TIME FOR THE PRINCE WHO WILL BE KING

Is he gonna be the first rock 'n' roll star you have to be 18 or older to see?

Halfway through the concert, the long legged blonde keyboard player has stripped down to her underwear. The occasion is Prince’s underground classic, “Head,” in which the keyboard player plays a soon-to-be-married virgin who encounters the insatiable Prince, hot for some action. Since he’s such a fox, she decides to provide him with her only available asset. But that’s not enough for Prince and he decides to take matters into his own hands, transforming his guitar into a phallic symbol. He manipulates it through a distorted solo worthy of Hendrix at his best as he gives a demonstration in selfgratification. When he’s finished he goes limp, lying exhausted on the stage as the crowd works itself into a froth of lust.

Slowly, he picks himself up from the floor and staggers to the mike.

“Do you think I’m nasty?” he wants to know.

The crowd thinks he’s nasty.

“Well I am,” he confirms with a fey shrug, “and everything you’ve heard about me is true!”

Everything?!!? This revelation is too much for one girl in the front row.

■ “Take it off,” she pleads, stretching out to grab his leg.

“And what are you gonna do?” Prince shoots back with a sneer. “Just sit there and watch?” He turns his back to the yearning mob and unleashes “Controversy,” the song which has almost everything we’ve heard about Prince condensed into seven minutes. Is he black or white? Is he straight or gay? Does he actually really have an older “Sister” who taught him everything abput sex? Was the sexual tableau which has come to dominate every aspect of his music and image really formed by what he says he learned from his mother’s pornography collection? Is he gonna be the first rock ’n’ roll star that you have to be 18 or older to see?

At the evening’s end, instead of filing out dutifully, the crowd refuses to leave. From the back of the darkened auditorium, the .chant begins to build, accompanied by a rhythmic stomp. As it spreads forward it picks up momentum until finally it crashes against the stage reverberating up into the balcony which is now also rocking, i “We want Prince, we want Prince, we want Prince...”

The regal being of the moment saunters back onto the stage and the frenzy explodes. He’s naked from the waist up, one suspender hangs down his side while the other just barely holds up his pants which are unbuttoned with the zipper halfway down. He stares out at the tumult with a nefarious smirk, eyes glinting from under a dark canopy of hair deliberately thrown across his forehead. He spreads his legs, puts one hand on his waist and grabs the mike with the other.

“If anybody asks you, who do you belong to?” he demands.

“Prince!” is the screamed reply.

“Who do you belong to?”

“Prince!” a thousands throats erupt in unison.

“1 said, who do you belong to?”

“Prince!” comes the affirmation.

“All right, then I’ll jack you off.” The audience howls with laughter.

“That’s right, I said it,” Prince declares to his minions. He then proceeds to “Jack U Off,” the frenzied rock ’n’ roll tune that brings down the curtain on Controversy. When the song is over, he grabs his crotch in a final salute to his fans and makes a hasty exit. The stunned throng still cannot believe what they’ve seen.

Even for the cocksure ’80s, last season’s Prince tour was the stuff wet dreams are made of, and now that he’s coming back out of the closet with the Time and Vanity 6, there is definitely more for the horny! You say you’ve barely heard of Prince because you only listen to groovy AOR stations and they’re too right-wing to play Prince, even though he’s making the same kind of music the British techno-pop bands claim to be the next wave and which AOR stations lap up? Well check this out. Prince is the guy who opened for the Stones L. A. Sure the audience tried to boo him the stage with insults like “nigger” and “fag,” but Prince and Mick are both troupers, so Mick invited him back and same thing happened again. What does that say for the komputer kiddies of the ’80s? Stones fans sure didn’t boo Stevie Wonder when he opened for the Stones ’72 and they sure wouldn’t have booed Sly Stone or Jimi Hendrix. Prince is every bit the innovator that Sly and Hendrix were, and Mick Jagger can borrow my hangout card anytime he wants to because he recognized what his fans can’t.

Prince is the most original and charismatic rocker I've ever seen.

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After Prince busted loose in 1979 with the funk/pop smash “I Wanna Be Your Lover” (which had people calling him a Michael Jackson with balls), he then decided to prove he was nobody’s clone by following the near-platinum Lover album with Dirty Mind, an LP devoted mainly to hot and hairy sex. Black radio was horrified and gave short shrift to even the R-rated tunes like “Uptown” and “Party Up.” It didn’t help much that Prince had rapidly gained a reputation for stripping to just the bare necessities during his act, nor aid the rumors that he was gay, which he did little to discourage. With airplay scant, he took his act to the streets where the people, ahem, ate it up. It didn’t matter that he played a lethal combination of funk and rock onstage, pointing the way to the ’80s as the British bands learned from him (and also learned from Gary Numan, M and Kraftwerk) are now displaying. The largely black audiences responded with something approaching reverence, as they fed back to him the power of the most dangerous combination imaginable, the endless groove of funk welded to the metal hail of rock. Dirty Mind sold well and was his most revealing, until the recently released 1999.

