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!!
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