Prince: The Story of Sign O' The Times is an audio documentary series brought to you by The Current in collaboration with the Prince Estate, Paisley Park, and Warner Records. Listen Thursdays at 8 p.m. Central, and read a written version below. The series is also available as a podcast on multiple platforms.

Prince: Live at Paisley Park Intro "There's a lot of things I could say about '87, pro and con. Mostly pro. But I'm not a speechmaker, so I'll do what I do best. Thank you very much, happy new year."

Audio: "Sign O' The Times" opening guitar work and beat

VO: This is Prince: The Story of Sign O' The Times, brought to you by The Current in collaboration with the Prince Estate, Paisley Park, and Warner Records.

VO: Welcome to the eighth and final episode of this season! I'm Andrea Swensson; I'm an author and radio host in Minneapolis, and it has been a total honor to ride along on this journey with you as we've taken a deep dive into the making of Prince's iconic album, Sign O' The Times, and all of the vault material that's included on the new, expanded reissue of this album.

For our final episode, we're going to dig into the story behind the video footage that's just been released. In addition to the 63 previously unreleased audio tracks on the Sign O' The Times reissue, fans now have the opportunity to watch the full, remastered, re-edited footage of Prince and his Sign O' The Times band performing at his newly opened complex, Paisley Park. It was on New Year's Eve, 1987. It was the final time Prince would perform the Sign O' The Times Tour stage show before completely shifting his focus to Lovesexy, and it included a fleeting, historic collaboration with the jazz legend Miles Davis in the encore — the only time that the two influential performers ever shared a stage.

Before we hear from Prince's collaborators about that historic night, I wanted to check in with someone who had a hand in reviving this long-lost concert footage and preparing it to be released.

Duane Tudahl: My name is Duane Tudahl and I'm the senior researcher for the Prince estate archives and author of Prince and the Purple Rain Era Studio Sessions.

VO: Duane works alongside vault archivist Michael Howe on cataloguing Prince's recorded works for the estate.

Andrea Swensson: So is part of your job just sitting in the vault like shrieking with joy at discoveries?

Duane Tudahl: I don't think there's a day I go into the vault that I don't feel such a privilege and honor and respect. And to see the full concert? Well, that's something that hasn't been seen before. I had a lot of people saying, "Probably the first half is just gonna be the audio because I don't think they have video for it." And we did. We found so much great footage of things that we didn't even know — shots of him — because that's what you want to see. You want to see Prince. You want to see him singing. You want to see him happy; you want to see him smiling; you want to see him goofing off with somebody; you want to see his hands playing. That, to me, is probably the coolest thing about this collection.

Prince: "Delirious" Live at Paisley Park

Duane Tudahl: The video for the concert is really something that's historically amazing. It's his first full show at Paisley Park. Now, he had recorded the concert there for the Sign 'O' the Times movie. But that was more a reenactment of that tour. This is the first show he did where he was actually performing for an audience. His mom and dad are in the audience and the critics are in the audience. Jon Bream is in the audience. And it's New Year's Eve, and Miles Davis is there! I mean this doesn't happen very often where you have all these things coming together. He's ending the year with the last Sign 'O' the Times show he'll ever play.

Andrea Swensson: Yeah. That was the first thing I put on when I got all the material.

Duane Tudahl: What'd you think?

Andrea Swensson: Like you said, to see so much detail, and to see a little glimpse into Paisley Park, his shiny new toy that he was showing off to the community — it's just — I've always been fascinated by that.

Duane Tudahl: Paisley Park had just opened up — literally opened up on September 11 of that year and this is him showing it off. This is him saying, "Look at my new toy, look at what I've got, and I wanna give you a little glimpse of where I've made my Willy Wonka Chocolate Factory. This is where I'm making the chocolate."

Audio: "Adore" (Live at Paisley Park, Dec. 31, 1987)

VO: The New Year's Eve 1987 gala at Paisley Park was a benefit for the Minnesota Coalition for the Homeless. Tickets were $200 per person, and according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, "about 400 people dined on a buffet of roast beef, salmon, torte Milanaise, various salads and a stunning array of desserts," and the black-tie audience mingled in a soundstage decorated with peach, purple, and silver balloons.

Karen Krattinger: It was fantastic.

VO: This is Karen Krattinger, who was the general manager of Prince's business PRN Productions, and was Prince's executive assistant. Everyone in Prince's world calls her K2.

Karen Krattinger: That whole event, it was spectacular. It went off incredibly well.

VO: Karen's day-to-day list of duties during this era was dizzying—

Karen Krattinger: Number one, Madonna. "e=4"; I don't know if that meant four tickets for Prince or what…

VO: This is her reading just one half of one page of the notebook where she would furiously scribble down Prince's requests to her in 1987.

Karen Krattinger: I needed Japan gold albums for Eric, Miko, Blistan, Brooks, Wally, Susan Rogers and Jeff Mason. I needed a letter for somebody named — Beckler? I don't remember who that was. I needed MMA tapes, which was Minnesota Music Awards of course. Screens in floor; big TV for Prince's room. Susan Rogers' expenses — limelight. Look video to his sister, Sharon; flowers to Sheila; "have a nice day."

Andrea Swensson: So you were the one sending the flowers.

Karen Krattinger: Oh, I did a little bit of everything.

VO: As the fancy New Year's Eve party at Paisley Park approached, it was Karen who made sure all the little details fell into place. It's worth noting that while Prince would later turn Paisley Park into a vegetarian, alcohol-free venue, that wasn't the situation in the '80s.

Karen Krattinger: Bunch of arbitrary notes — Bernadette, Jill, Lisa and Wendy, Joni. Those must be people we were inviting in. Liquor - five cases plus something white wine, two cases of blush, eight-and-a-half cases of Michelob Light, five-and-a-half cases of Mick, six Bacardis, two Tanquerays, 11 Absoluts … I mean just crazy notes. Glitter — "space glitter" — I don't know what "space glitter" referred to.

You know the staff, we were a machine, and with the cooperation of the town of Chanhassen, which was so small at that time; I mean, Paisley Park was a big deal to the town of Chanhassen, and they were just so wonderful in making sure everything was taken care of on their end. There's so many things that we were just too busy working to really enjoy, but I think a lot of us did have an opportunity to enjoy that, because once everything was in place and it was going on, we all were really kind of enjoying ourselves and being guests for a minute, so it was good.

Cubby Colby: Could I have been wearing a tuxedo?

Andrea Swensson: Oh, I hope so!

Cubby Colby: I have a tuxedo. They bought the crew tuxedos.

VO: This is Rob Colby, who everyone calls Cubby. He was Prince's front-of-house engineer.

Cubby Colby: All the hype and all about Miles Davis and this mysterious… You know, I just knew I needed to have a mic for a trumpet. So I had a mic ready on a stand, or I had a clip-on microphone if that's what he wanted — it was a lot of fun. It didn't feel like work. It was just a great place to have a New Year's Eve celebration was there at Paisley Park.

Audio: "I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man" (Live at Paisley Park, Dec. 31, 1987)

VO: Although the attendees didn't know about it ahead of time, there was a buzz among Prince's crew that Miles Davis had been invited to attend the party and might make an appearance onstage. Prince and Miles had been circling each other for months, talking about possible collaborations.

Alan Leeds: Of course, Prince was familiar with Miles Davis's classic recordings.

VO: This is Prince's longtime tour manager Alan Leeds. Alan's brother, Eric, was also in Prince's camp as his saxophonist.

Alan Leeds:I think Eric actually turned him on to some of it; maybe Wendy and Lisa because the three of them independently around post-Purple Rain were giving him records of things that he wasn't really familiar with. He was probing. That was the period of vast curiosity on his part. The iconic appeal of Miles was something that really was attractive to Prince. And it so happened that I developed a relationship with Miles's tour director, Gordon Meltzer, and Gordon and I arranged for Miles and Prince to meet. And their first meeting was actually in an airport in LAX where we both just happened to be getting off different flights in the same terminal and bumped into each other in baggage claim.

Andrea Swensson: Wow.

Alan Leeds: And they ended up going out into Miles's limousine and talking for what was probably — seemed like an hour — it was probably 20 minutes — but not long after that Prince invited Miles to Minneapolis. And Miles kept putting it off because he was busy, and they talked about working together and around that same time Miles had left Columbia Records after thirty-some years and had signed with Warner Bros, which of course was the label Prince was on. So now even the label was encouraging the idea of you guys should get together and do something for Miles's first Warner Bros album. Miles wanted Prince to actually produce him. Not necessarily a whole album; maybe a track or two — whatever the party called for; if it worked, you kept going. But his idea was like, "Look it: I will come in the studio, and you tell me what to do."

He just looked at me like I'm crazy, and he says, "Nobody has the right to produce Miles Davis. What would I feel like?" And what he was basically saying is, "I don't want anybody trying to produce me, so why would Miles Davis want somebody to produce him?" He couldn't grasp the concept that Miles would actually want him to do that.

Audio: "Can I Play With U?"

Alan Leeds: So the result is it never happened. And "Can I Play With U?" is, contrary to all these rumors, is the only track that they actually both played on with the purpose of working together but from afar. Prince did the track, sent it to Miles, he went in the studio with a couple of his own musicians, put his trumpet on; I think his keyboard player made a few changes or added some parts. I mean, it was pretty complicated because the tape kept going back and forth, but they were never in the studio together; never, ever.

Audio: "Can I Play With U?" (continues)

Alan Leeds: Now they had gotten to know each other well and Miles had a gig in Minneapolis, and he flew into town a day early at Prince's invite. He was playing the Orpheum, and he came into town and I picked him up at the airport, and we went straight to the warehouse where Prince and the band were rehearsing.

Audio: "Can I Play With U?" (continues)

Atlanta Bliss: So I heard Miles was coming in. So I made a point to be there that day.

VO: Here's trumpet player Atlanta Bliss.

Atlanta Bliss: So I was sitting at the door in the warehouse on like a barstool. And behind me walks Miles Davis, so I didn't see him coming in. Of course, he walks right beside me and he looks up at Prince and Prince is playing a drum track. He's recording a drum track and, it's in the warehouse, so there's a bunch of people milling around and Miles goes up and Prince stops for a minute, and he goes up and shakes his hand, and Prince says, "Well, hang on a second. Let me finish this track." So OK. Well, Miles comes over and he sits right beside me, and this is incredible. What a moment in my life. Miles Davis is sitting next to me. He puts out his hand to me and shake my hand and he says, "My name is Miles Davis." I said, "Well, I'm Atlanta Bliss. I'm Prince's trumpet player." And Miles says, "I like what you played on that last record." Like, Miles Davis liked what I played on the last record! I said, "What record was it? I'm gonna play it again; if it was something good, it was something that you thought you showed me how to play, being my mentor." I didn't go that far in the conversation, but I gave him the respect.

Alan Leeds: He stood and listened; kibbitzed a while. Prince stopped the rehearsal, asked Miles if he wanted to jam; Miles said no, and they ended up shooting pool for a little while and the ended up going off to Prince's house where he had a dinner catered and his father, John Nelson — God rest his soul — Sheila and Eric were the invited guests at this famous dinner. And only Eric should tell you about the dinner.

Eric Leeds: Well, first of all, just as a preface: There's probably no single musician that is more significant for my aspirations as a musician as Miles Davis.

VO: This is Eric Leeds.

Eric Leeds: There's little about Miles Davis's music that I didn't know. I mean, right up here in my record collection I have just about every recording that Miles Davis ever made in his entire career, including dozens and dozens and dozens of private bootleg recordings! My brother and I are collectors, as are many other people. So Prince was not deep into Miles, but certain albums of Miles's that he liked and he liked a lot. And I also was aware of the fact that Miles had expressed in interviews at that time that he considered Prince to be perhaps one of the most significant artists in any kind of music at that time. I remember one specific occasion where I had read a comment of Miles's about Prince, and I made sure that Prince knew, because in the back of my mind there was something — "Wow, what if some day these two guys actually got together to do something?" And my agenda for myself was very clear. If that was going to happen, I was going to make damn well sure I was in the middle of it by hook or crook. They were going to have to physically remove me from whatever space they were going to be in.

VO: The dinner Eric attended with Prince, Miles and Sheila E. was at Prince's Galpin Boulevard home in Chanhassen.

Eric Leeds: It's one of those nights where I really wish that I had had a small personal recording device hidden in my jacket. Someday I may write an essay about that conversation. Miles Davis was one of the funniest people you could ever know. The fascinating thing I will say about it is that you had these two super egos in Miles and Prince. It had this inordinate amount of mutual admiration and respect for each other on a really deep creative musical — you know, there was really things that they looked at each other that they saw themselves. They identified with each other in that manner. Neither one of them was going to give it up to the other. So their relationship and their conversations was always like this dance of the two of them around each other, and if you could look inside their minds, I'm convinced that inside Prince's head he's looking at Miles and saying, "Yeah, you're Miles Davis and you're everything maybe that I could hope to aspire to as an artist, but you're old and I'm the new kid on the block so get the hell out of the way." And I'm looking at Miles and I'm thinking he's looking at Prince and said, "Yeah, you're the next kid on the block, but I'm Miles Davis. Without me, there is no you." It was absolutely hilarious to be around the two of them.

VO: The day of the New Year's Eve show, Prince started cluing in his band on what might transpire that night on the Paisley Park stage. Here's Levi Seacer.

Levi Seacer: Before the concert we didn't really know what was going on. Every now and then Prince would be like, "Yeah, I got a surprise for you all." And after a while we'd say, "It's going to be this or this or this." Nobody expected Miles Davis. So, you know, we're at rehearsal and like, "Whoa, wow, I wonder when he's going to tell us what's going on." Because we were just kind of sitting around, and I'm like doodling on the piano and my spider sense — I said, "Somebody's sitting next to me who I don't know." I turned, and it was Miles Davis. So you have to imagine that. So he's been an icon to every musician on the planet in one way or the other. And he's right next to me and he's talking to me like we been knowing each other 30 years: "Did you know there are no bad keys on the piano? There are no bad notes; did you know that?" And he's using some other colorful words that I can't say right now. And I'm like, "I didn't know that, Miles," and he says, "Keep playing." So he's playing this solo, but to me it sounds a little out of key but he said, "Wait, don't make that face. It's not out of key! I know what I'm doing." I said, "Of course you know what you're doing." And then he was explaining to me how nothing is wrong in music; it just depends on if you let the audience know it. (laughs) He said sometimes he'll play a note that's so irritating to people, he'll play it until they like it. And I'm like, "Oh my god, right?" And then he taught me a few other things, and I'm like, "Well, thank you, sir," and he's like, "Yeah, yeah, I'll see you later onstage." Oh, I'm like, "Oh my god, we're gonna play with Miles Davis." So they needed a deer-in-the-headlights sticker for that show, because if you look really hard, which I'm going to be looking for, our eyes were big, like — we're playing our parts and we're like, "I cannot believe this is happening right now."

Matt Fink: I can't wait to see that again, too, because I haven't seen that in years.

VO: This is Dr. Fink.

Matt Fink: I mean, come on! Who wouldn't want to jam with Miles Davis? I look at it as being along for a big ride with him because, you know, you're just there. You're the side man. You're the guy. We all are. We're around this prolific guy, and then here comes Miles Davis, who was like one of the greatest jazz guys out there. So it was like, "Oh my gosh, it's a meeting of the minds; we're gonna witness this!" You know, just that in itself was a treat. I get a back seat to this, and then I'm going to be asked to actually jam with this guy. Somebody pinch me!

Audio: "It's Gonna Be A Beautiful Night" (medley)

Atlanta Bliss: I've seen the video and everyone tells me that when he walked up onstage that the smile of my face is like edge-to-edge, you know? (laughs)

Audio: "It's Gonna Be A Beautiful Night" (medley) feat. Miles Davis

Cat Glover: I remember when Miles came onstage, I was like, "This is the best night of my life." To see Miles Davis and to see Prince and the whole band, we were so happy.

Eric Leeds: And while Miles is playing, Prince turned around to the band and threw up his arm to give us one of the signals for the band to hit one of these cues, and no one paid him any attention. It was probably a good thing that nobody did it, because it could've been like a musical train wreck otherwise. But everybody in that band — all we were doing, particularly me and Matt Blistan, you know — all we're doing is looking at Miles and we're laughing because we said, "That's Miles Davis." You understand we're standing on the stage: "That's Miles Davis." And Prince threw up this cue and just after the thought everyone's kind of looking and says, "What?" And Prince got mad. I mean, that was not a reaction — no reaction at all was not exactly what Prince was expecting. And I remember him yelling loud enough that we could hear him over everything that was going onstage, and basically all he said — like, "Hey!" — as if to say, "I'm still paying y'all."

Audio: music continues; Prince is heard yelling "Hey!"

Eric Leeds: I think the band was in hysterics by that point, because we were just like looking at Prince — "Oh, oh, OK fine, let's do that — now can you move out of the way? That's Miles Davis."

Audio: more music, band starts responding with hits

Alan Leeds: What I remember most was Prince basically trying to sabotage him by cuing the band to do all these different impromptu hits and breakdowns that Prince would always do in his jams, but he would be behind Miles and he'd be cuing the band to do these things, and Miles would have no clue because he's not — he's not seeing — you know, Miles was enough of a musician that if he had been watching Prince, he would've expected something like that and rolled with it. But I suspect Prince just intended for Miles to just continue to play through it, but you can where Prince would suddenly cue these stops and breaks and hits, and you can just see Miles is flustered like, "What the hell are you doing?" and Prince is loving it because he had a history of enjoying making it difficult for people who would sit in with him; I mean, particularly in Europe, but on the Purple Rain tour as well. It wasn't unusual to look up and see Ron Wood or Sting and Clapton, who all had a run of coming out on a Prince jam at the end of his show and getting sabotaged. And I'll never forget the time Springsteen came out. Prince would do the same thing to all these guys. He would cue all these things that the band knew, but they didn't know, and would just totally throw them and he loved doing it. And I remember walking him to the dressing room after the one and only time Springsteen sat in, and I could barely hear Prince in my ear because of the crowd noise, but he looked at me — he leaned in my ear, stopped walking for a minute, which was unusual — and leaned in my ear and said, "I told you Springsteen can't play guitar!" You know, it was like, "OK, OK." And of course, that aspect of him didn't change over the years to with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — the famous George Harrison tribute, where Prince just came out and chewed everybody up, threw his guitar in the air and ran off, you know? Everybody else is taking bows and pledging allegiance to George Harrison and his kid who's onstage, and Prince just comes out and wipes the place and disappears, and I'm just like. "OK, nothing's changed."

Prince: "Mr. Miles Davis! Thank you."

Cat Glover: That was like the best until Prince said, "Hey, Miles, isn't it past your bedtime?"

VO: This is Cat Glover.

Cat Glover: And I went, "No you didn't." So I'm like laughing, going, "Oh you're so cold."

Eric Leeds: That moment when Miles sat in with us on that gig for that five or 10 minutes that he was up onstage with us is — and I can say this probably with a degree of certainty that is somewhere between 98% and 99% correct — it is the only time that Miles and Prince were ever in the space together making music in a space.

VO: In the video footage of the concert, the cameras occasionally pan the audience, who are dressed to the nines in tuxedos and glittery gowns. At one point, the camera lingers briefly on the front row, where Prince's father, John Nelson, and mother, Mattie Shaw Baker, are smiling as they watch the show.

Karen Krattinger: I would imagine standing there with his parents — now his dad had been there. I don't recall if his mom had been there before or not. But his dad came with him the first time he came to see what I had done with all the furniture, and I'm peeking out one of those little windows upstairs watching them walk around and look at everything. So John had definitely been there, and I'm sure John had been in the studios with him and maybe even done some recording in there already. But I don't recall Mattie having been there prior, so for her to see that and for him to see his mom realizing what he had actually done — I don't have any children, but I can imagine the pride that both of his parents felt for a long time. Huge accomplishment.

Audio: "Purple Rain/Auld Lang Syne"

Levi Seacer: Oh, man. Yeah, it was just — it's just thousands of moments like that, but I mean that was obviously one of the big ones, yeah. You know that movie Troy? There's a line — it's my favorite line — at the end, the guy who was just under Troy, he said he was proud that he had lived in the day of Achilles. So I often say that. I say, "I'm just lucky that I lived in the time of Prince," because it's just not going to be another one.

Cat Glover: I love Prince. He's always shown me so much respect. He took me under his wing. He took such good care of me on tour. He trusted in everything I said — the moods, what I wanted to do — he would sit next to me and go, "So what do you think right here, Cat? And what do you think right there?"

Alan Leeds: For me, the biggest memory about Sign 'O' the Times, is like, "OK, this guy is a whole lot of things, but one of them is he's a master songwriter." And particularly for those of us who were aware of how many amazing songs never made the albums — back to The Dream Factory, Camille, Crystal Ball and all these different gestations of albums that preceded what Sign 'O' the Times became, and those of us who had heard things like "Room With No Light" and — God forbid — "Power Fantastic," which is one of my favorite Prince recordings to this day. For those of us who heard those songs, we were like, "Oh my god, how can you not release that stuff?" Now, this deluxe edition with this trove of unreleased material, it inflates how amazing Sign 'O' the Times is when you listen to all of these incredible songs — these were rejects! I mean, these were songs that anybody else, it would've been the lead track on their album. If anybody ever had a doubt about how important Prince was as a songwriter/recording artist, to think that this material — what's in the box set — was all produced in a period of a couple, couple-and-a-half years is just beyond imagination.

Levi Seacer: That's the beauty of recording things, because you can always come back and say, "I hear it different now."

Prince: "One more, one more? Louder?"