Controversy was just as good, and black radio began to forgive him his transgressions. The critics who drooled over Dirty Mind were also happy, though not as happy as when he sang about incest. This time he sang about ordinary sex, and more people began mentioning him in the same breath as Sly Stone, Jimi Hendrix and Chuck Berry. Let me be one of the first to put it in print. Prince is the most original and charismatic rocker I’ve ever seen, and that includes all the greats. He’s got the juitar imagination of Jimi Hendrix, the lance bottom of Sly, the moves of James Irown, the good looks and energy of Little lichard, the multi-instrumental ability of tevie Wonder and a falsetto that won’t Smokey Robinson out of business but can hang in there. In the ’50s, your irents couldn’t get pioneering rock ’n’ roll their pop stations, so they turned the to the black stations. If you want to the music of the ’80s as it takes form, you'll have to do the same thing. Do you have as much nerve as your parents?

Not content with having exposed himself, Prince is solidifying his hold by exposing other acts who manifest his bizarre visions. Last time around it was the Time, who, like him, are from Iceberg Central (Minneapolis). Prince not only discovered them, signed them to the same management company and record label that handles him, but even allowed his engineer to co-produce their debut album. Now is this guy regal or merely daft? Not only do the Time have a similar sound, but their lead singer could be Prince’s brother. To prove his fearlessness, Prince took the Time on his ’81-’82 tour and they were duly mobbed by Prince fanatics and fiends. It could be because of the resemblance Morris Day has to his highness, it could also be because the Time’s hit single “Get It Up” (a song that would never have seen the light of day on black radio before Prince opened it up) was battling “Controversy” all the way to the top of the charts. Since Prince declined any interviews, we cornered members of the Time as they prepared for their ’82-’83 tour with Prince to find out what the hell was going on.

“Yeah, it’s true, Prince discovered us.” Morris Day, lead singer and leader is taking his leisure. A stunning model-type is there to keep up the image (or. whatever) and other gorgeous women hover around. “We’re competition for him but we’d be competition for any group. Prince was the only one who was man enough to let us out. There were a lot of people even more established than Prince who didn’t want to follow us so we had trouble getting on a tour. What we’re doing complements what Prince does. We’re both doing something new and I go along with the idea that maybe he brought us out to make it clear that what he’s doing isn’t as totally out of whack as it would seem if he were the only one doing it...we’re making a new sound. 1 think the Time is a lot cooler than Prince, but we’re the same kind of people. I can’t speak for Prince, but I’d like to think that our music is sexually motivated. We do what we sing, we’re cool, we get it up...

The girls in the room all giggle but decline to comment.

“All I can say about Prince is that I think he’s cool. If he’s a freak, I don’t know, because I haven’t attended any of his freaky parties if he’s had any. He’s basically just a very confident entertainer and a lot of people aren’t very confident these days. The black market has been starved for entertainers like us who project a real image and are gonna be stars. There has been too much of the same thing and there hasn’t been groups like Sly Stone, and back in that era when people were great. Prince and us are trying to bring back that kind of excitement.

Does that mean fondling his crotch on stage?

“I really don’t care what another person thinks about what we do, whoever it may be,” Day decrees. “I gotta do this the way see it fit to do or else I won’t feel good the end and that’s who’s got to feel good about it—me. I think Prince feels the same way about things. They told him radio wouldn’t play his Dirty Mind album, but put it out anyway. They told us they were concerned about the lyrics to “Get It Up,” but they couldn't deny that it was a strong track. A year ago we might not have been able to put it out. Prince opened up the door. We are more concerned with getting a following of people who are interested in what we’re doing than in appeasing radio. So far there haven’t been any complaints.”

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Prince mounted the same kind of defense last year when he said: “My lyrics are everyday talk that goes on around me all the time. The radio stations that don’t play it are only denying the public of their lives. My songs reflect what my generation is all about. Radio Or no radio, we’re just gonna keep on playing till enough people hear us.”

If you want to see first hand what all the talk is about, you’ve got one last chance. Prince and The Time are back together again and this time they’ve added Vanity 6 —CREEM dreems that will make you steam. This combination should make for some interesting after concert parties since Vanity 6 has a hit album out which features the smash single “Nasty Girls.” Yes, they are nasty. They sing about deep throats, fantasize about sex in limos, whine about their wet dreams and declare flatly that they’ve got to have “seven inches or more.” True to tradition, Vanity 6 was discovered by the Time and the leader looks as if she could be the sister that taught Prince or Time leader Morris Day all the tricks in the book. The Time’s second album What Time Is It? is also a hit, even though it doesn’t have anything as blatant as “Get It Up.”

Not to be forgotten, Prince has unveiled, 1999, a double album set for all those who complained that a mere twelve incher wasn’t enough for them. Now they have a record twenty four inches to play with.

That’s what I call king size!