Jan 86 Early 1986 : !

As well as the version released on the 1998 disc, which was heavily edited by engineer H. M. Buff, there were three alternative takes of ‘Crystal Ball’. These feature Wendy and Lisa on vocals, as well as Susannah (the released version is just Prince and Susannah). On the Wendy and Lisa versions, the intensity is increased by a spoken-word section panned across the speakers that addresses ‘sisters

and brothers of the purple underground’ and associates danger with blackness, a concept Prince would continue to pursue. This direct address recalls early band member Dez Dickerson’s claim that Prince was always looking for more than just a band, wanting to shape his fans into a movement, something that would become of even greater importance to him during the 1990s and early twentyfirst century before he would abruptly lose interest in the possibility of shaping mass opinion.
20-04-1986 : Starfish And Coffee (1) (2:46) – Dream Factory
The track was initially included as the ninth track on the late April configuration of the Dream Factory album. It was kept for inclusion as the eighth track on the first disc on the 3 June, 1986 configuration and the seventh track on the 18 July, 1986 configuration.
Starfish And Coffee

“Starfish And Coffee” was inspired by Susannah’s recollection of her schooldays and a retarded girl named Cynthia Rose whom she went to school with. Prince recorded an LM-1 drum machine track to the song and then flipped the tape upside down and played it through, thus reversing the drum track from beginning to end. “It was all part of the song being about opening your mind to other possibilities,” Rogers notes. I’d often wondered whether the character of Cynthia Rose in ‘Starfish and Coffee’ was a secret homage to Cynthia Robinson and Rose Stone of Sly and the Family Stone. But Susannah Melvoin told me the song portrayed a girl they knew. ‘We knew somebody named Cynthia Rose and [the song has] beautiful imagery, and we were at the house and he went downstairs and came upstairs a few hours later and there it was, “Starfish and Coffee”. I said, “It’s fantastic, it’s so sweet. Cynthia, if she really knew, she would love this.”’

23-04-1986 : Washington Post
Pop Tours Cancelled. Prince, Others Fear Terrorism Abroad

Prince and Manhattan Transfer will not tour Europe this summer for fear of terrorist reprisals in the wake of the United States' bombing of Libya. In addition, several other acts - including Lionel Richie and the Bangles -acknowledge concern about their safety in Europe and the Middle East. Prince's manager, Steve Fargnoli, said today they had been exploring summer European dates for the pop-rock star but that any further negotiations have been shelved because of "the recent Libyan conflict." Manhattan Transfer publicist Alan Eichler said the vocal quartet's cancellation of a 21-date European tour was the direct result of "tension arising from the current world situation." "They were just afraid to go, it's as simple as that," he said. "It was the group themselves that decided not to tour Europe, and we had to respect their wishes." Eichler added that the group, winner of three Grammys in February, is sacrificing about $500,000 in potential concert revenues by the cancellation. The tour was to have included stops in Rome, Vienna, Stockholm and the jazz festivals in Copenhagen and in Montreux, Switzerland. The group will instead concentrate on U.S. concert dates this summer. No U.S. dates have been added yet, he said. The Bangles will proceed with its European tour, which begins in June in West Germany, but the Los Angeles-based rock group has scrapped plans to shoot a promotional video in Cairo during the tour. "Even though I can't honestly say the Libyan-European situation hasn't been an issue for us, it hasn't caused us or the group to seriously consider canceling the tour, " said Mike Gormley of L.A. Personal Direction, the Bangles' management company. "We're concerned about their safety, but it's an issue of exposure versus risk, and we think the risk in the places they're playing England, the Netherlands and West Germany is less than it might be elsewhere." Gormley said that Wall of Voodoo, another of the rock groups handled by his company, has been touring in Europe for two months and has experienced "no trouble of any kind." "And we're still going ahead with plans for Oingo Boingo to tour Europe later this summer," Gormley added. Popdom's general mood regarding European appearances this year is one of caution. Vicki Rose, a publicist with the Howard Bloom Agency in New York, said Lionel Richie, who was considering a European tour later this year, had postponed such considerations indefinitely. "The whole Libyan thing has made Richie very nervous; he'll probably wait until things have cooled down a bit over there," Rose added. "I mean, Cambodia seems safer than southern Europe right now.”

