![]() By the time the drum part was recorded, it was clear. He went out and played guitar, then overdubbed drums. VP): You could not only tell there was talent but there was a vision. because its executives agreed to give Prince artistic freedom and let him produce his debut. Husney refused offers from A&M and Columbia and opted for Warner Bros. And we sent the tape on a silver reel - it was reel-to-reel, not cassette. We were all wearing three-piece suits we had one made for Prince, too. at that time was jeans open, untucked shirts, and cowboy boots. I didn’t want any press clippings or 8 million pictures. I knew that he was shy, so the second marketing move was that less is more. I knew if he was worth so much at 18, he was worth that much more at 17. The first marketing move was I put his age back a year. OWEN HUSNEY: We put together 15 press kits and sent out seven or eight to the major labels. It was Andre, me and Prince most of the time. We would move the furniture around at office, and we’d jam until dawn almost every night. We went to a Santana concert at Northrop. I took him to get his license eventually. He got over that shyness, that’s for sure.īOBBY Z: My day job was a runner for Owen’s ad company, but my job became basically to take care of Prince. came in while he was singing “Soft and Wet,” and he was a little embarrassed. When anyone came in the studio while he was singing, he wanted me to turn the light off because he didn’t want anybody to look at him. The horn part, the guitar part - he had it all separated. He had a little cassette machine into which he’d hummed each part. ![]() To record a second demo, he enlisted Bobby Z’s brother, Minneapolis recording engineer David Rivkin (later David Z), who had recorded Prince’s band Grand Central in 1975.ĭAVID Z: He did all the instruments. Husney raised $50,000 from investors to support Prince until he could land a record contract. They unsuccessfully pitched a demo tape to record labels, then turned to Owen Husney, a concert promoter who also owned an ad agency. Moon gave Prince a key to the studio so he could work at night. ![]() I’d never seen anyone play the piano like that. It was moving, waving like a cartoon, responding to his fingertips. It was an upright or spinet - a small thing. In 1976 Chris Moon, a south Minneapolis studio proprietor and aspiring lyricist, hired Prince and other musicians to record music for a slide show.īOBBY Z (drummer): Prince was playing the piano. ![]() I grew up with Santana and Larry Graham and Fleetwood Mac, all kinds of different things. PRINCE (on “Larry King Live,” 1999): was interesting because I grew up getting a wider array of music. He had the biggest Afro in the world - that wasn’t fair, either. He showed up at practice and picks up a guitar and plays, note for note, the intricate solo from Chicago’s “Make Me Smile.” I made the mistake of getting up from the drums, and he sat there and he killed ‘em. I was gonna play drums, and I knew Prince played keyboards. We were in a band to back up the choir at school. JIMMY JAM: We were at Bryant Junior High. I’d usually get ridiculed for it, but I ended up doing my own thing. I was a poor student, because when a teacher would be trying to teach me how to play junky stuff, I would start playing my own songs. I had one piano lesson and two guitar lessons as a kid. PRINCE (Star Tribune interview, 1978): Around the time I was 8, I had a pretty good idea what the piano was all about. I’d have to hunt for him, and that’s where he’d be - in the music department. When he was 3 or 4, we’d go to the department store and he’d jump on the radio, the organ, any type of instrument there was. HIS MOTHER (Star Tribune interview, 1984): He could hear music even from a very early age. Since Mattie called her husband Prince, she dubbed her son Skipper “because he was small in size and he was just real cute - he was a darling baby.” They had been in a jazz ensemble called the Prince Roger Trio. Prince Roger Nelson was born June 7, 1958, at Mount Sinai Hospital in Minneapolis to Mattie Shaw and John Nelson. This oral history was originally compiled by the Star Tribune staff in 2004, when the man behind the “Minneapolis sound” was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. ![]()
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