Levi Seacer: So I think that's going to be what's going to happen with this, too. There's going to be a new audience for Sign 'O' the Times, and then it's going to take them a while to let it sink in, and then they going have their reaction to this, like, "Oh my god, I didn't realize what I was listening to." In the spiritual world, there's no time. There's a couple of songs — oh, "I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man" — I didn't realize that that was written a long time ago. I didn't know that.

Prince: "Last one, come on."

Levi Seacer: I did not know that. I thought he had wrote that maybe a year before I got in the band. I'm like, "Oh my god." He's got this other version of "Forever in My Life, and I'm like, "Wow." So that just shows you, you know, like I say, in the spiritual world there's no timestamp, which is cool.

Duane Tudahl: Sign 'O' the Times is an amazing project, but I can only imagine what he would've written this year. And that's the saddest thing of all, is Sign O' the Times might've been one of those things we looked back and said yeah, that was a nice appetizer for what he would do in 2020. And the sad thing is there is no way of knowing, so what we have is the ability this year to use his statements and his thoughts and his music to reflect on where we are, and that's what we have right now. We don't have him talking new, but we have him talking stuff that's new to us, and I think that's pretty powerful.

Prince: singing "Auld Lang Syne"

Credits

Prince: The Story of Sign O' The Times is produced by The Current, supported by the Minnesota Legacy Amendment's Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, and created in collaboration with The Prince Estate and Warner Records and with their support. This story was written by Andrea Swensson; Anna Weggel is our producer. Thanks to Technical Director Corey Schreppel, Digital Producer Jay Gabler, Radio Production Director Derrick Stevens and Managing Director David Safar.

Thanks also to Trevor Guy, Giancarlo Sciama, Michael Howe and Duane Tudahl. And a special thank you to everyone who participated in this 8-episode series about this transformative era: Susannah Melvoin, Wendy Melvoin, Lisa Coleman, Susan Rogers, Eric Leeds, Matt Blistan, Matt Fink, Mark Brown, Lenny Waronker, Duane Tudahl, Daphne Brooks, Levi Seacer Jr., Coke Johnson, Cat Glover, Alan Leeds, Jeff Katz, Karen Krattinger, LeRoy Bennett, Cubby Colby, jooZt Mattheij, Pascal Comvalius, Roald Bakker, Patrick Jordens, Fred Armisen, and Maya Rudolph.

To learn more about The Current, visit thecurrent.org. If you haven't subscribed yet, search for Prince: The Story of Sign O' The Times on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Also, to learn more about Prince, visit Prince.com.

Prince: The Story of Sign O' The Times is an audio documentary series brought to you by The Current in collaboration with the Prince Estate, Paisley Park, and Warner Records. Listen Thursdays at 8 p.m. Central, and read a written version below. The series is also available as a podcast on multiple platforms.

Audio: "It's Gonna Be a Beautiful Night" (Live)

VO: This is Prince: The Story of Sign O' The Times, brought to you by The Current in collaboration with the Prince Estate, Paisley Park, and Warner Records.

VO: Hello! Welcome to the seventh episode of this podcast! I'm Andrea Swensson, I'm an author and a radio host in Minneapolis, and this series is dedicated to unpacking the many twists and turns that Prince made on his way to releasing his critically adored, epochal double album, Sign O' The Times.

In this episode, we're going to talk about Prince's epic Sign O' The Times Tour, which swept across Europe in May and June of 1987 and was filmed for the concert movie Sign O' The Times. This is the tour that introduced Prince's first post-Revolution band to the world, and he would emerge as the enthralling bandleader of a dazzling and much more theatrical stage show. For this tour, Prince was even directing the audience to join in the production; ticketholders were instructed to attend the shows wearing peach or black.

There are so many incredible stories about the Sign O' The Times Tour, but I thought we'd start at the same point where the Sign O' The Times film begins: by staring into that electric blue, hypnotic orb.

Audio: plasma ball crackle

LeRoy Bennett: My name is LeRoy Bennett. I was Prince's production designer, also co-creator/creative partner in basically everything that we did together.

Andrea Swensson: I was wondering if you could start by telling the story of the plasma ball.

LeRoy Bennett: Oh my god. OK. Well, the plasma ball — it was a very trendy thing at the time in the '80s. I don't know who bought it for him, but we had a plasma ball in the rehearsal or in the studio. I can't remember where it came from.

Matt Fink: [makes plasma light noise] That stuff? Well, you'll never guess who introduced that to Prince.

VO: This is Dr. Fink.

Matt Fink: We were in New Orleans on tour, and I went into an art gallery and lo and behold, it was an art gallery designed specifically to show off these plasma balls that were made by an artist. And I said, "Wow, that is just really cool," so then I got all the information about it, and I brought it to Prince; I said, "This is really great, this could be cool on stage."

LeRoy Bennett: He was fascinated by it. And for those who don't know what a plasma ball is, plasma ball is a glass sphere approximately 10 inches filled with plasma gas that had a central core of an electrical charge in the middle of this sphere that charges the plasma gas, and if you put your fingers close to it on the outside of it, it would be the grounding, so you'd get these little lightning bolts kind of happening. Well, Prince wanted an eight-foot diameter one. When you start to increase the size of something like that, the voltage goes up, and so going from 10 inches to eight feet is a massive amount of difference. It becomes ridiculous, and the amount of RF — radio frequency — that it would set off into an arena when we started it would take out all the computers in the entire building, let alone onstage. Prince would've said, "Well, just figure it out." The thing was that kind of turned him off a little bit was we told him that he had to stand on a real thick rubber mat, and if for any reason there was — he became a ground he would turn into a pile of dust. He would basically explode, and we didn't want that. So he said, "OK, no plasma ball." (laughs)

Audio: "The Ball"

VO: In the last episode of this podcast, we were talking about the story behind the now-iconic cover art for the album, which features a backdrop from a local production of Guys and Dolls that Prince's team borrowed from the nearby Chanhassen Dinner Theatres. Although the actual backdrop from that cover artwork had to be returned to the theater after the photo shoot, the vibe of it stayed with Prince. He would end up asking Roy to design the entire set for the live show around it.

LeRoy Bennett: Sign 'O' the Times was a full-on theatrical show, the first time we'd stepped that far into something. The stage set was based off of the backdrop that was from the Chanhassen Dinner Theatres. I wanted to make the backdrop its own character within the show and its own personality. And so I decided to take all the buildings in the picture; obviously, I didn't copy them, but it was just — I wanted to make this forced perspective kind of somewhat industrial, whimsical, theatrical city scene was done in the very theatrical flats way and then I also added all the neon signs. So they were real neon signs, which was a whole other thing in itself.

VO: As the band watched the stage set grow and grow, the scale of the production became clear. Here's trumpet player Atlanta Bliss.

Atlanta Bliss: I don't believe we're going to have all this neon onstage with us. And how are they going to transport all this neon on stage? Man, we're going to Europe? You're going to — how you going to get this to Europe and it's not going to break? Yeah, it was an amazing stage. The pods that were above us were — I think they were like eight or 10 feet wide, and Roy had these things rotate around us and spin and all the neon and the stage and everything. It was just amazing.

LeRoy Bennett: It became this really funky, eclectic, urban world. And that really was the essence of what the album was. It was a night club, it was night life, it was intimate bedroom stuff, it was all of that. And that's what we tried to create.

Audio: "Hot Thing"

Cat Glover: I didn't have anything to do with that heart. Let's make that clear. That was not my idea! I was following directions and a lot of things happened on that heart. Lots of things.

VO: This is Cat Glover, who had some particularly steamy scenes with Prince onstage.

Cat Glover: I think I was 26 or 27, but everyone thought I was 19.

Andrea Swensson: Oh wow.

Cat Glover: [sings "Hot Thing, barely 21…"] I was older than that, so — I was like OK, I'll do the dance, but you know I'm older than this.

VO: Sign O' The Times was released on March 30, 1987, in the U.K., and March 31 in the U.S., and the Sign O' The Times Tour kicked off in Stockholm, Sweden, on May 8. The tour routed Prince and his new band through many of the same cities he'd just played the previous year with The Revolution on the Parade Tour.

LeRoy Bennett: Parade, based off of the movie, that opened Prince's eyes to Europe a lot. The European audiences in general are way more musically educated. There is a lot more sophistication than there is here in America. And because his musical mind was in another stratosphere, universe, they could relate to it; they understood it; they followed him, and he just loved that.

Cat Glover: I love Europe, number one; and I think, the Europeans are more susceptible to things than we are here. The culture, the food, the clubs … I was just really excited because everyone over there were just so excited to see Prince. That's why Prince did not tour Sign 'O' the Times in America, because he told us Europeans are more susceptible, they love him more over there.

LeRoy Bennett: He felt at home. He felt he didn't have to be commercial; he could play what he loved, do what he loved, feel the freedom of being able to do all that stuff. They suddenly became his friends; they became his people.

VO: In the U.S., mainstream audiences were introduced to Prince through Purple Rain concert experience; his Purple Rain Tour sold over 1.7 million tickets. But in Europe, the entry point for many Prince fans were the Parade and Sign O' The Times tours, which would often set up camp in each city for three- or four-night runs.

Audio: "Play in the Sunshine" (Live); Prince says, "Hello Holland, and welcome!"

VO: From June 19 to 22, 1987, Prince took over a soccer stadium in Utrecht, Holland, setting up chairs to host nearly 15,000 fans each night. I've gotten the chance to connect with a handful of Dutch fans who were actually at the show on June 20, 1987, which was recorded and has been remastered and included in the Super Deluxe reissue of Sign O' The Times.

Pascal Comvalius: So my name is Pascal Comvalius. And growing up just in that era in the '80s as a teenager — I was 16 at the time when I went to the Sign 'O' the Times concert — it was sort of like I sneaked out just to the house, otherwise my parents would be very upset if I would just skip school.

Roald Bakker: My name is Roald Bakker. I was 19.

Patrick Jordens: Well, my name is Patrick, Patrick Jordens. I was 18. And by the way, more than happy to skip school for Prince! [laughs]

Angelo Schifano: Whenever I run into people that are not really big Prince fans, maybe casual fans, and if they have only one record at home it's always Sign 'O' the Times. And if they have only seen him live during one tour, it's always Sign 'O' the Times. So that says something about the appeal, about the, I think, sort of crossover that he made at least on the European side of the pond.

Roald Bakker: We stayed overnight to get tickets. I remember that. It wasn't like these days of course. You had to not sleep to get tickets.

Pascal Comvalius: The shows kicked off in Stockholm, so a lot of just journalists went especially to these early, early gigs. They start just reporting about them. So we're already reading all the stuff that's going off like, "Wow, this has to be madness. Everybody is blown away by this."

Patrick Jordens: I think I called Roald and other friends that were going, and I said, you know, "We have to wear something peach or black." It was in the ad in the newspaper: "Wear something peach or black." It was on the tickets, I think, as well.

Pascal Comvalius: I wore black, then I went to The Body Shop, and I had peach perfume, peach-scented shampoo, and I would just wash my hair, and that was my combination of peach and black, and I wore it for years! (laughs)

Patrick: On the part of Prince, it was a great move, because you know what happens? People did wear peach and black. So Utrecht wasn't really a rock and roll city. Their concerts weren't usually in Utrecht; they were usually in Rotterdam. And Prince just flooded Utrecht with peach-and-black people. So it really added to the atmosphere of the show.

VO: As another longtime Prince fan and scholar from Holland told me, Prince put a lot of effort into crafting the experience his audience would have at his shows — right down to the seats they would sit in.

jooZt: I'm jooZt Mattheij. I am the editor of princevault.com. In Europe, it's very normal to have festival-style performances, so standing room only. But he didn't want that, so he requested specially that there would be 6,000 seats placed in the stadium. It was in a football stadium so they had to put seats there and everything. It was very, you know, unheard for in The Netherlands. We don't do that. But then, of course, before the show, it rained a lot, and the seats were set up, so Prince came to sound check on the 19th, and he saw that on all the seats was a little puddle of water. So he personally then ordered for all the seats to — for a hole to be drilled in, so that the water would be away.

Pascal Comvalius: Didn't he also have, like, tambourines on the first rows? Like, being on the chairs?

Roald Bakker: Yeah. I think Patrick is getting one of them.

Patrick Jordens: Yeah! That's right. Exactly, yes!

Andrea Swensson: Aw.

Patrick Jordens: [shakes tambourine] This one is from Utrecht.

Audio: "Four"(live in Utrecht)

VO: The opening act for the Sign O' The Times Tour was Madhouse, Prince's experimental jazz side project. The original live lineup of Madhouse included Eric Leeds, Dr. Fink, Levi Seacer, and drummer Dale Alexander.

Patrick Jordens: I was watching Madhouse like my life depended on it because I loved it. I lot of people were not paying attention, but when I was looking at Madhouse, I looked to the side of the stage, and I see Prince, and he's watching Madhouse from the side of the stage, and he's hanging on some kind of bar. He's swinging, and then he jumps off and he stands there a little bit, and no one sees him but me, I think. So I tap Roald, and I say, you know, "Hey! Look over there; it's Prince." And he sees me getting Roald and pointing at him, and then he waves at us — never forget it! It was beautiful!

VO: As the sun went down each night, Madhouse would wrap up their opening set and Prince would prepare to take the stage. Here's Levi Seacer Jr.

Levi Seacer: I think we were about two weeks in, and we're all backstage. It was an outside show. It was a little cool that night, so we're all blowing on our hands, trying to stay warm. And then Prince walks by, and I say, "Hey, good luck tonight."

And he stopped me. He gave me the meanest look I'd ever seen. He said, "Don't ever say 'good luck'."

I'm like, "Hey, I'm sorry, man, I didn't—"

He said, "No, let me explain: What we do isn't about luck. Did you guys have a hard three months trying to learn this show? Didn't I put you through the wringer?"

I said, "You sure did, oh my god."

He said, "So it's not about luck; we're ready. We're soldiers. You guys are well-trained. Even on a bad night, we're going to have a good show. That's why I rehearse you like that. So don't ever say it's luck, because if you're going on luck, then the show's gonna suck. If you go on the fact that you worked hard, you're always gonna have a good show."

And I said, "You know what? That's why he's the best." That's why, right there. "That little thing you just told me? That's why you're the best." Yeah.

Audio: "Sign O' The Times" (Live)

Patrick Jordens: Yeah, he started by himself. So he rips his guitar, and then you hear the Linn Drum blast through the stadium, and he's just standing there by himself, and that was just the best opening you can imagine.

Pascal Comvalius: Yeah, I still get goosebumps right now: He's here, and he's going to kick ass. And that was fantastic, and then all of a sudden, he had these drummers just coming from the sides. You're like, "Holy, holy crap, I cannot believe what I see." So that was majestic.

Audio: "Sign O' The Times" (Live) with drumline

jooZt: It was a whole new show, you know, within 10 months with a new band and everything, and, well, the stage setup, and it was amazing. I was blown away by it. Then I really realized this is someone special that I should, you know, dedicate my life to almost, musically speaking. And in a way, it also spoiled me for live acts now, you know? I don't really go anymore because I saw Prince live many, many times, and I don't care what act you go to, it's not going to be as good as Prince. I'm sorry, but it's just not!

LeRoy Bennett: Nothing will ever replace a live show. I know whatever we're going through with the COVID crisis and all that stuff and all this — these virtual concerts and stuff. It's not the same thing, because there's an energy flow that flows between the audience members and the audience and the artist, and the more the energy starts to click, the better the show is. It's just this thing, it just flows; you can never replicate it. It's the way things smell; it's the way things — you hear it, you see it, you feel it. That energy flowed heavily in our shows.

Audio: "Housequake" (Live)

jooZt: "Housequake" is really interesting, because it has the stop-and-go thing with the audience when they shout "Quake!" You know, that's really special.

Audio: "Housequake" (Live)

Cat Glover: Europeans show much love because they do chant the things that Prince asked them to chant. They sing. They light their lighters a lot more. They're just so appreciative.

jooZt: The crowd was very affectionate, and something that was invented sort of that night — you can see the Sign 'O' the Times film — was the lighter wave. You can see it during "Forever In My Life," you know, everybody flicks their lighter on the beat of the song.

Audio: "Forever In My Life"

Patrick: And that is really where Prince got the idea, because he does that in the movie as well. He used this audience trick in the Sign 'O' the Times movie, and we were there when it happened. And the next day, they themselves came out with their lighters up during "Forever In My Life," saying, "Hey, guys, you did it yesterday; do it again."

VO: Rather than continue on to play the Wembley Stadium in London as he'd originally planned, Prince opted to extend his time in Holland, adding three more shows in Rotterdam June 26 through the 28, before closing out the tour in Antwerp, Belgium.

Patrick Jordens: You got the feeling that Prince came over to Europe, lived all his life; he was writing also here, and he was probably recording here as well. Well — he was recording the Sign 'O' the Times movie, obviously, and Susan Rogers has told us that, you know, he always had his recording equipment with him. 96:22 he was just living - continuing to live his life in Europe, touring, playing. You felt like you became part of Prince's life. You were his entourage, if you will, and that was just an amazing feeling, and when he left, you know, some of us really had the blues.

VO: There are a lot of theories about why Prince decided to cut his European tour short, and move the production to Paisley Park to finish a live concert film rather than tour the U.S. — especially given how critically acclaimed the album had become back home.

Alan Leeds: This is Alan Leeds, and I was Prince's tour manager from 1983 until 1989.

Andrea Swensson: So for someone who might not understand what term is, how would you describe being Prince's tour manager? What does that mean?

Alan Leeds: It would take a week, because being a tour manager is an umbrella term, and the job definition depends entirely on the artist and the type of tour. It's everything from babysitting the band and Prince and making sure everybody's in the right place at the right time, to assembling a crew and staff that's loyal and fully understands the situation and compatible with the artist. And basically, all the logistics. He had cancelled any idea of touring the States with this show. I thought it was a real loss not to do that, because by the time we did tour the States with Lovesexy in 1988, again after a European run, the heat of the Lovesexy album had kind of died down, and as remarkable as that production was, that tour didn't have the impact that a Sign 'O' the Times tour would have a year and a half earlier.

LeRoy Bennett: There's a lot of reasons. Because ultimately, there was a storyline that played. As abstract as it was, it was this kind of abstract story line to connect all the songs and segue them together. I think he just decided, "Let's just shoot this whole thing at Paisley Park as the story that I want it to be - the way I want it to be seen on film and the way I want it" because film is forever.

Alan Leeds: I think he realized that the marketplace wanted to see the show. So that's number one. Number two is he realized that it should be documented, that he wanted his legacy to include a proper documentation of the show, just as he had with Purple Rain. And basically every tour he did was documented somehow, even if it was just his own private footage. So I'm sure he was anxious to have a proper video recording of the concert just for the archive and knowing that at some point in 2020 — God willing, he'd still be with us to do it — but there would be people who would want to see that all these years later.

VO: Although some scenes for the Sign O' The Times film were captured on the final leg of the Sign O' The Times Tour, the majority of the production happened in July of 1987 at Paisley Park.

Matt Fink: We knew about the film I think before we went on tour.

Cat Glover: He had all these brilliant ideas and however — we don't know what he's up to until it's all put together. It's like, "Why am I sitting on a bed and there's thunderstorms?" I didn't know where he was going with that, but then when I saw it all put together, I go, "Oh… OK." And then he got this storyline that me and Brooks were in a relationship, but Brooks cheated on me, and in the beginning of the movie, Prince is playing the drums and I'm talking to him about trust and love and he just wants money. And then Prince is listening to all this and Prince is trying to be my boyfriend in the movie and telling me to leave Brooks. So I didn't get all that because it was pieced together, you know — you have to guess, "OK, why am I doing this? OK, yeah."

Levi Seacer: Everything he was doing back then, he was always at least a year ahead of himself, if not two. Now he couldn't tell everybody that because it would just divide everybody's attention up from what we need to finish now. But he himself was always ahead, and I think that during that time he was probably — he was probably thinking about the film when we were rehearsing. And so while we were rehearsing, he's like, "Hmm, that'll work in the film. That'll work. Hmm. Oh! I didn't plan on that, but that's" &madsh; you know, he's writing it down. And then at some point he's like, "I'm ready to do this," and he felt like he didn't really have to explain things to people. He felt like, "I work hard enough. Why do I have to explain? This is what I wanna do; let's go."

Cat Glover: To me, Sign O' the Times is what's going on today. I want people to know that the Sign O' the Times movie was Prince's heart. That was his little baby. Everybody worked really hard; so did I as a dancer, and Miko and Levi and Bonnie Boyer, rest in peace.

VO: For American audiences, the Sign O' The Times concert film was their first big introduction to Prince's new live band. It premiered on October 29, 1987, in Detroit and then opened the next month nationwide.

Andrea Swensson: So did you both see that in the theatres, the movie?

Fred Armisen: Yeah, oh yes.

Maya Rudolph: Yeah, it was so exciting. 29:00

VO: This is Fred Armisen and Maya Rudolph, two lifelong Prince fans who have woven tributes to him into their work as actors and comedians.

Fred Armisen: I just couldn't wait to go. I remember just that opening shot. The camera goes across each bandmember.

Maya Rudolph: The drumline is unbelievable.

Fred Armisen: Oh, it's great. It's great. I was at the height, at the time, of my Prince fandom, and every subsequent album surprised you even more. Parade already — I was, I just couldn't — how does he reinvent himself this quickly? it almost seems like a brand-new career, and brand-new artist every album.

