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Old 12-14-2021, 02:39 PM   #16 (permalink)
Trollheart
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Album title What Time Is It?
Released as: The Time
Label: Warner Bros
Recorded: January - June 1982
Release Date: August 25 1982
Producer: Morris Day and The Starr Company (Prince )
Studio(s): Prince’s home studio, California; Sunset Sound, California
Chart Position* 26
Singles Released: ”777-9311”, “The Walk”, “Gigolos Get Lonely Too”
Singles Chart Performance: 777-9311: 88 @BH100, 2 @ @ BHSSC; TW: 24 @ BHSSC, 42 @ BHDCS; GGLT: 77 @ BHSSC
Sales: 500,000

The second album from Prince’s first pet project utilised as its title a phrase Morris Day tended to use so much on stage that it became his catchphrase. It keeps up the basic funk of Prince’s earlier work, getting going with “Wild and Loose”, again recalling for me “U Got the Look” in its style, very much a “let’s party” song, with quite a lot of what I would personally consider superfluous conversation against the beat, which once again lengthens the track unnecessarily, making it a frankly ridiculous seven and a half minutes. It’s all right but it’s nothing terribly special. Some nice jangly guitar, infectious rhythm, I guess it does what it’s supposed to. Nice funky guitar opening to “777-9311”, one of the singles, feels like another meh track. At least he resists rhyming 9311 with Heaven, which is something as I expected this to happen. The song is full of braggadocio - “Come on, baby, I ain’t got all night”, that sort of thing - and to me comes across as very dated, but it seems to have gone down well. Prince certainly rips off a fine guitar solo near the end.

There’s a fast beat running through “OnedayI’mgonnabesomebody”, maybe the first time Prince uses the idea he would later champion of pushing words together in song titles, and it sort of sounds a bit silly really, as Prince is already somebody at this stage, and The Time, if they’re going to ever be somebody, are nothing but Prince’s puppets. Remember, before he picked them out of obscurity they were struggling to get by and would most likely never have made it (other than Alexander O’Neal, who made it without his help, but had to leave the band to do so), so who are they really fooling? And since it’s written by Prince, what is he saying? It can only be an in-joke, one that most people are in on, because who didn’t know this band was just an extension of Prince? There’s another joke as they shout at the end “We don’t like new wave!” and all have a good laugh. Har har. We get it, guys. It’s not worth nine and a half fucking minutes though!

Cameo-style tune next in “The Walk”, which seems to be Prince trying to get in on fashion, another facet of his stardom he would command, in a similar way to Bowie earlier, setting trends others would follow. There’s a sort of army march chant in the song which is quite amusing and a little endearing if I’m honest. It’s another jam, and features another silly conversation, which are getting annoying. I’d also have to say that maybe Prince is hiding some really almost bordering on misogynist tendencies in these songs. I suppose it’s all in good fun, but I don’t think feminists would approve. There’s a ballad in “Gigolos Get Lonely Too”, and it’s, well, it’s all right I suppose but again nothing great. Kind of get the feeling Prince was pouring any old crap into this album that he didn’t feel was good enough to be released under his own name. The final track then is “I Don’t Wanna Leave You”, which despite its ballad-sounding title is in fact a bouncy pop tune, with sprightly keyboard and a boppy beat. Nice piano run at the end. Not a bad tune, decent closer, but again it doesn’t need to be an epic six and a half minutes, when all the extra does is showcase Prince’s musicianship.

TRACK LISTING

Wild and Loose
777-0311
Ondayi’mgonnabesomebody
The Walk
Gigolos Get Lonely Too
I Don’t Wanna Leave You

Doubt I’ll ever be a Time fan, but they’re part of the Prince story so they have to be reviewed. I seriously don’t get the idea though: did he really think people didn’t know? Well, soon enough he’d have bigger, and better things to think about. His own time (sorry) was fast approaching.

Nobody can say with any certainty where Prince’s obsession with the colour purple came from, but once this album was released it would be a colour he would be forever identified with, not least due to the title of the album to follow this. There are theories that it had to do with the colour scheme used by his favourite football team, the Minnesota Vikings, however no evidence exists to show Prince was ever interested in sports. Then again, as a way of paying his dues to and at the same time promoting his hometown, maybe even subliminally there’s some mileage in that. There are also references to one of his great heroes, Hendrix, and his famous hit “Purple Haze”, but again this is all conjecture. He had written a song for his debut called “Purple Lawn”, which never made the cut, so again maybe.

