Prince RIP

i thought it was a pretty interesting poll, which i prefer to standard listings of "canon" hits. a mishmash of his super poppy stuff like "little red corvette" and '80s b-sides and deep album cuts. so for "1999" there's no sign of "delirious", "d.m.s.r.", or "automatic", but we do get "lady cab driver" and "how come u don't call me anymore". which is... idiosyncratic.

but i voted for "batdance" as my #1 so i'm not about to complain about idiosyncratic results.

So Mayte has a book coming out? Maybe it was already mentioned upthread.

thanks Jon!

Jon I messaged you on FB

thanks for telling me, since I only check it once a month or so!

I hit a local shop for a Halloween sale this afternoon, and noticed they had some sealed New Old Stock vinyl copies of SoT (with the big yellow heart sticker with bar code & album info) for $27, which would be a steal but for the impending remaster.

hoooly shit the newly released "Moonbeam Levels" (1999-era) is incredible

http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/video/heard-prince-song-moonbeam-levels-released-43715143

moonbeam levels is the best.

Watching the listeners stiffly nod their heads in that news clip feels like being trapped in a long, long elevator ride with strangers.

yeah i dipped out & just listened to the bootleg version, it was weird to watch

Not even sure that would make the cut on an 80min b-sides comp for me. It was ok. Maybe repeat listens will help.

wut

Sounds more Around the World...-era than 1999 to me, which is probably why its not doing much for me.

https://twitter.com/DavidJuurlink/status/801398265065435136

Sorry, just think "Moonbeam Levels" is ok. Better than many tracks, but not incredible.

Do Yourself a Favor is the true gem of that era

No "Wally," no credibility

did we ever have a 'vault/unreleased/bootleg tracks' poll?

don't think so, we should

i think me and donald trump have the same favorite vault/unreleased/bootleg prince song. big tall wall y'all.

guys this is amazing

Prince’s Closest Friends Share Their Best Prince Stories

AMAZING

Springs: After the show—it was maybe like 10, 11— everybody was leaving, and Prince grabs me and says, "Hey, let's go bike riding." He had four bikes—two white cruisers and two dark blue or black mountain bikes. So I got on a cruiser, he got on a mountain bike, and we rode past everybody with our Afros, and everybody's like, "Oh my God! Prince!" He lives in a kinda rural area. We rode down Audubon Road, then there's a park right across the street and there's a path so we rode down there a little bit.

Washington: First, when you go on the bike rides, you're like, "Wow! I went on a bike ride with Prince down to Lake Minnetonka!" It's fun. And you think you're special. Then I stayed there long enough that I'm like, "Oh—this is his thing." This is what he does. He has the movie theater where you go to watch a movie—he'll buy out the theater. He has his routine with all these young girls who come in: movies, bike ride, possibly a jam session. That sounds about right.

We have a thing called Caribou Coffee in Minnesota, which is like Starbucks. He'd go over there, and he didn't have any pockets. He didn't have a wallet or any credit cards. He just had cash he'd carry in his hand—like, a $100 bill. And whoever took his order, they'd have a good day, 'cause he'd buy his coffee drink and then just leave the whole hundred. He doesn't wait for any change because he doesn't have anywhere to put it.

<3 <3 <3

*Everything* about these stories. My current favorite:

Van Jones: He was very interested in the world. He wanted me to explain how the White House worked. He asked very detailed kind of foreign-policy questions. And then he'd ask, "Why doesn't Obama just outlaw birthdays?" (laughs) I'm, like, "What?" He said, "I was hoping that Obama, as soon as he was elected, would get up and announce there'd be no more Christmas presents and no more birthdays—we've got too much to do." I said, "Yeah, I don't know if that would go over too well."

amazing to read the other side of the infamous charlie murphy basketball/pancakes story

Davison: The backstory to that was—and this is the part Charlie doesn't tell—Eddie had wanted to play Prince his new album. So during that basketball game, Eddie's music was playing, via boom box, on a cassette. After that game, Prince goes over and he tosses the cassette out of the boom box, and he says, "Let me ask you a question: Do you see me stop my show to do comedy?"

Damaris Lewis (model, tour dancer): I tried playing Prince in Ping-Pong once. I told him he was the Serena of Ping-Pong and I would never be playing him again. He was literally a master of Ping-Pong.

