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...

"unsolicited lapdance from a pimp"

yeah. I'm still here. I'm still kicking. I'm still combing through my old notebooks and posts about P.

The post title? In quotes? That was one of my unedited reactions to the Come album as it was released in 1994.

Expecting the hard, wild ferocity of the Glam Slam Ulysses tracks ...it was a cruel bait-and-switch when that pimptastic x-rated smutty mess splashed through the speakers in dad's ram charger 4x4 on the day it came out, the day I bought it.

So this post is a placeholder for the various times I, a life-long Prince fan, was left wondering what the hell was going on in his head when he released the things he did at the times he did.

I know the whole feud-with-WB was going on at the time. I painfully remember being told to write WB and demand they set the Gold Experience free.

But who needed all that absurd cowbell in Endorphinmachine? Giving WB the shitty versions of songs might mean you can keep the best one in the vault, but it still means you're shitting in the ears of loyal listeners who trotted out and bought the danged thing on release day.

I love Prince. I will always. This music has helped me through the darkest moments of my life and I will always return to it in the trying times left in my future.

I do not expect anybody to believe that my fandom is without doubts and moments of feeling left behind by it all. The relentless march into the future left me behind years ago. I don't know how I feel about 20ten, it's soft and makes sense he gave it away.

I love P. When he's at his best, or even close to his best, he's still light-years ahead of almost everybody else who ever played the game of making music for their fans.

Pop country sucks, modern American radio sucks, and all those "reality" teevee music shows are shite I'd throw my shoes away if I stepped in...I won't let it near my ears.

more to come. I have plenty left to say.

Blessings on The Revolution. We're with you, we feel you, we love you. Keep your heads up, please.

Love... Thy Will B Done (the song & appreciation thereof)

So this is gonna be about the song Martika first took to radio.

I don't remember the year just now. I know at the time I bought the cassette single of the song and played it everywhere. It's such a powerful expression of deity-free spiritual bliss that spun its new power magick inside me.

I still have that tape. I know the song like a long lost lover. I know the song in my head and my heart.

For most of the common folk Prince peaked in the 1980s with that atrocious "new romantic" pastels and lace look so common on the Revolution in the Purple Rain era.

For me, it was the 1990s. From the shadows of Batman, the majesty of D&P, the beginning of the crumbling of the majesty we were promised with 0(+>.

The fade from the popular scene that followed. I could go on all night about that and all the turncoats and fakers that were exposed among the fans in that era.

The point is that Love...Thy Will B Done is an epic song, impressive and awesome. It is a part of me. It is quite possibly the perfect collab, the top of the very impressive heap of songs he didn't just write himself.

I chanced to read a scrap of a story about P on my cellphone during a horrific blur of 'the world's longest bad day' that I recently endured.

Baz Luhrman said something brief about how LTWBD was meant to be a part of one of his film projects. But the rights couldn't be secured in time, or without extraordinary effort. So it never happened.

This is another track that may very well await us in some future release from the legendary Vault.

I was a regular at Paisley Park "rehearsals" between 1994 and 1996. During this period, before Gold Experience and Come were released...our symbol-named fellow played Love...Thy Will with a searing prominent guitar solo, in epic fashion. He did it several times.

I think this is one of the defining moments of my life. I cried. I felt the music thundering through me and the room was so loud I sung along at the top of my lungs to every single word. I shouted and cheered like a crazy person as the band faded to silence at the end.

If you have the bootlegs maybe you can hear me going fanboy insane.

If there are any studio versions of those searing, angelic, anthemic gold-symbol guitar solos he played on that song...I hope we're offered some way to hear that someday.

All respect and patience to the men entrusted with the Vault. We trust you will do him proud, and we're willing to wait for you to get it right on the first try.

a little bit mo' (speculating on the Vault)

Yeah, I bit a Jamie Lidell song for a subject/title. He's clearly inspired by P and he's funky.

It's a holiday. A holiday made to disturb pets and nerves by mixing booze and gunpowder with idiots.

(I won't go off on the contradictions, failures and lies that make it dubious to celebrate America at all for anybody with a couple of brain cells to rub together. We're not nearly as great as we think we are!)

But let's just say: July 4th is an American holiday.

Turns out it was ALSO the grand opening of the Prince Online Museum.

According to the press release, this museum is constructed with the people who helped Prince create the websites that originally housed the content. So all the people who were paid to develop the sites have been brought back in to help re-create them for the museum. Sounds like a great way to do this.

http://princeonlinemuseum.com/

Check it out.

Also, I made a brief scribble in my notebook the other day taking down projects we still want to see, hear, or otherwise learn more about from the Paisley Park vault.

What does it say? Here, I'll just type it in from my notebook.

20ten Deluxe (although Rich Friends makes me retch)
Moonbeam Levels
Pangaea
Shades of Umber

maybe it's a stand-alone album, maybe it's a "phase" of the HnR project but it's called
black is the new black

hit n run phase three? four? more?

Glam Slam Ulysses (this one's a personal grail/albatross)

Madhouse 24

New Power Madhouse (the NPG version of 24)

the "techno" record one assumes he yanked "The Human Body" from

the song from Lotusflow3r that he said was "too good to release"

the 20 minute version of Courtin' Time

songs:
And That Says What?
Bloody Mouth
Finest Whiskey
Funk Radio ("if Ur radio ain't on the funk, Ur radio ain't on!" brief sample to NPGMC)
Laurianne
Dream
Big House
Come Elektra Tuesday
What Should B Souled?

albums/project titles:
Heart
Sacred Fire
The Dawn
The Tora Tora Experience
Crystal Ball II
NPG Sampling Series
Madrid 2 Chicago
The Chocolate Invasion (the 7 CD set may include C-Note, Xpectation, Slaughterhouse, etc)

autobiography/memoir

Piano & A Microphone Australia live album allegedly mixed before April 2016.

That's the current want-list in my head. I kept remembering more so I started writing them down.

Also see DJ Brother Jules' Remix Experience and Love Experience CDs coming soon on NPG Records!

http://remixexperience.com/

Good News

I'm not gonna throw a bunch of links at you. That's what search engines are for.

Promising developments lately.

Two men instrumental and central to P's career in the last 20 years are named by the Bremer Trust to manage the future of the remaining art, facilities and assets.

DJ Brother Jules, a fixture in the New Power family since at least the mid-1990s, has announcements. He's worked on two projects with direct involvement from Prince that are nearing release. The Love Experience and The Remix Experience. Whether digital or physical release is unclear so far...

All proceeds will be donated to charity.

Hopefully we're not talking about it coming out a year from now. Maybe yet this summer?!?

Look it up on the org or NPG+, google or whatever for further information. This is good news.

In the end of April or beginning of May, I can't recall when I saw it. Brent Fischer, son of legendary composer and arranger Clare Fischer, spoke with Rolling Stone magazine. In the article he discussed his most recent work with P.

I find myself astonished to read again - another collaborator mentions that maybe 1/4 or less of the works they themselves considered finished or completed have ever been actually released. They got paychecks for their work, but the art P paid them for has yet to be appreciated by the worldwide audience.

In the RS article Mr. Fischer mentions Shades of Umber, a song that was performed at Montreux, and Pangaea - both of these songs arranged with a relatively new approach where the string section tried to play along with a guitar part meant specifically for that purpose.

You've heard of the "guide vocal" to give a singer something to sing along with, mimic when laying down their actual vocal track? Imagine a guitar part meant to be followed by the string section, and then dropped out of the final mix or blended in with the other channels.

We heard just the littlest hint of it on Baltimore. There's a hint of what sounds like the cloud guitar from I Wish U Heaven in the last half of Baltimore. And the string section and the guitar do some impressive, incredible things together. Makes you wish P had played live with the string section for all of us to behold. I'd loooooooove to watch some footage of that!!

