Читать книгу Prince - Brian Morton - Страница 9

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Minneapolis, 1997. A baby boy is playing in the dirt with a purple ball when his attention is diverted by three gold chains half buried beside him. His cries disturb a television journalist standing nearby to report on the start of a rock tour that is going to reverse ‘the low concert grossing of even the biggest of the superstar acts’. The baby jumps into his teenage mother’s arms and shows her what he’s found. ‘The young mother holds the chains to her bosom and begins to remember back, back . . . five years ago.’

* * *

Minneapolis, 1992. Warner Brothers release, its non-verbal emblem a combination of the astrological signs for male and female. It’s the work of the label’s most charismatic but also most troublesome artist. The album is supposed to come with a video programme that links sixteen funk songs into a narrative about a rock star and a teenage Egyptian princess. The inheritor of a sacred relic, the ‘three gold rings of Turin’, she is being pursued by the seven men who murdered her father. In an attempt to find them first, she sends a tape of her dancing to the legendary rock star. He falls in love at once, as princes are supposed to fall in love with princesses. But he fears emotional entrapment and consoles himself in sex with others. In so doing, he also destroys seven older versions of himself who are, of course, the old king’s killers. A double destiny is thus enacted. The 320-year-old pretender and the sixteen-year-old princess are mystically united.

The journalist Vanessa Bartholomew was played in the video by Kirstie Alley, who made her name in the cult television series Cheers. Her part was largely cut out of the final album mix. It survives in a short abortive conversation with the star – he hangs up as soon as she admits the conversation is being taped – and in her later attempt to question him about about a rumour that the crown princess of Egypt has become a member of his band, the New Power Generation. He flirts with her, pretends to be called Victor, and hangs up mid-sentence. The princess, for whom the whole elaborate story was confected, was played by a dancer-singer called Mayte. The rock star was, for now, still known as Prince.

Their mystical union was made flesh almost five years later and almost at the date imagined in the video. On February 14, 1996, Prince and Mayte Janelle Garcia exchanged vows at a church in Minneapolis. It was a complex time career-wise for the musician. Over the previous year, he’d taken to appearing in public, most notoriously at the Brits Music Awards, with the word SLAVE written in eyebrow pencil on his cheek. (So iconic a moment was this that some time later a member of Blur appeared at the same event with DAVE pencilled on his cheek.) At the start of 1996, Prince had parted company with his enslavers Warner Brothers, the record company which had made him a star with unprecedented control over his own music, by dashing off in just ten days a contract-fulfilling final album before he launched his own NPG imprint on EMI. Slight it may have been, but that year’s well-named Chaos and Disorder still sold substantially better than Mayte’s own Children of the Sun album, a solo project written and produced by Prince.

In November 1996, just before the launch of a triple set significantly called Emancipation, Mayte gave birth to a premature baby boy. Gregory was fated never to find gold chains in the dust. The infant was diagnosed as having a medical condition known as acrocephalosyndactyly, more commonly as Pfeiffer’s syndrome or ‘clover-leaf syndrome’ after a distinctive deformation of the skull. In what has to be seen as an emancipation for a child fated never to see, hear, taste or smile, the boy died a fortnight later, after his life support system was switched off. To everyone’s astonishment, Prince went ahead with release plans for the new album, threw a lavish party and fulfilled video and press commitments. The rumour mill suggested that the baby’s uterine heartbeat could be heard on Emancipation. The rumour mill also picked up on a line in the seemingly autobiographical ‘The Sacrifice of Victor’ which suggested Prince had suffered from epilepsy in early childhood. Did this explain his small stature – five foot two to five foot four depending on your source – and did it maybe suggest that Gregory’s problems were hereditary? There were more surprises to come. On Oprah, he denied that there had been anything wrong with the child. On a slightly later occasion, three weeks after the boy’s death, Prince told assembled journalists that he was ‘enjoying fatherhood’.

* * *

It may have seemed, and might seem now, just one more self-consciously bizarre pronouncement in a career marked by the most profound self-consciousness imaginable, but there is a recurrent twist to Prince’s references to fathers and sons. An Oedipal strain is never far from the surface, and neither is the romantic presumption that the child is wiser than the man.