Maya Rudolph: Yeah, that's true. There was this unbelievable anticipation of feeling like you were held in the arms of whatever you were about to experience and willingly, you know. I think I was 14, 15, and it felt more adult to me, this album, and I didn't know why. I couldn't put my finger on it. I was very struck by him saying, "Now he's doing horse," knowing that he meant heroin and that he was speaking about drug use. That really was intense to me as a Prince fan at that age, and it felt like really dealing with like a really serious issue. And it felt grittier in a different way. I think one of the things that informed this idea of him getting older is I think he's wearing glasses. And that kind of, as a kid, I was like, "Oh, he's - he's more mature. He's a little bit more of a well-read gentleman."

Audio: "The Ballad of Dorothy Parker"

Fred Armisen: Just the sound of it itself — I still haven't figured out, which means — I mean that in the way that like, I love it. So even for today, I still can't wrap my head around even what style of music it is. I don't know. I can't put it in a category, and I don't mean that like, "Oh, he did many different styles." I mean that I think "The Ballad of Dorothy Parker" is a — that's not a genre that I, to this day, recognize what that even is.

Maya Rudolph: And I'm still very puzzled by a lot of it. There was a large shift in the Prince universe, you know, between Parade and this; it's vast. Vast. And a lot was not explained. And as a fan, I don't think I asked a lot of questions but then later on, I was like, "Wait a minute, what happened — what happened to them? Where's the thing that I got used to?" And yet you hear a lot of it on this album. You hear a lot of those muscles and those elements that make that particular sound that Fred's talking about completely unique unto itself.

Maya Rudolph: You were going to say, "How great are Prince fans"?

Fred Armisen: Yeah! Remember going to the shows, how great they were? Never had a negative experience ever. Everyone was just the best!

Maya Rudolph: I think it's also there was such a level of respect for him. There was such a level of reverence for him. That was a uniting factor — that we all knew that we were in the presence of a unique individual.

Fred Armisen: Totally. It was never like, "Well, this might be one of those off nights." Every single show was the best show.

Maya Rudolph: Fred and I got to be in the room for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame performance of "My Guitar Gently Weeps." That was amazing to see, and that's what I'm talking about — watching everyone on the stage watch him was unbelievable. I will never forget it as long as I live.

Audio: "It's Gonna Be A Beautiful Night (medley)" live New Year's Eve at Paisley Park

VO: Coming up next on Prince: The Story of Sign O' The Times: it's our final episode! I know. I don't want to stop. On episode 8, you will hear the behind-the-scenes tale of Prince's only onstage collaboration with the jazz icon Miles Davis.

Eric Leeds: While Miles is playing, Prince turned around to the band and threw up his arm to give us one of the signals for the band to hit one of these cues, and no one paid him any attention. It was probably a good thing that nobody did it because it could've been like a musical train wreck otherwise. But everybody in that band — all we were doing, particularly me and Matt Blistan, you know — all we're doing is looking at Miles and we're laughing because … that's Miles Davis.

Credits

Prince: The Story of Sign O' The Times is produced by The Current, supported by the Minnesota Legacy Amendment's Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, and created in collaboration with The Prince Estate and Warner Records and with their support. This story was written by Andrea Swensson; Anna Weggel is our producer. Thanks to Technical Director Corey Schreppel, Digital Producer Jay Gabler, Radio Production Director Derrick Stevens and Managing Director David Safar.

Thanks also to Trevor Guy, Giancarlo Sciama, Michael Howe and Duane Tudahl. To learn more about The Current, visit thecurrent.org. If you haven't subscribed yet, search for Prince: The Story of Sign O' The Times on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Also, to learn more about Prince, visit Prince.com.

Prince: The Story of Sign O' The Times is an audio documentary series brought to you by The Current in collaboration with the Prince Estate, Paisley Park, and Warner Records. Listen Thursdays at 8 p.m. Central, and read a written version below. The series is also available as a podcast on multiple platforms.

Audio: "Play in the Sunshine"

VO: This is Prince: The Story of Sign O' The Times, brought to you by The Current in collaboration with the Prince Estate, Paisley Park, and Warner Records.

Hello! I'm Andrea Swensson. Before we get into this week's episode, I want to take a moment to acknowledge that we are now on the sixth of eight episodes in this series about the making of Prince's magnum opus Sign O' The Times, and we are just now getting to the part of the story where Prince assembles his new live band, releases the album, and dazzles audiences all across Europe with his Sign O' The Times Tour.

It took five episodes to reach this point because of how prolific Prince was in the studio in the period leading up to Sign O' The Times — as we've discussed, he recorded enough material in this era to fill several albums. There was also so much happening in his life. By the end of 1986, Prince had dissolved the Revolution, and he and his fiancée, Susannah Melvoin, had broken up for the last time.

Audio: "Wally"

This is the second version of a song called "Wally" that Prince wrote at the end of December 1986 about the changes he was experiencing that winter. The first version was even more personal; after recording it, Prince demanded that his engineer Susan Rogers erase the tape. This second version, recorded on December 30, 1986, has remained in Prince's vault until now.

Audio: "Wally" (continues)

VO: It's important to remember just how quickly Prince was moving in this time. His breakup with Susannah and the recording of "Wally" happened just days after Prince had recorded his final song to be included on Sign O' The Times, "U Got the Look." Once he got the song "Wally" out of his system, Prince immediately turned his attention toward gathering all of his new band members together for the first time. Their first rehearsals happened just after New Year's Day 1987.

Audio: "Hot Thing"

Cat Glover: Hi, guys. This is Cat Glover, former dancer with Prince — protégé and all that. Hi.

VO: Cat Glover first met Prince through her friend Devin DeVasquez, a singer and a Playboy model. Cat and Devin competed on Star Search together, where Cat advanced to the final round using her signature dance move, the "Cat Skat."

Cat Glover: We had never been formally introduced until the club Voilà, when Devin took everyone to the club. So that's how that all started. And Prince said to me, "I want to ask you a question."

I said, "Sure."

He said, "Will you dance with me when a good song comes on?"

And I said, "Sure."

And so we get on the dance floor and Prince started dancing. I was doing my little thing, but I didn't want to show him that I could really dance because some guys will just run off the dance floor. So then he started doing little gestures, I started doing little gestures. I start following what he does, and I think it clicked in his mind: "Hmm…"

Audio: "Hot Thing"

Cat Glover: Steven Fargnoli, Devin DeVasquez — all these guys are sitting there — and I'm jacking my body, thinking of Franky Knuckles and Prince started looking. And then about three songs I sat down. He whispered to Steven, "She's mine." Prince asked me to go to his house and pick up this dress. OK. Picked up the dress. Calls me and says you have a flight. I want you to bring the dress to Minneapolis. Weird. And I went, "OK, taking the dress." So I go to his house; I get the dress; he flies me to Minneapolis and I had no idea what he was doing. Come to find out, that dress originally was for Susannah Melvoin. And she's very short, and I'm very tall, so the dress was really tiny — yeah, too tiny. So they had to sew some shorts in it. I'm 5'8" and Susannah's probably 5'3". All the ladies are small except Jill and I. Yeah, so I tried on the dress, came to Minneapolis; all of a sudden, I see photographers and they dressed me like Prince. I didn't know what was going on.

VO: So many of Prince's collaborators have a similar story. Their entrance into Prince's world happens suddenly and mysteriously. Sometimes, you're getting your picture taken for an album cover before you've even met your bandmates. That's Cat on the cover of the single "Sign O' The Times," holding a heart in front of her face on the front of the seven-inch, and playing Prince's peach Cloud guitar on the back.

Cat Glover: They just dressed me, gave me his guitar, and Prince said, "Play something."

Audio: Guitar work in "Sign O' The Times"

Cat Glover: I had no idea that was his vision — to put me on the cover, because a lot of people say we look alike, like our features and our body; however, that heart — this is why I'm upset. Tell me if you wouldn't be upset? You're in a photo shoot for two hours. You have to continue to hold this heart and take the pictures over and over again. Guess what? If I had known when they put it on the album it was just going to be black, I would've told them, "Give me a black cardboard." But no, they give me a 100-pound mirror. That's why you see my muscles. It was so heavy I was shaking! Yes! So Prince's dad called me up. He said, "Cat, I'm gonna ask you something."

I said, "Sure, Mr. Nelson."

"Please, please tell me that's you on the cover."

I said, "Mr. Nelson that's me."

He said, "Thank God because I thought my son lost his mind this time."

Audio: "Housequake" (Live) (group chanting)

VO: Cat Glover was one of several new members who were brought into the fold that winter. There was also a sizable contingent of the new band that had been recruited from the Bay Area — including Prince's protégé Sheila E. and her bandmates Miko Weaver, Boni Boyer and Levi Seacer, Jr.

Levi Seacer: I mean, I have to thank Sheila for a lot of things. I always say Prince is my musical father, and so she would be my musical mother.

VO: That's Levi Seacer, Jr., who played guitar in Sheila E.'s group and would end up playing bass for Prince.

Levi Seacer: Prince was very hands-on with all of his groups, so he would fly out to the Bay Area. So I spent a lot of time with him before I actually got in his band. And sure enough, a year later, I got a call from his secretary, and she goes, "Hold on!" That's how they do it. And the secretary just calls you; there's no, like, "Is your name Levi?"; none of that stuff. "Hold on a second; somebody wants to talk to you."

He said, "Levi, you wanna be in my band?"

I'm like, "Yes."

He said, "But I need you on bass guitar, because you're gonna take Mark Brown's place, and we can talk about you going on guitar later, but right now I need you on bass."

And I said, "Of course."

He said, "Rehearsal is Monday," and it was Friday then.

Andrea Swensson: Hunh. What do you think it was about Sheila and this whole Bay Area band that Prince was drawn to at this time, like, how would you describe musically what you were bringing to the table?

Levi Seacer: If you listen to Prince on guitar, he's influenced by a lot of people, but he has a heavy Carlos Santana influence, you know? He's got the Jimi Hendrix too, but if you listen to Sly Stone, you hear that; and of course, James Brown. And so that whole Bay Area sound was in him just like it was in me. So I think when we connected, he could hear some of that. And I was wondering how he got our sound from the Bay Area in Minneapolis. (laughs) So I think that's what the connection was, yeah.

VO: The rest of the band was made up of musicians from the expanded lineup of The Revolution that had performed with Prince on the Parade Tour, including the dancers Wally Safford and Greg Brooks, horn players Eric Leeds and Atlanta Bliss, and Prince's longtime keyboardist Matt Fink, who we all know as Dr. Fink.

Matt Fink: Sheila was on the road with us with her band on Purple Rain tour, and some of those people were around; like, if we were playing Oakland or San Francisco all her crew would come. So I was a little bit familiar with them but, yeah that was really interesting — whole different chemistry coming in.

Andrea Swensson: Yeah. What do you remember about some of those early rehearsals with the new members and kind of feeling out this new band?

Matt Fink: Well, I thought they were just great, technically; great players, like The Revolution too, and capable of handling anything Prince could throw at them, you know? 'Course I missed my old bandmates. I was still very in mourning — I'm like in mourning. Seriously! It was bad. But I had to, as they say, "Buck up, kid! Get your ass out there and play the music!" OK, so that's what I did. What can I say?

Audio: "Promise to Be True"

VO: In early 1987, Paisley Park was still under construction and Prince was mostly working out of a nearby warehouse.

Cat Glover: Most of the work we did for Sign 'O' the Times was done at the warehouse. That cover of the whole band? That's at the warehouse.

Levi Seacer: That was a fun place. I really liked that.

Audio: "Promise to Be True" (continues)

Levi Seacer: That space, it was just one word: open. And I mean not — it was literally space — but it was also literally open as far as creativity; like, you felt like anything's on the table; we can try anything. If he didn't like it he'd just say, "Uh-uh, uh-uh, that's not sexy; we're not doing that." And I'm like OK. Everything had to be sexy or not, OK? Just so you know. But it was open. I mean, we might be doing a rehearsal; his dad would pop in; he would go play some pool while we were playing, and then when we'd have lunch he'd play piano for us. It was great; it was great. His mom would come down sometimes. Bonnie Raitt was hanging out with us. So she'd come, and she'd watch our rehearsal, and we didn't know she was coming and Prince was like, "Hey, you wanna sit in with us?" I'm like, "We're getting to play with Bonnie Raitt?" She's like, "Oh, I'd love to!" You didn't know what to expect.

Audio: "I Need a Man"

VO: This is a song Prince wrote for Bonnie Raitt in January 1987, when she and Prince were thinking of collaborating on a project.

Levi Seacer: I haven't had any kind of environment like that since. And I knew that at the time. I said, "You know what? I better take this in, because it's never gonna be like this again."

VO: One of the first things his new band members learned at those rehearsals was how hard Prince worked his band — and how seriously he took his craft.

Levi Seacer: I knew there was a certain level of work, but I didn't know how organized he was, you know, so when I got to Minneapolis the first day of being in his band, he said, "Hey, listen. Thanks for coming guys, but let me tell you something about me. I laugh and I joke and stuff. I'm very serious about this, so if you don't wanna have conflict with me, I need you to do one of two things: So if you're not a genius, I need you to make notes, extensive notes, on all of the things that I give you. Or make a recording so that you can study it later, because it's gonna be a lot of stuff, and after you guys rehearse with me, I have my own rehearsal separate from you," which I had never heard of that from an artist. But he wanted us to play at a level that we were not used to playing at. As far as the work it was like — it reminded me of Berry Gordy when he talked about how he ran Hitsville, you know; it was a machine…

Cat Glover: I remember I was very nervous looking around at all these people, and the rehearsals were crucial. But Prince didn't know how strong I was. I mean, like, I can go all night long. I could just - "Come on! You wanna test me?" - I was a dancer. It was like aerobics to me.

Levi Seacer: Cat was a surprise for all of us. Very few people have the energy that Prince has. She's the only one that I think might've had a little more (laughs). It might be possible. But when you watch the two of them dancing together it's just — it's like nuclear, OK? Even at rehearsal, just dancing hard like it was a show. And so he couldn't watch that and not want to move. I call her "Orange Energy." You know? That was our color then with the orange. But she was orange, like pure orange energy.

VO: Prince had also found a foil in Boni Boyer, a powerhouse vocalist who brought gospel and soul elements to the band's sound — and kept Prince on his toes at rehearsals.

Matt Fink: Yeah, she was a ball of fire, Boni. She was a gregarious soul and very funny, very talented at keyboards and vocals and everything else. She was a lot of fun to be around.

Levi Seacer: Boni. Oh, man, um… First of all, she was incredibly talented. She was very in-the-moment about her playing and singing; like, you would never get the same thing, you know, because she was like, "I'm feeling it this way today," so she'd sing it this way or she'd play something that way. That's a big transition just to go from the Bay Area to Prince's band. And she did it without missing a beat. That's what I liked about her. Boni had some outrageous jokes that I'd have to grab your ears. But it was cool, it was cool. Prince liked her a lot, yeah.

Audio: "Forever in My Life" (featuring live Boni Boyer vocals)

Alan Leeds: Boni Boyer — God rest her soul — was a wonderful keyboard player, a great background singer.

VO: This is Prince's longtime tour manager, Alan Leeds. He oversaw the Sign O' The Times tour.

Alan Leeds: She had a completely different style, brought a different kind of flavor to the band. But one thing was equally attractive — and as far as the guitar, Miko Weaver is an amazing rhythm guitarist. Needless to say, no Prince band is looking for a guitar soloist, so the idea that having a solid rhythm guitar player was what was most important, and Miko more than filled the bill. Once people heard this band and realized what it was, albeit significantly different than The Revolution, you couldn't be angry because it did — like any Prince band, it's going to be rehearsed into the ground. Nobody's going to make mistakes.

VO: At the same time that the band was refining its sound, it was also developing its look. Even Dr. Fink got a new, sleeker set of medical scrubs.

Matt Fink: I went to a more '60s Dr. Kildare vibe, which is exactly how I put it to Prince's wardrobe gal. I said I want to look like Dr. Kildare. He was my hero in the '60s. I wanted to be just like him.

Andrea Swensson: Well, that must've been fun to have a wardrobe person that could whip up whatever you wanted.

Matt Fink: We were spoiled! We were all spoiled by then.

Audio: "Strange Relationship" (1987 Shep Pettibone mix)

VO: All of the photographs that have become synonymous with the look of Sign O' The Times, from the album artwork to the tour merchandise, were captured by Jeff Katz, who had become Prince's primary photographer in this era. Prince and Jeff started working together on a shoot for The Family in 1985, and Jeff took the iconic black-and-white portrait of Prince that appeared on the cover of Parade. Jeff's first time visiting Minnesota was the cover shoot for Sign O' The Times at Prince's rehearsal warehouse.

Jeff Katz: I got a phone call: "Can you come photograph Prince?" No explanation of anything, and I go to the warehouse and he's got the Sign 'O' the Time outfits; everybody does, and you know — he has these iconic symbols — and they're all on the floor and they're all over the place and Sheila was playing drums, and Matt Fink was on piano, and then there were some new players and it was really like this wild Fellini film where things would happen and I would photograph it and more people would come in and then less people would come in, and we'd be on the stage and we'd be here and we'd be there and then — and then it even got to the point where he wanted something more than what was happening there, like visually, and it happened to be a Sunday, and the only thing open, was the Chanhassen Dinner Theatre was putting on a production of Guys and Dolls, so that background is actually the Guys and Dolls backdrop that the dinner theater was doing.

Audio: "Take the "A" Train (live)

Jeff Katz: Karen Krattinger, who worked here, she went out and she found that and she procured that and she assured them nothing would happen and brought it here, and that became like the most iconic element of it.

Karen Krattinger: I ran down with several of the guys to the Chanhassen Dinner Theatre, and they showed me a few backdrops, and I said, "That one! That one will work." And we loaded it up and got it back to the soundstage and hung it, and it was — started throwing the band gear around and whatever other little decorations, and it turned out great. It was a big scramble, but things with Prince often were a big scramble. But he had such an amazing group of people working with him that, you know what? Pat myself on the back as being part of that. We always pulled it off. It was something.

VO: As Jeff recalls, even the image on the cover of Sign O' The Times came out of a moment of pure, spontaneous creativity.

Jeff Katz: After like a whole two-day process, he sits down on a box right in front of my lens, and I go, "You know this isn't in focus." He goes, "Just shoot." I said, "Well, it's going to be a very long exposure; it's really dark; I haven't lighted," and it was like 16 seconds, like one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand. So he does it, and he's all out of focus and I go, "Here." He goes, "I love it." And then when he got all the film back, he went right back to that picture where he's out of focus. He said, "Go to Warner Bros and tell them this is the cover." And they thought I was kidding too. I mean, that's what he did. It was something so not-what-you-would-expect, and I just love it.

VO: There was a lot of excitement coursing through the group as they prepared for the Sign O' The Times Tour, but there was a nervousness, too — especially as they prepared to make their live debut at First Avenue, the venue Prince and The Revolution had made famous.

Levi Seacer: Oh, boy, did I feel it. Remember I told you Prince said, "You're gonna be in my band"? I'm like, "Yeah," so I flew out Saturday. So I got a couple of days before Monday. So I said, "Well, let me see the town." So I go out to First Avenue, and when I go in there I'm looking around and I'm like, "Oh, is that Jesse Johnson?" I said, "No, that's just a guy dressed like him. Is that Vanity?" I mean the whole — it was like Halloween! It was like paisley purple Halloween every day so I go to the bar — I don't drink — but I said, "I'll have a Shirley Temple." So I'm sitting there and everybody, all the guys, they're mad. All the musicians. And I'm like - I said, "I better listen in on this, you know" — they're upset because Prince like went outside of his town to get musicians who grew up with him who felt like, "OK, you're disbanding The Revolution. I don't understand why I don't get a shot or try at it, and you'd even listen and you bypassed us and got some strangers? They better be good."

So — after hearing about 30 or 40 minutes, I mean the whole — everybody was talking about: "Wonder what the new band is like?" I just put my hand up and left — I left the bar, and I went back and I said, "Oh, boy, we got it coming." I'm like, "You know what? So what we need to do is do the best that we can, and kind of ease the tensions a little bit because we don't want to have that kind of thing going on in the town."

And it all worked out! You know, after we played the first time and, you know, the musicians came up and they said, "Man, you know what, I was really hating on you guys, but you guys sound pretty good, man, and I think, you know, he picked the right people, and I'm looking forward to hearing all the new music." And I'm like, "Uh-oh! Touchdown."

Audio: "Paisley Park"

VO: At the same time that Prince was transforming his band, he was also inching closer to being able to use his new facilities, Paisley Park — a sprawling complex that was designed to include studios, rehearsal rooms, a massive production soundstage, offices, and a wardrobe department all under one roof. Prince couldn't wait to shift band rehearsals and recording sessions out of the warehouse and into his new space.

Levi Seacer: And he kept telling us about this big complex he was building, and I'm like, "Wow, it's bigger than this?" Because where we were at, it was pretty big, you know, and he's like, "Oh, no, you can't — this is like the Disneyland of studios, man."

Atlanta Bliss: The soundstage there — I was told, and you probably can — you could park a 747 in that thing.

VO: This is trumpet player Atlanta Bliss.

Atlanta Bliss: Instead of going to Los Angeles or going to New York for production rehearsals, OK, well, bands now, they come to Minneapolis. It's not the crazy atmosphere of L.A. or New York, and it's get down to business and you do your tour rehearsals and take care of it.

Eric Leeds: This was his dream, this complex.

VO: This is saxophonist Eric Leeds.

