Saturday, February 18, 2012

Mad for Madhouse

filed under: madhouse, prince, wax poetics

Wax Poetics, the true music-lover’s music magazine, celebrates its tenth anniversary this month with a special issue devoted to Prince. Naturally I crashed the party, with a nearly 5,000-word feature on the late-1980s Paisley Park Records jazz band, Madhouse. Wax Poetics #50, freshly resized and redesigned, should start showing up in bookstores and magazine shops everyplace next week.

M’man Michael A. Gonzales rapped with Jesse Johnson, the former Time guitarist who needs no introduction. (This year Jesse joined The Testimony, D’Angelo’s new band. Watch for them at the Essence Music Festival this summer, rumor has it.) Dean Van Nguyn, editor of Dublin’s One More Robot, interviewed the inimitable Morris Day. ?uestlove ran through 33 reasons why Prince is hiphop. (A mag dedicated to Prince without ?uestlove woulda been as bogus as a mag dedicated to Prince without MML.) Wax Poetics highlights The Family, Larry Graham, Andre Cymone and more. Seriously? Get it before it completely disappears.

My Madhouse article came about because it may be another 15 years before I get a shot at a 10,000-word Vanity Fair story. Four years ago I decided to start work on my dream story, something personal that only a handful of people (the right handful, of course) would even get: an exposé on the cult group Madhouse. For those who don’t know, Prince plays every instrument except sax on their 1987 début album, 8, and nearly everything on the followup record, 16. There is no Madhouse. It’s Prince, with ex-Revolution saxophonist Eric Leeds.

Prince wrote, played and produced these tunes at the tail-end of the most monumental creative peak of his career (1982-1987). Don’t bother trolling iTunes for the music, it’s not there. If you’re interested in hearing Madhouse, then YouTube is probably your best bet. This year I promise to start bugging Rhino to produce a killer Paisley Park box set.

And but so, “Syncopated Strut” is the Madhouse story I would have written for Vanity Fair if Graydon Carter had any idea who I am. I interviewed Eric Leeds in Paris, and his brother Alan Leeds (tour manager to James Brown, Prince, D’Angelo and more). I spoke with ex-Revolution keyboardist Matt Fink; sexy Madhouse cover girl Maneca Lightner; and saxophonist James Carter.

Did I mention the entire story is uncut and online for free? Nearly twice as long as the magazine version? See WaxPoetics.com.

(P.S. Love the image above, a modern take on the flavor of photographer Richard Litt’s classic Madhouse albums for the ever elusive, never released 24. If you’ve never seen the originals, scroll through Facebook’s Mad 4 Madhouse fan page, administrated by you-know-who.)

Friday, July 23, 2010

Anatomy of a Prince Aftershow: Live at New Morning

filed under: new morning, paris, prince

Prince invaded the New Morning—capacity: 300—in Paris at 2:25am last night, in a hush-hush secretive show that lasted until the dawn’s early light. After two tipoffs (special thanks to Saul Williams and Erykah Badu), standing on the rue des Petites-Écuries with a thousand other hopefuls, and an eventual mad dash past security, I caught my first Aftershow.

The lore of the Prince Aftershow dates back at least as far as August 3, 1983: the night Prince & the Revolution played a 70-minute show at Minneapolis’s First Avenue previewing much of the following year’s Purple Rain. A benefit show for the Minnesota Dance Theater, that concert wasn’t exactly an Aftershow, and neither was last night at New Morning (there was no “main” show elsewhere). For over 25 years, the “Aftershow” tag has been applied to any last-minute, previously unannounced, wee hours Prince gig. They tend to be performed in intimate clubs after more mainstream shows someplace larger, with a looser vibe and extremely fanboy-friendly setlists. Prince fanatics have long been earning their stripes as true followers by experiencing these word-of-mouth Aftershows by hook or crook.

