“Pretty contrived”: The album Prince always regretted
When he was a teenager, Prince made a demo that found its way to a local Minneapolis businessman named Owen Husney. The savvy mogul 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 bosses, he almost instantly started calling the shots.
Firstly, the label was convinced that Prince would pair well with Earth, Wind & Fire’s Maurice White. They pitched him to the teenager as a potential producer. However, Prince sensed that the classic disco sound was waning. He wanted a fresher sense of innovation on For You, so he wrote back: “I respect and love Maurice, but I know when that sound will be over, and I don’t want that imprint on my sound.”
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 to cut the record in the sunshine. 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 embraced psychological torture a few months earlier to make Rumours.
The teenage prodigy then made another demand that skewed Vicari’s best-laid plans: every note on the record would come from Prince. Vicari’s only job would be to capture everything Prince did 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.
Such stern confidence is what made Prince the beloved artist he became. He never settled for anything less than perfection and progress. However, when he did wander astray, there was no external input that could offer any pushback. According to his trusted sound engineer, Susan Rogers, he even had an ulterior motive behind his progressive move to work with so many female artists.
“Obviously, he was a heterosexual man and enjoyed having beautiful women around,” Rogers says, “But he also needed to be the alpha male to get done what he needed to get done.”
What he needed to get done in 1979 was a hit record. Above all, Prince wanted to be an individual, but in a close second, he wanted to be a successful individual. His originality, nerve, talent and wherewithal might have impressed the music industry when it came to his debut album, but it didn’t impress the public enough for many people to buy it. So, the singular star felt he had a point to prove with his follow-up. It would be the last time he ever tried to prove a point to anyone other than himself.
”The second album was pretty contrived,” Prince told The Los Angeles Times in regrettable tones. “I have put myself in a hole with the first record because I spent a lot of money to make it. I wanted to remedy that with the second album. I wanted a ’hit’ album. It was for radio rather than for me, and it got a lot of people interested in my music.”
However, he never felt it was truly his music. It was a brand of R&B that he would soon ditch in favour of the funky pop sound he would become known for. However, he had to overcome being pigeonholed for a time to hit the idiosyncratic heights he always strived for. As he lamented at the time, ”It wasn’t the kind of audience you really want. They only come around to check you out when you have another hit.”
He had worked his way onto the radio, but amid the flurry of typical AM waffle, he was just another artist, and the backstory of being a virtuoso who broke onto the scene playing every note on a shimmering debut that shunned the support of Maurice White went amiss.
”They won’t come to see you when you change directions and try something new,” he continued, lamenting his newfound fan base. ”That’s the kind of audience I wanted.”
He’d get that with his next record, Dirty Mind. It didn’t sell as well, and it led to his first battle with his label, but it was a necessary hit to establish what followed. The flippancy of quick success was behind him, and with the right fans gathering in his wake, he was able to leave the regret of his second in the past, learning from his mistake to liberate his sound even further. Reassured after a successful setback, he was now set to funk them just to see the look on their face.
