Let's Go Crazy (6 page)

The double LP
1999
was released on October 27, 1982. Despite Prince's dreams of a crossover audience for his music, thus far the mentality of the Rolling Stones' audience remained all too representative—and in fact, that exact month represented an all-time low point in pop music integration. Steve Greenberg would later write in
Billboard
that “in 1979, nearly half of the songs on the weekly
Billboard
Hot 100 pop chart could also be found on the urban contemporary chart. By 1982, the amount of
black music on the Hot 100 was down by almost 80 ­percent. . . . Not one record by a black artist could be found in the Top 20 on the Top 200 album chart or the Hot 100 singles chart for three consecutive weeks that October—a phenomenon unseen since before the creation of Top 40 radio in the mid-1950s.”

But
1999
's release also fell directly in between two events that would forever change pop's rules. In September of 1982, the fledgling cable network MTV, which had launched a year earlier, was added to the cable systems in the New York area, followed by those in Los Angeles a few months later, setting in motion its true impact as a national music channel. And one month after
1999
hit stores, on November 30, Michael Jackson's
Thriller
album came out, which would create an entirely new sense of scale for recordings, music videos, and the impact of all musicians.

Critics picked up on
1999
, which had both a stronger focus on guitars and a revolutionary new set of synthesizer sounds. The title song, with its unforgettable call to party in the face of nuclear devastation, made some impact but still came up short of the Top 40. The plans were for Prince to participate in the album promotion, or at least his own version of it, but after his first interview—with Robert Hilburn of the
Los Angeles Times
—he walked out of the room and announced that he would never speak to the press again. It would indeed be two and a half years before he sat down with another journalist.

It was apparently time to truly secure the mythology he had been refining over the years. Prince's band watched him assume a superstar's persona long before he had actually
earned the status. “Growing up, like anyone would practice their instrument, he practiced his face; he practiced what he looked like on camera,” says Lisa Coleman. “He would videotape himself in his bedroom at night, just talking or doing things, and he'd watch himself to see what he looked like. He really worked on it as if he was a dancer or something, training himself for being a big star—almost the way Motown used to have the finishing school. He just decided, ‘I've gotta be famous.'

“One time in Minneapolis, really early on, he was still a cute guy with a 'fro, but some girls saw him walking down the street and one of the girls said, ‘Is that Prince?' and the other one said, ‘Nah'—like, he didn't look good that day. And that changed his life forever.” He saw that to truly fulfill his vision, he needed to be Prince every minute of every day, not have a separate and distinct performing persona.

The 24/7 commitment to being a larger-than-life star eventually extended to the rest of the band, who weren't allowed to appear in public in regular street clothes. “He used to get upset when anyone would refer to the clothes as costumes,” says Wendy Melvoin. “He freaked—‘Those aren't costumes, those are clothes!' ” Engineer Susan Rogers remembered Steve Fargnoli coming to rehearsal and saying to Prince, “Shall I have the band get into their stage costumes?” He responded just as Melvoin indicated. “I knew immediately that he had misspoken, that that was a mistake,” says Rogers, “and Prince right away corrected Steve and said, ‘They aren't costumes. They're clothes.' ” (Albert Magnoli, director of
Purple Rain
, would say
that Prince's insistence on using stage clothes conceived by his personal designer, Sorbonne graduate Marie France—later described by journalist Maureen Callahan as evocative of “extravagant romanticism”—as everyday wear throughout the film was one of the greatest challenges of the production.)

