New Power Madhouse & Glam Slam Ulysses (alternate album configurations I keep returning to)

we r the new power generation!
new power, we stand!

ur gonna have 2 fight ur own damn war!
we don't wanna fight no more!

my heart lives somewhere between Partyup and New Power Generation on the rebel-meter

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this is a placeholder post to prod me into finishing the post that goes here. if you see this line expect edits. it's a Work In Progress, yo

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I need to express how much I love some unreleased albums and the various configurations of what became Come and The Gold exPeRIeNCE. My undying love for the songs originally put together for a multimedia dance theater project called Glam Slam Ulysses and another piece from shortly thereafter most fans know as 10,000 Wallpaper. Also the New Power Madhouse remix of the Madhouse 24 album, as I can't seem to get enough of that lately.

I've seen some people say that the song Strays of the World is too campy, too much broadway bombast for their tastes. To each their own, I'd never try to push this on you any more than I'd let you push Wedding Feast or tMBGitW on me. But I love the all-encompassing idea behind SotW and how it's like New Power Generation part 3 or 4 or something in my heart.

the 'Hide the Bone' story

I was living away from home for only the second time, at college in a small town in Minnesota. This was the slow part of the year, when winter verrry gradually gave way to spring. Just after the Crystal Ball set came out from Prince, calling himself The Artist at the time,  so we’re talking the timeframe after Emancipation and before NewPowerSoul. 

I walked over to the mall and bought a copy in the clear-plastic round box direct from the Sam Goody. They had about a dozen copies. There had been a full-page ad in most of the Minnesota newspapers that week. As a kid I collected the Star Tribune and Pioneer Press front pages when the Twins won the World Series, I assure you I still have that ad folded up in a drawer somewhere.

I couldn’t get over how stank-dawg nasty-funky Hide The Bone was - any more than I could get the song out of my head. I couldn’t just play it loud for only myself in my dorm room for the fiftieth time. One evening, itching to see people enjoy it as much as me, I took the disc and went to the Student Center.

The snow had stopped a few days before, and it was just another Saturday night in Marshall. Our campus recently renovated a building that had been dormant for years. The Student Center didn’t really have a performance space, it was just a large concrete bunker that doubled as a cafeteria where sometimes you could catch the random folksinger with their acoustic guitar standing in a corner without so much as a microphone.

I still remember being amazed by what they put into the old Food Service East building. An actual lounge with a proper sound system, a real dance floor, a small stage, party lighting complete with a spotlight, a mirror-ball and a well equipped DJ booth. It had a decent kitchen and made acceptable fried American bar-room food. No pool tables and arcade machines to be seen, this was about as slick as it got in the middle of nowhere.

For such an impressively outfitted room, it could have been a friendlier atmosphere, but it was more like halfway-to-Church the way they ran it. They certainly didn’t go for any Snoop, Pac or Biggie in the Student Center lounge - they had a low tolerance for gangster rap, G-funk, whatever that thin, whiny synth-backed rap was called. (Which is why it played incessantly from the footballers’ and wrestlers’ dorm windows until quiet-hours forced them to STFU. They couldn’t play explicit rap in the gym, either. Thus the gym was the domain of those mindnumbingly-bad Jock-Jams comps 24-7.)

I strolled across that shiny floor and stepped up to the DJ, presently playing some anonymous inoffensive hip-hop of the late 90s - Montell Jordan maybe? I politely asked if he’d drop Hide The Bone into the mix. He agreed to drop it in without even looking at it or asking what it was. I sat down nearby and sipped at a coke and waited to reclaim my CD once he’d played it, watching a handful of people lazily dancing, trying to make the most of the teen-club vibes of a place with a dance floor but no alcohol. 

One of the attendees that night was differently-abled and using a self-propelled wheelchair, but there was a small group of no more than 20 people mostly standing around. Then as Montell faded out and Hide The Bone began, bouncy upward notes of thumping bass filling the room with anticipation vibes, the lights swept across from the sliver of a stage and lit the dance floor up in a flicker of colors. 

The guy I’d assumed was the DJ because he was behind the board when I walked in, he faded the room lights down and everybody seemed to take the focus being on the music and the lit-up dance floor. It went from a hallway-discussion to full-on party in a flash.

As hesitantly as any of the Dionysian pleasures are to be engaged in by the average Minnesotan on a given day, these people were clearly waiting for a chance to unwind. Before thirty seconds had passed the atmosphere entirely changed, the babbling stopped, the music took over and commanded respect and vaguely slutty expressions of dancing and glee. 

Even the girl in the wheelchair rolled back and forth just a little bit, the fingers of one hand outstretched, the other clutching the movement-control stick on her armrest to allow her motion, a halfway guilty smile relaxing to spread out across her lips. These few handful of randomly gathered, normally staid, quiet, mostly Lutheran, pale-skinned people however briefly managed to uncage their inner beasts. 

They wriggled around like they just didn’t care. It was a sight to behold and I wish you’d been there to see us. I’d been casually observing, almost uninvolved for the first thirty seconds myself. I’d come as a skeptic with the mind to pull a stunt and then watch like a scientist from my chair. 

