PRINCE and The Parade & Sign O’ Times Era
Studio Sessions 1985 and 1986
Studio Sessions 1985 and 1986
Written by Duane Tudahl
Published by Rowman & Littlefield
Miles Davis was not an easy man to impress, but Prince Rogers Nelson, or the artist simply known as Prince, was one person who greatly impressed him. In the late 1980s, Miles often talked glowingly about Prince during interviews, and Miles’s autobiography - published in 1989 - was peppered with Prince references: “I really love Prince and after I heard him, I wanted to play with him sometime;” “A great musician has to have the ability to stretch, and Prince can certainly stretch,” “For me, he can be the new Ellington of our time, if he just keeps at it.” Miles even referred to Prince as being one of his friends.
This book is of particular interest to jazz fans, and especially those with an interest in Miles and the 1980s, because it covers the period when Miles and Prince first met; first collaborated on a tune together, and influenced each other’s musical development. It also marks a time when Prince began importing the vocabulary of jazz (from horn sections to long, improvised jam sessions to jazz harmonies) into his music, culminating in a jazz-fusion project known as Madhouse.
This is a massive book (almost 700 pages) and author Duane Tudahl has seemingly left no stone unturned in his quest to document this era. In addition to the hundreds of hours of interviews he has conducted with band members, musicians, studio engineers and other Prince associates, he has consulted countless studio logs, more than two thousand articles, as well as numerous audio, video and online sources – the book includes 55 pages of dense notes and a comprehensive index. This is the second title in the Prince Studio Session Series – the first,’ Prince and the Purple Rain Era Studio Sessions 1983 and 1984’, was published to great acclaim in 2017. This book deserves at least as much praise, because it offers everything you could want from a music book – it’s scholarly, but highly readable, detailed, but written with a clarity that enables you to pick your way through the dense forest of Prince’s recording sessions, concerts, musical collaborations, film and video projects.
The book is arranged chronologically in chapters, starting with January 1985 and ending in December 1986, with each chapter containing day-by-day descriptions of the activities Prince was engaged in. Three things hit you straight away – the first is how much Prince lived, breathed and dreamt music. It’s no exaggeration to say that music was his life and indeed, music came before anything else, including personal relationships. The second was the sheer energy of the man. One is left almost breathless as you read how Prince constantly moved between recording studio and concert hall, in addition to producing other artists, directing a major film, and playing numerous jam sessions and after-show gigs. The third thing is the speed at which he worked – within one day, Prince could compose a song, arrange it, play all the parts in the studio, write the lyrics, add vocals and have a rough mix finished before leaving for home.
The book starts at what was undoubtedly Prince’s commercial zenith. The previous year had seen the release of the film Purple Rain (starring Prince), and its accompanying soundtrack album. The film was a box office success (and later topped the video sale and rental charts), while the album topped the charts, selling more than 25 million copies, earning 13 platinum records, spawning a raft of hit songs (including ‘Let’s Go Crazy’ and ‘When Doves Cry’) and winning both Grammy and Academy awards.
It should have been the happiest time of his life, but it was quite the opposite. Despite the extrovert stage persona, Prince was a shy, private person, who loved the privacy, security and intimacy of the recording studio. But in January 1985, he was part way through a four-month tour promoting Purple Rain with his band The Revolution: keyboardists Lisa Coleman and Matt Fink; bassist Mark Brown, drummer Bobby Z and guitarist Wendy Melvoin – whose twin sister Susannah was in a relationship with Prince. Prince was feeling burnt-out; desperate to move onto new music projects; disliked the media attention that mega-success brought and couldn’t wait for the tour to end.
During this period, Prince was beginning to widen his musical vocabulary, and he expanded The Revolution to include a horn section, with the addition of saxophonist Eric Leeds and trumpeter Matt Blistan (aka Atlanta Bliss). Both Leeds and Blistan had jazz backgrounds. Prince was well aware of jazz - his father John Nelson had been a jazz pianist, and Leeds says that he had heard that Prince had listened to records such as Sketches of Spain and Kind of Blue. However, Leeds, Coleman and Melvoin exposed Prince to more jazz influences – Leeds remembers buying him a set of Miles’s second great quintet albums. And Leeds was also reporting back to Prince the various complimentary things Miles was saying about him in interviews.