24-04-1986 : Rolling Stone
Prince strips down
By Davitt Sigerson

Who but Prince fills us today with the kind of anticipation we once reserved for new work by Bob Dylan, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones ? Happily, following the commercial and creative letdown of Around the World in a Day (cleverly presented as his Personal Statement record), Parade: Music from 'Under the Cherry Moon' bears the weight of intense hope and scrutiny as lightly as its maker wears the satin capes he favors. Prince has made it his task to shock us: his work sounds so inevitable we can no longer identify what it was that first surprised us. He did this on "When Doves Cry." Was it simply the omission of bass guitar or the retention of a single line of melody for verse and chorus? The answer lies in the way it was assembled; the result is that most of us can remember where we were and what we were doing the first time we heard it. "When Doves Cry" and Purple Rain, the blockbuster it introduced, weren't even Prince's best work. That had been achieved one record before - on 1999. A febrile double album of extended dance pieces, it featured his best song, "Little Red Corvette," and an example of his musical wit, "1999." A lover of sixties pop, he built "1999" around the central riff of the Mamas and the Papas' "Monday, Monday." To complete this tribute-by-triangulation, Prince has now written for the Bangles "Manic Monday," which bears a melody almost identical to "1999" but omits the founding riff that would link it to its original source. This is the degree of energy and intelligence we have come to expect from Prince. This is the promise he has once again kept - on Parade. Like Purple Rain, the new album is a soundtrack (for the forthcoming Under the Cherry Moon) and is preceded by the stunning "Kiss." The single has been mistaken as a return to the music of his Dirty Mind period. In fact, it is made with a sparseness and - most surprising to the ear - an absence of reverb that bespeak years of learning. Rhythmically, "Kiss" is funk; harmonically, it is rhythm & blues; lyrically, it proves Prince is crossing yet another frontier, into emotional maturity. The petulant baby - first trumpeting a purported sexuality and then expecting us to care about a so-called spiritual rejuvenation - is no more. Not that Prince wasn't intelligent enough to say interesting things all along, between the nonsense. Usually, though, sex was his code word for a kind of achievement in which the gratification of voyeur and audience defined success. This explains the curious the curious lack of love, or even motivation, in Prince's sex songs. Dirty Mind's "Sister," for example, isn't a song about making love to one's sister; it's a song about making love in which the female seducer is cast as the protagonist's sister, much as a pornographer might create a fantasy to titillate his audience. "Sister" is not about what it claims to be about, and neither incites nor shocks. What really shocks, of course, is the aural landscape of records like "When Doves Cry" and "Kiss." We all may have dirty minds, but few of us are visionaries. In the arrangements on Parade, it is Prince's vision to that is paraded: a simple Weillen waltz like "Under the Cherry Moon" proves an excuse for all manner of orchestral invention ; when Prince says on "New Position," "You've got to try my new funk," believe him. In "New Position," on "Kiss" and above all in the sensational "Girls & Boys," Prince conceives a clean, diamond-hard style that could spawn years of imitations. Far from the funk of Dirty Mind, this style springs from an understanding f orchestration, rather than the innate ability to jam on rhythm instruments. On Parade, all sounds - snippets of guitar, horn, percussion, voice - are treated equally, erasing the line between "basic track" and "sweetening." Prince has achieved the effect of a full groove using only the elements essential to a listener's understanding - and so has devised a funk completed only by the listener's response. Thanks to Under the Cherry Moon, we get the title song, "Sometimes It Snows in April" and "Christopher Tracy's Parade"; thanks to shooting in France, we get the French touches in "Girls & Boys" and "Do U Lie ?" But the growth in Prince's lyrics isn't because maturity is written into the film script. On Parade, sex and love sound real, and perhaps for the first time, they sound related. He's made the adult discovery - or is it an admission ? - that the people you care about can be the people who turn you on the most. "Kiss" even offers something of a manifesto : in lines like "Women not girls rule my world," "U don't have 2 watch Dynasty 2 have an attitude" and "U can't be 2 flirty mama I know how 2 undress me," Prince smiles at his old ways. On another track, he serves notice that he's "got 2 try a new position." If Parade harks back to Dirty Mind, it is less in the surface similarities of the falsetto funk style than in its freedom from thematic pretensions. Prince has given us three successive concept albums - first the unintended masterpiece 1999; next the Cinerama extravaganza Purple Rain, where his exertions occasionally drowned out his intentions; and finally the con job Around the World in a Day, when he summoned craft and packaging to bridge the creative chasm he faced. Having gathered enough laurels on which to rest comfortably forevermore, Prince wants to have some fun with music, or as he puts it, to "go fishing in the river, the river of life." What better time for a new baptism ?
Though few working the greenroom seem to know it, Prince is standing in a hallway not five feet away. After Sheila’s final encore, he and the Revolution — now twelve members strong — are scheduled to sign in for a still undetermined number of songs. Prince, you remember, said last year that he might never again play live, that he was going to “look for the ladder.” There haven’t been many miracles in Los Angeles lately, and his surprise performance will be hailed by the committed as a return from the Other Side. For the rest of the audience, the evening promises to provide a damn nice show. Most of Hollywood still seems to be sipping lunch at Musso & Frank’s, but Wendy checks her watch and realizes it’s time for the sound check. The bill is paid, and everyone clambers back into Wendy’s rented BMW for the trip to the Universal Amphitheatre. Clean-cut, dressed in a resplendent black suit and a white ruffled shirt, Prince faces the band and orders up a tune. The Revolution begins hammering. “Okay,” says Prince, “Sheila comes in here.” Cut. “Is Sheila here yet ?” he asks. Momentarily, Sheila E. strides in, stage left, in sunglasses and a trench coat. She and Prince huddle for a second, then the meastro barks, "'Controversy' ! Ready !" The band is pounding again. “Come on, stay in beat,” says Prince. “I’m listening.” Perfection is found in a few measures, and the band carries on with the song. Prince then announces, “End of ‘A Love Bizarre.’ Check it out.” He jumps offstage and runs up an aisle, both listening to the sound and practicing an audience run he will perform that night. “Can we lose that low range somehow ?” he asks. “Let me hear the bass out.” Perfection again, then into the Revolution’s new single, “Kiss.” Prince pauses. “I think finger cymbals would be better. Now when we film videos tomorrow, we’re going to drag it out so everybody will get their chance to be in it.” With that, he heads offstage. Wendy unstraps herself from the guitar, Lisa unplugs from the keyboard, and they head back upstairs for dinner. Like Tom Landry checking out field conditions ten minutes before the season’s opening game, a quietly wired Prince roams the grounds backstage. Walking down the corridor, he pays as little attention to the greenroom dollies as Landry does to the Dallas Cowboys’ cheerleaders. Prince disappears through the wings and heads anonymously into the audience to watch Sheila pound out her tunes. The walls are shaking out there; the crowd is swaying, its eyes centered on Sheila and her neon drumsticks. No one pays heed to the clean-cut guy in the nice black suit who has melted into their midst. While Prince cases the joint from the bleachers, the Revolution is upstairs getting made up in its two dressing rooms. Sheila is finishing up onstage now, whipping the crowd out of its seats as she beats a first encore. The entire Revolution meets for a moment, agrees on the key for the first song, “A Love Bizarre,” then hustles downstairs, just offstage. Huddled in the darkness like a high-school basketball team about to take the court, the musicians fidget and limber up. One encore for Sheila. Another. One more. The curtain comes down again, and the crowd sees the shadow of scurrying feet. Something is happening. The curtain goes up, the Revolution is in place, and the disbelieving screams start. Prince smiles, Wendy smiles next to him, and in her apartment, Lisa cocks her head, finally relents and smiles, too. The first chord is an A, and the unceasing screams leave no doubt that the real king, his queens and the purple court have finally returned.
Ladies In Waiting

