no fun. That wasn’t the point of it. I always share this story, and I’ll share it with you. I remember the first night of the Sign “O” the Times tour, and that was my first tour night with him. Just before the show began, the band was looking a little worn out because we had worked so hard. Prince looked at us and said, “What’s wrong with y’all? You’re tired?” He said, “Guess what? I don’t care, I don’t really care. The show is for the people who have paid and for the fans. They’ve been saving up their money to come see us. I don’t really care if you have a good time. As a matter of fact, that’ll keep you more alert.” [ laughs ] “We’re here to play to the peak of our perfection for people who love our music. So you all got that. Now, if you have a day when you have a good time, then that’s wonderful, but I’m not here to make sure that you have a good time playing with Prince. Is that clear?” [ laughs ] I remember, about a week into the tour, I said to him, “Good luck tonight.” He said, “Don’t say that,” and I was like, “Okay, what did I say wrong?” He was like, “It’s not about luck. We are good because we practice. Don’t call it luck. I’m going to have a good show because I practiced. Even on my worst night, the show is still going to be good because we’ve practiced. We’re a well-oiled machine.” That was the genius of Prince. This is what Prince used to do. So, if we had a three-month tour, we would rehearse for three months. If it was a six-month tour, we would rehearse for five or six months. Most people get together for two weeks and then go on tour. No, we rehearsed for the same length as the tour. We were doing six days a week, ten to twelve hours a day, and that was just for rehearsal. That wasn’t including recording sessions at night, or playing at clubs on the weekend. That was our schedule. I remember the first day in his band. We were all there and he said, “Okay, everybody listen up. This is how I want stuff. Rehearsal is not for rehearsal.” I had to let that sink in for a minute, and I was like, “What does he mean by that?” He said, “Listen, we don’t come to rehearsal learning the songs.” This was during the Sign “O” the Times album. He said, “Listen, I’m going to give you three songs a night. Okay, so if you play bass, you need to learn the bass part and the vocals part. If you play the keys, you need to learn the keys and vocal parts. You need to learn the song at home, okay. And on the following day, I’m going to count the song off, and it better sound like a record.” [ laughs ] So he said, “Rehearsal is for me to dissect the songs and decide what the arrangements will be—I might want to take a verse out, or I might want to give this a try, but I can’t do that if y’all don’t know the songs well, so you learn the songs in their entirety and then I’ll do the tracking when we get to rehearsal. Don’t come to rehearsal learning stuff.” A few people tried to test him a little bit, and that didn’t work out too well for them. He made a big deal about that, and a couple people got fired. So we learned twenty-one songs in seven days. And we’re talking about Prince songs that had serious arrangements. It was intense in that way. Now, if you did your homework and came there prepared, you would be all right. But if you came not knowing your stuff, it was going to be a bad day. A real bad day. When you moved like that, you could accomplish so much. You could’ve came to see Prince for ten days straight, and every day would be different, because he had the band at that kind of level. We were always used to changing stuff. As a matter of fact, after the three months of rehearsing for a three-month tour, the first day of the tour we changed almost the whole show. Prince would be like, “Okay, you all did a good job, but now we’re performing in front of people. Now, I got these notes. On song one, take out the bridge, and on song number three, I wrote a whole new part for it.” He gave us two hours of note changes, and we got to make the changes then and played them that night. Mind you, we were videotaping and recording every night, and he was listening to everything every night. It was very intense.
but it’s in hindsight. It was kind of like when he did The Black Album . The reason he did that album was because people said, “Prince ain’t funky no more.” I was there. He said, “What? Do you speak English?” He took like three weeks and made the hardest funk he could think of and that was The Black Album . It was a similar kind of thing. People were saying, “Damn. We like the Lovesexy work, and we think it’s real creative, but I don’t know, can Prince make the hits again?” That kind of thing. And he was very competitive. He was like, “I know how to do that all day long; that’s easy.” [ laughs ] During that time, going from Sign “O” the Times to The Black Album , and then to Lovesexy , the Batman soundtrack, and Graffiti Bridge , as you were saying, people were questioning whether or not he could still come up with the goods. What was his mind-set going into the making of this album when people were questioning him? Levi Seacer Jr.: Well, even though he didn’t really care about the commercial stuff like that, he always felt like a real true artist would do what they did. There would be times when things hit and times when they didn’t. But in the long run, if an artist made a good record, people were going to come back and say, “You know what, I need to go back and listen to that again, because that was some good music,” I would say on Diamonds and Pearls , he was like, “I need to show them that I can do what they’re doing, but I can do it better than them. [ laughs ] I’m going to do cool commercial and cool, you know what I mean?” He was like, “I need to show y’all something, just in case y’all forgot.” [ laughs ] I liked that about him. You know, he could do whatever he wanted. He was like, “I can make hits, and I can make creative stuff.” That was his mind-set. I think, if he were to open his diary and talk like I’m talking to you, he would have said it like that. When he was working on the material for this record, did he demo any of his songs before bringing them to you guys? Or was it kind of like a process where a lot of this stuff evolved from jam sessions? Levi Seacer Jr.: No, he didn’t do any demos. A typical recording session for us would be just bringing a notepad, and he may have had tons of notes and stuff. For example, songs like “Push” and “Willing and Able” were just ideas. And he was like, “Hey, let’s fool around with something. I’m kind of hearing the beat like this.” He would allow us to kind of take that seed of an idea and turn it into a song. There were occasions where he was in the studio recording a song, and then he would bring us in to give it kind of a band sound. For four of those basic tracks, we did them all in one day. We were in Japan, and we had a little time off. One day, I was practicing, just kind of grooving on bass, and he said, “Hey, what’s that?” I said, “Oh, just something I was messing around with.” He said, “Michael, put a beat to that.” Michael put a beat to it, and then he had some notes. He was working on a song titled “Willing and Able,” but he didn’t have any music for it yet. He was like, “This will work fine for that.” So that’s how that came together. For “Diamonds and Pearls,” he had that one written. He wanted to actually start a cut on that one. He was about fifty percent done when he brought us in, and we put our last colors on it.
Can you describe what the band’s rehearsal sessions were like?
Levi Seacer Jr.: People always ask me, “Hey, did you have fun?” I quickly say, “No”—and put a p on it: “ Nope .” I put a p on it, okay? They’re like, “Oh, come on, man,” No, no, no, it wasn’t fun. There was
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Levi Seacer Jr. during Prince’s ACT II tour in Gent, Belgium, 1993. Photo by Gie Knaeps/Getty Images.
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