Jan 80 06-01-1980 : Midnight Special Shooting – aired 11-01-80

Lisa Coleman replaces Gayle Chapman
Lisa Coleman replaces Gayle Chapman as keyboards player in Prince’s band. Gayle left the band because her religious beliefs were incompatible with Prince’s increasingly sexually explicit lyrics and daring stage show. Lisa Coleman, of Los Angeles, California, was the daughter of Los Angeles studio percussionist Gary Coleman. Lisa had no previous professional experience, although she had studied classical piano from a very early age. Her style of music was influenced by classical composers, and jazz pianists like Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett. Another influence is Mike Melvoin, the father of her best friend, Wendy Melvoin. Lisa was 19 and working as a shipping clerk when a friend who worked for Cavallo, Ruffalo and Fargnoli heard that Prince needed a new keyboards player. She sent a tape and was summoned to Minneapolis for an audition : “He wanted to meet me to see if I was nice, so he flew me to Minneapolis and took me downstairs to his studio and told me to start playing. I was kind of nervous since I knew he could hear me upstairs, but he came down and picked up a guitar and we started to jam. A week later I was living in Minneapolis !”
It was obvious that Lisa was better suited to the band compared to Gayle, as good as gold either in terms of personality and music. Prince already greatly respected the talents of Lisa and they developed an intimate relationship. Lisa points to the "color" of music and begins to expose him to great composers like John Cage, Claude Debussy, Igor Stravinsky, Vaughan Williams, Domenico Scarlatti, and Paul Hindersmith. According to Lisa, the only knowledge of classical music Prince was limited to at the time was the "Bolero" by Maurice Ravel, whose presence is prominent in the soundtrack of Blake Edwards’ 10. The complexity of the emerging music of Prince in the coming years can thank, to some extent, the influence of Lisa.
The end of this particular phase in Prince’s development was marked by the departure of Gayle Chapman from the band. Previous biographies have always stated that Chapman left for religious reasons and because she was troubled with a stage act that involved kissing Prince during ‘Head’ or by the provocative costumes with which he was presenting her, but Chapman told me, ‘That’s all hogwash. For years people would write that stuff in the books, and all I could say was, “They never asked me.” It’s not like, “I served God here, now I serve Prince.” I worked for this guy, I didn’t worship him. But maybe young egotistical males want that.’ Fink was shocked by Gayle’s departure, but even in the midst of his increased success and fame, Prince already seemed to be thinking way beyond the current moment, with a game plan that those around him sometimes found strange. Pepe Willie remembers a perplexing meeting with Prince at First Avenue shortly after the release of his second album. ‘I remember him telling me he wanted to get to a place where people couldn’t find him, and I just said, “Why ?”’ But Willie had witnessed Prince’s occasional discomfort with fans, and could see this was something that might grow stronger in future, and shape his later behaviour.
Dez Dickerson believes that in spite of Lisa Coleman having much broader abilities as a musician than Gayle Chapman, Prince’s decision to draft her into the band was also due to her being younger : ‘This pattern of replacing folks with younger players would continue in the future, I believe, at least in part, due to the fact that younger folks were more pliable.’ Prince’s interest in young collaborators has remained constant throughout his career: from 1981, when he recorded an unreleased song called ‘She’s Just a Baby’, which may have been inspired by his relationship with sixteen-year-old Susan Moonsie, to 2011, when he was out on the road with a new young female independent musician named Andy Allo. It’s easy to see the darker side of such relationships, but it seems that Prince is attracted to talent as much as beauty, and if the two are combined, so much the better. What must it have been like to have a woman with the incredible musical breadth and ability of nineteen-year-old Lisa Coleman come into your life at twenty-one ? The Prince myth is such that we think of everyone who worked with him as being lucky to have that opportunity, and it’s true that many of Prince’s early records are one-man shows. But still, Coleman is arguably his most important collaborator, and clearly facilitated his musical growth from 1980 until 1986, most notably in the way she opened him up to classical music and piano-based jazz, giving him a breadth of sound that none of his competitors could rival. When I met Coleman, a charming and self-effacing woman, in Los Angeles, she went out of her way to play down her influence on Prince, admitting that she ‘kind of’ introduced him to classical music but being wary of taking full credit for this, semiseriously suggesting that it was her car that he truly coveted. ‘He considered me a source for that [sort of music], and sometimes he would ask me to bring some records around. I had a great car, my pink Mercury, which had a really cool sound system in it. He’d take rides in my car and borrow it. I always had classical-music tapes, Dionne Warwick and stuff, and yeah, we turned each other on. To impress him I’d play some Mozart on the piano when he “wasn’t listening”. I turned him on to lots of different composers – Vaughan Williams, Mahler, Hindemith, Bill Evans and Claus Ogerman. Symbiosis. He was blown away.’
Bloomington rehearsals
A new rehearsal place for the band is found in a Bloomington warehouse, the location of a concert sound and lighting company called Naked Zoo.
Spring 1980 : Prince moves to Lake Minnetonka