Prince and I talked a lot about music, but we didn’t talk much about the music business in those early years. I was his oasis from all that. I’m not sure I would have understood it at the time, anyway. One of his crew people told me years later, “Everything was great until Purple Rain. Then he got everything he ever wanted, and he didn’t like it.” That made sense from my perspective.
The Warner Bros. situation was brewing and getting closer to the surface. The basic issue was a dispute over when and how Prince’s music should be released. He had a strategy that didn’t jibe with the label’s, and it bothered him that someone else had the clout to tell him when he could and could not put his own music out there. He didn’t have a personal beef with anyone at the label—or with the idea of record labels in general; he recognized that record labels are great for most artists. But Prince wasn’t like most artists. He had his own massive studio where he could do anything the label’s studio could do. He needed the relationship for distribution, and he was becoming more and more uncomfortable with what he had to give up on his side of that deal: commercial control of his music. When he recorded under the umbrella of the record label, they owned the master—the physical finished version of that song. In Prince’s thinking, the logical counterpart to “master” was “slave.”
This all came to a head in 1994 because of a disagreement over when to drop the album and in what order the singles should be released. The studio wanted to release “7” as the first single; he wanted “My Name Is Prince” first. Ultimately, they did go with what he wanted, but “My Name Is Prince” only got to #36 on the Billboard Hot 100; “7” rocketed to the Top 10 and peaked, coincidentally, at number seven. I don’t think he was bothered by the fact that this made it seem like they were right and he was wrong; it was the fact that the decision was open to discussion at all. He felt he’d earned the right to call those shots, and from my perspective now, I have to agree with him.
One day I rode to Warner Bros. in the limo with him because he was going to a meeting that had him feeling stressed. I waited in the car, making a few calls. When he came out, he had SLAVE written on the right side of his face.
“So… that went well,” I said, hoping to make him smile.
“It definitely changed the tone of the meeting,” he said.
Honestly, even now, I have only a general idea of what this was all about, and at the time I was completely confused by it, but I could tell there was something weighing on him when we came home from the Act I Tour. He hadn’t told me the details of all that yet. He did say that he’d signed a $100 million deal for ten albums—which was a lot more than some other major stars were getting. He was a long way from delivering the ten albums and already beginning to feel trapped, because he had this mountain of unreleased material in the vault, but they wouldn’t let him release it.
He said an exclusivity clause in his contract meant he couldn’t just go off and be a member of someone else’s band—an idea that made him happy, in theory—so he developed a character called Tora Tora who had a whole life of his own. When you see him with a scarf or a veil of chains over his face, that’s Tora Tora. And in the middle of all this, MTV kept asking him to do Unplugged—and he really wanted to do it—but again, there was no negotiating ownership of the master.
During a rare moment of downtime, I invited Mama to bring Hena up for a visit. I didn’t tell Prince that Mama was in town, because he would have thought it was rude to call me to come over while she was visiting, and I didn’t want him not to call me to come over. One afternoon when I hadn’t seen him for a few days, he called me sounding overwhelmed and sad, not saying much but not wanting me to hang up.
“What’s wrong?” I kept asking.
“Nothing.”
“Should I come over?”
“No,” he said. “I’m sick. I don’t look good.”
“I don’t care about that.”
“I care.”
He sounded hollowed out and foggy, and that scared me a little. He didn’t get sick very often. And this felt different. We sat together on the phone without talking for a while, and then I said, “Hey, remember Hena? The little dog you saw in my dressing room in Florida? She’s um… she’s visiting me. Let me bring her over. She’ll cheer you up.”
I wasn’t at all sure this was true, but I hoped it would be, and it was the only way in I could think of at that moment.
Prince surprised me when he said, “Yeah. Bring her over.”
I hustled Hena into her car carrier and booked over there as fast as I could. I was startled when I saw him. He was in his pajamas, which wasn’t totally unusual at that hour of the afternoon, but he kept his eyes away from mine. He seemed vulnerable and weirdly… loopy.
“Are you all right?” I asked.