This night the almighty Funk would have none of my wallflowerishness, and I almost immediately rose back up. I didn’t let my inner critic stop me, I didn’t have time for that. I just walked a couple steps to the dance floor and got myself on down, bouncing and wobbling around amongst my fellow students as I should have properly been when the song I requested began.

I closed my eyes and swayed around, holding in my memory a dance party and performance I’d attended in the NPGMC lounge at Paisley Park within the previous year. An Emancipation-era warm-up party where there wasn’t a single wallflower, I remember doing ‘The Bird’ to ‘Jam of the Year’ spun by DJ Brother Jules up on the catwalk before the band did their set. 

I held that same inner shine when I was wishing Hide The Bone went on for half an hour that night in the Student Center at college. When all the rump-shaking and bouncing around and joyfulness that went along with my sudden surprise request of Hide The Bone - that should have just kept right on going...well, it went kaput when the next song somehow ended up being ‘I Believe I Can Fly’ and just took those rising vibes and settled them gently back down to the safe, boring solid ground where they’d begun.

I felt a little bizarre. Revved up like a sugar high because I’d just transformed the energy in the room with a singular song choice. Sad to see it immediately sag back to where it had started from. I also felt like I’d just had a handful of bottle rockets shoot out of my hand. Didn’t anybody else think that was awesome how we all just gave in to the groove for a few minutes there?!? 

I walked in and cold dropped a song nobody knew, in a place notorious for the Midwestern stoic-wallflower act, and had them spontaneously bust into party mode like the drop-of-a-hat. I felt like a god with a lightning bolt in my pocket. Prince could do ANYthing! 

That night when everybody just stopped in their tracks and started getting nasty to Hide The Bone. Music can take control, even when we least expect it to, even when we’re not really familiar with the song. Prince music still held mighty magic, even if people didn't hear any of the latest music on the radio very much - it could still MOVE bodies!

With shoutouts to soniclovenoize, jiggy22, purplehassan, listen2prince.blogspot.com and darlingnisi and a thanks for cover art from M Celestine

(Alternate post title: "Get down, all ye Strays of the World!")

shadows between moonbeams

shadows between moonbeams (or if U don’t like that title, in the fashion of a Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoon, try the alternate title: “if we didn’t have dark, we wouldn’t need light” a quote from the dream warriors first record - a band tangentially tied to Prince since the artist known as Ninety-9 - the female slam poet on a few Prince tracks, herself shouted out in typically Prince fashion as “the upside-down double 6” in ?was it Days of Wild or Now? - she appears on the 2nd Dream Warriors record)

I don’t wanna be a downer. I’m neuro-chemically prone to the depressive side of the force, that is, if modern medicine knows half of what it claims to know about me. But I don’t wanna actively bring anybody down. That’s the backwards of my purpose here -which I hope is clear- as grandma would say, from the get-go.

I just wish to take a brief moment to remember things I have seen with my own eyes in the past ten years or so. Not just the shiny moments like going to see Prince in Oakland last February. The electricity of anticipation as we sat facing a lone piano in the center of the stage. The infectious way that we all kept singing ‘Free Urself’ for several minutes after he left the stage. Nobody wanted the evening to end, even after that long second set.

I also remember the pile of Lotusflow3r-MPLSound-Elixir triple-CD sets on the rack in central California Target store shelves marked down to $4.99 and then $2.49 before they disappeared completely. I grabbed two I didn’t need and have since only opened one when I’d misplaced my very first copy, but I should’ve grabbed a bunch more before they either hit the dumpster or the Goodwill.

Going back a little further I remember multiple occasions stopping at the New Power Generation boutique in Uptown, Minneapolis and seeing the various remix versions of TMBGITW each on their own single, at least five different ones. Staxowax, Mustang Mix, etc. They were all marked down to 99 cents in their OWN artists’ store. I could have, were I not the broke-on-top-of-broke teenager at the time, bought a pile of 10 copies of EACH one. I just saw somebody selling the Mustang Mix remix CD for $38!

Heck, I could’ve bought the TMBGITW “greeting card” format single, on CD or cassette, for just a couple of dollars each. Those are going for ridiculous amounts of money on various e-commerce websites because most people don’t really know what they are. So the nefarious profitmonger can post a single picture of the gold symbol on the front cover and promise their item is “rare and unreleased” when it’s anything but. *smh* I mean, yeah, it’s rare NOW, but at the time they were slashing prices just to get them out of the door and anybody with paper could have walked out with a handful.

I’m not trying to throw a bone to the haters, either. TMBGITW was huge in the world, a little less so in the US because WB had already done some damage to the relations between Prince and O(+> and the fans. That was in February and March when it was full of springtime vibes, fresh and new and still getting video and radio play. Come September it was yesterday’s news and the single was being marked down even at the NPG store.

By contrast I remember feeling blessed when I happily grabbed The Rainbow Children on CD at Best Buy in Rochester, Minnesota when it had been marked down to 99 cents. If there had been more than just the one, I would have bought a handful at that price. It wasn’t an album that deserved to be relegated to last-week’s-news, it deserved far better than that. I already had it digitally since I paid for the NPGMC, but I’d never hunted down the actual CD till that day.

