1981-1982 Part 2: "Controversy" and the Prolific Artist's Dilemma
The Next Thing
The reaction to “Dirty Mind” sent a very clear message to Prince. He now knew that attention came to him from his artistic risks, and that there were enough people who would enjoy that kind of material to keep his career going, even if that material was a failure from a purely “dollars and cents” perspective. It was an experience that would shape much of his future decision making. Even as he would complain about the reactions to the “Controversy” around him, he also knew that if a few people were outraged, that meant he had everyone’s attention.
He would need that attention badly as his next album was released. Any new material would automatically be seen as a follow-up to "Dirty Mind," and there aren't many sequels that can match an original.
Getting His Money's Worth
As soon as the tour for “Dirty Mind” wrapped up, Prince came back to a new house and a new studio. More accurately, he came home to a house that had been turned into a studio. Prince had taken a split-level ranch style house and had it outfitted it to his specifications, which were that it was a place to eat, sleep, record, rehearse and nothing else whatsoever. The living room was turned into a studio control room and a series of small booths used for recording spaces. On the other side of the ground floor was Prince’s bedroom. The piano was in an upstairs room, once again too big to fit into the regular studio. Most of the gear was from his Arm Drive house, but now the soundproofing and acoustic treatments were to a much higher standard.
Not only was the quality of sound improved, but Prince’s ability to consistently churn out first- rate material had also reached a higher level. For decades to come, he would regularly produce many albums’ worth of material each year for himself and others. It’s hard to say exactly how much music he created in his lifetime since the overwhelming majority may still be in his vault, but the next few years would see him release an amount of material each year that is staggering for an artist of his generation.
This run was still accelerating in 1981, as sessions for “The Time” overlapped with initial sessions for the album that would become “Controversy.”
Problems of Proliferation
Later on in his career Prince would become very unhappy with Warner Bros for several reasons, but one that he often cited was Warner’s fear of their artists releasing too much music too quickly. Warner feared overexposure would prevent Prince from building the kind of momentum his career was finally starting to build in 1981. At this point, Warner did not yet have an issue with Prince's release schedule, so Prince kept up the pace of roughly one album of material a year right up to his death, but it was clear that he produced far more.
As irritating as it was to Prince to have somebody else controlling the flow of his work into the market, Warner did have a point. There are two main problems with any prolific artist in any medium, and Prince will certainly fall victim to both of these phenomena. First, they can’t all be hits. When you release as much music as Prince, some of it is just bound to be not as good. Second, quality material can be treated as a “miss” simply by its timing – especially in retrospect. “Controversy” suffers from this. In the timeline of Prince’s releases, we are now just between “Dirty Mind” and his first truly huge hit album “1999.” Between these two peaks, it’s hard to see “Controversy” as anything but a valley.
All that said, “Controversy” is still a good album, even if it is a transitional work. It will probably always going to be viewed as either a cleaner, brushed-up sequel to “Dirty Mind” or as a prototype for the sound Prince finally assembled for “1999,” though. I have difficulty seeing it on its own merits myself.
1. Controversy
The title track is a stone cold Minneapolis Sound classic. Everything about this song is pure 1980s Prince, from the stomping beat to the slightly fuzzy keyboards to the raggedy, scratchy guitar, it’s just a fantastic track. Prince kept this song in his live repertoire for the rest of his life, and for good reason. Morris Day makes an uncredited appearance here on drums.
2. Sexuality
I wonder if Prince thought this was easing down on the “explicit content” throttle after the last album had “Head.” He does veer into political territory though, with lyrics like “I’m talking about a revolution, we got to organize,” followed by the chant “reproduction of a new breed / leaders stand up, organize.” And in an early example of what would become a hallmark of his work, Prince throws together two different concepts and treats them as almost interchangeable values, in this case social justice and sexual liberation.
3. Do Me, Baby
I’ll be honest, “Do Me, Baby” isn’t really my cup of tea. Prince definitely did not share my opinion of this track, as he kept it as a centerpiece of his live set at least through 1988, and still played it very regularly thereafter, right up until 2001, when the song would have been considered too racy for him, and by the time he started to move past that nonsense, other songs took its place. It appears that most of the music on this track was actually written by Andre Cymone and credited to Prince, possibly without Andre’s knowledge or consent.
The track was first recorded in 1979, after Prince wrote the lyrics. This version was released as a single in late 2021, and I have to say that even though I don’t like the song much, I like the 79 version even less. The demo is more uptempo and stripped of the melodrama of the more familiar version.
Friends have suggested to me that I simply don’t get the appeal of the song. As Wodehouse used to say “there may be something in this.” The album version is considerably extended compared to the single edit you get on most compilations. After the main Al Green + Liberace section, there is a long spoken word section, where he apparently speaks to the woman the song is addressed to. Let’s just say it gets…explicit for a second, and when that part of the song has…ummm climaxed…then Prince apparently gets all emotionally vulnerable and asks to be held for a while. So yeah, not for me, but I suppose there is a chance – just possibly – that I am not the intended audience.
4. Private Joy
“Private Joy” kicks off the flipside of the album and it’s a bubbling, fizzy piece of 80’s pop trying to find a mall to play it. Which will not be easy, since at one point Prince refers to the subject of the song as an “Orgasmatron.”
