Hermits were every bit as immediately compelling as r’n’b. These were the groups that played uptown and these were the groups that got the local airplay. In 1978 when Prince released his first album the best known Minneapolis band were punk thunderers Hüsker Dü; a couple of years later, you might mention The Replacements as well. Though punk as such didn’t make much impact on him, white rock and pop were to influence Prince’s music from the beginning.
It’s wrong to suggest that Minneapolis had no musical infrastructure, just that it was very different to those of Chicago or Philadelphia. The town’s most important contribution to popular music was the retail system established by Amos Hellicher’s distribution label Soma. By the late 1960s, though, it was living up to its name. People were being put to sleep by smooth, close-harmony romance and looking for a more resonant style of pop. There was also a thriving club scene in the Twin Cities, particularly in the knot of clubs and restaurants round Seven Corners, where John and Mattie Nelson played.
Records, gigs and radio are all influential, but what sparks many a career is a strong local role model, someone from the same background who makes good. Apart from his father, there was no one of a slightly older generation to emulate. Pianist Bobby Lyle is probably best known as MD to soul diva Anita Baker in the mid-1980s and from the smooth jazz of Pianomagic and 2004’s Straight and Smooth. Lyle grew up in Minneapolis, and was known to John Nelson. His early records seem to have been released only in Japan and by the mid-1970s he was drifting away from jazz, and from the Twin Cities. In 1976, though, Lyle was working with Sly & the Family Stone and Prince would certainly have been aware of that.
While Prince’s ferocious self-determination clearly didn’t develop in a vacuum, there was no black Minneapolitan he could point to and say: I want to be him. The only internationally famous Minnesotan was Bob Dylan, who was born in Duluth and grew up in grimy Hibbing, where black skin probably meant you worked in the iron mill and washed off at the end of the day. There were bands around who proved it was possible to make a go of a musical career, even on a relatively unstructured scene like that of North Side Minneapolis and, given the scale of the place, it’s inevitable that their histories intersect with Prince’s. Flyte Tyme was perhaps the most successful of the basement groups, with a membership that included Terry Lewis, Jellybean Johnson and later Jimmy Jam. It also featured a small horn section, which would not have endeared it to Prince, who was initially wary of horns. There was also another North Side band The Family (not to be confused with English rockers Family), for whom Prince later wrote ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’, best known from Sinéad O’Connor’s cover version.
Jam and Lewis, who went on to be Janet Jackson’s saviours, eventually co-opted the Flyte Tyme name for their production company, but by then the band had metamorphosed into Prince protégés The Time, who became an integral part of his scene-breaking tour packages, along with the shrewdly confected girl band Apollonia 6. Soul star Alexander O’Neal was proposed as vocalist for the new group, but declined; perhaps believing that Minneapolis wasn’t big enough for Prince and himself; perhaps outraged at the money side of the deal; perhaps (as in one version) sacked for being ‘too black’, or possibly looking too much like Billy Eckstine for a funk-rock group. Five years older than the young Pretender, O’Neal’s breakthrough nevertheless didn’t come until 1985, by which time Prince was touring the multiple-platinum Purple Rain.
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School friends remember him as Skipper (or Skippy) Nelson. The pet name came from his mother and might have been Mattie Shaw hitting back at her husband. Even if, as Jimmy Jam remembers, most of it was platforms and the biggest ’fro anyone had ever seen, those who talk about Prince remember him as having stature, on and off the basketball court. Not everyone called him Skippy or Princess or Butcher Dog; he was also known as ‘the Human Jukebox’, the kid who knew every song going and who could reproduce them on a widening array of instruments. Some of his celebrated multi-instrumentalism and composer credits are on the material released on Minneapolis Genius, but there Prince is very much a group player. The 94 East material, originally intended for Polydor before that deal fell through, overlaps with the first work on what became For You.
His musical career seems to have begun at home, picking out tunes on John Nelson’s piano. The first tune he learned to play is supposed to have been the television Batman theme, coincidentally given his later involvement with the Tim Burton movie. It’s said that he wrote his first song at the age of seven, and it may well be that that first manuscript (possibly known as ‘Funkmachine’) is lying in the vaults at Paisley Park even now. Interestingly, no one who knew him in his early teens remembers him as a prodigy. Prince’s ‘genius’ is more likely to have resulted from sheer hard work rather than some kind of Mozartian gift. There’s a possible parallel here with Andy Warhol, the ‘Picasso out of Pittsburgh’, whose apparently enervated and will-less approach to work disguised a ruggedly industrial and intensely hard-working background; no coincidence that this son of a manufacturing town should call his studio ‘the Factory’. It’s significant, too, that one of the most important aspects of Prince’s musical education was a business class. It was run at Central High by an easygoing former session player called Jim Davidson who taught students how to make and present demo tapes, as well as copyright, contract and other legal issues. Andre Anderson and Terry Lewis both took the class, but it was Prince who took the lessons most to heart. One wonders how often in later years he tried to apply Davidson’s uncomplicated principles to his dealings with Warners, sacked band members and copyright claimants.
There was scarcely a moment in his teens when Prince was not making music, either alone or with the friends who formed his first band. Grand Central went through a number of personnel, including Prince’s cousin Charles Smith, who seems to have been a respectable drummer. (He also introduced Prince to keyboard player Gayle Chapman.) He was probably better than his replacement Morris Day, who along with Andre Anderson and Prince formed the nucleus of the active band. There may have been an extra-musical reason for Day’s recruitment, since his attic offered an alternative rehearsal venue to Prince’s basement at the Anderson house. When they were working from home Andre’s sister Linda sometimes played keyboards.
Until Prince was sidetracked – or monorailed – into making solo demos with Chris Moon, Grand Central and Champagne were the focus of his musical life. Recollections vary as to what they sounded like. One has to be wary of self-interest in the suggestion of band members that the roots of Prince’s black music revolution lay in those chaperoned gigs in downtown bars, where the age limit was a rock-solid twenty-one. Most reliable witnesses remember a mix of lightly funked-up rock and jazz. Champagne was a faintly ironic banner for the abstemious and in those days not even studiedly frivolous Prince. No underage drinking for him, in fact nothing that got in the way of making music.
If his father was the key early influence, it was a cousin by marriage who helped steer him and Grand Central along a more professional route. Linster Willie – always known as Pepe – left New York for Minneapolis after marrying Shauntel Manderville, who was the daughter of Mattie Nelson’s twin sister. Pepe had worked in and around the music business for some years, as a gofer for his uncle’s band Little Anthony and the Imperials and as a freelance songwriter. He knew Prince and talked to him about music, but it seems that it was Morris Day’s mother who suggested that he take Grand Central in hand. The first priority, as far as Willie was concerned, was to put the publishing situation on a proper footing, suggesting to Prince that he write to Broadcast Music Incorporated – the powerful BMI – and make sure that all songs were securely copyrighted. This was one area where Jim Davidson’s Business of Music lessons seem not to have taken, and later it was to be the source of much disagreement.
Like just about every association in Prince’s early life, this one ended acrimoniously, but for a time the cousins worked together effectively enough. Pepe helped streamline Prince’s songs, which demonstrated more creative ambition than structure or market awareness; in 1977, the year before his debut record, Prince was playing on Pepe’s own demos. They attracted some interest from Polydor, who were later set to release 94 East before that deal collapsed. Some of their overlapping work appears on Minneapolis Genius and Pepe Willie is the composer of the briefly successful ‘If You Feel Like Dancing’. Given how his own career stalled apart from that one minor hit, it’s not