hitting the snare drum, in the exact same spot every time , as hard as he freaking could. I’m sure it sounded great by the end. It was amazing to see the precision and power he played with. He was literally beating this drum to death. Rosie Gaines’s presence is felt on this album with her lead and background vocals. What was it like working with her and Levi Seacer on this album? Michael Koppelman: There were certain people in the camp that Prince really respected, musically. Sonny was on that list. Rosie and Levi were on that list too. There were certain people he wouldn’t act like the boss to. Rosie was such an amazing singer and a bright, fun personality. Prince knew if he put her on a song, she would nail it. For example, he wanted some sexy breathing on a song. He had some girls from I don’t know where hanging out in the studio, which was really rare. Let me emphasize that. He put them on the mic for fun. They were self-conscious, and they couldn’t begin to pretend having sex on the microphone. The next day, he had Rosie go into the studio, and she fucking killed it. She nailed it on the first take. The contrast was hilarious to us, and even Prince too.
all day long in London or Minnesota. It was essentially him trying to get rid of distractions to not being here. I don’t want to make him sound like he was a sexist or something, but he prioritized women and music, roughly speaking, but the music came first every day I was with him, for sure.
How would Prince like his instruments set up in the studio?
Michael Koppelman: He would use the Roland D-50 for the keyboard controller, which we would have next to the tape machine. Back then, MIDI stuff was kind of new. I had an Apple—we called it a Mac Portable; it’s like the world’s heaviest premium laptop computer. So I was just starting to figure out what MIDI was like and how to record without a tape machine. But prior to that was a thing called Publison, which was like a digital sampler, and he leveraged the hell out of that thing. And it was sort of like the LinnDrum. It was a hugely important tool for him during the pre-sequencer world. At that time, before I introduced him to MIDI sequencing and stuff, I don’t remember all the controllers. There was an E-mu sampler and some keyboards. All the guys would set up the guitar and amps, and we would mic them up. But there wasn’t anything extra special. I remember some of the microphones that we used. For his vocals, we’d used a LeWilson 247 Tube microphone or an AKG C12, which was my favorite—we’d go to the studio and there would be two AKG C12s mounted to one microphone, or the 247. We set everything up so it would be pretty easy to start recording on anything. It was all analog, so we weren’t locked to tape. So if we wanted to sample something, we would trigger it with an audio signal. Prince would be running the mute button on whatever song we were using to trigger the sample. He’d say, “Let’s sample these vocals.” So we put that in the Publison sampler, and Prince would play it on the keyboard and it wouldn’t change the length of it. So he’d play it an octave higher, and it would still take the same amount of bars, which was totally revolutionary for the time. So he could make harmonies by playing the keyboard with a sample. So that’s a lot of what we did. If Prince was going to the club to play a show or something and he couldn’t be in the studio, he’d give us shit to do.
What type of studio routine did the engineers and Prince have during the making of this album?
Michael Koppelman: With Prince, the clock meant nothing. During my time with him, sleep deprivation was sort of his drug. And he didn’t do drugs, according to what he told me, because we talked about it. He was Prince, so he could do whatever he wanted. On a typical day, we would start at noon and work until ten or eleven, and then Prince would go to the club and do something. He’d always have a girl with him. Then he’d come back at one or two, or three, and then work until whatever. In the presence of a girl, he would actually go home at three or four in the morning. Sometimes the girl would go home and Prince would stay, and we would work until noon the next day, or keep working the whole next day. Sometimes, he’d let me go, and I’d be driving home at three in the morning and my beeper would go off saying come back. So you couldn’t predict anything. I think one of the reasons that Tom [Garneau] and Dave [Friedlander] and I were able to do all that was because we were young and indestructible. We could take the abuse of working all the time. We worked virtually with no food and we’d grab five to ten minutes of sleep. When Prince would go out to L.A., we could sleep for three days. When he came back, we started all over again. This was a project that never ended. It was hard work every day. How was Prince constructing his melodies and harmonies for the songs on this record? Would he be by himself playing the piano or guitar and working things out before the band would arrive? Michael Koppelman: Yes. It seemed to me that he did most of that at home. He would come in, and have a cassette that he would listen to from home where he played something on piano or guitar. He would walk in with the idea in his head. It was just a matter of getting it onto the tape. When he walked into the studio, you could just see it in his eyes and it would be done in hours. Literally, you could see it in his eyes. He’d walk in and the song would be done a few hours later. He did that with a lot of songs. Other times, he was constructing the music part of it. Then, he was doing the vocals. When he was out is when he would do the creative work of songwriting. I never saw
From your vantage point, what was the collaborating process between Prince and the band members in the studio?
Michael Koppelman: There would be two main configurations, if the whole band was playing. Prince would go into the studio side with them and just play as a band, specifically. Prince was out there, playing guitar and piano with the band, and very much part of the band. Sometimes, he would be playing in the studio, so he would be in the studio side with a guitar or keyboard directing them on what to do. This would happen when he had something that he specifically wanted them to do, versus the more like jam style, if he was out on the studio side. But otherwise, Michael Bland would go in the isolation booth with his drums in Studio A at Paisley Park, and the rest of the band would be gathered around up there. Levi played in the studio, and sometimes, it would be Prince and Levi in the studio. Levi was the right-hand man to Prince at that time. Levi was an amazing guy and musician and just got along really well with everybody, and certainly, with Prince. Prince respected him as a musician. But that was pretty much it. I remember—sort of side story—we were recording basic tracks for something, and Prince kept talking to Michael Bland through the mic by saying, “Hit them harder. Hit the drums harder.” After the session was over, there was a dent in the snare drum probably the size of a silver dollar that was a quarter-inch deep, where he’d been
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