Eric Leeds: It was a white elephant since day one. There was absolutely no economic reason in the world why he should've ever built that place. And all of his business managers and his personal management were telling him, "Are you out of your mind?" From day one, he wanted it: his own private playground. I also think — and this is just speculation — but, you know, a lot has been talked about the fact that the Sign 'O' the Times tour was never played in the States. And instead of doing that, he did the concert film. I have a feeling that a part of his decision was that we were finishing up in Europe just about the time that Paisley was getting ready to open. I think a lot of that decision was based on his excitement to get into the building.

Cat Glover: It was so awesome. We were all excited, and I remember going into studio A. I remember Prince had a little dance room built for me. It was like hardwood floors and mirrors, and the bathrooms were down the hall. We had this rehearsal-area private space, and then the soundstage — ahhh! (Applauds) The studios! (Applauds) We had so much space. Paisley Park was my home. We used to play hide-and-seek. I was so mischievous, I would hide and go way to where the wardrobe is. I knew a private way to get on the roof, which no one did. I used to sneak on top of the roof, crawl onto the pyramid — you know, that pyramid? — and I remember Prince was looking for us to start recording and I'm looking down at everybody going (knocks) and I hear him going, "Where's Cat? Where is Cat? Where is Cat?" Cat was looking at them. Least to say, I got in trouble. It was fun, see, I was like the little tomboy girl. I was just curious about everything at Paisley Park; like, we used to roller skate in there, play basketball, play ping-pong. Wow! It was amazing.

Audio: "Sign O' The Times" (Live)

VO: Coming up next on Prince: The Story of Sign O' The Times: The show stopping Sign O' The Times Tour embarks for dates across Europe. You'll hear from fans who were there — including Dutch fans who saw the show Prince and his band played in Utrecht, which is being released for the first time in the Super Deluxe Edition of Sign O' The Times.

jooZt Mattheij: I'm jooZt Mattheij. I am the editor of princevault.com … It was amazing. I was blown away by it. I really realized this is someone special that I should, you know, dedicate my life to almost, musically speaking. And in a way it also spoiled me for live acts now, you know? I don't really go anymore because I saw Prince live many, many times, and I don't care what acts you go to, it's not going to be as good as Prince! I'm sorry, but it's just not.

Credits

Prince: The Story of Sign O' The Times is produced by The Current, supported by the Minnesota Legacy Amendment's Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, and created in collaboration with The Prince Estate and Warner Records and with their support. This story was written by Andrea Swensson; Anna Weggel is our producer. Thanks to Technical Director Corey Schreppel, Digital Producer Jay Gabler, Radio Production Director Derrick Stevens and Managing Director David Safar.

Thanks also to Trevor Guy, Giancarlo Sciama, Michael Howe and Duane Tudahl. To learn more about The Current, visit thecurrent.org. If you haven't subscribed yet, search for Prince: The Story of Sign O' The Times on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Also, to learn more about Prince, visit Prince.com.

Prince: The Story of Sign O' The Times is an audio documentary series brought to you by The Current in collaboration with the Prince Estate, Paisley Park, and Warner Records. Listen Thursdays at 8 p.m. Central, and read a written version below. The series is also available as a podcast on multiple platforms.

Lenny Waronker: So I called him at the studio, at Sunset Sound. He picks up the phone, and he just says, "I hear you don't like my album."

Audio: "It Be's Like That Sometimes"

VO: This is Prince: The Story of Sign O' The Times, brought to you by The Current in collaboration with the Prince Estate, Paisley Park, and Warner Records.

Hey! It's Andrea Swensson. That track you're hearing is called "It Be's Like That Sometimes," and it's one of the many unreleased tracks from Prince's vault that are included on the new Super Deluxe Reissue of Sign O' The Times. Elements of it would end up in "Eye No," a song on his 1988 release, Lovesexy. But at the time it was recorded, in October 1986, it was one of dozens of songs that Prince was tracking between the breakup of his hit-making band, The Revolution, and the completion of Sign O' The Times.

Years later, while writing the liner notes for his 1998 compilation of unreleased music, Crystal Ball, Prince would look back on this period. Writing about the track "Good Love," he said, "This track was recorded during an intense period of musical change 4 Prince — he had disbanded the Revolution and moved 2 L.A., booking Sunset Sound Studios — sometimes 4 months at a time. 'Shockadelica,' 'Feel U Up,' and parts of the Black Album were also recorded during this period. Prince was happy he reflected and very optimistic about his musical possibilities with a new line-up of musicians, which included Sheila E."

By the time the news of The Revolution's breakup was reported in the papers, Prince had already set up camp at Sunset Sound and was recording one or two songs a day.

Coke Johnson: When they came back from tour, the 18-wheeler pulled up and they brought all this stuff from the tour in and decorated the studio.

VO: This is engineer Coke Johnson, who worked closely with Prince at Sunset Sound.

Coke Johnson: That's when the king-sized bed showed up.

VO: Yes, a bed.

Coke Johnson: Instead of having a couch out there, he moved in a big ol' full king-sized bed that had a big purple comforter on it because it sat high so he could sit on the edge of it and play his guitar. I think a lot of times he sat out there and wrote in his little notebooks what he was feeling and what was going on in his life, because everybody wanted a piece of him, and they all were pulling him here and pulling him there. And he had lawyers and accountants and architects trying to get his approval on building Paisley Park. I remember one day, one of the architects showed up, and he had built a three-foot-by-three-foot piece of coroplast, and it was a mockup of Paisley Park down to the dream window pyramids on the top to a T with little trees in the yards and stuff; tried to show Prince what the design concept was. And I think Prince had told him, you know, what he wanted, and the guy brought it into the room; he set it in the studio and then he invited that guy to leave. No gratification at all! I don't know if he ever told him, "Good job." He expected perfection out of everybody he worked with. And because he expected that, that drove everybody to really put their all into it.

Audio: "Witness 4 the Prosecution" (Version 2)

VO: One of the songs Prince recorded during this period was a reworking of "Witness 4 the Prosecution" on October 6, 1986. Prince intended to give this new version to the country star Deborah Allen, and the next day, he tracked another song for her, "Telepathy," that she would ultimately release.

As Prince went into overdrive creating new material in the studio, he would work such long hours that he needed a bench of engineers at the ready. In the fall of 1986, that often meant that Coke Johnson was trading off behind the board with Prince's primary engineer Susan Rogers.

Coke Johnson: He would work you into the ground. And so I could work with Prince, and we could tag team him. A lot of times either she or I would be sleeping. There was a break room right across the hall with a couple nice couches, and so we could take little catnaps in there.

VO: The studio was a deeply personal space for Prince; as Coke recalls, not even Prince's bodyguard would be allowed in the actual recording rooms. Which meant that Coke — who Prince called "Cuz" — logged countless hours alone in the studio with Prince.

Coke Johnson: So he always referred to me as "Cuz," short for "cousin," you know — if he wanted me in the studio he'd come over the talkback and say, "Cuz, studio three." He loved Doritos; he loved Famous Amos cookies, the little bags where they were always fresh. He liked Perrier water and he liked Evian water. We kept all of those in the break room in case he wanted to take a break. And it was rare that he would drink much coffee, but if we'd been recording for seven or eight hours and it was 10 o'clock at night, he would say, "Cuz. We need a cup of coffee." And I'd say, "Really?" Generally, it was with a little bit of cream and a sugar cube. And if he said "Two sugars," that meant you were going to be there for another four hours, because he was such a purist, that even a sugar buzz would get him wound up.

VO: With The Revolution's breakup still fresh, Prince seemed to pivot in this period toward creating music for other people, trying on different personas and personalities. In the span of just one week that October, he recorded songs for Deborah Allen, Jill Jones, and Joni Mitchell — who struggled to find herself in the lyrics for the song Prince penned for her, "Emotional Pump."

Audio: "Emotional Pump"

VO: While exploring the more feminine side of his songwriting, Prince also tapped into a piece of technology that could shift his voice into new registers. By mid-October, he'd become fascinated with recording in a voice he would call Camille.

Coke Johnson: He was writing so many songs and doing so much stuff that he got tired of his voice singing the solo on all the songs. So we got a couple of special effects devices. One of them was called the Publison Infernal Machine, which is a pitch-changing device where he can sing in his normal voice and it'll come out like on, "Bob." You know that song?

Audio: "Bob George"

Coke Johnson: Bob, ain't that a bitch. He could actually sing in his normal register and we could transpose it down or we could transpose it up. When he started singing in his falsetto in his head tone it was such a pure tone, there was nothing out on the radio that sounded anything like that. And I think he liked that. And then he was just trying to find the right song or the right vehicle to exploit that sound.

Audio: "Rebirth of the Flesh"

Coke Johnson: And so we started collecting all those songs. He had six or seven of them that he had sung with that higher voice, and he didn't want to throw them away because they were good songs. So I think that's where he was putting together the Camille album.

VO: Although a test pressing was made, the Camille album was abandoned before it could be officially released. But its mere existence has become a fascination for Prince scholars and fans. With the release of the Super Deluxe edition of Sign O' The Times, it's possible to experience the full collection of Camille tracks, which started with "Rebirth of the Flesh" …

Audio: "Rebirth of the Flesh"

VO: And included "Housequake" …

Audio: "Housequake"

VO: "Strange Relationship" …

Audio: "Strange Relationship"

VO: "Feel U Up," which Prince released as a B-side to "Partyman" in 1989…

Audio: "Feel U Up"

VO: "Shockadelica," which was released as a B-side to "If I Was Your Girlfriend," and references Camille…

Audio: "Shockadelica (Extended Version)"

VO: "Good Love," which was released on the 1988 Bright Lights, Big City soundtrack…

Audio: "Good Love"

VO: "If I Was Your Girlfriend" …

Audio: "If I Was Your Girlfriend"

VO: And "Rockhard in a Funky Place," which would end up on The Black Album.

Audio: "Rockhard in a Funky Place"

VO: Even The Black Album was an ephemeral creation in this period; a handful of the tracks were mixed together to soundtrack Sheila E's birthday party that December.

Coke Johnson: I just assumed that those were for the party only, that those would never be released, because we spent a while mixing those things out. We made some tapes that would be slammin' for Sheila E's birthday. He seemed really driven back in that particular three- to four-month period. He didn't have The Revolution around. He was in the studio, in his element, doing what he enjoyed doing and he was making himself happy — along with me! (laughs)

Susan Rogers: I was very puzzled around that time.

VO: This is engineer Susan Rogers.

Susan Rogers: I was puzzled because he wasn't talking about it; he wasn't showing it. There were big changes going on his life. I knew how important The Revolution was to him. Bobby was one of his oldest friends, and Wendy and Lisa were, again, among his oldest dearest friends. For him to lose his band, I knew that he was struggling. There were deep tensions there and he would not — this frustrated me as a Prince fan — he would not write about it. He would not sing about it. He would not say anything about it. Because in addition to all that, he had this tension going on with Susannah because what's she supposed to do when her sister leaves and here she is? And I kept waiting for the songs. I mean, gee, if you ever wanted inspiration, there's a great way to be inspired. Your world kind of falling moderately apart. But Prince did not acknowledge weakness. When we were on tour if he had a cold or the flu, he'd take that DayQuil and he'd hit the stage. He did not like making excuses. He did not like admitting any kind of a weakness.

Audio: "Play in the Sunshine"

Susan Rogers: So musically and artistically around this time, the tension was there in the room, but the music is generally pretty upbeat — things like "Play in the Sunshine" and "Housequake" and even the dance stuff that we did, like "Le Grind" and "Cindy C" and this happy, joyful stuff. I can see it when I watch the movie Sign 'O' the Times and the concert that we did over in the Netherlands, watching it recently after all these yearss it gives me the impression of just manic, untethered joy — like being really joyful, but without a reason to be. It's not tied to a birthday or Christmas or a happy event like getting married or — it's just joy for the sake of joy. And that's a little bit puzzling and a little bit troubling, but from that feeling, he got a masterpiece from it. To some extent, he plumbed the depths of what he was feeling, like with "Sign 'O' the Times" and with "The Cross" and with "Adore," with "It." And to another set of songs, he's not touching it. He's not touching what he's feeling. It's music made from the neck up. It's purely cerebral, yet it's so damn good. Most artists would be hard pressed to pull that off. You have to be a true maestro to be able to be that good.

VO: That "joy for the sake of joy" may have seemed dissonant to those around Prince in that tumultuous era, but looking back at Prince's work all these years later, I think that's part of Sign O' The Times' lasting appeal: it captured the full spectrum of the human experience, from reckoning with deeply personal disappointments and spiritual epiphanies to embracing resilience and joy — in other words, as Yale professor Daphne Brooks described in a previous episode, he was finding ways to celebrate the expansiveness and limitless possibilities of Black artistic expression. As Daphne reminded me, the Camille persona was just another example of the ways that Prince that pushed away boundaries.

Daphne Brooks: The technique that first piqued my ears and still is the detail that is most alluring to me and inspiring is the emergence of the Camille persona. And she or they — as our younger fans might call that character right now — they come to us initially through "Housequake."

Audio: "Housequake"

Daphne Brooks: The longer genealogy and thinking about a character like Camille is obviously through something like P-Funk; it's so central to Prince's DNA And the fact that P-Funk was so revolutionary in playing with Afro-futuristic kinds of characters through technological calibrations of vocals clears a space for Prince to then actually design and inhabit an expansive, heterogeneous, polygender universe, right? So that's one particular example of how I think of Prince as having taken kind of the building blocks of funk and pushed them to their limits in these ways that made really radical statements about, again, the malleability and gloriously constructed possibilities attached to identity performance.

Audio: "If I Was Your Girlfriend"

VO: By the end of November 1986, Prince had assembled what was to be his next artistic masterpiece: the 22-track, triple album Crystal Ball. It included eight tracks from his abandoned Dream Factory album, which he'd primarily completed with The Revolution's Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman, and his fiancée at the time, Susannah Melvoin; another seven tracks from the Camille project; and another handful of songs he'd just completed that fall at Sunset Sound.

Audio: "Rebirth of the Flesh"

VO: The track list was finalized on November 30, 1986, and submitted to Warner Bros. Records. And if Prince had been in charge of the label, that three-disc set is the version we would have all heard in early 1987. But for the first time since the runaway success of Purple Rain — and with the dust still settling from his film Under the Cherry Moon's disappointing reception earlier that year — Warner Bros. pushed back. You're going to hear now from Lenny Waronker, former record producer and record executive at Warner Records. His relationship with Prince started a decade before Sign O' The Times. They met when Prince was in the process of signing to Warner Bros. in 1977, and Lenny remembers visiting Prince in the studio when he wanted to prove to the label, at the tender age of 19, that he was capable of producing himself.

Lenny Waronker: We took him in the studio, and I really didn't want him to think he was auditioning. We just wanted to see what he did, you know? And he started with an acoustic guitar, got that down; put the drums on it. And as he was putting the drums on, you could tell he had it covered. Because I was really concerned about not auditioning him, I said to him, "After you've finished putting the drums on, we can stop, and if you want, you can have the tape or whatever," and he looked at me and it's one of the few things he said that day, but he said, "No, I gotta finish," and he was very firm about that; firm enough to where I backed off and said, "OK, OK, whatever." And we were in the control booth, which was very, very thin, especially with all those big, 24-track tape machines. He was sort of sitting on the floor, and I was walking across the booth to talk to the engineer, and as I'm stepping over him, he looked up at me and he said, "Don't make me Black." And he then went on to say that he's competing with everyone, and named artists from different genres, different times: the Beatles, and Sly and the Family Stone, Eric Clapton. I mean he went on and on and on, and again, it was jumping genres, which really made it interesting. It was like, geez, there's an enormous amount of ambition, and there's also the ambition to be great. That was a big thing for me - you know - it was like, "You better get this guy and stay the hell out of his way," for the most part.

VO: And for the most part, that's how Prince and Lenny's relationship played out. Executives from the label rarely visited Prince in the studio, and Prince would visit the Warner Bros. offices on his own terms to share his latest music with Lenny and his colleagues. But when Prince handed in his three-disc album Crystal Ball, the label felt lukewarm about it.

Audio: "The Ball"

Lenny Waronker: It was the first time that we had stepped in. When the album came in I listened to it, and I realized I was having a very difficult time getting through it. Part of that is just me, and the other part is that it felt long. It felt like there were 20 songs.

VO: There were 22 songs in total.

Lenny Waronker: And so there was a meeting that took place in Bob Cavallo's office, with Steve Fargnoli, Bob and Joe and Mo and myself.

VO: Bob Cavallo, Steve Fargnoli, and Joe Ruffalo were Prince's management at the time; Mo Ostin was the CEO of Warner Bros. Records.

Lenny Waronker: I got there a hair late, and I could hear what they were talking about, which was trying to get it down to one album. They were all worried, you know, about the size of the thing. And I listened for a while and finally I just said, "You guys, there's no way. There's no way that he's gonna take three albums and condense it into one, based on what I've heard. I think the approach should really be, 'Let's do a double album.'" He can get away with that easily, and it would make for a better album I thought. And I gave them the reasons again, you know — the artistic reasons — why it would be impossible, I thought, to win that battle. And why battle? Why not present it in a way where you're talking about what's best for the record. So, they wanted me to talk to him about it. I thought, "Oh god, here we go…" you know. Because it was never easy with bad news or what he perceived as bad news.

So I said, "All right, but don't say anything to him. I'll pick my time and my place. I want to do it in a neutral place." So [I] went home, went out to dinner, came back; it was about 11 o'clock. Had a phone call from Steve Fargnoli. He was one of three managers, and Steve said, "Prince wants to talk to you."

And I said, "Steve, did you tell him?"

He said, "Well, I had to. He knew there was a meeting."

So I just said. "All right."

So I called him at the studio, at Sunset Sound, and I remember the woman who picked up the phone put me right through. In other words, Prince had told her I would be calling and make sure that this call gets in here. I called and got him immediately. He picks up the phone, and he just says — this is the opening line, it wasn't "hello" or any of that stuff — it was, "I hear you don't like my album," which was typical of him because he could challenge you. And I said, "That's not true. I didn't say that. The thing I said is I think it would be a phenomenal album, but I think that it needs to be edited."

I had just gotten back from a vacation in Hawaii and I read this fabulous book about this book editor, Maxwell Perkins, who found F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, etc., etc. So I told Prince about this famous book publisher and all he wanted to do was make sure that the books were as good as they could be and as tight as they could be. And I said, "In your case, there's no Max Perkins. You're that guy. You're gonna edit it."

I was just trying to get him to think about what's best for the record. He didn't say much. And then at the very end, he just said, "You know what? I'm going home to Minneapolis," and hung up. So I figured "Oh man, I blew it." The next morning, I went to the office and got two A&R people who I really trust to sit with me and go through all the songs and see if we could edit it down, or at least have our version to have him respond to it. And I called Bob Cavallo, who was sort of a senior manager and a longtime friend of mine, somebody I really respected. And I said, "I know I'm gonna have to go to Minneapolis to get this done, and we decided we would put the album together with, what we thought were the stronger songs," and he said, "What are you talking about, 'Fly to Minneapolis'? He's been up all night editing the album!"

Andrea Swensson: I like that you went the route of saying, "You are both the artist and the editor in this analogy."

Lenny Waronker: Yeah, it was the only way to do it. And by the way, it was the right way to do it. We're not as good as he is, you know.

VO: Years later, Prince would reflect on this exchange with Lenny and the label. In 1996, when his conflicts with Warner Bros. had reached a fever pitch, The Artist said in an interview, "I delivered three CDs for Sign O' The Times. Because the people at Warner were tired, they came up with reasons why I should be tired too. I don't know if it's their place to talk me into or out of things." In another interview that year, he added, "These are the same people who would tell Mozart he writes too many notes, or that Citizen Kane is a long movie."

Susan Rogers: I do remember that when he told me we've got to take it apart — the sequence that we had — he was angry. He was angry and disappointed. And he, at this point, was not used to not getting his way with the label. And I remember him huffing and puffing and being angry about the way some people act and the way some people think and the way some people behave and what kind of a world we're living in and blahblah.

Audio: "Bob George"

Susan Rogers: And I did not know the context in which he was so angry. I didn't get involved in his business affairs or his personal affairs for that matter. But I remember he was angry about that, and then eventually there was acceptance and we moved on. And it was the better choice. The double album was the better choice, but it wasn't what he wanted and this was one of the — it had been a long since he hadn't gotten what he wanted.

Audio: "U Got the Look"

VO: There is only one song on Sign O' The Times that wasn't on the three-disc Crystal Ball — and Prince recorded it at the 11th hour, on December 21, 1986, with Sheena Easton.

Susan Rogers: I remember that we spent an extra-long time on "U Got the Look." Originally the song was a slower tempo, so we had the tape machine slowed down. It was going to be a slow, kind of deep-funky kind of thing. It was very clear that he was considering this to be a song like "Pop Life" or "When Doves Cry," that this was a major song to him on this record; perhaps a single, I don't know. But we spent a long time, at least a full day, with it in that lower tempo, and he decided he didn't like it. Typically, if he decided he didn't like it that's when a song — tape would come off the machine. He's finish it up; we'd make a mix of it; it'd come off the machine and the tape would go straight into the vault. But in this case he did something unusual: He just kept working on it. So we stripped down the whole top line, we vari-sped the tape machine to speed it up — made it a whole different thing; made it a pop thing and that's why the drums sound so bright and high-pitched, high in tone. It's because we sped it up from their original tone. So as he's working on it, he's friends with Sheena, they have a phone call, he invites her down to the studio and she comes down and they put up a mic and he's written lyrics for her and she sings. It was very quick. She was a pro just like he was. Her voice was always warmed up, and she did a great vocal part.