Yes, friends, it sounds like P had yet again found an impressive way to reinvent his sound. And there's at least a few tracks, if not a whole album intended for release, waiting to be heard. Finished and meant for the public, if it were not for the clumsiness of the process - it would already be with us.

Then there's the pressing issue of how many more Phases might be in the series of Phase albums we've gotten two of already. Maybe there are more, like enough to match the number of moon phases?

I can't remember where I first heard this, but people keep saying recent collaborator and youtube sensation MonoNeon has mentioned an album called "Black Is The New Black" that was completed and ready for the world in February or March, if not before that. Maybe it was a subtitle to another Phase album, maybe it was an ensemble jam session. Who knows?

I'll try not to throw too many 2000+ word missives like my complicated relationship with bootlegs in the previous post. This should be a fun blog, not like homework or a marathon reading session.

Things are looking up.

Many blessings on DJ Brother Jules, Mr. McMillan and Mr. Koppelman as they turn their attention to the matters at hand.

to bootleg or not to bootleg? (a wish 4 a brighter 2morro?)

If there's no other issue likely to divide fans of any artist, it's whether or not to buy, listen to, or trade bootlegs. Maybe not among Grateful Dead or DMB fans, but among Prince fans the topic is sure to cause some pretty surprising reactions.

To be clear, we're talking about recordings of  - for the most part - LIVE concert performances. Sometimes the band performed live to the venue and piped the soundboard mix out to radio broadcast. Plenty of variations on this process are probable.

"Bootlegs" can be FM radio recordings recorded flawlessly from the airwaves, or have moderate tuning drift. They can be ripped from webstreams made available live once as they were created and then never seen again.

Most live recordings that are not professionally recorded are classified AUD or audience-sourced. The quality of these obviously varies widely, as does the skill required to operate the gear, the gear itself, the quality of the sound-man's mix and other venue circumstances.

Boots can be made with a field recorder that would fit in a shirt pocket and has halfway decent on-board capsule mics. They can sound like they were recorded through an old sweat sock from a bathroom stall in the opposite side of the arena from the stage.

Bootlegs are also made with cellphones and feature coughs, sneezes and pocket rustling - when they shut up, stop singing along off-key while missing half the words, and you can actually hear the music. There's even the unfortunate "listen to them dodge security" dropouts in otherwise excellent audience recordings.

In almost all of the online Prince communities I've seen and been part of - there is a heavy pressure not to support the "bootleggers" despite the unusually high quality of studio and soundboard live recordings. They're not unofficial. These are things that had an official purpose and were shared with small groups of people as or just after they were made.

This information is out there. It has been for decades. Uptown Magazine in Sweden published a fanzine about it. (I really wish P hadn't hated Per Nilsen's work so much. His DMSR book was impressive. But P sued Uptown into legal stalemate and Per's work seems to have just stopped.)

Probably the first fanzine I ever saw that wasn't for Star Trek was for Prince. He started his own (or gave official sanction to one that started independently - I don't have the earliest Controversy issues so I can't just check) called Controversy.

By that time I'd grown to prefer Uptown over Controversy for the quality of the information. I also understood that there were competing fanzines for the Beatles and Elvis decades before there were competing forums for Neil Young, Nine Inch Nails, and Pearl Jam.

If Uptown's influence on my insatiable curiosity about the World of Prince weren't enough, there were the bootleg bibles called Hot Wacks that chronicled everything that existed in the 80s on vinyl. From Springsteen to ZZ Top, those books also included a generous portion on Prince.

Record Collector and Goldmine magazines, just to name a couple, regularly featured the kind of detailed work they were known for - dedicated to all sorts of artists. Including Prince, and not just in the features.

In 2016 the same information is available on sites like discogs and princevault. Despite hostility from the Prince camp from time to time, the fan community maintains the information and mostly helps each other.

There are two main ways (we'll get to roll-your-own) bootlegs find their way into the hands of the people, the thirsting ears and hearts of the fans who already own all the official stuff and still want more bad enough to seek it out where it is not commonly found.

The "pros" and the "indies" to make a rough distinction.

They have different motives, but there's no way to deny that there are massively passionate people with enormous reverence for the material working on both sides of this divide.

"pros"

Moonraker. Thunderball. Sabotage. Eye. Silverline. Ladybird. Irukandji. Optimum. Superhero. SaTim.

These are the "labels" that - for the most part - are providing high quality source material pressed to silver CDs with excellent glossy cover art and tray liner cards, silkscreened or otherwise printed CD tops. Competing in every way with their corporate counterparts - except in most American corporate-run music stores.

Some of the quality of both the audio and the graphics has made it common rumor among fans that the "pro" bootleg labels are somehow indirectly supplied by someone at Paisley Park. While I might have once thought this reasonable, later years made me think it far less likely than I had in the 1990s.

The downside?

They get $20-$50 per disc when they find themselves a gullible sucker, and more for the multi-disc box sets.  I've sniped a few at the lowest end of the price range, but never felt very good about it. Nothing like the wide-eyed triumph of my first record convention grabs...

Who knows where the money spent on pro-label bootlegs goes, who gets it, or what they do with it?

In response to this uncertainty, and empowered by the internet's very nature, this led to the...

"independents"

Digital Funk Bitch. Fullasoul. 4DaFunk. Free Boot Generation. Confusion. UCI. Brave. Habibi. Camille. Pure Funk. GetBlue. Akashic Records. Enfant Terrible. Foefur. Superball. NewPowerGroovez. Fun With Vinyl / Polyvinyl Acetate. Love or Money. Chaos. Serveitupfrankie.

These are the ones who are doing it free, or intentionally NOT FOR SALE, not to be sold.

If you see any titles from the independent freely-shared groups being sold on ebay or someplace like that, you should report their asses. These release groups are trying to beat the bootleggers at their own game.

I've read several times in different places over the years about small groups of fans in one place or another gathering together to pool their money and buy a rehearsal tape or an uncirculated studio outtake.

This is the history of the independents releasing excellent quality material that is in every way the equal and rival of anything the "pros" have been able to do. The independents regularly source their own material seemingly from nowhere.

Independent bootleg artisans have devoted their resources many times to improving and remastering existing bootlegs that were issued in flawed original condition by the professionals.

There are whole series of remasters and 'retouches' that are a joy to listen to after many years with their inferior predecessors.

I'm still kind of attached to a few of my "pro" label boots, but I'll side with the independents any time, as I believe this is where the majority of the talent and the creativity lie. Not to mention the future...

+++

To take this into my personal relationship with the material for a minute, I've never been the same since hearing the lyric to Partyup.

"You're gonna have 2 fight your own damn war!
We don't wanna fight no more!"

I don't care if legend has attributed the song to Morris Day. Doesn't matter who wrote it.

What mattered most to me is that it felt like I could have written it. I certainly clearly felt it.

I've been an anarchist since I found out what it meant.

I remember a kind of high-wire act of nervousness on the day I made it clear to my parents that I would not be a soldier. I might have to register, but I would never be anything other than a conscientious objector if called to serve and fight...

I am with the independents. My coat is a brownish color. This is where my loyalties lie.

If I have sympathy, broadly speaking nine times out of ten it's gonna be for the little guy, the underdog, the downtrodden, the poor, the sick, the needy.

To bring it back to the topic at hand, I'd rather see the community itself share everything they can get their hands on and do it with the express intention of putting the bootleggers out of business.

F the middlemen just out to make a profit. They're not part of the art. They're moneychangers in the temple.

+++

Yet as a hobby that has begun to resemble a passion, I regularly record concerts I am lucky enough to attend. Reminded of something I saw a user on dimeadozen say, "It's just a memory if you don't record it."