Wendy, Lisa and Prince : a musical love affair

by Neal Karlen

Minutes from now, Sheila E. will begin pounding her magical drumsticks for 6200 howling fans inside the Universal Amphitheatre. Though showtime is imminent, the backstage greenroom at this Universal City concert hall remains packed elbow to elbow with assorted kings, queens and court jesters of the Los Angeles music kingdom. Rock& roll Annies, pressed between the walls and their escorts, nurse their complimentary drinks and grind out Gitanes at their painted competition’s feet. Funkified Barbie, Ken and Mr. T dolls fight for air space and each other, while a quickly panicking backstage guard shields the door with her body and announces, “No more, no room, no air, nobody else !” Though few working the greenroom seem to know it, Prince is standing in a hallway not five feet away. After Sheila’s final encore, he and the Revolution — now twelve members strong — are scheduled to sign in for a still undetermined number of songs. Prince, you remember, said last year that he might never again play live, that he was going to “look for the ladder.” There haven’t been many miracles in Los Angeles lately, and his surprise performance will be hailed by the committed as a return from the Other Side. For the rest of the audience, the evening promises to provide a damn nice show. Upstairs from the stage, Revolution keyboard player Lisa Coleman and guitarist Wendy Melvoin are waiting in their dressing room. Both are Los Angeles natives and the only members of the Revolution who commute to Minneapolis. They are also the Revolution’s only women and the only faces in the band that carry brand-name recognition. But they aren’t feminine adornments, tambourine-banging mannequins brought in to leaven Prince’s macho onstage swaggering. Above all else, Lisa and Wendy are wicked musicians, the only ones to whom Prince gives carte blanche in the private music-making regions of his head. No, they both assert, Prince isn’t their boss; he’s their best friend and collaborator. “We don’t want to leave and start our own thing,” says Lisa softly, “because this is our own thing — I don’t feel like we’re just hired musicians taking orders. He’s always asking for our ideas.” And more. The group’s latest album, Parade : Music from 'Under the Cherry Moon,’ contains two songs — “Sometimes It Snows in April” and “Mountains” — co-written by Lisa and Wendy. They have also begun writing songs for Prince’s third movie. They’re not sure what it’s about, but Prince has let it be known he’ll shape his film to suit their songs. Together, says Wendy, the triad makes music no one can beat “I’m sorry,” she says with conviction, “but no one can come close to what the three of us have together when we’re playing in the studio. Nobody !”

Wendy makes me seem all right in the eyes of people watching. She keeps a smile on her face. When I sneer, she smiles. It’s not premeditated, she just does it. It’s a goad contrast.  Lisa is like my sister. She’ll play what the average person won’t. She’ll press two notes with one finger so the chord is a lot larger, things like that. She’s more abstract. She’s into Joni Mitchell too.