For much of his career, Prince has played the knowing child-man, and turned that enigmatic image against an industry which began as nurturing and permissive and became increasingly denying and censorious. The loss of Gregory was followed by separation from the label that had launched his career with an unprecedented emancipation from corporate control. If the first album was a joyous whirl in a hand-held spotlight, Warner expected something different of their artist’s creative adolescence, and the infamous (though in retrospect rather innocuous) Black Album was said to have been made behind closed doors, the musical equivalent of whacking off in the bathroom. Then the sulks and rages, then the inevitable parting.

It’s an image reinforced by Prince’s diminutive stature, by the fatal glamour of momma’s clothes closet, and in the music itself by his addiction to switches and pedals that could switch between a falsetto vocal and a deep parental growl that sounded like the voice of the superego and sometimes like God himself. In that abortive interview with Vanessa Bartholomew, Prince explains why he sounds different on the telephone: ‘It’s a tongue box . . . I use it to disguise my voice.’ It was part of his genius to recognise that the voice is the truest self but also the most cunning disguise. Much of his singing in this period is in borrowed voices: camp squeals that might imitate a mother’s or a girlfriend’s fussing, the soulful bleat of a preacher, a pervert’s heavy breathing or the kind of voice that tells you the kid is safe and where to leave the money. Few artists are more instantly recognisable for not sounding like themselves. What makes a Prince album distinctive is how the music is put together.

There’s a corollary to that in the received view of who and what Prince is. He wouldn’t be the first pop star to rewrite his own biography, lie about his age and about his parents; Jim Morrison of The Doors used to pretend that his mother and his father, an admiral in the US Navy, had been killed in a car wreck, when both were inconveniently and bemusedly alive. What’s interesting about Prince, as Dave Hill points out in his 1989 biography Prince: A Pop Life, is the star’s collusion in the lies and fabrications of other people, childhood friends, ex-friends, Minneapolis hangers-on with a hook into a free lunch or a tip-off fee. It seems scarcely to have mattered to Prince whether the invention was his own or not. As in his work, which plunders all up and down the coastline of black American music, he appropriated anything and everything said about him, as if that was his reality. ‘Image’ – that treacherously inclusive word – was less important than the latest carefully confected persona or alter ego. It was as if every time he looked in the mirror Prince expected to see someone other than himself and certainly someone who did not remind him of his father.

* * *

For all his fantasies of reincarnation and royal blood, Prince’s version of the ‘family romance’ is relatively modest. It’s not unusual for children – and not just self-mythologising rock stars – to imagine that their real parents are dead, or that they are being raised by other than their blood parents, who are, of course, far more high-born and exotic. In the original treatment to the film Purple Rain, then simply known as Dreams, he explored just such a possibility, but for the moment his self-mythologising took a more modest turn. In February 1981, just after Controversy was released, Rolling Stone announced that Prince was the son of a half-black father and an Italian mother. It was a genealogy that from the magazine’s unshakably white middle-class point of view obviously made some sense of Controversy’s new brand of carnal funk and its otherwise indefinable difference from earlier bump-and-grind acts like the Ike and Tina Turner Revue, Millie Jackson or Rick James, for whom Prince was to open on tour that year.

Unfortunately, the lineage was twice wrong. The idea had got around some time previously that Prince was the son of a black mother and Italian father, and that could be traced back to an interview he gave (when he was still giving interviews) to the Los Angeles Times. He’d said that both parents were light-skinned blacks, there was a sprinkle of Italian blood on the paternal side and a poorly researched Native American connection on the maternal. Though common enough, these were important marks of exception, of a potentially exotic lineage, and Prince may well have exaggerated at least one aspect of his descent.

What they were was probably less important than where they met. Mattie Shaw was a girl from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who like many before her had left the South in search of whatever version of a better world she dreamed of: less prejudice, brighter lights, greater economic opportunity. Unlike most, drawn to New York City, Detroit, Chicago, or – the short hop – Washington D.C., Mattie and her sister Edna Mae came to live in Minneapolis, possibly the least black of all the major American cities. There, her singing caught the attention of a local jazz pianist, who asked her to sit in with his group. In June 1956, twenty-two-year-old Mattie became John L. Nelson’s second wife; he was a fellow Louisianan and eighteen years her senior. By day John worked for Honeywell Computers. By night, though, he continued to indulge the showbiz side of his nature, an aspect which surfaced whenever in later years he appeared in his son’s entourage with ever-younger and more glamorous girlfriends. He was the front man of the ‘Prince Rogers Trio’.

