prince

I thought that other live broadcast was supposed to go away after three days, but it still seems to be playable.

the Dead had great soundchecks, they often went on for three or four hours

Reminds me of some quarantine meme I just saw on Friendbook.

https://i.imgur.com/VrilQfe.jpg

https://youtu.be/m8mg7CxAYUM

I am in love with Wendy and Lisa. This video for “waterfall” slays: https://youtu.be/mdfAhCG3oDo

Just listened to that album a couple days ago

god help me i'm starting to fall for computer blue

yes, Lisa

i can't imagine a time before having fallen for computer blue. but the 'hallway version' took it to a whole new level

otm

I’ve been thinking about the Prince/Sony deal.

Prince’s songs that were written for the original cut of James L. Brooks’ 1994 film I’ll Do Anything have been unavailable since the film was re-edited to delete all of its musical numbers. With Prince’s catalog with Sony, and the film being a Sony/Columbia property, is there a possibility that his demos and/or the original cut of the film (which has been bootlegged) can be released?

Granted, with the songs included, the film is still a total shit show. There is one scene where Albert Brooks tortures the audience by singing among a parade of limousines that I can’t unsee

i honestly didn't know about this and would like to see this bootleg! somebody ilx a fellow or let's ilplex this up!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9fTd776KZI

Cinefile Video in L.A. (the last and the best video rental establishment ever), has it for rent. You can probably find it on backchannels, too. It’s a sixth-generation VHS dupe of a workprint; don’t expect it to look presentable

I am kinda not expecting it to either look or BE presentable honestly but am morbidly curious; somebody plz ilxmail me if you got it digitally.

Whoa. Love the psuedo-New Orleans groove on that one.

Wouldn't know how to begin finding the actual movie online, but a trailer of the original cut remains! A few snippets of some musical numbers, plus the music that soundtracks the trailer (what sounds like a "cast" version of the Prince song above). Apparently James L. Brooks has said, recent-ishly, that he would like to put out the original cut of the film sometime, but who knows if that'll ever happen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-V5nw8KI08

really painful hearing him do this less than a month before his death :(

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfGoNojom7A

So wished I got to saw ‘The Piano And A Mic’ tour...I think that’s when he was at his best just sat playing the keyboard

https://open.spotify.com/track/4IR4v23yUq31dz4opUOpce?si=lZdmlfpPRtuu1MMlS4zBAA

A lost Camille track?

Actually, not a question. A lost Camille track. Despite it being a demo shopped around for other artists to sing. Not sure who would’ve tackled this successfully in the 86/87 Top 40 landscape tho.

I was just wondering last week what Prince might have been up to right now. Concerts from home? Tons of new songs and/or albums released? Protest anthems? Unreleased music dumps?

Options 1 and 3, plus recording a slew of stuff he wouldn't release. Would all be on piano, which after four more years than he got he would feel he is finally starting to fully master as he felt it.

https://open.spotify.com/track/4IR4v23yUq31dz4opUOpce?si=lZdmlfpPRtuu1MMlS4zBAA🕸

A lost Camille track?

see for me it's different

for me it's thinking how prince would react to being called out for his abuse, for being called out as part of #metoo

thinking about how prince would react to some of us trans people pointing out that uh honestly "if i was your girlfriend" has some really big trans feels to it, given his documented hostility towards gay people

as devastating as prince's and bowie's deaths were and are, i find certain parts of their legacy easier to deal with knowing that neither of them are going around hurting anybody else

Didn't Prince's hostility towards gay people only come about because he joined the Jehovah's Witnesses, and as a result of their doctrine? Not that it's any excuse for his homophobia, but he was way more queer-friendly in the '80s, and the conversion was in the nineties. I know he stopped playing some of his more sexually explicit songs after that, but I dunno if the same happened with songs like "If I Was Your Girlfriend"?