— PRINCE

A lot has happened to the purple clan in the months that have preceded the Resolution’s surprise Los Angeles appearance. For lunch on the day of the show, Lisa and Wendy pick the Musso & Frank Grill as an appropriate Hollywood spot to talk. While would-be and real movie agents and producers drink their lunch at nearby tables, the two order salads and mull over the recent events. The Family, a band Prince godfathered through its first album, has just fallen apart in the wake of singer Paul Peterson’s walkout. Among those left stranded is Susannah Melvoin, the Family’s other exsinger, Prince’s current beloved (though, contrary to rumor, not his fiancée) and Wendy’s forever identical twin sister. Then there’s Parade, the Revolution’s new record, and Under the Cherry Moon, Prince’s new movie, which he directed and which will be out in a few months. According to Lisa, the film is a “boy-meets-girl love story, a kind of a Pygmalion in reverse. Instead of making a high-society dame out of a tramp, it’s about a man trying to loosen up a high-society dame.” Right around the time the movie opens, Prince and the Revolution are planning to take off on a nine-month world tour, their longest ever. So now it’s time to start getting the live kinks out : except for a three-hour performance earlier this week at Minneapolis's First Avenue club, neither Prince nor his band has played a note in public in a year."I'm not ,” says Wendy, ‘and I don’t even want to guess what’s going to happen. All I know is that this band is going to be together a long, long time.” Lisa nods in agreement. Superficially, the two women’s offstage personalities seem very similar to their onstage auras. Wendy, in front and extroverted, embellishing whatever’s been said with a cracking verbal riff or some funny dialect. Lisa, hanging back, talking slowly, adding grace notes of reflection or perfectly timed tiny gibes to keep the two different story lines in electric rhythm. That they talk the way they jam, says Wendy, makes perfect psychological rock-band sense. “There are actually different attitudes for different positions in a band," she explains. “Keyboard players know when they join a band that they’re going to be in the second line. And guitarists know they’re going to be in front. So they get that guitarist’s attitude of being in front. When you’re up there, you know you can’t just stare down at your instrument and pretend you’re not there.” Long pause. Lisa reflects, takes a drag on her cigarette, adds her chord: “I like it in the second line. I feel comfortable there. I call it my apartment.” Half-beat pause, Wendy adds a hearty riff via a deepthroated laugh. “She calls it her apartment !” Lisa says she doesn’t mind that “Lisa and Wendy” are a single entity in the rock public’s eye. She laughs shyly — her most frequent kind of laugh — as she remembers a solo shopping trip she took this week. “I was at the market," she says, “and these two little girls, all decked out, walk by. They went past me, turned around, and yelled, ‘It’s Lisa and Wendy ! It’s Lisa and Wendy !’ I had to stop and count how many of myself there were. Let’s see. One.” Wendy has more trouble with the commingling of their public personas. “It’s hard,” she says thoughtfully. “It’s weird.” The two then engage each other in a dialogue that is one part Abbott and Costello to two parts longtime best friends busting each other’s chops. LISA : It’s fine. I couldn’t think of a better person to be linked with. Wendy : (Laughing) I could. LISA : (Laughing) Yeah, Me. Like Prince, Wendy and Lisa grew up in families headed by fathers who were professional musicians and who eventually were divorced from their wives. Jazz keyboardist Mike Melvoin and percussionist Gary Coleman are seasoned studio musicians and best friends. Their credits include Barbra Streisand’s “Evergreen” and Frank Sinatra’s “That’s Life”: they appeared together on the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” and on several early Jackson 5 albums; and they were the ones who played the instruments for half of the Partridge Family. “Our parents were total beatniks, then hippies, and we turned into twelve-year-old hippies ourselves,” says Wendy, who’s now twenty-two. ‘They used to joke that to rebel we’d have to turn into staunch Republicans,” adds Lisa. who’s twenty-five. “But we just rook their lives and went a step further.” In 1971, all six Melvoin and Coleman kids joined together to cut a kiddie-hippie-bubblegum album. “But we weren’t the Partridge Family,” chortles Lisa, “we all actually played our instruments.” The name of the album ? “I forget,” feigns Wendy. “I think it was... Geek City.” “Yes, I’m sure that was it,’ says Lisa, mock soberly. Both earnestly agree that their birthright as spectators into rock-business reality has helped them keep that ever - diminishing industry resource - perspective. “Growing up the way we did,” says Wendy, “really gave us an edge on people who were just starting in music. We know how to get around all the games.” She pauses. “There’s so much ego in the music business, especially when you first get started. The people who grew up around the business are more relaxed with it.” And fantastic success, Wendy says, hasn’t changed her a bit. “I never think about it. I have a few friends and a few things I like to do. I never go clubbing. I’d rather just go home and play my guitar. Sometimes I can’t believe how boring I must seem to my friends.” “A lot of people have this real glamorous vision of what it means to be a musician,” adds Lisa. “Sometimes it’s true, but what I learned as a kid is that there’s got to be a whole lot of work behind it. You have to practice, you have to have your chops, you have to know your music perfectly.” Sometimes it hits her that she’s Lisa - but never in public. Alone, at home, she occasionally thinks about it. Then she usually goes to bed. Lisa began studying classical piano at an early age. Three years older than Wendy and Susannah Melvoin, she remembers the twins when they looked like “plucked chickens in diapers.” Wendy got her first guitar for her sixth birthday; Susannah received toe shoes. Surrounded by musical relations, Lisa and Wendy kept practicing. In private. Even after their bubblegum record, they refused to play in front of their classmates. Says Wendy, “People who went to junior high school with me at Cal Prep in Encino still come up and say, ‘I didn’t even know you knew how to play the guitar.’ The instrument was still so personal to me that I didn’t want to share it with anyone.” In Hollywood, Lisa suffered similar junior-high phobias. Once, the drama department at her school needed a pianist to accompany a dance routine. Lisa was called out of class, placed on a piano bench and ordered to play “Mr. Bojangles.” Lisa shudders as she recalls the experience : “I don’t know what happened, but I sat down at the piano and couldn’t play. I mean I could play, but I pretended that I couldn’t. I was really depressed all day, then went home and sat back down at my piano. You know, that night I played the shit out of ‘Mr. Bojangles.’” She got through Hollywood High through the good graces of an English teacher named Judy Coleman, who gave Lisa ample independent-study credits for her music and Joni Mitchell-style lyrics. “I basically just stayed home from school and wrote songs," she says. “Every once in a while I’d call up Judy and say, ‘Come on over and give me some credits.’” After graduation, she enrolled at Los Angeles Community College as an English major, pulled down a 4.0 average, “read everything from Vonnegut to Hayakawa” and dropped out. Lisa then started work as a grunt on the shipping dock of a documentary-film company in Los Angeles. In 1979, a friend working for Prince’s L.A. management company heard that His Royal Badness - who was still a couple of years away from his big commercial breakthrough — was looking for a keyboard player. Lisa made a tape, sent it in and was quickly summoned to Minneapolis for a private audition. “When I got to Prince’s house,” Lisa remembers, “he sent me downstairs and said he was going to change clothes. There was a piano down there, and I just started playing, trying to relax. I got the feeling he was eavesdropping at the top of the stairs, so I whipped out my best Mozart. He finally came back downstairs, picked up his guitar, and we started jamming. From the first chord, we hit it off.” Hired on the spot, she moved to Minneapolis. Wendy, meanwhile, was gritting her way through high school in North Conway, New Hampshire, her divorced mother’s new home. She liked the country but felt marooned. “No one understood what I liked,” she says, “and no one knew I played the guitar.” Foiled romance finally gave her the gumption to get through. “I was sixteen and madly in love with a senior named David Merrill. I finally went up to him and said, ‘I can’t stand it anymore, I just have to let you know that I’m attracted to you.’ He just looked at me and said, ‘There’s a whole bunch of other guys in the school.’ After that, I said, ‘Forget it, I just want to get out of here.’” Wendy graduated, then headed back to L.A. to waitress and play secretary while she figured out which music college to attend. In 1983, she went to visit Lisa in New York. The band was on the 1999 tour, and Wendy holed up for a few days in her friend’s hotel room. Down the hall, Prince heard someone playing a guitar. He knocked on Lisa’s door and found Wendy practicing. He asked her to play more, liked what he heard and later asked her to fill in at a sound check that guitarist Dez Dickerson had missed. Soon after, Dickerson quit to form his own band, and Wendy was in. How does it feel being the only women in a twelve-member band ? “It’s a little weird,” says Lisa, “but not really. When I first joined the band, I got solace from the fact that here were some other people so different that they only fit in there. That’s the thing — they’re all nice guys, and we all fit together.” What about the explicitly sexual content of Prince’s lyrics ? “Like ‘Head’ ?” Wend says, laughing. “People do it. It exists." "It's all in the name of good music," adds Lisa. And what about romance ? “I like to keep my personal life personal,” says Lisa with an air of distaste. “I love Bugs Bunny," says Wendy, ever in front with a lick. “I’d marry him if he were alive. He’s just so Hollywood.” Most of Hollywood still seems to be sipping lunch at Musso & Frank’s, but Wendy checks her watch and realizes it’s time for the sound check. The bill is paid, and everyone clambers back into Wendy’s rented BMW for the trip to the Universal Amphitheatre.
