Again, swiped from the archives of The Star Tribune, found these interesting nuggets of info (Tom Tucker's is omewhat alarming however)

• CHUCK ZWICKY:
He was so prolific, by the time he released an album, he may have had literally 10 albums sitting around. By the time the critics got ahold of something and ripped it apart, he'd moved on. When he was on the Lovesexy Tour, I was assigned to go in the vault and provide mixes for songs that had never been mixed. I think I did 130 songs that had never appeared anywhere. You were given a pager, and he seemed to have an uncanny sense of when to call at the worst time. Right when the meal would arrive at a restaurant, the pager would go off. Crawl into bed with your girlfriend, the pager would go off. You'd get called in at very odd hours, set up and wait. Sometimes he'd show up, and sometimes he wouldn't.

• TOM TUCKER:
I'd say half the things I mixed for him never made it to a record. And half of his vault, right now, none of us have ever heard. Nobody but him. It's really a shame.

*We tried to talk him into archiving everything when he was still with Warners. We were going to buy a convection oven and bake all the analog tapes, and archive them to digital. But at the last minute he pulled the plug. He said he didn't want anybody to hear all that music. Those old analog tapes are just gumming up down in his vault. And then what's going to happen if it's not in his will? What if it's in his will to destroy that stuff? That would be like half the Beatles' tunes being lost.*

One of the reasons I kept my job with him for so long was because I think it was one of the best jobs you could have, getting to mix his stuff. I could spend 10 hours on one song and love it. Can you imagine: Getting to work on recordings with one of the best artists of our lifetimes? And without any formal music training, his understanding and his ear for music was amazing. He would work on songs sporadically. That was his method. He'd tell one of the engineers to go down to the vault and get a certain song, and it could be from 10 years ago. And he'd maybe keep one element of it, and just re-write other parts. He constantly had this creative style of just merging ideas together.


[This message was edited Fri Mar 12 17:40:06 2004 by bananacologne]

Oh God, Nana...that makes me so fucking sad.

before the 'oh-it's-his-stuff-let-'im-do-what-he-wants' squad arrives on this thread, lemme get a few tears flowin anyway....


i still wanna know what's in therrrrre!!!!
i don't want more...i just wish to know more!!!! is that so wrong????? waaaaa-hah-haaaaa!!!!!

































....okay, let 'er rip!

bananacologne said:

The horror! THE HORROR! I can't stand the thought of what damage his no-cursing little Jehova-brainwashed mind might have caused! AAAAARGH!
[This message was edited Fri Mar 12 20:10:31 2004 by scififilmnerd]

I've mentioned this before, that he's probably letting the tapes deteriorate. Magnetic tape has a pretty short shelf life. Baking the tapes means that the tapes at the time of the interview, were already at the "last resort" stage. Once baked, the tape can be played one more time or so, if you're lucky.

Hold onto those boots.

squirrelgrease said:

There is a lot of material in the Vault the Prince is very happy with, but just 'didn't fit' with
whatever album he was working on at the time. These songs probably WILL see the light of
day in one form or another at some point in the future.

The worrying thing is that these tracks only account for less than 10% of what's in the Vault,
and Prince really isn't interested in letting the rest of it ever be heard. There's been a few
times when people have tried to get Prince to archive the Vault properly, but so far he's always
refused. A lot of the earlier stuff is now very near the point of no return. It wouldn't suprise me
if Prince has a clause in his will, like Stevie Wonder, whereby all his unreleased material will
be destroyed when he dies.