My night began with Christine (a/k/a wifey) at Olympia, to see Erykah Badu perform New Amerykah Pt. Two (Return of the Ankh). Kickass harmonicist Frédérick Yonnet, who I’d seen play with Prince & the NPG last year at the Grand Palais, palmed off our backstage passes and ushered us in through Olympia’s “artist entrance.” We passed NPG keyboardist Morris Hayes on the rue de Caumartin, but I thought nothing of it. (Prince played the north of France—La Citadelle in Arras—on July 9, and jumped onstage with Stevie Wonder in Paris on Independence Day. He’s been staying in Paris for a month now, turns out.)

Erykah totally rocked the spot (another post, another time). Backstage afterwards was typically intimate, with kids running around and a small gathering of folks including vocalist Gregory B. Caldwell, singer Mia Doi Todd, poet Saul Williams, producer Julien Bonnet and documentarian Essimi Mevegue. Saul gave me the word first (“You know, right?”). By the time Erykah dropped word on me, I told her I was immediately on my way over.

We walked to the 10th, Gregory, Julien and I, and found over 1,000 heads grouped outside New Morning. G & J split, but I stuck it out. I blew off an Aftershow in Manhattan back in 2002, a night Prince played Avery Fisher Hall. No regrets, but c’mon: how many Aftershows can one blow off? Life’s too short. And in Paris? The world is divided between people who think they can get in and people who think they can’t. Join the positive thinkers.

(How to Crash a Prince Aftershow: Don’t wait on line. Get close as you can near the front door without offending the folks who, you know, have already been standing there for over an hour. When security open the doors, navigate the ebb and flow of bodies and be patient. Use the wait as meditation time; listen to “Om Nama Shivaya” on your iPhone till you get close to the door again. Be patient. Bluff your way out of paying the 80€ charge at the door. Be sympathetic to the security guy who tries to escort you out of the club when you explain you only have 40 bucks. And when a random girl makes a mad dash inside without paying, forcing the security dude to leave you and go after her, make a madder dash for the crowd at stage right. Blend in.)

So, the show. Never seen Prince that close (it was my 11th time), 30 feet away. The eight-piece band started jamming on jazz-fusion drummer Billy Cobham’s “Stratus” while I waited outside, but Prince didn’t step onstage until the minute I got there. Singer Shelby J lent throaty, gospelized vocals to India.Arie’s “Brown Skin” and Aretha’s “I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)” while Prince strummed guitar (the leopard print one), often with his back to the audience. His bespoke black suit had the collar flipped, revealing gold squiggly patterns underneath.

“Y’all got that purple book?” Shelby asked, referencing the 21 Nights Prince photo book with the Indigo Nights CD inside. She ripped into “Baby Love,” a throaty funk number from that live CD; it makes you happy for Prince that this is what he comes up with when he throws commercial considerations completely to the wind.

“Beautiful Strange” came next, from the obscure Prince remix album Rave In2 the Joy Fantastic. It was that kind of night, an Aftershow night. He played “Dreamer” and “Future Soul Song” off the recent Lotusflow3r and 20Ten albums. Background singer Liv Warfield took the foreground on the 1970 Staple Singers lament, “When Will We Be Paid” (once a Prince B-side for the 2001 Angie Stone duet, “U Make My Sun Shine”). These are the type of obscurities that only a Prince fanatic could love, but brought to life in laid-back Aftershow vibe in ways that make them impossible not to love live.

Then there were the parts that make you especially jealous if you weren’t there. Prince started both “Controversy” and “Kiss” alone on guitar, distilling each song to its funk essence and letting the NPG reconstruct the songs on the spot. “Controversy” turned into a “Housequake” chant, with Parisians jumping up and down like the club handed out pogo sticks. He sang “Sometimes It Snows in April” alone at the mic, leading the crowd like an extended 300-member chorus. Did the same for “Still Waiting,” playing keyboard while a random woman from the audience held the mic for him at his Yamaha. (“That’s the best human resource I’ve ever seen,” he said afterwards; homegirl works somewhere in human resources.)

