A new collection reveals Prince’s artistic scope at the height of his powers
Image: Graphic: Rebecca Fassola Music Features Prince
It’s hard to imagine now, but when Prince’s Sign O’ The Times hit record stores in the spring of 1987, it was widely viewed as a comeback record. The 1982 double album 1999 had converted the critics’ darling into a certified hit-maker; and 1984’s Purple Rain LP and film turned Prince into a superstar. But 1985’s Around The World In A Day and 1986’s Parade—while producing unassailable singles like “Raspberry Beret” and “Pop Life” (World) and “Kiss” (Parade)—drew mixed reviews and were relatively disappointing commercially.
Then along came Sign O’ The Times: two discs’ worth of hard funk, giddy pop, and wild experiments, even more expansive and adventurous than 1999. The album produced three Billboard Top 10 hits: “U Got The Look,” “I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man,” and the title track. It also dominated the critics’ best-of-the-year lists. During rare one-on-one encounters with the media during his mid-1980s rise to fame, Prince would often indicate that he was working on music constantly in his home studio, and had entire albums sitting in “the Vault” that had been completed but never released. The eclectic, electrifying Sign O’ The Times sounded like a greatest-hits collection drawn from all that unreleased music.
What wasn’t widely reported at the time—but later became a major part of Prince lore—was that Sign O’ The Times was actually something of a salvage job. In a way, it was a “best of the never-heard” set, drawing elements from three different aborted projects: a sophisticated, romantic and jazzy album titled Dream Factory, a raw and eccentric dance record titled Camille, and a triple-disc blowout titled Crystal Ball. The latter was meant to be a defiant “I’m not washed up yet!” rebuke to all the critics who’d shrugged off Prince’s previous two LPs, as well as his flop 1986 movie, Under The Cherry Moon.
When the Prince estate and Warner Bros. announced they were reissuing Sign O’ The Times in an expanded “Super Deluxe” edition (out this Friday, September 25, but available for pre-order now), many fans hoped the set’s curators might rebuild these never-released records, each of which have been passed around in makeshift forms on bootlegs for years. But here’s the bad news: Not only does this Sign O’ The Times edition not feature track-by-track recreations of Dream Factory or any of the rest, it also omits songs from those projects that have surfaced elsewhere. If you want to hear “Dream Factory” itself, or the ten-minute version of “Crystal Ball,” you’ll have to dig out your copy of Prince’s 1998 album Crystal Ball (which, confusingly, is not the same as the album Warners rejected). Ultimately, this eight-LP set (which in its physical form also contains a DVD of a full concert performance) isn’t concerned with what-might’ve-beens. It’s more about making Prince’s ambitious, magnificent masterpiece even grander.
It does this by including over a dozen songs that never appeared on any of the nascent versions of Sign O’ The Times. While much of the material earmarked for Camille and Crystal Ball was released commercially in Prince’s lifetime, a healthy chunk of Dream Factory hasn’t been widely heard outside of bootlegs. And even people who’ve illegally downloaded bootlegs of Dream Factory—a record that went through several iterations before it was scrapped altogether—never got a copy that included some of these new songs, like the bouncy ’70s-style AM pop ditty “Everybody Want What They Don’t Got” or the sweetly swinging ballad “Adonis And Bathsheba.” Both of them have a playfulness and grace that exemplify what that album was aiming to be.
Prince never talked much to the press about his intentions, so we mostly have to rely on his collaborators’ memories to piece together his original plans for this project—and why he scotched them. Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman of his backing band The Revolution have described the Dream Factory sessions as Prince’s attempt at a truly collaborative record, with the two women in particular providing not just musical support but also lyrics, melodies, arrangements and lead vocals. Prince—the largely self-taught son of jazz musicians, and a devotee of Joni Mitchell—began to incorporate more horns, aiming for a big-band/cabaret sound similar to what Mitchell played with on albums like Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter. He wanted something with scope.
