recordings. Prince and McKee collaborate on several tracks, some of which Prince says "he's scared of".

As final mixing occurs in early June Prince informs the band that and up-and-coming film director named Tim Burton was going to direct the first video for ScarLover and to be ready to shoot the 'mini-film' at the end of July in Detroit.

"When's the album coming out?" Marsalis asked.

"End of September, I hope," Prince replied. "Then we tour. At first Europe, then the U.S. Then by early next year, we done."

The album that followed, WIN SOME, is a huge global hit, it's lead-off single ScarLover another #1 chart topper. Will O' Wisp plays several select shows in the U.S. and Europe over the course of October through December of '85. The album's second single "Raspberry Beret", a perfect pop ditty with McKee in lead vocals, is also a huge hit.

At their last show after party in Brussells, Prince congratulates his fellow band members and gives them each diamond-encrusted purple harmonicas as gifts.

As Stevie Ray looks at his mouth harp with a puzzled expression he asks Prince, "So what you got goin' on now?

"I am getting The Revolution back together," Prince says. "We are going to record an album, then make a movie in Paris. After that, who knows?"

Surely there's someplace else for your fan fiction.

LOL, that was good! Major props for the Jeff Porcaro reference!

In this alternate timeline, does Prince participate in We Are The World? Because that snub would have an affect, I'm sure, on getting anyone to just drop what they were doing to work with him. And that snub occured primarily because he didn't like working with other musicians outside of his very tight circle.

Prince was a supergroup.

Is there any story ever about Prince working with other talented musicians with Ego and their own thing that worked out?

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The collaborations with George Clinton never really worked, Mavis didn't have ego (nor did Maceo), the work with Miles Davis was more of an anticlimax than anything else... Larry Graham seems to be the only example I can think of.. all others he worked with were either trained by him or were willing to submit to his whims.

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As to your story, I don't think the group would have been interesting, even though Bernie is in there. And also, Around the world in a day is my favourite Prince album, so missing out on that would have been really bad!

It's not the same but Prince refusing to be a part of "We are the World" due to having to work with other artists and not being in charge leads me to believe this scenario impossible.

Graycap23 said:

Prince was a supergroup.