It is late, I’m momentarily thinking that if I am to write beyond my professional duties, I will have to become an artistic obsessive and write when inspiration strikes, knowing full well that I cannot maintain that commitment. The dishes are done, the kids are in bed, the baby certainly about to wake up for a midnight bottle, and if I write this I will not fully appreciate the showing of the Prince concert-ish film for “Sign o’ the Times.”
It is extraordinary. A dutifully sexy portrait of the multi-racial, multi-gendered world he created for us, where his lead dancer tells him to “fuck off” when he proposes an after-show date. Whether in real life she would have been free to get away with that does not change its expressive presence in the show. It is good to see Prince in a live form like this, still with the core members of the Revolution, plus Sheila E on drums, introduced with knowing irony as “Pretty good for a girl.” He’s showing her off and loves the break with rock and roll tradition. And I’ve always loved the fact that he allowed Dr. Fink to wear his stupid medical scrubs, which make for a lame visual pun and are so dreadfully boring compared to the rest of the show. So you get the impression that everyone can wear whatever they want, the shirtless bassist and the skimpily clad dancer and the matronly keyboardist and Sheila E typically rocking it if she’s got it. Her attire does not come across as Prince’s imposition, maybe just his advice. He was never one to abjure a little skin. This was Prince’s family and allowing them their individuality brings a joy that places us among friends. Even though Prince’s music was all his, drums, guitars, keyboards, drums, background vocals, he was best when he allowed himself to play with a band. In concert he was forced to, and during this era he gave them little bits of songs that lent a bit of new tonal color and allowed the song to wander out of his own crowded claustrophobic head. Likewise he is front and center for this whole performance, but it populated by something like a community. It goes without saying that his talent is incomparable, master of all instruments, composition, lyrics, and a hell of a dancer with that leaping athleticism, in heels! Where did he come from? A shy boy and a shy man who is transformed Jekyll & Hyde style before a crowd into this winking peacock strutting and sliding and stripping, none of it accidental nor acts of passion, the passion is there but the performance is planned from top to bottom. This is sober disciplined show-biz. In this he had no equals.
And then he does something with sexuality that would be impossible, possibly even for him, today with our prudish fears of cancellation and excessive presuppositions of pornographic playacting. The sexuality of Prince’s performances is coy and knowing and full the playfulness and transgression appropriate that particular genre of activity. But for Prince it is also holy. Youthful beauty exists in something of a Greek tribute to the body as pure aesthetic object, and for Prince its lusty sexuality joins into that aesthetic purity. The band that prays together has sex together. The sexuality is part and parcel of this disciplined performance, and in its prayerfulness the performance becomes ritual. It is, despite all appearances, a church service, and not just the church of Prince. “The Cross” stands as its culmination. The release Jesus offers to the fullness of creation, and the silly and sometimes fearful means God instituted for procreation. In this life-affirming theology, Prince offers us an escape from the self-canceling dread of the cancel culture.
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lue Tuesday 12.1.1987
This is a continuation of
http://prince.org/msg/7/299844 My Goodness: isn’t the Black Album a really rather marvellous thing?
http://prince.org/msg/7/247006 The Black Album / Ecstasy / Lovesexy story
Ruperts Dance Club [Minneapolis Minn.] Paisley Park studios [Minneapolis Minn.]
Prince Warner Bro. Ingrid Chavez Karen Krattinger Susan Rogers Matt Fink Gilbert Davison Mo Ostin Marylou Badeaux Eric Leads
From the perspective of Warner Bros., the Black Album was emblematic of the label’s concerns about Prince’s career. Increasingly, his marketing decisions seemed designed to alienate the public rather than to increase his record sales; meanwhile, his material was becoming consistently less accessible. The company desperately wanted Prince to come up with catchy songs that would re-establish him as a potent hit-maker and guide him back towards Purple Rain-like levels of fame. What it got instead was The Black Album.
Despite Warners trepidation, plans for the release went forward and hundreds of thousands of vinyl albums, cassettes, and compact discs were pressed for distribution. As he often did just before putting out new albums, Prince went to a nightclub to audition it for an unsuspecting public. On December 1,1987- a little more than a week before its scheduled release-Prince went to Rupert’s, a Minneapolis dance club. Entering undetected by the crowd, he made his way to the deejay booth and played songs without fanfare to see how club goers would react.
insert from: NightGod My source: Cat Glover
I filmed a behind the scenes video of her modeling shoot last year (the one many of you have seen on youtube), and spent a couple days hanging out with Cat Glover. She is very open and shared some amazing stories with me. This is one:
1987: Prince had never tried Ecstasy, and was curious about it after Cat told him what it felt like. He asked Cat to get him some (it came from her, where the common misconception is that it came from Ingrid). Cat was in LA when Prince made his request. She got some and flew in to MN and was staying at a hotel when Prince’s limo showed up. While they were both in her room, Cat suggested Prince take half a dose “because he was so small”. He took the full dose and told Cat to wait for him. He rode off in his limo and Cat didn’t hear from him until much later.