“It's like he created a doppelgänger of himself,” says Susannah Melvoin, Wendy's twin sister, who would become both romantically and musically involved with Prince. “He didn't want to be the smart kid in high school who played piano in the music room; he didn't want to be normal, and he didn't want anyone around him to be, either. And that could create conflict—if you showed yourself to be broken or fallible, to be weak in some way, he'd be on you, sometimes mad. Like, ‘If you fuck it up, I look like I'm not real—I have to believe in it or I'm not going to be able to sell it.' ”

Meantime, the Triple Threat tour rolled out, initially in theaters, with Vanity 6 (who had a hit of their own with “Nasty Girl”) and the Time (whose fantastic
What Time Is It?
album reached number two on the R&B charts) opening the dates. Now that Prince had used the other groups to help plant the seeds and create the context for his sound, the fate of
1999
, and of his career, changed with the February 1983 release of “Little Red Corvette” as his next single, which found Prince turning his attention from apocalypse back to sex. The slinky, metaphor-­laced tale of a promiscuous and irresistible lover shot up the charts, eventually becoming his first Top Ten hit. With a fleet, jagged guitar solo by Dez Dickerson (named in 2008 by
Guitar World
magazine as one of the 100 Greatest Guitar Solos
of All Time), the song seemed to connect with white listeners in a new way; incredibly, it was released just a few days before Michael Jackson issued “Beat It,” his own rocked-up track that included an Eddie Van Halen guitar solo, as a single.

“Corvette” was aided immeasurably by MTV's increasing influence. The video, with a memorable, acrobatic James Brown–style dance break by Prince—clad in the familiar purple coat, with a frilly shirt and an increasingly complicated hairstyle piled atop his head—during Dickerson's solo, became a staple on the network. (Rick James believed that this support for his archrival was an act of revenge taken by MTV in response to his criticism of its resistance to giving airtime to black artists.) But Prince's approach to music video was, at least at this point, far different from the narrative clips Jackson and others were pioneering. His videos were really “multi-­camera adaptations of his live show,” as Nelson George wrote in his 2010 book on the making of
Thriller
, “definitely a reflection of Prince's otherworldly confidence that, in an era of increasingly conceptual videos, his visual expressions were all about capturing his band and himself.”

On the heels of the success of “Corvette,” the decision was made to rerelease the “1999” single, which this time climbed up to number 12 on the charts; “shut out of pop radio upon its initial release in 1982,”
Billboard
later noted, “[‘1999'] was relaunched in mid-1983, and off the back of its belated MTV exposure became a huge pop radio success the second time around.” (
Rolling Stone
pointed out at the time that “Prince's guitar-heavy, synth-fried
1999
had already gone gold before
rock stations opened their eyes.”) The one-two punch, followed by another Top Ten hit with the frantic electro-dance track “Delirious,” marked Prince's entry into the big leagues of pop.

“We were playing in theaters,” says Alan Leeds, who had come onboard as the tour manager directly from a job overseeing Kiss on the road, “and during the course of the tour, they broke ‘Corvette.' Then they rereleased ‘1999,' and all of a sudden he was selling out arenas. We saw this happen over a period of three or four weeks, where the audience went from a predominantly black audience in theaters to a heavily mixed audience in arenas.”

Dez Dickerson has said that from the stage, you could track the progress of “Little Red Corvette”; that the “impact that the song was having reflected in the makeup of the ­audience—this tidal wave of white hitting the audience, getting whiter and whiter each night.”

Off the stage, Prince was still battling with his need for control. His autocratic side surfaced mid-tour when Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis of the Time, who had begun doing some production projects on the side, missed a concert because snow kept their plane from taking off following a session with the S.O.S. Band. On the duo's return, he fired them, setting in motion an ongoing and ultimately disastrous tension over whose band the Time actually was—his or Morris Day's. Jam and Lewis, of course, went on to become one of the most successful production teams of the '80s, with their version of the “Minneapolis Sound” powering dozens of hits by the likes of
George Michael, Luther Vandross, and, most notably, Janet Jackson.

“Prince had been urging Morris and Jesse [Johnson, guitarist] to find replacements, but they weren't even looking,” says Leeds. “I don't know if it was just denial or if it was actually strategic—that if they waited long enough, Prince would have to accept [Jam and Lewis] back. In their mind, Prince had inappropriately screwed up their band. They didn't see it as
his
band; they saw it as
their
band. But if they wanted to ­really see the truth, they knew they weren't coming back. First of all, those guys had their own ambitions, and I'm not sure they even wanted to come back. So Prince took it upon himself to find the replacements, and basically brought people in and said, ‘Hey, fellas, this is your new band,' which of course just made the resentment worse.”