As they wait for the afternoon call to the stage, Wendy and Lisa relax in their dressing room. On the couch lies a paperback of hard-to-do crossword puzzles and a copy of The Twilight Zone magazine. Wendy is musing over a piece of plastic that looks just like an American Express platinum card. Shaking her head, she points out the words HARD ROCK CAFE where the American Express legend should be. The embossment on the bottom left of the card says WENDY, just WENDY. “This was just sent to me, unsolicited, in the mail,” she says. “This card allows me to butt in front of anybody in line at the Hard Rock Cafe. Can you imagine the kind of person who would use this ?” Wendy drops the card and lights some incense to chase out the room’s sweat-sock smell. Lisa lights a Merit. On a table sits an uneaten basket of strangely colored and oddly shaped cookies baked by a fan who spied them shopping for books the day before. “Give some to Prince," pleads the note that accompanied the questionable edibles backstage, “please.” An aide walks in and announces, “Prince wants you onstage ASAP.” As Lisa walks down the stairs and through the wings, she says, “I nicknamed Prince ‘Fearless: as in ‘Fearless Leader.’" As in Rocky and Bullwinkle. On the stage, Lisa and Wendy strap and plug themselves into position — Lisa back in her dark apartment with a little smile and her head cocked slightly; Wendy in front with a wide grin, next to Prince in the fully lit, empty auditorium. Gone are the days when Fearless Leader put his friends through all-afternoon sound-check jams that could last as long as that night’s concert. Clean-cut, dressed in a resplendent black suit and a white ruffled shirt, Prince faces the band and orders up a tune. The Revolution begins hammering. “Okay,” says Prince, “Sheila comes in here.” Cut. “Is Sheila here yet ?” he asks. Momentarily, Sheila E. strides in, stage left, in sunglasses and a trench coat. She and Prince huddle for a second, then the meastro barks, "'Controversy' ! Ready !" The band is pounding again. “Come on, stay in beat,” says Prince. “I’m listening.” Perfection is found in a few measures, and the band carries on with the song. Prince then announces, “End of ‘A Love Bizarre.’ Check it out.” He jumps offstage and runs up an aisle, both listening to the sound and practicing an audience run he will perform that night. “Can we lose that low range somehow ?” he asks. “Let me hear the bass out.” Perfection again, then into the Revolution’s new single, “Kiss.” Prince pauses. “I think finger cymbals would be better. Now when we film videos tomorrow, we’re going to drag it out so everybody will get their chance to be in it.” With that, he heads offstage. Wendy unstraps herself from the guitar, Lisa unplugs from the keyboard, and they head back upstairs for dinner.
Wendy is fighting for terms to describe her and Lisa’s relationship with Prince. They aren’t his toys or minions; he’s not their boss or master. Together they form a musical ménage that has alchemized new multiracial forms of funk rock out of both talent and (they say) deep-dish love. ‘We tell Prince we love him all the time,” says Wendy. “He always gets all embarrassed and doesn’t know what to say. We tell him to tell us the same thing so he goes, ‘Uh, okay, yeah, I love you too.’ It’s silly, us all being so intense about it and swooning over each other, but it’s meaningful. Not that the rest of the band doesn’t understand Prince — they do. We’re just a bit more spiritual with him.” The three have a silent language, adds Lisa. “When Prince says something funny at rehearsal," she explains, “he knows who will understand and where to look for the smile. And it’s always there. And we know where to look for that smile too.” Like Tom Landry checking out field conditions ten minutes before the season’s opening game, a quietly wired Prince roams the grounds backstage. Walking down the corridor, he pays as little attention to the greenroom dollies as Landry does to the Dallas Cowboys’ cheerleaders. Prince disappears through the wings and heads anonymously into the audience to watch Sheila pound out her tunes. The walls are shaking out there; the crowd is swaying, its eyes centered on Sheila and her neon drumsticks. No one pays heed to the clean-cut guy in the nice black suit who has melted into their midst. While Prince cases the joint trom the bleachers, the Revolution is upstairs getting made up in its two dressing rooms. The men’s quarters are crowded with faces both familiar and new. In recent months, Prince has added six new members to the band : Eric Leeds on sax, Matt Bliss on trumpet, Mico Weaver on guitar and three guys whose job it is to work to the side of Prince as a Pips-like dance line. They are Greg Brooks, Wally Safford and Jerome Benton — Morris Day’s hilarious valet and mirror holder in Purple Rain and the only Revolution member to appear in Under the Cherry Moon. “We’ve got a much bigger sound now," says Lisa. “And we’re a lot more funk oriented, that’s for sure.” In one corner, Revolution drummer Bobby Z and keyboardist Matt Fink, tied for second in the race for Most Famous Jewish Rock Star Ever to Come Out of Minnesota, are discussing whether the Yiddish word for “gizzard” is pipik or pupik. In the shtetl the chicken gizzard was a delicacy saved for the head of the household on Friday night. In suburban St Louis Park, Minnesota, however, the word now generally is spoken by parents wondering why their son has hair down to his pipik. Or is it pupik ? Matt, in his green doctor’s scrub suit, thinks it’s the latter. Bobby Z finally agrees. While the guys get made up, dope smoke wafts down the hallway. “You know how much trouble we’d get in if we did that ?” one new member of the honest-to-God drug-free Revolution says, laughing. Across the hall, Wendy explains the band’s pharmaceutical habits. “There is absolutely no person in this band involved with drugs," she says vehemently. “We’re real militant about that. Fortunately, it happens that everybody in the band got together and felt the same way. There are a few people in the organization who are into the drugular lifestyle, but you can’t help that.” “This band’s going to last a long time because we’re all going to live a long time," Lisa adds softly. “The headline KEYBOARD PLAYER FOUND DEAD OF DRUG OVERDOSE sounds boring and pathetic to me.” Sheila is finishing up onstage now, whipping the crowd out of its seats as she beats a first encore. The entire Revolution meets for a moment, agrees on the key for the first song, “A Love Bizarre,” then hustles downstairs, just offstage. Huddled in the darkness like a high-school basketball team about to take the court, the musicians fidget and limber up. One encore for Sheila. Another. One more. The curtain comes down again, and the crowd sees the shadow of scurrying feet. Something is happening. The curtain goes up, the Revolution is in place, and the disbelieving screams start. Prince smiles, Wendy smiles next to him, and in her apartment, Lisa cocks her head, finally relents and smiles, too. The first chord is an A, and the unceasing screams leave no doubt that the real king, his queens and the purple court have finally returned.
??-04-1986 : Big Tall Wall (1) (5:40) – Dream Factory #1
“Big Tall Wall” is a minimalist funk/rock song, with Prince's vocals accompanied only by a Linn LN-1 drum machine. The track was recorded around the time when Prince's then-girlfriend Susannah Melvoin had moved out of Prince's house and the lyrics, including "I'm gonna build a big tall wall, stone circle so you can’t get out”, are a direct reference to the round apartment building in Lake Calhoun to which she moved. The song includes the line "I've got more holes than a golf course" which Prince later reused in the party intro to The Ball (heard both in the intro to both Joy In Repetition and Eye No). The line "pretty little baby, you're so glam, every time I see you I wanna slam" also inspired Glam Slam. While the lyrics in the initial version were focused on a negative, possessive relationship, the revised version reframed the lyrics to depict a positive, loving relationship.
Big Tall Wall

