Transcription
Want to know why? Ask how. Howard the humongous on April 21st, uh, 20, what year is this? 2016. Prince died.
I was going to give you a podcast on Bernie Sanders, but the fact is that I worked for seven years with Prince. In a sense, in the days in which I was doing public relations and, um, career strategy in the music industry, Prince was my masterpiece. But he was my masterpiece because he was Prince's masterpiece. And I thought I would try to tell you a little bit about stuff I would have seen that you would not necessarily have seen.
I started following Prince probably in 1978. Um, he put out a first album. It made it on the R&B charts. Nobody seemed to notice. Nobody knew who he was. The R&B charts was its own ghetto. Most people in the record industry didn't even read the R&B charts. Then a year later, in 1979, he put out his second album, Prince. An astonishing thing happened. No one knew who he was, and that album went platinum. I was paying attention the whole time.
Then I got a message from Bob Cavallo, a phone call. Bob Cavallo was the man who had been hired to manage Prince. Bob Cavallo is a bloody [ __ ] genius. And Bob said, "I've come with this new artist, Prince. Would you like to work with him?" Well, hell yes. I had been admiring whoever this person was from a distance for achieving impossible things, for with total anonymity somehow climbing all the way to platinum on only his second album, and I was hired to go to work with Prince.
The thing that struck me from the very beginning, first of all, I, I laid out my conditions. I had realized through years of work what it took for me to do my part in making a star. Music is an exchange of human soul. It is not the sale of a piece of plastic. It is not the sale of a download. It is not the sale of a concert ticket. It is a soul exchange. And for me to do my part, I needed to find the soul of the artist. And to do that, I needed a month to study everything that artist had ever written, everything that artist had ever said. And then I needed between one and three days alone with the artist to find, to find something very specific.
If you are an artist of any kind, a performing artist, when you sit down at 1:00 or 2:00 in the afternoon in front of a blank computer screen or a blank piece of paper, you have writer's block. You need to write a lyric. You know you can never write another lyric again in your life. You have no idea of how you've written the lyrics for the songs before. And on a good day, by 4:00, there's a lyric sitting in front of you. And on a really good day, the lyric is so utterly perfect that you feel it wrote itself through you.
When you go on stage, the eyes, the pupils of the audience on some very good days dilate. They open wide. The faces melt. People come into a concert terribly self-conscious about the people behind them, the people on either side of them, and what those people will think of them. But if they become utterly fascinated by you, the performer on stage, that self-consciousness melts away, and their faces melt as if they were wax. And somehow the energy of the entire audience comes together and it pours itself across the distance between you and those who are watching you and channels through you as if you were an empty pipe. Goes into something higher inside of you and is utterly transmogrified, utterly transformed, and comes pouring out of you. The experience is so ecstatic. Standing outside the body is what ecstasy means. So ecstatic that sometimes you have an out-of-body experience. You feel as if you are on the ceiling watching as you are danced around by a marionette through a force that you and the audience pass back and forth to each other like a reverberatory circuit in an old-style radio. It is an astonishing experience.
Um, my job was to find the you inside of you, the gods inside of you that wrote that lyric, the gods inside of you that took you over when that audience and you went ecstatic together. And to do that, I studied everything about you and needed to be alone, totally with you.
I had a call from one of the publicists at, uh, Warner Brothers Records at Prince's Record Company. Now, in those days, black publicists, if there were any at all, um, were a little segregated ghetto. They didn't talk to the white publicists. They didn't behave like the white publicists. But Warner's was smart enough to have a really good black publicity team, good people with analytic minds, highly articulate. And one of these highly articulate, analytic people called and said, "Howard, you're going to have trouble with this one. Prince will not do interviews. We tried to put him with two interviewers, and he tried to strangle one of them. It's useless."
Well, Prince flew me to Buffalo, New York, which happens to be my hometown, where he was rehearsing for the Dirty Minds Tour. He, I watched while he rehearsed until 2:00 in the morning. And then from 2:00 in the morning until 9:00 in the morning, we sat together, and I went through the story of Prince's life. What was I looking for? I was looking for passion points. I was looking for moments in Prince's life that inserted themselves into the development of his brain and which his brain wrapped itself around for the rest of his life, making him who he was.
And I found a story. When Prince was 5 years old, his mother had taken him to see a rehearsal, a rehearsal of his father in a theater very much like the theater he and I were sitting backstage in. Um, somewhere between 500 and 1,200 seats, all facing the stage. Um, he saw his father in the spotlight at a piano with five of the most beautiful women he had ever seen in his life. And that was it. That was his passion point. That was the moment that fixated Prince on music.
But the reason I knew Prince was a superstar was very different than that. Prince, if you have all the talent in the world and you have no persistence, you will go nowhere. If you have a modicum of talent and you persist and persist and persist, you can go an awful lot further. If the music is knit into your bones so bad that you need to make music almost every single working hour of the day, that in working hour that you need to make it every leisure hour of the day. If the music is so strong in you that it's the thing that you live for. That to you it's more valuable than eating, breathing, and sleeping, then the persistence is automatic. The work ethic is there. And you have part of what it takes to be a star. The other part of what it takes is that ability to go explosive and ecstatic on stage and take the audience explosive and ecstatic with you.
Those were all qualities that Prince had, possibly more than any other musical artist that in my days running the biggest PR firm in the music industry as a scientific experiment in mass behavior, as a scientific experiment to dive somehow into the very marrow of the forces of history. I worked with Billy Joel, Billy Idol, Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel, David Byrne, Aerosmith, Kiss, Queen, um, Paul Simon, etc. And of all the explosive stars, John Mellencamp was one of the most explosive entertainers you've ever seen in your life on stage. Michael Jackson was one of the most ferociously in command performers you've ever seen in your life. But one of at least the top three was Prince.
This is Howard the humongous speaking to you from the future. It's your job and my job to make or want to know why? Ask how. And now for that insidious, slippery, sleazy, slimy. I have no idea of why they put the button way back here. Off button. I think I've found it.