“There was a piece by Lisa Coleman called Visions. “There was a piece by Wendy Melvoin called Colors, as I recall,” continues Rogers. Astonishingly, they were working on Dream Factory as early as 1982, when the band recorded a trio of songs that included an early version of I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man. “ Dream Factory was conceived of and put together earlier than the rest, back when The Revolution were still around,” says Rogers. ‘ Dream Factory’ was one of several potential albums he was working on simultaneously, all of which eventually coalesced into 1987’s Sign O’ The Times. His engagement to Susannah Melvoin was breaking up, and he was about to turn 30.” “This took a long time because he was in a period of flux. “He was experimenting with what his next vision would be,” says Susan Rogers.
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I was under no illusions that any of it would ever be released.” Says Rogers, “ Prince had so much fun playing them that I think he wanted to release them, but he was astute enough to realise it was a half-baked idea.” Dream Factory (1986)įollowing the success of Purple Rain and the box office disappointment of his follow-up movie Under The Cherry Moon, Prince was trying to figure out what to do next. I gave him something and he said, ‘Yeah, cool.’ That was pretty much the end of it. There was one song called Junk Music that I cut down from maybe 40 or 45 minutes.
“So he gave me an opportunity to mess around with them, maybe do some overdubs or some edits. “A lot of those jams might have gone on for 15 or 20 minutes,” Leeds explains. They’d be listening to records in his room and his father would come in and say, ‘How dare you bring the flesh into this house?’ Prince always had that religion/sex dichotomy.”Įventually he handed some of these recordings over to Eric Leeds, his saxophone player, to see if there was enough material for an album. “I learned that when Prince was young – 13 or so – his father would get really angry at him for bringing girls over to the house. Rogers believes the name may have come from his father. It wasn’t just two different planets, it was two different galaxies!” “So the span between Controversy and 1999 was an age unto itself. “Even when we were playing in clubs, we played like it was a coliseum,” says Dez Dickerson, Prince’s touring guitarist. It transpires they were recording a live album and a concert film – ‘ The Second Coming’, a remarkable, if lost, snapshot of a transitional period in Prince’s career.Īt the time, Prince and his band were playing some of their best shows as they upgraded to bigger venues.
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Their stop at the Met Center in Bloomington, Minnesota, stands out because, unexpectedly, there were real cameras there and a professional film crew to capture their performance. That’s how we learned and improved the shows.” “He would point out mistakes or things we did well. “We would watch the tape every night on the bus,” recalls keyboard player Matt Fink. Prince filmed every show on the Controversy tour in 19, usually on a fairly primitive VHS camera set up next to the soundboard. Here are some of his most notorious albums that never made it out of Paisley Park… The Second Coming (1982) But those lost albums continue to provoke endless what-ifs and conjure countless alternate timelines. He created albums faster than he could release them. His motives for scrapping an album were often never known or now forgotten, but in most cases Prince simply moved on to the next big idea.
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That work ethic means he left behind a legendarily massive vault crammed full of alternate takes, false starts, cul-de-sac jams and more than a few “lost” records.īecause he thought one and sometimes two albums ahead, he might abandon a project on a whim – no matter how far along he was in the process.
He might be trying to assemble his next album or he might be taking notes, writing songs, goofing off, or practising his own purple brand of mad science. On tour he recorded every show at home he was in Paisley Park Studio A as much as possible.
To celebrate the imminent arrival of Welcome 2 America, the latest issue of Uncut takes a fascinating trip inside Prince‘s archives.
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