Sounds like it. The Star Tribune in Minneapolis published an oral history on Prince in 2004, which was re-published right after Prince's death, and Wendy Melvoin touches on this:

"We tried to put together a (Revolution) reunion tour in 2000, and he declined because of my homosexuality and the fact I’m half-Jewish. It came back: Go have a press conference denouncing your homosexuality and that you’re converting to Jehovah. I was like: I guess we’ll never hear from him again. And I had to kind of mourn him. It was devastating to think we’ve kind of lost him."

FWIW, the article ends with this anecdote from 2004:

WENDY MELVOIN: Me and Bobby (Z) and Susannah wanted to go see him at the House of Blues [the L.A. club where Prince played on Grammy night]. I called his guitar tech to let Prince know that the Revolution wanted to be there. Bobby got this call saying, “Bobby can go for free, but everybody else has to pay.” What the hell is this? So we get there; none of us has to pay, but it was incredibly difficult to get in. There’s Steven Tyler [of Aerosmith] and Beck walking by us, and all these other people.

We finally got shuffled off to this room where there wasn’t a seat for us. He called a whole bunch of people onstage but didn’t call any of us. I thought, “Well, that’s it.” His wife introduced herself, and I told her to thank him for the tickets and goodbye.

Then the next day, I get this call: “Prince would like you to come and rehearse with him on acoustic guitar for `The Tavis Smiley Show’ he’s doing.” Curiosity got the best of me. I went down, and he was remarkably kind and open, and gave me a huge hug. He had me sit in with his band, and I hung with him for two hours.

The next day, it was just him and me, and he was gorgeous. He was the guy I knew when I first met him. He was the guy who spent the night at my and Lisa’s house on our pullout bed. I held on to him and kept kissing him and hugging him and telling him I loved him. I don’t know what to think of it. He knows we all love him.

He seemed to go full Witness starting around 2001, but I saw him play a club in 2000 and he was plenty profane. There must have already been murmurings of his religious turn, because it surprised me at the time that there was so much sex stuff and cursing, iirc. By the time of his Musicology arena tour in 2004, which felt like something of a big comeback, he had cleaned up a lot of the songs, but it didn't seem terribly disruptive or distracting.

Yeah, I don't think it really took over his music outside of the Rainbow Children album and tour. He may have toned it down afterwards, but one could have chalked that up to mellowing with age if they didn't know about Prince's conversion.

There were a few good stories related to all that after he died. My two favorites are probably the one where a Time reporter impressed him so much that he tried to convert him (helped that he did his homework and correctly guessed that Prince would be much more open to discussing Christianity in his interview), and Erykah Badu running down her encounters with Prince, including the following:

The time Prince "evolved " and wouldn't sign yo mama's 'Dirty Mind' album cover cause he said he wasn't into that no mo and yo mama told him "well you shouldn't have made it then" and you were embarrassed.
The time Prince had a "swear jar" and you just put a 20 dollar bill in it when you walk in.
The time Prince and Larry Graham had you cornered in a Jehovah's Witness...well, witness session.

iirc his deep dive into Jehovah's Witness madness was connected to the death of his child? Of course there's ample evidence that he groomed mayte around age sixteen.

That's a tough question to answer unless Prince left a more definitive statement somewhere. It's reasonable to think it played some role, even if it's indirect, but it's still speculation. Losing a child (and the miscarriage that came with their next attempt) meant a lot of plans and a lot of dreams or ideas about the future were let go, and that's obviously enormous, even traumatic.

It's been documented that Graham made in-roads with converting Prince when his family visited and there was an issue with taking them to his shows. I think the "Face Down" number (great track from Emancipation) was the one that brought this to a head, but generally it was Graham saying, "why do you have to do that on stage?" and that conversation became a bigger one that led to Graham convincing Prince to try a different direction in life. But the context of losing children and the prospect of building a family, etc. I think that probably played a role.

