you.” What I heard in that phone call was the same young sixteen- year-old, kind-of-scared kid trying to sing in my studio, now out in the world, famous with all the money, still realizing that he was still scared. It was still a lonely world, even though he was achieving his dream and getting everything he wanted in life, but it really wasn’t the end all to everything that it could have been. In fact, I did an interview recently with the BBC. The BBC asked me a question that was interesting. They asked, “How do you feel about having discovered Prince and your work with him?” After he died, I really asked myself that question, and I’m not sure that I really did him a favor. I think, if I had to go back and do it all over again, I might not have discovered him. I might not have taken him where I took him. And maybe he would have had a really ordinary life, and married a really ordinary girl, and had a really ordinary family, and lived a really ordinary life and been happier. My deal with Prince from the beginning was the fact that I was going to do whatever I could to make him famous. There was only one thing I wanted. He asked, “What’s that?” I said, “The only thing I want is that any songs we write together, you give me credit for my songs. My only reason for doing this is, I just love music. I’d like to see you get out there, and I’d like to see you get out there with at least one of my songs.” People say, “Wow, if you could go back and do it again, don’t you wish you got him under contract? Or don’t you wish you got a bigger piece of him?” I say, “No, because I got all done packaging him up, and we finished his demo tape.” He came to me and said, “I want you to be my manager.” I said, “No way. I had no interest in being a manager. I do this because I love music. I’m not interested in booking your hotels, making sure you get on the plane, and seeing if you got food in your room. That doesn’t interest me at all. I’ll find someone to do that, but I won’t be a manager. It’s not a job I’m interested in.” I found him a good manager. I did the piece with him I wanted him to do.
somebody needed to bring it out of him. He needed the opportunity. It makes you wonder how many other kids in the inner city have all the talent in the world they need to be world-famous superstars but just never get the opportunity. When you began working with him as a solo artist, where would you guys be positioned in your studio? Would he be working side by side with you? Moon: We’d sit on the piano bench together. I have a pretty pitchy singing voice, but I feel a lot of melody in my head. So, we’d sit on piano together. He’d play the music. He wrote the music, and I wrote the words. Together, we would work out the arrangement for them. After we’d done three songs on his demo tape—we did maybe fifteen songs altogether, but it occurred to me that I was taking him in the direction that wasn’t going to serve him long-term. He needed to be able to do this himself. So I told him, “For your demo tape, I want you to do one song that’s all you. I want you to write the lyrics. I want you to produce it, mix it, do the music, and do it all without anything to do with me, because you need to know that you can also do this without me. You don’t need to be dependent on me to get your artistic expression out.” So the fourth song on his demo tape was a song that he had all done himself called “Baby.”
What equipment and instruments did you have at your studio?
Moon: Well, back then, we did all of these songs on an eight-track, reel-to-reel cassette TASCAM recorder. I didn’t have a lot of money. I built my recording studio from the money of selling vacuum cleaners. [ laughs ] It was scraped together with nickels and pennies here and there. So it wasn’t the world’s best equipment, but both of us came to it with more passion than the money, for sure. So one of the things that we would do with the studio was, we would experiment—I always told Prince I really wanted to experiment a lot. The Beatles had made a big impression on me. We used to do things backwards where the tape was playing backwards. We’d make sounds with pots and pans and singing through vacuum-cleaner hoses. We were swinging them and doing all kinds of singing into a Leslie organ speaker. We were doing all kinds of weird things. At the time, we were using [Shure] SM58s. We were using AKG C414s for vocal mics and Sony condensers. Then I had some UREI compressors in the studio. I had a guy build me a phaser/flanger. It was pretty good. We had that built into the rack and it wasn’t the most expensive equipment, but we used to do a lot of multitracking. So we’d do three voices, then mix it down to one, and then do another two voices and mix it down to one, and then mix those two down to one, and then to stack up our voices, because we only had eight tracks to work with. We were always having to bounce things around like crazy. So, that was the studio environment. And then, we would really spend all our free time in there every day or weekends. He’d always get so upset when I broke away to do anything other than work with him and spend time with him. After he became famous, he called me up. This was three or four years later. He called me up out of the blue, and I said, “Hey, Prince. I haven’t heard from you in a long time.” He asked, “How are you doing? I’m so lonely. You know, I never realized, but when you’re famous, you don’t know why people are with you. Everyone wants to be with me. Everyone wants to be my friend. I know they just want me for my money and my fame. I feel so lonely because I can’t really trust any connections that I’ve got with anybody. The only person that ever did anything for me, without really wanting anything back, was
How did you bring him to Owen Husney?
Moon: Owen was managing another artist; it was a folk artist who was recording in the studio at that time. So Owen would come over to the studio sometimes, and sit with me, while we were recording, and he was working with these real prim and proper couple of White guys singing folk songs. But he was a solid manager. He was a good businessman. He had a little ad agency, and he had the understanding of the ad agency background and the marketing components I had put into Prince that he had to leverage them into the next step. When I was thinking about trying to find his manager for him, Owen came to mind fairly quickly because I knew him. Even though I was a recording engineer/producer/writer, I was really a marketing person first. All my life, I’ve been doing marketing, so that was always a passion of mine. Owen was a natural person to pass the baton to. I’ll never forget the line that I used that day. I said, “Owen, I’ve got the next Stevie Wonder. He can play all the instruments. He’s sixteen years old, but he’s not blind.” That was my pitch. I played this four-song demo that I had written and produced with Prince. He said, “Okay. It’s not bad. Let me listen to it.” I kept coming back for the rest of the week, every day, saying, “Owen, have you spent more time? Have you listened to the tape?” Then after about a week, he came and said, “You know, okay, I’m hearing it. I think you got something here.” I think what he did was he went off and played it for other people and started getting some good feedback. Then he said, “Yes, I think you got something here. I’d like to work with your artist.” I said, “I’m not looking for anything. I’ll hand him off to you. The only deal is the same deal I did with Prince. Anything that comes out that I wrote, I want to make sure it’s got my name on it.” Owen took it from there and got him a deal with Warner Bros.
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