Spurious aristocratic titles are part of jazz mythology. Count Basie and Duke Ellington are only the most famous members of a jazz lineage that in places reads like the Almanach de Gotha: kings, earls, more dukes and counts, and princes, too. The only difference about this otherwise obscure Minneapolis group, which played mostly lounge gigs, reportedly in the smooth manner of the Ahmad Jamal group, was what it bequeathed to pop history.

At 6.17 p.m. on June 7, 1958, Mattie Shaw Nelson gave birth to a boy at Mount Sinai Hospital in Minneapolis. It was the child’s first stroke of luck that his father didn’t play with the Swinging Dixie Cups or the Minneapolis Three because John Nelson decided to name his new son after the band. The birth certificate actually gives the child’s name as ‘Prince Roger Nelson’. It may be that the dropped ‘s’ was deliberate, a concession to Mattie’s preference for a more familiar boy’s name; a clerk’s haste seems equally likely.

Talking to the Los Angeles Times in January 1981, he said, ‘I think my father was kind of lashing out at my mother when he named me’, but typically provided no explanation or context for the remark. John Nelson may have lashed out in other ways as well. If Purple Rain is even notionally autobiographical, it was a sometimes violent household. Some of Prince’s closest associates have hinted at a history of abuse. The artist himself has remained reticent on the subject, beyond a few rumour-fuelling hints in songs like ‘Papa’ on the desperate 1994 Come album, which includes the unexpectedly naked line ‘Don’t abuse children or they turn out like me’. There is more of the same on ‘The Sacrifice of Victor’, the final track on the so-called Love Symbol Album (1992), and on ‘Da, Da, Da’ from Emancipation (1996). It requires no great effort to comprehend that this was genuinely an issue for Prince.

It’s no more than a happy coincidence that a certain uncertainty and fluidity of names was part of Prince’s story from the very start. Later, he tried to abandon the name altogether, overtly to neutralise Warner branding, but maybe to escape his father’s embarrassing self-advertisement, or simply because he didn’t like it. There was more to it than that, though. The Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa used umpteen creative personas to express different parts of his creative personality or different creative personalities. Prince can’t claim quite as many heteronyms, but he has also worked as Alexander Nevermind, Camille, Joey Coco, Christopher Tracy, Jamie Starr, Tora Tora, Victor and the evil Spooky Electric, disguises which only fooled the uninitiated.

The uninitiated sometimes included childhood friends, sections of the press and of the music business. On the South Side streets and at high school, kids would see him coming and call him ‘Princess’. To those tabloids mystified and irritated by the look, the sound and the attention-grabbing antics he became ‘Ponce’ or, recalling his most celebrated album and film role, ‘the Purple Pain’. Perhaps John Nelson was lashing out not at his wife but at the child who would far outstrip his modest fame.

As always with Prince, it’s virtually impossible to separate real events from legend, but in Barney Hoskyns’s Imp of the Perverse there is a small anecdote that adds a convincing detail to the Oedipal drama. Prince recalls sneaking in the back door of a club to watch his father play. He is maybe five years old, certainly no more than nine or ten, standing hidden in a service area, looking at the lights, listening to the jingle of ice in glasses and soft feminine laughter at darkened tables. There he’s found by one of the club dancers, a beautiful girl, scantily dressed, on her way outside for a cigarette. Mock-angry and liking his looks and his sass, she takes the boy outside to wait for his father. Maybe she flirts with him and he precociously flirts back. There might even be a kiss on his cheek or, to embarrass him, on the mouth. Even if it’s invented rather than a genuine primal memory, the story is nicely constructed to fit into Prince’s psychological profile. An illicit act in an inappropriate place, above all an illicit act of looking; an older woman, but not a conventional ‘older woman’ and certainly not a mother figure; precocious desire met with an odd mix of adult denial, gentle humiliation, and permissiveness.

Light, costume, glamour, sex – the only element missing from the picture/memory is the one in which Prince was seemingly fated to spend the rest of his life. What music was John Nelson playing? Was it his father’s performance rather than that conveniently archetypal dancer’s attentions that turned Prince on? However ambivalent he felt about Nelson, the boy seems to have related to his father’s performing and went to extraordinary lengths to surpass it.

