Chapter VI: Judgement Day - The Purple Reign Begins
November 20 1981 was the date of the first proper Prince tour, his own tour on which he had to pander to nobody and where people were actually coming to see him, his own fans coming to hear his music, and pay him homage. His own support act, The Time, would open for him.
Controversy was selling well, and he was back on black radio with the title track. Critics were still divided in their opinion of the album, but it was to come eighth in a poll held by the influential music magazine
Village Voice, of the best albums of that year.
Prince had also, for once, learned from his ordeal on stage opening for the Stones. Gone was the bikini, gone was the trenchcoat, and in their place was the outfit he wore on the album, including the soon-to-be-iconic purple jacket. His stage show went through some changes, including a fireman’s pole in the middle of the stage down which he slid to make his entrance, and purple smoke billowing across the front as he and the band played. In front of his own fans, he could do no wrong, and his popularity had now grown so much that Warner believed it necessary he should have a minder, a security guy who could act as a barrier between him and his legion of adoring fans, and stave off any trouble that might be heading his way.
The guy’s name was Charles Huntsberry, but he was known as “Big Chick”, and with good reason. Standing six feet eight, he weighed almost four hundred pounds, his thick white beard giving him the deceptive air of a Santa Claus, but the only gifts this man would be dishing out to those who incurred his wrath would be bunches of fives, and I don’t mean candy canes! He had previously been on the security detail for AC/DC and had been a cop in Tennessee, so he certainly knew how to handle himself. He scared everyone, including, ironically, Prince himself, who decided to let him go after a single day. Dez convinced him to change his mind, pointing out that in order to protect his boss, Chick
had to look scary. But he had spoken to him, he said, and he was a nice guy. Besides, he was being paid to look after Prince, so why should be pose any threat to his employer? Unsure, Prince relented and Big Chick joined the expanding entourage which began to follow the little musician from Minneapolis, as if he were in fact a real prince.
He had his next project in sight, lining up a friend of his, Susan Moonsie, his wardrobe assistant Brenda Bennett and another employee of his management team, Jamie Shoop, to be his second shadow band, The Hookers. When he met model Denise Matthews, however, he decided to base the band around her. Meanwhile, his tour was proceeding and he had already written more songs, including “Baby I’m a Star”, which would not be used until three years later on
Purple Rain. Given how much has just been written about his personal security, it’s perhaps ironic that his own personal
insecurity led him to remove The Time from some of his shows, worrying that they were getting more press than him, and that people were coming to see them and not him. He might have winced, had he thought about it (if he did), how closely this situation mirrored the Rick James one he had found himself in two years earlier.
Instead he involved them in the creation of the girl group, whose name he had now changed to Vanity 6, Matthews now being named Vanity (he had originally wanted to call her Vagina: I wonder if that might not have backfired? He ditched the idea though in favour of this one). The Time sat in on the recording sessions for the band, watching and learning. You could say, without I think any real argument, that Prince was definitely using sex to sell this new band. All women, all pretty, all dressed in revealing lingerie, it wasn’t too hard to guess the kind of market he was aiming at. Prince was a master by now at knowing what sold, and how to sell it. And he sold it in August, just days before The Time were due to release their second album.
Album title Vanity 6
Released as: Vanity 6
Label: Warner Bros
Recorded: March - April 1982
Release Date: August 11 1982
Producer: Prince (as The Starr Company)
Studio(s): Prince’s home studio, California; Sunset Sound, California
Chart Position* 45
Singles Released:”He’s So Dull”, “Nasty Girl”, “Drive Me Wild”, “Bite the Beat”
Singles Chart Performance: NG: 7 @ USR&BC, 1@ USDC
Sales: 500,000
Full and fair disclosure here: the only place I could get the album was on YouTube, and the videos make it a little hard to concentrate on the music, but it’s kind of by now what you’d expect from Prince. “Nasty Girl” kicks proceedings off and it’s a lightweight funk number with plenty of synths and effects, and the voices of the girls are kind of interchangeable; indeed, I wouldn't have been that surprised to have found that it was Prince singing (though it’s not). You can hear echoes of what Prince would later mould Scottish songstress Sheena Easton into, and it’s very danceable and catchy and throwaway. Now back to those videos…
The sort of Arabic chant near the end is interesting, but Prince really goes for broke on the sexual innuendos here when he has Vanity sing “I need seven inches more.” Ah, right. Probably building a shelf or something. No? Um, well, she’s got a good stage presence; you definitely feel yourself (stop that!) being drawn towards her as the main woman, though in fairness here at least she does take the lead vocal, and the camera follows her around. And speaking of sexual innuendo, “Wet Dream” is another bouncy, upbeat number with some nice vocal harmonies, some interesting sound effects and some very happy synth lines. Couldn’t say anything is standing out (I SAID STOP THAT!) so far though; it’s all pretty innocuous musically speaking, and both the first tracks are forgotten by the time the third begins, this being “Drive Me Wild”, it’s the first on which Prince really breaks out the guitar. It’s hard funk and electronica, with quite a low-key vocal, though the version I’ve been given here is the extended version, which is over three times as long as the album version. Definitely head and shoulders above everything else so far, almost the first “serious” song on the album.
