Go Crazy.” And maybe it’s easy to confuse “Purple Haze” and “Purple Rain” if you’re in a rush.
The closest Prince got to a Hendrix phase was in 2009 with Lotusflow3r’s turned-to-eleven guitar attack. Hendrix is most obvious on “Dreamer,” which would be at home on Are You Experienced, and the 1960s cover “Crimson & Clover.” The latter includes the classic garage-band riff from “Wild Thing,” which Hendrix claimed as his own at 1967’s Monterey International Pop Music Festival by scorching the song and then torching his guitar.
Prince covered about ten Hendrix songs. Among the highlights are “Who Knows,” from Band of Gypsys, with a “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” quote, from a 2002 Copenhagen aftershow, and multiple performances of “Villanova Junction,” Hendrix’s Woodstock set closer.
Prince released two studio Hendrix covers. The renamed “Red House” appeared as “Purple House” on the LP Power of Soul: A Tribute to Jimi Hendrix, and the reworked “Machine Gun” was an NPG Music Club Download in 2001 as “Habibi” (later edited to eliminate Hendrix references). Prince also recorded “Fire” with Margie Cox for the unfinished Flash/MC Flash album project in 1989. And some claim to hear the Experience’s “Third Stone from the Sun” mixed in with “Take Me with U” on “Rocknroll Loveaffair.”
Miles Davis
Miles Davis was a musical genius, endlessly creative on the trumpet and equally skilled as a bandleader, composer, and arranger. He helped create or perfect at least half a dozen jazz styles, including bebop, cool jazz, and fusion. Like Santana, his playing was lyrical, sweet, and reflexive but without cheap sentimentality or pandering. Like Hendrix, he could be nasty when he wanted to be, whipping up an electric brew of dissonance, often punctuated by resounding silence.
According to Wendy, Miles Davis influenced Prince by allowing him to be confident enough to break barriers, to play by jazz logic rather than pop rules. In many ways, the relationship was less one of influence than a mutual admiration society, as Davis was praising Prince as early as 1999.
Prince and Davis never pulled together a full project. After Davis signed with Warner Bros. in 1985, he asked Prince for a song for his next LP: Tutu. In December 1985 during the Parade sessions, Prince created “Can I Play with U?” for Davis, who later overdubbed some trumpet. Neither was happy with the results, and the song remains unreleased (but widely available). At the same session, Prince recorded the tribute instrumental “A Couple of Miles” (also unreleased). Writing these songs motivated further December 1985 and January 1986 instrumental sessions that set the groundwork for future jazz projects, including Madhouse.
Prince continued to offer Davis songs until the latter’s death in 1991, but none were recorded and released by Davis. These songs include unreleased Madhouse 24 songs “17 (Penetration),” “19 (Jailbait), “and “20 (A Girl and Her Puppy),” and 1989’s instrumental “Funky”; Davis incorporated “Penetration” and “Movie Star” into his late 1980s/early 1990s live repertoire. Two days after Davis’s death Prince recorded the unreleased tribute “Letter 4 Miles” (aka “Miles Is Not Dead”).
Beyond all this and the copy of Davis’s 1986 LP You’re Under Arrest hanging around Christopher Tracy’s room in the film Under the Cherry Moon, Prince dipped into Davis’s songbooks at least half a dozen times live (more often playing songs associated with rather than composed by Davis). Most notable are the Miles Smiles classic “Footprints,” which was frequently played in Las Vegas in early 2007, and “Freddie Freeloader” from a December 5, 1987, one-off gig at the Fine Line Café in Minneapolis. A few weeks later, Prince celebrated New Year’s Eve at Paisley Park, closing with Davis playing on “It’s Gonna Be a Beautiful Night” in a medley that included Davis’s “So What.” Prince’s “Copenhagen” was originally released as an NPG Music Club download, including part of Davis’s “Jean-Pierre,” but the quote from the We Want Miles track was left off a subsequent download and the C-Note LP.