There were moments between 2008-2015 when I first heard digital one-off singles Purple & Gold and Rich Friends. Rich Friends is like a bad sequel to The 1 U Wanna C. I don’t hate the music of that song, but a refrain of “I gotta lotta money” in the era of the W.T.O. protests and ever-worsening income inequality in America is a glaringly tone-deaf moment from somebody who ought to know better. Rich Friends is worse - Vegas schmooze oozy enough to leave a snail trail. This track provides probably the best argument of anything Prince actually released (digitally, I know not physically) that should have stayed in the vault.

While I personally like Purple & Gold, there seems to be pretty much universal opinion against it online and in podcasts, commentary, and on the whirl of rabid knives known as the org. It could have stood the more layered majestic approach given to 3 Chains O’ Gold rather than the flat digital production it got, but that’s all opinion. There’s honest inspiration underneath that old-fashioned fight-song, but not so much with Rich Friends.

Le sigh. This world be what this world be - if I didn’t choose or help to make it that way, I won’t feel guilty for the sadder things it does without my consent. It’s like domestic politics. We were all screaming as loud as we could before it got this bad. How do you scream any louder? We’re already at 11.5 on a scale that ended at 10. In the grand scheme of things, compared to glacial topics like war and peace, life and death, the miniscule fact that your favorite artist didn’t do what you expected them to do on ONE danged song? Boo-to-the-hoo to the hoo-hoo-hoo!??!

Back to the topic of the post, the sad truth is that the general public grew a fair amount of distance between themselves and the Prince we fams/fans have been loving since the 80s or before. Not enough younger music listeners know the stuff that’s been making us happy and enriching our daily lives since the 90s. I can’t help but want to correct this -relatively minor- injustice. 

I want the Purple-Rain-level casual-fans to know the NPGMC tracks as well as those of us who happily paid for them in 1999 and 2000, and I want them to know those songs N-O-W! (I don’t want the NPGMC tracks only available from Tidal, either! That’s pop-fascism! Spread them far and wide to increase the general public’s awareness of them, and cast the moneychangers out of the Vault forever and ever, amen!) I want the kids who think ‘wow Prince sure was funky back in 1983!’ to know how ferocious Billy Jack Bitch, M.P.L.S., the cowbell-free version of Endorphinmachine, F.U.N.K., Mad, Funky Design and Screwdriver can be!

Just because the rest of the world was going gaga for 2pac at the time, why wasn’t everybody else I knew trading cassettes with people on the internet in the spring of 1994 and getting their first exposure to Now, Days of Wild, Pheromone, Acknowledge Me, and 319? Nothing about radio at the time was compelling. These songs were infectious, catchy, and immediate. They were of-the-moment. It was incredible to roll up to Paisley Park for a show and have the songs they were gonna play to bump out of your car while you waited with everybody else for the doors to open and the line to start forming.

Hard as it can be to imagine for a hermit-curmudgeon like me, I actually went out to a dance-club no-cover ‘Prince tribute’ night nearby. A few hours later I left inspired to make an every-other-track-is-Prince type of mix myself. I’m just reaching for Daft Punk and Kip Blackshire and plenty of Minnesotan music at least as much as their disco-heavy night or any of the plastic-pop-music stuff most of the young drinking-and-dancing crowd was probably expecting to hear this past Thursday night.

I don’t even think, no matter how much I’d normally be itching to, that I’d include any of what the whiners would decry as ‘bootleg’ material in this mix. So it will only feature tracks that were actually released, no matter how limited the CD pressings were, and anything available in the present day ending-April 2016 on the various digital platforms. And just bc the status is still iffy, I would steer clear of the newest Deliverance EP or the Purple Rain Deluxe coming soon but not yet officially released.

My intent is to prove a point and big-up the 90s-00s at the same time as being a funky-ass mixtape I’d hope to amaze a few friends with. I don’t know how it would fare if dropped at the club I was in the other night. I’d like to hope it would go over great, but I wouldn’t sweat it either way. The doing of the thing itself is its own reward.

thoughts & first impressions of Deliverance EP

Trying to make sense of all this. Only about a year ago we were hearing about how Prince very quietly wanted to redefine “p2p” and sell records independently, the way they initially distributed Judith Hill’s album. Digitally direct from the artist, but if any physical copies were to be made they’d be all indie from the pressing/printing to the Subaru trunk the boxes rode to the store shelf in, and the storefront handing over merchandise for paper.

For those who’ve been down with midwest rap and hip-hop music since the 90s, it was like he woke up to how Doomtree have been doing everything, and Rhymesayers before them. Even down to Judith Hill’s album and the Hit’n’Run Phases being pressed by the same Minneapolis based Copycats Media that does in-house promotional materials for Doomtree. It looked like there could be a new trail being blazed by Prince, distribution-wise, is what I’m getting at.

Then this week like a bolt from the blue, an engineer announced and seemingly instantly released tracks Prince recorded about a decade ago already, a mini-suite they’re calling the Deliverance EP. It has cover art both distinct enough to mark a new project, yet similar enough in scope to his most recent indie online digital releases. On the website are the lyrics, laid out spatially so that they’re slowly meandering down the screen in a fashion not unlike the original lyric-video for One Song. 

Equally surprising is that within two hours of having discovered the EP was available and having bought myself a copy, news comes crushing down from all sides that the litigious corporatists are suing to stop this music from being released by anybody but a corporate interest. While they may have a legitimate point, I still bristle with outrage at the same old WB-mindset taking the side of Tha Man rather than the individual artist who made the songs. 