I was in the concert choir at college and one of the tenors recorded every performance on a little dictaphone in his pocket. I dubbed a show at the end of the semester from doc's cassette, but I wish I had more of our concerts saved somewhere.

The act of smuggling in a device and making an audience recording might seem like a crime to some, but I still consider it to be a defiant act of defending my own memory. If I were unlucky enough to go out like my grandparents did, at least maybe somebody will be nice enough to me in my old age to throw a bunch of concerts I was AT (and recorded my own self) on a nanoSD card, screw it into a pair of earbuds and let me relive my past somehow...

I've been encouraged at the explosion of people younger than myself who took it seriously when encouraged by technology to BECOME the media, and participate in creating something everyday.

The Live Music Archive at archive.org has filled in many gaps from shows I was at but didn't want to bring recording gear, or was too poor and young yet to have afforded to buy any... I've traded tapes and CDs and such to collect radio shows from Rev105 and Soul Coughing.

I've also benefited personally from semi-pro tapers who've recorded legendary Ween concerts, and had the audio and video of those shows really provide solace, escape, and empathy when going through some particularly difficult emotional times.

I support unauthorized recordings of independent origin and their right to continue to exist and be shared freely. I do not support people who try to profit from this.

I make "bootlegs" but I don't even share them. I'm afraid. Chilling effects on culture have done their work on me... Yet I'm not scared of everything. I still find ways to participate, share, seed, and otherwise make sure people have options that aren't paying for this stuff.

A little effort and a little time, just like in the days when all I had to offer was blanks-and-postage, and anything I've been lucky enough to collect should also be yours. Because none of it's mine, it belongs to everybody now. All of it.

I have grown into a philosophy now where I refuse to deny myself something just because of how it came to be. I still buy bootlegs because I once had to resort to trading B&P or buying high-speed dubbed cassettes at record conventions.

I have hunted down silvers for all those cheap dubs that were once all I had. Of course in the decades between then and now I've replaced those tapes several times over. First in low-end mp3 (128k) and then full 320k mp3. Then ape. Then FLAC. Every time they sounded marginally better.

I guess I'm still irritated to see the patriarchal wagging of the finger and tut-tutting at THE org.

If it's out there, it's none of your business how I choose to spend my money and obtain what entertains and inspires me. Yeah, I'd rather the bootleggers didn't exist either. I'd rather there was a strong internet presence by Paisley Park or PRN Enterprises!!

Someday all the things we do in archiving and co-managing the artistic legacy of other songwriter and performing artists - from Neil Young to Ali Farka Toure - doing those diligent, careful things with the art and performances created by Prince - this will also be normalized.

No longer whispered about as if illegal. We reject that crass, dismissive, ignorant interpretation.

We can finally come out of the 'scared of being sued into debtor's prison' closet we've been hiding in and join the rest of the internet appreciating this incredible musical art out in the wide world of freedom with our heads free of worry and held high like everybody else...

Chappelle did stand-up at Paisley Park?!?

Hey, for all I know it happened more than once. I just know what I saw.

They were shooting the Love 4 One Another special that would eventually air on VH-1.

In the televised edit there's a very brief section of Dave Chappelle doing a few jokes.

I just remember that he was a lot looser and had maybe 5-10 minutes with the people in the room.

We were crammed in there between the tracks for the camera dolly and the stage, which butted up against the 15-or-20 foot high dual doors with the symbol painted on them.

Dave stepped up to the mic to cheers, but we were tired and we'd been in there for 2-3 hours already.

He asked "so, what do y'all do here in Minneapolis to have fun?"

Some of the ladies in the front row seemed to have divided into two camps on either side of the amorphous blob of us directly in front of the stage.

One of them replied "we go to see Prince!"

And before Dave could reply, the bunch of women on the other side - well several of them took offense and one shouted "HIS NAME AIN'T PRINCE NO' MO'!" You can imagine the guts-deep place her shout originated from. She was a full-figured woman and she really meant what she said.

There was no reply from the dippy woman who'd had the audacity to use his given name in that time span. It served to illustrate that there are casual fans looking to hear Purple Rain again for the hundredth time and there are people who actually keep up on things and know he wasn't using that name at the time.

Dave looked surprised at the animosity. His eyes got big, he backed away in an exaggerated dramatic fashion, and he immediately tried to calm down the situation. I can't recall his words specifically but something to the effect of "let's not lose our minds or anything...y'all need to calm down!"

Another awkward moment or two, just a few beats, and then he went onto the next part of his routine at the time. I just know there was a bunch before the fade-in on the televised version of Love 4 One Another.

I doubt we'll ever see it unless somebody remasters all the SD resolution video in the infamous vault.

I just always laugh thinking of it. Knowing as it happened, in that flicker of a moment, that it would never be broadcast, never be shown at the time. I laughed, as many of us did.

It called attention to the name change and details being managed in a straight-faced fashion. Including any of that moment would have needed skillful editing to not just draw attention to the issue and invite the "symbolina" level of social reference all too common at the time.

In the televised version of Love 4 One Another the whole Chappelle bit isn't more than 3 minutes, but I'll never forget it. Maybe someday we'll see an expanded version of some of these forgotten masterpieces.

I know that The Beautiful Experience, The Undertaker, The Sacrifice of Victor, Love 4 One Another, and many other video productions were difficult or impossible to appreciate for the average music listener and video viewer at the time they were created for television.

They deserve wider exposure, wider appreciation than they've gotten up to this point in the timeline.

+++

Footnote:

NONE of the graphics, memories, recollections or words used on this blog are intended to imply consent or participation by the copyright holders. This is fair use, illustrating important historic events with images found in the wild on public websites.

All rights belong to the original creators of these products and no attempt has been made to elude this basic fact.

If you're wondering why I need to specify this, go search (the wayback machine if you need it) for an arstechnica story "Prince sues fans", PFU Prince Fans United, or a sued-out-of-existence former blogger known as dabang319.

Even mentioning that blogger's name could bring down the ban-hammer, that's what Prince fans had to accept in the 2000s. The threat of legal entanglements not unlike what was intended to deter users from the original incarnation of napster.

Go ahead and think I'm being melodramatic and emo all you want. I watched it happen at the time with slack-jawed disbelief, thinking to myself "yeah, why aim at only one foot if you're gonna shoot yourself? Why not aim at BOTH feet?!?"

A year ago Art Official Age had worked its slow-burn magic on me and I swung back hardcore into Prince fandom. I was collecting everything I could get my hands on, wondering how on earth he went and made himself LESS popular - at least in mainstream American culture, utterly voluntarily, while getting ever increasingly BETTER at what he did?!?

I remain in awe, Brother Nelson. I hope you and your guitar are every kind of happy U always made us.

This feeling will never end. Even after my bones are dust. I will carry all these memories around in my head and heart now and in whatever I have after that.

I sincerely hope I can help preserve these things I have grown to so enjoy.

I hope that I do not end up on the receiving end of a C&D order just for being enthusiastic and using the internet how it's DESIGNED to be used.

The Undertaker (in defense of looser, jam-based grooves)

When I first heard Prince had retired, before the name change, before the Hits/B-Sides box set...I was sad because the O(+> album was epic in scope, and I wanted more impeccably arranged, flawlessly executed ensemble studio magic like that.

The first bootleg I ever heard was The Black Album. It was underwhelming, but that's another story. I'll tell you about the guy who dubbed it off and mailed it to me, and where we met.

But the first bootleg I became attached to was The Undertaker. And it wasn't love-at-first-sight. It took a while for me to appreciate it, at first blush we hardly got along.

It was an official live performance sold mainly on Laserdiscs in Japan. It started on VHS "official bootlegs" that I've been told several times were only sold if you asked for them, and then for $50 or $100 each at the NPG store in Uptown.

