this innocent side to it. It creates a very powerful marketing asset. Go with that. We need to have a name and we need to have a color. These things need to work together. Now, let’s talk about the name.” He said, “Well, I know what my name is going to be.” I said, “Well, I know what your name is going to be. Let’s just make sure we’re all on the same page. I’ll go first—I think your name should be Prince.” I’m sitting waiting for him to go, “Yes, of course, duh.” He goes, “Listen, I will never, ever, use that name. Forget it, it won’t work, I don’t agree, no, no, no.” Prince’s real name was Prince Rogers Nelson. Now, coming from the ad agency, learning how your name impacts these things, I thought we had been given a gift. I said, “You got the King… but there’s never been a Prince. What a great image to work with.” I could see exactly how the package is wrapped around Prince. He said, “No, no, no, no, no, no.” He was vehemently against it. In fact, it ended up being a three-month-long argument that nearly broke us up in terms of a writing team. It was the biggest disagreement we ever had. You’re probably wondering, “What did he think his name should be?” After he told me that he did not want to go by the name Prince and that it would never, ever happen, I said, “Okay, what name are you thinking about using?” I was just dying to hear this, because I didn’t know where he would go after this. He said, “There’s only one name I will ever go by.” I said, “Okay, what is it?” He said, “I just want you to understand there’s only one possibility here with my name that I will even consider.” I said, “Okay, what is it?” He said, “I want to be known as Mr. Nelson.”
the recording studio and sit there and teach you how to do it all for nothing? He had an intensive one-on-one course in recording, producing, mixing, and engineering, which became his hallmark. Because once he understood that he could control his art, through controlling the recording, producing, engineering, and mixing process, he never went back. He never went out and sought out other people to produce him. He got dialed in early and that was the ultimate way to be. Then what did he do? He built a house that was a recording studio. Lived in a recording studio and spent his whole life recording. That was the second thing that was career changing for him. The third thing that happened was—I worked in an ad agency and it was the largest ad agency in Minneapolis. It was tenth or twelfth in the country at the time. It was a pretty big ad agency called Campbell Mithun, and they were doing a lot of work with major national clients. They were teaching them how to use color, words, name recognition, and create an identity. I was bringing that all back and then applying it to the fundamentals of packaging out Prince. The first thing that happened was, after doing a few songs with him, I came home from the studio one day, from the ad agency, and I said, “Okay, I’ve written your first hit song.” He asked, “How do you know it’s going to be a hit song?” I said, “You know how I know, it’s because this song has been written and designed to promote you as an artist. Most people go out and write songs that they just feel and think. This is a song written and engineered to market you as an artist, with your primary marketing concept in place.” But he didn’t know anything about marketing concepts, identity, image, and all of that at sixteen years old. I said, “Let me explain to you what I had to do to write this song. What I had to do is to think about how someone markets a five-feet four-inch-Afro-haired kid from the North Side of town into the music industry and make you huge.” He was all perked up, saying, “Okay, how?” I said, “Well, I looked at it. It’s all about demographics and identifying your target audience. After doing some research, the target audience for music is people who buy music for kids from ten to sixteen years old. Those are people who buy more of this music. They’ve got the money to spend on it. Once they become eighteen and they go out into the world, they got to pay cars and rent and all the other stuff. The audience that we’re trying to appeal to here is twelve- to sixteen-year-old young people. I don’t think that guys are going to really relate to you, but I think we can get girls to relate to you. The way we can get girls to relate to you is by writing songs that have a sexual double meaning. In songwriting, it’s called the double entendre. I’ve been thinking about this, and I’ve written this song that has a double-entendre sexual undertone. I think this should be the marketing theme that we use to promote you, because I think that’s a very strong emotion that you can lock into and tie into young people. It will give you an identity.” He said, “Okay, that’s really cool. That’s really cool. What’s the song called?” I said, “The song is called ‘Soft and Wet.’ ” That was his first hit song. He asked, “What’s the double meaning?” I said, “Well, don’t you know?” He said, “I get the sexual meaning.” [ laughs ] “What’s the double meaning?” I said, “The double meaning is—I’ll fast-forward five years. My mother heard this song, and she was a proper British woman. She heard ‘Soft and Wet’ played on the radio. She came up to me in front of my whole family at the dinner table. She said, ‘Son, I heard your song on the radio. It’s great, I really like it but what is “Soft and Wet?” ’ Now, here I am, in front of my mother, who, like I said, is straight as an arrow, I said to her, ‘Mother, it’s about a kiss.’ ” [ laughs ] I explained to Prince that it being about a kiss “was the defendable position. You could say things that are highly sexual but also have
Interesting.
Moon: After three months, I finally said to him, “Either we do it my way, or I’m not going to work with you anymore, because I cannot make a Mr. Nelson famous. God could not make Mr. Nelson famous. As a name, it doesn’t work. If we’re going to keep working together, and if I’m going to keep paying all the bills and cover all your time, it’s going to be Prince.” He didn’t like that at all. I mean, this was not a happy day between us, but I guess he didn’t have a choice. After we settled on “Prince,” I said, “Now we need a color.” I said, “Prince is royalty, so there is only one color we can choose. It’s got to be purple.” Because purple is the color of royalty. He agreed with that, and we had no problem on that topic. That’s really how his image was developed and constructed over the course of the year that we worked together, and how the concept of sexual innuendo in his lyrics was developed and came out in his first hit song.
I had no idea.
Moon: Most people don’t. I don’t know what most people think. I think they think he had all these ideas and worked in the studio and said this is how we’re going to do it, but it didn’t happen that way at all. I’ve never heard anyone at any time report it that way. But this is one hundred percent accurate in terms of how it developed and why it developed the way it did. If you look back at it, it’s really a lucky set of chances, really, that all lined up together. That’s why I said, I think he was already born in the studio over that year, because, by the time he walked out, I wrote three of the four songs on his demo tape. He had an identity. He had the name. He had the color. He had a marketing image to go with him. And then I went and found his manager to help him manage his career, which was Owen Husney, who was someone I knew. He walked in as this shy guy and walked out as a packaged artist. Let me be clear: I didn’t make him . It was just—if we hadn’t come together, what happened wouldn’t have happened. He had the talent. It was just [that]
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