I couldn’t help but wonder as I clicked through paying for and getting the files...just who is getting this money and where is it going. I didn’t see any indication it’s being donated 100% to Yes We Code or any of the artist’s other favorite charities. So that’s still a mystery.

I just think it’s to Prince’s lasting credit as an icon and a visionary as well as an upsetter and a determined independent, that somehow even now he’s bringing music to his audience whether any of the powers-that-be want him to or not!

I haven’t even played the whole EP for myself yet. I’m taking a very slow approach to the new music, like a friend I made at college who listened to all his new albums for the very first time at the rate of one-and-only-one song per day. So I won’t finish it until this weekend. (I must express my dismay at being sold joint-stereo mp3s at premium prices and having the proper flac lossless files priced at nearly 3x the lossy version. $20 for flac? Even Tidal doesn’t charge that much! What purpose could this have other than short-term profit?!?!)

I am very pleased to hear new Prince music playing in my home again. I can hardly begin to form opinions about it. I’m reminded of several other songs with similar sounds and lyrical content. ‘I Am’ already has the feel of something I’ll remember for a long time. I’ve only heard it once, trying to savor it instead of play it 20x in a row the way my teenaged self would have surely done.

I’m certain there are dozens of these kind of new music experiences awaiting our thirsting ears, still cloaked in the veil of the legendary Vault. I hope that all of them are not in the tight clutches of the corporatists. I hope there are many scattered among the common people waiting to be discovered in their own proper time.

Honestly, knowing how Prince and The Artist Formerly Known as Prince disliked the corporate culture of America and the larger world, I find myself hoping he spent the majority of the time between 2005 and 2010 cutting one-off sessions like the Deliverance EP. I hope it rains down new music from all sides to bring chaos to the corporatists, the profit-minded, profit-motivated people attempting to reinvent Paisley Park as Graceland North. 

I support a Paisley Park museum, yes, but not affiliated with Graceland, thank you. And they could have waited an entire year before opening it, wouldn’t have hurt anything but the zeroes. The critics of the suddenness of the tours starting last fall aren’t making arguments without merit. Money should not be the central guiding motive behind what remains at Paisley Park, is all I’m saying. It reflects poorly on the man who knew enough about inequality to write more than a few songs with the depth, tragedy, and common sense present in Money Don’t Matter 2night.

The tickets for the 2017 Celebration at Paisley Park are far more than they ever were during Celebrations Prince held there in the past. This time around they cost as much as a plane ticket costs if you’re 1000+ miles away. That isn’t what fans experienced while the man himself was here to keep the costs down. Furthermore, his own Celebrations took place nearest his June birthday, not April - the month when -if anything- death itself died defeated by music which lives forever.

So owing to my lifelong anti-capitalist streak, I sincerely hope Prince left tons of unreleased, uncatalogued music laying around all over the world to jump up and enrich the lives of his fanbase while they keep the legal department chasing their tails.

That is what I choose to make of the Deliverance EP before I’ve even heard more than 2 songs of it.

In closing and in brief, if the rumored tracklist for Purple Rain Deluxe is accurate, there’s plenty of wasted space on 7-inch edits where there could be more content that’s not already present. The edits are already represented  in the proper full length versions. If you didn’t hear the outcry from the ‘we hate edits’ chorus when WB’s obligatory ‘The Hits/B-Sides’ came out loaded with them, get ready for a whole new recital from that perspective.

3 Maxi-Singles that should have been, could have been MORE

First there was New Power Generation, then Gett Off and Cream. There was a brief window there when everything could have been really, really sweet.

I know a lot of today’s audience hadn’t even been born yet at the time, but I don’t care. In this life you KNOW what you KNOW. I was there in the room for a bunch of Paisley Park performance dates in 1994 and 1995 and I remember how it felt then and in the years between 1986 and 1992 before I'd ever seen them play, where I just wore out the few cassettes I'd been fortunate enough to own. 

Prince’s best years were right there before our eyes and ears, and we watched as the profit motive and the love of money (*cough* WB *cough*) crushed what could’ve been a stellar artistic achievement and redefined a culture or two. Unfortunately for the rest of us, almost as soon as it started it was over. 

A few familiar glimmers of hope trickled out in the following years, but then this particular brief period of stunning original achievement slammed back shut again. Or at least IF the process of splitting a single into half a dozen wildly creative, enjoyable variations of itself continued, the results of that process never made it past being sealed in the vault.

We were offered a brief glimpse into the process of music-making for Prince and the New Power Generation. The very first Maxi-Single/EP of its kind almost snuck off like a fluke. From what the general public seems to remember as an unfulfilling moment, the Graffiti Bridge film spawned an excellent ensemble soundtrack album. 

The song from which the New Power Generation take their name was the very first maxi-single with expanded, extended, remixed, and otherwise jammed-on, varied, jazzy, funky takes on the source material proved it could be a viable form of expression worthy of merit independent of the album itself. But like I said, it came at a time when there were a lot of other logistical balls in the air, so to speak, and even this could have been so much more. 