In summer 1985, Miles moved from Columbia Records to Warner Bros, the same label as Prince, but it wouldn’t be until early December before the two men met, a chance meeting at Los Angeles airport. This meeting seems to have galvanised Prince into wanting to collaborate with Miles, and on 26 December 1985, he went into the studio to record two tracks with Miles in mind: ‘A Couple of Miles’ and ‘Can I Play With U?’ Tudahl’s book includes a copy of the studio log for the day, which provides a fascinating record of how Prince created these two numbers.
Prince spent six hours - from 2pm to 8pm – laying down the tracks for the first tune, ‘A Couple of Miles,’ using a combination of electronic drums, acoustic drums and synthesisers. The track, an instrumental with a running time of just over four minutes, is a mid-tempo number with a catchy hook and a series of stabbing horn lines played by Leeds. So far, the track remains unreleased. From 8pm to 1am, Prince recorded the parts for ‘Can I Play With U?’ using the same instrumentation, plus guitar. He then spent two and half hours composing lyrics and recording the vocals, to create a rough mix. The next day, Eric Leeds added tenor and baritone sax parts to the mix.
Prince had written and recorded ‘Can I Play With U?’ with the idea of it being a musical collaboration with Miles. But instead of inviting Miles to join him in the studio, Prince preferred to send Miles vocal and instrumental mixes of the tune for him to overdub his parts in another studio – Prince would never be in the same studio as Miles. ‘Can I Play With U?’ is a six-and-half minute mid-tempo funk tune, with a stop-start structure and James Brown-type horn section. Prince’s hyperactive vocals go from a whisper to a scream.
When Miles received Prince’s mixes, he was recording the Tutu album with Marcus Miller and producer Tommy LiPuma, and the plan was for ‘Can I Play With U?’ to be the final track on the album. In February 1986, Miles added his horn parts (both open and muted trumpet) to the mix, with Miller overdubbing some slap bass parts and keyboardist Adam Holzman playing some synth parts. The track was mixed by Miller and sent back to Prince in early March. Alan Leeds, who was then Prince’s tour manager (he is also the brother of Eric Leeds) says that Prince was underwhelmed when he heard the finished track, not with Miles’s playing, but with the overall quality of the music. When Prince asked Eric Leeds for his opinion, Leeds said that he didn’t think that the music did Miles justice. Prince agreed and pulled the track from Tutu.
Reflecting on ‘Can I Play With U?,’ Marcus Miller told this writer, “The only problem with it was it didn’t seem like Miles had a lot to do on it. It sounded like he was rising over it as opposed to being in it. I think if he and Prince had spent more time together that would have been different.” ‘Can I Play With U?’ remained unreleased during Miles’s and Prince’s lifetimes, but a new mix emerged in 2020 on the Super Deluxe Edition version of Prince’s Sign O’ Times album and can be heard on various streaming platforms. The general consensus is that this was a disappointing musical collaboration between two giants, with Variety describing ‘Can I Play With U?’ as a ‘mediocre song’ and a ‘tepid funk workout.’
Their first musical collaboration might have been underwhelming, but there is no doubt about the impact Miles and Prince had on each other. Wendy Melvoin noted that, “Miles was influential in convincing Prince [to] feel more confident in doing that thing when you’re playing jazz, which is to stretch the scales; invert the chords, harmonically stretch something, screw with the rhythms and polyrhythms. Miles gave him the confidence to do that because it really validated Prince. Then he got involved with Eric Leeds and he was really instrumental in helping him mould a certain jazz philosophy.”
