How Prince laid down a perfect marker with his first album
Love him or loathe him, nobody in their right mind could deny that Prince was a very singular artist. Part of the reason for this was that he was also very singular in a literal sense, taking complete autonomy over his projects and often shunning norms to go his own way. Even at the tender age of 19, he was exhibiting this characteristic rather fiercely.
“He always demanded the best,” Patrick Whalen, Prince’s former production manager, once told The Hollywood Reporter. Whalen was one of the fateful few who said ‘no’ to Prince once and learned very quickly never to say it again. He recalled the moment he told the little virtuoso that his lighting request was impossible: “He looked me in the eye and said: ‘So what you’re telling me is that in the one second it took for you to say ‘no,’ you left your body and exhausted every possibility?’”
This is proof that Prince abided by the adage: “If you want something done right, do it yourself”. But he also extended this to a creative tenet. When he was 19, Prince made a demo that found its way to a local Minneapolis businessman named Owen Husney, who then soon signed him up and put together press materials to shop Prince to major labels. Within weeks he was signed to Warner Bros, and rather than be enamoured by his new big label, he almost instantly started calling the shots.
Firstly, the label was convinced that Prince would pair well with Earth, Wind & Fire’s Maurice White, who they pitched as producer. However, Prince sensed that the classic disco sound was waining and wanted a fresher sense of innovation on For You, so he wrote back to them: “I respect and love Maurice, but I know when that sound will be over, and I don’t want that imprint on my sound.”
So, this was his first bold rejection. The next one came when the label and chosen producer Tommy Vicari wanted Price to travel out to the new musical hub of Los Angeles. Again, Prince feared this would tarnish the individualism of his sound so he instructed Husney to tell the label to hire the Record Plant in Sausalito, California, where Fleetwood Mac had just successfully holed down a few months earlier to make Rumours.
Prince then makes another demand counter to Vicari’s typical plans: every note on the record would come from Prince. Vicari’s only job would be to capture everything Prince does in the studio. In fact, Husney even recalls Prince kicking the president of Warner Bros’ A&R out of the room so he could focus purely on the music. While Husney shuddered, Prince barely flinched, assured by his own teenage talent.
From this point on, he was simply calling every single shot. As Vicari recalls: “The first time I got a sense of this individual—the real Prince—was when we took him into the studio. I took him in with Russ Titelman, another Warner’s producer, and maybe a couple other guys. We brought him into the studio because we were so curious and he was so interesting, but we didn’t want him to feel like he was auditioning. We just wanted to see him do his thing. He put down a guitar track and got it right. Then he put down the drums—wow. You could just tell—the guitar was locked in, the timing was good, you could tell it was easy for him.”
Vicari continues: “So I naturally was like, this is silly, let’s stop, he can clearly handle it. But he said, ‘No, let me do a bass overdub.’ I said it’s unnecessary and that he could take the tape and leave, but then he did something unusual. He was typically a quiet and reserved guy, very mysterious, and it was the first time I saw any true emotion. He looked at me and said, ‘No, I need to finish the track’. He was very firm about it. I said okay, no problem.” And he was equally firm in his countered desire to create a luscious overdubbed sound for the album.
Then when the whole thing was wrapped up, Prince even hired his own photographer for the cover art. However, perhaps the most Prince-like element of the whole defining debut came after it was released. The record flopped. It peaked at 163 in the US album chart. Was Prince perturbed? Not in the slightest. He was a “physical wreck”, had cost his label thousands with a record that ran three times over budget and had strained his relationship with Vicari, but none of this really seemed to matter too much to him.
In a way, this even helped to convince the label that they should back Prince once more. Husney would later bemoan: “There’s just no artist development like that anymore.” Alas, they were far from foolhardy in this endeavour; the credits on the back of the record alone proved that the teenage Prince was a precious talent worth keeping, as it listed him as: “lead vocals, backing vocals, electric and acoustic guitars, piano, Fender Rhodes electric piano, clavinet, ARP Pro Soloist, ARP String Ensemble, Minimoog, Polymoog, Oberheim 4-Voice, bass guitar, drums, Pollard Syndrums, slapstick, wind chimes, finger cymbals, handclaps, fingersnaps, water drums, bongos, congas, brush trap, bell tree, wood block, producer, arranger, engineer, dust cover design.”
As Travis told us, this 19-year-old would go on to define the 1980s and ”bestrode that decade like a little colossus”. His first may have flopped, but it set him up to be the artist that changed music forevermore, selling over 100million records worldwide.