“He’s So Dull” has a very I expect deliberate early sixties sound about it, right down to the honking organ riff and the silly dance the girls do, and it’s very much a let-down after the power and majesty of “Drive Me Wild.” It takes us, if you can believe it, halfway through the album. Pure disco funk then for “If a Girl Answers (Don’t Hang Up)”, pretty much spoken (I can’t even call it a rap; part of it is but mostly it’s just talking to the music, which I don’t think is the same) and I guess an early example of what the Spice Girls would call “girl power” ten years later. The song however suffers from again Prince’s habit of overextending things, and it could lose the last minute and not suffer for it. “Make-Up” has a dark, bassy beat running under it, very electronic drums and a sort of sparse vocal with what sounds like thunder effects? Has a kind of darkwave effect sort of? Coldwave maybe. Ah hell I don’t know; something like maybe Laurie Anderson might put out if she was into dance music?
More simple and straightforward is “Bite the Beat”, with a staggering synth line and another low-key vocal, puts me in mind of Depeche Mode playing John Cougar Mellencamp. Yeah. Good keyboard solo on it and the handclap drums work well. The closer is the ballad, but in fairness it’s not a soppy love song and Prince takes the opportunity to lament the plight of women in the workplace, I think. Anyway he makes a point about the enfranchisement of women, so fair play to him. It’s also a decent song, and in fact I’d place it second best after “Drive Me Wild”.
TRACK LISTING
Nasty Girl
Wet Dream
Drive Me Wild
He’s So Dull
If a Girl Answers (Don’t Hang Up)
Make-Up
Bite the Beat
3x2=6
It’s interesting I guess seeing Prince write for women for the first time - though it certainly would not be the last - while at the same time perhaps slightly cringe-inducing that he’s talking for them: Vanity 6 are nothing more than pretty mouthpieces for his music and lyrics, though they do the job well. The album was never going to break any charts and though it got to number 6 in the Black Charts it didn’t even scrape into the top forty of the Billboard Hot 100. The band broke up shortly after the release of this album and there never was another. A decade later they would change their name to Apollonia 6 (doesn’t quite roll off the tongue as easily, does it?) to reflect the departure of Vanity and her replacement by Apollonia. They, too, would release one album and then disband.
But apart from these projects Prince was also writing material for what would become his world-busting, explosive breakout album, and had already come up with the lyric and melody to what would be one of his biggest hits while sitting in Lisa Coleman’s pink Edsel waiting for her to come out of her girlfriend’s flat. Ever the innovator, Prince had moved smoothly along with the technology as it developed, and he was now using a Linn drum machine to create his drumbeats and patterns. He got more into writing music with the aid of computer software, and found he could get a lot more done more quickly. During the recording sessions for
1999 he met Lisa’s friend, Wendy Melvoin.
Wendy was always coming to the studio with Lisa, so Prince decided to let her sing backup on one of the songs, “Irresistible Bitch”. She would later become a fixture of his band, and go on to have a solo (well, dual) career with Lisa. This time around, Prince felt that he had too many ideas, too many songs, and too many of them were too good not to be used, so he took the unusual step, for an artist who had not yet truly broken the market, to record a double album. It was quite a gamble: a double album would cost not quite double the price of an ordinary one, but more, certainly. And could he keep people’s attention focussed over two full records? He believed he could, with this new music, and intended to make the first record all the dancy electronic stuff and the other one to be filled mostly with slower, ballad-like material.
Warner were of course dubious about the project, worried it wouldn’t sell, but by now The Time had recorded (i.e., Prince had written and recorded for them) their second album and it had sold well, even getting to number 26 in the Hot 100, though where it had of course made its true mark was on the black music market, where it rose to a staggering number two spot on the Billboard Top Soul Albums chart. Trusting Prince’s instincts, and based on the reaction to his tour and previous sales - and surely not wishing to be the equivalent of the people who turned down the Rolling Stones - they agreed to finance a double album. It would be one of the smartest, and most profitable decisions they ever made.