1986, the choice to defect seemed obvious, but Prince convinced him to stay through the Parade tour. In the studio, Brown feels that he didn’t get credit for producing “Kiss.”
Brown Mark produced the 1985 Mazarati LP with coproducer Rivkin and cowrote “Strawberry Lover” and “I Guess It’s All Over” with Prince. For released Prince LP tracks, Brown Mark appeared on “D.M.S.R.” on background vocals and hand claps and on bass on the standard thirteen tracks that include all Revolution members.
Brown Mark’s second album, the Levi Seacer Jr.–produced Good Feeling, was released in 1989 on Paisley Park. Prince wrote and sings background on “Shall We Dance” and sings background on “Bang Bang.”
Jill Jones (1982–1988)
Jill Jones was a background singer on the 1982–1983 Triple Threat tour and a Prince triple threat herself: band member, protégé, and girlfriend. She was the first Prince band member who didn’t play an instrument, but she didn’t have to, as she’s probably best known for appearing in lingerie and a cap in the “1999” video.
Jones comes from an entertainment family. Her stepfather is Motown founder Berry Gordy, and her mother managed Teena Marie (“Ooo La La La”). Her uncle, Earl Jones, was Prince’s hairdresser from 1983 to 1989. Jill was eighteen years old and singing for Teena Marie on the 1980 Dirty Mind tour winter leg when she first met Prince.
Jones sang background on “1999,” “Automatic,” “Free,” and “Lady Cab Driver” as J.J., then joined the 1999 tour. On tour, she sang for Vanity 6 from behind a curtain. In addition to the 1999 material, Jones sang background on numerous Prince and associate recordings and lead on “Wednesday,” which was cut from Purple Rain. She’s in the movie as the scene-stealing waitress and shows up in Graffiti Bridge, typecast as the Kid’s Girlfriend.
Jones released one Paisley Park album before leaving the Purple Realm in 1993.
5
Musicology Musical Influences
Prince’s work feels both familiar and different. As with other talented artists, it’s like he joined an ongoing conversation, but he says things no one ever said before and says them in ways no one else imagined. This chapter is about the familiar that allowed Prince to be different, the other speakers in the ongoing conversation Prince joined with his music. Whom was he listening to? Whom was he responding to? On the shoulders of which giants was he standing in his custom-made, high-heel Andre No. 1 boots?
James Brown
Brown is a Prince influence, blueprint, and mirror. He battled record companies, founded labels, used aliases, and released instrumental jazz/soul/funk as a faceless group. He employed top-notch backing bands and a Svengali-like approach to cultivating acts. He was the top live performer of his generation and had an LP chart for more than a year (Live at the Apollo for sixty-six weeks). He had drug problems. He married multiple times. He was African American, which meant a lot to Prince but something different to Brown in the pre–civil rights American South. He played a concert to keep the peace after the senseless killing of a black man. He was a demanding bandleader. He employed Alan Leeds as his tour manager. He had a many-year victory lap playing his greatest hits live.
And then there’s the music. James Brown invented funk, solidified soul, and maximized R&B. He blended gospel, blues, jazz, and, later, disco into his mix. And his beats made hip-hop and rap happen. What didn’t he do that Prince did? He stayed away from rock and pop.
Like Prince, when James was onstage, it was impossible not to watch him and, watching him, impossible not to want to be him—ask Mick Jagger. When producer Rick Rubin visited Prince, there was an endless video loop of Brown performing. The live influence blossomed on the Purple Rain tour, Prince’s first with dancers and real horns. On 1992’s Diamond and Pearls tour, Prince’s bigger horn section included trombone, a defining feature of Brown’s early 1970s sound. Brown’s horn section at that time included sax player Maceo Parker, who would later join Prince, and trombonist Fred Wesley. Wesley appears on one Prince track: George Clinton’s unreleased early 1990s track “My Pony.”
Brown and Prince shared a stage twice. In the mid-1960s, Prince’s stepfather put him onstage at a Brown show. He danced and was dazzled by both Brown’s command of his band and the pretty ladies. He went home and started practicing to be Brown. On August 20, 1983, bodyguard Chick Huntsberry piggybacked Prince to Brown’s stage at the request of Michael Jackson, who had just moonwalked his way into the hearts of the crowd at the Beverly Theater in Los Angeles. Brown had no idea who Prince was, and that was just the beginning of the awkwardness. Prince flubbed around with a borrowed guitar, gave a weak try at dancing, and then left the stage, battering a prop on the way off. Brown would be riding Prince’s coattails in just over a year, playing a September 10, 1984, gig at First Avenue.
Prince played bits of more than a dozen Brown songs live, with 1972’s “Talkin’ Loud and Sayin’ Nothing” racking up around 150 performances. Prince never released a studio version of a Brown song but was reminded of something James used to say and sampled “Mother Popcorn” on “Gett Off.”
Stevie Wonder
Stevie Wonder was a child prodigy, releasing his Little Stevie LP at age twelve and hitting number one with “Fingertips—Part 1” at age thirteen. Throughout his teens, he consistently manufactured top 100 pop singles and released more than a dozen successful albums. But by the 1970s, he felt like another cog in the Motown machine. Wonder all but wrote “slave” on his cheek in a protracted contract stare-down with Motown boss Berry Gordy. It wasn’t until Wonder hit twenty-one and was free of his contract that Gordy blinked and relented to his demands.
On 1972’s Music of My Mind, Wonder assumed total control of the recording process, including songwriting, innovative multilayered production, and most instrumentation. This began a string of albums from 1972 to 1976 that stands up to the greatest work of any recording artist over a five-year period. These albums, including Innervisions (1973) and Talking Book (1972), helped define and fine-tune funk and led to the left-turn Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through “The Secret Life of Plants” (1979), a genre-defying LP that influenced Prince’s thinking on Around the World in a Day.
In the fall of 1976, Prince went to New York, scoping a recording contract. Chris Moon got Prince a meeting by first claiming that he managed Stevie Wonder, then admitting he had the “new” Stevie Wonder. In the spring of 1977, Moon-recruited manager Owen Husney hit Los Angeles, also peddling the “new” Stevie Wonder: a black crossover artist who could write, produce, and play everything. This trip resulted in Prince’s first Warner Bros. contract.
Wonder’s “Cold Chill (Prince Version)” was released on the UK promo CD Polydor Brighton Conference 1995, then surfaced commercially a decade later on the iTunes Remixes album as part of a thirty-nine-disc The Complete Stevie Wonder collection. Prince plays guitar on the track, as he does on Wonder’s 2005 single “So What the Fuss” and its multiple remixes.
Stevie Wonder joined Prince onstage on June 26, 1994, at Glam Slam Los Angeles, singing “Maybe Your Baby,” and multiple times over the next two decades. Prince first returned the favor during a 2005 Wonder show in Las Vegas on “Superstition” and “Maybe Your Baby.” The two collaborated at the June 13, 2015, performance for Barack Obama at the White House to celebrate African American Music Appreciation Month.
Wonder’s harmonica on Chaka Khan’s million-selling version of “I Feel for You” most famously connects the duo. The most tangential connections are the 1977 Pepe Willie recordings “Fortune Teller” and “10:15,” which feature Prince on guitar and background vocals, produced by Henry/Hank Crosby, the Motown producer of Wonder’s early hits.
Prince