The quality of the recording is very different from the rest of the album as it was the first track Prince ever recorded at Sunset Sound in Hollywood during the final week of work on “Controversy.” Apparently this song was originally called “Dear Uncle George” before Prince wrote new lyrics. It also seems likely that the original song was recorded at Kiowa Trail, but Prince completely re-recorded the track for this version.
5. Ronnie Talk To Russia
Again, politics make their way onto the album. This time, an appeal to the President at the time to settle the Cold War before somebody makes a nuclear mistake. Hence “Ronnie, talk to Russia before it’s too late.” I particularly like the bit about “You can go to the zoo, but you can’t feed the realists / Left wing realists.”
6. Let's Work
This is a song left over from a run of sessions recorded in Boulder, CO in 1979. Prince apparently wanted to have his band record their own album. The band tentatively took the name The Rebels and the band recorded songs they had written. A few songs were written by Prince as well, but by and large it was the band’s work.
This collaborative atmosphere led some of the band to believe that the sessions were just an incentive for the band rather than a sincere attempt to produce music for later release. Again, it depends who you talk to. The band’s guitarist, Dez Dickerson seems to believe that the whole thing was just a pacifier for the band. Dr. Fink can’t seem to make up his mind. In all likelihood, both options were probably true at different times, and possibly it was just Prince trying out the process that would later create The Time, Vanity 6 and other acts.
In any case, “Let’s Work” is a fantastic song with maybe the catchiest bass line Prince would write for the next two decades. The 12 inch single also has an extended version that was later released on the “Ultimate” compilation. According to a post on the NPG Music Club website in 2003, the extended version was created by taking the album track recorded at Kiowa Trail to Sunset Sound, where additional recording took place featuring both Prince and Morris Day on drums, where they switched places on the drum kit live during the recording. Also, some samples from other songs on “Controversy” appear, the first time Prince used clips of his music in this way.
7. Annie Christian
Anti-Christian, get it? Yeah yeah. It says something about Prince’s commercial instinct that almost every time he wanted to say something potentially off-putting he made damn sure that song was a banger, which “Annie Christian” absolutely is. Despite the title, it doesn’t really proselytize much. Instead, it’s largely about the violent side of the American collective unconscious.
Prince had a show in New York scheduled for December 9, 1980 on the “Dirty Mind” tour. It was delayed until a little past midnight because all of New York had ground to a halt the day before when John Lennon was shot outside his apartment building. There has been speculation that Prince hired a bodyguard soon after as a reaction to Lennon’s death. It’s possible, especially considering at about the same time he went from making out with members of his audience to keeping them at arm’s length and barely even speaking to them. Prince was basically unapproachable (literally, there was at least one huge surly dude between the world and Prince at all times) from now until 2000.
At any rate, the song is more than worth a listen, especially as a foreshadowing of his next album. This song features Prince’s last use of his Korg drum machine. Starting with “Private Joy,” his main drum machine for the next decade was the classic Linn LM-1. Plus there are some really pointed lyrics about certain segments of the population’s habits of hypocrisy. “She shot John Lennon / Shot him down cold / Then she tried to kill Reagan / Then somebody said ‘Gun Control!’”
8. Jack U Off
This song almost sounds like Weird Al doing one of his stylistic parodies. It’s certainly sung tongue-in-cheek. There’s almost nothing more to say about it other than it was an unusually collaborative track, with Bobby Z on drums, plus both Dr. Fink and Lisa playing keys. Not quite “Prince and the Revolution,” but the signs are there.
B-Side: Gotta Stop (Messin' About)
This is a holdover from the “Dirty Mind” sessions, and the sound quality certainly gives the game away. It was Prince’s first non-album B-Side, and I have to say it is not among the best. It occupies the B-Side to “Let’s Work” on the U.S. 12-inch single. In a few European territories it was even given its own release as an A-Side…not sure how that happened. Anyway, it’s not a bad little track, but it definitely feels like it’s about to shake itself apart. If it were a live recording, it would seem like any second now the band was going to lose it and have to re-start the song.
The Controversy Tour
Prince was definitely feeling the need to play larger venues, but by the same token, he knew he simply could not fill arenas just yet. He definitely had a plan for that, but the tour for “Controversy” had to come first.
It seems like the 1981-82 tour was one of those “best of times, worst of times” situations. By all accounts, Prince’s band was playing better than they ever had, helped along by the fact that Prince’s albums to date had been successful enough that he didn’t have any marginal material in the set. Also, he had The Time with him to open, so everything should have been hunky dory, right?
The band had gotten much better in the last few years, to the point that Prince’s skills as a band leader began sharpening and he began demanding more of the band during performances. He took a lot of his cues from James Brown on this, whose band could stop on a dime and take off in a new direction with a single word from James.
Prince used the band’s expanding abilities to begin experimenting with longer jams on songs like “Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?” and “Head” that included free-wheeling synth improvisations that deviated from the album versions.
Even at this point, he seems very out of pace next to Wonder Bread, French's mustard and plastic cups.
The reasons why he seemed so intent on these new things didn’t become evident until the tour was over and work on “1999” began in earnest. Prince had become restless. Change was in the air.
NEXT WEEK: Prince expands his roster, creating what will be called “The Prince Camp.” Vanity 6 and The Time’s second album “What Time Is It?”
Comments