The wealth of material from the GB sessions could have easily blown the NPG single into a full mini-album type of affair. Instead, cuts like Elisa Fiorillo’s Oobey Doop and Mavis Staples’ My Tree ended up as snippets in the outro of the album track and scraps on bootlegs for fans left to collect. If they had appeared on this maxi-single there could have been one more format the 1980s would’ve been known for.

In 1991 the Diamonds and Pearls album came out with a series of stellar hit singles and chart topping music videos. Alongside this popular success was the fact that each of the singles from the D&P record had a maxi-single attached which truly defined the artform. The maxi-singles in question turned out to be nearly stuffed with content. Remixes, re-imaginings, dub-style, instrumentals, laid-back solos and rapping variations on the lyrics. 

Just about anything that might happen in the process of any band practicing and rehearsing got included, a very wide net was cast on the session that brought about the single songs and this resulted in a cornucopia of various approaches and attempts to re-cast the original music in new and interesting forms, imaginative directions.

Cases in point, the maxi-singles for the tracks Cream and Gett Off. Following the first-of-its-kind, at least in the Prince discography, the previous single for the track New Power Generation from the Graffiti Bridge soundtrack had also toyed with remixes, re-interpretations, and flat-out reinventions of the source material presented on the maxi-single.

The pinnacle of the listener being invited behind the velvet rope and into the music-creation process remains the Diamonds and Pearls maxi-singles. The sheer infectious energy and forward momentum in the product is of enduring quality, memorable and innovative. The later singles from D&P didn’t have such impressive variety, perhaps due to the fact that the band was touring and supporting the record at the time. More dramatic challenges laid in wait for Prince, who would change his name in the coming years. 

From a sociological perspective, I recognize there’s inherent bias in the music which was most important to you when you were blossoming from a youth into an adult. Psychologically it makes sense that we’d be attached to what was our support at such a dramatic, dynamic time in our lives. I just also know that my defaults were dialed in, my tastes were whet, and my expectations set for a new normal where Prince would bang out an hour or more of variations on his new singles as a matter of course. 

To say that I wanted more is mere understatement, I expected it because Prince and the New Power Generation as a sheer force of nature coached me to expect they always sounded that loose, oozing with creative collective energy the way they did on those maxi-singles.

The albums were workouts and rip-roaring headlong attacks of innovation and emotional honesty. But the singles could be a similar space for a different, spontaneous creation growing outward in the drift of the original songs, if Gett Off and Cream were any indication. I yearned for the day when I’d have a heap of singles just like them in a pile next to my stereo, slowly getting worn-out from regular use.

Unfortunately it wasn’t meant to be. I can tell that the years-later awkward attempt at recreating the magic, The Beautiful Experience, could have been stellar. The pieces of what should have been are still with us. There’s an impressive version of TMBGITW by Brian Gallagher solo on his saxophone, there’s the remix-ish 2morro that ended up on Crystal Ball, and one can only imagine what else might have been planned for TBE before it became clear it would be just a by-the-numbers bore-fest.

The Artist Formerly Known As Prince wanted TBE to be far better than what we eventually got. Warner Brothers squashed TBE into being a strictly by-the-numbers affair featuring no new material. Not a hint of 'Violet the Organ Grinder' to be found, this was chaste as a perfume advertisement.

The Space maxi single from the Come record a brief time later was also a glimmer of what could have been. This did contain two different remixes that were as good as the material from the D&P maxis. It’s just that the connective tissue wasn’t there. No solos, no jazzy noodling around, no house remixes, and very little of the loose, playful, fun-spirited band party we’d come to expect shows up here. One can assume there could’ve been the original more skeletal demo-like version of Space from The Glam Slam Ulysses dance review. The one with the NASA samples fully out in front of the music louder than on the album version.

Of course there are the myriad versions of Come, in addition to the 10+ minute pimptastic smut sandwich that came out as the album version of the track. (The first time I heard the ten-minute Come mini-suite drifting into self-parody as it tread on soft-pornography is the very first time I doubted Prince’s artistic sense. Unfortunately it also would not be the last...)

If TAFKAP hadn’t been feuding with his label at the time, we might have gotten the Come EP with 18 & Over in its proper place as a remix, rather than filler on Crystal Ball. We could have heard the original skeletal techno styled version of Come with the original demo-ish lyrics, or the more polished, later version included on The Beautiful Experience broadcast film in Europe.

Still, I remember thinking during the Symbol record and the long, long haul to The Gold Experience a few years later that these songs still deserved the D&P maxi-single treatment. I didn’t care if P had legitimate differences with his wrecka company. I was a loyal listener and music buyer and I wanted the same high quality material I’d grown to expect and love with Gett Off and Cream giving us Gangster Glam and Do Your Dance. 

I wished that instead of the boring, repetitive, dull 7-versions-of-7 promo single, instead there had been a real retail 7-versions-of-7 that wowed us the way Gett Off and Cream had done. A fully acoustic 7, a fully acapella 7, an all-sitar 7, a chorale arrangement of 7 focusing on the background parts in all their celestial glory, maybe some other things I hadn’t even dreamed of. But nope, it never happened.

I remember thinking that I Wanna Melt With U could’ve been a sick, ridiculous remix of 7 on a maxi-single. Then a few years later I remember reading that it was what it had been originally intended for, but then Prince scrapped the story-line segues from the Symbol record and stuffed Melt With U in the middle of side A where it didn’t really belong.

