Paisley Park
contained some of his biggest hits of the ’90s but goes unrecognized as a fully functioning example of his relentless pop inventiveness. In Great Britain, the heavy guitars and pub-ready melodies of Britpop were causing a wave of Union Jack–waving musical nationalism. The most popular albums in the U.S. in 1995 veered from Tupac’s Me Against to the World to Mariah Carey’s Daydream to a Garth Brooks hits compilation. On The Gold Experience , Prince looked to precisely none of the above. Here was one of the world’s biggest pop draws, allegedly a half decade past his prime, flying above all trends. “I’m not a woman, I’m not a man,” he famously sung on “I Would Die 4 U” a decade previous. “I am something that you’ll never understand.” The Gold Experience finds the artist once again recast as something the world was trying to get to grips with.
In public, the Artist Formerly Known as Prince was a chaotic madman. A twisted pop freak to be gawked at in the pages of trashy tabloids. But behind the outlandish exterior, The Gold Experience was born in a time of fruitful creativity. Recording, of course, took place at Paisley Park, the near-mythical Minneapolis compound Prince called his home and place of work. In the early ’90s, the place was a bustling hive of activity. Staff were on hand to address any needs the star might need. No minor errands were going to stifle his creativity when he caught a crest of inspiration. By the time the sessions that spawned The Gold Experience came along, the number of people operating out of Paisley Park had been chiseled down, including the band. The horn section had been a key component during the early days of the New Power Generation. Rather than keeping them on a full-time basis, Prince would instead pick up the phone anytime he felt his latest joint needed some brass flavor. “It was a much quieter place in the mid- to late ’90s,” says Michael B. Nelson, who had been a part of Prince’s horn section since 1991. “Everything still worked great. There were always great people working there, but it wasn’t the huge machine that it was when we first went there. Working on those later tracks, it felt more like his recording studio, and he didn’t have that huge business umbrella that it did early on.” To outsiders, Paisley Park always felt like a workshop of dreams where the eccentric maestro inside would—well, it was hard to say exactly just what Prince did in there. Since Prince’s death, it has become a site for pilgrims—a pop-music Jerusalem that fans visit to absorb the site where their idol did such remarkable things. As a workplace, Paisley Park was much like what they might have envisioned. “There was always funky stuff,” remembers Barbarella. “The studios were really cozy. The studios were full of scarves and tapestries and candles and incense and rugs—it was crazy. The whole place was used as a playground—it all changed every day.” At Paisley Park, there was no such thing as casual Friday. The Kid never looked less than music-video-ready. “He always dressed like Prince. Absolutely, I never saw him in any common clothes,” says Nelson with a laugh. “In that world, it was amazing. Everything seemed right in Paisley, the way it was laid out, the way he looked when he came in. And he was always moving. He was moving fast when he came in when he walked by you. It seemed like he was always on a mission. He was always the Prince you’d expect him to be.” For the musicians, pinpointing the specific sessions that spawned The Gold Experience is tricky. Prince’s collaborators never felt involved in recording an album, as such. Instead, he’d guide them through his sonic concepts as they came to him. As a member of the brass section, Nelson wouldn’t hear how the fruits of his labor had been pieced together until he went down to his local record store and picked up the final product. “In the case of all those songs—and the many, many songs that we worked on with Prince—you just kind of did them, and when the album [came out], you went, ‘Oh, that’s what that one was for,’ ” he says about the material that actually got released. For the other songs, “It went into the vault,” Nelson laments, “or it was lost to history until somebody finally decides to release that stuff.” According to Princevault.com, the bulk of The Gold Experience was recorded between September 1993 and March 1994—around the same time material was produced for the album Come , which was released in 1994 under Prince’s own name. It was an era that brings nothing but good memories back to Barbarella: “On a musical level, that time was really fun, because the band was really small. The band was always
Get Wild
On the night of February 20, 1995, the Artist Formerly Known as Prince stepped out at Brit Awards at London’s Alexandra Palace in a gaudy gold shirt, gold pants, and a cane to match. Triumphant in the Best International Male Solo category, it wasn’t the flashy outfit that caught the crowd’s attention as the thirty-six-year-old strolled onto the stage to collect the gong. With “Slave” written across his face, Prince, in that trademark deep baritone, delivered a seventeen-word manifesto that would summarize his mid-’90s mindset: “Prince, best? The Gold Experience , better. In concert, perfectly free. On record, slave. Get wild. Come. Peace.” In the tradition of British acts disrespecting Black American artistry (this was a year before Jarvis Cocker invaded the stage during a Michael Jackson performance), Blur’s Dave Rowntree wrote “Dave” across his face. The silliness just underlined that Prince’s attempts to isolate the mainstream was working. People thought he was quite mad. “I don’t care. If people think I’m insane, fine,” he told NME journalist Andy Richardson almost two weeks later. “I want people to think I’m insane. But I’m in control. It was different before I became [the Symbol]. I didn’t have control. I didn’t know what was happening beyond the next two albums. But now I know exactly what the next two albums will be. I’m not playing anyone else’s game. I’m in control. I don’t care if people say I’m mad. It don’t matter.” As Richardson tells me over twenty years later, “He wanted people to think he was insane. He orchestrated that. He used the Brits as a platform to say, ‘I hate the record company, I’m a slave, they own everything, I’m just working for them,’ ” adds Richardson. “That’s what Karl Marx spoke about when he said, ‘This is what work is’— this is what we all do. But as a creative, it wasn’t a satisfactory way of engaging with his audience or getting his music to his audience.” Among his unusual media appearances at the time was an interview with the BBC’s The Sunday Show , when Prince covered his face in a gold veil and refused to speak a word to bemused host Veronica Webb. The behavior was another cruise missile being launched at Fortress Warner Bros. “It was unfortunate sometimes when he did the name change, [because] everyone just talked about that,” admits Tommy Barbarella, keyboardist and one of Prince’s closest musical allies during the ’90s. “Music and him as an artist were overshadowed often, at that time, by the name change. People were laughing about it. It was often hard for us to have to deal with that.” As for Warner’s riposte, as Richardson remembers: “You only ever received from them a corporate response. They wouldn’t get into a public argument with an artist because they could only lose in that situation. It would have been self-defeating. From them, [it was] a dignified or diplomatic silence.”
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