I felt embarrassed about bringing up ‘Big Tall Wall’ in front of Susannah Melvoin. It was as if I’d dug out an intimate love letter Prince had written her, filled with private detail, and asked her what she’d done to inspire it. Talking to Wendy and Lisa previously, I’d discovered that they’d heard outtakes, but didn’t necessarily have copies of them. And although I assumed that Susannah would have wanted to hear every song Prince had allegedly written about her, I had no idea if he’d played them to her at the time, and if not, whether she would have tracked them down. Susannah told me he hadn’t played her ‘Big Tall Wall’ at the time – and she hadn’t heard it in many years – but it was clear from her reaction that she still remembered the impact the lyrics had made on her. It’s easy to understand why, and also to appreciate why Prince has – to date – kept it from official release. Stylistically, it’s among his most important out-takes – you can hear in it the seeds of many of the songs on Sign o’ the Times, The Black Album, Lovesexy and Graffiti Bridge – but lyrically it’s unbelievably reactionary, a throwback to the lock-her-up-in- a-trunk misogynist crap of Cliff Richard’s ‘Living Doll’. The song is from the perspective of a possessive lover overwhelmed by a girlfriend – with a sexy body and curly brown hair – who decides to respond to her challenges by imprisoning her inside a circular stone wall, while continuing, it seems, to see another girlfriend on the side. This, the singer maintains, is true love. It would be a mistake to take the song too seriously: it’s a definite exercise in black humour, but by the end of the song he’s fully inhabited the persona of a psychopath.