Another blown opportunity.

The years are scattered with moments when I thought, however briefly, that Prince might resurrect the continually rewarding experiences provided on the D&P maxi singles. I remember thinking that Emancipation would have been a perfect time to drop an earthshatteringly huge record and then slap some sick maxi-singles out to just floss and pimp and wow the world with how solid your skills are. Imagine how 45 minutes with wild remixes and variations on Face Down could’ve been underground dancefloor fire?!?!

There aren’t even that many people around who know what I’m talking about now. Things are just different.

Years later when the NPG’s New Power Soul record came out we got another few glimpses of the best maxi singles in the D&P era when Come On got a few decent turns in the remix department. I am reminded by my younger bros that Breakfast Can Wait and Rock & Roll Love Affair got similar maxi-single treatments, but with only minor variations of the source material - nothing like Gangster Glam or Do Your Dance to be found among them - at least not to my ears.

Prince could’ve not just briefly been at, but STAYED at the forefront of the maxi-single remix culture, blowing the walls down and the possibilities wide open for what an artist could do in reinterpreting their own art while it's still fresh and new in the hearts of their audience. To some limited degree the form did survive and flourish for a while, but nothing like what could’ve been. 

I still imagine hearing Prince’s own variations on his singles, as we got in the all-too-brief heydey of the NPG version 1.0. I can’t help but imagine what wonders lay in his vault... or if I’ll be lucky enough to live long enough to hear any of them.

[editing still in progress. I've been kicking this post down the road, rather redundant, unfinished, unedited and unposted long enough. time to whittle it down to size...]

I Will (aka Eye Will) with babble about I Believe In You (live)

Maybe it has been almost 20 years. Sure doesn't feel like it all that much.

I stumbled around Dinkytown Minneapolis during my lunch break. We open our remembery early September 1998, classes at the U starting up again. So many wide-eyed students in the streets that the cars and buses have to hustle around them. The businesses in the area were having a sidewalk sale. Lemming that I am, I ended up digging in the dollar-CD bin outside Disc-Go-Round.

I found "Girl Bros." which I knew to be Wendy and Lisa. This was the first of a heap of more than a dozen discs I grabbed that day. I could spool you off a whole nother blog post about the Tulare Dust comp in this pile, but that's a story for another day, or at least a more No Depression Americana centered theme.

Coincidentally I could also spool off a whole series of blog posts about rare compilations with incredible versions of songs most people have never heard. If only there were an audience for such a thing... /deadpan

I'm sitting here now listening to Blue Scholars' album Cinémetropolis and loving the vibes. Reminds me of CYNE and makes me want to go further down the rabbit hole and further back in their discography.

I should have a list of the comps I've made on cheap CDRs for the car over the years. And the ones I made on cassette and minidisc before that. Might even be worth posting somewhere, if I ever get around to it...

I had been a pretty dedicated Prince addict in the middle of the 1990s. I still am way into him. I've known more than a few people who can discuss the differences between sources for the same content from Neil Young, Led Zeppelin, The Who, and other bands. I'm just the guy who can do that for Prince music.

I've been reviewing sources trying to match the cassette I wore out at college in the 1990s. I had The Beautiful Experience live version of I Believe In You, performed at a live concert broadcast in Europe on Valentine's Day 1994 to celebrate the release of TMBGITW single. Don't get me wrong, they weren't IN Europe.

O(+> and the NPG played for a room of lucky people on the main sound stage at Paisley Park. Where they shot so many of his videos, all of Graffiti Bridge, and what is a big display of four different eras of stage sets now in the Museum it's become.

But relations with Warner Bros being what they were at that time, only us die-hards ever heard The Beautiful Experience live concert at the time. American audiences didn't get to hear or see any of the later 1990s promotional materials that went with the music. The rest of the world got one chance at the time, and nobody who isn't dedicated to preserving their media has seen much of it ever since.

Sure I have "The Sacrifice of Victor" and "The Undertaker"...on laserdisc. Know anybody who can repair laserdisc players? Somebody needs to monetize these assets for the estate and the museum.

But once again I digress... The cassette I played on my walkman at college featured a brutally loud bassline overpowering the rest of the sound during I Believe In You. I grew to appreciate it like that. Thick funky bass that could crush a dumpster made my brains go YUM. I threw my yo-yo and stomped through the snow and sleet with that bumping into my ears all the time back then.

Every 'bootleg' I've found since sounds different somehow. The mix is softer, the vocals and organ are louder than the bass. No big deal. If I exhaust the sources available I'll just process it myself to make it sound like I remember. Until I find that one missing cassette...whenever that is...

Anyway. I Will was a brief song on the record-company kiss-off contractual-obligation album from O(+> called Chaos & Disorder. Despite it having some excellent tracks, most people hardly remember this one. I remember thinking that because I Will blended into the next track, called Into The Light, in a hurried way.

Hurry was no surprise. Everybody wanted the Warner Bros years to be over at that point. So C&D sounded like it couldn't be over fast enough, no matter how many excellent ideas were left stillborn along the brief 45 minute tear through songs rehearsal-style.

