Music Banter - View Single Post - Baby I'm A Star - The Once and Future Prince
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Old 08-18-2021, 07:56 PM   #13 (permalink)
Trollheart
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Despite his resistance to Warner’s request that he meet radio DJs and promoters, Prince found, perhaps to his surprise, that most of them were genuinely interested in, and impressed with his music. Given that this was the first time he had directly interacted with these sort of people, it may have changed the way he had originally thought about them all as paid company shills and suits with no innate love of music. Still, ever the self-promoter, he used the opportunity to further craft his legend, claiming he was half white (which was not true, and surely must have backfired with his loyal black fanbase) and telling stories about his mother reading him soft porn novels, which was also untrue, and unfair, as she was working in a Minnesota school as a social worker, and this was not publicity (indeed, false publicity) she needed. He further claimed that the lyrics in his songs were all based on personal experience, especially “Head” and “Sister.” That must have pleased his sister I’m sure.

His next tour was a disaster. On the back of poor sales and ambiguous response to the songs on Dirty Mind, he nevertheless crammed his ninety-minute set with the entire album (it being only thirty minutes, this was not hard but inadvisable surely) and the result was poor ticket sales and a quickly-cancelled tour. He was frustrated. People did not get it. They did not understand what he was trying to do, bridging genres that had seldom if ever been bridged before. Rock, funk, disco, new wave, soul, jazz, electronic - he used them all in his music, but nobody cared. They didn’t want the new songs, which were hard to put into the context of what could perhaps at that time generously be called a Prince fan; they wanted the older, more accessible, poppy dancy stuff. And Prince was in no mood to pander to his fans.

His new image didn’t help. He started being branded as “gay” and called a freak. This was 1980, and conservatives like Ronald Reagan were hovering in the wings, eager to take America back to “family values”, and no great supporter of civil rights either. It wasn’t a great time to be black and experimenting sexually in the land of the nominally free. Prejudice was rife, as always, and plenty of people hated blacks, but they could muster up just a little more hatred for blacks who went around in high heels and panties and who wore makeup. Some of these people might have tacitly approved of the idea of sleeping with their sister, but only if she was white, of course. Seeking to raise his profile, particularly among white Americans, Prince did a set on Saturday Night Live.

But while middle America struggled to sort out this odd enigma and decide whether they should fete him or run him out of town on a rail, back home he was their hero. He played an impromptu gig at Sam’s, where there wasn’t even only standing room: some people hung out of the rafters of the converted bus terminal as Prince belted out his songs, and they loved him. Minneapolis Tribune’s Jon Bream crowed “Minneapolis finally has its own bona fide rock star!”

Time for a Change

Though his original idea to put together a band which could play music different to his, but which he would manage and basically control had fizzled out, Prince was ready to give it another shot. This time, pardon the pun, the band was The Time. The music was all his, his and his own band, but when it came to performing, he needed an actual band, and so he approached Flyte Time, who had been together since 1973 but were still gigging around clubs and trying to sell their album without success. Interestingly, the band contained a young Alexander O’Neal, who would go on to be a huge star in the world of soul and pop, but he was not interested in the project and bowed out. The remaining members were happy to go along with Prince’s idea, if only for the exposure and the chance to play to real audiences.

The idea was simple, yet brilliant. Prince would have the band play his music, but tell reporters and critics it was theirs (with his blessing). When O’Neal backed out of the deal, he recruited his old Grand Central bandmate Morris Day to replace him, and Day brought along with him guitarist Jesse Johnson. The hardest part, of course, was for Day to match Prince’s intonations and inflections perfectly, as it was his voice singing on the vocal and Day had to reproduce it exactly, and by now we all know what a perfectionist Prince was. Good enough just would not do.

Six songs completed in two weeks, Prince mixed the album in L.A. in only two days, and The Time’s first album was ready to be released. He had Warner, who foresaw in the album a return to the Prince they knew and loved (ie the Prince who sold big) and they signed up The Time without delay.