One could say the initial show lasted about eight songs, with the rest of the night made up of six encores. Every time Prince and the band exited the stage, the crowd demanded more, and got served… all the way up to 6:15 in the morning. The final piano medley of the night started with less than a minute of “An Honest Man,” the melancholy, unreleased ballad Prince once opened Under the Cherry Moon playing. During encore no.2, somewhere around 4:30, Prince launched into The Rolling Stones’ “Miss You” as “that song after you drank too much, you got to go home now.” But he stayed. For hours.

“Purple Music” is one of those Prince fanatic songs, recorded around 1982 and never released, probably because of its similarity to “Irresistible Bitch.” But he played it. And it segued into “All the Critics Love U in New Morning.” “How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore” morphed into James Brown’s “Please, Please, Please,” with the crowd eventually begging Prince “please please don’t go.” Which brought on encore no.4. Which began with The Jacksons’ “Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground).” And did I mention Sylvester’s “Dance (Disco Heat)”?

If you ever, ever, EVER get the chance, attend an Aftershow. We should all see at least one.

Here’s the setlist:

“Stratus”
“Brown Skin”
“I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)”
“Baby Love”
“Beautiful Strange”
“Sometimes It Snows in April”
“Hair”
“2045: Radical Man”
“When Will We B Paid?”
“Que Sera, Sera”
“Controversy” w/“Housequake”
“Eye Love U but Eye Don’t Trust U Anymore”
“Dreamer”
“The Ride”
“Blue Motel Room”
“Miss You”
“Kiss”
“Cream”
“How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore?” w/“Please, Please, Please”
“Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground)”
“Everyday People”
“I Want to Take You Higher”
“Purple Music”
“All the Critics Love U in New Morning”
“Dance (Disco Heat)”
“An Honest Man”
“Diamonds and Pearls”
“Raspberry Beret”
“Starfish and Coffee”
“Venus de Milo”
“Still Waiting”
“Future Soul Song”
“Purple Rain”

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Purple Rain Turns 25... and You?

filed under: electric intercourse, moonbeam levels, prince, purple rain

This could run 15, 20 paragraphs easy: Purple Rain came out 25 years ago next month! Around late May 1984, most of us got our first taste of the Linn LM-1 “Linn drum” Drum Computer beats on “When Doves Cry” from worldwide radio stations. “When Doves Cry” hit stores June 9; Purple Rain followed on June 25; and the famous film dropped July 27. But this ain’t about Wikipedia stats. Purple Rain, for me, always resurrects the summer of 1984. Things like:

Co-op City hotties Gretchen and Shanese doing “The Seduction” (a recreation of Prince’s “Baby I’m a Star” self-caressing stage stutter from Purple Rain, involving G. & S. circling willing Bronx boy-toy victims and feelin us up).
That super-effeminate pink Ebony magazine cover with Prince holding a rose in front of his unbuttoned ruffled shirt, the one that made me refuse to see the movie till it came out on VHS in 1985. (The joke was on me.)
My personal discovery of Purple Rain, playing the cassette while fighting through some 9th grade homework. (Back-to-back with Cyndi Lauper’s She’s So Unusual, incidentally.)
The rumors of an X-rated Purple Rain floatin around, where sexy Prince and Apollonia outtakes revealed what our horny teenage imaginations just knew went down on set.
The college-age homeboy in my building who lent me those 12” extended remixes one day for the B-sides: “Another Lonely Christmas,” “God,” “17 Days.”

In fact, I’ll break here to talk about my alternative iTunes Purple Rain mix a little. Yes Virginia, there’s at least one Purple Rain outtake. Waiting to renew my carte de séjour recently at a French préfecture (worse than the Department of Motor Vehicles), I cued up that playlist on my iPod and reminisced.