On C&D we heard Prince's version of the song, if there's any relation to it, first. That's the point. I had gotten to know C&D like the back of my hand for a while and then had newer music, both from Prince and others replace it in the forefront of my mind. Despite it containing Same December, one of my absolute favorites! Heck, most casual-fan types don't even know there was a video for that song.

When I grabbed that Girl Bros CD I didn't make the connection that their incredible song I Will might even be the same song composition as that half-formed idea on C&D. I just knew I liked it. I liked several of those songs on the Girl Bros. release and played it a lot in that period. Don't get me wrong, I appreciated the whole album, but I kept going back for certain songs. Not just I Will, either.

For some reason I couldn't find the CD when I went looking for it a year ago, it had somehow fallen from my shelf in the half dozen moves I've made since I bought it.

But Wendy and Lisa have an excellent online presence and I gladly bought an expanded digital edition of Girl Bros and some of their other albums in the span of a few mouse clicks. These things don't have to be complicated and they don't have to involve a subscription, either.

I guess I thought I should bring this up. I'd heard O(+> power through a brief verse or two of "eye will" from C&D that became "Into The Light" before it really felt like it started. But when I heard Girl Bros do their song with the same title, I Will, I heard something finished and whole.

I don't even know if there was any shred of a Revolution song that connects these two things.

But if you catch me staring off into the clouds these are the sorts of things I'm probably thinking about...

reflecting on a composition called "emotional pump" & current events

The Revolution played First Avenue for three nights in a row.

There’s still no audio recording in the wild, but mere days later that’s no real surprise. We used to have to wait years to get these things. Now it’s common enough for taper-friendly bands to have their shows, sometimes even HD video, online before the show has ended. And that’s if it wasn’t webcast live for free...

It was a clearly emotional experience. I’d gladly pay the band or the venue for a high quality recording of any/all of it. I suppose that’s a slippery legal slope what with how sue-happy ol’ Spooky Eclectic used to be.

I saw plenty of clips of those shows. I had multiple friends live-streaming from the floor during those shows. There are plenty of phone videos posted here and there. I wonder if somebody could collect them and paste them together into a more whole-shaped experience?

I guess during one of the dance parties the illustrious Questlove played an uncirculated outtake called Emotional Pump that P wrote for Joni Mitchell.  People be saying that Alan Leeds is tight with him and thus Q has songs none of us mere mortals have.

Multiple reports of different songs played, and confusing references to Q having half a dozen other rare grail-level unheard tracks rumored to exist for decades.

The song Emotional Pump itself is odd, as somebody astutely noticed on the org (“how is it any diff asking Joni to sing this smuttiness than MJ asking P to sing “your butt is mine” in the original idea for the Bad video??) considering how quiet and folksingery Ms. Mitchell’s oeuvre is. Doesn’t exactly sound like her. Or even remotely like her.

Imagine something with the perpertual-motion funk of The Glamorous Life where if anything the vocals are drowning in a sea of brass, horns shuffling along and bouncing around us on all sides. Allegedly from the post-Revolution burst of independent creativity, but also another in a very large pile of amazeballs-excellent songs actually intended for another artist from the beginning.

The format of these “demos” was pretty clear. P recorded "scratch vocals" over fully produced instrumentation. Yet nothing about how he worked was "scratch" quality. He put everything into his vocals for every one of these songs, and because of how familiar he was with the process, he thought little to nothing of maintaining these temp vox because he could do them again and again in his sleep.

He heard the song arranged and finished from the first moment it occurred to his muse.

The idea was the interested musician could merely re-record their own vocals and slot them in place of his scratch track. And yet they’re almost always incredible, judging from the ones we few obsessive have collected  - often cast aside immediately by the man himself, but there are already albums worth of them getting played the heck out of by fans and there have been for a decade.

I love the spunky, horns-to-the-fore, drum-programming-tight-as-feck sound of the song. From a minor two minute clip captured blurry and halfassed in a noisy club we can still tell it’s a banger with a real dancehall “watch everybody rush to the dancefloor as soon as they hear the first few notes” kind of vibe.

I can’t help but wonder if Joni would have condensed all those funk gymnastics back down to an energetic acoustic flamenco-inspired chamber-music-workout of a folky guitar song if she bothered to cut her own version?

Just for a moment consider ??who else?? EVER produces something this seamless, this professional, this FINISHED, and then still relegates it to the status of a DEMO because he wrote it for somebody else? This song is FIRE, it was FINISHED, it deserves a far wider audience than Alan Leeds and whoever he deems worthy of sharing it with. 

I just sit here in silent AMAZEMENT at how far we’ve come. This experience isn’t me downloading a 96kbps 22khz mp3 of “Goodbye” about two years before Crystal Ball came out. Waiting about 30 minutes while all 2MB trickled down over the modem-speed network at the college I overpaid to attend.

This “leak” is somebody whipping out their pocket tracking device, aka cellphone, and immediately recording a clip that they then immediately shared. Things move just a bit faster nowadays than napster ever did.

+++

If you’ll allow me a typically Midwestern digression; I am left reeling in the news of Jacob Wetterling’s story finally being given a closure of some grisly fashion. You couldn’t have grown up in Minnesota and not known who he was. I don’t have the fortitude to get into it further here. But it has some effect on my frame of mind this Labor Day weekend and deserved mention.