One of the most compelling arguments I’ve read though is that he envisaged a battle between demons, who were red, and angels who were blue, mixing and melding together to form the colour purple, and this of course gave birth to his breakthrough single and album. Whatever the real story is - hell, maybe the guy just liked the colour - the fact is that purple would appear in song and album titles from now on, and as much as the colour black was associated with Johnny Cash, for Prince, purple would be the colour. He wanted purple on the album cover, and he wanted better videos for the songs that were to be released as singles. MTV had doggedly stuck in the fifties and sixties in terms of its mindset, despite being supposedly the “hip new channel for the kids”, the story is well known that until CBS threatened to pull all their white artists’ videos from their playlist, they wouldn’t even countenance playing Michael Jackson on their show! Sounds stupid now of course, but back then that was the way they saw it: black music was for black people, and black people didn’t watch MTV.

Prince was about to change all that. His videos would be sleek, sexy, attractive and impossible to ignore, not only for the music but for the sexy women in barely-there costumes that would be picked up upon by many bands in the future, most famously by three Texas blues players to sell their heavily-electronically-based new brand of pop rock and send them skyrocketing to the top with singles like “Legs” and “Gimme All Your Lovin’”. It might - it does - seem odd now, even unbelievable, but when “1999” was released as a lead single in September , though it went down well as usual with black audiences, rising to number 4 on the Black Chart, the pop audience yawned and afforded it a weak position at number 44.

Whether he realised it didn’t matter, that he knew he was on the brink of something huge, or not, Prince went ahead organising his biggest tour yet. His “pet bands” would be on the bill, so essentially he would be, as he had been for all his so-far young life, supporting himself and doing everything, even if now, others would be carrying out the tasks for him. He had to be the first artist in music history who was supported by two bands, both of whom played the music he had written and sang the lyrics he had crafted. In some way, you could say it was the next thing to musical masturbation. And I will. It was the next thing to musical masturbation. Why Prince chose bands everyone knew were basically him I don’t know: maybe he didn’t trust any other small band to open for him and not make a mess of things, maybe memories of him opening for Rick James were still a little too fresh and raw, or maybe he was afraid a young band might upstage him? Maybe he felt he had to have total creative control, and a band operating independently, outside of the World of Prince, the Princesphere, might not toe the line.

So he had his - let’s be unkind here, but also slightly honest - trained monkeys open for him, but not before he had literally put them through their paces. Prince was, as we have seen, a hard taskmaster, and he was the kind of man who was not satisfied with anything less than perfection. In fact, he went one further: when keyboard player Jimmy Jam of The Time had no melody to play in a song, and was just using his left hand to play the bass, Prince berated him, telling him he had to find a part to play. The music live, he told them all, had to be better than it was on the studio recordings. Improvisation was the name of the game, which, coming from such a control freak as Mr. Nelson, was an odd stance for him to take. But he pushed them till they resented him, then hated him, then realised he had after all made them go the extra mile so that they could be better. And they were better. And now grateful, and they understood. “That’s what Prince did, time and again,” Jam said. “He taught us we could do things we’d never believed we could.”

Jesse Johnson did not agree, believing that Prince played down the ability of both The Time and Vanity 6, especially their fame, contending that nobody would recognise them on the streets, which was certainly not true. In some ways, it seems he was saying “Don’t ever forget, you’re nothing without me. I made you and I can break you.” And of course he had, for what were either band without Prince writing their music, producing and arranging, playing their instruments and basically acting as their meal ticket, a one-man X Factor years in advance of that show?

And so perhaps there was after all a darker side to Prince, where he tried to keep everyone down so that he shone from among them, above them, beyond them, and most importantly, they didn’t get above themselves and start demanding more money, or better conditions. Maybe he wasn’t the self-assured, swaggering, confident, arrogant music star he made himself out to be. Could it be that he was in fact quite insecure, worried that either his fame wouldn’t last or that someone would overshadow him and end up leaving him in the cold? He was still quite young at this time, and maturity, and security would only come with age and experience, so perhaps he could be forgiven for taking such a stance, but it seems clear he didn’t consider anyone, least of all the bands he had created, to be anywhere near his level.

In that, though, he was right.
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