Glam Slam 9 June 1994 (am)

 1993 saw Prince change his name to a symbol, but it was 1994 when he seized upon this new direction and killed off the Prince of the 1980s. With a complete rejection of his former music and persona, the man we see in 1994 has completely reinvented himself,  all traces of his previous history completely erased. That makes for a thrilling ride as the bootlegs of 1994 and the next few years come from a completely revitalized artist, with fresh material, a new outlook, and a mesmerizing stage presence. The change is so striking, so dramatic, and so strong, that the most surprising aspect of this metamorphosis isn’t the fact that Prince changed, but the fact that it didn’t change everything forever after. Watching these shows, it is hard to imagine that by 2010 Prince would have reverted back to his name, back to his songs, and was presenting greatest hits shows for the masses. 1994 was a lightning strike that made this future impossible to imagine. I have covered several concerts from 1994 already because they are important in the overall arc of Prince's career. The bootlegs are exhilarating celebrations of rebirth, and although at the time it left me, and many others, scratching our heads, in the wider context and 25 years on we can see just how momentous these concerts were. This week I will be looking at the second of three nights from Miami; hot sweaty concerts that very much capture the spirit of the time. It has taken me many years to catch up with him, but this is the Prince that I enjoy most. 

1994-06-09 (am) Glam Slam, Miami Beach, Florida 

With the metallic storm of electric guitar opening the show, Prince demonstrates that although his classic rock sound has been tempered, he remains committed to his instrument, more so than ever as it barely leaves his hands even as he plays an incendiary version of “Billy Jack Bitch.” Prince pushes deeper into territories he has previously successfully mined, in this case, the funk of the song is just as strong as anything else he has produced, and the streak of steely guitar he inserts into it comes not from a rock background, nor a funk background, but rather his unique vision and immediately adds a cold steel edge that the lyrics suggest but never quite deliver. Everything you need to know about the forthcoming show is in these opening minutes, the funk dark and heavy, the guitar sharpened and brutal, and the lyrics venomous and angry, not at past lovers as we heard in the previous ten years, but at the world at large, his anger no longer looking inwards, but now aimed outwards. The song may be aimed square at CJ, but there is a much darker undercurrent that bites at the media and the deeper hurt. 

 

“The Most Beautiful Girl In The World,” neatly straddles pure pop and a ballad. It could be read as either, and there are moments in the song when it sounds so ethereal that Prince is merely the channel for the music that is emanating from the stage. A song that can be (and often is) overworked, Prince in this case chooses not to tinker with it, and that perhaps explains why it does have the feeling that it does. At six months old, it had already peaked in the charts, and already it feels like an elder statesman at this concert. 

The last album to be released under the name Prince is still two months away, so any song off Come still retains an unknown quality to this audience. “Loose,” has a modern club sound, at least for the time, and has Prince doing his best to bury his previous self, and music, under the busy sound. It’s a daring song, full of electronic noise that serves as the canvas upon which Prince and the band paint their sounds across. With a bassline hot and heavy, seemingly rising from under the floor, where it may well have been mined, the electronic whistles and drive are equally matched by this wall of thick sound.  The melodic Prince we heard earlier is gone, replaced by pure energy and rhythm, the only hint that this might be the same man coming from the galaxy-shattering guitar solo that cuts through all the excesses and brings us to a place that the music had previously promised, somewhere new, unknown, and thrilling –  a foreign planet that had been hiding behind the black hole that existed at the heart of the song all along. 

 

Prince’s choice of cover version is interesting, whereas usually we see an older song chosen, and typically by a funk artist, in this case, we have a song that is only a year old at the time, and from a hip-hop artist. His cover of Salt-n-Peppers “Shoop” is an odd affair, Prince reading lyrics to some of his own songs over the music, “Sexy MF” and “Gett Off,’ both make guest appearances, in what is a causal performance that updates some Prince material (although only a couple of years old) for his current palette. 