The other day I tried to coax myself into making another “carcomp” again. I was working on one in April, and I think I finished half of it before May. I just seem to have drifted away from this practice for a while there.

I dialed it back in and started piling up tracks. I know the minute we have to finally upgrade and buy a different car I’ll stop this and start using a usb the size of my thumbnail instead. But we still have a car that works and it has an old stereo and I still burn the occasional CD for the car because I got into the habit way back in the mid 90s.

And I’m a mercurial music-obsessive who keeps craving that “Roll Over Beethoven” experience.

I’ll smoke your reefer, but don’t need cocaine...purple music does the same to my brain...

I routinely find a song that I have to play to death because my brain rehearses it when it isn’t playing. So I hear it even when it isn’t on. Then I can play the disc in the car and it helps me during traffic and other irritations of automobile travel.

In the midst of planning my first carcomp of the Fall season a cellphone clip of Emotional Pump drops into my midst. No I won’t tell you where, you’re smart enough to find it for yourselves.

I now have a disc nearly full of the usual stuff I listen to. Some Dean Ween Group songs live, P sitting in with GCS at Montreux, weezer, Doomtree, Dessa, POS, Cecil Otter, Mr. Lif, Wendy & Lisa, and some peppy, energetic chiptune.

I had a half a cup of bulletproof coffee last night and did the dishes, this time without a podcast in my ear as I worked. I found myself thinking out loud that if the legendary Vault has been drilled into, then we need some safety, some protections, some failsafes here.

I know I don’t speak for everyone, but I really DO NOT want a Vault dump. I don’t want a fire-sale mentality of ten albums in five years just to make money to turn Paisley into Graceland North.

Honestly, I’d like to see something like a Board of Directors under Mr. McMillan and Mr. Koppelman who also worked with P, like Alan Leeds, Kirk Johnson, Wendy and Lisa, Sonny Thompson, and the 3rdeyegirl women. They could manage the remaining music and see that it’s not dumped on the public through K-Tel style infomercials.

If it were left up to me, I’d want no more than 10-12 “new” P songs from the vault every year. Either on a subscription basis, or a standard 10-track album every year with 2-3 bonus cuts for everybody who pays more than the minimum price.

Of course I was thinking about this last night as I did my various things and again as I went to sleep. I saw something the other day I disregarded as a joke or a troll.

Today Fox9 News, which was once the respected independent station KMSP-9 but now has the stink of Fox on everything they do...is reporting that September 8-9 at Chanhassen Dinner Theaters there will be interviews for people to become tourguides at Paisley Park.

This is some strange parallel universe I must be living in. I remember hearing friends in junior high school telling us about going with the high school marching band, Anoka being one of the biggest ones in the whole state, when they were invited to Paisley Park in the late 80s/early 90s and given “the WHOLE tour.”

I think one of the most fulfilling experiences left in this lifetime would be to help people celebrate and cherish something THIS important to me.

I do not think I could walk the halls of the place without a few days to numb myself.

I’m still trying to get over my emotions and pay for the public tour this fall.

A part of me wants to wait a while yet. Whole world seems drunk on the idea some-the-f-body died up in there. I refuse to allow death any further incursion into my 2016. Death has died.

There were at least 2 albums in the can and ready to drop. Let’s have ‘em.

Then we can set about to a rough timeframe of moderately spaced out STUDIO Vault tapes, not chronological, but focused on the eras from which they came.

Live shows, audio or audio-video, should come on their own schedule independent of the studio material. Perhaps even moderately quicker releases from the Live category to help manage funds coming in that are directed to the production of the future releases.

But walking the halls of Paisley giving deeply heartfelt tour guide tidbits as I led patrons through on their tours? Or even helping with concession sales, merchandise sales, or security on grounds? I don’t know if I’m there yet, even if management is starting to seek employees for these staffing vacancies...

If there’s only so much, even 100 albums worth and hundreds of live recordings, of P left unheard-by-me on this green Earth...I’m no longer in such a rabid hurry to have it ALL right now.

We might need a three or four tiered release plan. Video, audio studio, audio live, and demos. I could listen to JUST P’s demos for songs he wrote for other musicians all day long. So many of his demos are as good or better than the eventual “proper” released cover versions.

I’m serious. There could be a collectors/limited edition 7-inch single series of his demos that would smoke the ears of the mainstream Purple-Rain-era fans who’ve never heard them before. P himself didn’t care as much about his demos as he should have, in the most honest, heartfelt opinion of my own ears.

When it comes to whatever gets released out beyond what P left unreleased-but-meant-for-release? Beyond more Hit N Run Phases or Black Is The New Black?

Above all I want any studio stuff in the Vault to be untouched, unadulterated, un-remixed, un-messed-with. Give us what P put down on whatever medium the studio had at his disposal, wherever he happened to be on the day he created the music. Don’t post-process it unless it’s tastefully unobtrusive, hardly noticeable.

Overall I think I can wait at least a month between each track I’ve never heard before if it leaves as long-lasting and deep impression on my brain as Emotional Pump’s ass-shaking funk-soldier horn-odyssey has already made...all from a shaky two-minute cellphone clip shared on twitter. All from a song allegedly cut the day before Housequake...

These emotions I be feeling, boy oh boy do they be something complicated...