offstage.
Just as Prince did with Rick James, The Time was intent on upstaging Prince, upset at their lack of creative input and low wages. This resulted in Jesse Johnson getting pulled offstage and getting handcuffed to a coatrack, a major food fight, and Morris Day paying for hotel damages.
Prince first played “Cool” live at Paisley Park on November 4, 1998, before going on to play it more than 100 times, mainly from 2010 on. He also played “The Stick” live four times between 2002 and 2011.
What Time Is It? (1982)
What Time Is It? was released on August 25, 1982. Recorded between January and June 1982 at the home studio and Sunset Sound, it’s once again mostly Prince, although songwriting is credited to The Time (four songs) and Morris Day (two songs) and production to Day and the Starr* Company, another Prince pseudonym.
Most of the music is Prince. Morris Day plays drums on “Wild and Loose,” “The Walk,” and “Gigolos Get Lonely Too” (which Prince released on Originals in 2019). Jesse Johnson contributes a guitar solo to the latter song and Vanity a spoken part on “The Walk.” Prince wrote five of the six songs and cowrote “Wild and Loose” with Dez Dickerson.
The album refines the funk/dance grooves of the first outing and focuses on Day’s predator/prankster character. It’s mainly silly, stretched-out fun on “Wild and Loose,” “777-9311” (Dickerson’s phone number), and “The Walk” until the last two ballads turn a bit more introspective. The sessions also produced “Bold Generation” and “Colleen,” both of which show up on 1999 Super Deluxe.
What Time Is It? hit number two on the black charts and number twenty-six on the pop charts and included three singles. The single “777-9311” hit number two on the black charts, “The Walk” number twenty-four, and “Gigolos Get Lonely Too” number seventy-seven. A-side and B-side edits are unavailable, as is the Prince-written B-side “Grace,” lyrically reminiscent of the Vanessa Bartholomew material on Symbol.
The Time played two headlining gigs before joining the 1999 Triple Threat tour on November 11, 1982, in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Joined by Jill Jones, they backed Vanity 6 from behind a curtain, for $250 each per gig, before performing their own set.
There was again discord between Prince and The Time. It reached a climax on March 24, 1983, when Jam and Lewis, picking up production work to supplement Prince’s meager wages, missed a gig. Benton mimed the bass while Prince played offstage, and Lisa Coleman played Jam’s parts offstage. This led to a fine and a firing on April 18. Jam and Lewis became prodigious producers, producing sixteen pop and twenty-six R&B number one singles, including a slew by Janet Jackson. They played on many of these hits, joined often by Monte Moir, who followed them out of loyalty. In October 1983, the trio was replaced by Paul “St. Paul” Peterson and Mark Cardenas on keyboards and Rocky Harris on bass, although Harris was replaced by Jerry Hubbard after he showed up late for the first day of Purple Rain’s filming.
On the Triple Threat Tour The Time played a standard forty-minute, seven-song set of the debut’s “Get It Up,” “Cool,” and “Girl, joined by “Wild and Loose,” “Gigolos Get Lonely Too,” “777-9311,” and “The Walk.”
“777-9311” got the most love from Prince, performed about forty times from June 19, 1994, at Glam Slam LA through the March 5, 2016, San Francisco sampler set. “Wild and Loose” and “The Walk” were interpolated live a few times.
Ice Cream Castle (1984)
Prince started working with Day and Jesse Johnson on Ice Cream Castle at Sunset Sound on March 26–27, 1983, two days after the Jam/Lewis incident. The session produced the Time’s “Jungle Love” and Crystal Ball’s “Cloreen Bacon Skin,” featuring Day on drums. Recordings continued in April and wrapped in January 1984. In between these last two sessions, the group recorded “The Bird” live at First Avenue on October 4, the only complete band song on the first three records, and filmed Purple Rain.
Purple Rain proved a triumph for The Time and a star turn for Day, but it also signaled the end of the band’s first phase. Day had grown tired of aping Prince’s guide vocals in the studio, although it was also clear that Prince had grown tired of Day’s growing cocaine habit. After Day’s solo career floundered, he was back in the fold by 1989 for the Graffiti Bridge and Pandemonium projects.
Jesse Johnson also left in 1984, taking along Cardenas and Hubbard. Aided by Prince’s former manager Owen Husney, he signed a deal with A&M Records and released three moderately successful albums.
By June 1984, The Time ceased to exist. Prince salvaged Peterson, Benton, and Jellybean Johnson as half of The Family.
Morris Day had a lead role and other members of the reformed The Time played Seven Corners musicians in Prince’s 1990 film Graffiti Bridge. (Courtesy Jeff Munson)
Splitting initially during the Purple Rain and Ice Cream Castle era, The Time broke up a second time after fulfilling Graffiti Bridge and Pandemonium contractual obligations in early 1991. Morris Day pulled the group back together in late 1995 and some version of the band has been performing off-and-on ever since. (Courtesy Thomas de Bruin, unused-prince-tickets.com)
Ice Cream Castle sticks to the same formula as the first two LPs—three long grooves paired with three shorter songs. While not pop, the music here is brighter and more accessible than the first two albums, especially the group’s trademark “The Bird.”
Prince composed “Chili Sauce,” “My Drawers,” and “If the Kid Can’t Make You Come” on his own; “Ice Cream Castles” with Day; and “Jungle Love” and “The Bird” with Day and Johnson, although the songs are credited to Day or Day and Johnson. Day sings lead on all songs and drums on “My Drawers.” Johnson is on guitar for much of the LP, solos on “My Drawers, and drums on “If the Kid Can’t Make You Come.” The live band performs “The Bird” without Prince.
Ice Cream Castle was released on July 2, 1984. It reached number twenty-four on the top 200 and number three on the soul LP charts and went gold. As with the first two LPs, there were three singles: the title song, which hit number eleven on the black charts; “Jungle Love,” which hit number twenty; and “The Bird,” which hit number thirty-three. Two singles featured the non-LP “Tricky,” with the drums and bass from “Cloreen Bacon Skin,” and a US twelve-inch offers “The Bird (Remix).”
Since the band dissolved, there was no tour, but a stripped-down version of the group, led by Jesse Johnson, performed at the third annual Minnesota Black Music Awards at the Prom Center in St. Paul on June 8, 1984. Accompanied by Prince, they performed “Jungle Love.” Prince performed that song and “The Bird” about fifty times each and the title song a few times but didn’t perform the other three songs. His version of “Jungle Love” was released on Originals in 2019.
Pandemonium (1990)
From June to August 1989, Prince worked with Morris Day and Jerome Benton on The Time reunion album Corporate