Mike Duquette lovingly reconstructs a 'lost Prince album' just as Prince himself intended, helped along by the recent re-issues and remasters of the early 90s catalogue of the man “wrapped in lace and studs and carrying an electric guitar that looked like a cloud”. God or genius…or both?
Words and curation by Mike Duquette, cover art by…Lina Moon!
The day Prince died, I cried so hard at work that I thought I would be sent home early. The miserable arrangement of the modern open-floor plan meant nobody could get anything done without hearing me choking back sobs for most of the afternoon. We all remember that spring day in 2016 - one of many that year which found us saying goodbye to so many artistic heroes - and the shock that came with someone as seemingly youthful, as immortal, as Prince, found dead in an elevator at his Paisley Park studio just outside his native Minneapolis.
But for me, it was different.
I wouldn’t be writing this if it wasn’t, right? Millions of us flocked to Prince’s mould-shattering blend of electronic pop and mind-expanding funk. We adored his utopian vision of a world where racism was eradicated, sexuality was accepted, and a watchful God surveyed it all. It was the soundtrack of much of the ‘80s. But my story began in 2004, in a liquidating Sam Goody at a New Jersey mall, picking up a CD of Purple Rain because it seemed like a record a discerning listener should own.
Like so many American teens, I was confused. Our high school years were punctuated by terrorism and religious fanaticism - a doctrine I once, in part, tacitly supported. An unwavering Roman Catholic, I turned to the teachings of the church to quell the chemicals boiling inside my pubescent brain. I was in a youth group, for fuck’s sake - learning about trust falls and prayer circles from a priest that looked like Phil Donahue and hadn’t yet been arrested, tried and convicted for crimes against a minor in a previous clergy.
Eventually, you start to ask questions that a human shepherd can’t answer, and the lack of satisfying answers can sting. But then, wrapped in lace and studs and carrying an electric guitar that looked like a cloud came the man called Prince - a human, a dove, a conscious, a love; a proud Black man who loved God and loved to fuck in equal measure and seemed to indicate that that was just fine.
If buying albums like Purple Rain and Batman (of all releases) was akin to taking literature from a streetcorner missionary, tuning into the Super Bowl XLI halftime show in 2007 was like attending a megachurch. His impassioned song sermon, performed fearlessly against a thrashing rainstorm, took the legend of Prince out of the history books and into laser-focus - the present, the here and now. I was hooked - bound to trawl record bins for the hardest-to-find discs or the best-quality bootlegs, annoying and fascinating the friends and girlfriends in my life with an endless font of knowledge and belief in Prince’s music and message.
Today, Prince lives on as a globally-shared memory. The bitterest pill to swallow, every year from that fateful day in 2016, is how that passing has infused life into his catalog. In 2020, Sign O’ The Times - his ambitious 1987 double album, revered for its thematic diversity and unchecked sonic boundaries - has been expanded as a super deluxe box set, packed with B-sides, remixes, live concerts and 45 unreleased tracks from his storied Vault. From now until my last day, I will look forward to every stone unturned, every secret he kept that gets told, because I want to know more about the man who has fuelled my greatest musical passions and my truest philosophies. But I would trade it all in to have him walk among us still.
About the Playlist
Sign O’ The Times rose like a phoenix from the ashes of three separate discarded projects through 1986 and 1987: Dream Factory, a planned fourth album by Prince and The Revolution that evaporated when he broke up the band; Camille, a short, funky series of tracks featuring pitch shifted vocals credited to a female alter ego; and Crystal Ball, an epic, three-record culmination of all those ideas that Warner Bros. insisted get trimmed to two LPs - the classic album we know today.
The deluxe Sign O’ The Times and other archival releases that came before it allow fans to construct virtually all of these albums as Prince originally conceived. It’s Dream Factory I keep coming back to the most. It’s sort of a fraternal twin to Sign O’ The Times: eight of its tracks ended up on that release, and some in different ways. “Strange Relationship” loses its bubbling bottom end for a sitar and tighter, layered vocals, while “The Ballad of Dorothy Parker” becomes even more dreamlike with a dizzy horn section mixed out of the final release.
It also presented Prince as more of a collaborator, especially alongside bandmates Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman. Opener “Visions” and delicate waltz “A Place in Heaven” features Lisa front and centre, while interlude “Colours” features Wendy, not Prince on guitar. When the three come together, as on funk outing “Witness 4 the Prosecution” or the jazzy “Power Fantastic,” it’s pure magic.
But it also offers one of the realest peeks into his unchecked psyche. The lengthy “Crystal Ball” and taut “Sign O’ the Times” both traffic in imagery of apocalypse (natural and man-made) whirling around a central thesis that love must survive. That message was relevant in 1987 and might be even more so today. It’s more organised chaos compared to Sign O’ The Times’ scattershot aim - yet it’s the latter that’s rightly regarded as a classic. We can’t change history, but thanks to this set, we can examine it closer than ever.
Mike Duquette is an incurable pop geek and semi-professional writer/historian. In 2010, he founded The Second Disc, a site devoted to music reissues, box sets and compilations. In the decade since, he parlayed the site’s success into a career at catalog labels, collaborating on unbelievable projects like the Grammy Award-winning Squeeze Box: The Complete Works of “Weird Al” Yankovic.
Lina Moon is an artist that caught our eye through her Instagram with fabulous renderings of Robert Smith, the Beatles, and this particular portrait of Prince. Welcome Lina!