Van Jones: At Paisley, the ping-pong table's right outside the studio. So it's kind of back and forth between recording, destroying somebody in Ping-Pong , go back to recording. Oh my God, it was embarrassing. To the point that he wouldn't even play me, he was just so disgusted with my inability to play. One time, he wouldn't even move—he'd stand in one spot, and his arms were not that long and I'm six feet two. Talking crap the whole time. He's like the worst trash-talker.

xp I was just going to post that. The idea of Prince clowning Eddie Murphy over his music career -- esp. given the Rick James connection and how much James hated Prince -- is beautiful.

Figures a JW would hate birthdays and Christmas

Hayes: Nobody was allowed to say "deadlines" around him. He hated that word. He said: "That's arbitrary and stupid. What happens when I go over the line? I'm dead?" Prince would always tell us "time is a trick." I remember one day I was late, and he was, "You're late, Morris!" and I said, "Well, you know, Prince, time is a trick…" It didn't work. He was, "How about I Jedi-mind-trick that check when you don't show up again?"

holy shit

Davison: We were on a flight from Minneapolis to Los Angeles, about a three-and-half-hour flight, and we'd been up pretty late the night before, but he wanted to go out to record. On the plane [he's] asking for pads and paper, and so I get him a notebook and pen and he starts writing, and he writes a poem, and he hands it to me. And I read it, and I go, "Well, you know, that's nice…sounds clever, good." I hand it back to him. Ten minutes, fifteen minutes later, he hands me another poem. I'm, like, "Oh yeah, that's just as good as the first." And I'm like, "Why does he keep handing me these poems?" This goes on for the whole flight, and we land, and he says, "Do you mind if we go to the studio?"—he was always cordial—and I'm like, you know, "You can do whatever you want to do." And he says, "Well, I'll just be there for a few hours and then we'll head to the house." And so we go to the studio. We were in there for three days, almost four days, straight. When he's finished, I go into the studio and I'm listening to the music. I asked him on the way home: "Did you have all that in your head? Not just the lyrics, not just the music, not just the melodies, but the arrangement, everything?" And he said, "Yeah, you know, I have to get it out when it's in there, or I can't sleep." He had written [the first two album sides of] Sign o' the Times. He had basically written an album in a three-and-a half-hour plane ride.

<3<3<3

I love all of this so much ... but still the regret that we had to lose him to get these stories

Freed: He wanted to sell a shirt for $1,000 that would get you into Paisley Park for free for life.

i think me and donald trump have the same favorite vault/unreleased/bootleg prince song. big tall wall y'all.

― fact checking cuz

you think he's not that into "donald trump (black version)"?

i love the stories about his sense of humor. dude was a funny motherfucker

prince is not allowed to die

this, the second post on this thread, remains truer than ever

Walsh: I said to him, "Come on, man—don't you want to make another Sign o' the Times, another Purple Rain?" I don't know if I framed it exactly like that, but he said, "No, no—Jim, I've been to the mountaintop. There's nothing there."

o_O

_*Walsh:* I said to him, "Come on, man—don't you want to make another Sign o' the Times, another Purple Rain?" I don't know if I framed it exactly like that, but he said, "No, no—Jim, I've been to the mountaintop. There's nothing there."_

o_O

^^^^ this one stood out to me too

This Susan Rogers RBMA lecture is fantastic. She goes deep on a few SOTT tracks, and so much more:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ON0nQCQF08

For some reason, I thought that video title was Prince's full name, really.

lol at "Prince Engineer Susan Rogers Nelson"

lolol

Dang, that was one of my screennames in reserve.

Idk, that quote doesn't seem particularly surprising to me. It's a really dumb question.

I don't think that's a dumb question at all really

http://recordmecca.com/products-page/museum-quality-collectibles/prince-owned-worn-purple-rain-era-custom-made-pants/

20k for one pair of pants!

I can't imagine Prince of all people wanting to consciously retread past territory in the studio or recapture past glories. I'm sure he was trying to make good records at the time, or rather just getting out what he heard, same as when he made his classics.

This is also great from the GQ article upthread and seems worth sharing on here. I can picture the exchanges.

“When I first started, I tried one time to unify a group splintered by whether I was still ‘funky’ or not. That question still goes on, obviously.” — Prince, 2001, on his early experiences with web chat rooms

I can't imagine Prince of all people wanting to consciously retread past territory in the studio or recapture past glories. I'm sure he was trying to make good records at the time, or rather just getting out what he heard, same as when he made his classics.

I agree with this, but at the same time, he seems to become less interested in Big-Gesture albums, doesn't he? he does giant-package things like Crystal Ball, and the Rainbow Children's a concept album, but he kinda withdraws, it seems to me - whereas both Purple Rain and SOTT are pretty zeitgeist-aimed record imo ymmv