I've heard hints those tapes started out okay, but that they soon had to give refunds because a clueless tech dubbed copies from copies, reducing the quality of the tapes they tried to sell.

Eventually, after what was becoming an obligatory forced wait, it was issued by Warner Bros.

In Japan. Not here. I don't think there was any way to get it in the U.S. like we had been able to do for the Hits VHS and the Gett Off video maxi-single.

http://www.discogs.com/Prince-The-Undertaker/master/388667

I finally hunted down a copy eventually because I'm like that. But it's not like anybody made it easy.

To begin with I had it dubbed on a tape. Probably a year later I bought a halfway decent CD bootleg with excellent packaging at a record convention in like Edina or someplace near there. In a hotel ballroom.

Finally I did the whole thing again, first getting a tape, then a CDR dub of a far superior version to the first one, from a different bootleg called Past, Present, Future II. I'm sure somebody has remastered it since then, don't go chase down silvers for hundreds of dollars!

These days there are bootleg labels selling "brand-new" plastic wrapped proper pressed CDs sourced from mp3s that they got out of the same zipfile you did. So the time has come when silver CDs are no promise of superior quality, if they ever were to begin with.

Prices for just about anything with his name on it have exploded since April. I know I should not be surprised but I still am. Why charge $700 for the SOTT sheet music songbook?

Books I might have found for a quarter at a garage sale in February are now fetching prices in the hundreds of dollars on amazon and other places. Not just ebay.

The performance on the Undertaker disc is a long, spawling, live jam. It is funky, it is guitar-centered, and it is far from the studio mastery we'd come to expect.

I remember being initially off-put by The Undertaker. I didn't like it because it wasn't tidy and neat and overdubbed and studio quality like the majority of Prince's work I'd grown up appreciating.

This was different. This was raw. This was still officially being sold as a Prince project, but it was really his first post-Prince project. He kept true to the idea that Prince had retired from studio recording by making it a live recording made "directly to DAT" as the jacket says.

There are rehearsals and live performances shared here and there online. You know where to look.

I just keep coming back to the raw, garage-band style shredding of The Undertaker. It is an endless source of inspiration. I can go back to it over and over again and see/hear something new every time.

I really hope that somehow the officially released video projects under whatever name he was using at the time, eventually see remastering and re-release. They didn't get their due the first time, being only sold in some countries.

There's a worldwide audience deeply thirsting for these things. We aren't going anywhere...

I never understood why we could have hundreds of Grateful Dead and Led Zeppelin bootlegs out there in the wild world, but we were supposed to pay no attention to the mindblowing, life-affirming, endlessly inspiring library of performances across the spectrum of Prince's live-on-stage career.

If there's any justice in the world, we won't have to hide from our own shadows to continue collecting new live recordings in constant fear of being sued out of existence like during the dark period when PFU duked it out with PRN Enterprises.

There's an official song called F.U.N.K. that is sometimes subtitled PFUnk. I remember thinking at the time that the attitude of the song might as well describe the title as an acronym. PFU are nitwits and know-it-alls?

Prince Fans United know nothing? PFU are numbskulls and kiss-asses? That seemed to be the strange animosity between a brief period of Prince suing fan websites out of existence nearly 10 years ago now. Toward the end of that funk workout of a track, he says in that lazy Camille voice "I love all o' y'all; (but) don't y'all bother me no mo'!"

Now we're in an unfortunate shadow where it seems like websites are disappearing just like youtube videos. There are news stories about new crackdowns on "rampant bootlegging" and they better be talking about the freaks selling "unauthorized live recordings" on amazon and not those of us sharing freely without desire to profit.

I really, really hope the big bad wolf who hates the internet is dead and we can all appreciate this art together, somehow, someday...

choirboy programmed for music mania?

I had a theory a year or more ago that the first musical artist who "sat down on me like a couch" and left a deep impression behind, would be Prince.

Now that's a gross oversimplification. One of the few rigid expectations made of me in my youth was regular attendance in the church choir.

I remember now that it wasn't Prince who first pushed a large body of work into my head. It was choir. Every wednesday evening for an hour. Pretty much ANY day after school if we weren't at the nursing home, we were at choir. Assorted Sundays during the year, too. Then once a spring the whole sermon-in-song shebang. (My first taste of a walk-on speaking part left me with a migraine...)

I had a headful, a batch of songs to learn, practice, memorize and be off-music from before performing them. Either in front of some subset of the community or in front of the whole sanctuary full of churchgoers.

Then there was the huge holiday concert in December. So big we couldn't all fit into the church, it had to be held in the auditorium at the high school. And we still had folding chairs in the aisles and packed them in there.

Point is that I've gone onto other artists with large bodies of work after being initially inspired, primed, prepped, and educated by my Prince fandom.

I learned that there were plenty of people on the PML with me who were as into Prince as I was and yet also that into Zeppelin, or Neil Young, or Rush, or half a hundred other bands. Not just the Dead.

So it was during the same time as I was doing the Golden Experience tape tree, dubbing off tapes for people on the PML...I was reaching out for other tape trading experiences.

Tori Amos had spawned an internet digest mailing list in the same time as I was on the PML getting my head around the internet and college. Soon enough, I believe February 1994, I had joined Really Deep Thoughts, the Tori Amos mailing list.

So I was able to obtain the Under The Covers compilations, both volume 1 and 2. I even made a few dubs for people later that year.

It was a few years later yet, but eventually I was on the Magical Armchair mailing list for Ben Folds Five.

The idea here is that I once assumed Prince was the first to - if you'll forgive a particularly Kevin Smith turn of metaphor - stretch me out with the big artistic dick he was swinging.

In reality it was being in the choir. Then Prince. Then Tori. Then Rev 105. Then Ben Folds. Soul Coughing. Ani DiFranco. The Honeydogs. Open mic nights at Kieran's Irish Pub.

By the time I'd flamed out of college a second time? Weezer. If not for Pinkerton, I might never have made it there for a while. That album made me feel like a mirror held up to every kind of raw I felt inside. It's still awesome to crank up loud and scream along with!

I mean Chaos & Disorder was in that same timeframe, but it wasn't the same kind of raw I was. Don't get me wrong, I still played the hell out of it. But it didn't fit me like Pinkerton did right then.

A few years later the whole "No Depression" scene. The Jayhawks, Son Volt, Uncle Tupelo.

And I've been borderline OCD collecting every track I can find for plenty of bands since then.

Now? Jason Isbell, Mr. Lif, Doomtree, Ted Leo, and Open Mike Eagle.

This isn't the passing-fancy sort of fandom, "I once had an Aerosmith tape..." or "I had a Debbie Gibson poster when I was an awkward child" kind of thing.

This is reading the internet, collecting b-sides, demos, imports, books, articles, posters, and all sorts of things. Regular, sustained interest that sticks with you like a google-alert in your mind. That's how it works.

(I remember the guy at MediaPlay in Coon Rapids calling me to take their Emancipation display. But I literally had nowhere to put it. Same when he called with the Irresistable Bliss Soul Coughing display. I wanted it badly and deeply. I had nowhere to put it.)

I didn't get quite as into Tori or Ben, I don't have snail mail they sent out. I never saw them play at their own venue in my home state, literally just an hour or so down the highway from home.

I've read people adapting the idea, the meme that states "hey, at least somehow you managed 2 b alive at the same time as Prince" and I like it. Somehow I could drive back home to my own bed after marathon shows at the Park...

Somehow I could wake up, work the day, and then drive down the highway to Chanhassen at night...when I knew pockets of people flew in from the Netherlands and further away - just to see him play.