There’s sometimes confirmation in omission or denial. The one thing the movie version takes away from John Nelson is performance. Purple Rain is no more than semi-autobiographical, if it is even that, but it scatters important clues. Prince is cast as ‘The Kid’, a sulky, selfish wannabe who turns the basement of a shabby frame house into a softly lit laboratory of music and seduction. Upstairs, his parents fight and make up, fight and make up, and it isn’t clear which disturbs The Kid more or whose attention he really covets. When he intervenes on his mother’s behalf, he is slapped down. She is light-skinned (certainly light-skinned enough to be Italian, and actually played by a Greek actress) but passive and curiously anonymous. We last see her sitting wretchedly in the street with her back turned, perhaps to hide her bruises but also to suggest that she matters less to this story than the brooding figure of the man who beats her.

By contrast, the camera lingers on Francis L., a powerful, handsome man, caught between utter stillness and explosive violence, elegantly dressed for a world he seems disinclined to enter. The Kid’s father is a frustrated and self-destructive artist, shut away in his own basement, playing exquisite piano in the darkness. The boy tracks him down there, roaring ‘Motherfucker’ through the empty house like some disco Hamlet. His fury abates as he listens to Francis play, but underneath the tenderness of the moment – for all its raunch, the movie’s only convincing love scene – there is an act of denial. When The Kid asks if he writes down his songs, Francis puts a forefinger to his head: they’re locked away there. It’s a highly ambiguous gesture in the circumstances. A little later, Francis puts a gun to that same temple and shoots himself. In the aftermath, The Kid/Prince finds a locked trunk of unperformed compositions in the cellar, all of them signed Francis L. We see him take his father’s place, creatively if not Oedipally. The most important object in the movie isn’t the growling purple motorbike or the equally phallic guitar bought for him by Apollonia, the girl who sets free his oddly passive libido and then becomes a rival performer. The most important object in the film is Francis L.’s piano, its clinching frame another turned-back shot, this time of the son going about his father’s business.

When the success of Purple Rain allowed Prince to move into a brand-new custom-built mansion, John was given the old purple house down from Paisley Park and a similarly coloured BMW; in return he gave Prince the white Thunderbird mentioned in 1988’s ‘Alphabet St’. John continued to show up in the star’s entourage, with ever younger girlfriends. He was there for the ceremonial unveiling of the completed Around the World in a Day (1985), on which John L. Nelson has two co-writing credits. The father–son partnership continued on Parade with ‘Christopher Tracy’s Parade’ and ‘Under the Cherry Moon’, and the rapprochement seemed firmly cemented by the time of the Batman soundtrack, made in 1989, which has one track, ‘Scandalous’, credited to Prince and Nelson Sr. Inevitably, though, like almost every Prince associate, John believed that other songs were at least partly his work and the relationship foundered. John wasn’t present on Valentine’s Day 1996 when his son married Mayte.

For a time, Prince had seemed keen to foster his father’s career. There were other motives behind the call, but a decade earlier, Prince had picked up the phone to a former manager and sometime collaborator and asked him to listen to John Nelson’s tapes and consider producing an album. Chris Moon was the mildly eccentric Englishman and adoptive Minneapolitan who wrote the original lyric to what became the title song of Prince’s first album For You, or at least so he claimed. He and Prince parted company amicably enough – though there were copyright wrangles later – and it was Owen Husney who brokered the soon to be controversial contract with Warner Brothers. Whether Prince retained an affection for Moon, nursed a grudge or a sense of guilt depends on how you read the signs scattered in the work (the ‘Christopher’ pseudonym and the money obsession of Under the Cherry Moon). It is telling that Chris Moon should have been his first thought as the man to kick-start John Nelson’s stalled career.

How much in turn Nelson had helped his son with his developing passion for music isn’t known, presumably not much. The marriage foundered before Prince was in fourth grade. Thereafter, Prince was pretty much brought up by family friend Bernadette Anderson. Contact with his father was, for the time being, intermittent.

Interestingly, when Prince spoke to the BBC in 1981, he traced his interest in sexual themes to reading his mother’s ‘dirty books’. It’s tempting to think that the stash of porn was really his father’s, but it seems Mattie’s idea of sex education was to give her son Playboy magazines to read. It hardly matters, because Prince quickly tired of other people’s fantasies and started to write down his own.

