they’re going to freak out, man. [ laughs ] There was this beautiful, lush orchestra on there. It’s crazy. [ laughs ] That’s just one of thousands of songs. I brought that up to say that a lot of the songs in the vault were precursors to the final production like “Gett Off.” There were ten versions of that before he got to the final one. I was there to watch the whole thing. The song is still “Gett Off,” but he redid it about ten times to get to that final one that you heard. He said, “Man, something still ain’t right.” And all the other versions were cool. [ laughs ] I was like, “Man, to me, you were done on version four.” He was like “No, no, no.” When we used to work in the studio, I used to look in his eyes and you could tell when it was done and when it wasn’t. When it wasn’t, he would look up in the sky. It was almost like he was talking to a spirit, “It ain’t there, we have to keep going.” And until he actually took his eyes from the sky and looked straight across, that’s when I knew it was done. Then it was time to mix that. It was hard, man, because the ideas he was doing getting up to the final ones were cool, but all of that kind of stuff went in the vault. I don’t know of any artist on the planet who even has that kind of body of work. Because they’d have to write it, sing it, and play it. He did a lot of his own recording, too, like an engineer. They’d have to be able to do all of those things to even have a third of that kind of catalog. It’s crazy, man. Then, they’d have to be prolific on top of that. You know what I mean? It’s one thing to be like, “I worked really, really hard.” But you could be working hard on some stuff that ain’t happening. Here was a guy who could deliver, and he had a work ethic like that. That was rare. It was definitely rare. When you guys were all in the studio, where was Prince positioned? Where were you positioned? Where were the other musicians positioned during studio sessions? Levi Seacer Jr.: I basically put songs in two categories: it was either piano songs or guitar songs. If it was a song like “The Question of U” or “Diamond and Pearls,” they started off as piano songs. Now, if we were doing some rock stuff that had guitar leads, then he would be on the guitar. Position-wise, the drummer was always in an isolated room with glass. Prince would always be facing us when we recorded. On Diamonds and Pearls , I was on bass, so I’d usually be on the left of him. The keyboards would be slightly behind that and the drummer would be in the booth. We didn’t do all of the vocals and the music at the same time. Sometimes, Prince would just have his stage mic there, and he would just throw down a scratch track, just so we knew the structure of a song, but then he would erase that and do it over later, after we built up the music. That was basically the configuration. There were a few times when we recorded everything at once. At Paisley Park, we had three isolation rooms, so you could put the horn section in one, the drums in another, and the vocalist in another. It was pretty isolated. It was usually lead guitar, rhythm, bass, keys and drums. That was the usual tracking system. Then, depending if it was a piano or guitar song, he would be on the piano or the guitar.
Let’s transition to your band and Prince’s studio routine during the making of this album. Was there a set time that you guys would go into the studio to work on material, or was it just pretty much whenever Prince felt like going into the studio? Levi Seacer Jr.: I spent a lot of time with Prince when I was with Sheila. Prince did a lot of recording at Sunset Sound [in Los Angeles]. When I joined Sheila’s band, he would invite me to his sessions to play. I was sitting there with Wendy and Lisa, and I wasn’t in his band, but we all jammed together for years. When I got in his band, he remembered that I liked doing studio stuff, and he said, “You got some studio chops. You like to write a bit. Levi, I am going to tell you this once. Are you listening?” And I said, “Yes, man. I am listening.” He said, “Listen, we do ten to twelve hours of rehearsal.” Some people started at nighttime, but we weren’t like that. We would start at ten in the morning. After ten hours, he’d say, “Okay, Levi. I’m in the studio. I’m going to say this once. If you want to work with me in the studio, I just gave you my schedule. So if you show up, then I know you’re serious. If you don’t, then okay. I’m just going to say he does the band thing. He’s not that interested in the studio thing.” But I took him up on it. So he’d have his dinner, and sure enough, like clockwork, every night, an hour after rehearsal, he was in there recording something. I’d be sitting right there, he’d say, “Oh, you showed up!” Now, as far as how long his sessions would go, I am not going to lie, we pulled some all-nighters. We’d be coming out of there at six in the morning, and then be back at rehearsal at ten in the morning. When he would do it, and I actually liked doing it this way, Prince wouldn’t leave the studio until the song was at least seventy percent formed. If we started off with nothing, by the time we left the studio, we might have recorded two or three songs in one night. They were all going to be at seventy percent level. In other words, they would be almost ready to mix. It was just as intense as rehearsal. He used to laugh and say, “Listen. I know you’re tired from the studio, but I’m expecting everything in rehearsal tomorrow, okay. They are two separate things. You got that?” I said, “Yeah, I got it, man, I got it.” Every now and then, we might get out of there at midnight, but it was usually at four or five in the morning and that was for six days a week, too. I mean, he was just music, music, music, which explains why there are so many songs in his vault. Prince was doing two or three songs, at seventy percent level six days a week, for his whole career. So you’re talking about thousands of songs, not in this ideal form but recorded with vocals, production, everything. It’s mind-boggling. When they talk about the vault, it’s like the world doesn’t have a clue. I heard a lot of stuff from the vault, man. It’s some stuff in there, man. You’ll be like, “How could he not have put this out?” [ laughs ] One day, Prince said to me, “Levi, I want you to hear something. You remember when you heard ‘When Doves Cry’?” I said, “Prince, I have to be honest with you, man. When you put that out, I thought you made one of the biggest mistakes.” When “When Doves Cry” came out, it was nothing but drums and vocals. I was like, “Where’s all the production?” But after a while, it caught on. I thought it was kind of cool. He said, “Okay. Now check this out.” He sat me down, and he played me the original version of “When Doves Cry.” Man, there were one hundred violins on it, guitars, basses, and all this other stuff. I said, “Man, okay, okay. How could you record all that and decide to break it down to vocals and drums? That was a big decision.” He said, “Yeah, man. I just wanted to do something really different, and I wanted people to get used to a different kind of sound. I knew it was drastic, but I took a gamble on it and, you know, it paid off.” I said, “Yeah, it came out, but oh my God.” What I’m trying to tell you is, when the world actually hears the real version of “When Doves Cry,”
Can you talk about the collaboration between the band members during the making of this record?
Levi Seacer Jr.: Well, obviously, there were a few tunes on there with the rap stuff, so he and Tony Mosley were handling that kind of stuff. Now, I’ll go on the record for this, because a lot of times the critics were brutal in their criticism of Tony. What the critics didn’t know is even if Prince would’ve had a real super dope rapper or whatever, whoever was hot at the time, Prince would not have let them done
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