Question, I'm looking into Duane Tudahl's book on the Purple Rain sessions, and it looks like there are two versions? How can I tell them apart? I would like the expanded version if at all possible.

nevermind, i couldn't tell from the amazon page which version the ebook was but the sample made it clear that it was, in fact, the expanded/revised edition

god, this madrid '93 encore, he's just killing it here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDgB5Jd-tT8

Just an update, I am up to May 1984 and I am _really_ impressed with Duane Tudahl's book so far. It has exceeded my expectations. I bought it just looking for a super-nerdy deep dive into, you know, Prince's recording sessions, when did he record this song, when did he track this song, and that information is all in there and all incredibly edifying. Tudahl's book is so much more than that, though.

Part of the reasons my expectations were tempered going in is that this is Tudahl's first published book. His bio talks about his professional career, which isn't in publishing. His career has been in producing TV documentaries on channels I don't watch, about topics I don't care about. It didn't seem like something that would particularly qualify him to publish a book about Prince.

It's weird for me to say this, as I've never seen any of the documentaries he produced and don't plan to, but reading the book I can really see how he applied his professional skills from his day job to the book. The man knows how to tell a coherent story, which is important in this case because both the underlying data he's working with and, ultimately, Prince himself, are topics that defy easy categorization, reason, often sense.

Even though the goal of his book is only to make sense out of the music Prince recorded in 1983-1984, the way he goes about it naturally leads one to learn far more than this. He never met Prince, never talked to Prince. This isn't a book Prince would have wanted anyone to write. Tudahl knows this but still, you know, loves Prince's music. He's what sometimes seems the rarest sort of fan - one whose eyes are open to the flaws of the person they're a fan of, but reconciles, on an ongoing basis, that knowledge with their deep and abiding love for their work. It's a weird thing to say of Tudahl that he does the work, echoing a Prince song, when the work he's doing is in direct opposition to anything Prince would have wanted... but Prince esta muerte.

What survives is the work he did, yes, and more than that, the people around him. This is the real brilliance of Tudahl's work, his ability to present, clearly and honestly, the voices of those around him, many of them alive, those who love him and were hurt by him and were betrayed by him. Prince the man was inseparable from his music, and so to talk about his music, Tudahl centers the voices of the people who knew him. And they talk about his kindness, and his gentleness, and his shyness, and his absolute inability to understand boundaries, and how he understood women, loved women not just as sex objects but as kindred spirits, how he thought a lot about what he would be, would he would do, if he was a woman, and then about all of the ways he controlled and manipulated the people who were around him, who were mostly women. Because, again, Tudahl understands that these things are necessary to talk about if we want to understand the music he made?

I'm really looking forward to his next book, which I think is supposed to be on 85-86 - my personal favorite Prince era.

thank you, great post, now I'm curious about the book

For those of you desperate to hear Tracy Ullman sing 'Don't Talk 2 Strangers'

http://www.princevault.com/index.php?title=Album:_I%27ll_Do_Anything_(1994)

https://wetransfer.com/downloads/fdb74b7304d350fd6f046d449593893a20200822140721/3b3b2c24a848b053bf9a50559e14b0a620200822140800/d7b4ce

Some odd things in here!

After Karina Longworth's series on Polly Platt I am definitely interested in this.

no idea why that vault link isn't working but:

l Do Anything is an unreleased soundtrack for the James L. Brooks movie I'll Do Anything, with songs written by Prince. The album features eight tracks sung by actors Nick Nolte, Albert Brooks, Tracey Ullman, Julie Kavner, Whittni Wright (all of whom had a part in the movie) and by singer Melissa Etheridge.
The project began when Prince was approached in 1992 by James L. Brooks to write original songs for his planned movie musical I'll Do Anything. Carole King and Sinead O'Connor were also asked to contribute. Prince wrote and recorded ten new songs between mid-late March 1992 at Paisley Park Studios in Chanhassen, Minnesota and mid-April 1992, in Australia while on the Diamonds And Pearls Tour: I'll Do Anything, Make Believe, My Little Pill, Don't Talk 2 Strangers, Poor Little Bastard, The Rest Of My Life, There Is Lonely, Be My Mirror, Wow and I Can't Love U Anymore. An eleventh track, Empty Room was pulled from the vault and also considered, but was not rerecorded for the project by the actors.

