S inger and Prince protegé JILL JONES spent five years working on her debut album for Paisley Park. With the help of producer David Z and Prince himself, Jones created a perfect pop album and a wildly creative work of art—but it unfortunately went underheard and underappreciated in its time.
POP ART by Michael A. Gonzales
The musical/visual landscape of the 1980s overflowed with the power of so-called divas blaring from Top 40 radio, telegenic profiling in video clips on MTV, and glamorously strutting on concert stages throughout the world. While Detroit homegirl Madonna usually receives credit for igniting the post-disco inferno of provocative pop, documentarians of the era often overlook the aural contributions of high-heeled groundbreakers Vanity 6. Developed by Prince in mid-1981, the group featured exotic lead vocalist Denise Matthews (Vanity) singing alongside Brenda Bennett and Susan Moonsie. Clad in lingerie, panty hose, and garter belts, the sexy trio’s self-titled debut album, which featured the smoldering funk/new-wave single “Nasty Girl,” was the template for the times that sonically (and visually) inspired a decade of future sensations that included Madonna, Lisa Lisa, Janet Jackson, Pebbles, Jody Watley, and so many others. While Vanity 6 was the songwriter/producer’s first foray into crafting female-driven pop hits in the tradition of Phil Spector, Holland-Dozier-Holland, and Curtis Mayfield, it was just the beginning of a long career of Prince’s collaboration with women artists. By the mid-’80s, in addition to his own brilliant albums and singles, Prince’s wondrous tracks with women artists included platinum hits with Shelia E. (“The Glamorous Life”), the Bangles (“Manic Monday”), and Sheena Easton (“Sugar Walls”), each with Prince credited under a different pseudonym. However, for many fans of the music Prince created during that electric era, the best album of the Paisley period was made by a former small-town-Ohio girl turned California teen Jill Jones, an attractive, fair-skinned, biracial sister with long brown hair, intriguing eyes, and a baby face, whose self-titled masterwork was released to little fanfare in 1987. A timeless record that still sounds as though it were recorded tomorrow, Jill Jones (Paisley Park) was a long labor of love and talent
that the singer recorded over five years with producers Prince and David Z. Engineer Susan Rogers, who worked with Jones on many sessions, once called her the most patient artist signed to Paisley Park—whose roster included the Family, Mazarati, Taja Sevelle, and Madhouse—since it took five years from her first joining the camp for her album to come out. “In the beginning, I wasn’t really there to record an album,” Jill Jones says from her home in Los Angeles; born in 1962, she was four years younger than Prince. “I moved [to Minneapolis] in 1982, but I didn’t sign a recording contract with Paisley until 1986. I came to Minneapolis because Prince explained his vision of Paisley to me, and I believed in it. With his artists, it was more than music; Prince was trying to start a movement.” Nearly thirty years after the release of Jill Jones , former SoulTrain. com editor and singer Rhonda Nicole can still remember the thrill of buying the cassette at a local wrecka stow in New Orleans while visiting her grandparents: “I was a preteen girl, so I loved the pink tint on the cover photo, but I was also studying music and playing saxophone, so I was impressed by the strings and horns. I loved Jill’s voice on that album, because she had an assertiveness you don’t hear in other Prince-produced artists. Her screams on ‘All Day, All Night’ were so wild and powerful. Listening to her vocals on the dreamy ‘Violet Blue,’ I appreciated that her voice was more raw than pretty, but she still sounded cool. The entire Jill Jones album was lush, dramatic, romantic, and outrageous, and it still holds up decades later.” After breaking with Paisley Park in 1990, Jill Jones, whose last album, I Am (Peace Bisquit), was released in 2016, toured with Chic and recorded with Ryuichi Sakamoto (“You Do Me”). Still, although she made only one album with Prince, that eight-song disc was brilliant enough to turn her into an iconic cult singer whose long out-
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( opposite ) Stylized portrait of Jill Jones. Original photo by Isabel Snyder from the inner sleeve of 1987’s Jill Jones on Paisley Park.
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