PRINCE: DIRTY MIND OR COLOR BLIND?

PRINCE: DIRTY MIND OR COLOR BLIND?

LAURA FISSINGER

Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota: white.

White is everywhere. The ground is white from October 'til April. Street after street strolls without hurry between rows of big old family houses, pointed white. The area's largest "ethnic group" is Scandinavian, so the white people in Minneapolis/St. Paul hope fairly white skin and fairly light hit which turns white in the summer. One Minneapolis suburb hosts America's oldest shopping center, replete with its miles of shiny white corridors. Its very famous American rep theatre does the big plays of western white culture for well-to-do white audiences. And these people buy a lot of white clothing, because the Twin Cities are so dirt-free. By and large, what starts out white stays white—and people by and large like it that way.

It should be noted here that white skin does not a white person make. People in the Twin Cities figured Prince Rcgers Nelson for a black teenager when he first came on the music scene, but his looks were only a part of it. It was the energy, the attitude. He and his barband made the Top 40 schtub they played come back from the dead and bite 'cha. Prince dressed like he didn't mind being noticed; he looked at people without deferring or false fumbling. How rude! And that walk!

How uncouth! Don't know what color it is, Harriet, but it can't be white.

Tolerance may be the Minnesota state bird, but the unwhite of any skin color or lifestyle had best stay in their own neighborhoods and keep their essential lack of civilization to themselves.

Prince was born into a badneighborhood family, to an Italian/black father and a mixed breed mother who kept sex mags and vibrators barely hidden away in her bedroom. Not far from the streets where he lived (and ran away from), Prince made his unofficial concert debut somewhere around 1978. The songs were culled from his Warner Brothers debut, For You; the audience, from the scores of friends and family who'd been watching him grow up. A pal of mine came back from that Capri Theatre gig as if she'd been ravaged.

It was foreshadowing.

Back then, like now, the band was mixed race and mixed gender. Andre Cymone (Livin' In The New Wave) was the original bassist, Dez Dickerson the guitarist before the 1 983 add, Wendy. Gail Chapman came before Lisa on synthesizers. Our pal Dr. Fink and drummer Bobby Z had been there since the Capri. Prince was still experimenting with the cast of characters concept; to this day, Fink is the only one that wears a costume onstage.

You'd think maybe having a friend in the band would have netted us juicy stuff like the details on the unprecedented contract with Warners (big money and artistic control for a rank beginner). Okay, maybe something'easier—like who Prince slept with? Or how many instruments did Prince play, really? Did he speak in falsetto all the time, too? f

Forget destiny, just show us the travelogue!

To Fink's credit, we heard nothing except "I have to sleep now"; being in Prince's band was apparently going to be hard work. He exhausted them at endless jam sessions from which pivotal Princian riffs were born. Band members were allowed no self-indulgence that affected the group, be it drugs or scruffy haircuts. Prince was reticent with them, friendly in a remote sort of way; the vision of the music ruled, and everything played handmaiden to it.

Fink kvetched and moaned but was amazed with the musical and personal growing that this opportunity was forcing him to do. He went out and got lots of haircuts.

That ferocity was perhaps the unwhitest thing about Prince—a "lust for life" as fellow primal screamer Iggy Pop once put it. The first album tried to muffle the ferocious moans a little—For You was fairly respectable MOR makeout soul, which just shows to go you how far Prince was preparing to travel. The graphic lyrics of his first minor hit, "Soft And Wet," only hinted.

If "Soft And Wet" was graphic, then the big numbers from Prince (1979) were scratch and sniff. "Sexy Dancer" and "I Wanna Be Your Lover" also earned Prince his union card on the soul and dance charts. Fink was now the Doctor, replete with face mask and stethoscope, and he laughed at our swooning reactions to Prince's first large-scale hometown show. Leopard underpants and thigh-high boots and a hard-rock guitar song called "Bambi." Yowl As the band whiplashed the grooves, Prince humped inanimate objects with no regard for good manners. Depending on whom you asked, Minneapolis was offended, stunned, thrilled to pieces. The biggest thing since Bob Dylan! Bigger than Mary Tyler Moore! Let's have Prince and Mary do it on a desk-top at WJN! That would have been the perfect parable to explain what was happening to this colored guy and his white hometown.

