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The Official Magazine Of Paisley Park And Beyond Cover

5 February 1981 Hometown Artist Sold 3 Million Records Before Age 20 To say that Warner Brothers recording artist Prince is a musical prodigy is almost an understatement. Before he turned 20, Prince had sold nearly three million records. He had recorded three LPs, playing all the instruments and writing and singing all the songs himself. And he'd gotten his first number one Single – "I Wanna Be Your Lover." One might expect a musician who plays 26 instruments and records his albums in a home-made Minneapolis studio to have a lot of formal training. But as Prince confesses, "I had one piano lesson and two guitar lessons as a kid." At the age of seven, Prince first started teaching himself to play. "My dad left home for the first time and left his piano," Prince says. "He never let anyone play it before. So I taught myself songs from the television — Batman, Man From UNCLE. I learned to play them by ear." By fifth grade Prince (his real name) was playing piano in talent shows, and soon after started writing original songs. By 13, he had his first band — Champagne. Champagne played hotels and high school dances, but by the time Prince finished high school, he realized he had far greater ambitions. A break came when Christ Moon, proprietor of a local Minneapolis studio, asked Prince to add some piano tracks to a guitar and voice demo Moon had made. After he put down to piano part, Prince asked Moon if he wanted bass. Moon accepted, and by the time Prince was done, he'd added bass, drums, guitar lead and overdubbed his own backing vocal. To return the favor, Moon let Prince have some free studio time. After Prince recorded some demo tapes, he said out for New York to find fame and fortune, and even though he was offered two record deals, Prince turned them down because "they wouldn't let me produce myself. They had a lot of strange ideas — tubas and cellos and stuff. I knew I was going to have to do it myself if it was going to turn out right." Prince returns to Minneapolis where meanwhile Moon had played Prince's work for a local manager. The manager was impressed enough to help Prince get his recording deal with Warner Brothers, and became at 18 the youngest artist on the label to ever produce his own record. "I have a lot of creative control," explains Prince. "They let me produce my own records, write my own songs, picked arrangements and all that. They're really open. I just do the album, give it to them, and they put it out." Although he makes it sound like a modest achievement, Prince's records have already make a splash. The singles "Soft and Wet" (off For You, his debut) and "I Wanna Be Your Lover" were both R&B hits. "Uptown," off his latest — Dirty Mind — marks Prince's third hit. At 20, Prince may still just be a kid. But it's clear this is one kid who knows what he's doing.

The Official Magazine Of Paisley Park And Beyond Cover

Rolling Stone February 19, 1981 Bill Adler Snaking out from the wings toward center stage at the Ritz, prancing like a pony with his hands on his hips and then flinging a clorine kick with a coquettish toss of his head, Prince is androgyny personified. Slender and doe-eyed, with a faint pubescent mustache, he is bare-chested beneath a gray, hip-length Edwardian jacket. There’s a raffish red scarf at this neck, and he’s wearing tight black bikini briefs, thigh-high black leg-warmers and black-fringed go-go boots. With his racially and sexually mixed five-piece band churning out the terse rhythms of “Sexy Dancer” behind him, the effect is at once truly sexy and more than a little disorienting , and his breathy falsetto only adds to his ambiguity – for sheer girlish vulnerability, there’s no one around to touch him: not Michael Jackson, not even fourteen-year-old soul songbird Stacy Lattisaw. At age twenty, Prince may be the unlikeliest rock star, black or white, in recent memory—but a star he definitely is. As quickly becomes apparent, Prince’s lyrics bear little relation to standard AM radio floss. In addition to bald sexual come-ons and twisted love plaints, he champions the need for independence and self-expression. And one song, “Uptown,” is, among other things, an antiwar chant. Further complicating the proceedings are the heavy-metal moans Prince wrenches out of his guitar and the punchy dance-rock rhythms of his band (bassist Andre Cymone, guitarist Dez Dickerson, keyboardists Lisa Coleman and Dr. Fink and drummer Bobby Z.), all of whom are longtime cohorts from Prince’s hometown—Minneapolis, of all places. “I grew up on the borderline,” Prince says after the show. “I had a bunch of white friends, and I had a bunch of black friends. I never grew up in any one particular culture.” The son of a half-black father and an Italian mother who divorced when he was seven, Prince pretty much raised himself from the age of twelve, when he formed his first band. Oddly, he claims that the normalcy and remoteness of Minneapolis provided just artistic nourishment he needed. “We basically got all the new music and dances three months late, so I just decided that I was gonna do my own thing. Otherwise, when we did split Minneapolis, we were gonna be way behind and dated. The white radio stations were mostly country, and the one black radio station was really boring to me. For that matter, I didn’t really have a record player when I was growing up, and I never got a chance to check out Hendrix and the rest of them because they were dead by the time I was really getting serious. I didn’t even start playing guitar until 1974.” With his taste for outlandish clothes and his “lunatic” friends, Prince says he “took a lot of heat all the time. People would say something about our clothes or the way we looked or who we were with, and we’d end up fighting. I was a very good fighter,” he says with a soft, shy laugh. “I never lost. I don’t know if I fight fair, but I go for it. That’s what ’Uptown’ is about—we do whatever we want, and those who cannot deal with it have a problem within themselves.” Prince has written, arranged, performed and produced three albums to date (For You, Prince and Dirty Mind), all presenting the same unique persona. Appearances to the contrary, though, he says he’s not gay, and he has a standard rebuff for overenthusiastic male fans: “I’m not about that; we can be friends, but that’s as far as it goes. My sexual preferences really aren’t any of their business.” A Penthouse “Pet of the Month” centerfold laid out on a nearby table silently underscores his point. It took Prince six months alone in the studio to concoct his 1978 debut album, because, he says, “I was younger then.” Prince required six weeks. He controlled the making of both records, but notes that they were “overseen” by record company and management representatives. Dirty Mind, however, was made in isolation in Minneapolis. “Nobody knew what was going on, and I became totally engulfed in it,” he says. “It really felt like me for once.” The result of this increased freedom was a collection of songs celebrating incest ("Sister") and oral sex ("Head") in language raw enough to merit a warning sticker on the album’s cover. “When I brought it to the record company it shocked a lot of people,” he says. “But they didn’t ask me to go back and change anything, and I’m real grateful. Anyway, I wasn’t being deliberately provocative. I was being deliberately me.” Obviously, judging by the polished eclecticism of Dirty Mind, being himself is the best course. “I ran away from home when I was twelve,” Prince says. “I’ve changed address in Minneapolis thirty-two times, and there was a great deal of loneliness. But when I think about it, I know I’m here for a purpose, and I don’t worry about it so much.”