The first fruits of this new approach to music making occurred on 28 December 1985, when Prince entered the studio with Eric Leeds, bassist Levi Seacer Jr and drummer Sheila Escovedo (‘Sheila E’). The project, known as ‘The Flesh’ consisted of hours of jazz-funk jamming, with the improvisation and spontaneity of a live jazz session. More jam sessions with the same line-up would follow. In January 1986, Prince expanded the line-up to include Lisa Coleman, Wendy Melvoin and her brother Jonathan on percussion on a session known as ‘Everybody’s Jams’.
Prince – who played drums, bass or guitar on various tunes throughout the session - had talk-back microphones fitted into the musician’s headphones and through them would issue instructions (such as, “Go to E-flat” or “Drop out the bass”). Again, hours of music were recorded, Leeds says the sessions, “May not have the harmonic sophistication of a straight-up jazz band, but the ethic was very similar. That’s the closest we got to the jazz concept.” Tudahl notes that the music inspired future Prince projects, including Madhouse.
But while Leeds was happy with the resulting music, Coleman and Melvoin were feeling less comfortable about the sessions. ‘That was the era where I felt like, ‘Oh people are going to get replaced,’” stated Melvoin, while Coleman added, ‘I hate to say it, but whenever anybody else was playing with us, it always smelled like an audition.” Their instincts were correct, because as Tudahl notes, “Within a year, Wendy, Lisa and almost the entire Revolution would be gone, and Prince would invite Levi Seacer Jr, Eric Leeds and Sheila E to join his band.”
The integration of jazz into Prince’s music during this era continued, with his band starting to play Charlie Parker’s ‘Now’s The Time’ in concert, and Prince recording tunes such as ‘And That Says What’ with its big band jazz feel; the Latin-Jazz ‘In A Large Room With No Light,’ and a jazzy version of ‘The Ballad of Dorothy Parker’ that included saxophone and trumpet. In September 1986, Prince embarked on his biggest jazz project, Madhouse. The concept was for Prince and Eric Leeds to record a series of jazz-tinged numbers, with Prince composing all the tunes and playing all the instruments, except saxophone and flute.
In all, eight tunes were recorded, all given a single number for the song title (‘One’ to ‘Eight.’). Leeds is ambivalent about the project. On the one hand, he was flattered that Prince wanted to record an album with him, but as he told Tudahl, “It wasn’t collaboration to that extent. It wasn’t like him coming to me and saying, ‘Hey Eric, I’d really love to do a project with just you and me. Go in the studio and see what we come up with.’ He never said, ‘Do you have any music of your own that you’d like to bring and see what we could do with as a start?’ So really my role in Madhouse was little or no different than my role in his band. The only difference was instead of the music having a vocal, which was him, the lead vocalist was my horn.” Leeds also has mixed feelings about the music and was only really happy with the last track, ‘Eight’. And when the first Madhouse album was finally released (known as ‘8’) Prince insisted on keeping his involvement a secret, because he feared a backlash from jazz critics, who might accuse him of having the arrogance to meddle in jazz. Leeds would become the public face of Madhouse.
The cross-pollination between Miles and Prince also worked in the other direction. Two tunes Prince recorded during this era, ‘A Love Bizarre,’ and ‘Movie Star’ would find their way into Miles’s live repertoire, with the former played 15 times in concert between July 1986 and November 1987, and the latter played 85 times, between May 1987 and December 1988 (statistics are from Peter Michael Probst’s Miles website www.kind-of-blue.de). And later on, Miles and Prince would perform together onstage, and Prince would give Miles four more tunes to record, but that, as they say, is for another book.
This review has naturally focused on the jazz aspects of Prince’s music, but this book covers much, much more, including the disappointing follow-up albums to Purple Rain: Around The World In A Day and Parade; the movie Under A Cherry Moon which Prince directed and was a major flop; the painful breakup of The Revolution; the planned collaborations with Joni Mitchell and Bonnie Rait; the aborted album projects that included Dream Factor, Crystal Ball and Camille; his break-up with fiancé Susannah Melvoin, and the fight with Warner Bros to release Sign O’ The Times as a triple album. As Tudahl notes, “Prince always played winner-takes-all whether professional or personal.” This is an exceptional book that documents an incredibly productive period of one of the most creative and influential music artists of the past 50 years.