Audio: "U Got the Look"

VO: Coming up next on Prince: The Story of Sign O' The Times, Prince assembles his new live band and prepares to introduce them to the world with a big European tour. You'll meet more of the musicians who Prince brought along for the ride — including the incomparable Cat Glover.

Audio: "Hot Thing"

Cat Glover:I tried on a dress, came to Minneapolis; all of a sudden, I see photographers, and they dressed me like Prince. I didn't know what was going on. They just dressed me, gave me his guitar, and Prince said, "Play something."

Credits

Prince: The Story of Sign O' The Times is produced by The Current, supported by the Minnesota Legacy Amendment's Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, and created in collaboration with The Prince Estate and Warner Records and with their support. This story was written by Andrea Swensson; Anna Weggel is our producer. Thanks to Technical Director Corey Schreppel, Digital Producer Jay Gabler, Radio Production Director Derrick Stevens and Managing Director David Safar.

Thanks also to Trevor Guy, Giancarlo Sciama, Michael Howe and Duane Tudahl. To learn more about The Current, visit thecurrent.org. If you haven't subscribed yet, search for Prince: The Story of Sign O' The Times on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Also, to learn more about Prince, visit Prince.com.

Prince: The Story of Sign O' The Times is an audio documentary series brought to you by The Current in collaboration with the Prince Estate, Paisley Park, and Warner Records. Listen Thursdays at 8 p.m. Central, and read a written version below. The series is also available as a podcast on multiple platforms.

Andrea Swensson (to Lisa Coleman): He said, "I think they love me so much, and I love them so much, that if they came over all the time I wouldn't be able to be to them what I am, and they wouldn't be able to do for me what they do."

Lisa Coleman: Wow.

Andrea Swensson (to Lisa Coleman): What do you think that means?

Lisa Coleman: We knew the guy, but the professional persona was somebody who was pretty mysterious and very powerful and sort of a lone wolf, but we started getting so close, that the lone wolf started going away. But, you know, he knew what his purpose in life was, and it was to be Prince.

Audio: "I Could Never Take the Place of Your Mind"

VO: This is Prince: The Story of Sign O' The Times, brought to you by The Current in collaboration with the Prince Estate, Paisley Park, and Warner Records.

VO: Hey, I'm Andrea Swensson. We started this episode hearing from Lisa Coleman, keyboard player in the Revolution and close friend and collaborator of Prince's in the prolific era that led up to the creation of Sign O' The Times. Lisa was responding to a quote that Prince gave to Rolling Stone writer Neal Karlen in the summer of 1985, just before he would begin to significantly change the composition of his band.

I've had a chance to speak to nearly everyone who played in a band with Prince in 1986, including members of The Revolution, members of his side projects, and members of what would become his new band — a precursor to his ever-evolving New Power Generation. That band solidified on New Year's Eve, 1986, and debuted on the Sign O' The Times Tour.

When you look back on an artist's career, it can all seem so orderly: we watch each album come out; we study the different photographs and aesthetics. For Prince, it's clear that where he was during the Purple Rain era is completely different than where he was during the release of his second film, Under the Cherry Moon and the soundtrack Parade, and then during Sign O' The Times, even though they all came out within three years of each other. But the process of creation, especially for an artist as prolific and path-forging as Prince, is messy. Personal and professional relationships get intertwiened, and when change comes, it can be really painful. At first, Prince's transition away from the musical chemistry he'd tapped into with the Revolution was gradual; there wasn't really a clean break — until finally, there was. And it happened just before Prince would complete his sprawling three-disc set called Crystal Ball, and just six months before he would edit down that massive collection into the double album Sign O' The Times and release it into the world.

A few months after Prince talked to Rolling Stone and gave that quote reflecting on his relationship with his closest bandmates, he also recorded an interview for MTV in October 1985. At one point, he would reflect on his first formative concert experience, when his stepfather placed him onstage to dance alongside James Brown when he was around 10 years old.

Prince to MTV, 1985: "The reason I liked James Brown so much is, on my way backstage, on my way out, I saw some of the finest dancing girls I've ever seen in my life. And I think in that respect, he influenced me. By his control over his group — his dancing girls, his apples and his oranges."

VO: For as tight as the Revolution was following their massive Purple Rain Tour, there were constant reminders that this was all unfolding according to Prince's creative vision.

Mark Brown: Hi, I'm BrownMark with The Revolution.

Matt Fink: Hi. This is Matt Fink, aka Dr. Fink from Prince and The Revolution.

Eric Leeds: I'm Eric Leeds. I was a saxophone player in Prince's band primarily from 1985, '86 through early '89 in the tours that were in support of Purple Rain, his album Parade, Sign 'O' the Times and then Lovesexy.

Mark Brown: One of the number-one things that I took away from the college, the "University of Prince Funkology," was how to be a leader; you know, you gotta take the lead. You can't be afraid to step outside the box. Who cares what people think.

VO: Changes started happening to The Revolution's lineup in late 1985, following the dissolution of one of Prince's main protégé acts at the time, The Family. The group's lead singer, St. Paul Peterson, had departed to pursue a solo career, and Prince invited the Family's Jerome Benton and Eric Leeds to join The Revolution. By the time the expanded group made their live debut in early 1986, they had gained a total of three dancers — Jerome, Wally Safford, and Greg Brooks — an additional guitar player, Miko Weaver, and a live horn section made up of Eric Leeds and trumpet player Matt Blistan, who Prince renamed Atlanta Bliss.

Eric Leeds: Matt and I, we had played together in jazz bands, we had played together in funk bands, and our role in Prince's band during those years, we kind of looked at each other — we were the anti-horn section, because we kind of filled in a lot of his gaps and it was very interesting how Prince used the horns in those days because certainly on some songs we were used as a more traditional R&B funk horn section would be. But a lot of the times, we were there just to kind of provide little counter lines to what was going on in the rhythm section.

Atlanta Bliss: When Eric and I joined, we called ourselves the Counter Revolution. we couldn't say we were the Revolution because the Revolution is that quintessential band.

Eric Leeds: There was a Revolution, and now you've got to deal with all of us, because all of a sudden everybody that had been in The Revolution besides Prince — there were five of them, and also looking up one day and they're now, what? One, two, three, four, five — there are six more. And it was an adjustment for them. It literally was.

Matt Fink All of us in The Revolution were a little miffed by it. We were so used to having this tight little family unit and all of a sudden, he brings in these new people. It can be a little like a foreign object coming in, invading your body, you know? No, it wasn't that severe! But yeah, we were all talking about it at the time, going, "I don't know about this, this doesn't feel right; the chemistry is changing."

Lisa Coleman: Eric really brought a lot to the band with his horn arrangements and stuff. But there was also a feeling, to be totally honest, we did feel a little bit territorial and possessive of the band. So when more and more people started coming onstage and at the end of the night like, "Baby, I'm a Star," we would call it the "Bugs Bunny Revue"; like, "What's going on here? This is turning into like Looney Tunes."

Andrea Swensson: So as the band started to evolve, did it seem like a new chapter was beginning? Like, did you get the sense that, "OK, now we're going to be moving in a new direction?"

Matt Fink: Absolutely yeah, musically and otherwise, because as soon as you're bringing horns in, then that creates a whole new thing he could play with, musical toy that he didn't have before other than doing it on synthesizer. And then he could be James Brown's, you know, younger brother.

Audio: "In a Large Room with No Light"

VO: This is the vault track "In a Large Room with No Light," written by Wendy and Lisa and recorded on May 4, 1986. It features an interesting cross-section of the musicians that Prince was collaborating with at this era: there's Wendy and Lisa from the Revolution; Eric Leeds and Atlanta Bliss from the expanded live band; and his Bay Area collaborators, Sheila E., and Levi Seacer, Jr. At the very beginning of 1986, Prince had holed up with this same collection of musicians for an intensive series of jams referred to as the "Flesh Sessions," and it was clear Prince was searching around for a new direction and sound.

Eric Leeds: Right after Christmas of 1985, for the next few weeks, I was out in L.A. with Prince, and we were in the studio off and on almost every day. And we were doing a lot of jam sessions with Levi and Sheila, Wendy and Lisa, and there was absolutely no doubt in my mind that his long-term vision was that Sheila was going to end up being the drummer in the band.

Levi Seacer: I spent a lot of time with him before I actually got in his band.

VO: This is the guitarist and bassist, Levi Seacer, Jr.

Levi Seacer: And so he's checking us out, and then eventually we went on a tour with him where we opened up, right? And Jerome Benton, he says, "Prince likes you, man." He said, "You gonna be in the next band!" And I'm saying, "What are you talking about? Because The Revolution is here. I don't understand what you mean." I felt like I was in his band before I was in the band. It's weird.
Andrea Swensson: Yeah, it really seems like he was kind of scoping you out, seeing if you might work.

Levi Seacer: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like James Brown; that's what James Brown used to do. James Brown had two or three bands all the time.

Audio: "And That Says What?"

VO: Prince was clearly energized by his new horn section. In the Super Deluxe reissue of Sign O' The Times, many of the vault tracks from 1986 feature horn parts from Eric Leeds and Atlanta Bliss — like this track, called "And That Says What?" because of Prince's giddy comment captured at the end of the track. It features Wendy Melvoin on bass, Lisa Coleman on piano, Eric Leeds on sax, and Matt Fink on keys.

Prince (from Audio track): "And That Says What?"

VO: In addition to clocking countless hours in the studio that summer, Prince also kept his evolving band busy with grueling, lengthy rehearsals — which were held leading up to a pair of high-profile shows at Madison Square Garden in early August 1986, and the Parade Tour that would take them across Europe that month and end in Yokohama, Japan.
Shifting into more of an old-school funk bandleader role, Prince had developed an intricate system of cues and turnarounds that the band could pull out a moment's notice — like yelling "Ice cream!"

Audio: "Soul Psychedelocide"

Matt Fink: He had all kinds of hand cues and like that - the ice cream thing. And then one time, he had a handkerchief that he would drop and you'd have to watch it and as soon as it hit the floor, boom! You'd hit a big horn punch. And when he shook his hand like this, right, he'd go [sings], and then there was a lick that we'd all play. All of a sudden it would — he'd time it just right so it was at the end of a bar or the bar before, and he was doing this, so you're counting off, the horns would come in the band — everybody [sings the part] and that was the hook. And we'd hit that. And that was how all those licks were. They were just little James Brown-y horn licks à la Prince, and little turnarounds, but he learned all that from the other masters that came before him.

VO: This song from the vault is called "Soul Psychedelocide," also referred to as "Ice Cream." It was recorded at the band's Washington Avenue rehearsal warehouse just before the Parade Tour. In a song that he wrote that month, "Joy in Repetition" — which was intended for his scrapped three-disc album Crystal Ball and eventually was released on the Graffiti Bridge soundtrack — Prince references the song and the band in this era.

Audio: "Joy in Repetition" from Graffiti Bridge (includes mention of band playing for hours and "Soul Psychedelicide")

Lisa Coleman: Yeah. I have to tell you, when I heard the title "Joy in Repetition," when I heard that line, I had to laugh, because it's like, "Dude, that is all we do all day long." The band playing for months? Yeah, that would us, that would be us. Because at rehearsal we'd have grooves that would last literally hours. Literally hours.

VO: Despite how well-oiled and refined the band was at this moment, as the Parade Tour embarked from Chanhassen to New York and then Europe, tensions were brewing between the core members of The Revolution and Prince. Here's Wendy Melvoin.

Wendy Melvoin: While Sign 'O' the Times was being recorded we were finishing Parade, we were finishing Roadhouse Garden, and certain things for Crystal Ball and The Dream Factory. They were all being swirled around but we were getting ready to go and do the Parade tour. And up until that point the band had not really been making very much money, and I don't know who instigated it, but someone said, "Maybe we should ask for a raise?" And that kind of started the end. Because by that point, other people wanted to sign us to labels and have us do our own record — me and Lisa were like "Count me in! Let's do this, and produce this record, and do this and dadada!" We were highly sought after at the time, and we didn't want to go, but we weren't making any money, right? "Welll, maybe we should just ask for a small little raise." It wasn't much, and I'm not even going to get into the price. But it was just the idea of it. It really didn't sit well with him.

VO: Unbeknownst to the other members at the time, BrownMark had already started negotiating a new deal with Prince in an attempt to resolve some ongoing disagreements they'd been having about pay and publishing credits.

Mark Brown: I had already knew I was going to quit after Purple Rain. I had enough. But me and him remained friends, see, and our relationship shifted more business. You know, I was now a writer, a producer; I had written for Atlantic, Warner Brothers, Motown, SOLAR. I did a contract — sworn to secrecy under that contract. I couldn't tell anybody. But I did this contract to make it look like I was still — I still existed in his world as the bassist to The Revolution.

Wendy Melvoin: By the end of the Parade tour, there was tension between us. It was the best tour we'd had. It was more musical than ever, and we were still writing a lot of stuff on the road, and we were still being productive, but there started to be this thing where little things would happen, like The Revolution knew when Prince put Wally and the three guys in the Parade tour &mash; Wally, Brooks and Jerome. When those guys were at the front of the stage we were like, "It's a sea change, folks. Something's happening. It's a sea change."

Mark Brown: That whole tour — Parade tour — I was behind the piano and he put three guys in front of me. If that's not him letting me know that he's angry — you know, he basically let me know he's mad at me.

Lisa Coleman: Prince was an odd person, and every once in a while, he would call us into his dressing room and just simply say, "I'm gonna end the band. We're breaking up, so play like you've never played before." I think he was trying to inspire us or light a fire under us to play extra hard that night or something. He did that a couple times, where he said he was going to end the band: "We're breaking up; this it." He'd call you in, and he'd either be like, "You look beautiful tonight," or it would be like, "We're breaking up. So it was like, "Oh my god. AHHHHH!"

Audio: "It Ain't Over 'Til the Fat Lady Sings"

Wendy: But knowing him and being friends, you know when people are testing and shifting, and it's not the same, and maybe that glance isn't as long into the eyes of the person that you then — you know, things like that. Like maybe you walk through the hallway and you know you're standing there but you don't look at them. Things like that started happening. And by the time we were in Yokohama and he destroyed his Cloud guitar at the end of "Purple Rain" — but he did it in a way that was a big, "F*** you."

Lisa Coleman: You know I remember that last sound check; he had some other musicians come up, some of Sheila's band, and it was like "What's going on here?" He would look at me and Wendy and like to say, "Lay out," and that was so unusual because, you know, we were his right hand, you know? And then suddenly at sound check for him to say, "Shh; don't play." It was like "What?" Because he had other musicians up there, and he was having fun with them, and he wanted to see what they could do and how badass they were, and so it felt like something was going on. And then that night of the gig was when he smashed his guitars on "Purple Rain." It was like, "Uh-oh. What's happening here? Why is he so mad?" That's what I felt. I felt like, "Why is he so mad?" I even thought, "Did something happen?" Like, did the crew f*** something up or did something actually happen? But it was just the crest of the wave was just breaking and there it was, and that was it.

Mark Brown: By the end, the last gig in Japan, he went on a rant. He was, you know, smashing stuff onstage and he was pretty angry. I knew what a lot of that was about.

Audio: part in "Purple Rain" where guitars are smashed

Wendy: He did it, and we knew it. I looked at Bobby while he was playing drums, and I mouthed to him, "We're f****d."

Andrea Swensson: Oh wow.

Wendy Melvoin: And I looked at Lisa and I said, "I don't think—" And Bobby was like, [whispers] "It's over."

Andrea Swensson: Wow.

Wendy Melvoin: We just knew it. We just knew it.

Matt Fink: It was definitely not in character with what he would do. I mean, he'd throw guitars and stuff, but always throw them at the guitar tech and they'd catch them. He wasn't like purposely doing a Jimi Hendrix, you know, and a full smash.

Andrea Swensson: Wow. So then when the end actually did come, did you believe that it was true?

Lisa Coleman: No. No. I was still — me out of everybody too. Me, I was the most like, "No, it's gonna be fine! He does this all the time. It's just another tantrum." But Wendy did. Wendy was like, "Oh my god, it's over. He's done. He's gonna fire us."

Wendy: We got back to our hotel room and I said to Lisa, "I think we're gonna get fired. I think he's gonna fire us." She said, "Why do you have to be so negative? No he's not." And I said, "I just think he's gonna do it."

Lisa: And I was like, "No, no, no way, it's cool, we're good." We were, like, looking at houses to buy in Minneapolis, and in my mind, it was like it was all good. We were doing so much work and we had come so far and it was like I couldn't understand how he could suddenly just like [imitates screeching brakes], "No, I'm doing something else now." But that's exactly what he did.

Wendy: So we all flew back to the United States. Me and Lisa flew home to L.A., and we got a call from Bobby and Bobby said, "He's really upset. He wants to let us all go. He's really upset." And I said, "Well, we don't wanna go. What can we do?" So Prince flew out to L.A., and me and Lisa met with him. And, um, he fired us. Had a little dinner with us and said, "I know that — I know that you guys can't go where I'm gonna go next."

Lisa Coleman: And it's like, "Well, what do you want us to do?" And then I remember the words "nipple-less bras" and "crotchless panties." You know, I mean it got kind of grotesque and, I felt like, "No, you can't ask me to do that. That's not what we're doing now. I mean, we did that; we took our pants off and shook our booties in the '80s and we got attention, and now we can grow up a little bit." I just had a different view. And so there you go. He had a different view than I did. I was at Tower Records one time after this happened, and I heard these fans talking, and they were saying, "You know The Revolution was a great band, but now, Prince is so hot." And so I kind of understood: he still wanted to be hot and not just like suddenly we're Tom Petty or somebody just writing songs, you know what I mean?

Andrea Swensson: I do.

Lisa Coleman: He needed to be, like, on fire all the time.

Wendy Melvoin: At the time, Lisa and I were very quiet about it, and we didn't really want to talk to the press about it. But it was a heavy, heavy time. It was a heavy time. We didn't quite understand it, but we totally understood it. He was done. He was just done; ready for something else and he subsequently did that over and over and over and over. But when you're young and you're in the most successful time, you don't think it's going to happen to you.

Audio: "Train"

VO: After his conversation with Wendy and Lisa, Prince let his longtime drummer Bobby Z. go as well, and then he called Matt Fink.

Matt Fink: It was shocking and sad and I really felt for my bandmates that this was happening. I felt really bad. And then he — Prince himself — put it as an option to stay or go. It was interesting. It was like, "I had to let these people go. You're welcome to stay but I would understand if you chose to leave now." That's exactly what he said.

Andrea Swensson: Hm.

Matt Fink: It's really weird. I mean, it's really like putting it in my hands. I mean he didn't have to say anything. He could've just said, "Well, you're still in the band; these guys are out; blahblah," you know, and that would've been the end of it. And in a sense it was almost like a test of loyalty, maybe. In hindsight, at the time, I didn't even think about loyalty. I just thought, "Oh, no, I have no reason to go at this point; nope. I don't know. Why would I?"

VO: BrownMark got a similar offer.

Mark Brown: Right after he disbanded The Revolution, he called me out to Paisley, and he asked me to be in New Power Generation. Sign 'O' the Times album. Matt had already contracted with him to do it. Everybody else was let go. I said, "Prince…" You know, it was Sheila E on drums, it was Levi, Miko Weaver, me — it was going to be a phenomenal band, but — I was like, "I gotta move on." I said, "My time is over." I said, "I gave you my best years," and I said, "I got nothing to show for it, you know? I got some fancy cars," I said, "a studio, but, you know, it's time for me to really find out who I am." And he respected me for that, because he kind of just shook his head and he said, "I can respect that."

VO: On October 17, 1986, a press release was sent out to announce the disbanding of The Revolution. It began with a quote from Joni Mitchell that said: "He's driven like an artist. His motivations are growth and experimentation as opposed to formula and hits." And speaking to Ebony that year, Prince would state his new vision using three simple, beguiling words: "I feel that we're on the brink of something," he said. "It's going to be strict and wild and pretty."

Audio: "Rebirth of the Flesh"

VO: On October 28, 1986, with the news of the Revolution's breakup still fresh, Prince would record the song "Rebirth of the Flesh" at Sunset Sound. Using his sped-up Camille voice, you can hear Prince reflecting, "It ain't about the money, we just wanna play."

Audio: "Rebirth of the Flesh" (continuing)

VO: Prince would spend the rest of 1986 cranking through dozens of songs at Sunset Sound, creating a new persona — the androgynous Camille — and a new side project, Madhouse. By the end of November, he would turn in the expansive 3-disc album Crystal Ball to his label, Warner Bros. Records, certain that he'd just delivered a creative masterpiece.

Audio: "The Ball"

VO: Coming up next on Prince: The Story of Sign O' The Times, you're going to hear from Lenny Waronker. He was the person at Warner Bros. who had to call Prince and tell him that they would not release his three-disc opus, and that he needed to edit it down.

Lenny Waronker: So I called him at the studio, at Sunset Sound, He picks up the phone and he just says — this is the opening line; it wasn't hello or any of that stuff. It was "I hear you don't like my album."

Susan Rogers: He was angry. He was angry and disappointed. And he, at this point, was not used to not getting his way with the label.

Credits

Prince: The Story of Sign O' The Times is produced by The Current, supported by the Minnesota Legacy Amendment's Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, and created in collaboration with The Prince Estate and Warner Records and with their support. This story was written by Andrea Swensson; Anna Weggel is our producer. Thanks to Technical Director Corey Schreppel, Digital Producer Jay Gabler, Radio Production Director Derrick Stevens and Managing Director David Safar.