Rock & Soul




The Prince interview

Mr. Purple Discusses His Movies, His Music, His Musicians And More, More, More.

By Michael Shore

Prince's next feature film, Under the Cherry Moon - and the much-anticipated followup to his smash debut, Purple Rain - should be out in theaters in three or four months. It's even more eagerly awaited because it's also Prince's feature-film directing debut. Originally, the film was to be directed by Mary Lambert, a premier music-video director who has overseen Madonna's "Borderline" and "Material Girl," Sheila E.'s "The Glamorous Life," and the Go-Go's "Yes Or No." But in mid-September, about a month or so into the movie's two-month shooting schedule, Lambert abruptly walked off the set and handed the directing reins to His Royal Badness. Lambert issued a statement which read, in part, "I'm leaving under totally amicable circumstances. It's just become quite apparent that Prince has such a strong vision of what this movie should be, a vision that extends to so many areas of the film, that it makes no sense for me to stand between him and the film anymore. So I'm going off to work on my own feature and letting him finish his." Lambert's was not the first departure from the set of Under the Cherry Moon. Just days into filming, veteran British actor Terrance Stamp walked off the set, allegedly due to "scheduling conflicts," which may or may not be public relations' diplomacy. In any case, Stamp was replaced in short order by Steven Berkoff, who played the heavies in both Beverly Hills Cop and Rambo. He'll be seen as the father of Prince's love interest in the film. Under the Cherry Moon is a love story, set in the 1940s and shot in black and white. Word from the set has it that the plot is more or less spelled out in the lyrics to "Condition of the Heart" on Around the World in a Day, which appears to be about a musician falling in love with a woman too rich and worldly for his own lifestyle. In Under the Cherry Moon, Prince's love interest is a rich girl named Mary Sharon who, according to one cast member, "wears miniskirts and pigtails." Prince plays Christopher, a piano player in a casino-style lounge in a place similar to the French Riviera, where the film was shot. One unconfirmed story was that Prince wanted to shoot some scenes in Monte Carlo but Prince Rainier wouldn't grant permission. Guess he felt one prince on the premises was enough. While the plot may come from a Prince song, don't expect much Prince music in Under the Cherry Moon. Another unidentified crew member says the Revolution was on the set only to shoot the video for "America," that there's no band music in the film at all, and that the only Prince music in the film is His Royal Badness at the acoustic piano. So there may or may not be soundtrack album. Another crew member confirmed, though, that there is one actual "song," and it's called something like "Snowing in July." You'll recall that when Prince announced he would stop touring late in the Purple Rain tour, one of his cryptic reasons was, "Sometimes it snows in July." The rest of the cast includes little-known British actress Kristen Scott-Thomas as Mary Sharon; Jerome Benton, Morris Day's former valet in the Time and now a member of the Family, as Prince's "partner"; veteran British actress Francesca Annis as an older woman with whom Prince's character reportedly has an affair; and Victor Spinetti, whose career as a supporting player in rock movies goes all the way back to the Beatles' A Hard Day's Night and Help ! So what'll the movie be like ? Your guess is as good as ours or anyone else's at this point. But consider another hot report from one crew member. In order to complete the film on time after he took over from Lambert, Prince shot the remaining scenes in one take. Maybe that's a good sign. After all, His Royal Badness did all right making records by himself for a long time, and surprised a lot of supposed experts with the success of Purple Rain. Somehow, it's hard to believe Prince is finished surprising us. Late in 1985, Prince broke his self-imposed silence and spoke to the public for the first time in almost four years. First came an interview for Rolling Stone magazine. Later came an interview for MTV. Prince's agreement to be interviewed took MTV so suddenly that the staff at the cable network were unable to arrange to conduct the interview in person. Consequently, the Music News staff resorted to simply providing a list of questions to be read to Prince by his manager and answered by Prince on videotape. MTV elected to broadcast only parts of the interview. The full interview was then offered to other broadcasters. The videotaped interview was conducted in France, where Prince was shooting his forthcoming motion picture, Under the Cherry Moon. He first took a break to film the video for America, the third single from the Around the World in a Day LP, before 2,000 kids at the Theatre de la Verdure (translation : Greenery Theatre), which is a huge tent on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice. Once the video shoot was completed, Prince & the Revolution treated the audience to a 90-minute concert. Afterwards, Prince sat with a few of the young people in attendance and answered the questions prepared by the MTV Music News staff. It marked the first time in his career that Prince had said more than two sentences on TV. Unfortunately, in many cases, he didn't answer the questions posed, as you'll see. Although Prince is very good at many things, his inexperience with interviews shows greatly.
Unknown newspaper
Prince has been pilloried and praised, called everything from genius to madman. But whatever your opinion, a Prince movie is a Hollywood event. Under The Cherry Moon, his latest opus, is a pure Prince fantasy set in the Forties. His first movie, Purple Rain, was a box-office smash ($80 million), and there’s no reason to expect anything less of his latest. This time, he not only stars, but also directs and wrote the film’s title theme, several original songs and the score. Purple Rain drew on elements of Prince’s own life and was shot in Minneapolis, where he grew up. Under The Cherry Moon was shot in luxurious oceanfront villas in glittering Nice, France, with Prince attired in some of the most elegant clothing designers could drum up. The singer plays a slick American musician who goes to the French Riviera to get rich quick. “I grew up adoring those romantic films of the Forties,” Prince, 26, explains, “and that’s why I chose to set my new picture in that era.” Prince has a head start with this movie : The album, Parade : Music from Under The Cherry Moon, was released in early April, and one of the singles, Kiss, zoomed to the top of the charts in six weeks.
26-04-1986 : NME (UK)
The vision of excellence