Yet at the same time, Prince was opening up his own music, or at least its presentation, to more input from his own band. The videos showcased him not purely as a solo act but as a bandleader; in addition to Dickerson's “Corvette” solo, Lisa Coleman and Jill Jones were placed prominently in the “1999” video and sang on several other tracks; on one song, the soaring ballad “Free,” Coleman's girlfriend, Wendy Melvoin (who had been tagging along for some of the tour), even added to the background parts.

For those who were paying close attention, he included a clue about his next direction in the squiggly lettering on the
1999
cover. Written over the
i
in his name were the words
and the Revolution
. Bobby Z has said that “he was setting the public
up for something that was yet to come.” Prince himself later said, “I wanted community more than anything else.”

How much this was a creative desire and how much it was a marketing strategy is unclear, and ultimately unimportant. Certainly, the more Prince seemed like the front man for a bad­ass band, the more context a rock audience would have for his unclassifiable music. “The band was such an important media tool for him,” says Lisa Coleman. “
1999
proved that—trading verses, actually having people step up, there was a white girl and a black guy and whatever. His dream was that we would be Fleetwood Mac mixed with Sly and the Family Stone.”

After five albums, Prince had reached the mountaintop. It had been a steady build, with lessons learned and refinements made along the way. After multiple hits and a successful tour,
1999
continued to reach new plateaus, and to introduce Prince to more and more new fans. Eddie Murphy, riding high as the biggest star on
Saturday Night Live
and with his film
Trading Places
, titled his 1983 stand-up special
Delirious
after the latest
1999
hit. “I think Prince is five years in front of everybody—he's a fucking musical genius,” Murphy said. “He's the only entertainer in the world I would switch places with right now. But he's too short, so I guess I wouldn't.”

Prince made the cover of
Rolling Stone
in April—the headline was “The Secret Life of America's Sexiest One-Man Band”—without granting the magazine an interview; by the end of the year,
Rolling Stone
would claim that “the pint-sized founder of the ‘Minneapolis Sound' was starting to look like the most influential music man of the eighties so far” (and this
in a year when Michael Jackson thoroughly dominated all discussions of pop—or of anything, for that matter). Anticipation began building for his next album; if he could continue this momentum, it could really be his moment. “It was that point in a career where the table was set,” says Alan Leeds. “The right record, this kid goes through the roof.”

But Prince's ambitions were already getting bigger than just his next album, as his managers would soon discover. Their contract was coming up for renewal after five years. Having broken him through to a multiplatinum audience and developed him into an arena headliner, they assumed that the decision would be a no-brainer. “I thought we did an incredible job, we had a creative relationship, I'm sure he's gonna sign another contract,” recalls manager Bob Cavallo. “And he says that he won't sign with us again unless we get him a movie.”

THREE

Bring 2 Life a Vision

To those in Prince's inner circle, his fascination with film had long been apparent. “We used to watch so many old films,” says Jill Jones. “A lot of Italian films—he loved
Swept Away—
old Cary Grant. He got into David Lynch at one point, so he really started looking at, like,
Eraserhead
; I remember screaming at that little worm-baby or whatever it was. He was looking at European directors, trying to pull all of that in. He was really into the old studio system, too, Louis B. Mayer, he had books on those, looking at how that was structured. Also Elizabeth Taylor films, Marilyn Monroe—he'd look at a person long enough and try to figure out who they related to. Like the concept of giving me the blond hair: he said, ‘You're very plain just with your normal hair,' because I looked like I'd come out of some Ralph Lauren catalogue. He cut off all my hair with, like, fingernail scissors and started to Svengali.