Parliament/Funkadelic
P-Funk is a half-century-long party united under one hellacious groove by ring-leader George Clinton. Anchored by the (nominally) more vocally oriented Parliament and more instrumentally inclined Funkadelic, the P-Funk collective is at turns doo-wop, hard rock, stand-up comedy, pure funk, frat party, political activism, and circus act. And that’s just during the first song of their three-plus-hour set.
Perhaps the biggest influence Clinton had on Prince is showing that it’s okay to have fun and even be goofy, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be taken seriously. For Parliament, that meant there’s no shame starting an LP side with the tongue-in-cheek (and other places) “I Call My Baby Pussycat” and ending it with “Oh Lord, Why Lord/Prayer.” And there’s no shame if one of your members appears onstage in diapers.
Parliament taught Prince, everyone really, the importance of stagecraft. The well-staged storytelling of Lovesexy live and the mammoth (if flawed) ambition of the Endorphinmachine don’t happen without P-Funk landing the Mother-ship onstage back in 1976. And it’s in the Lovesexy/Black Album period that the P-Funk influence mainly shows up in the grooves. In terms of song titles, it’s impossible not to see the influence of Parliament songs such as “Aqua Boogie (A Psychoalphadiscobetabioaquadoloop)” in “Superfunkycalifragisexy” and the unreleased “Soulpsychodelicide.” And the same P-Funk song, among others, leads a direct path in terms of electronically altered vocals to tunes such as “Lovesexy” and “Bob George,” not to mention 2007’s “F.U.N.K.,” which was originally streamed with the title “PFUnk.”
Prince played more than a dozen Parliament and Funkadelic songs live but often just played snippets or grooves interpolated into other songs or as parts of medleys. “Flash Light” from 1977’s Funkentelechy vs. the Placebo Syndrome was played most often and given the most care. A live version from Amsterdam on July 26, 2011, was streamed the same day on Andy Allo’s Facebook page. In addition, Prince occasionally performed “Bootzilla” and “PsychoticBumpSchool” from P-Funk bassist extraordinaire Bootsy Collins, who also played with James Brown. Prince recorded, but left unreleased, “Cookie Jar,” originally written and recorded by early Parliament vocalist Fuzzy Haskins and also released by P-Funk’s girl-group blueprint for Vanity 6: Parlet.
The Rolling Stones
In a genre almost defined by white appropriation of black music and culture, the Rolling Stones stand out as the rock act that has benefited the most by repackaging black music for white audiences (Elvis Presley included). This is not to belie their accomplishments or to attribute malicious intent but rather to give some context for Dez Dickerson’s claim that Prince wanted to be the “black version” of the Rolling Stones, with Dez’s Keith Richards to Prince’s Mick Jagger. What exactly is the black version of a white band that wants to be a black band? Maybe that’s the explanation of Prince that makes the most sense.
What about the Rolling Stones inspired Prince? Musically, they’re cut from the same cloth: their best songs are R&B-based pop songs with a rock edge, danceable, but more than just dance music. Lyrically, especially in the 1970s, Jagger pushed the boundaries of innuendo and appropriate language (e.g., “Star Star” aka “Star Fucker” and “Short and Curlies”), boundaries that Prince would push even further. Onstage, Prince copped many of Jagger’s moves (moves Jagger had copped from James Brown and others) and embraced the role of the hypersexualized singing/dancing front man. There’s also the sustained financial success helped in part by astute business acumen, from the genius branding of the tongue logo to pioneering sponsorship deals to the creation of the money-generating Mobile Studio. And the anger with management and record labels played out in song in ways that Prince could only dream about, on both the filthy unreleased “Andrew’s Blues,” about their manager Andrew Loog Oldham, and “Schoolboy Blues” (aka “Cocksucker Blues”), a barely released bit of obscenity created as a middle finger to Decca Records, which required one more single