Thanks also to Trevor Guy, Giancarlo Sciama, Michael Howe and Duane Tudahl. To learn more about The Current, visit thecurrent.org. If you haven't subscribed yet, search for Prince: The Story of Sign O' The Times on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Also, to learn more about Prince, visit Prince.com.

Prince: The Story of Sign O' The Times is an audio documentary series brought to you by The Current in collaboration with the Prince Estate, Paisley Park, and Warner Records. Listen Thursdays at 8 p.m. Central, and read a written version below. The series is also available as a podcast on multiple platforms.

Susan Rogers: There were earthquakes, you know, the psychological kind in his life, in the world.

Audio: "Housequake"

VO: This is Prince: The Story of Sign O' The Times, brought to you by The Current in collaboration with the Prince Estate, Paisley Park, and Warner Records.

VO: Hello, and welcome to the third episode of Story of Sign O' The Times. I'm Andrea Swensson, and if you're just joining us, I'm an author and a radio host at The Current in Minneapolis, and I'm also one of the writers who contributed liner notes to the expanded reissue of Sign O' The Times.

This episode tells the story of an earthquake — an actual earthquake, not just a "Housequake" — and the composition of the song "Sign O' The Times." It kind of blew my mind to learn about this, and it's given me a whole new appreciation for a song that already felt so evocative to me, with lyrics that capture the tone and the tenor of 1986 when it was written, and it also feels so resonant in this moment in American history.

We spent the first two episodes taking a really intimate look at what was going on in Prince's life in 1986, both in terms of his relationship to his band, The Revolution, and his relationship with his fiancée at the time, Susannah Melvoin. In this episode, we're going to start to zoom out a little bit, and talk about the world around Prince in this era, and some of the exterior forces that shaped his work on an album that would become an iconic signpost of a turbulent era in American life.

We'll pick up the story with the release of Prince's second film, Under the Cherry Moon, which was also his directorial debut. Purple Rain was such a smash success that expectations for this movie were also really high. But as soon as it hit theaters in July 1986, it became clear that this was not going to be the career-defining film Prince hoped it would be. One person who worked for Prince back then actually told me that it was referred to among his staff as Under the Cherry Bomb…

Lenny Waronker: Aw, no, that was tough. That was very tough.

VO: This is Lenny Waronker, who signed Prince to Warner Bros. Records in 1977 and was president of the label in the '80s.

Lenny Waronker: That was tough on him. We went to a preview, somewhere in Pasadena, and it was awful. People were laughing. And he was sitting right behind me, and I was thinking as this thing started to unfold, that the vibe was really bad. And I would look around casually just to see him and finally about three-quarters of the way through or halfway through, I looked around and he was gone.

Susannah Melvoin: He wasn't one to reminisce about the stuff that didn't work.

VO: This is Susannah Melvoin.

Susannah: How I saw him manifest that kind of stuff was work harder. So he may have been less communicative — although he wasn't the most communicative guy in the world — but he would've been even more remote. He would've gone more internal and disappeared into the studio, which I'm sure that's exactly what he did. … I would never hear him say, you know, "I'm disappointed" or "This didn't work" or "I expected something else and it didn't happen, and oh well…" Like, he just didn't have that kind of language. That didn't come out of his mouth. He may have thought it, but the way he dealt with it was to be more remote with humans, the people, and go create more. On to the next.

VO: Prince and The Revolution held the release party for Under the Cherry Moon in Sheridan, Wyoming, where a fan had won a date with Prince through a contest on MTV — that is a surreal story that surely needs an entire podcast of its own. Just two days after that premiere and the day after the film debuted nationwide, Wendy Melvoin of The Revolution remembers arriving at the McNichols Arena in Denver and hearing Prince working on a brand-new sound.

Wendy Melvoin: I walked into sound check and Prince was playing "Sign 'O' the Times" through the monitors and playing his live guitar track and just testing out that drum rhythm and I was like mesmerized and was like, "Oh my god, we're going to another place!"

Audio: "Sign O' The Times" (looped intro)

VO: There was a month-long break scheduled between that July 3 show at the McNichols Arena and Denver and Prince and The Revolution's next shows at Madison Square Garden, and Prince would spend most of that month shuttling between his home studio in Chanhassen, Minn., and Sunset Sound in Los Angeles.

Andrea Swensson: So did you have a favorite space to record with him?

Wendy Melvoin: Sunset Sound, without a doubt.

Andrea Swensson: What was it about that studio that kept you returning to that space?

Wendy Melvoin:The sound out of the room. The sound out of that room was unmatched and quite frankly, Prince learned that board that was in there. It was an API board built by a guy by the name of DeMidio, and Prince knew how to use it so well. I would just watch his hand on the faders and watch his hand on dialing in the EQ. There's a famous three-band dials on an API EQ setting, and I have a seared-in memory of his hands dialing in EQs. He just knew how to use it, and he could splice tape. People don't do that anymore, you know? He could cut tape. He ran that room like it was just — like he was filing his nails. And frankly, he would file his nails and mix.

VO: Lisa Coleman also spent countless hours at Sunset Sound with Prince.

Lisa Coleman: It must have been the basketball hoop in the courtyard, because he always kicked everybody's ass at "HORSE."

VO: By the next year, Prince would soon have a recording and production complex of his own with Paisley Park, where everything he wanted was under one roof, including multiple recording studios, a soundstage for filming and rehearsal, and even a performance venue. But in the early years of his career, he spent a lot of time jetting between various locations — sometimes on a whim — depending on what spaces and tools he needed. In 1986, he was often choosing between working in his home studio in Chanhassen; a nearby warehouse where he held band rehearsals and captured live recordings; and flying to his favorite studio, Sunset Sound in Los Angeles. As Susan Rogers told me, in those days, it wasn't as simple as Dropboxing recording files back and forth, either; his staff was constantly running to the airport to shuttle master tapes to wherever Prince was.

Susan Rogers: That's how you had to do it. So if we had tapes at home in Minneapolis and we were out at Sunset Sound — and this is exactly what happened with the songs "Slow Love" and "I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man" — he decides he wants them. Of course, you can send it FedEx and it'll get there overnight, but with him that was not even fast enough. So what we would do is we would send it air cargo. So someone in Minneapolis, a member of his staff, would box it up, wrap it up properly, label it properly, drive to the airport. Go right to the air-cargo counter and send that package on the next flight that goes to Los Angeles. And then some crew member who works for him in L.A. — usually someone who worked for his management — would go out to LAX, get that tape and drive it to Sunset Sound. That's what you could do when you had a lot of money, which he had in those days. You'd put it on the next flight. He did that once with spareribs. He was in Los Angeles and he loved a place called Rudolph's Barbecue in Minneapolis. He loved Rudolph's Barbecue! So he had someone go down there and get just a big meal and pack it all up and put it on a plane and send it out to Los Angeles.

VO: Prince had become such a regular presence at Sunset Sound by the mid-'80s that he would roll in with a semi-truck full of gear — including scarves, candles, a workout station, and a king-size bed with a satin bedspread — and take over Studio 3 for weeks or months at a time.

Lisa Coleman: Yeah, definitely. Candles and drapes, you know, tapestries, and just vibe it up, because studios can be pretty dry when you first walk in and put on the bright lights. So it was important. Yeah, and he put a bed in there or something. There'd always be a place to lie down and either, you know, just write and hang out. There was always a vibe to his music that there was something going on behind it. It wasn't just the song. you know? It was three-dimensional and there was like, "What is he doing in there?" It was like you could imagine him doing things while he's singing. There was just a feeling and an air and that there was something going on. And usually because there was.

Audio: "Everybody Want What They Don't Got"

VO: This is "Everybody Want What They Don't Got," recorded at Sunset Sound on July 12, 1986. Looking at the track list for the Super Deluxe reissue of Sign O' The Times, it becomes clear just how fruitful this month was for Prince — there are eight new tracks being released from the vault that Prince recorded in July 1986 alone, the same month that he wrote and recorded his era-defining songs "Sign O' The Times," "Joy in Repetition," which he would release on his Graffiti Bridgesoundtrack, and "The Cross."

Duane Tudahl: When he was recording, he could record two or three songs in a day, and he did.

VO: That's Duane Tudahl, author and senior researcher for the Prince Estate Archives.

Duane Tudahl: I think the cool thing about Prince is he had so much that he recorded in between projects that it's almost wrong not to know what was there, because it conveys where he was. And with a project like this, we organized it in chronological order, because that's how Prince was recording it. This is what Prince was going through. So you can hear, "Oh, he's happy here"; "OK, he's sad here," and you can kind of get — this is his daily diary. His work was his diary in many ways. A guy who didn't do a lot of interviews, his talking was done through his music, and what he recorded was what he was feeling, what he was thinking. And if he was mad, he did a mad song; if he was upset, he'd to that; if he was in love, he'd do a love song.

VO: On the same day he recorded "Everybody Want What They Don't Got," Prince would also record his most explicitly religious song to date, "The Cross." Susan Rogers remembers that recording session clearly.

Audio: "The Cross"

Susan Rogers: That, as I recall — I don't remember the exact day of the week — but I seem to remember that it was one of our "Sunday songs." That was the term I had for the songs that were asking for redemption. They would often follow songs where he had been blatantly sexual or lustful. So when he would do something that was really lustful like an "Erotic City" from the earlier era, like "We Can F***" — which he ultimately changed to "We Can Funk" — when he would do something like that, there would be a backlash, and he'd do a song like "God" or a song like "The Cross" or "Temptation" or "The Ladder." So it was one of those where I thought, "Oh, he's feeling guilty about something!" And at Sunset Sound, I mic'd up the drums and I do remember about that recording, he went so fast; so fast in fact that the drums on "The Cross" speed up pretty badly. And this was one of those rare, rare times where I thought, "Oh, this won't work." I mean, it's pretty bad speeding up like that. And he didn't care. It served his purpose. I can't think of, certainly working as a producer with other artists, there's no way we'd let that take fly. You'd redo it. But when he would play acoustic drums on his music — this is just mind-blowing to think about and realize, but — he's listening to nothing; no headphones, no click. He's playing the drums with the full arrangement of the song in his head — the vocals, the breaks, the fills. He's playing the drum track de novo, from the new, apropos of nothing. And that was one of those songs. And then he came in and did the other instrumentation, one instrument at a time. An extraordinary piece, extraordinary piece that emerges from this head of his.

Audio: "The Cross"

VO: Prince had just started getting into a groove at Sunset Sound when natural forces took over. As those who lived on the West Coast 1986 might recall, this was a particularly dramatic time to be in L.A.: a series of earthquakes and aftershocks hit the area that July, including a 6.0 magnitude quake emanating from Palm Springs on July 8, and a 5.3 magnitude earthquake that hit the ocean off the coast of San Diego in the early morning hours of July 13.

Audio: Rumble noise sound effects

Susannah Melvoin: We were staying at the Bellagio Hotel, and we experienced this earthquake.

VO: Here's Susannah Melvoin again, who was a constant presence in Prince's life at this time.

Susannah Melvoin: And he did not — he did not like this earthquake. It scared the [expletive] out of him. For somebody who's so in control, that was just, you know, witnessing the power of the planet and the universe and all of it happening at once. It was just too much, and he's like "We gotta get outta here." But as we were getting ready, Gilbert came in with the newspaper, and in the front page of the newspaper, it said "AIDS epidemic out of control." It was the front cover of the L.A. Times. It was such a dramatic moment because he took it and he looked at the front page, and he was like, "Something's happening to the world." You know, there was some moment where he just — all of it just clicked.

VO: Here are some of the headlines from the July 13, 1986, edition of the L.A. Times: "Star Wars Leads All Defense Costs," an article about Ronald Reagan's anti-missile program. "New AIDS Findings to Alert a World at Risk," an article about an International AIDS Conference in Paris, France. Back home in Minneapolis, the Star Tribune was running a series of articles covering a murder trial, and the suspects were in a gang called The Disciples. Prince and Susannah hopped a plane from L.A. to Minneapolis that Sunday, and the very next day, Prince flew back to Sunset Sound. By Wednesday, he had finished his new song.

Audio: "Sign O' The Times"

Susannah Melvoin: And when I heard it, I was like, "Boy, did he tap in; boy, does he know how to use fear and uncertainty and loss of control and knows how to channel that. Listen to that song!" I was awestruck by that. I was awestruck by that. I certainly didn't do any of that. I just shook in my knees — it was so scary!

Susan Rogers: Yeah. You know what they say about musical artists, especially prolific ones: Everything influences you. Everything. And for a man who was on output to a much higher degree than most other artists, who was making more than he was taking in, he would get a lot of mileage out of inspiration. So when an unusual event would happen, like an earthquake or maybe a headline in the newspaper about AIDS or the Challenger explosion and things like that, when something unusual would happen, that would serve as inspiration for new pieces very readily for him, because he pretty much didn't do anything other than make music.

Andrea Swensson: What was your impression of it as it was being composed in the studio?

Susan Rogers: I knew that he was searching for his next stylistic gesture. his music was evolving. He was well aware that rap and hip hop were more than just fads; that rap and hip hop were now stylistic trends that had a purchase on popular music, and it's going to go for a while. He had said, back when we were at the Flying Cloud Drive warehouse, back in the days of Around the World in a Day, he had said, "The future of music is going to be just bass and drums and vocals." He was saying that in the early '80s. So I believe with "Sign 'O' the Times," with that stripped-down approach, he was not trying to compete with rap or hiphop; not at all. He would've made the beat different if he had been. But he was trying to be part of a trend of music that distinctly separated melody and rhythm, and didn't work so hard on harmony being the glue to hold those elements together; just melody, just rhythm. Let the harmony be implied from the melody or not.

VO: One of the first people to hear the song "Sign O' The Times" outside of Prince's immediate circle was Lenny Waronker, president of Warner Bros. Records.

Lenny Waronker: "Sign 'O' the Times" was interesting. The first time I heard it, I had a meeting with Prince and Bob Cavallo at Bob's office, and Prince wanted to play me this jazz record that he had done. It was good. And it was fun having Prince take me through the record, because he'd have all these observations based on the chord changes and the vibe and all that stuff. So it was a lot of fun. When he was the artist, he was fabulous. He was just fabulous. And he said, "I stole that from Fleetwood Mac" or "I did that" or whatever. But always fun and even self-effacing to some extent. So, Bob walked in the office and he said to Prince, "Why don't you play Lenny 'Sign 'O' the Times,' the single?" And so he said OK, because, you know, he didn't like to let go of things until he was ready, but he did it.

Audio: "Sign O' The Times"

Lenny Waronker: …And it totally freaked me out. When I heard the record I thought, "Oh my god. He's gone to another — just another zone. Unbelievable. It's just unbelievable." And I looked at him, and in those days, you could say things like, "That's gonna be a number-one record," which I usually never said because nobody knows. But I just felt it, and I'm not good at holding back if I believe something, so I just said, "That's a number-one record." And it was.

VO: We've been spending most of this series so far dialed into Prince and his immediate surroundings, and I want to take a moment to widen the lens and talk more about what was happening in the world around him. I knew just who I wanted to talk to about this, too.

Audio: "Teacher, Teacher"

Daphne Brooks: I'm Daphne Brooks. I teach at Yale University. I am the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of African American Studies, American Studies, Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies, and as of July, music.

VO: Daphne also wrote a powerful essay for the liner notes for the Sign O' The Times reissue.

Daphne Brooks: It's ironic to call '86 and the '80s "simpler times," but given the twin pandemics that we're living through right now, it was just a different way in which all sorts of, you know, diseases permeating the American body politic were manifesting themselves. So, you know, Ronald Reagan takes office in 1980. We now have the tapes in which he refers to African leaders as "monkeys," so if there was ever any question of Ronald Reagan's racism, which anyone who's African American and Latinx and Asian American and indigenous from California, and like myself, being African American from California, knew it very well. But the Reagan/Bush regime was very much designed to restructure the Republican party, finally and resolutely, around racial polarization and anti-black structural reform, eviscerating the advances made by the Civil Rights Freedom movement. And then, of course, in Prince's opening lines to "Sign 'O' the Times," he reminds of the fact that we were in a pandemic then. The AIDS epidemic, which disproportionately — and again it's eerie to use these words: disproportionately affecting black and brown neighborhoods as well as queer communities — it's very present in the universe. The strangeness of the '80s though — and this is kind of the world that we've inherited, too — is that on the one hand you have all of these very pronounced violences towards marginalized peoples, but the gains in civil rights representation lead to a cultural revolution such that you have, for the first time, a multiplicity of "crossover" African American pop superstars. Of course, the Purple One would've also, you know, the trifecta of Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston, and then there's also Lionel Richie who's hanging out there, which people forget that. That was a big and very controversial move for him to transition out of the Commodores into "Lady." There's the boom in Black independent cinema. So it's a very dizzying kind of moment, and in some ways, you know, culture is both possibility, right? On the other hand, it can actually distract you from seeing the ways that the police state is designed to forever repress black and brown peoples. I think that Prince really was so mindful of the nuances of those kinds of the paradoxical ways that Black life was unfolding at that moment.

Audio: "It"

Daphne Brooks: People were slow to understand the radical political life of Prince's music, right? It was easy to talk about the jouissance of his sound, you know, its deep resistant eroticism and the pleasures of a kind of Bohemian Blackness that could thrive in the public sphere, right? But those were political statements, to say this is about resisting the narrow definitions of what Blackness is. And if we think ideologically that way, if we can shift our minds to think about how expansive Blackness is, then in the best universe, it means, "I'm not going to put my knee on your neck for eight-plus minutes." That, at the end of the day, is what, you know, his music was really fighting for.

Audio: "Housequake"

Andrea Swensson: I would love to hear just a little bit of your personal memory of hearing Sign 'O' the Times for the first time. Like, how did that hit you when you first heard it?

Daphne Brooks: Man, it hit me like an earthquake. Being from California. And it was my freshman year, spring, at UC Berkeley — University of California, Berkeley — go, Bears! They were playing "Housequake" on the radio.

Audio: "Housequake"

Daphne Brooks: It must've been within the first week that they were spinning it, and these sisters had it blasting and their door open, and people were doing a Soul Train line. And I was like, "Oh my god!" It was that voice, and it was also — we haven't talked about his comedic side, which was so prominent, like master trickster; you know, that song is a compendium of all of his virtuosic trickster aesthetics, including my favorite, my favorite moment: "What was that? Aftershock!"

Audio: "Housequake"

Daphne Brooks: And if you're from California, that's a real thing. And I just felt like the world was opening up. It was such a sly and buoyant and dangerous sound. And I thought, "OK, no more Revolution, but another revolution is about to begin."

VO: Up next on Prince: The Story of Sign O' The Times: With most of the songs that would appear on Sign O' The Times already recorded, Prince and The Revolution embark on one final tour, and play their last show together in Yokohama, Japan.

Wendy Melvoin: And by the time we were in Yokohama and he destroyed his Cloud guitar at the end of "Purple Rain," but he did it in a way that was a big "f*** you." And we knew it. We just knew it. We just knew it. We got back to our hotel room and I said to Lisa, "I think we're gonna get fired."

Credits

Prince: The Story of Sign O' The Times is produced by The Current, supported by the Minnesota Legacy Amendment's Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, and created in collaboration with The Prince Estate and Warner Records and with their support. This story was written by Andrea Swensson; Anna Weggel is our producer. Thanks to Technical Director Corey Schreppel, Digital Producer Jay Gabler, Radio Production Director Derrick Stevens and Managing Director David Safar.

Thanks also to Trevor Guy, Giancarlo Sciama, Michael Howe and Duane Tudahl. To learn more about The Current, visit thecurrent.org. If you haven't subscribed yet, search for Prince: The Story of Sign O' The Times on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Also, to learn more about Prince, visit Prince.com.

Prince: The Story of Sign O' The Times is an audio documentary series brought to you by The Current in collaboration with the Prince Estate, Paisley Park, and Warner Records. Listen Thursdays at 8 p.m. Central, and read a written version below. The series is also available as a podcast on multiple platforms. (Missed Episode 1? Find it here.)

VO: Do you ever just need to get out of the house, and go for a drive? Do you ever wonder what Prince would have written about quarantine? So I'm out in Chanhassen, Minnesota, I am outside of Paisley Park at the moment, and I'm not going to go in Paisley Park today, but I decided to drive over here first, because I am on my way to Galpin Boulevard in Chanhassen, and this is where Prince lived starting in the winter of the end of 1985, and he had a home studio there, and that is where he recorded many of the songs that are on Sign O' The Times.

Audio: "Sign O' The Times"

VO: I'm Andrea Swensson and This is Prince: The Story of Sign O' The Times, brought to you by The Current in collaboration with the Prince Estate, Paisley Park, and Warner Records.

I'm parked on Paisley Path between Rogers Court and Paisley Court. This is a brand-new street that I'm parked on at the moment; it did not exist a year ago. This whole property is currently under construction and becoming a big subdivision out in Chanhassen. And this used to all be Prince's.

Prince moved into this property in the end of 1985 and started recording there in early, early 1986,: "The Ballad of Dorothy Parker" was the first thing he recorded in his Galpin Boulevard home. "Forever In My Life." "Starfish and Coffee." And it wasn't just a creative space for him. The Galpin Boulevard home was his first home that he wanted to build a life in with a romantic partner. At the time he had just gotten engaged to Susannah Melvoin, and this is where they decided to move into, to start to build their life together.

The house that Prince lived in here is long gone, but Susannah describes it as a very '80s mansion-y type house, and the rest of the property was just empty, open, beautiful, rolling hills. Now it's under construction, and pretty soon, there's going to be dozens of families living here where Prince and Susannah once were.