How obscenely lucky that I grew up so near Paisley Park?!?...an echo of cosmic justice and humor at once. Couldn't grow up normal enough for classmates, couldn't fit in enough to keep from getting ridiculed till I hated going to school at all, but yet could somehow someday have these intensely rewarding, revelatory, even somewhat personal concert experiences?!?

I tweeted the other day that Love... Thy Will B Done is probably Prince's best song. Of the ones I've heard. I still wonder how magnificent Pangaea is.

I remember seeing him shred his symbol guitar playing Love... Thy Will B Done a few different times. Gold couldn't even touch that song. The anthemic guitar part in that song is something this world has yet to appreciate like those of us who already do...

...here's hoping the rest of the world gets to appreciate Prince like us fans do.
And that it doesn't take decades to unlock the vault's jewels for the world to love...

the goldEN exPeRIeNCE tape tree

1994 was, as Shock G was soon to say about 1995, "a long one. They said nobody digs your music but you, kid, you need a strong one!" Being a Prince fan at this time was to have to ignore the ignorant with their "symbolina" level mindset, or have to try and apologize or explain the bizarre.

It wasn't just a time when Prince saw himself beginning to imagine a future without Warner Brothers Records, just as he'd finally become about as high-capacity a music-making machine as he'd ever had the chance to be.

Imagine, the infrastructure you thought you'd built with WB from the get-go, from day one, when you were just a kid yourself... you turn around ready to really deliver on the promise of Diamonds & Pearls, his biggest hit album since Purple Rain...

It is right when the hit-making could have been at its apex, when O(+> could have led to Come, Glam Slam Ulysses, and maybe even a great big Gold Exodus... then they decide to yank on your artistic freedom like it's a choke chain. Demand a greatest hits package rather than anything new.

Looking back on my 1993 into 1994 now seems dissolved into a single moment. Walking from Dad's house to Mom's house, no more than a mile or two despite it being 20-30 degrees BELOW zero outside. With my music blaring, sliding around dancing on the icy streets in the snow.

I was a Minnesotan through and through. I just bundled my walkman into my deepest coat pocket and ran the headphone wire behind my arm. What tape did I tuck into my coat that night? Traded from a friend, an audience recording of Prince's newest music since the Symbol record. Glam Slam Ulysses.

Blasting my shitty 3rd-generation dub so bad it sounded like a demo recorded from across the room. But Endorphinmachine, Interactive, Loose, Race, Dark, Come, Strays of the World, Pope. These were big songs, huge songs, (some of them actual RAP songs by Prince, NOT tony M!) gritty and beyond lively, they were punk and acid and ferocious with new power energy. Thus, so was I!! How cool is that?!?

1993 had seen me reduced from a big swinging high skool senior with friends everywhere and the fear and ugliness of public school pushed off into the background...to a loner at college doomed to fail at anything he puts his hands toward and actually touches.

Relationships with females, friendships refusing to become relationships with males, attending classes, eating, sleeping, registering for more classes...anything not related to my loose pack of freaks, rejects and malcontents was disinteresting.

Life itself seemed disinteresting to my collegiate nomadic self, subsisting among the desolate midwestern windy winter days exactly like yesterday and tomorrow.

I stayed bored. Except, of course, for the Prince tapes regularly threading their way through my walkman. Arriving in the mail...traded from internet contacts in Holland, Poland, Spain, Germany, even occasionally Australia. At that point yet still trickling in from friends I hadn't yet alienated back at home.

I fell far and hard. Proud and arrogant, I needed to. It's how life works its drama out on you. Of course when people closest to us lie like they're drinking water, we have to stop falling, give up and actually fail - in order to learn anything. In order to NOT continue spiralling along oblivious and continue hurting each other in new and worse ways.

*deep breath*

The upside of this is that by the summer of 1994 I was deep into a tape-trading tree. Membership in the PML led directly to that.

For a few weeks in the earliest part of my membership there, I read the messages trickling in throughout the day. Eventually I subscribed to the daily digest, and instead of being distracted throughout the day, I began to sit in the computer lab in the evenings and read the PML.

If the mac lab was full, I'd go down to the basement of the wing and use the VAX lab. A room full of ancient green-screened Wang terminals. Those one-piece monitor-and-big clacky qwerty keyboard dumb terminals that wouldn't be able to even function as a calculator without being wired into the VAX mainframe, nearby in a utility closet and roughly the size of grandma's 8 foot tall deep freezer.

In the spring and summer of 1994, after college had ceased to work for me, left me with a bag of debt and disrespect, the rest of my life consisting of ever increasing amounts of WORK WORK WORK, in whatever spare time remained for a hobby of any kind, it was then that I joined the Golden Experience tape trading tree.

If I recall correctly it was a guy named Joseph Allen Legge set the whole thing up.

We wanted to help O(+> free the Gold Experience. Fans had taken to calling it "the gold exPeRIeNCE" and liked to explain it was meant to signify that being known as the symbol now meant that this was the first true ex-Prince record.

We came up with a master tracklist, as prodded by the black and white fliers handed out at concerts at the Park and at the NPG store in Uptown, an early Gold tracklist including Days of Wild, claiming that the release date was NEVER and that we should write to Warner Brothers to petition its release.

Fans traded tapes and ended up with a passably decent, still by today's standards B to C grade audience recording of the penultimate track performed out of the country somewhere. Rio, Brazil, I can't recall. I should dig the tape out and digitize it for memory's sake.

The idea was we'd just do a tape trading tree. The master dubbed off 20-25 tapes as masters for the branches. And each of us designated a 'branch' got to take their master and dub off no less than 10 more for other people. I remember being down from the start and doing more like 20-30 myself.

I'd just gotten my first decent post-hi skool and post-college job. I had no experience with money at that point, having grown up poor as dirt, and pretty much incessantly mocked for it from kindergarten to high school. So one of the first things I ever bought aside from a car to get to work with...was a brand new Pioneer tape deck. With dolby and auto reverse on both decks!!

I felt like a king in some respects. I'd been given a kickass Kenwood amplifier by my dad and scored a nice pair of heavy ass 15 inch speakers in proper hardwood cabinets with big ruggedized tweeters and snap-on dust covers at a garage sale for like $40. So my system kicked so much more ass than any boombox wired-to-random-speakers-found-on-the-curb that I'd grown up using...

I was proud to offer to dub those tapes.

I remember them coming in at home, living in my aunt's attic at the time since my dad kicked me out of his. I was still trying to get down to Uptown for the Neo Manifesto poetry readings once a month at the NPG store. Sometimes I even read there.

I know it borders on urban legend at this point. But Duane, or whoever the guy behind the counter at the NPG store was that I keep thinking of as Duane...always said that the readings were videotaped for Prince to view "at his home, at his leisure."

Despite the fact that I'm certain I couldn't be...I know I read there at least 3 and perhaps as many as 8 times. There was a video camera there every time. It's possible, even on just an old heap of personal tapes he had made looking for his next Ingrid Chavez type inspiration among the heavily female crowd of fellow poets reading at those events...

...somewhere there's a freakish young version of me with his greasy long blond hair reading crappy teenaged angst poems with a bronze dolphin in his hand, mimicking the way O(+> carried his microphone-gun at the time...on a videotape made for Prince from the Neo Manifesto readings.

Anyway. I was thinking about the Golden Experience tape trading tree.

I first let myself just think about it a while. All the other Experiences we were originally primed to expect. Some of them mentioned in the stage sound effects, programmed during parts of the Gold Experience, Ultimate Live experience, whatever the tours of the time called themselves before the Love 4 One Another period.

We were totally expecting more Experiences. The word had curious prominence in the post-Prince world at the time. It began with the Beautiful Experience on Valentine's day 1994. Right around then Paisley Park sold a DAT of 8 songs to several different radio stations in Europe attempting to circumvent the traditional means of distribution head-on.

