“Bob Cavallo remembers early on in the process, ‘We were at odds with each other. Our contract was up; five years had gone by since Purple Rain. We met at the Four Seasons with his lawyer and his accountant, me and Steve Fargnoli to discuss some kind of rapprochement because he had fired us. Basically he said, “I’ll work with you again but you’ve got to help me make this movie.” I read the treatment and said, “This could be an interesting thing,” and I said, “I’ll try to put you together with some young hip writers and maybe we can come up with a script quickly, ’cause this is pretty detailed.” And he went, “What are you talking about? That is the script.” It was thirty pages. And he said, “I’m going to shoot it, I know exactly how to do it.” So I said, “Maybe we could get this on Broadway for you. Would you be interested in that?” And he said, “No.” Now he was pissed that I didn’t think this was a good enough script, so we shook hands and that was the end of it. Then, about a year later, we were suing each other. But even when we sued each other, it was kinda funny. I said, “How could you not pay me?” He said, “How could you sue me?” He said, “You can’t have my children, those songs. You’re gonna give your involvement in those songs to your grandchildren?” And I said, “Yeah, I put ten years of my life into you, and you sucked all the air out of the room. I couldn’t really manage anybody else except for your friends.”
“Steve Durkee had left not on friendly terms, which is not unusual in the Paisley world.”
“I have a lot of problems with fifteen-minute jazz-funk jams as well. I don’t care about instrumental prowess. I don’t care about quick-thinking improvisational skill. At all. I’m a songwriter and I’m familiar with Cage and I couldn’t really care about what notes people can think of quickly. It doesn’t interest me and I’m astounded that it interests other people still. Improvisation is what you do in the process of making something better.”
“Among the many ecstatic notices, Robert Christgau, the self-appointed ‘dean of American rock critics’, put it best, in a review that would still be being quoted when he left the Village Voice twenty-six years later: ‘Mick Jagger should fold up his penis and go home.”
“I asked Wendy Melvoin how serious she thought Prince was in his theological questioning. ‘I felt it was showbiz for me,’ she told me. ‘I did not relate personally. But part of the beauty of it back then is that there were Jews, Mexicans, blacks, whites, gays and straights in his band. Everyone had their own opinions and they were tolerated and embraced.’ Lisa Coleman developed this thought. ‘I felt when I first joined the band he thought it was more important to pose questions than to get answers, and somewhere along the line he looked at it and now he doesn’t pose the questions any more, he tells you what the answers are. That counts a lot of people out.’ Wendy agreed: ‘He always had a tendency to speak in parables. He’s not a clear talker. He can speak quickly and monosyllabically and get to the point of what he wants, but when you get down to really philosophical questions and get into a conversation it can become very difficult to follow. He has a different language that he’s learned.”
“America” came from a massive jam,’ Wendy told me. ‘We were playing and rehearsing for hours and hours and we hit on this one groove that we continued to play for five hours, and then subsequent days afterwards we kept referring back to it, and then Prince came in and did that “America” solo and started singing and it turned into the song we know. To this day, we can put that track on and feel that band’s energy and feel what we were like at our best together – a fucking freight train. No one was like “psst … psst … psst”, like those cats he plays with now. It was just a massive freight train, and no one moved from the tracks. I’m really proud of that song. It’s a perfect representation of Prince and The Revolution.”
“Wendy goes further, and although she has worked with him on several occasions since the disbandment of The Revolution – and wanted to emphasise to me that though she was feeling down on him the day we talked, her feelings about him fluctuated (Lisa adding that if he walked into the room now, they’d both give him a hug) – sometimes she did feel annoyance. ‘People wanna talk about him all the time, and I’m happy to, but sometimes it’s hard. Yeah, he was great, he was better than most, but he’s not now.”
“So I was sitting behind the console looking at all these bands and thinking, “Most of the lyrics these guys are singing are pretty dreadful. I know I can do better than that.” But I didn’t want to be the guy singing, so I came up with this idea: maybe what I’ll do is find a band and write the material, and they’ll produce the material and I’ll promote the band out there doing my songs.”
“But while Prince was publicly portraying himself as a masochist, unreleased tracks from this era reveal that he was simultaneously indulging his more sadistic side. ‘Extra Loveable’ and ‘Lust U Always’ might have caused controversy if they had made it onto the album, as both tracks feature Prince threatening rape.”
“Mick Jagger should fold up his penis and go home.”
“Vanity 6’s most famous song, ‘Nasty Girl’, may be less well-known than Prince’s greatest hits, but it’s among the most influential songs Prince has written. It’s easy to trace a line from Madonna, who in her earliest incarnation could have been a fourth member of the band, on to Janet Jackson, whose 1986 song ‘Nasty’ (produced by two former members of The Time) reverses the gender from ‘nasty girls’ to ‘nasty boys’, to Britney Spears, who claimed that the track ‘Boys’, from her 2001 album Britney, had ‘a kinda Prince feel to it’, but actually lifts directly from ‘Nasty Girl’ (the song is produced by The Neptunes, and its remixed version, ‘Boys (The Co-Ed Remix)’, features vocals from Pharrell Williams, a producer and rapper and diehard Prince fanatic). Britney’s ‘Let’s turn this dance floor into our own little nasty world’, and repeated invocations to ‘get nasty’, are clear Xeroxes of Vanity’s ‘my own little nasty world’ and ‘dance nasty girls’.”
“As with The Doors’ ‘The End’, ‘Extra Loveable’ also has an Oedipal theme, albeit reversed, with Prince suggesting that the object of his desire is so sexy and skilled that she will turn his mother lesbian and make his dead father (another clue that the song is fictional) return from the grave to have sex with her. The lyric also includes lines about bathing together which recall ‘The Ballad of Dorothy Parker’, but while the shared bath in that song sounded like the most fun date ever, here he’s threatening to drag an unwilling partner into the tub to violate her.4”
“Nicks has claimed that Prince also offered her ‘Purple Rain’, telling long-time Prince-watcher Jon Bream that he sent her a cassette of a long instrumental track and asked her to write lyrics for it. ‘It was so overwhelming, that 10-minute track, that I listened to it and I just got scared,’ Nicks explained. ‘I called him back and said, “I can’t do it. I wish I could. It’s too much for me.” I’m so glad that I didn’t, because he wrote it, and it became “Purple Rain”.’11”
Follow BukRate on social networks Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, and Pinterest. We update the best quotes every day! Join and share more with friends.
Advertisement