Reviewed by George Cole
Published by Rowman & Littlefield
Miles Davis was not an easy man to impress, but Prince Rogers Nelson, or the artist simply known as Prince, was one person who greatly impressed him. In the late 1980s, Miles often talked glowingly about Prince during interviews, and Miles’s autobiography - published in 1989 - was peppered with Prince references: “I really love Prince and after I heard him, I wanted to play with him sometime;” “A great musician has to have the ability to stretch, and Prince can certainly stretch,” “For me, he can be the new Ellington of our time, if he just keeps at it.” Miles even referred to Prince as being one of his friends.
This book is of particular interest to jazz fans, and especially those with an interest in Miles and the 1980s, because it covers the period when Miles and Prince first met; first collaborated on a tune together, and influenced each other’s musical development. It also marks a time when Prince began importing the vocabulary of jazz (from horn sections to long, improvised jam sessions to jazz harmonies) into his music, culminating in a jazz-fusion project known as Madhouse.
This is a massive book (almost 700 pages) and author Duane Tudahl has seemingly left no stone unturned in his quest to document this era. In addition to the hundreds of hours of interviews he has conducted with band members, musicians, studio engineers and other Prince associates, he has consulted countless studio logs, more than two thousand articles, as well as numerous audio, video and online sources – the book includes 55 pages of dense notes and a comprehensive index. This is the second title in the Prince Studio Session Series – the first,’ Prince and the Purple Rain Era Studio Sessions 1983 and 1984’, was published to great acclaim in 2017. This book deserves at least as much praise, because it offers everything you could want from a music book – it’s scholarly, but highly readable, detailed, but written with a clarity that enables you to pick your way through the dense forest of Prince’s recording sessions, concerts, musical collaborations, film and video projects.
The book is arranged chronologically in chapters, starting with January 1985 and ending in December 1986, with each chapter containing day-by-day descriptions of the activities Prince was engaged in. Three things hit you straight away – the first is how much Prince lived, breathed and dreamt music. It’s no exaggeration to say that music was his life and indeed, music came before anything else, including personal relationships. The second was the sheer energy of the man. One is left almost breathless as you read how Prince constantly moved between recording studio and concert hall, in addition to producing other artists, directing a major film, and playing numerous jam sessions and after-show gigs. The third thing is the speed at which he worked – within one day, Prince could compose a song, arrange it, play all the parts in the studio, write the lyrics, add vocals and have a rough mix finished before leaving for home.
The book starts at what was undoubtedly Prince’s commercial zenith. The previous year had seen the release of the film Purple Rain (starring Prince), and its accompanying soundtrack album. The film was a box office success (and later topped the video sale and rental charts), while the album topped the charts, selling more than 25 million copies, earning 13 platinum records, spawning a raft of hit songs (including ‘Let’s Go Crazy’ and ‘When Doves Cry’) and winning both Grammy and Academy awards.
It should have been the happiest time of his life, but it was quite the opposite. Despite the extrovert stage persona, Prince was a shy, private person, who loved the privacy, security and intimacy of the recording studio. But in January 1985, he was part way through a four-month tour promoting Purple Rain with his band The Revolution: keyboardists Lisa Coleman and Matt Fink; bassist Mark Brown, drummer Bobby Z and guitarist Wendy Melvoin – whose twin sister Susannah was in a relationship with Prince. Prince was feeling burnt-out; desperate to move onto new music projects; disliked the media attention that mega-success brought and couldn’t wait for the tour to end.
During this period, Prince was beginning to widen his musical vocabulary, and he expanded The Revolution to include a horn section, with the addition of saxophonist Eric Leeds and trumpeter Matt Blistan (aka Atlanta Bliss). Both Leeds and Blistan had jazz backgrounds. Prince was well aware of jazz - his father John Nelson had been a jazz pianist, and Leeds says that he had heard that Prince had listened to records such as Sketches of Spain and Kind of Blue. However, Leeds, Coleman and Melvoin exposed Prince to more jazz influences – Leeds remembers buying him a set of Miles’s second great quintet albums. And Leeds was also reporting back to Prince the various complimentary things Miles was saying about him in interviews.
