The Purple Brick Road...My Prince Top 10!

After weeks of diving back into the deep pool of music of the purple Yoda, I’ve decided to put together my top 10 list of Prince albums. While putting the list together it was obvious that the 90s was NOT an era of Prince that I enjoyed very much. There were some amazing songs scattered out across the decade (“7”, “Cream”, “Gett Off”, “Diamonds and Pearls”)…but when it came to albums as a whole I wasn’t that pleased. Bowie is another favorite artist of mine that went through a period where his albums didn’t grab me. With Bowie it was the 80s.

10. Lovesexy (1988)
A bright and funky blend of god, sex and drugs!
Key songs: "Alphabet St.", "I Wish U Heaven" and "Anna Stesia"

9. Parade (1986)
A sprawling kaleidoscope of sounds and textures. Parade is full of surprises, every song having experimental qualities. The arrangements are masterfully minimal.
Key songs: "Kiss", "Mountains" and "Anotherloverholenyohead"

8. Musicology (2004)
Catchy pop-funk that brought Prince back into view for those that didn't 'get off' on much of his 90s work. The spark was back and Prince delivered an album inspired by those that he grew up listening to.
Key songs: "Musicology", "Cinnamon Girl" and "Life 'O' The Party"

7. LotusFlow3r (2009)
Old school Prince. Some of his best guitar playing is on this release. LotusFlow3r is a fusion of rock, jazz and futuristic funk!
Key songs: "Feel Good, Feel Better, Feel Wonderful", "Crimson and Clover", "Colonized Mind" and "Dreamer"

6. Around The World In A Day (1985)
Prince maturing and expanding his artistic palette with psychedelic gems. As a huge Beatles fan, this album was a real treat. Instead of going a predicted route musically after Purple Rain, Prince released this bizarre slice of neo-psychedelia, divorcing himself from anything that might hint at the sounds that had come before. It was brave and GREAT!!
Key songs: "Raspberry Beret", "Pop Life" and "Paisley Park"

5. Dirty Mind (1980)
This was the album where Prince became the hyper-sexualized performer we know and love! Every song drips with sexuality. A genius funk, pop, new wave album that can get any party kicked into high gear.
Key songs: ALL OF THEM!

4. Controversy (1981)
This is a transitional album between the lean, dirty funk of the previous album (Dirty Mind), and the electric pop that Prince would stick with for most of the 80s. This is where Prince really began to show us where he was headed.
Key songs: "Controversy", "Lets Work", "Do Me Baby" and "Sexuality"

3. Purple Rain (1984)
What can really be said about this album that hasn't been said a million times before?
Key songs: ALL OF THEM!

2. 1999 (1982)
Not only did 1999 present Prince as a legitimate hitmaker, it managed to deliver his most adventurous album to date to his largest audience. The fact that Warner Bros. gave Prince the latitude to record a double-LP set shows how much star potential they felt he had.
Key songs: ALL OF THEM!

1. Sign "☮" the Times (1987)
In 1987 Prince promised to deliver "an album that matters," and he succeeded with this double-LP. Cooler than Michael Jackson, more diverse and subtle than Madonna and a killer musician to boot, Prince displayed that there were few genres within popular music that he couldn’t master. Purple Rain was the moment where he perfected quirky pop, but this goes even beyond that and becomes something much more. It is a perfect distillation of everything genius about Prince, and one of the best albums of the '80s!
Key songs: ALL OF THEM!!!

The Purple Reign

I want to start out saying something to all those that are expressing how pathetic it is to be so torn up over the loss of an artist such as Prince. I don't look up to him as a hero or a messiah. I never thought that he could walk on water or make the blind see. I don't intend on building a church in his name. The fact is that he played a major part of my youth. His music expanded my horizon and he opened my eyes to something that moved me. My wife showed me a Tweet from a fan in response to all those that can't seem to grasp it. It said "Thinking about how we mourn artists we've never met. We don't cry because we knew them, we cry because they helped us know ourselves".