Some elements of this new direction had been evident on Parade, which (as the semi-soundtrack to Under The Cherry Moon) at times evokes the feel of mid-20th century Europe, when a wave of Black entertainers took up residence in ritzy nightclubs. That same general approach is also apparent in Prince’s often under-appreciated ’90s work, where he became more of an old-fashioned bandleader, delegating solos and riffs to his hot combo rather than doing all the flashy stuff himself. But the Dream Factory era songs are looser and kookier, with more of a sense of joyous discovery. It has a lot of that sui generis Prince weirdness, in which he sometimes seemed to indulge just to crack himself up—like when he’d utter surprise interjections in odd voices, as though imitating a room full of people at a party.
According to a lot of sources (including Michaelangelo Matos’ excellent 33⅓ book on Sign O’ The Times), Prince went through three configurations of Dream Factory between April and July of 1986. The first was a single album, full of some of the most enjoyably frivolous songs he and The Revolution had ever cooked up—including a few of the more unusual ones that ended up on Sign O’ The Times, like the discursive and unclassifiable “The Ballad Of Dorothy Parker” and the thumping, oddly personal “Strange Relationship.” But perhaps because Around The World In A Day and Parade had been dinged for their more undernourished qualities, Prince and The Revolution kept recording, looking to capture the full range of styles and ideas they’d been talking about since the project began.
Two months later, they had a double-album version of Dream Factory, ending with the wonderfully nutty “All My Dreams,” which sounds like a fevered rendition of a corny 1930s movie musical, performed by the cast of Sesame Street. One month after that, Prince reshaped Dream Factory yet again—into another delightfully offbeat and off-the cuff double-disc set, adding a handful of future Sign O’ The Times classics, like the title track and the ironically cheery “I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man.” If this had been the record Prince released, it likely would’ve been just as beloved as Sign O’ The Times.
But two things happened before the artist could pull the trigger. The most important development was that Prince had a falling-out with The Revolution, for reasons even the band members have never been able to explain fully. Coleman and Melvoin have speculated that Prince decided collaboration didn’t suit his self-image. Others have said that some of Prince’s longtime cohorts (including Wendy and Lisa) irritated him by complaining about some of the new musicians he was bringing into the studio. Whatever the reason, Prince suddenly soured on Dream Factory, even though Warner Bros. was reportedly ready to release that third version of the album.
Prince retreated to his studio and went back to working as more of a one-man-band, experimenting with recording technology that made his vocals sound high and alien. He dubbed this new voice “Camille,” and recorded several sparse, rhythmic, and heavily synthesized songs in this style, include a new version of “Strange Relationship” and two more songs that ended up on Sign O’ The Times: the sinewy, sexually slippery “If I Was Your Girlfriend” and the hilarious, hard-edged house-party jam “Housequake.” Camille—which Prince wanted to release without fanfare, credited to “Camille”—was also close to being released in 1986. But it never hit stores, and the reasons why (like nearly everything else in Prince’s biography) are disputed. Either Warner Bros. didn’t want to put out an anonymous Prince album, or Prince himself began to doubt the spiritual righteousness of this arcane music.
Either way, he rallied immediately, returning to the idea of going big. The triple-album Crystal Ball—the one Warner Bros. nixed—would’ve contained most of the final version of Dream Factory and most of Camille, with the former’s songs re-arranged and re-recorded to de-emphasize The Revolution’s contributions. Crystal Ball added a few new songs too, including several eventual Sign O’ The Times favorites: the peppy “Play In The Sunshine,” raunchy “Hot Thing,” low-key country-soul sketch “Forever In My Life,” and an extended live performance of the glorious free-for-all “It’s Gonna Be A Beautiful Night.” It’s hard to say how Crystal Ball would’ve been received, had Warner Bros. not balked at the length. Prince certainly never forgot the slight, adding it to the long list of grievances that would later lead to him puckishly changing his name to an unpronounceable symbol.