In summer 1985, Miles moved from Columbia Records to Warner Bros, the same label as Prince, but it wouldn’t be until early December before the two men met, a chance meeting at Los Angeles airport. This meeting seems to have galvanised Prince into wanting to collaborate with Miles, and on 26 December 1985, he went into the studio to record two tracks with Miles in mind: ‘A Couple of Miles’ and ‘Can I Play With U?’ Tudahl’s book includes a copy of the studio log for the day, which provides a fascinating record of how Prince created these two numbers.
Prince spent six hours - from 2pm to 8pm – laying down the tracks for the first tune, ‘A Couple of Miles,’ using a combination of electronic drums, acoustic drums and synthesisers. The track, an instrumental with a running time of just over four minutes, is a mid-tempo number with a catchy hook and a series of stabbing horn lines played by Leeds. So far, the track remains unreleased. From 8pm to 1am, Prince recorded the parts for ‘Can I Play With U?’ using the same instrumentation, plus guitar. He then spent two and half hours composing lyrics and recording the vocals, to create a rough mix. The next day, Eric Leeds added tenor and baritone sax parts to the mix.
Prince had written and recorded ‘Can I Play With U?’ with the idea of it being a musical collaboration with Miles. But instead of inviting Miles to join him in the studio, Prince preferred to send Miles vocal and instrumental mixes of the tune for him to overdub his parts in another studio – Prince would never be in the same studio as Miles. ‘Can I Play With U?’ is a six-and-half minute mid-tempo funk tune, with a stop-start structure and James Brown-type horn section. Prince’s hyperactive vocals go from a whisper to a scream.
When Miles received Prince’s mixes, he was recording the Tutu album with Marcus Miller and producer Tommy LiPuma, and the plan was for ‘Can I Play With U?’ to be the final track on the album. In February 1986, Miles added his horn parts (both open and muted trumpet) to the mix, with Miller overdubbing some slap bass parts and keyboardist Adam Holzman playing some synth parts. The track was mixed by Miller and sent back to Prince in early March. Alan Leeds, who was then Prince’s tour manager (he is also the brother of Eric Leeds) says that Prince was underwhelmed when he heard the finished track, not with Miles’s playing, but with the overall quality of the music. When Prince asked Eric Leeds for his opinion, Leeds said that he didn’t think that the music did Miles justice. Prince agreed and pulled the track from Tutu.
Reflecting on ‘Can I Play With U?,’ Marcus Miller told this writer, “The only problem with it was it didn’t seem like Miles had a lot to do on it. It sounded like he was rising over it as opposed to being in it. I think if he and Prince had spent more time together that would have been different.” ‘Can I Play With U?’ remained unreleased during Miles’s and Prince’s lifetimes, but a new mix emerged in 2020 on the Super Deluxe Edition version of Prince’s Sign O’ Times album and can be heard on various streaming platforms. The general consensus is that this was a disappointing musical collaboration between two giants, with Variety describing ‘Can I Play With U?’ as a ‘mediocre song’ and a ‘tepid funk workout.’
Their first musical collaboration might have been underwhelming, but there is no doubt about the impact Miles and Prince had on each other. Wendy Melvoin noted that, “Miles was influential in convincing Prince [to] feel more confident in doing that thing when you’re playing jazz, which is to stretch the scales; invert the chords, harmonically stretch something, screw with the rhythms and polyrhythms. Miles gave him the confidence to do that because it really validated Prince. Then he got involved with Eric Leeds and he was really instrumental in helping him mould a certain jazz philosophy.”
The first fruits of this new approach to music making occurred on 28 December 1985, when Prince entered the studio with Eric Leeds, bassist Levi Seacer Jr and drummer Sheila Escovedo (‘Sheila E’). The project, known as ‘The Flesh’ consisted of hours of jazz-funk jamming, with the improvisation and spontaneity of a live jazz session. More jam sessions with the same line-up would follow. In January 1986, Prince expanded the line-up to include Lisa Coleman, Wendy Melvoin and her brother Jonathan on percussion on a session known as ‘Everybody’s Jams’.