If the second LP's hottest spots were scratch and sniff, well, then Dirty Mind's highlights were live sex shows in your living room. At last, the big time critics in New York and L.A. really took notice. How could they not? Some punk mutt kid from the frozen northcentral had suddenly done more for the use of sex as metaphor and sacrament than anyone since Elvis Presley. From out of the genteel prettiness of the first two albums had (uhhhhh) come a horny genius having his way with rock guitars, soul singing, gospel singing and composition builds, syntho-tech minimalism, disco dance grooves, funk dance grooves, British pop melodies ("When You Were Mine") and anything else that could be seduced into submission. Once you let go of being white, the record bellowed, then the colors were all there, the possibility of a full life was there. Dirty Mind presented an assbiting challenge to repression, dogmatism, arbitrary ethics and all those poor folks in the world that wish someone would turn the music down.

Acclaim does not a big seller make, of course, especially in towns like Minneapolis where radio program directors made themselves look stupid explaining why dance club smashes like "Uptown" and the title track couldn't get any airplay. (OK, we understood the problems with "Head" and "Sister"). Still, it sold better than Prince and 1981 's Controversy sold better than Dirty Mind, even without the complete rapture of the critics. The public was readier than the writers for the increased role of guitar, the ingenuously political lyrics, and the startling singing below the falsetto. Talk to me straight, boy. Talk to me low, honey. The squirming sweaty sex fiends versus the big band bombmakers. The hard-ons versus the hardliners! Hey— let's work!!

Meanwhile, back on dance floors from east to west, new wave and disco were making babies faster than rabbits on Spanish fly. Kids of every color said phooey to' arbitrary categories. Does it. make you sweat? Great, let's dance to it. Black? Techno-pop? Disco? Who cares? And for the first time in too long, what the hipsters liked and what the top 40 audience liked weren't a universe apart. And while working on LP #5, Prince contributed to the happy chaos. His friends the Time had a huge hit with "Cool," starting on their merry path to becoming a truly great dance band. Then a gorgeous gal named Vanity sent Prince a demo tape, which led to a trio in her name and a slab of big-selling super-smarm called "Nasty Girls." Some of Vanity 6 and the Time will be seen in the feature film that Prince started filming just this November. (Reportedly the film's soundtrack will be Prince album #6).

Freedom of expression is what they say Prince is about.

Seeing that / 999 went platinum last summer and is still lounging in upper chartland, we don't have to tell you that Prince finally became a superstar with fans as well as critics. And not just a few factions of fans but the most woolly potluck of humanity imaginable. For the fans who'd been there from the start, hearing the four sides of 1999 was like sitting in a darkroom witnessing the moment when the photograph started to really come dear. Scratch and sniff had just been a scratch on the surface.

For the 7 999 tour, the color was purple, a tour de force and farce of lights, sets, musicians, songs, clothing, crowds and manifestos of full personal expression. I know, I know—you saw the show, and not what you waded through this whole article to hear about. Miss Minneapolis here was supposed to lay some tasty Prince anecdotes on your cocktail crackers. Welllllll, I don't have any.

Well, maybe a little one. It was the night of the 1999 hometown show, also the night of one of the winter's most vigorous blizzards. Took us an hour to drive a mile from the arena parking lot to the hotel where the promoters were throwing his royal badness a party. The reclusive star was well-protected even there, by mobs of friends, family and a few bodyguards the size of meat-packing plants. Any thoughts of hihowareya were canceled, you dig?

Prince had personally programmed some irrestible dance tapes for the fete, so we all got out there and tried to get the concert out of our crotches. I was trashing away without inhibition when a pint-sized James Brown kneedropped to my left. Sure of trouble if I had too much fun with Prince nearby, I moved back. Then he stepped backward too, as if wanting to close the big circle of relatives gyrating in front of him. The music started to crank, the voodoo got heavier. For a minute there, Prince convulsed in a cocoon of bodies; the whole dance floor seemed to pull in like old white houses to the eye of a Midwestern tornado.

Freedom of personal expression is what they say Prince is about. A tornado is more what he feels like, making the colors break and splatter all over everyone in his path. Minneapolis, Minnesota is a little less white than before.