Yet in his 33⅓ book, Matos argues that no matter what Prince intended, Sign O’ The Times was exactly the album he had to release in 1987. Matos notes that it arrived in a year when the charts were filling up with Prince imitators, and reminded critics and music buffs that no one could make hooky, soulful, beat-driven pop-rock that sounded anywhere near so inspired or idiosyncratic. Matos also suggests that by renaming the album after its only overtly political song—an unflinching “state of the union,” in the spirit of Marvin Gaye—Prince joined the rising tide of pop stars who’d begun commenting on social injustice at the end of the Reagan era, making him seem all the more on-point. (“Sign O’ The Times” remains one of his most popular songs, perhaps because rock’s old guard appreciate that it sounds like protest music.)
Even after listening to six discs’ worth of songs that were under consideration for this album, the original two-LP Sign O’ The Times still seems like the best way Prince could’ve refined and packaged this material. The track order is perfect, flowing easily from Top 40 fodder to avant-garde funk to some of the most free-flowing eruptions of Prince’s subconscious ever committed to tape. (Nobody but Prince could’ve come up with a song as elusively magical as “The Ballad Of Dorothy Parker,” which sounds like something he just started humming to himself while fiddling around with a new synthesizer.)
It might’ve been better if this set’s generous collection of outtakes were arranged into a more logical order, to tell the story of these sessions more coherently. Nevertheless, the Super Deluxe Sign O’ The Times does help explain where this music came from, and why it feels more fleshed-out and urgent than much of what Prince released post-Purple Rain. He went on a journey with these songs, released and unreleased.
Like Neil Young, Stevie Wonder, Brian Wilson, and many of pop music’s other legendary studio rats, Prince conditioned himself to converse through song, turning whatever was going through his head on any given day into music… and then recording it right away, while the feeling was fresh. The Sign O’ The Times special edition contains fully arranged, performed, and produced songs—thrilling ones, too, like the ecstatic call-and-response jumper “When The Dawn Of The Morning Comes”—that Prince stuck in his vaunted Vault and never revisited. He tossed releasable music aside, knowing he could make more.
Still, when you compare what Prince workshopped versus what he actually sent out into the world, it becomes clear that he rarely released any music unless he felt it was saying something: about his own beliefs, about human nature, or even just about what music itself could do. Prince thought very deeply about what he wanted his albums to be. In 1987, one popular take on Sign O’ The Times was that it was all about Prince proving himself again: to the fans, to the press, and to his fellow pop stars. But these songs may have meant even more to the person who recorded them. This was Prince the explorer, reaching far and wide—on the hunt for the kind of sounds even Prince had never heard before.
51 Comments
For a topic I love I don’t have anything else to add. I love this album, will listen to the expanded version, Prince is awesome and fuck my life because I never got to see him live (as he hated Spain for some reason)
Still definitely the best concert I’ve ever been too. Sorry you missed him.
I saw him on the Purple Rain tour. It was, as you can well imagine, fantastic.
THAT must have been amazing. I was a little too young then, sadly.
Saw him about 50 times and I still wouldn’t call myself one of the Superfans.
I was only at 13 or so and I felt like a piker around the ‘superfans’. HAHA!
Truth: I was a superfan, but I became a slacker around the time I moved to the West Coast (late ‘90s). ::sob::
Prince toured Spain In 1990 (Nude Tour), 1993 (Act II), 1998 (New Power Soul Tour), and 1999 (tv shows/various small venues). He and his wife had a beautiful house there and lived In Marbella so, while I’m sorry you didn’t get a chance to see him, he definitely did not “hate Spain for some reason.”
I am in my early 40s and only started going to concerts and festivals on my late 20s (though my parents are everything but poor, being a bad student prevented me from having certain aspects of fun until I abandoned university and started working). The closest I was to see him was when he had three nights on a row in London by surprise (I moved here in 2012), but I found out too late. BTW, the 1998 show was in Marbella (7 hours away from Madrid). I heard the rumour that he did not like the Spanish audience in general. My sister was on the 1993 show and she told me she cried when they started singing Seven. Jesus, man, don’t remind me anymore of my aweful life decisions.