Around 1979 I was at a party (which I am SURE that I was not supposed to be at) when I first heard the music of Prince. The song was “Soft And Wet”. My first thought was that Michael Jackson had shed his good boy image and decided to dirty things up. It was the falsetto that made me think it was Michael Jackson. I was shown the album and told it was this amazing guy called Prince. Then “I Wanna Be Your Lover” blasted from the speakers. That was it. I was hooked. This guy played all the instruments, arranged, wrote AND produced his own music. It was the sex of it all that grabbed me. I was around 12 years old and sex was obviously something that was really starting to fog my mind. There were questions to be answered and Prince seemed to step in and introduce me to an alien landscape that opened my eyes…and the girls LOVED him. It wasn’t cool for a young, white, sheltered boy to like Prince yet. It was my secret. It was a secret I kept to myself until 1982 when the album 1999 hit the stores and airwaves and people REALLY started to pay attention to the strange little man. It was a bit safer to start sharing that I was a fan. Those that were just getting into him had missed out on some killer albums. Controversy and Dirty Mind were released prior to 1999 and were filled with some of the funkiest, sexual work that Prince ever released. It was music that you had to listen to on headphones so not to give your parents a heart attack and call a priest in to try and save the soul. My soul was just fine.

Everything changed in the summer of 1984. Purple Rain was released and Prince’s life changed forever. The musical landscape changed as well. Not only did Prince put orgasms to music, but he also rocked like Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin and the Stones. It was pure genius. He knew that he had to shock the world in a way that was original yet familiar enough to get the attention of those that were never exposed to music like his. Parents thought he was dangerous and that was enough to make the kids NEED to listen. We listened!

Purple Rain sold 1.5 million in its debut week in the United States alone and spent 24 consecutive weeks at #1 on the Billboard albums chart. The album established him as a force not to be messed with. Then came the film. Princemania exploded!! Considered to be one of the greatest rock-n-roll movies of all time, Purple Rain was a box office success, grossing $68,392,977 in the United States alone. Elements of funk, dance, and rock music made it easy for the music to defy genre categories. His songs could be heard on rock, country, pop and R&B stations across the country. He did not belong to any specific genre. He was…well…he was Prince.

I now felt safe to come out and announce being the fan that I was. My heavy metal buddies even embraced that this guy could rock. The world took to Prince in a way that I could not have imagined years prior. After years of circling the planet, Prince finally landed. His landing was like a meteor striking the center of the world creating a purple mushroom cloud.

The rest of the decade saw Prince release album after album of wonderful, chart topping pieces of art. Around The World In A Day, released in 1985, was his Sgt. Pepper. A psychedelic vibe flowed through fantastic songs such as "Raspberry Beret", "Pop Life" and "America". This really piqued my interest as to where Prince was now leading us. My first musical love affair was with The Beatles. Around The World In A Day was my cup of tea!

He then followed up with Parade in 1986. The album saw Prince further diversifying musically by adding orchestrations to his music. The song "Kiss' was THE song summer. He was now light years from his earlier sound and I was digging it.

Sign O' The Times, released in 1987, was the album I was waiting for! In my opinion it is his finest recording. The album's music draws on funk, soul, pop and rock. It was a double album that seemed to have everything that Prince represented up to that point. It was universally applauded by critics and the fans loved it. Prince ended the 80s with two more albums, Lovesexy and Batman. It was one hell of ride in a decade that also shot Michael Jackson and Madonna to stardom.

Prince continued to release albums until his passing. He never quite reached the heights he had climbed in the 80s though. That is a shame. Though I did not care much for some of his work in the 90s, he once again blew my mind with his 2004 release, Musicology. It was the sound of Prince reaching back to the artists that inspired him in his youth. What followed was a run of albums that all seemed to honor his past. 3121, Planet Earth, Lotusflow3r, MPLSound, Plectrumelectrum, HITnRUN Phase One and his swansong HITnRUN Phase Two were all fantastic reminders of what made Prince the artist that broke down barriers. He has earned his place on the Mount Rushmore of musicians.

So many wonderful memories are attached to an era when purple was the most cherished color. Many people have reached out to me in the past 24 hours with messages about how they thought of me as soon as they heard of his passing. They too have shared the magic of Prince with me through the years. My lip syncing days to the Purple Rain album was that of legend at the summer camp I attended for years. To this day I will shake my “thang” when a Prince song is played in a club or bar. I will miss the feeling I would get when I would experience a new Prince album for the first time. I have the memories though. I now REALLY know what it sounds like when doves cry!

Adrian Belew: On A Spaceship Ride with David Bowie

On January 10th the music world lost one of its greatest when David Bowie passed away. His influence will continue as long as music is created. For over 5 decades his peers and critics considered him an innovator. He brought a new dimension to popular music and his influence is unquestionable. Many artists have worked with Bowie. One in particular is from Northern Kentucky where I grew up. Adrian Belew.

I had contacted Belew and asked him about his time with Bowie and what it was like to work with rock royalty.