Album titleThe Time
Released as: The Time
Label: Warner Bros
Recorded: April 1981
Release Date: July 29 1981
Producer: Morris Day and Prince (as “Jamie Starr”)
Studio(s): Prince’s home studio, California
Chart Position: 50
Singles Released: ”Get it Up”, “Cool”, “Girl”
Singles Chart Performance: GIU: 42 @BH100, 6 @ @ BHSSC; Cool: 90 @ BH100, 3 @ BDH80 (Billboard Disco Hot 80), 7 @ BHSSC; Girl: 65 @ BHSSC
Sales: 500,000

The album contains only six tracks, but one is eight minutes long, one nine and one ten. Sounds more like a prog track listing to me! It kicks off with “Get It Up”, very Chic or Sister Sledge or some damn disco thing, I don’t know much about this genre. Lots of brass and squelchy keyboard, handclap percussion, and you can hear Prince’s original vocal there in the backing vocals and there’s a typical Prince guitar too. His handprints are all over this song, and probably all over the album too. Okay well this goes on way way way too long and is just another example of what would become Prince’s self-indulgence. Again, allowing for some pretty sweet guitar solos and exuberant work on the keys, it’s mostly repetition and there’s absolutely no excuse for this being nine minutes long. A pretty vacuous song, stretched beyond breaking point.

“Girl”, on the other hand, is, well, a soppy romantic ballad, with digital piano and soft organ, something a hundred boybands would infest the airwaves with over the next few decades. Unimaginative title, unimaginative song. No wonder he didn’t want to put his name to it officially. Things pick up, at least in terms of tempo, with “After Hi School”, one of only two tracks on the album credited to other than Prince, Dez Dickerson getting a writing credit on both this one and the next. Sort of a weird mix of rockabilly and new wave on this, with a piping keyboard running behind a sharp guitar riff, but again I wouldn’t be bothered. Very low-grade stuff. Sort of like the Buzzcocks suddenly and much to their consternation find themselves playing in a new wave band. Punky chant at the end sort of underlines how shit this is, and “Cool”, which runs for an excruciating ten minutes, believe it or not, is Dickerson’s other contribution.

Hey, at least it brings back the funk. It’s all very well to try to be all things to all men, but sometimes it gets not only confusing but frustrating, and if the last song had been a puppy, well sorry, but I would have drowned it.* “Cool” reminds me of “Money Don’t Matter Tonight” and “Baby I’m a Star”, with its hurried, finger-snapping beat and its blaring keyboard runs. Actually, it’s nowhere near as excruciating a listen as the opener was (I wrote that before I heard the song). It’s still way too long but it is catchy and it keeps the attention as it goes along. You’d have to say it falls very much into the category of jam though. Some spoken parts on it, perhaps nodding towards the emergent rap/hip-hop culture, though I read Prince had no time for those artists. The call-and-response is, I have to say, pretty cool: “Anybody hot? No! You know why? No! Cos we’re cool!” Indeed.

Another big ballad in “Oh Baby”, with clanging, ringing guitar and rippling piano, head and shoulders above the other ballad, which was just insipid and formulaic. This one has real heart, and looks back to the classic days of Motown with some fine backing vocals from Prince too. That leaves us with surely the most Princelike track on the album, another long one in the eight-minute-plus “The Stick”, which oozes cool and funks all over the place. It’s kind of hard not to like this. Yes, it’s another jam but it’s a damn good one. Prince/Day shouting out “What time is it?” is not quite inspired, but clever, and would also form the title of the band’s next album as well as becoming a favourite catchphrase of the band.

TRACK LISTING

Get It Up
Girl

After Hi School
Cool
Oh Baby
The Stick


Hard to know what to say about that album, other than I guess it provided a creative outlet for Prince’s music that he either couldn’t or didn’t want directly associated with his name. I find the whole idea strange; one way or another, people were going to know they were listening to Prince music, and if he thought he had anyone fooled, well, he didn’t exactly cover his tracks very well, did he? Amusing, I guess, or to quote Moe from The Simpsons, it’s not without its charm.


Anyway, I guess Prince found it fun. Filled up a few weeks putting it together and getting it going, scratched an itch, so to speak. And then of course, there was his fourth album to record. All in a day’s work.

* Note: No I wouldn't, and anyone who would contemplate such an action should be drowned themselves, see how they like it.
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