Not long, mere weeks after I was consoling myself over the "death" of Prince and his "retirement" from studio recording...by repeatedly playing the Glam Slam Ulysses dub I'd traded good quality blank cassettes and postage for...and there was MORE. That DAT got played regularly by the stations that bought copies.

The fans who requested that it be played dubbed copies off the airwaves and passed them along to fellows out of radio range. Across the pond, in many different directions. Literally as soon as dubbed, I remember somebody saying he sent out ten copies in two days.

I had one by the end of February, as the snow began to melt and the world thawed back out and became less hostile. I was bumping NOW and 319 and helping fellow fans sort out the words to Pussy Control from a PA recording made in a noisy room.

We were expecting a Beautiful Experience EP, not just a maxi-single of irritatingly similar remixes. There were plenty who expected much more artistic freedom and variation, like the song eventually turned up on the Crystal Ball NPG records set called 2morro. It is, in essence, a 1990s maxi-single era variation on TMBGITW.

We were also expecting the Space Experience. I believe the maxi-single for that cut when Come finally creeped out of the Warner Business machine was probably as close to unadulterated as possible at the time. Of course there were undoubtedly interesting things left off the Space maxi, but at least the version we did get is pretty varied, funky, smoooooth, and not as redundant as TBE or the unfulfilling maxi-single for Letitgo.

We were also expecting a Come EP. With 18 & Over on it, and the variations we'd grown to expect of that song. Did we ever get it? Hell, maybe I'll mock up a cover for one if I can hammer out a tracklist. Fans have done that for the song Glam Slam already. Amusing times we live in.

My point here is that watching a recent vast improvement on a VHS tape I had of the "birthday" shows around June 7th at Glam Slam Miami...there were going to be other Experiences. If nothing else the infamous first NPG Sampler cassette ... an item I also traded for a copy of before getting a bona-fide original ... suggested as much in the sales-pitch-as-narration between the short track snippets on it.

This would be a good place for an embedded pic of this cassette's artwork, which I did snap pics of with my phone and post on googleplus NPG+ room lately. I should go grab a link for that and paste it in here...any minute now...

I thought I should try and push myself to leave more remembrances here. I'm still stunned with the loss of my cousin. We knew her death was coming, she drank too much for decades, and even if it surprised her it didn't surprise any of the family too much, aside from her children. I am left reeling some days, lost in thought over these matters.

So I push myself to participate and DO something, even if I think I might edit the hell out of it later, or even delete it wholesale...just because I have to keep creating even when it's not easy or not assuredly excellent. Or else I would let myself go silent for a while, and that way leads to nothing getting said and done. Longwinded oversharing...sorry...

When it comes to Prince, I keep coming to the conclusion that moreso than for any other artist our world has ever known, it will not need to seem like "he" is "gone" for a long time yet.

There's so much stuff we haven't heard yet, haven't seen yet, even those of us with heaps of bootlegs and stacks of tapes, none of us has to feel that anybody went anywhere.

There's grooves and grooves up on the shelf.
Deep purple concord jams...
...the dream is never over!

Daddy pop leads the band,  and the new power generation,
the funkiest suckers of the new gold nation, we won't ever die!!

Play In The Sunshine (random topics; babbling brain bubbles) And That Says What?

I came back from Minnesota -seem' like a minute ago- with a real shock of inspiration to DO something HERE on this blarg. And in general.

And yet what happened instead? I know there was a time in the mid 2000s where every blog had to get over the idea that LIFE is unpredictable and we can't always post everyday or as often as we wanted to.

So I'm doing that again? Repeating myself? No, not really.

Good King Stephen says any writer has to read, or they won't write anything worth reading. I have agreed with that sentiment since before I read him saying it.

So I've been reading. A strange quirk, then, that I've ordered and bought and collected, even when streaking through an airport to a changed gate before departure, every Prince commemorative edition magazine I've seen for sale.

And I haven't read a word in any of them. Can't even bring myself to flip through a single page.

I read the newspaper clippings my mother in law sent me. The Strib is always welcome, familiar. I grew up in Anoka, just over the river from Ramsey County, in which one finds Minneapolis.

So not just the Minneapolis Star Tribune was an everyday part of my life, so was KMSP-9 TV which was a true independent station back then and still regularly outperformed the local network affiliate stations with their newscasts and production values of ads, graphics, visuals and bumpers.

KTCA-2 or KTCI-17 were our PBS affiliates, and they occasionally recognized our hometown treasures, Purple ones and other ones, too. But perhaps most significant in this context were the Minneapolis radio stations.

I'm on the record elsewhere and among countless friends as an acolyte, historian, fanatic about KJJO 104 FM and KREV Rev105 Revolution Radio in the 1990s. These were essential elements of my post-high school and post-college life.

I grew up on the saccharine bucolic teenager music of the 1980s. Mainly these trickled through to me via KDWB 101.3 FM and WLOL 99.1 FM. I was ridiculously devoted to Casey Kasem's American Top 40 for a span that seemed endless at the time and yet can still be measured in months, not years, when looking back on it in internet searches now.

Before I had started listening to Prince albums, I knew his music through the radio and Minnesotan culture. These things permeated around me before I knew how to appreciate them in any kind of depth.

So when I did finally recognize the vast ocean of ONE man's music, I became forever enthralled and enchanted when I dove in and drank deep of it.

This is a longwinded way to come back around and say that rather than reading anything posthumous about Prince [which is preposterous since I won't believe he could be dead. He certainly isn't "gone."] I have been sticking to stuff written before this year. Optimistic, shall we say?

I haven't been reading the magazines, the countless publications to attempt to memorialize Brother Nelson. I _have_ however been reading the sh-t out of books written and published in the mindset I remain partial to. He's still alive, he's still potent, he's still creative and full of dynamics.

I've read several books and will read several more.

I just wish that the ONE track in the various permutations of what became Sign O The Times ... Dream Factory and Crystal Ball... a track called "And That Says What?" has not "leaked" or otherwise been shared with the collector community...I keep wishing it finally WOULD.

I really wanna hear "And That Says What?" No surprise, what Prince lover doesn't want to hear more music they haven't heard? And I can't stop at merely calling myself a "fan" since we went through that rough patch in the late 1990s where O(+> made the feeble comparison that "fan is short for fanatic, and we don't want those!" I love his music. Love. (I'm no fanatic, you symbol-named fool.)

What makes this particular "outtake" an itch I can't yet scratch? Why bother whining about this one cut when I've got dozens of songs most people don't even know exist? Bc within the past few years a whole album credited to the jam band Prince was working with at this time HAS become commonly available and shared widely.

[Hell, it's probably on youtube by now, waiting to be sniped down by some wannabe white-hat with websheriff so deeply ingrained it has transcended the concept of "bookmarked" and gone on to replace actual brain cells.]

If I do have any "spooky electric" inside, I could tease my unfocused theory that if anybody did die, perhaps it was the Big Bad Wolf that's been having a tantrum about the internet for the last 10+ years. The BBW I'm referring to this time is the guy who looked and sounded a LOT like Prince, but wasted his time pouting about how youtube never paid HIM (?!?) for videos OTHER people shot and posted there.

The BBW had no respect for shared culture of a new and different kind, made no artistic attempts to stitch together people's cellphone videos and create something truly new from them...no appreciation at all, just megalomaniac struggling for control, spewing hate!??

As much of an asshole as I can be at this point is that I hope the BBW is gone. I hope whatever remains can make peace with the culture of sharing that the internet has revived among humanity.

I hope that reissues, repressings, expanded editions stuffed with bonus tracks, and tens of unreleased albums quickly spiral out of Paisley Park, PRN enterprises, 3rdeyegirl, Tyka's trust, or whoever looks out for the eventual museum The Park was bound to become.