“Electric Intercourse” is a ballad cast in the mold of “The Beautiful Ones,” recorded in that 1983-84 period where Prince could do no wrong: piano, Linn drum, screams. “Feel some kind of love for you, don’t know your name,” he starts with a synth burst. “It’s the kinda love that takes two/Want you and I’m not ashamed.” He slithers towards the chorus as if tumbling out of that steamy bathtub from the “When Doves Cry” clip: “Baby, you shock my body with a sexual electricity extraordinaire…” Etc, etc. It’s a lost gem. (Lost, that is, unless you have LimeWire.)

“Moonbeam Levels” is another rarity, though it dates a little further back to the 1999 era. I lost my cassette of the mix long ago, an oldie from my college bootleg hookup Dave, but it’s a monster. Sometimes called “A Better Place to Die,” Prince sings about a post-nuclear world and searching for evidence of his lost love’s survival. Getting back to Purple Rain, there’s also the “God (Instrumental)” that Americans got cheated out of, the eight-minute Purple Rain love theme only available on the B-side of the U.K. “Purple Rain” singles. Sublime.

Though I always loved “Controversy,” “1999,” “Little Red Corvette” and “Delirious” growin up, Purple Rain is where I really joined the revolution, and I didn’t really defect till Come 10 years later. (Wow, was Come only 10 years after Purple Rain? Prince is so prolific that it don’t hardly seem like it.) In an alternate universe, Greg Tate is writing 15,000 words on this milestone anniversary for a The New Yorker feature. Till we get that space-time continuum machine running, there’s just us.

Thursday, March 13, 2008

Prince and His Parisongs

filed under: dez dickerson, parisongs, prince

Just heard “Modernaire” by Dez Dickerson & the Modernaires over on imeem.com, a song I’ve only known 30 seconds of for the past 28 years. For anyone not a Prince fanatic, Dez played guitar in homeboy’s band from 1979 to 1983, wrote music for The Time and Vanity 6, sang a line on “1999” and made a brief appearance in Purple Rain performing the never-released “Modernaire.” The track reminded me that I’ve been meaning to jot down some trivia linking Prince to the city of Paris for a while, so let’s get it over with.

Arguably, things went creatively downhill for Prince after 1987 and the Sign o’ the Times album. Without the foil of Wendy & Lisa and the rest of the Revolution post-86 (not to mention his reputed fiancée at the time, Wendy’s twin sister Susannah), he got more hermetic and less open to incorporating different influences into his sound, and what happened happened. I’m actually a fan of later work like The Gold Experience, that acoustic bonus CD to Crystal Ball entitled The Truth, even Batman. But imagine if Prince had settled in Paris after filming Under the Cherry Moon in the south of France, married Susannah (or, hell, Sheila E.) at 28, had some babies, kept the Revolution around and concentrated on his more open-minded European audience. Just something to make you go “hmmm.”

Here’s that checklist; please add tidbits that I’ve maybe forgotten:

The first line of “Sign o’ the Times”: “In France a skinny man died of a big disease with a little name…”
Prince used Controversy Music as the publishing company for most of his songs, but the instrumentals he wrote and performed pseudonymously as Madhouse circa 1986 were all copyrighted under Parisongs, as was all output from The Family (“The Screams of Passion,” etc.).
“It’s Gonna Be a Beautiful Night” from Sign o’ the Times was recorded live in Paris at Le Zénith.
“Girls & Boys” has that French lyric: “Vous êtes très belle, mama…”
The B-side to “Mountains,” the second single from Parade, was an instrumental with incredible drumming from Sheila E. entitled “Alexa de Paris.” (It’s criminal this wasn’t on The Hits/The B-sides.)
The “U Got the Look” video has Sheena Easton rolling through Paris while icons speed by in the background: the Eiffel Tower, the Moulin Rouge, the Arc de Triomphe, and the Egyptian obelisk at Invalides.
That lyric from 1985’s “Condition of the Heart”: “There was a girl in Paris whom he sent a letter to…”

By the way, Dez has a tell-all book out these days, My Time With Prince: Confessions of a Revolutionary.