PRINCEAs much of a bandleader as Prince
was in his music, the artwork for
the cover of 1999 was more
collaborative. It featured some early
ideas for the Purple Rain fi l m.
“Prince was ready for a big change
in his work,” says Jill Jones (pictured
below). “If you look at the 1999
artwork, it’s a collage about his fi lm- today, you might even say it’s a
mood board. He featured fi lm ideas
among the images, like Marilyn
Monroe’s arm.”
Jones reveals Prince had a board in
his offi ce, open to anyone who
wanted to draw on it or add a
design. “Vanity did a lot of drawing,
some of which is in the artwork,”
says Jones. “It all fed in – the album
helped come together because
everyone was adding to the collage
of what it could be, and Prince was
defi nitely inspired by having all these
talented people around him.”
He added The Revolution’s name in
backwards writing at the last minute.
“Prince was inspired by The Time to
have his own musicians become a
band,” says Jones. “He’d been
working on that concept in his mind
for some time. Writing their name in
the artwork helped The Revolution
become manifest.”
D.M.S-ART
Dickerson might have enjoyed trying to
win over 94,000 angry Stones fans, but the
opposition caused Prince to rethink his music
altogether. “As dark and frustrating as the
Stones experience was, what Prince did as a
reaction was to write his way out of it,” says
Bobby Z. “He created a fork in the road –
for The Stones’ audience and rock radio, he
created Little Red Corvette. And in one song,
1999 , Prince encapsulated all the remnants
left of the disco era.”
Jill Jones befriended Prince when she was
a backing singer for Teena Marie, the
support act on his Dirty Mind tour in 1980.
They fi rst worked together on 1999 , when
Jones could see Prince was determined to
fi nally break through into the mainstream.
“When Prince’s best friend André Cymone left
the band as his bassist in 1981, he was on a
different mission,” Jones explains. “He
wanted to move away from the black charts
and into the white charts, the pop charts.
Accessing that new audience was a very
creative time for him.”
Lisa Coleman had joined Prince as pianist
and keyboardist for Dirty Mind and saw his
battle to break through. “Everything was just
starting to take form around then,” says
Coleman. “Prince’s management saw that
what he was doing could be bigger, that he
had the talent of a major artist. They’d
sometimes push him to write that hit song –
‘That thing you play on the guitar all the time?“PRINCE’S MANAGEMENT
SAW THAT WHAT HE WAS
DOING COULD BE BIGGER,
THAT HE HAD THE TALENT
OF A MAJOR ARTIST”
LISA COLEMAN
That’s a hit: write it!’ They pushed him to that,
but he wanted it, too. He wanted to be a
great artist. At the same time, he was a
guerrilla warfare guy who wanted to make
his own rules.”
Famously prolifi c, Prince had so many
ideas it’s no wonder he sometimes had to be
reminded which of them were potentially
gold. Even 1999 itself was remarkably
casual. Jones recalls being woken up by
Prince while with him at his house in
Minneapolis to record her vocals, with
Coleman driving over in the middle of the
night having also been summoned. “I’d been
asleep, and suddenly Prince was going, ‘Can
you come and sing on this?’ like it was
urgent,” says Jones. “I was in my pyjamas,
threw on my fuzzy bunny slippers and made
a cup of tea while waiting for Lisa. I guess
your voice is still waking up if you’re woken
up like that and has a different tone, so
maybe there was method to his madness!”FIGHT FOR YOUR RIGHT TO PARTY
As was standard for the pair, Jones and
Coleman shared a microphone to record
their vocals. “Mine and Lisa’s tones worked
well together anyway,” says Jones. “I knew
not to interfere with the main singer’s voice,
but to add whatever my own tonal abilities
were – those were always the best backing
vocals.” Coleman is full of enthusiasm for
Jones’ talents, laughing as she recalls the pair
recording the song’s explosive “paaarty!”
fi nale. “Prince was encouraging me, going,
‘Come on, Lisa, this is your bit!’” she says.
“I was a little shy, going, [timid voice] ‘Ooh,
party, woo-hoo.’ Jill really has the power.
She was kicking my ass, singing all these
great licks, and she added the fi re we
needed. My voice is a lot dreamier.”
In seeking to make the album appeal to as
wide an audience as possible, Prince made
his message clear that he was here to dance
as well as rock out. “The word ‘party’ is key
to 1999 ,” says Bobby Z. “He might sound
tongue-in-cheek, but ‘That’s right – party’ is
an important line, as he’s cleaning up the
mess left behind by ‘Disco sucks’. He’s saying,
‘It’s the end of the world, but we’re dancing to
Prince and partying. It was a message of
‘This is your moment, so live it up.’” The
drummer says the song was inspired by
watching on tour the otherwise forgettable
1981 Nostradamus documentary The Man
Who Saw Tomorrow, voiced by Orson
Welles, which predicts the apocalypse will
happen in 1999. “All these movies we saw
on VHS on the tour bus inspired Prince,” says
Bobby. “The Idolmaker, an amazing fi lm
about Fabian, inspired Prince to create The
Time. A huge part of creating Purple Rain
was Quadrophenia – the different styles of
clothing for mods and rockers fascinated
Prince. We were immersed in culture.”
Maybe so, though Prince wasn’t above
less artistic pursuits on tour. “Prince was big
on Mattel Intellivision, which was infi nitely
better than Atari but not marketed so well,”
states Dickerson. “Prince and I got locked in
battles on Super Pro Football. We’d have
running tournaments, getting to the point
where we almost couldn’t wait to be done
with the show, so we could get back on the
bus and resume playing. Prince hated