Prince decided to go to a club while he was tripping. It was here that he met Ingrid Chavez, which eventually led them to Paisley Park. Cat said she didn’t think Ingrid knew Prince was tripping on E. Prince called Cat later from the limo and told her about Ingrid. She was riding with him at that point, and the three of them went out to Paisley, making for a historical night in Prince’s career.
Even more interesting is her source for where she got the Ecstasy in the first place: Anthony Kiedis from the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
As the music played over the sound system, Prince mingled with the crowd and eventually became involved in a detailed conversation with a singer-songwriter-poet in her early twenties named Ingrid Chavez. An attractive brunette with a serious and reflective air, Chavez had moved to Minneapolis several years earlier to work on music with a friend. But that collaboration had soured, and since then she had been working alone on her poetry and spoken-word pieces. Like Prince, Chavez had grown up in a strictly religious home (in her case, Baptist), but as an adult she too sought spiritual answers outside the confines of any specific religion.
Prince and Chavez seemed fascinated by each other despite an apperent lack of sexual chemistry, and, after a while, they drove back to the recently completed Paisley Park studio complex. They continued a lengthy and intense conversation about religious issues, love, and life fulfillment, but Prince eventually excused himself, saying he had a stomachache. Waiting to see where the strange night would go next, Chavez stayed put while Prince disappeared elsewhere in the complex.
At about 1:30am Karen Krattinger received a strange phone call. Speaking with uncharacteristic emotion, Prince apologized for having been so hard on her, said he had trouble expressing his feelings, and that he loved her.
At about the same time that night, Susan Rogers also got a phone call from Prince, asking her to come to Paisley Park. After four years as Prince’s engineer, she had resigned that post shortly after the completion of the Black Album i October 1987. But she agreed to go to the studio. Arriving in the rehearsal room, she found it dark, save for a few red candles that cast ominous shadows across the walls. Out of the gloom she heard a woman’s voice.
“Are you looking for Prince?” Rogers, who would later learn this was Chavez, answered, “Yes.” “Well, he’s here somewhere,” Chavez replied. Abruptly, Prince emerged out of the darkness, looking unlike she had ever seen him before. “I’m certain he was high,” Rogers said. “His pupils were really dilated. He looked like he was tripping.” As he had with Krattinger, Prince struggled to connect emotionally with Rogers. “I just want to know one thing. Do you still love me?” Rogers, startled, said she did, and that she knew he loved her. “Will you stay?” Prince asked. “No, I won’t,” she said, and left the complex. “It was really scary,” she recalled of the evening. Matt Fink confirmed the sequence of events, saying he was told by bodyguard Gilbert Davison, who was present at Paisley Park that evening, that Prince had taken the drug Ecstasy. “He had a bad trip, and felt that [the Black Album] was the devil working through him,” Fink said. Chavez has also said that in the course of the evening Prince decided that The Black Album represented an evil force.
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But something had changed. Prince believed that he had experienced a spiritual and moral epiphany, and that Chavez, serving as a guide, had shown him the way to greater connection with God and other people. The Black Album, he decided, represented the anger and licentiousness that he must leave behind. After casting about for months for a way to truly put the Revolution era behind him, he had found one.
Days after the ecstasy trip, Prince contacted Warner Bros. chairman Mo Ostin and insisted that the Black Album, with its release just days away, be canceled. “Prince was very adamant and pleaded with Mo,” recalled Marylou Badeaux. Although Ostin ultimately agreed, halting the release was a logistical nightmare for Warners. Five hundred thousand LPs – which now needed to be destroyed – had been pressed, and were on loading docks ready for shipment to stores. A small number of vinyl records and cds escaped destruction, and The Black Album quickly became available on the bootleg market, with fans selling and trading cassette duplicates of widely varying fidelity.
Prince has never given a clear public explanation of the decision to shelve the album, but the program from his next tour included a cryptic discussion of the Black Album’s “evil” nature, and refers to December 1, 1987 (the night he spent with Chavez at Paisley Park), as “Blue Tuesday.”
Having shelved the Black Album, Prince immediately threw himself into the recording of his next LP, Lovesexy, which he conceived as a document of his epiphany.
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Moreover, very few of Prince’s associates related to the lyrical messages, and also wondered why Ingred Chavez, who seemed to some a bit odd, was playing such a huge role. When band members seemed confused by the lyrics of the title track, he rerecorded it to make the meaning ring out more clearly. It still didn’t work. “I did not understand what the term ‘lovesexy’ was supposed to mean,” Eric Leeds said. “People weren’t getting it.”