I do like the idea of Prince getting served crappy paella somewhere and then immediately calling up his manager to order Barcelona off of the touring schedule.
I still remember the day Prince died. My dad came to visit me and we went out for pizza and just the entire time I was thinking “damn Prince is dead, how can life get better?” Went with a thin crust pizza with sausage though that was great, had a couple Peronis because the only other option was Bud Light. Same year and same feeling I have with David Bowie. They were two of my favorites and ones I always wanted to see live, but never could.
Little did we know Bowie and Prince were what was keeping the world from falling apart.
In retrospect it should have been pretty obvious. In seriousness, those two were mirror images of one another. Constantly experimenting for the sake of satisfying their own musical interests, major physical stylistic transformations, teasingly coy about their personal lives, and generally mysterious despite being megastars.
He lived a full life but Leonard Cohen’s death from this year hit hard as well.
Not for nothin’, but I’d read the ever loving hell out of that graphic novel.
Those two will always top my “shoulda seen them” list.
I consider myself very lucky to have seen both of them live in the mid-90s, though I do wish I could have seen Prince earlier in his career, before he became a Jehovah’s Witness. He was definitely downplaying the sexier side of his work by then.
The day Prince died, I had to go shopping at Walmart. I saw a woman in the self-checkout just put items into her bag without scanning them. The attendant saw her and didn’t do anything. Neither did I. I thought to myself, “This is a world without Prince.”
i was helping a friend move out her ex-boyfriend’s stuff from her house when i found out that he died. i was instantly transported to the one time i saw prince in concert.
i was going through a breakup of my own and was not doing well at all. a (different) friend of mine said “i’m taking you to see prince tonight.”
i was a casual fan, but damn if i didn’t bawl my eyes out when he sang “purple rain.”
I’m a huge Prince fan. The day he died I was just about to take a professional test for work and this one guy who had my phone number texted me ‘Prince is dead!’ and I thought, ‘That dumb fuck doesn’t have a clue!’ As I was going through the test online I started to feel lightheaded and faintly out of my body…thinking, what if that fool is right? But I dared NOT look again at his message or anything else on my phone until the end of the test. As SOON as the test was done I went to the news sites I follow and was DEVASTATED!! I had to get to the toilet on the floor and just bawl my eyes out. Family and friends called me all day long like it was someone I knew who died. And that’s exactly how I felt.
“Mind if I turn on the radio?”
“Oh, my favorite song” she said
And it was Joni singing “Help me I think I’m falling…”BrrringLove that song so much
I remember one critic writing that it was a mistake that never should have seen the light of day and the less said about it the better. I was like ‘Is that motherfucker on CRACK?! This shit is DOPE AS FUUUUCK!’ I still feel that way. I LOVE hearing the story of how it got made too.
the song or the album “was a mistake that never should have seen the light of day and the less said about it the better.”? Either way, both smell of clickbait hot-takes. (Before we had clicks…)
The song. How dare they!! HAHA!
I rewound that part of the tape over and over. It’s like a weird little piece of Bach.Also, I’ve always thought of this song as his take on Norwegian Wood.
Prince had a falling-out with The Revolution, for reasons even the band members have never been able to explain fully.
I believe it had something to do with pancakes.
reasons even the band members have never been able to explain fullyHonestly, it sounds like a tag line for everything Prince ever did.
No, it did not.Pancakes bring life, not destruction.
It was basketball.
Great album
I’m going to take this opportunity to recommend the work Wendy and Lisa have done as a duo, including their self-titled album and Girl Bros. They’re not that Princey but you can see the common ground, and they’re very good in their own right.
Eroica, in particular, is stone-cold excellent. Rainbow Lake, Skeleton Key, Mother Of Pearl, Why Wait For Heaven… all killer tracks. Wendy gets an all-around guitar showcase on this record that she never got with The Revolution, and it’s glorious.
Thanks for the heads up – annoyingly, that one’s not on Spotify, but I’ll seek out a copy.