But I'm gonna keep reading as many words as I can get my hands on from before anybody started to treat the phrase Mayte uttered in 1993 "Prince esta muerto" as if it were literal fact. Because I refuse to accept that.

Death has no dominion over the endless power of music. Anything ol' spooky reaper-skullface can do pales in comparison.

Tribe of Millions!!

Recovering from a sudden week out of town for a family funeral.

And already I was salivating at the chance to post again, formulating words behind my shut eyes while flying back across the country to where home is now. Weird enough, that concept.

The first performer I ever saw at Paisley Park was NOT Prince. It was Tribe of Millions.

I remember hearing that weekend something about Halo Black. I guess they're another Minneapolis band. I heard some of their music eventually. I know there were remixes tagged with that name, too.

Thankfully StuArt shot me youtube links and I'm singing along with Tribe songs I haven't heard in a minute.

I can't help but wonder where Malo Adams is. If there are other videos or audio recordings of Tribe of Millions performances I could collect, share, listen to, play for my friends in silent appreciative amazement.

There's a video of the performance we saw at the Park. They played in the soundstage in front of the symbol doors and there's a bunch of us standing in front of them. I think I'd consider paying a heavy price to see that video.

Now I set about to find out who might have it...

But do yourself a favor and seek out Tribe of Millions music, youtube videos. These guys rawk my face off. I have demo tapes I collected from friends I had in radio. I have already digitized them.

Interesting days lay ahead, people. The dream is NEVER over!

NPG - Goldn-gga & another shirt

This was fall of 1993. No longer top-of-the-heap Senior in Hi Skool, now I'm just another anonymous Frosh at college. I'd just begun trading tapes internationally. New to the PML. Taking my basic classes, trying not to get bored or homesick. Actually making a few friends...

The Love Symbol #2 album had been getting mad spins. I couldn't stop listening to it. An odyssey that deserves far more appreciation than it got at the time, it should have spawned a comic book, a movie, and made Diamonds and Pearls look small by comparison.

Seems it didn't turn out quite that way.

I remember going into the NPG store again, this my 3rd or 4th time, dragging my dad along behind me like a disinterested pet. But one that had been through this ritual before and understood the pattern.

I had been sustaining myself on a diet of traded tapes. On those traded tapes of Act I and Act II tour live recordings were new songs credited to the NPG.

The band was on fire playing them. "Johnny" may be 'just' another extended funny funk jam, but I can't help thinking it was just a preview of what came ahead. The next NPG album ended with an absolute marathon funk workout even longer than this track. "Deuce & A Quarter" was also smooth and funky performed live in that era.

"No Black MFs In The House" might sound like a prerequisite for a Donald Trump rally today, but back then it was a lovely farce with Prince voicing a redneck character lamenting his lack of dance skills, among other ridiculous complaints.

I can see a straight line from this to Dave Chappelle's immortal Prince skit. The humor is so nuanced it seems simple at first blush. Impressively deep when you give it a second to sink in.

The title Goldn-gga is an attempt not only to invert and redeem the term n-gga but also a backhand to the idea of a gold-digger, rather intending to be an endless source of positivity instead of needing or taking anything from anyone.

For a kid who regularly got called a "dirty", got derided and even beaten up for being poor, I found empowerment in these ideas no matter how lily white my ass still is. Ask Chuck D. for more about appealing across racial lines in ways nobody quite expected till they happened...

Anyway, knowing that "Call The Law", which had been a b-side to a D&P single was gonna be on GN? It sealed the deal. I knew I had to have a copy. I remember having my discman in my pocket. Winter coats in Minnesota are puffy, fairly thick affairs.

Earbuds around my neck, I pulled out my disc player, popped the B-sides disc of the Hits/B-sides box set out of it and put GN into the player, placing the other disc in its case.

The dude behind the register said "it's kind of like the passing of the torch, from Prince to the NPG?" and we had a good laugh. I told him "I've heard some of these new songs, and they're awesome!"

I paid my $15 or $20 and still have that first pressing copy of GN to this day. Apparently there's a Paul McCartney / Wings song referenced in one of the first tracks, and it was yanked from any pressings after that. I just know I thought it was dope. And the back cover artwork? Seeing downtown Minneapolis made me feel special, like I wasn't from nowhere.

I remembered another shirt I have in storage. It has the "We Are The New Power Generation" graphic similar to the one on the front of the store, but across the back of a maroon colored t-shirt. The front was a collage of Prince's face and the Love Symbol and swirly designs, IIRC some features of the Minneapolis skyline?!? The design on that shirt seemed thick and I didn't want to wear it or wash it too often bc I didn't want to harm the artwork.

Just trying to keep up with what flows out of my brain...

77 days of Sacred Fire

Beginning to adjust to a world without my cousin in it. Can't help but think of what Syrio teaches Arya on GoT. "What do we say to death? NOT TODAY!!!"

I have decided that even if they aren't consecutive, I'm gonna post here for 77 days. Or 77 times. 77 stories. Some variation on that number. Gotta do what speaks to you, and that rings with resonance for me, so there it is. Don't like it?!?... go start your own blog...

There was for a brief time a wonderful chimera of retail space, creative space, and rich opulent beauty on the side of the street facing Calhoun Square mall in Uptown Minneapolis.

We Are The New Power Generation, this boutique was called. I remember being unable to stay away when rumor suggested that the Purple Rain motorcycle was on the premises, albeit behind a velvet rope. No pictures, no cameras or recording devices, please. Was posted just inside the door.

The first time I ever walked in there I was still 98% n00b. I remember being overcome by the atmosphere. The veils, beads, scents, the woodgrain, the artwork, the sense of it being decorated by someone with a top-shelf no-expenses-spared mentality.

In the coming years I remember going upstairs there for the Neo Manifesto poetry readings. More on that another time, once I find the fliers in my handbill collection. I still have things the NPG store mailed out to us with the address of the house I grew up in on the back side of them...

Along the stairs to the second floor were three, maybe 4-5 separate professionally framed image collages. Prince, in pictures I don't recall if I've ever seen elsewhere. Variations on flames, from candle flames to larger effects, cut and overlaid to create cover-style artwork.

The theme of them stuck with me because I was playing the Indigo Girls Strange Fire cassette over and over in my walkman while working the job I had at the time. (The other go-to tape I was slowly wearing out sat in the box for Strange Fire, and I dubbed it myself. It was a comp I've re-made several times over the years. Glam Slam Ulysses songs on one side and I'll Do Anything songs on the other. But again, another story 4 another time.)

These framed impressive pieces of art included the phrase Sacred Fire.

I will not forget them. I only recently remembered the specific term.

Maybe we'll see it someday, somehow. Maybe it was speculative art or a gift from a relative of a bandmate. I don't know any more about it than what I remember. I can't even imagine I would've asked the dude behind the register.

I was still 75% stuck in my shell and/or with my head up my own claven yet in those years. I might have thought about it, but overcoming my inner critic and actually saying anything? Not bloody likely...

I realize this is gonna be at least as much about me as it is what I'm recalling. But that's either a psychologist's and/or an editor's job. And I may have utterly run out of fecks to give when Cheri succumbed to her alcoholism.

If I'm lucky, I'm still getting the first draft down. Sometimes it ain't even that well put together. Art ain't pretty, plenty of people who make it say if it isn't making you even mildly uncomfortable it isn't serving its purpose.

If you want polished journalism, this may not be the place to get it. Just sayin'... the brain-scrapings shall continue. More occurs to me a little everyday.

dumb dave's shirt collection; so long Cheri, so long

Yeah, that title ain't great, but it's significant for at least one reason. Maybe someday I'll even tell U what that is...

This started out to be a short blog, actually more of a list. My psyche gums it up on the way out and it gets longer as it goes.

