The album that derailed Prince’s entire career
One meeting can change everything, ain’t that an understatement? Divorces, lost jobs, wars all start around a conference table somewhere and really, this story about Prince feels like it involves all three.
It begins happily, though. Prince was on fire in the mid-1980s. Purple Rain had made him not just a star, but a phenomenon. From there, though, he’d defied any rules and just kept on pushing. He didn’t just release carbon copies of the same hit record, but evolved, moving into Around the World in a Day, and then onto the varied Parade, which features both the mega hit ‘Kiss’ and the poignant ‘Sometimes It Snows In April’.
Prince was still making the point he’d been making from the beginning. Ever since he demanded to make his debut utterly alone with no outsider intervention daring to impact his vision, he’d made it clear that it would always be his way or the highway. No one would be telling him what to do.
And so we land in 1986. Prince is at the top of his game and is clearly endlessly inspired as he hits the studio once again, keen to evolve more and keen to just keep on running forward and doing more.
However, the issue is that in his enthusiasm, he simply doesn’t stop. Between March and November that year, Prince polished off a three-LP album called Crystal Ball. With 22 tracks, it’s a mammoth, and then, when you look at the tracklist now, it’s a staggering, golden mammoth.
Amidst the tracklist, there are hits. ‘Sign O’ The Times’ is there. ‘I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man’ is there. ‘If I Was Your Girlfriend’ is there. ‘Starfish and Coffee’, ‘Strange Relationship’, ‘Shockadelica’, ‘Housequake’. It’s a tracklist that just keeps going, just keeps delivering. It’s epic.
And his label hated it.
When Prince delivered the album to Warner Bros, one of those life-changing meetings happened. They sat around and listened to the two-hour-long album, likely with the classic stoic faces the suits of the music world have, and then delivered the blow – they didn’t want to release it.
It splintered something. “Crystal Ball was something he loved. He was super tapped-in to the part of himself that he wanted to share,” bandmate and collaborator Wendy Melvoin said of that moment, “When he turned that record in, Warners didn’t like it. It was way too long, and they didn’t respond to the music. He was not happy about that in the slightest.”
It felt like a huge blow. Prince had just presented them with something he thought was big and powerful, but they’d taken one look at it and simply deemed it too expensive. From their perspective, it didn’t make sense. Why would they slap all those songs on one massive album when they could be split up and sold separately, boosting the income and profits by being individual singles for three separate albums?
Prince didn’t care about that. He wanted to put his music out his way, and mostly, he simply wanted to put music out. “I grew up when albums came out every three or four months. I wanted to make a lot of music,” he later said in 2004. For someone as prolific as him, there would always be more songs, so he wasn’t precious about releasing 22 of them at once. He trusted he’d make more, he wanted to clear his desk and present them exactly like this in an almost overwhelming quantity.
The meeting changed everything. This was the moment when Warner Bros began to be the villain in the Prince story as he was forced to repurpose Crystal Ball, using the songs for Sign O The Times and splitting the rest across a few other records. From then on, tensions kept worsening. It set the ball rolling that would eventually crash into 1993, and the moment when Prince changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol in rebellion against the label, demanding he be freed from his contract all so he could do things his way.