Little Richard’s niece stripping off her Beatles T-shirt, preparing to get dirty with Jimi Hendrix’s ghost… Prince wants to be alone, provided we all know about it; wants to be nobody by being everyone. Stuart Cosgrove strips away the masks…

It was late December, the arse end of Christmas, and not quite New Year. Prince came staggering through the lounge-bar and swung a punch at Lord Nelson. A nun with only half a habit was showing too much thigh and throwing lager in the air. Nana Mouskouri was still slumped in the corner necking with Frankenstein. Happy new year. Would you suck a bolt ? Russ Abbott, complete with kilt and paint-brush, was trying to calm things down but the bouncer was going locomotive near the bar door. “You better make yourself scarce son. The polls are coming.” Prince picked up his wig, grabbed his lilac jacket and did a runner. Let’s face it, even the famous must resist arrest. From Scotland to Santa Monica, we know them well, because fancy dress more than drugs or sex is the first friend of the pop star. Imitation is a sure sign of flattery, but no one imitates the real Prince, whoever or whatever that is, they imitate an image of Prince, a momentary pause in the life, loves and shifting personae of Prince Rogers Nelson. The one that escaped the long arm of the law was regency Prince, the Prince Regent, born in 1983, soaked in purple rain and strutting on the sexual side of psychedelia. When the world decides you’re worth imitating, your fame or notoriety are nearly secure. Fancy dress is our revenge on the famous, a shaky step on the winding road of stardom, a route even the most quiet of us have thought about. The Purple Prince shall be your guide, follow his journey with care, grasshopper. Prince, the master of 20 musical instruments, began his journey in earnest at the age of 17, when he left his native Minneapolis for New York, carrying a demo tape and making the unprecedented demand that he, and he alone, should produce his debut album. He allegedly turned down three companies and several more showed him the door. A year later Warner Brothers signed him to an exclusive contract. Prince became the youngest artist in the company’s history to be granted sole control of his own music. By the age of 19, Prince, playing every instrument, released his first platinum album. It wasn’t until the release of the motion picture Purple Rain that he found success in Britain. His first two albums threatened to break out of the club scene and into a wider market but Prince’s perpetual search for a form of music that was neither soul nor rock left him out in the British cold, unwelcome in the company of the soul tribes, too black and too feminine for the male cathedrals of white rock. Then the rain came. Propelled by a royal ego, Prince had distanced himself from his own past, giving his friends from home an inelegant elbow when they threatened to obscure his action. Andre Cymone, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, and finally Morris Day were all ditched on the way. Like most stars, Prince is consumed by the need to stand alone, unsided by competitors, and like all stars he had to admit, at least to himself, that nothing he does, nothing he plays and nothing he says is truly unique. On the contrary, Prince’s stardom is the construct of stars that went before, a re-writing of pop’s history that pulls together musical elements that were never meant to meet. So who and where ? Bowie is undoubtedly there ghosting around on Controversy and Sexuality; partisan punk provides the soundtrack for Ronnie, Talk To Russia and Jack U Off; Rick James grunts his way through most of Dirty Mind and everyone’s favourite reference point, The Beatles, the guru boys of Penny Lane, pepper the identity of Around The World In A Day. Like he always threatened to do, Prince has paid homage to Joni Mitchell on his current album Parade, particularly in the modern folk song Sometimes It Snows In April, and the onlookers still argue whether it was The Doors, Hendrix or Alice Walker who first showed Prince the colour purple. “His eyes would always turn to the sky, as if trying to discern some light, and the colour for him that became the true colour of his existence… was that weird purple, before the advent of the night. The extreme side of the spectral haze, purple into the nights, the endless nights of his life.” (The Life Of Jimi Hendrix, David Henderson, 1981) But Hendrix is a generational god, mythologised by the tragic self-destructiveness of rock. Prince is a star, a self-made star, maybe even a commodity star, the kind of star whose discontentment with the limits of pop makes him look to cinema, and very soon to literature, anything that will broaden the possibilities of his stardom. In Hendrix’s life the colour purple was “a spectral haze,” a way of denying black and white and a way of summarizing ‘expanded consciousness,’ the ideal present, ‘scuse me while I kiss the sky. For Prince the colour purple is just another part of rock’s past, another part of his wardrobe, a way of incorporating and consuming the manners of psychedelia without really having to confront either its meaning, its lifestyle or its challenging madness. Prince will never commit suicide, nor die self-destructive death. No OD. No Silver Porsche. No blood stains on the bed-linen of next year’s Chelsea Hotel. Prince’s self-love and his controlled understanding of rock history could never allow it. This boy is here to stay. Prince Nelson Sinatra will always be up for another come-back concert. And no matter what image he manufactures in pursuit of the next step forward, it is that purple regency jacket, the one that punched Lord Nelson, that made Prince a star. Freeze frame. That was his Ziggy Stardust and this is how he pulled it off. “I went through a lot when I was a boy. They called me sissy, punk, freak and faggot. If I ever went out to friends’ houses on my own, the guys would try to catch me, about eight or 20 of them together. They would run me. I never knew I could run so fast, but I was scared they would jump on me, you know, ‘cos they didn’t like my action. See the girls loved you, but the boys hated you… Sugarfoot Sam from Alabam was a minstrel show. It was quite something. That was the first time I performed in a dress. One of the girls was missing one night and they put me in a red evening gown. I was the biggest mess you ever saw. They called me Princess Lavonne.” (The Life And Times Of Little Richard, Charles White, 1984) Is Prince a princess too ? A man wearing feminine robes, a boy the other boys allegedly hated and a male the schoolgirls flock to ? More than anyone else, including Bowie, The Beatles and Jimi Hendrix, it is Little Richard Penniman, peacock cool in perfumed pompadour haircut and eye-line make up, who exerts the biggest visible influence on Prince. Little Richard trod a similar path years before Prince, straddling the division between black and white music and living between the sexual categories unsure where and if he really belonged. In our urgency to place Prince in a rock tradition – the little red corvette of white America – we should look beneath the surface of the extravagant guitar image he adopted in Purple Rain and look beyond the trappings of psychedelia. Prince has a voice, several voices, but the one that he always returns to is the dominant voice of Kiss, a voice that kneels at the same altar as Curtis Mayfield, the same kind of high, sensuous, almost forced register that The Stylistics perfected in the ‘70s. Prince’s voice is the androgynous voice of R&B. Kiss, widely acclaimed as his best ‘soul’ record for years, and its accompanying video, clearly demonstrate Prince playing with gender. The video shows him flaunting and cavorting around a studio space, lined in mascara and singing in an unusually high pitch. He plays the role ‘conventionally’ given to women in pop videos, a sex object undressing for the camera. The guitarist Wendy, a woman, fully clothed throughout, play the role ‘conventionally’ taken by the male, she looks on, playing the only instrument visible in the video, a semi-acoustic guitar. The Kiss video extends Prince’s games with gender. A fascination that stretches back to his very first set of albums. He has been seen naked on a white horse, undressed as a rude boy wearing only a coat and a pair of bikini pants, overdressed on a purple motorbike wearing an extravagant coat and a white brocade shirt, and of course, the clothes regularly harp back to the anthem of Controversy, “Am I black or white ? Am I straight or gay ? Controversy.” Ironically, his own career has provided very clear answers. Unlike Little Richard, Prince’s sexuality is only ambiguous in theatrical sense. In reality – if that can ever be known – he is as straight as funk stars come. The verbal showdowns with Rick James about who was the horniest kid in black America; the svengali hold he exerted over Vanity 6; the way he gave Apollonia her name and the screenplay he sanctioned for Purple Rain (one of the most heterosexist films of the decade) all point in the same direction. Prince is a heterosexual male but he’s a man with at least the beginning of a conscience. Kiss is his public apology for Purple Rain. The narcissism is still there, maybe he’ll always love himself above all else, but the selfish man-child on a motorbike has been laid to rest. Ah man, --- MISSING SCAN ---
Late 04-1986 : Exit Susannah Melvoin
In late April, Susannah Melvoin and Prince split a few months after having lived in Prince’s house. Prince rented a condo in the District of Lake Calhoun, MPLS and persuaded Susannah to live there. Prince did not mean to break the engagement, but he clearly admitted the difficulty of living with him daily. Prince was dating other women, and it seemed so obvious that his relationship with Susannah wouldn’t last. Without being overtly discreet, he flirts with young actresses Sherilyn Fenn and Troy Beyer, Jackie St Clair’s model, and had a brief love affair with Carole Davis, a New York girl with musical ambitions. Cheerful and outgoing, Carole Davis encouraged Prince to expand its horizons beyond a controlled environment.
While Prince has written plenty of songs inspired by the end of a relationship, he’s never written an out-and-out break-up album in the manner of Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, Marvin Gaye’s Here, My Dear or Nick Cave’s The Boatman’s Call . Some fans consider Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic the closest he came to this, but this relies largely on speculation. For me, it’s the songs he wrote during his relationship with Susannah Melvoin that give the closest sense of what such a record might sound like. I got to talk to Susannah Melvoin about these songs, and what they meant to her. Like her sister, Melvoin is an extremely intellectual and artistic woman, although she is slightly less direct and has a more abstract way of expressing herself. It was intriguing to discover that the subject of these songs felt the same way about them as the fans do. ‘Some people say I was his muse, and I don’t know if

that’s what it was, but I can say I did inspire a certain kind of writing. There was a part of him that wanted to express himself in a deeper way, and I think our relationship was an opportunity for him to do that at the time. So if that’s what being a muse is, that’s what it was. I think Wendy and Lisa had the same effect.’
Dream Factory 1^st configuration
A) Visions (Instrumental) (2:11) - composed & performed by Lisa Coleman
Dream Factory (3:07)
It’s A Wonderful Day (3:40)**
The Ballad Of Dorothy Parker (4:04)
Big Tall Wall (5:50)**
And That Says What? (Instrumental)**
B) Strange Relationship (4:14)*
Teacher Teacher (3:05)**
Starfish And Coffee (2:50)*
A Place In Heaven (2:43)**
Sexual Suicide (3:39)*
28-04-1986 : Jet
Prince plays surprise gig at Boston club

Prince gave an impromptu concert at a nightclub in Boston recently for 1.250 fans while hundreds more clamoured outside, offering up to $300 for $12.50 tickets to get inside the club. He gave 48 hours notice that he was going to appear at the Metro Dance Club in Boston and gave those lucky enough to get in all he had.

30-04-1986 :

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