Of the proposed songs, eight were considered for the movie and were subsequently re-recorded by the cast and unidentified musicians for the soundtrack and musical scenes: Wow, Make Believe, My Little Pill, There Is Lonely, Be My Mirror, I Can't Love U Anymore, Don't Talk 2 Strangers, I'll Do Anything.

Wow was re-recorded by the ensemble cast for the movie, basically as a solo vocal performance by Tracey Ullman (who also sings lead on Don't Talk 2 Strangers) and was weaved into the movie at six different points during a rough cut of the movie. Five versions of Wow were recorded, one of them using the music of Sexy M.F.. Two versions of Make Believe in the movie were made to appear at three different points in the movie : one by actress Julie Kavner and the second by the ensemble cast. My Little Pill was also sung by Julie Kavner, as was an early version of I Can't Love U Anymore. After a first test screening and sub-par reactions to her vocals, a second version of I Can't Love U Anymore was made with Melissa Etheridge. Nick Nolte re-recorded Be My Mirror as a duet with Whittni Wright who played the role of his young daughter in the movie.There Is Lonely and I'll Do Anything were sung by Albert Brooks. Prince was not involved in the re-recording sessions, which also comprised a medley of some of the songs and a track called DNG Groove (containing no input by Prince), which was placed as an intro for I Can't Love U Anymore. Two other songs without Prince input ("This Lonely Life" by Sinead O'Connor and "You Are The Best" by Carole King) also appeared in the first cuts of the movie but were not planned for the soundtrack album.

After different test-screenings, and overwhelmingly negative reactions to the music, all production numbers from the film were cut, and the proposed album was canceled. James L. Brooks shot new scenes and I'll Do Anything was released in 1994 as a satirical comedy-drama film and not a musical. Despite the new editing, the film was a commercial and critical failure. None of the songs Prince wrote specifically for the movie were used in the film or the released original motion picture score, which is made of four instrumentals composed by Hans Zimmer and a track ("You Are The Best") written by Carole King and sung by Whittni Wright.

None of the re-recorded Prince tracks by the I'll Do Anything cast saw the light of the day. Prince would later release his own versions of some of the songs planned for this project:

Don't Talk 2 Strangers would be used for another soundtrack, Girl 6 in 1996. Another version, sung by Chaka Khan would be included on her Come 2 My House album, produced by Prince and released by NPG Records.
My Little Pill and There Is Lonely would be included in The Vault... Old Friends 4 Sale, as was The Rest Of My Life.
In 1995, Prince made a video for Empty Room, which was not recorded for the film, but offered for consideration. A live version recorded during a soundcheck in 2002 was released as a download by the NPG Music Club and later included on the C-Note album. A rehearsal take with 3rdEyeGirl was streamed on YouTube in 2014.
Be My Mirror, Wow, I Can't Love U Anymore, I'll Do Anything, Make Believe, and Poor Little Bastard remain unreleased.

i never listen to podcasts but i could maybe make an exception
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jLtcGgdTG0

Love these podcasts. But the professor interviewed there does know prince was quite the Reagan supporter in the early/mid 80s right?

the podcast is good yes. susan rogers seems like such a fun interview

saving folks a click: that is a 46 second video that, in second 45, reveals that it is an advertisement for an eight-part podcast about the making of Sign O' The Times.

the podcast does not appear to actually exist as a podcast, only on streaming / walled-garden services, but transcripts of each episode can be found at the website of the MPR station that created it, and the mp3 files can be downloaded by reading the source code of each transcript page.

well whatever it is I just subscribed to it

Eh? It's a regular ol podcast, I subscribed to it through Apple's app.

i feel this way every time one of these deluxe editions has come out but it's wild to me that i'm listening to "all my dreams" and it's not a bootleg

It's a regular ol podcast, I subscribed to it through Apple's app.

That's a walled garden!

yr such a commie

if it cannot be cast to a pod, then the people are not truly free it's not a podcast