Prince was released on October 19, 1979. It went platinum on the back of the R&B number one “I Wanna Be Your Lover,” hitting twenty-two on the pop charts and the top five on the R&B charts. The LP also found Prince releasing his first video (“I Wanna Be Your Lover”) and making his first national television appearances on American Bandstand and Midnight Special. Prince started the process of making Prince a household name.
As on For You, Prince plays everything, although Bobby Z. and Andre Cymone are listed as “heaven-sent helpers,” and the latter contributed vocals to “Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?” Unlike the expensive and elongated first-LP process, Prince was recorded quickly from April to June 1979 at Alpha Studios in Burbank, with overdubs and remixes soon after. The goal this time wasn’t learning a craft but rather crafting hits. To this end, the album was a success—to a degree.
While Prince had only one unqualified radio hit at the time, it produced three classics and doesn’t have a weak song. However, it falls short of masterpiece status. The main issue is a lack of dynamics and subtlety both in song selection and in production. You’ve got five bright and bombastic songs that hit you over the head and four mellow ballads (strong on sentiment but often in search of a strong hook). For all the appraisals that claim the album is more varied than the first, there’s no middle ground. If Prince were a dog (and it’s not an uncommon canine name), it would be either humping your leg or trying to give you a big mushy kiss.
Backed by his five-piece band, Prince performed his first concert as a solo artist on January 5, 1979. The show, and one the subsequent night, was designed for Warner Bros. executives to determine if Prince was ready to tour in support of For You. (Courtesy Thomas de Bruin, unused-prince-tickets.com)
The three classics? The most enduring is lead single “I Wanna Be Your Lover.” The latter half of the song is an instrumental groove that lays the groundwork for future funk experiments. “Sexy Dancer” pushes past pure disco and lays down the funk. The best-known song is “I Feel for You” because of Chaka Khan. Khan’s version won Prince a Grammy, but Prince’s version is three minutes and twenty-four seconds of pure pop funk and is better, and, in a more just world, it would have been a hit single. The newly surfaced, longer “I Feel for You (Acoustic Demo)” was released as a limited-edition purple vinyl single in 2020.
“Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?” is a catchy pop song with a hard rock edge, while “Bambi” is a hard rock song that is more memorable for its anti-lesbian lyrics than it is catchy. “It’s Gonna Be Lonely” is the first trip into power ballad territory. Both “When We’re Dancing Close and Slow” and “Still Waiting” find Prince in his finest chanteuse form, channeling his inner Billie Holiday, as on “So Blue.” The weakest song is “With You,” which sounds like a Lionel Richie outtake commissioned for a wedding photography commercial.
Prince spawned three US singles. “I Wanna Be Your Lover” had the most success, providing his first pop top twenty hit at number eleven and his first R&B number one. “Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad” hit number thirteen on the R&B chart, and “Still Waiting” hit number sixty-five. All three songs were released in mono versions that have not appeared on CD or download, and the New Zealand version of “Still Waiting” contained the full-length version of the song that appeared only on initial vinyl versions of the LP. None of these releases contained non-LP songs, but the UK “Sexy Dancer” twelve-inch includes the uncollected “Long Version.”
All of the songs appear to be written for this album except “With You” and “I Feel for You.” These were the two Prince-penned of six songs recorded in New York City at Music Farm Studios on February 17, 1979, with Cymone on bass and mentor Willie Pepe leading the proceedings. The session demoed songs for Little Anthony and the Imperials, who released 94 East’s “One Man Jam” as “Fast Freddie the Roller Disco King.” The session also produced a version of “Do Me, Baby” and “Thrill You or Kill You” with Cymone on lead vocals and the 94 East instrumental “If You Feel Like Dancin’.”
In late 1978, Prince assembled his first solo band, with Cymone on bass, Bobby Z. on drums, Dez Dickerson on guitar, and Matt Fink and Gayle Chapman on keyboards. This lineup lasted from the January 1979 Capri Theater debut gig until the May 1980 end of the Rick James Tour but never released a song as Prince’s band. The group, including Prince, recorded nine unreleased songs in 1979 as The Rebels.
Prince leaned heavily on Prince songs through the Dirty Mind tour and then abandoned most of them until the late 2000s. Only “It’s Gonna Be Lonely” was never performed live.
Dirty Mind (1980)
Dirty Mind is Prince’s first masterpiece. It pairs a bare electro-funk pulse with stark, sexual lyrics and adorns them in the naked ambition of blossoming genius. It’s aggressive, impish, oddly optimistic, and utterly irresistible. In other words, it’s Prince. The only complaint is that there’s not more of the eight-song, thirty-minute album.
On the surface, Dirty Mind appears to be a simple case of one-upmanship in a post-tour battle with Rick James. It’s Prince jumping James’s naughty funk-punk train. But whatever Prince hijacked musically, lyrically, and visually from James—and he seems to have borrowed more than a bit—Prince’s determination, creativity, and superior talent transformed a potential shtick into a relevant and enduring artistic persona.
Dirty Mind’s synthesizer-driven sound signals a sharp break from the previous albums’ radio-friendly rounded edges. These songs, left in demo form, are angular and mechanical. This isn’t pop music that politely invites you over to listen but rather raw funk that gets in your face, shakes your shoulders, and demands that you listen. And it’s one of the few times that Prince the producer outpaces Prince the performer.
Lyrically, Prince extends the sexual sad sack persona on “When You Were Mine” and “Gotta Broken Heart Again,” but the revelation here is the increasingly explicit sexual content, as last year’s unspoken “sex-related fantasies” are now increasingly verbalized, especially in “Head” and “Sister.” The gates of Erotic City have swung wide open.
There isn’t a weak song on the album. Each track is catchy enough to warrant radio play, and any one would be the crowning achievement of most musical careers.
For all this, Dirty Mind was a commercial failure. Released on October 8, 1980, the album reached only number forty-five, the lowest pop ranking of an LP of strictly new material until 2001’s Rainbow Children failed to crack the top 100.
The LP was recorded during May and June 1980 “somewhere in Uptown” (aka Prince’s Home Studio in Wayzata), about thirteen miles west of Minneapolis. There was slightly more outside participation on these tracks, with Dr. Fink playing on and cowriting the title track and contributing synthesizer on “Head,” which included vocal contributions from keyboardist Lisa Coleman. Uncredited, Andre Cymone cowrote “Uptown,” and Morris Day cowrote “Partyup.” Day relinquished official credit in exchange for Prince’s production of the first Time LP. And, officially, The Time LP was coproduced by Jamie Starr, Prince’s earliest alias and the credited engineer of Dirty Mind.
Dirty Mind saw the US release of two commercial and two promo singles and “Do It All Night” as a UK-only release. The first US single, “Uptown,” was released on September 10, 1980. The edit hit number 101 on the Billboard “Bubbling Under” chart and number five on the R&B chart. Along with the US promo release single “Head,” the non-charting single “Dirty Mind,” and the LP track “Partyup,” “Uptown”