I wanted to jot down what shirts I have related to the Prince collection. I have at least 2 for Ben Folds Five, 3 or more Indigo Girls shirts, and not just bc I knew a guy who bought out the stock of a store that folded once, either.

I bought The Gold Experience t-shirt on release day at the NPG store in Uptown. Midnight sale for the superfans night before release day. A line stretching down the block when we got there, the store not yet open. The security guard at the door hustles us in along a velvet rope. No other purchases possible, just the Gold Bag with the album on cassette or CD, a t-shirt, a gold experience branded phone card ?!?! and I don't recall anything else. Not even a poster. And it was like $50 back in 1995.

And then? Ta-very much for a lovely night, then. No, you're not going back out the front door. Follow the line of refridgerator-sized mild-tempered brothers in immaculate suits as they usher you out the side door into the alley. Thank you for your purchase, please come again, goodnight!

I digress.

The Beautiful Experience t-shirt bought from merch table at the Park one night that summer or early fall, during the Gold Experience tour rehearsal shows (not under the Love 4 One Another banner, probably even before that...) and this was for the semi-private concert back on valentine's day that I had a tape recording of from another European trader. The one with the Salt N Pepa cover. None Of Your Bizness. "Bud Lite" tries to play guitar and gets laughed off the stage...that one. See the "bootleg" called TUBE. The Ultimate Beautiful Experience, remastered by 4DF - 4 Da Funk, the miraculous fan-to-fan never-for-sale "label."

I bought a black shirt with yellow graphic text on it at the NPG store. It said "Pussy Control" and I put it over the driver's seat of my car. Sadly it got sunbleached and stretched to hell when forced to serve in such a manner. I have it in a box of memorabilia somewhere. There's a guy selling one on ebay. For $300!?!? (the shameful manner in which I treated this $20 purchase is another reason for my alternate title, dumb dave.)

The 2004ever purple musicology shirt I bought when StuArt got us FRONT ROW seats at the Xcel Energy Center and StuArt grabbed a drumstick from John Blackwell afterwards.

The black shirt with O(+> in a top hat with the gold symbol guitar leaning backwards. Was that Habibi or was the black one Habibi?!?

I bought a NPG jersey from ebay over a year ago. The blue one, worn but in great shape. The literal NEXT DAY after that I saw a purple one, UNworn, for no more than $20 above what I bought the first one for, so I sucked it up in my post-college-loans-somehow adulthood and bought both. The unworn one will continue to be unworn.

I bought a Free Urself t from the website but can't bring myself to wear it. It's absolutely gorgeous. The only t-shirt I ever bought from the official source that I could ever have imagined Prince actually wearing. It's just a stunning piece of art. (Pics or gtfo!! I hear U shout...and yes. This won't be half the blog without photos of the evidence. I'm well aware of that and already working on it...)

I bought a Piano and a Microphone shirt after the show in Oakland a month or so ago.

I won an ebay auction for a NPG Music Club shirt this morning.

Minutes after placing that bid, my phone rang.

Mom told me my cousin Cheri died when they took her off the machines keeping her alive. Turns out you can't drink your life away without consequences. Like going before your mother and too soon to be remembered by your grandkids?!?! Ain't nothing right about any of that... buck fooze!!

So I'm a little scatterbrained, I find it easy to be moved to tears, and I'm watching "public piano" videos on youtube because I don't play very well and mom isn't here to do it for me.

Life seems to be choosing 2016 to try and convince me it's a fleeting thing, friends. Try and make the most of it...

April 2nd, 1994

I first started collecting Prince music in college. Shinders bookstore sold magazines. Walking through their aisles felt like they carried everything. All sorts of international stuff. Plenty of tmus.

I found the fan-zine called "Uptown" published out of Sweden, with plenty of help from various people in the Netherlands. Shinders sold most of their rarer stuff bagged, sealed. In the bag with the ?7th? maybe 8th or 9th issue of Uptown came two fliers.

One was for the european store selling P memorabilia through the mail.

One was a photocopied sub-fanzine called ? Pheromone ? that itself gave a shout-out and praise to an "internet email list" called simply enough, the Prince Mailing List.

As I began to learn how to use the VAX and GOPHER and FETCH and IRC, ISCABBS and other things available through these magical machines called computers...

one of my first acts with my newly acquired email address was to join the PML.

If you've ever been to prince.org and seen their vociferous-to-the-point-of-absurdity admonitions to NOT ASK FOR, WHERE TO GET, OR HELP OBTAINING ANY "bootlegs" ever ever ever ever ever.

I may have been one of the whiny little teenaged bitches who made them choose to do that.

I shudder to think how pathetic I must have come off back then. But then we all grow up, some of us have further to go in the process. That's all...

I need to tell the WHOLE story. It was the fall of the year I graduated high school, 1993. I joined the PML and began trading tapes with fellow students in Holland and Denmark, Germany, Sweden, Norway.

There's a lot of this story that began with me going to First Avenue the following spring expecting a birthday show with the glam-metal band Extreme in the mainroom.

But when I got there, the doors were chained shut, the place clearly deserted, and no show took place at all.

I felt alone and rejected and pissed off.

If only I knew how many times I'd see Prince shred his guitar, play a keyboard or two, even take a whack at the drums...

I wouldn't have felt so rejected by Extreme's no-show.

The coming years were amazingly excellent. I plan to delve into them in detail right here...

every new beginning...

okay so this will be an amusing mess.

I hope for better, but have finally concluded that all these stories in my head need to be outside it somewhere.

I've dropped scraps and shreds at various places, but this will be the one page to try and remember it all on.

I've been a Prince fan since growing up in Minneapolis with KDWB and WLOL radio playing the "Minneapolis sound" in the 1980s made me one. U Got The Look, The Glamorous Life, LRC, 1999, The Bird, Delirious, I Feel For You, Manic Monday, Raspberry Beret. Mmmmmm.

I remember it started to be more than just a passing thing when the single New Power Generation got regular airplay. I knew Prince songs before, but just the radio ones, and the ones they played at the roller skating rink over in Coon Rapids. This new song felt like it came from inside me somehow.

The lyric, the idea, the ferocity of the performance, all of this spoke to my inner teenager craving rebellion and anarchy. This was also in the timeframe of the first Gulf War, so the idea of "making love and music the only things we're fighting for!" had extra appeal among us budding proto-hippies.

I soon enough bought the Graffiti Bridge soundtrack on cassette and proceeded to wear that thing out. I even made a mark with my fingernail on the little clear window in the middle of the tape so I could know just where to rewind it to and hear SHAKE! by The Time.

I grew to love that tape because of the openly acknowledged awkward relationship with a father figure that the voiceover introduction shared with me. I felt like if Prince could have a weird relationship with his father, or even just The Kid from the movie, maybe I wasn't such a misfit weirdo after all. I mean, look at Prince being awesome. If he came from a messed up beginning and grew up to be okay, maybe someday somehow I'll be okay, too!

The story continues through my appreciation for the Batman soundtrack.

There are plenty of stories to tell.

I just had to get started.

I attended 12-15 or more events at Paisley Park over the years. With the help of numerous references online and offline, I'm gonna try to zoom in on each of those experiences and get them down in text so that I don't forget them, and maybe someone else will appreciate them too. Anything's possible, right?

I also read some of my crappy teenaged poetry at the Neo Manifesto poetry readings at the NPG store in Uptown Minneapolis between 1994-1996. We were there once a month for more than a year. I can remember some of the faces I saw turn out regularly for those events, also.

And of course there are plenty of other memories to pepper in from all sides and angles.

I can't let any more of these memories slip into the past. I have to try and nail them down in words.

Thank you, internet and world at large, for showing me how much we all love Prince.

I intend to do anything I can to add to the celebration.

Peace and B wild!