In his 1977 obituary for Elvis, Lester Bangs wrote “We will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis. So I won’t bother saying goodbye to his corpse. I will say goodbye to you.” In the Prince world, we may well say something similar – “We will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Purple Rain” Here Prince pushes that theory. Prince fans of various factions may share the love for “Purple Rain,” 1984, and all that it meant, but ever since Prince has pushed his music harder and further in different directions, testing how far his fans are prepared to go with him. His funk is funkier, his rock rockier and his pop poppier, as all those that follow him, the funkateers, the rockers, the pop-music fans, are pulled further and further apart from each other as he continues in this quest for new territories. The long groove that fills the second half of the song, Tommy Barbarella playing while Prince furnishes it with a bass line that barely simmers, would test a casual fan, but more than anything it makes a lie of the second part of Lester Bang’s quote “So I won’t bother saying good-bye to his corpse. I will say goodbye to you.” The new music of Prince is stretching in many directions at once, but it galvanizes the fans. They each may have their own sound that they seek from Prince, but all are held together by the uniqueness of this artist, and the sense that they are witnessing something special unfolding onstage. Never again would Prince fans have a single album or song to rally around, but now it is Prince himself who holds the fan community together, he has finally become one with music and to follow him is to follow all that he does. We are not saying goodbye to each other at all, but saying goodbye to familiarity and contentment, now committed to following Prince and wherever he may take us. 

 

“It’s Alright” is the cover version we would expect from Prince.  It isn’t a full-blooded rendition, but it is the jolt that is required to again re-energize the concert. There isn’t a lot to it, and it is the much longer “I Believe In You,” (also from Graham Central Station)  that highlights the band onstage with Prince. Sonny T and Morris Hayes make a firm impression, but it is hard for anyone to hold a candle to Prince when he has the guitar in hand, and the final minutes belong solely to him as he lifts the song to a level previously only dreamt of. 

 

Prince stands alone out in front of the music for his cover of Stevie Wonder's” Maybe Your Baby” While the band drapes their sound across the stage, Prince alone brings the soul of the song to light at the front of the stage, first with his vocal delivery, then with his shattering guitar break that can barely be contained by the room. It is jarring against the smoothness of the rest of the song but adds a sense of urgency to an otherwise laid-back sound. The song ends with a bizarre hat show by Prince, as he models an array of hats to the adoring and somewhat bewildered audience. It’s all good fun but does leave me wondering what was the point. The video bootleg of the concert ends at this point, although there is circulating an audience audio recording that contains the following “Peach” and “Glam Slam Boogie” 

 

The importance of these 1994 concerts cannot be understated. This is a man who having conquered commercial and creative heights is now seeking to push himself even further, to see just how far one can go as an artist. It may have been driven by commercial considerations and his war with Warners, but as an artist, it offered him a chance to try something that perhaps he would not have dared had he been more comfortable. If you live long enough, you see the end of what you saw the beginning of, and this is certainly true for anyone who has followed Prince’s career. 1993/1994 were the beginnings of the name change, the war with Warners, and all the new music that came with it. Prince may have sought to bury his previous popself, he certainly makes a good fist of it here, but time softened him, eventually returning to his name and the music. This era, and the bootlegs of the time, now exist in isolation, an island that sits in the middle of his career, untouched and untainted by what came before and what came after. The bootlegs give us a new, almost unrecognizable, artist and his new creative domain, another time, another place, only existing on faded recordings and videotapes. This bootleg is entirely of its time and serves as a reminder of what an adventurous artist Prince was at this moment. No hits (except for “The Most Beautiful Girl In The World”) and none of the bombastic hype that came with his pop success, this is a man presenting his new music in the simplest way possible. Every one of these shows is worth studying, and this one gives us a brief peek into the monumental changes Prince was undergoing at the time, this concert is short, but its impact remains huge. 

It's only fitting that next time I will take a listen to the next show from Miami, as Prince continues down this new road.  I’ll see you then for more of the same, but different.