"In Lake Geneva, Switzerland there was a popular lakeside casino which sometimes featured name bands in concert. One such event was Frank Zappa and The Mothers Of Invention. Long before I worked with Frank, they played a show at the casino. As the story goes, someone with a flare gun shot a flare into the ceiling while Frank was playing, the ceiling caught on fire, and the casino burnt to the ground. Frank told me after they evacuated the building he and his band walked around the lake to their hotel where they sat and watched the place burn down with all their gear and instruments inside. The next day there was nothing left. Even the cymbals had melted. This is of course the story which prompted the song "Smoke On The Water" by Deep Purple. The casino was re-built and expanded to include a recording studio. It's where the Montreux Jazz Festival is held each year. It's where we recorded Lodger in 1978."

Indifferently received by critics at the time, Lodger is now widely considered to be among Bowie's most underrated albums and a favorite with fans. It was recorded between legs of Bowie's 1978 world tour.

"The new studio/casino was built out of thick concrete. It looked like a WWII bunker. The strangest feature of the studio was that the control room was on the first floor and the recording room was up the stairs on the second floor above it.Usually you can see the producer, engineer, etc. through a glass window. In this case you could not see them, but they could see you through a closed circuit TV screen." Belew explained.

Belew went on to explain the recording process.

"By the time I was brought in there were 20 tracks to work on. I was very anxious to hear them but David and the producers, Brian Eno and Tony Visconti, patiently explained their concept. The record was to be called "Planned Accidents" so they wanted to capture my accidental responses to the songs by not allowing me to hear them beforehand. I would go upstairs into the recording room, put on my headphones, look into the closed circuit camera and say, "What key would this one be in?". I'd hear a disconnected voice, "Don't worry about the key. When you hear the count off just start playing something." Belew added "I would be allowed perhaps 2 or 3 tries and then we'd move on just about the time I knew the key. David, Eno, and Tony would "piece together" their favorite bits from whatever I'd managed to play.That's how we did "DJ", "Boys Keep Swinging" and "Red Sails" to name a few of my favorites.What I learned from the process was something I long suspected: the recording studio is where the magic happens and where I love to be."

In 1990 Bowie began a greatest hits tour. The Sound+Vision tour was one in which he would retire his back catalog. The tour would visit 27 countries with over 100 performances. Bowie had used Belew on his 1978 tour as guitarist. He must have been very impressed because for the Sound+Vision tour he hired Belew to be the music director. The two even got together to record some music before the tour began.

"At the time David asked me to be music director for the 1990 Sound and Vision tour, which was expected to be a year-long tour, I had just started recording my fifth solo album to be called Young Lions. It made sense for David to be involved in the album so he generously sent me a demo of one of his unreleased songs called "Pretty Pink Rose". I recorded my version of the song, playing all the instruments, but leaving room for vocals. It was decided we should sing it as a duet. During tour rehearsals in New York City we finally had an evening to record the vocals, an extraordinary moment for me. Later I mixed the song and put it on my record along with a second song we wrote together called "Gunman".

When asked if there was a creative spark ignited in working with Bowie...

"You bet! It was always exciting to be around David and inspiring as well. He gave me plenty of rope to hang myself with, asked for my input more often than not and was enthusiastic about most of my ideas."

Many had come and gone in the world of Bowie. Belew was fortunate enough to have worked with him on 2 tours, an album and 2 songs. I also asked him if he had any fond memories of working with the Starman and if they had stayed in contact after that last tour together.

"Every memory is fond. It all runs together in my mind like a film I've seen. To pick one instance: I visited David at his home in Switzerland for a week during which time he taught me about his influences and he and I even tried to write songs together. We stayed in contact via email, but hadn't seen each other for a few years. We had no plans to work together again but I always assumed it would happen."

I have been asked many times what my favorite Bowie songs are. It is such a hard question to answer with such a massive library of songs that span a career of over 50 years. Belew answered with his.

"I have to name 3: "Ashes To Ashes "summarizes what made David so unique. "Space Oddity" was the first song of our concert each night for 108 shows and each night it gave me chills. Last but not least "Pretty Pink Rose" for obvious reasons."

Adrian Belew is a talent beyond measure and one of the nicest men I have ever encountered in the music industry. A Northern Kentucky boy that has left a mark in the world of music and is still exciting fans around the globe with new music and tours. I want to thank him for all the wonderful music he has created. I have seen him live with King Crimson, The Bears and solo. Each time was a mind blowing experience.