Purple Rain offers only teasing glimpses of how things might have been or might have seemed to an imaginative boy. There is no complicating sibling in the movie, but two years after Prince was born John Nelson and Mattie Shaw had one other child, a girl christened Tyka (Tika Evene) who pops up in the release sheets for 1988 with an album for Chrysalis and then disappears again. John and Mattie drifted apart and were divorced in 1966, when Prince was nine. More unusual was their son’s behaviour. Rather than split his loyalties, or plump for life with one parent rather than the other, Prince turned his back on both. Having left his mother and stepfather to live with John Nelson for a time, at thirteen he was ostensibly alone and self-sufficient. One persistent story suggests that he lived rough. This is a familiar element of myth, comparable to Bob Dylan’s hobo days and Kurt Cobain’s sojourn under the Aberdeen bridge. In reality Prince was being looked after by a family friend, a South Side neighbour and fellow Seventh Day Adventist called Bernadette Anderson, whose son Andre – later Andre Cymone – was a mainstay of the Grand Central band and Prince’s most stimulating early musical associate.

The exact circumstances are, as usual, not entirely clear. Bernadette Anderson remembers that Prince had regular fallouts with his dad, but that things came to a head when a girl, perhaps the first of many infatuated soul-girls, followed him home after a rehearsal night. According to Bernadette, his father threw the boy out of the house and he came to her. By the time this is supposed to have happened John Nelson had moved out and Mattie was living with a guy called Hayward Baker. He has an important role in the development of Prince the musician, because it seems he took the boy to see a James Brown concert and even put the ten-year-old up on stage to dance with the star, until a security man dragged him off. (According to Brown himself, Prince repeated the experience more officially in 1984, when he and Michael Jackson played guest spots, the three Hardest Working Men in Showbusiness together on the same stage.) However warmly he might have remembered that childhood epiphany, Prince was suspicious of his mother’s new partner, and some former associates suggest that it was Baker and not John Nelson who beat him.

Prince continued to spend time with John. If the two were crashing in what was effectively a bachelor pad, there may well have been tensions if the son brought a girl home; or it may be that Baker was uneasy about a growing boy sharing the house on Fifth Avenue South and it was he who precipitated the final leave-taking. Whatever the case, it seems that Nelson gave his blessing to the new arrangement. As well he might have, since Bernadette Anderson was no ordinary woman, a tough, generous soul with a strong record in community activism. She is explictly thanked on the 1992 album: ‘Bernadette the lady – she told me / Whatever U do, son, a little discipline is what you need.’ (The track is the strange, autobiographical ‘The Sacrifice of Victor’, in which Prince adopts a new identity.)

Prince is not unusual in having, as well as a full sister, an array of step- and half-siblings. John Nelson had three children by his previous marriage – including Lorna Nelson, who claimed, unsuccessfully, to have written ‘U Got the Look’ – but the household also included Vivienne Nelson’s child from a previous relationship; Prince’s childhood companion Duane was later a Paisley Park employee, before falling foul of the law. Is he the brother ‘handsome and tall’ who’s paid back in one of those vicious sexual thrusts in ‘Lady Cab Driver’? Prince was also close to Mattie and Hayward’s son Omar. Casual adoptions are not unusual and children are often raised by grandparents, aunts (Prince briefly attempted to move in with his aunt Olivia) and non-family members. It was generous if not heroic of Mrs Anderson to offer a home to yet another troubled adolescent. Selective versions of his time there provided media profilers with the first clues to what made Prince tick. In a crowded house, lines have to be drawn. The published legend deemed that at least one of them should be literal. Did Prince or Andre really run a strip of tape down the centre of their tiny bedroom? Real or invented, it separated Prince’s fussy order from Andre’s adolescent clutter and separated Prince from his immediate surroundings, an early token of what is either remoteness or a sign of intense powers of concentration. Bernadette later moved him into the basement, where he could order his life more comfortably.

More than any comparable artist, Prince has been a victim of the pop psychologists. Once you hear the work and see the performing self as consolation for a stolen childhood and overcompensation for small stature Prince is reduced to his own fantastical creation. When at the age of twenty he released a record written, performed and produced entirely by himself, the media gratefully seized on an image of Prince as a precocious loner and equally gratefully accepted every perverse tidbit he threw their way. What makes For You (1978) an epoch in American popular music can’t be explained by back-of-envelope psychology. To see Prince as a grubby child excitedly waving the treasure he’s found is to be distracted by the glister. What is interesting about Prince is the dust rather than the gold. To understand him, one needs to understand the industry he helped to transform, and to understand Minneapolis.