and the court jesters Manchester Evening News July 6, 1994

Cover and four pages Rock & Folk magazine October 1986

Creem magazine— January/February 1993 (Vol. 2, No. 2) Cover and one page

Q magazine, September 1987 two pages Misty girl drummers turned singers. Raucous funk merchants. Camisoled nymphettes. Regency lackeys with electric guitars. They have all enjoyed the benevolent patronage of Prince. Jill Jones is an engaging, gifted, and eclectic person, who knows all about Tennessee Williams, and has no qualms whatsoever about displaying what might most decorously be described as an old-fashioned cleavage. Each of these qualities marks her self-titled debut album, the latest piece of output from the Paisley Park label, the regular showcase for friends and protégés of Prince. "With Prince, it's like I'm his sister," she explains, casually, of a relationship that goes back to the Dirty Mind era, circa 1980, when the Minneapolis mogul first achieved his remarkable crossover from the black music audience to the wider, richer white one. Since that liaison, when she and Teena Marie comprised the support act for the Dirty Mind tour, Jill Jones has maintained her Minneapolis connection, contributing vocals to the 1999 album and its accompanying concert dates, and generally keeping in touch throughout the rude one's ascent to glorious infamy. As such, hers is a typical Paisley Park career, partly the product of benevolent patronage, partly the expression of a work-related friendship which has endured over a suitable period of time. The fruits of this relationship are also pretty much standard for the Paisley operation. Most of the tracks, including her current single, the frothy and capricious Mia Boccia, have been co-written with the maestro. He has provided the music while she delivers self-composed words which read like the work of a true disciple: "for love, I would suffer kisses from another, if that was what turned you on." Well, really! "It just happened because I wasn't that serious about singing," she says of an involvement with pop music which began by accident when Teena Marie suggested she help her out years back, when barely a dot on Rick James' horizon. Cruelly, it might be said that an interest in singing has not always been the prime characteristic of the lady friends of Prince. The camisoled nymphettes of Vanity 6 provided perfect visual decoration for his rather muddled sexual politics, but precious little creative output of comparable value. The same goes for Apollonia 6, the instant group formulated during the filming of Purple Rain after Vanity absented herself permanently from the set. Jill Jones though is different in that, indelibly

Rolling Stone — Issue No. 472 April 24, 1986 (cover only) This is one of the most iconic Prince‑era Rolling Stone covers, published at the height of the Parade era and just as Under the Cherry Moon promotion was ramping up. LADIES WAITING Wendy, Lisa and Prince: a musical love affair By Neal Karlen Sheila E. will begin pounding her magical drumsticks for 6,200 howling fans inside the Universal Amphitheatre. Though showtime is imminent, the backstage greenroom at this Universal City concert hall remains packed elbow to elbow with assorted kings, queens, and court jesters of the Los Angeles music kingdom. Rock & roll Annies, pressed between the walls and their escorts, nurse their complimentary drinks and grind out Gitanes at their painted competition's feet. Funkified Barbie, Ken, and Mr. T dolls fight for space and each other, while a quickly panicking backstage guard shields the door with her body and announces, "No more, no room, no air, nobody else!" Though few working the greenroom seem to know it, Prince is standing in a hallway not five feet away. After Sheila's final encore, he and the Revolution—now twelve Revolution members strong—are scheduled to sign in for a still undetermined number of songs.