Prince – who played drums, bass or guitar on various tunes throughout the session - had talk-back microphones fitted into the musician’s headphones and through them would issue instructions (such as, “Go to E-flat” or “Drop out the bass”). Again, hours of music were recorded, Leeds says the sessions, “May not have the harmonic sophistication of a straight-up jazz band, but the ethic was very similar. That’s the closest we got to the jazz concept.” Tudahl notes that the music inspired future Prince projects, including Madhouse.
But while Leeds was happy with the resulting music, Coleman and Melvoin were feeling less comfortable about the sessions. ‘That was the era where I felt like, ‘Oh people are going to get replaced,’” stated Melvoin, while Coleman added, ‘I hate to say it, but whenever anybody else was playing with us, it always smelled like an audition.” Their instincts were correct, because as Tudahl notes, “Within a year, Wendy, Lisa and almost the entire Revolution would be gone, and Prince would invite Levi Seacer Jr, Eric Leeds and Sheila E to join his band.”
The integration of jazz into Prince’s music during this era continued, with his band starting to play Charlie Parker’s ‘Now’s The Time’ in concert, and Prince recording tunes such as ‘And That Says What’ with its big band jazz feel; the Latin-Jazz ‘In A Large Room With No Light,’ and a jazzy version of ‘The Ballad of Dorothy Parker’ that included saxophone and trumpet. In September 1986, Prince embarked on his biggest jazz project, Madhouse. The concept was for Prince and Eric Leeds to record a series of jazz-tinged numbers, with Prince composing all the tunes and playing all the instruments, except saxophone and flute.
In all, eight tunes were recorded, all given a single number for the song title (‘One’ to ‘Eight.’). Leeds is ambivalent about the project. On the one hand, he was flattered that Prince wanted to record an album with him, but as he told Tudahl, “It wasn’t collaboration to that extent. It wasn’t like him coming to me and saying, ‘Hey Eric, I’d really love to do a project with just you and me. Go in the studio and see what we come up with.’ He never said, ‘Do you have any music of your own that you’d like to bring and see what we could do with as a start?’ So really my role in Madhouse was little or no different than my role in his band. The only difference was instead of the music having a vocal, which was him, the lead vocalist was my horn.” Leeds also has mixed feelings about the music and was only really happy with the last track, ‘Eight’. And when the first Madhouse album was finally released (known as ‘8’) Prince insisted on keeping his involvement a secret, because he feared a backlash from jazz critics, who might accuse him of having the arrogance to meddle in jazz. Leeds would become the public face of Madhouse.
The cross-pollination between Miles and Prince also worked in the other direction. Two tunes Prince recorded during this era, ‘A Love Bizarre,’ and ‘Movie Star’ would find their way into Miles’s live repertoire, with the former played 15 times in concert between July 1986 and November 1987, and the latter played 85 times, between May 1987 and December 1988 (statistics are from Peter Michael Probst’s Miles website www.kind-of-blue.de). And later on, Miles and Prince would perform together onstage, and Prince would give Miles four more tunes to record, but that, as they say, is for another book.
This review has naturally focused on the jazz aspects of Prince’s music, but this book covers much, much more, including the disappointing follow-up albums to Purple Rain: Around The World In A Day and Parade; the movie Under A Cherry Moon which Prince directed and was a major flop; the painful breakup of The Revolution; the planned collaborations with Joni Mitchell and Bonnie Rait; the aborted album projects that included Dream Factor, Crystal Ball and Camille; his break-up with fiancé Susannah Melvoin, and the fight with Warner Bros to release Sign O’ The Times as a triple album. As Tudahl notes, “Prince always played winner-takes-all whether professional or personal.” This is an exceptional book that documents an incredibly productive period of one of the most creative and influential music artists of the past 50 years.
Reviewed by George Cole