Audio: "Forever In My Life"

Susannah Melvoin: My job was to create a home for us while he was away, and it's what I did happily. I was very happy to do so.

VO: This is Susannah — twin sister of The Revolution's Wendy Melvoin, lead singer of Prince's side project The Family, and the first resident and decorator of the Galpin house, a task she worked on while Prince was in the south of France filming Under the Cherry Moon in late 1985.

Susannah Melvoin: …And so I kept the fires stoked at home. I had the pleasure of working with an interior designer, and she helped a lot to facilitate what I was looking for and what I knew he would love and, at the time I mean it was '85, '86, and it was like &mash; you know — lots of pastels, let's put it that way. That's not where I'd be going now with it but at the time it was gorgeous! Great old antique lamps and beautiful chandeliers and very romantic and lots of hanging things off the ceilings, and it was just beautiful. And getting the studio together.

VO: Prince came home from filming Under The Cherry Moon in time for Thanksgiving, and on November 26, 1985, he got to see his new house on Galpin Boulevard for the first time.

Susannah Melvoin: I picked him up at the airport, and he was so excited to see what the house looked like, and when we drove up — it was a circular drive — and the first thing you'd see — I don't know if it was there at the end; I have no idea. And again, this is all so 1986. But it had this extraordinarily beautiful, enormous teardrop chandelier. And it was one of the things he was like, "Get the best chandelier you can find," and walking in and that's the first thing he sees when he looks up and he just — his eyes — you know, those big doe-y-eyed beautiful eyes just got greener and happier. And he was just — it was glorious. It was really sweet and wonderful.

And the studio had not been totally hooked up yet, but all the gear was being put in, and monitors were being set up. So that was the first thing I did was take him down: "You've gotta see the studio." I had designed some lovely stained-glass panels that would get that afternoon sun from the land he had. It just kills me to know that that land was sold. But you'd look out the back windows and it was just expanse, and it's beautiful. And that's what he wanted, his beloved Minnesota in his — you know — in his eyesight.

VO: When Susannah said this, it reminded me of something Prince said in an interview he gave for MTV in late 1985, just a few weeks before returning home to see his house for the first time.

Prince on MTV: "One thing I'd like to say is that, I don't live in a prison, and I'm not afraid of anything. I haven't built any walls around myself. I am just like anyone else. I need love and water. And I don't really consider myself a superstar. I live in a small town, and I always will, because I can walk around and be me."

Audio: "Dream Factory"

VO: Just four days after touring his new home with Susannah, Prince would record the song "Dream Factory" at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles. The song was written as a reaction to Susannah's bandmate, St. Paul Peterson, leaving the Family, effectively disbanding that project, and it marked the beginning of a new era of creativity for Prince that would center on his Galpin Boulevard home.

Susan Rogers: Hi. My name is Susan Rogers, and I was Prince's engineer from 1983 to '87.

VO: In addition to Susannah, the other constant presence in the Galpin house was Susan Rogers, who was there to oversee the installation of the new home studio.

Susan Rogers: He had had a home studio in a small bedroom just off the hallway in the Kiowa Trail house where he lived in Chanhassen. So this time now, he wanted a real professional studio within the confines of the space. So it was downstairs in the rec room and you'd go — you started at the landing. The landing was just above where the kitchen meets the dining room, and you'd walk downstairs. If you turned to the left, you would be in a rec room. You'd be in a rec room where he had a pool table, and there was a bathroom in there. But if you turned to the right, you'd go in through a glass door — a heavy, glass, soundproof door — you'd go in, you're in a sound lock. You go in through a second glass door, and now you're in the control room. The control room was absolutely gorgeous: dark royal purple carpeting, kind of shag carpeting with an area for parquet floor, and then there was this pale — it was kind of an oak wood-colored — the wood was kind of a pale, pale ashen shade, which complemented that gorgeous, dark-purple carpeting beautifully. The rear windows of the room were stained glass. Susannah loved stained glass and she custom ordered these stained-glass windows, and there was a door there that went out because the house was built on a hill. So it was a big step up from his prior home studio, and it served us really well at that time.

VO: The home studio was outfitted with a custom DeMedio board, which was modeled after the board Prince liked to use at Sunset Sound.

Susan Rogers: It finally came online — it came online in late winter. In fact, I remember Frank DeMedio was in town; he's the man who designed the custom console that was in that room. Frank came into town to do that last of the wiring, and we watched on the TV monitor up above, we watched the Challenger explosion which was January of 1986. So I remember: we're hooking up the last wires in the wintertime, and that's the first song we did at that home studio, was "Ballad of Dorothy Parker."

Audio: "The Ballad of Dorothy Parker"

Susan Rogers: He was so eager for this damned console to be installed. One of the main things to know about Prince is how on fire his creativity was, and it's coming and coming and coming, and he's not going to sit in his room with a little four-track recorder and demo things. If he's going to be playing and singing, it's going to go to tape, and it's going to be the canonical version as far as he is concerned. He didn't demo things. So he could not wait for this console to be finished.

We're trying as best we can, but there are things that need to be fixed and a lot of testing that needs to be done. So he — he was asleep one night and he had a dream, and he woke up and he called me and he said, "We're recording whether you like it or not. We're going on." So I came down to the studio as fast as I could, and at this point Frank had already gone home. So I came down to the home studio and put up the tape and — Bam! Bam! Bam! — he starts recording, starting with drum machine and the keyboard part and the bass part and &mdashl; bam! — one instrument after another, and it is awesome! And it is also deeply flawed, because the sound of it — I'm thinking, "Oh no, something is definitely wrong." I had seen for myself that this console, its frequency response was flat from DC — direct current — out to 70 kHz, which is nearly four times higher than the range of human hearing. This thing had high-end response. But not what we were hearing, because what we were hearing, [puts hands over mouth to muffle voice] it sounded like this. It sounded like there was just a blanket over everything. And I'm thinking, "What's he doing?'. Does he not hear this? Why won't he stop?" And when he does stop, with each instrument we're adding, my death will be more and more profound. I'm going to be more and more in trouble, because it's not just ruining the drums; it's ruining the drums and the bass and the keyboards and the vocals. But then I thought, "Good for me." I knew him pretty well at this point. Don't stop him. Don't stop him. He's on a roll, he's happy. Let him go and fix it later.

So anyway, we spent — it was a good long day; well into the night. We finally finish. He's happy. And then he says, "I like this console, but it's kind og dull." It was so funny, because he leaves the room and I'm thinking, "Well, I'm going to live — this time." But of course he heard it. Of course, he heard it. He didn't care. It was one of those happy accidents where the lack of high end, the dullness, made it sound underwater. He used that dull response to make art.

Andrea Swensson: That's so amazing. I love, too, that there's a part where the character of the song is overhearing Joni Mitchell on the radio, and because it's a little muffled, it just adds to that just surreal experience of listening to it.

Susan Rogers: Yes. He was so good at turning life into music. He was so good at it! Rather than trying to reshape life so that it would serve his music; he wasn't that type. He made music out of the life he was living.

Audio: "The Ballad of Dorothy Parker" (with horns)

VO: One intriguing track that's being pulled out of the vault and included on the super deluxe reissue of Sign O' The Times is an alternate version of "The Ballad of Dorothy Parker," also completed at the Galpin home studio. It features additional horn parts by Eric Leeds and Atlanta Bliss.
Eric Leeds: Oh, they're putting that on there?

VO: This is Eric Leeds.

Eric Leeds: Holy cow! That is one thing I don't have a copy of. I'm interested in listening. Prince came to me one day and asked me to just put a horn arrangement on it, and I was surprised because that — we all just considered that to be a gem, to just be a perfect little boutique kind of song, and my brother came up with the characterization of certain kind of Prince songs that were referred to as boutique songs — things that are just really just so distinctively Prince, but otherwise not really easily categorized. And I think that's kind of the quintessential boutique Prince song from my perspective. I didn't think it needed anything. But if Prince is asking me to do that, it's a compliment to the fact that he even considers that there might be something I could add to it that could have value. When he did not use the version with the horns, I was not surprised.

Audio: "Witness 4 The Prosecution (Take 1)"

VO: It's remarkable to think about all of the music that, as Susan Rogers put it, Prince made out of the life he was living in the beginning of 1986. In March and April of that year, as his album Parade was released and the single "Kiss" climbed to No. 1 on the pop charts, Prince would churn through dozens of songs in his new home studio, including several that would end up on Sign O' The Times. Occasionally Eric Leeds and Atlanta Bliss would stop by to record horn parts, or other members of The Revolution would stop in to visit or jam. This version of "Witness for the Prosecution" was initially recorded by Prince alone at the Galpin home studio in March 1986, and the horns and additional parts by Wendy, Lisa, and Susannah would be added to it a few weeks later.

Eric Leeds:I can tell you the date that I put the horns on: April 15, 1986. It's kind of funny because, I mean, we spent a lot of time there, and it was just like the front door was always open because basically — you know — I mean there was a gate out front, so I mean, it wasn't like anyone was gonna — but I mean it was like, get through the gate, park the car in front and just walk in and head down to the studio.

Atlanta Bliss: Prince would call Eric and I up, and it might be one or two in the morning, and say, "Hey come on over; I wanna record."

VO: This is Matt Blistan, who Prince renamed Atlanta Bliss.

Atlanta Bliss: So it'd just be him, and he would be singing us the parts. We didn't have anything written, but he would sing us the parts, and he would go [sings parts] — "OK, you guys ready?" He's ready to hit the red button to record that. I'd say, "Wait a second. I'm still scratching some things down." It wasn't like, "Take it home and practice it." It was like, "It's coming out of my guitar that fast; I expect it to come out of you that fast."

Eric Leeds: Depending on what the song was, sometimes Prince would have the horns in on the day that he was doing the rhythm track. Other times, the rhythm track — everything that he'd done may be around for weeks, sometimes months before he might decide whether to add anything to it or not.

Andrea Swensson: It's pretty mind-boggling to think about just — well how much music was constantly coursing through his brain, but also to have the organization mentally to say, "Oh, you know, that song that I wrote 30 songs ago? I'm going to pull that one back out now."

Eric Leeds: Yeah. I counted up — curiously, once years ago, somebody had asked me how many recording sessions I might've done with Prince over those years. With no real basis I just said, "It might've been 50, 75, somewhere around there." And then I got curious, and I looked through my journals, and all the records that I have of pretty much all the sessions that I did with him, and I lost track over about 150, 160. And I would say that probably 80% of the stuff that I recorded for Prince is yet to be released.

Susan Rogers: I loved "Witness for the Prosecution"!

VO: That's Susan Rogers again.

Susan Rogers: That floor-stomping soul — you know — those background vocals just singing, "Witness!"

Audio: "Witness 4 The Prosecution (Take 1)"

It's that soul, it's that B3 organ, it's that church. He hadn't been doing too much of that. Now when The Revolution disbanded, of course, he's losing key members of his band that bring important flavors to it. Wendy and Lisa in particular — what they brought in terms of their knowledge of chord changes and harmony and things like that. Once it goes, it's gone. Sheila E and her magnificent band from Oakland brought a whole new flavor to Prince's style. But he lost something in the process, and I loved that "Witness for the Prosecution" was neither the sound of Oakland nor was it the sound of The Revolution. That was pure early Prince and his — not early Prince in terms of the pop-punk, new-wave movement that he had going on in the late '70s — but early Prince in that that was totally the street he lived on. That's his soul.

VO: As Susan pointed out, although The Revolution wouldn't disband until the fall of 1986, Prince was clearly already transitioning into a new creative space that spring and summer. Once his home studio was up and running, Prince spent day after day holed up in that basement, dreaming up new styles and sounds. And Susannah was there for all of it.

Susannah: It was beautiful to watch, actually. He was completely self-contained and wanted it that way. I mean, he was in his element, and that element is so much of where his brain was. It's like, so much was going on his brain to facilitate the creative work that if anybody else became involved in it, it was just a distraction for him, right? And you had to figure out a way to become part of that machine in his mind, in his creative mind, so that you didn't get in the way. And some of us did. There were — you know — there was a good handful of us that knew how to stay out of the way and also be supportive and also be creative with him, and I think that's one of the reasons why he kept those kinds of people around.

Andrea Swensson: I would love to hear more about just the day-to-day rhythm that you fell into in that time — you know — I'm so interested in how you described being supportive but also not getting in the way. That's a very fine line and like a dance that you were doing creatively to be there together and know that sometimes he would need to just work and sometimes it was together and sometimes it was apart.

Susannah Melvoin: Well, that's it. There's a psychology to that, and I suppose that that has something to do with being a twin. I'm not easily intimidated by people's creative work ethic, nor am I intimidated by people's quirks. I don't react in any way. I just see people as whatever they are, and I think that had to do with being a twin. Wendy and I could mirror to each other the world in a way that helped us both be stable in our character.

So my day-to-day was never about my worry about what he thought or whether he loved me or not. that didn't lead the way. What led was, if he was working, I just did something else. There was no talking about it. Like if he had to explain to you, "I'm in the middle of something — go find something to do," that was a distraction. He'd get up, take a shower, clean up usually very late in the day if we'd had a very late night, he'd be in the studio. I could get a call and say, "Do you mind making me a cup of tea?" and I'd go make him a cup of tea, bring him something downstairs and say, "I'm gonna go somewhere," and I would go do that. Or I would go back upstairs and just do what I was doing. It was almost incredibly normal; very normal. So the day-to-day had a stability to it. I didn't need anything. And he certainly didn't need anything from me.

Audio: "Eggplant"

Andrea Swensson: Can you talk a little bit about how you painted the mural outside of the studio?

Susannah Melvoin: I've always been a wannabe artist. Anyway, when I first met Prince, and I was at the studio a lot during the Purple Rain recordings — it was the sequencing of Purple Rain — and I was in the studio, and I had all my art supplies with me — why? I don't know. Not sure. But the box that the master was sitting in, I took and put it in my lap and it's so funny — I think it's in the vault. I drew all over it. I drew all these weird, cool things on it, then he started drawing on it. But it's sort of my art style. And so, he'd seen some of my work. And so, off the studio was a small room. We called it "the game room" and also kind of a workout room. It just had one bench and had a pool table in it. It had Galaga and Pac Man, Defender — his favorite, my favorite — to play Defender. I spent a lot of time in there. And I just brought down all my art supplies, and I started to draw. It was this just an expansive wall that just splayed out from one side of the room to the other, and I was like, "What's this huge empty space?" Like, we've got to do, you know — we didn't have any artwork on it. There was nothing there so I was just like okay, okay I'm gonna go for it. I wanted it to have jewels on it. I wanted it to sparkle. I wanted it to be, you know — this magical mural that you could actually feel and touch on it as well as the flatness of the drawing. But, you know — he wrote "Crystal Ball" because of what I was doing in this mural.

Audio: "Crystal Ball" 7-inch mix "my baby draws pictures of sex all over the wall"

Susannah Melvoin: …I can't stress enough what it's like for two people to experience each other this way. My experience of him, his experience of me was two people — and again, this is my twinning thing, I know how to be with another human being without being in the way. So that in itself is an inspiration for him. He didn't have to think about what he was doing. And so I inspired something. I pulled something out of him and that was "Crystal Ball."

Audio: "Crystal Ball" beginning of song

VO: "Crystal Ball" has such an intriguing backstory. It was initially intended for the album Dream Factory, and then became the title track to the triple album Crystal Ball that Prince would turn in to Warner Brothers at the end of 1986, but would be discarded when he whittled that track list down to the 16 songs that would make up Sign O' The Times. When some of the unreleased material from this prolific era was released on the 1998 triple-disc compilation Crystal Ball — which is different from that album that Prince turned in to the label in '86 — Prince would reflect back on this period, writing that: "The song 'Crystal Ball' was written in a deepbluefunk depression" as Prince pondered his future in a music business that had become more business than music. His only solace during this time, as Prince wrote, was his continuing "search 4 a soul mate. All that matters is the love we make 2night. The notion of making love during the apocalypse was an interesting notion 2 us at the time."

Audio: "Crystal Ball" 7-inch mix

Susannah Melvoin: "Crystal Ball" itself went through many incarnations. It took a long time. And I remember him tracking and then changing things up and then doing the vocal, having me go in, do the vocal, having us both behind the mic doing the vocal. And during that time while it was taking this time, I was still doing the mural. This whole time period was making music, making art, loving each other, feeding each other, sleeping with each other, you know — like just life in this sort of all-encompassing way. It was the longest period of recording I'd seen him do on one song and not be frustrated by it. And when it was finally finished, I remember him coming upstairs with the cassette — "Let's get in the car and go listen to it!" Which we always did — that was the place to go listen to the finish: If it sounded great in the car, we had the mix.

Audio: "Starfish and Coffee" - intro

VO: Another one of Prince and Susannah's most personal collaborations was the song "Starfish and Coffee," which was co-written by Susannah.

Susannah Melvoin: That song was created from stories I would tell Prince about someone I went to school — Wendy and I went to school with. So we had this one young girl who I am still very close with, Cynthia Rose. She's an extraordinary woman who's exactly the same as she was when she was 11; exactly the same. She just has more references to be funny with, but she's an autistic savant, and no one knew at the time that was as special as she was, but I knew that she was the most glorious kook I'd ever met. Sixth grade was my last year with her; I took her with me always.

So one day at the house on Galpin the studio was up and running. He called Susan. "Susan, roll tape; we're gonna record today." He comes up into the kitchen table and sits down and he said, "Do me a favor. Would you write down the story of Cynthia Rose? Write it all down for me." Sure. And he was like, "The whole thing — just all of it."

I gave him the paper, and he grabs it out of my hand and goes downstairs. Couple minutes later, he comes back up, and he points to the page. He said, "Do you mind if I change that to 'coffee'?" And it was "starfish and peepee," because that's what Cynthia would say: "I want my starfish and peepee! You know what I had for breakfast?"

I'd say, "What'd you have, Cynthia?"

"Starfish and peepee!"

So it was like, "Of course you can't sing 'peepee'!" And then, you know — end of day, he comes up, you know — he's got his shirt off, he's kind of sweaty. He said come on down. He stands at the board and he presses "play" and there it is.

Audio: "Starfish and Coffee"

Susannah Melvoin: …Again, I mean what a beautiful time to have experienced. What a beautiful time.

Andrea Swensson: So has Cynthia Rose — I imagine has heard "Starfish and Coffee." What does she think?

Susannah Melvoin: She has! She has. One of her caretakers had heard that record and they knew right away; they knew right away. And so when I talked to Cynthia about it, she was like, "You know, I still love — I still love my starfish!: I was like, "Why?" She goes, "Because they're transformative." And of course, she had my heart. Her brain — you talk about a brain that lives in the unconscious, that mind is so — she's such a fascinating mind. And I think that Prince had that same ability to tap into that unconscious mind to be creative. Like I think he — he lived in that place.

VO: As so many of his collaborators have remarked, Prince wasn't one to go into a lot of detail about his thoughts or pour his heart out to the people around him. But as Susannah learned time and time again, when he had something to say to her, he often said it to her through his music. Sometimes, it was something so pure and happy…

Audio: "Forever In My Life"

Susannah Melvoin: He woke me up in the morning, told me to come downstairs and listen, and it was "Forever in my Life." You know, he just sorta looked — looked at me; gave me a look. I said, "Who's it for? Did you write this for somebody?" He was like, "No, I'm keeping it for myself." I was like, "It's beautiful." I knew what it was. I knew what it was saying.

Andrea Swensson: Yeah. As you said, he doesn't really over-explain anything.

Susannah Melvoin: No, he didn't use that — language wasn't used for that. Music was. Music was his language.

VO: Sometimes, he used his songs to express something darker.

Andrea Swensson: Are there other songs that come to mind where you felt maybe he was using the music to tell you something?

Susannah Melvoin: "If I Was Your Girlfriend."

Audio: "If I Was Your Girlfriend"

Susannah Melvoin: Yeah, that's one. I knew what that was. I knew he wanted to twin off with me because he had hard time that I was so close to Wendy. That was hard for him. That was hard. I think that was the thing that broke us up, was that I couldn't be that fantasy for him. There was just no way. I was too human, and I had my own needs and they were real. And my relationships were solid and deep and thoughtful with my family, particularly my twin sister. And so, "If I Was Your Girlfriend" was a direct hit. I knew what that was about. It was like,"Whoa, huh, mm, ow."

Andrea Swensson: I found it challenging to listen to the lyrics of "Big Tall Wall."

Audio: "Big Tall Wall"

Susannah Melvoin: Oh yeah. There's another example of needing me to be his and his only, you know — I was kind of the bird in the gilded cage a little bit. A little bit? A lot, I think. He may have felt that way with everybody he was with. I don't think he liked sharing his secret, his vulnerabilities with anybody. He hid that. There was plenty of times when it was very dark and complicated. But if I were to tell you in my life to know that I was part of these creative moments in such a profound human being as he was — we talk about the inner work and creative part of himself and that unconscious imaginative self, this part that led the way for him. And I was there with him. Because I relate that way, and I create that way, I was the perfect piece in that puzzle during that time. And for me? You know — when I write down my life story, I say I got to be on some of the greatest work I could have ever dreamt up, not just for myself, but to be with somebody as, you know, touched as he was — really touched and I was, you know — in awe of it. There was painting and art and love and music and writing and living. I mean, it was just an all-encompassing experience — emotional, physical, spiritual, a soul experience. How lucky am I to have had that as a memory?

Audio: "Adore"

VO: Coming up next on Prince: The Story of Sign O' The Times, you're going to hear the incredible story of how the song "Sign O' The Times" came to be — and all of the real-world events that inspired it.

