Prince: shy frail and sexually explicit
John Morthland
Sunday night: Prince the 20-year-old Minneapolis singer songwriter and multi-instrumentalist hailed in some quarters as the future of black rock leaps off the stage and bounds into the audience at the Ritz. At one point the band stops playing and a number of females in the middle of the crowd squeal in unison. Because the floor is too crowded to spot the flamboyant Prince it’s impossible to tell what’s happening. But the tune he’s doing is called “Head,” a story-song about engaging in sexual activity with a young woman he meets on the way to her wedding.
Monday afternoon: Prince is sitting in a midtown hotel room — not his own ,which he has deemed too messy to be seen by outsiders. For one hour he grimly stares straight ahead, as if in a trance, while answering questions in a painfully slow monotone. He seems so frail so shy and just plain scared that one is reluctant to press him for fear he’ll snap.
So which one is Prince and what’s going on here?
The career history is a brief one. At 18 he wrote all the songs and played all the instruments on his debut album “For You,” which yielded the hit single “Soft and Wet.” He also produced it under the supervision of an executive producer. He did the same for “Prince,” except this time there was no executive producer. That album included an even bigger hit in “I Wanna Be Your Lover” and showed him moving from funk toward rock. Though both albums went heavy on an image of androgynous sexuality, neither was adequate preparation for last year’s “Dirty Mind,” which he claims is his first fully autobiographical work.
Most of the songs on that album are so explicit they’ve received no airplay and their lyrics can’t be quoted in a family newspaper. Among the highlights are the title song “Head” and “Sister,” the story of a 16-year-old boy who loses his virginity to his 32-year-old sister. But the album also contains “Gotta Broken Heart Again,” an airy shuffle that actually sounds like the work of a young innocent, and “When You Were Mine,” featuring the lines “When you were mine/I let you wear all my clothes,” which sums up the sexual ambiguity and/or confusion of these days about as well as any song and is worth a good laugh to boot. ‘‘Dirty Mind” is indeed unremittingly sexual, but while it conveys the notion that by now Prince has done it all, he doesn’t seem nearly as sure of what “it” is as his notices suggest.
No matter. Critics were ecstatic with the album winding up on many year-end Top 10 lists, and for good reason Whatever he’s singing about in his strained falsetto, Prince is clearly a boy wonder as a songwriter and musician. He builds tight funk rhythm grooves laced with powerful rock riffs and melodies that stick in the brain. He has already influenced any number of other musicians black (Michael Jackson, Rick James) and white (Blondie), as well as fails who attend shows dressed as outrageously as the star (Onstage Prince favors such costumes as black knee-high boots, bikini underwear and an open trench coat.)
Prince’s past is checkered enough to make his songs more than credible. He won’t reveal his real name or too much about his background, but does say that his father (who led a popular midwestern jazz orchestra called the Prince Rogers band) is black and Italian and his mother is a mixture of several other races. When Prince was 7, his father left his mom; soon, a new stepfather moved in. At 12, Prince himself left home
“I just felt real inhibited there, and we came to a mutual agreement. It was my idea, but my mom said okay,” he explains. “At home my hours were restricted and I couldn’t play my music .They didn’t like what I played, they didn’t like what I wrote. No one really cared, actually, and I felt like... see my mother lost my father because of music. He wanted to play music night and day. He was a responsible man but he felt hurt that he never got his break, because of having the wife and kids and stuff. She knew that, and there were constant fights, which caused the break-up between them. She could see a lot of that coming out in me, and used to say that to me a lot. I just regretted having to go through all that”
First he moved in with his father who by then was playing backup for strippers in downtown Minneapolis. Prince came and went several times (It was always over life-style; he’s stubborn and I’m stubborn”) before moving into the basement of a friend’s house. The friend was Andre Cymone, who today is a member of Prince’s band, and Prince spent most of his teen years more or less a member of the Cymone family, albeit a less closely supervised member. Out of boredom and ennui, he taught himself to play 26 instruments.
His first band Champagne, was formed when he was 12. “We started out playing rock Top 40 because we didn’t know any better,” he says. “We just played music that we saw other bands playing, whatever had the hardest licks on the record. Then we had to play just black Top 40.
“But we still got to do some original songs, and I really liked to hear the band play a song I had written. There were a lot of love songs and some real crazy ones, campy stuff; like, I wrote a song about spitting, which was real dumb and crude but I was young then. We used to laugh a lot back then. I liked writing fantasies, fairy tales. I used to make up things a lot then, different situations I‘d put myself into, and pretend I was that particular person and write a story concerning my experience. I dealt in fantasy a lot back then, because I spent a lot of time alone. That’s what those first two albums are about.”
Eventually, that band moved back more toward rock, which is where the money gigs were, but it wasn’t quick enough for Prince. He quit coming to New York just after he turned 17 to try to work his solo demos out on record companies. He roused some interest, but couldn’t get an offer he considered fair. Back in Minneapolis he hooked up with a new manager who not only landed him a contract, but also won him the right to produce his own records, unheard of for a new artist. After working once with the executive producer, he’s been on his own ever since, and claims, “It goes five times faster. I know exactly what I want and I don’t have to explain anything to anybody. It takes a shorter amount of time and costs less money.”
“Dirty Mind” began as a collection of demo tapes he’d recorded only for his personal use. “But I realized once I finished them all and really listened that this was really me, and it was silly to keep releasing fantasies. Everything on this record is about a relationship or a state of mind I was in at a particular time. I thought it was important that I put them out. Now I’m sure all the rest of my records will also be personal.
“I take these songs very seriously, each and every one of them. As parts of my life. If you had gone through the events I’ve gone through, you’d understand,” he adds. Asked if he intended humor in any of them, he looks puzzled. “No I don’t think so. I never really thought about humor, I guess.”
His mom, he says, has never seen his show; his dad saw it once and told him not to change anything. Both his parents still live in Minneapolis, as does he, though he virtually never sees any of his family. He does have a girlfriend he describes as “steady when I’m at home, if that makes sense. I haven’t really been on the road a lot. I just started doing things, and it’s all been so sporadic. Before, I never really had time for relationships, didn’t get involved too often.”
Still, he will say, he was introduced to sex at 13. Then he turns right around and describes all his relationships until he was 17 as having been “real platonic and for the moment, I guess. When I turned 17 I considered myself really grown up and I started doing things . . . I tried to do things like an adult”
Huh? Doesn’t he realize that both statements can’t be true, that a relationship couldn’t be both sexual and platonic? “Maybe,” he replies still staring straight ahead, “What can I say?”