“Well, he's playing mainstream pop-rock,” Fink told him. Fink, recalls that during the 1999 tour, his band leader asked him what makes Seger’s music so popular. Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet band were doubling down on white-man soul with the basic but wildly popular “Old Time Rock & Roll,” and Michael Jackson was re-wiring the industry with an album composed almost entirely of number 1 pop hits that spent 37 weeks lording over the Billboard charts. In 1982, Bruce Springsteen was devastating the country with the spare and stark depictions of a bankrupt American Dream on his darkened opus Nebraska. His most successful song to date, “Little Red Corvette,” had peaked at number 6 on the Billboard Hot 100, which simply was not good enough for the man who once described the musical training he received at the hands of his father as “almost like the Army.” Despite his acute talent, he was still viewed by the industry at large as little more than an extra-funky urban novelty act, someone in league with the likes of Rick James and Lipps Inc. You were to believe that he was as mysterious as god, something conjured, perhaps from your fantasies, a magical apparition descending from funk heaven, arriving on a cloud of purple smoke and adorned in little more than a guitar, a falsetto made of glitter, and a deeply intractable groove.īut as the wildly creative are wont to do, by 1983 Prince was looking to switch that whole thing up. He was from some alternate dimension where it was always 2 a.m. You were not to find pictures of him in Teen Beat buying apples and milk at the grocery store in sweatpants and a baseball cap. You were not to fully comprehend his race nor his gender. You were not to know who he was or where he was from. He famously stonewalled music press royalty-even kingmaker Dick Clark on his own show. He refused interviews and shied away from press profiles. He presented himself as a kind of raunch alien bringing the divine soundtrack to your coke-fueled, crushed velour orgy, the musical equivalent of a fog machine and a black strobe light. Steve came in the next day and kicked everybody out of the studio ’cause he wanted to sing it by himself.Prior to Purple Rain, the backstory Prince had created for himself was that of a sex-obsessed R&B groove superstar, a multi-instrumentalist and prodigious musical upstart who used his considerable powers for the sole purposes of getting the club lit the fuck up. “So I wrote out my own little chart and I went out, and I believe we played the song twice and that was it. “I didn’t know what to do on it so I said ‘I’ll just sit this one out,’ and everybody went, ‘No, no, just play, play whatever comes to your mind,’ ” the guitarist says. “The next day, brings in this song that just came to him in the middle of the night and wrote down all the lyrics and had the basic song put together,” remembers Schon, who nevertheless had trouble coming up with a solo. The song was a late addition to the album, after producers Mike Stone and Kevin Elson asked for another power ballad for the set. “Faithfully” was the second single from Frontiers, peaking at No. “He got me these amazing seats at the Purple Rain show when he played the Cow Palace in San Francisco, and I thought it was ridiculous how cool it was,” Cain says. But that particular phone call was amazing.” There was a One Direction song I was upset about and I just let it roll. He wanted to check in with Jonathan Cain and make sure I wasn’t going to say, ‘That sounds like “Faithfully.” ‘ There’s so many other things that have come down the pike that were more of a rip-off, that have stolen Journey songs. “I just thought it seriously showed the kind of caring, classy guy Prince was. “No, no, that’ll just bring bad juju on you, and you don’t want to do that,” Cain says. Let it go.’ ” But Cain never had a moment’s second thought about even asking for a co-writing credit on the anthem. “I think he called our office asking about it and we all talked about it and everybody said, ‘Nah, it’s the highest form of flattery. “Prince felt, I guess, it was obvious enough that he was worried we were going to sue him,” Journey guitarist Neal Schon recalls. Stevie Nicks Recalls "Amazing Relationship" With Prince After "I Kind of Ripped off His Song"
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