Duane Tudahl: All of a sudden it became a social commentary. It was his Marvin Gaye. It was his "What's Going On."

VO: And we'll dig through more of these unreleased vault tracks with Duane Tudahl, author and senior researcher for the Prince Estate Archives.

Audio: "Blanche"

Duane Tudahl: That's one of the reasons I enjoy this collection, is because you get the wide range. You get everything he was going through: "Here's the good, here's my sad, here's my goofy song, here's a song called 'Blanche'; it's got a great riff or it's just a bunch of rhymes I'm doing." When he was recording, he could record two or three songs in a day, and he did.

Credits

Prince: The Story of Sign O' The Times is produced by The Current, supported by the Minnesota Legacy Amendment's Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, and created in collaboration with The Prince Estate and Warner Records and with their support. This story was written by Andrea Swensson; Anna Weggel is our producer. Thanks to Technical Director Corey Schreppel, Digital Producer Jay Gabler, Radio Production Director Derrick Stevens and Managing Director David Safar.

Thanks also to Trevor Guy, Giancarlo Sciama, Michael Howe and Duane Tudahl. To learn more about The Current, visit thecurrent.org. If you haven't subscribed yet, search for Prince: The Story of Sign O' The Times on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Also, to learn more about Prince, visit Prince.com.

Prince: The Story of Sign O' The Times is an audio documentary series brought to you by The Current in collaboration with the Prince Estate, Paisley Park, and Warner Records. Listen Thursdays at 8 p.m. Central, and read a written version below. The series is also available as a podcast on multiple platforms.

Audio: "Power Fantastic" clip of Prince saying: "Ok ready? And just trip. There are no mistakes, this time. This is the fun track, this one. It might not be the one we keep, but we just have fun with it. Play anything you want. Ready?"

Audio: "Sign O' The Times"

VO: This is Prince: The Story of Sign O' The Times, brought to you by The Current in collaboration with the Prince Estate, Paisley Park, and Warner Records.

Susan Rogers: Sign 'O' the Times, we could hear that the flame of youth had dimmed and then we can see and hear him a little bit better. And you hear he's more of a genius than you even thought.

Susannah Melvoin: This particular period of time where five records were made at one time — who does that?

Maya Rudolph: There was a large shift in the Prince universe — in between Parade and this … it's VAST. And it felt more adult to me, this album, and I didn't know why.

Lenny Waronker: it totally freaked me out. When I heard the record I thought oh my god. He's gone to another — just another zone. Unbelievable. And I looked at him and I'm not good at holding back if I believe something so I just said that's a number-one record. And it was!

Audio: "Sign O' The Times"

VO: Welcome back to the official Prince podcast. This is a new season, it is our biggest yet. I am Andrea Swensson, and I'm so excited to be here with you. I'm an author and a radio host at the Current, I live in Minneapolis, and I have been Zooming up a storm with Prince collaborators on both coasts and also right here in the Twin Cities. I've been working on the liner notes for the new Sign O' The Times Super Deluxe box set, which is coming out September 25, and I've also been working on this podcast, all the while attempting to piece together this two-year saga of how Sign O' The Times came to be.

When I tell people I'm working on a project about Sign O' The Times, they often have the same response: "Oh, that's my favorite Prince album!" Or, "That's the best Prince album!"

We're not going to get into that debate right now, but I do think it's important to note up front that although Purple Rain was Prince's most commercially successful release, Sign O' The Times is his most critically acclaimed. This was a moment that Prince proved once and for all that he would not go down in history as a one-hit wonder or a passing phase: he was an artist capable of maturing musically, philosophically, and spiritually, and he had something to say about the world around him.

In 1985 and 1986, when Sign O' The Times was recorded, the world was dealing with a lot of similar issues that we're all confronting today: There was a huge health crisis, with the AIDS epidemic; the ongoing threat of nuclear war; the Challenger explosion setting a dark tone for the year; and deep divides politically and socially. I think that's why, in a lot of conversations I've had about this album, people remark that it feels more relevant now than ever.

The Sign O' The Times era spans two almost entirely different bands, and there were a lot of painful and personal transformations that Prince went through in this period. He disbanded The Revolution during this creative era; he got engaged and then separated from his muse and close collaborator, Susannah Melvoin; and he released a film that didn't exactly get the warm reception from critics that he hoped.

All the while, Prince was flying into a creative overdrive, developing new side projects, albums, and personas like Camille, and overseeing the construction of his massive new recording and production complex, Paisley Park.

Prince was always two steps ahead of the rest of the world, so to tell the story of Sign O' The Times, we actually need to start a couple years earlier, at the moment when Prince and The Revolution were riding high. They'd just wrapped up the wildly successful Purple Rain Tour, selling 1.7 million tickets; they'd already released a follow-up album, Around the World in a Day; and were hard at work on their next soundtrack and film…

Audio: "It's a Wonderful Day"

Wendy Melvoin: Hi, everybody. I'm Wendy Melvoin.

And this is , mind you, this is after Purple Rain. This is like during — this is like during Around the World in a Day, Sign 'O' the Times, Parade, Dream Factory, Roadhouse Garden, Crystal Ball — all these records were all being done at once.

VO: By this point in his musical evolution, Prince had developed a deep level of trust with the Revolution, especially Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman. The trio were in a fluid state of constant creation, passing ideas back and forth and writing prolifically. Here's Lisa.

Lisa Coleman: Sometimes we weren't in the same state so a lot of times he would just send a master reel on an airplane and then our engineer or somebody would to go pick it up and we'd be passing the — literally, passing this big cake box. Yeah, he would send us kind of sketches of songs, maybe a little guitar and vocal or piano and drums or whatever it was. And he would just say, "I need some background vocals," or he'd say something he wanted specifically. But then he'd also say — you know — "Just put your stuff on it." So you're like "OK, we've got lots of stuff, so we'll put it on it."

Audio: "Teacher, Teacher (1985 version)"

Andrea Swensson: So I would love to hear more about that "stuff" that you said Prince would ask you to put on his songs. Can you just describe a little bit of that musical collaboration between you and Wendy and the way that that came into play in Prince's music in this time?

Lisa Coleman:Well, I think Wendy and I were just so motivated, inspired and happy to be where we were, working with Prince, and that he had come to the point to trust us so much. You know, we'd jam constantly every day and that builds like this love intimacy thing between all of us and — we would do everything in the studio. Wendy and I would get into the studio, and we were just so inspired we would try everything from let's put a bass part on to doing like patty-cake rhymes and things from our childhood that we'd think of, and it's like "Oh, let's just throw this thing on there," and Prince was like "What was that?" We were just having fun.

Audio: "A Place in Heaven" (Lisa vocal)

Wendy Melvoin: To be as young as I was at the time, and to be that productive, um, was an honorable feeling. And to do it with the person that I was in love with — my girlfriend — and to also be doing it with the artist who I felt was the most important artist of my generation other than two others that I had revered as much was Joni Mitchell and David Bowie. So those three people, and to have me be a part of that every time I stepped back and sort of satellited myself in the room. I had my moments in the quiet moments of the night after a project was done and you'd listen back to your work — and what you know your input was and what made him happy and what made him feel inspired — gave me so much energy and motivation to keep at what I was doing. I felt like my voice was important. And it was even stronger because my musical collaboration with Lisa was so strong at that time. Our sound as a duo was so strong at that point — it still is very strong now. It's almost rarified now; back then, it was used for good.

Audio: "In a Large Room With No Light"

VO: There are 63 unreleased tracks being released from the vault this fall, a large portion of the material was written with significant input from Wendy and Lisa. These recordings showcase just how unique and powerful their voices were to Prince's expanding sound.

Because Prince's creative process was so relentless, it's hard to draw a line around just when the creation of Sign O' The Times began. In fact, the earliest recording happened in 1979, when Prince was only working on his sophomore album. The other early recordings for Sign O' The Times took place in the summer and fall of 1985, just after the conclusion of the Purple Rain Tour and prior to production of the film Under the Cherry Moon in the south of France.

Audio: "Strange Relationship" (original version)

VO: This is an early reworking of "Strange Relationship," produced by Wendy and Lisa at the Complex in Los Angeles on July 1, 1985. It features samples created with a Fairlight digital synthesizer.

Lisa: It was fun because we had like all these amazing sounds that suddenly you could have like a sitar or something, which was so rare back then; you'd have to find a sitar player or something, but this was like it was all right there at your fingertips, so we just had fun. We were just loading songs up with strange sounds and flutes and congas that were fake; all kinds of things like that.

One of the first samplers, so you could actually record like ten seconds of an instrument and then you save it on a floppy disk, and it had like this monitor screen that you used a light pen, which was also like, "Well that's so cool." It was so, "The future is here! We have a light pen and floppy disks!" And it was like, huge.

Audio: "Strange Relationship" (original version)

VO: At the time, there wasn't a specific plan for where some of these more adventurous songs might end up. But there was an idea floating around between Prince, Wendy, and Lisa for an album that could be called "Dream Factory."

Audio: "Dream Factory"

Lisa Coleman: See, the thing about Dream Factory is that it was being made ever since I could remember. Every like spare song that we recorded, every jam there was always like, "Oh, that could be for Dream Factory, "or it was like an idea that had been hanging around for a long time. So there was never a specific, like, "We're gonna make the 'Dream Factory' album now." It was just things that we would collect along the way that didn't fit on whatever album we were doing at the time. They were the cool kind of jams and experiments and even though Prince didn't like the word "experiment" because he felt that it sounded like you weren't finished if it was an experiment. So forgive me for calling them experiments, but I felt very experimental when I was playing.

Audio: "Visions"
VO: This is "Visions," an improvised solo piano piece that Lisa recorded at Prince's home studio in early 1986.

Wendy Melvoin: Like Santa's elves, you know? It was like the North Pole. This little factory was like toys being made, but they were dreams! Songs, chapters, books. But I guess you could say it was like the equivalent of the Brill Building in New York or Motown's building here or — you know — it was like where things were happening. And the Dream Factory came from a really productive time where there was a lot going on at once. And Prince wasn't one to be like flat-footed. He'd always put some other kind of metaphor to describe something, but — so I think "dream" worked perfect with his lexicon of parables — his life of parables.

Andrea Swensson: I like that. I also like that he was constantly envisioning these kind of metaphorical places — Uptown, Dream Factory, Paisley Park — it was almost like he was like manifesting them through the songs.

Wendy Melvoin: All the time. He was always looking for a higher consciousness and a place to feel better. And he wasn't — he wasn't tortured. He wasn't like an internally tortured guy, but he was really contemplative, so he thought a lot about what he could do to make things better for himself, and through that, the vehicle would be songs to give to the world. And didn't he do it? He did it.

Andrea Swensson Yes, yes he did.

Audio: "Colors"

VO: This is "Colors," a solo performance by Wendy that was also intended for Dream Factory.

Wendy Melvoin: I think that later on in his life, his parables became more religiously centered and maybe ethically centered as he got older. But the edge of his exploration wasn't as strong as it was during this period where it was like all bets are off, and maybe that is part of youth. I mean, he was still young at that point doing those things. And you're sort of happily reckless. I think it was John Lewis — our representative who just passed — that said, he said, "Get into good trouble." I think that that's kind of a mandate of Prince, too. Back then it was trying to get into good trouble, and he definitely — if he found a subject matter that was new and unexplored, he would just explore it and there's always be a finished song to it.

Audio: "Neveah Ni Ecalp"

Lisa Coleman: Yeah. That was our thing. even in these modern times now with Black Lives Matter and COVID. We're in a difficult time right now, but we're all very passionate about it and it — you know — and if we were putting out records I'm sure we'd still be trying to describe an alternative life where we can be free and we can love each other and take care of each other and be creative and just enjoy this beautiful earth. I think we all grew up kind of seeing that in the '60s and '70s, in the race riots and things. I remember when I was a kid, and it's one of the things that I really connected with Prince over was that whole human-rights issues. When we first met we would kind of talk about that. And so I loved how his songwriting and his lyrics would always kind of support that thought, that there's a different way; there's another way and we need to love each other and all that kind of stuff that you can get away with saying in songs.

Audio: "All My Dreams"

VO: The Revolution solidified as a band — anchored by Wendy, Lisa, "Dr." Fink, BrownMark, and Bobby Z. — during the creation of Purple Rain. By the time Dream Factory was being conceived, the band was evolving once again. The Revolution now had a live horn section, including Eric Leeds on saxophone and Atlanta Bliss on trumpet, and would also add an additional guitarist, Miko Weaver, and a trio of back-up singers and dancers: Jerome Benton, Wally Safford, and Greg Brooks.

The expanded group made their live debut at First Avenue in Minneapolis on March 3, 1986, to celebrate the release of their new soundtrack, Parade. And around that same time, an expanding collection of musicians would join Prince in the studio to flesh out new songs.

One of the most striking time capsules of The Revolution in this era is a recording of the song "Power Fantastic," written by Lisa, Wendy and Prince, and performed on March 19, 1986, in Prince's new home studio on Galpin Boulevard in Chanhassen, not far from where Prince was constructing a massive creative complex, Paisley Park.

Every person who was part of that session still remembers it vividly, including the musicians Wendy and Lisa, Eric Leeds, Atlanta Bliss, Bobby Z., and Susan Rogers, who was Prince's primary engineer from 1983 to 1987.

Susan Rogers: So what happened is when we were in the south of France doing the Under the Cherry Moon movie, it's around Thanksgiving time and Prince sent Wendy, Lisa and me to London for a week. And our instructions were to go into Advision Studios and just write some stuff; record some stuff and bring it back to the south of France so he could get on with the movie. And we did. Wendy came up with the riff for the song "Mountains." But for Lisa's part, she sat down at the piano as this goddess is wont to do. Gosh, what piano player. I get choked up talking about how she plays piano much less listening to it. And she played this gorgeous piece. Again, there were no lyrics but it was just so frickin' stunning. So we brought these two things home. "Mountains," it was clear what to do with it. "Power Fantastic" became "Power Fantastic" when he finally sat down with it. He wrote lyrics to it; came up with a melody and then brought us all together in the Galpin Road home studio right after the last wire had been put in place. Brings us all in and he says, "I'm gonna have the band come down and we're gonna record this song. Mic the piano upstairs for Lisa. Run headphones up there." We had drums downstairs. We had Eric in the sound lock with the flute. Bobby in that iso booth for the drums. And Prince was the only place he could be, which was in the control room with me.

Lisa Coleman: Yeah that's exactly right. He was sitting like in the control room downstairs and I was upstairs at the piano, and so we couldn't see each other. Usually we would see each other, you know, and he could give visual cues. But this time, yeah, he was just talking in a mic in our headphones and giving us cues.

Audio: "Power Fantastic" (Prince intro and piano free form, keep playing throughout descriptions)

Susan Rogers: But this was when I discovered I didn't have enough headphones to go around. So everybody had headphones except me. I mean, the studio wasn't designed to have that many people recording at once. So what to do? I had to record everyone. I had to be in the control room where he was and where he was singing, but I couldn't listen to anything because if I turned the speakers up all that leakage would've gone into the mic. First, I got all my sounds dialed in, but then I had to turn it all off because he's in the control room with me and he has to do his vocal. He hated that because he was used to doing his vocals all alone. So he had me set up the vocal mic in the corner, the furthest corner of the room, and set it up so that he would face the corner like the stereotypical dunce with the dunce cap being asked to sit in the corner. He goes to the corner, faces the wedge of this corner and sings his vocal. I'm sitting there behind the console hearing nothing but his voice.

Audio: "Power Fantastic"

Susan Rogers: Oh, I mean just magnificent. Just hearing that voice. It was a moment I will never, ever forget. He wasn't pleased, but what are you gonna do? There we are. Yeah, that's a wonderful song, wonderful, wonderful. That's Lisa Coleman though.

VO: Here's saxophonist Eric Leeds, talking about Lisa.

Eric Leeds: So yeah, she's upstairs all by her lonesome. If I recall, Bobby, it was one of the few times that I ever recorded with Bobby on live drums. And once again there are a lot of people out there who want to believe that that's Miles on trumpet on that, and it's not. That's Matt Blistan, and Miles had nothing to do with that horn.

Atlanta Bliss: Oh yeah. What an honor to be thought of as I halfway sound like him.

VO: Here's Matt Blistan, who Prince called Atlanta Bliss.

Atlanta Bliss: This whole song is pretty incredible, especially with the beginning like that. It's like, that's the noise of the world. It's just crazy and crazy and crazy and then all of a sudden it just focuses down. You turn out the lights, turn up the sound and you're all - we're really focused. It's everyone that's listening in the one spot. That's what music is about. That's the whole motion of this song. Yeah, this is probably one of my favorites or all-time favorite tracks.

Wendy Melvoin: Yeah, it was really a special day, because it was not often that he would have the Revolution come to his private space at the house. Back in the day, he would, but once things got really big with him, his home didn't really end up being the hangout zone like it used to. It was much quieter back in those times. So to all be together in his space was a special moment and not common. Kind of a rare moment.

VO: Despite how close knit the Revolution had become in the two years since Purple Rain went mainstream, there was tension in the group. By the fall of 1986, the band would officially dissolve, to be replaced by an almost entirely new lineup of musicians— a dramatic transformation that we're going to explore in greater detail in coming episodes.

Before the band imploded, they would embark on one final tour, known in hindsight as the Parade Tour, and they'd continue contributing in rehearsals, studio sessions, and rigorous pre-show soundchecks to the songs that would eventually make their way onto Sign O' The Times. The path to that critically acclaimed double album is a jagged one: from the collection of songs intended for Dream Factory, many would end up on a triple-album called Crystal Ball — which is not the same "Crystal Ball that Prince would release in 1998, although it does include some of that vault material — and it would eventually be whittled down into the two discs that would make up Sign O' The Times.

Of the 16 tracks on that finished album, 11 of them were finished while Prince and The Revolution were still together — including the album's penultimate track, a live recording of the song "It's Gonna Be a Beautiful Night," written collaboratively on the Parade Tour and captured by a mobile recording truck parked outside Le Zenith in Paris, France, on August 25, 1986.

Audio: It's Gonna Be a Beautiful Night

VO: "It's Gonna Be a Beautiful Night" would be co-credited to Dr. Fink, the only member of The Revolution who would remain in the band following the Parade Tour.

Matt Fink: "It's Gonna Be a Beautiful Night," that came out of a jam session at a sound check one night with the band. And then, you know, it's just how it worked. But yeah, he had Around the World in a Day in the can before the Purple Rain tour was done too. So yeah, he was always looking forward and had moved on to the next project already while we were still touring on the previous one.

VO: The bassist Mark Brown, who performs under the name BrownMark:

Mark Brown: Prince was always a couple albums in front. Sign 'O' the Times was actually being created with The Revolution, see. We were working on that stuff way before that album was finished

VO: And the saxophonist Eric Leeds, one of the newest band members at that time:

Eric Leeds: Almost all of that stuff was starting to be done late '85 through '86 when The Revolution was still around. A lot of people equate all of the stuff that we think of as Sign 'O' the Times stuff with that band with Sheila E on drums and other people, because that was the band that went out and played that music, but they had nothing to do with any of the music that was on Sign 'O' the Times album, at least to my knowledge. Alot of that music, Wendy and Lisa might have more to do with some of that music than I would know.

Andrea Swensson to Wendy: "It's Gonna Be A Beautiful Night" is like such a beautiful testament to The Revolution, and I just can't imagine what that was like.

Wendy Melvoin: Brokenhearted. Because at the very end of it, we looked at the credits and it just said, "Thank you, Wendy and Lisa" at the very — the very last credit on the Sign 'O' the Times record, and meanwhile we had done so much work on that record, as you will attest to the deluxe record. So yeah, it was very painful; very painful. But we understood, you know, we're not — yeah, it hurt like hell but, you know, life goes on.

Audio: "Forever In My Life"

VO: Up next on Prince: The Story of Sign O' The Times: We're going to dive deeper into the creation of Prince's new home studio in Chanhassen, where he recorded the Sign O' The Times tracks "The Ballad of Dorothy Parker," "Starfish and Coffee," "Slow Love," and "Forever In My Life," along with countless tracks that would be shelved in his vault and are now being released. His home on Galpin Boulevard in Chanhassen is also where he built a new life with his fiancée at the time, Susannah Melvoin. Susannah was a significant muse, collaborator, and companion in this prolific era.

Susannah Melvoin: This whole time period was making music, making art, loving each other, feeding each other, sleeping with each other, like just life in this sort of all encompassing way.

VO: And we'll hear more from the incomparable Susan Rogers on her memories of setting up Prince's home studio and scrambling to capture his new ideas as they poured out of him.

Susan Rogers: He was so eager for this damned console to be installed. One of the main things to know about Prince is how on fire his creativity was, and it's coming and coming and coming and he's not going to sit in his room with a little four-track recorder and demo things. If he's going to be playing and singing it's going to go to tape and it's going to be the canonical version as far as he is concerned. He didn't demo things. So he couldn't wait for this console to be finished.

Credits

Prince: The Story of Sign O' The Times is produced by The Current, supported by the Minnesota Legacy Amendment's Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, and created in collaboration with The Prince Estate and Warner Records and with their support. This story was written by Andrea Swensson; Anna Weggel is our producer. Thanks to Technical Director Corey Schreppel, Digital Producer Jay Gabler, Radio Production Director Derrick Stevens and Managing Director David Safar.

Thanks also to Trevor Guy, Giancarlo Sciama, Michael Howe and Duane Tudahl. To learn more about The Current, visit thecurrent.org. If you haven't subscribed yet, search for Prince: The Story of Sign O' The Times on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Also, to learn more about Prince, visit Prince.com.