Take me through the studio setup. Where did Prince typically record, and where were you situated during the recording process? Susan Rogers: He liked to move quickly in the studio. Typically, the drums would be in another room in the studio. The control room is where the console was located. The drums had to be on the other side of the glass. Because Prince played every instrument, he liked to have his guitar running direct in the control room. He liked to have as many keyboards as possible in the control room. He wanted to have the piano miked up all the time, so that any point he could jump out and play acoustic piano, as opposed to electronic keyboard. He liked to have his microphone in the control room, because he wanted to do his vocals by himself. After we would lay down the bed track of drums, bass, and the basic rhythm instruments, the next thing he wanted to do was his vocal. So he would do his vocal when the song was about halfway done. To do his vocal, I would set up his vocal path; meaning, in the control room, I would set up the microphone he liked on a boom stand, and then I’d route it through whatever preamp and compressor or limiter. And both of us liked using the Urei LA-2A, and he’d be all set up and ready to go so he could record his vocals alone in the control room. All he had to do was switch tracks if he wanted to punch himself in and out of record. So the engineer [and] I, or whoever was working with him, would leave the control room, and he would do his lead vocal alone. Then we would come back in, and he’d do his backing vocals and the remainder of the overdubs, sitting in the control room behind the console. Often while he was playing keyboards or guitar, I would be playing the console, shaping sounds, EQing, compressing, adding reverb, and adding delay, dialing in the sound. By the time we finished the final overdubs, the song would be nearly ready to go. Then we would mix it, and we’d print it, and it’d be done. This was different from how most artists worked. In a typical day, most artists could spend twelve hours at the studio. In a twelve-hour day, most artists could do two or three parts, because it took artists so long to come up with ideas; but if an artist is able to get a couple guitar parts done in a day in a studio, that was a good day for every record maker during the golden era of record making. But Prince, in the same amount of time, could do half a song in twelve hours. In twenty-four hours, the song would be done. It would be mixed and everything. We worked exceptionally fast, sometimes to our detriment. Prince wasn’t a perfectionist, contrary to popular belief. He was not a perfectionist. He would’ve never been able to put out that much stuff if he had been a perfectionist. He was prolific. He wrote a lot . Pound for pound, that guy had more ideas than any popular music maker ever . So what Prince needed was not perfection, because that would’ve slowed him down. What he needed was facilitation. He needed someone to facilitate the working process so he could get his ideas out really fast, which is why in the ’80s I was a very useful person to him, because I wasn’t going to get hung up on the details of engineering. I was just going to help him to get it done. Prince was one-of-a-kind. There was no one like him. He was a true genius.
a rhythm. I put the acoustic guitar through the gate and triggered it with the hi-hat. So what it does is, it slows down the track, only when the hi-hat is hitting, then it shuts down the guitar track. And it shuts it off, when it’s not appearing. That resulted in the rhythm that became infectious on the track. The piano part I stole from a Bo Diddley song called “Say Man.” The background vocals I stole from Brenda Lee’s song called “Sweet Nothin’s.” Prince put a lead guitar on there, which was beautiful, and he sang it. Then, while we were mixing it, he said we didn’t need the bass or piano part, so it became this bare-bones thing. I reached over and snuck the piano in some places. In the end, I don’t think we used all nine tracks for the song. We didn’t put any echo or reverb on the song. There was some reverb on the kick sound that actually filled up the bass spot, so we didn’t need the bass anymore. The song was very different from anything else he had done to that point in his career. When he gave the song to Warner Bros. to make it the single, I received a call from the A&R there and he said, “Prince really fucked up.” I replied, “What?” He said, “Yeah. Prince fucked up. We’re not going to release that. It sounds like a demo. There is no bass, no echo. There’s nothing. It sucks.” I hung up the phone, and I was so brokenhearted. I was really down. Luckily enough, Prince had enough pull because of Purple Rain . He told Warner Bros., “You’re going to put that out, or I’m not giving you another single.” So they had to put it out, reluctantly. A year later, all they were trying to do was to find songs just like “Kiss.” It was cool for me to be involved musically with the creation of Prince’s song. Susan Rogers: On “Kiss,” we were at Sunset Sound, and [Revolution bassist] Brown Mark had a band that were friends of his that he was bringing up through the ranks. They were called Mazarati. They were a local Minneapolis band. I think Prince signed them to Paisley Park Records. While Prince and I were working in Studio 3 at Sunset Sound, Prince booked time for Brown Mark and David Z in Studio 2 across the courtyard to work with Mazarati on their album. They needed another song for it. So Prince and I stopped what we were doing, and Prince took an acoustic guitar, which was something he almost never did, but he picked up this Ovation acoustic guitar and he banged out this song really fast. We put it on cassette. It was really a demo recording, which is also something else he never did. It was him doing the basic idea for “Kiss” on acoustic guitar. We sent the tape over to Studio 2. David Z and Brown Mark came up with this great track, and the guys from Mazarati did the backing vocals. David Z came up with the famous chords for the song. They brought the track back, and Prince freaked out. He loved it so much. He was laughing when he said, “I’m taking that back! I’m taking that back!” [ laughs ] We took the tape back. It sounded great. They did a great job. Prince put his lead vocal on it, and we did the overdubs. Kudos go to Brown Mark and David Z. It was Prince’s song, but it was another collaboration for sure. On “Anotherloverholenyohead,” I loved this song so much! It was one of the many songs that he banged out so fast. The unusual guitar sound on it came from this weird instrument made by Roland. Roland tried to make a MIDI guitar. It was horrible. Prince had an early one. It was really crap, because it wouldn’t track well. He would play a certain thing, but the sound that came out wouldn’t track your hand movements. It was really unpredictable. It was impossibly difficult to play. But he was able to coax enough sound out of it that we were able to get the lead line for that song. He came up with that beautiful piano part at the end of it. It was a really nice track. “Girls & Boys” came together very quickly. It was a very strong song, and it was obvious that it was going to be one of the singles released from the album. It also featured the same Roland MIDI guitar thing as well.
Let’s delve into some of the singles released from this album.
David Z: For “Kiss,” there was only nine tracks used for that song. There was twenty-four tracks, but we only used nine. The drum pattern was out of a machine called the Linn LM-1 drum machine. We had a kick drum on one track and everything else on the other tracks: snare, tongs, and hi-hats. There was one bass track. The instrument I used was: I gated the hi-hat through a delay unit to make
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