It’s hard to come by. I worked in a record store back when it was released, and I had to bring it in from Germany. The North American label just kind of abandoned it. You can find it on the YouTube though. This drum groove is one of my go-to favourite riffs to play – obscenely funky:
That’s true, but I don’t think you can spend as much time with Prince as they did and not become great musicians in the end. Maybe not his calibre, but certainly much, much better than you were before.
I doubt that Prince put up with many amatuer musicians or as Miles Davis called them “No playin’ motherfuckers”. I’m sure Prince had similar standards.
Lisa came to him fully formed and most musicians who worked with the two together have said she’s the closest to his genius than any other artist he ever had in his band. Wendy joined the band and played the songs that ended up on Purple Rain (the ones that were live) with like only days of practice. I’d argue the three shaded each other’s work after they three worked together. Not saying you intended to sound sexist, yet, some might take it as such too btw.
That’s interesting to know; thanks for sharing. However, I’d have to argue that in no way is my post sexist, so I’m sorry you read it that way, especially since I always appreciated how Prince supported and encouraged female musicians.However, the reason I wrote what I did was because of an old story that went around about Eric Clapton, where someone asked him what it felt like to be the greatest guitarist in the world and he replied, “I don’t know, go ask Prince.” There is also the theory that, if you play (a game, an instrument, whatever) with someone who is better than you for a period of time, then you, too, will eventually improve. I’m certain that both Wendy and Lisa were great musicians when they first began playing with Prince, but they were teenages (19, I think) when they joined his band. Prince was truly gifted and I maintain that working and playing alongside him would make a great musician even greater. Although let’s face it, Prince was never really able to recreate the magic he had with The Revolution.Good to know you’re still a Wendy and Lisa fan. So am I. Thanks for your reply; I appreciate your point of view. Cheers!
ha! i ran into Eric Clapton and John Meyer at a Wendy and Lisa Largo show a few years back. As we walked in, they were leaving. Anyways, I’m not sure if Prince was the greatest, it’s all subjective. However, after reading an interview with Bjork, were she pointed out how sexist it is that she’s always asked about her male collaborators as if they were responsible for her sounds and yet pundits never flip and do that when it comes to female musicians, i’m just extra sensitive and try to discourage that narrative. For me, Prince’s genius was his songwriting and his star wattage. He knew how to work a stage or a camera while someone like Van Hunt, Nikki Costa and, yes, Wendy and Lisa can play instruments and write just as good songs but they just lack that star wattage. I don’t think we will ever have another star like Prince or Teena Marie or Rick James. Not until we invest in stronger education systems.
So uhhh…when’s that next stimulus check comin’? I got me a record I’d like to buy.
This and that Sade box set for me.
Probably my most-desired “deluxe edition” of any album ever. I am so psyched to dive into this set. One of the few bright spots in an otherwise dire 2020.
I mean, this is pretty much the greatest record of the 80s. Or at least on the very short shortlist.
Are we still allowed to listen to Prince or has he been cancelled yet? I can’t keep track anymore…
It wouldn’t be the first time they tried!
I’ll never forget sitting at the steps of Flinders Street Station with a mate listening to Prince’s Purple Rain.
men like Prince are the creative force of America. love them.
Speaking of ‘digging out old CDs’ Warner finally put ‘Arms of Orion’ on youtube. So many years when I got a jones for that song, I had to dig out my nearly 30 year old Batman Soundtrack for that one.
I saw Prince several times live and he never failed to captivate me. Like most people I thought I had a little more time to see him again, but I should have learned like so many others of his stature (no pun intended), their light may go out prematurely.
Prince scratched a particular itch for me. I considered him to very sophisticated as a composer and musician, without the stuffy elitism that can come with that. I always felt he was battling some demons in his music, as free and sexy as he was, there was some spiritual repression going on. I related to the mess. I was gutted like so many others when he died.
Darn you, AV Club. Now I’m $160 poorer!
Still my favorite Prince song ever.