Your hand shouldn’t be idle.’ Then he would want you to sing a harmony note. When I would be playing the keyboards, if my left wasn’t doing something, he’d say, ‘Find a part. "The other thing he’d do, he never wanted you to have a free hand. And it would be Little Red Corvette or something, and we’d be like, ‘Wow, that’s dope.’ He’d come to our rehearsals, then go to his own rehearsals, then he’d cut all night in the studio, and the next day, he’d show up at our rehearsal with some new song that he wrote. Hit-making R&B producer Jimmy Jam, who played in the first of Prince’s many side project bands, The Time, told me, “With Prince, it was about work ethic. To be a member of Prince’s band meant not only staying awake but living up to the boss’s sky-high standards. In 1983, he added an ampersand and called them The Revolution. While he had toured with various players early on, it wasn’t until the breakthrough success of 1982’s album 1999 that Prince surrounded himself with the formalised line-up of musicians that he considered his equals. There are very few musicians who will stay awake that long.” I use engineers in shifts a lot of the time because when I start something, I like to go all the way through. There will be times when I’ve been working in the studio for twenty hours and I’ll be falling asleep in the chair, but I’ll still be able to tell the engineer what cut I want to make. “I swear to God it’s not out of boldness when I say this, but there’s not a person around who can stay awake as long as I can. “The reason I don’t use musicians a lot of the time had to do with the hours that I worked,” Prince told Rolling Stone in 1985. Prince must have sensed that if he was going to punch that higher floor on the elevator to global supremacy, he needed to rock. The minimalist, pogo-funk sound of those early records, typified by songs like When You Were Mine, I Wanna Be Your Lover and I Feel For You, was charmingly offbeat and original. ![]() Like auteurs Stevie Wonder, Todd Rundgren and Paul McCartney before him, the Minneapolis multi-track whiz kid wrote, arranged, produced and played almost every instrument on his first five albums, from 1978-1982. Prince performs at the Hollywood Palace to promote the opening of his film 'Purple Rain' on Jin Los Angeles, California (Image credit: Sherry Rayn Barnett)
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