because I was in the audio world. I literally called Paisley Park and said, “I’m a recording engineer in town. Can I come by and get a tour of the studio?” They said yes. And I went out there and the studio manager showed me around. In retrospect, it was hard to find people with experience on an SSL console, which Prince had in Studio A. Anyone can learn it, but the people who worked on those, especially during that time, were fairly rare. He was trying to hire someone, and I didn’t even realize it at the time. The studio manager was super nice. His name was John Dressel. They asked me to come back and work for a couple of days as a tryout, then I would have a job after that, if it all worked out. This is what brought me to Paisley Park. I started at the bottom of the ladder. I was the assistant day engineer. I was aligning tape machines and getting people coffee or food, driving them around, or plugging in microphones, that sort of thing. Prince was a big presence for a small person. I’d see him walking around every now and then. This was back during his Batman era, so around 1989 was the time I joined him at Paisley Park. He had a couple of big singles off that album. He was living large. Paisley Park was this awesome, immaculate place full of people managing a record label, wardrobe styling, soundstage, and multiple recording studios. It was such a busy place back then. On this Prince project, specifically, he was going to have one specific engineer and a lot of assistant engineers because he would work people to death. So they were always trying people out to see who would work well in that situation. Femi Jiya was the engineer on the Batman record. So they tried me out as an assistant engineer with Prince, and I worked with Femi. I don’t think Prince really noticed me per se. There was nothing revolutionary about it, other than me not getting fired, because some people would get fired after working one day in the studio with Prince. [ laughs ] I began working more and more with Femi as his assistant engineer; then one day, Femi was gone. There were three main assistant engineers at the time. It was myself, Tom Garneau, and Dave Friedlander. We were all peers and friends and really driven to be great at what we were doing. Prince tried all three of us out at various times. I had no idea that he was looking for a new main engineer, but he would challenge us by saying we sucked. It would push us all. He’d say, “Put up the drum sound.” One of us would be doing it, and he’d mic it. He’d shoo us away and tell the other one to try it. It was this bizarre situation. Tom, Dave, and I worked with Prince for years after that. I became his main engineer some point after that. I had a lot of experience, but it wasn’t like I had the same amount of experience as Femi Jiya. Step by step, I kept doing more for Prince.
“I don’t even want to meet her until she can prove what she can do. There’s no sense in me meeting her and we can’t get down.” So he was in his apartment at Paisley and he said, “Levi, I just wrote a song, and I want that to be her audition. Take her to the studio and record her, and then bring me back the cassette. Then I’ll tell you if I like her or not.” I said, “Okay, cool.” Rosie asked me, “Where’s Prince?” I told her, “Don’t worry about it. Let’s go knock this song out.” Rosie knocked that song out in twenty minutes. The lead and background vocals. I went up to Prince’s office and he was eating. He said, “Hey!” I said, “Let me put this in.” [ laughs ] I put that cassette in and he said, “That voice is in my studio right now ?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “She sounds like Aretha Franklin, man.” He was so excited. He said, “Okay. Hold on now. Is she going to give me a headache? Is there going to be a problem? Because I don’t want to get used to that voice, man. I already hear her next album.” You should have seen his face. He was so excited. It was like he got Aretha Franklin. I said, “Man, she’s cool. I already talked to her. It’s all yours, dude. I told you. Didn’t I tell you?” He said, “Yeah, but I didn’t know it was like that .” He was so happy to have a vocalist on that kind of level. If you looked at some of our tours, Prince would leave the stage for about ten minutes and let Rosie take over. On the album, all it did was open his mind even more on the possibilities of where he could go. The whole “Diamonds and Pearls” song, that was really him knowing he had a voice like that in the background that he could use. We had more of an R&B side to us than the Revolution. So all those elements helped to shape that sound. When he did “Purple Rain,” Wendy and Lisa had a more pop [influence], like a Joni Mitchell–ish type of thing. Rosie got him into that soul and R&B sound, but Prince was already a soul singer. But to have somebody like that brought out that side of him more. Remember what I told you about how intense Prince’s studio sessions were? Prince couldn’t just have any kind of engineer in his studio. First of all, if we were spending all those hours in the studio, Prince had to like you. He really didn’t like people around him that didn’t bring something to the table. They had to have some kind of vibe, because he was spending too much time with them. Michael [Koppelman] was a really cool engineer. He really knew his job, and he was musical. There were a lot of engineers who went to school, but they’re not musical. They’re coming at you with all these numbers and frequencies, but Prince was like, “Look, that sounds like bullshit right there. That doesn’t sound good, I don’t care what the frequency is. That doesn’t sound right.” [ laughs ] He only said that twice because, if he had to say it a third time, he was going to take a break and another engineer would be flying in from New York. Because you know, not to be mean, but he was like, “I don’t have time for this. I’m trying to get this stuff done.” Michael knew Prince’s flow. Michael was really cool. Michael had a certain look to him, and he could handle Prince’s temperaments in the studio. It wasn’t like Prince was crazy in the studio. The only time Prince got crazy was if somebody didn’t know their job. So Michael fit all of that stuff, and he was very musical. Michael knew Prince so well that when we were working, he was already fixing stuff that he knew Prince would fix later. Prince would say, “Oh, you heard that. Cool.” That is what Michael Koppelman and Rosie brought to the table.
When and where did you first meet Prince?
Michael Koppelman: The first interaction I had with Prince was when he asked me to unlock the door to Studio A. But my first sort of real interaction was, I think I was the only one at Paisley Park, and he wanted to get in the vault, but he didn’t know the combination. So he asked me. I wanted to be helpful, even though I didn’t know the combination. So I called Therese [Stoulil], who was his assistant at the time, and I said, “Hey, Prince wants to get into the vault.” She replied, “Okay. No problem.” She began talking me through the process of opening the vault, and it was not working. Eventually, Prince began standing right behind me and staring at the vault door, while I was trying to open the vault over and over again. I remember him looking at me and saying, “Get help.” The first two words he ever said to me were, “Get help.” [ laughs ] So I called Therese back and eventually got the door open. It was the first time I said a word to him.
Michael, how did you begin working with Prince?
Michael Koppelman: After I graduated from the Berklee College of Music in 1988, the first studio I worked in was in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, called Royal Recorders. I grew up in Grand Forks, North Dakota, so Minneapolis was always the big nearby town for us. So I had friends in Minneapolis, and I would come back to visit them,
105
Made with FlippingBook - PDF hosting