Sex fiend or control freak? Prince, apparently, was both. Since his death from a fentanyl overdose in 2016, stories have multiplied about his exacting perfectionism in the studio and the stringent rules he imposed on guests and staff at his Paisley Park mansion. The most colorful anecdote, so far, is of Prince in his car, chasing a young Sinéad O’Connor on foot while she flees his house in Malibu. According to O’Connor, Prince was insisting that she become one of his “protégées” and also stop swearing in interviews. She answered both demands with an expletive, and that was not the funky response he wanted.
The image Prince crafted for himself in lyrics, concerts, and videos was looseness and liberation, a lascivious letting-go. So how did Prince get to be such a tightass? Since his death, stories have multiplied about his exacting perfectionism in the studio and the stringent rules he imposed on guests and staff at Paisley Park.
In fact, funk was never as free as it seemed, starting with Soul Brother No. 1, His Bad Self, the Minister of New New Super Heavy Funk, James Brown. Like Prince, Brown was raised by an authoritarian father; and, like Prince, he fined his staff when they didn’t meet his standards. The stories about both men point to a larger truth about funk music in general: it might be nasty, but it was never undisciplined.
Funk Is Perfectly Nasty
What is funk? Quincy Jones, the composer and arranger who produced Michael Jackson’s first three albums and all of his greatest hits, defined funky as follows: “It means to get nasty!… It deals with the heart in its purest form.” The word funk is about the same age as Shakespeare and the King James Bible. Initially, it meant “stink”. In the 1950s, it became associated with jazz and blues as a term for earthy, authentic, and emotional playing.
James Brown elevated the performance style into funk music, teaching America and the world to “Make It Funky“. Many singers before and since have been praised for their emotional delivery. If you want to hear funk music at its source, watch Soul Brother No. 1, His Bad Self, the Minister of New New Super Heavy Funk perform his 1966 song “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” at the Olympia Theater in Paris. Alternating loud and soft, with pauses so long the audience thinks the song is over before it’s finished, Brown ekes out a three-minute single to ten minutes of singing, shrieking, and grunting. Unh! The band isn’t funky yet, but Brown is.
Next year his band, the J.B.s, would have its turn on “Cold Sweat” (1967), one of the first funk songs properly so-called. Horns and bass dominate, but you can already hear the distinctive “chank” of funk guitar. Except for the bridge, the whole song is played on just one chord, D7.
What makes a song funky? In 2000, Grammy-winning producer Gabriel Roth wrote a how-to article for Big Daddy quarterly titled “Shitty Is Pretty: Anatomy of a Heavy Funk 45”. To make it funky, Roth suggests, you need to “keep it rough, entry-level, stupid, and above all shitty!” Roth’s stage name is Bosco Mann, with its French and Italian roots, means “forest person”. Shitty, it turns out, does not mean “sloppy” when it comes to funk music. Funk may be “nasty”, as Quincy Jones says, but it’s precise.
Like in “Cold Sweat“, Roth recommends staying on one chord. “If you can’t get into the idea of playing one chord for a whole song, put down this magazine immediately and go find yourself a nice Beatles songbook.” To illustrate, Roth tells a story about you-know-who: “It is said that James Brown’s guitar auditions consisted of ‘Can you play a E9 chord’ (Yeah.) ‘For how long?'” The trick was not to play the chord; it was to keep the chord – and the rhythm – going for as long as Brown felt like singing over it.
It’s Not Easy Being Funky
Even some experienced musicians can’t do it: when Daft Punk, who had already been performing for 15 years, started to record Discovery, a disco album in 2008, the duo discovered that it wasn’t good enough. “We were limited,” one of them told Pitchfork, “by our own disability to hold a groove the way we wanted for more than eight or 16 bars.” So they hired outside musicians, including Nile Rodgers, a funk guitarist from the 1970s; he shares the stage with Daft Punk on the video for “Get Lucky” the album’s hit single.
Funk music may sound “entry-level”, but getting that entry-level sound takes practice. Gabriel Roth, when he auditioned a guitarist, used the same method as James Brown: “the first time we brought Binky Griptite into the Desco studios I told him ‘Give it Up Turnit Loose in [the key of] D,’ and we got right down to it.… I wanted to see how long he could play the part before he started #&*)$%@ around. Five minutes…Ten minutes…After watching Binky sit there with his eyes closed for 30 minutes without wandering one note from the 3-note line, I stopped myself. He’s been steppin’ with [Roth’s band] the Soul Providers ever since.”
Funk Perfection
The story ends happily, but the whole thing sounds authoritarian. Mr. Brown (as he insisted on being called) was a martinet, not only in rehearsal but also on stage. Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards recalls the first time he saw James Brown in concert at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. What he comments on is not Brown’s passion but his perfectionism: “He was a piece of work. So on the button.… The discipline in that band impressed me more than anything else. On stage, James would snap his fingers if he thought somebody had missed a beat or hit a wrong note, and you could see the player’s face fall. He would signal the fine he had imposed with his fingers. Those guys would be watching his hands. I even saw Maceo Parker, the sax player who was the architect of James Brown’s band… get fined about fifty bucks that night. It was a fantastic show.”
It was a fantastic show, not despite Brown’s perfectionism but because of it. Because his band was tight, controlled, and disciplined, Brown himself could be loose, wild, and emotional. There was a similar dynamic in Led Zeppelin: according to the bass player, John Paul Jones, he and the drummer locked in tight so that the guitarist, Jimmy Page, and the singer, Robert Plant, “could be more free to improvise and experiment.” The frontmen are free because the rhythm section is disciplined.
Even that freedom can be an illusion. “James Brown screams in nearly every song he has ever recorded or performed,” observed journalist Philip Gourevitch, who followed Brown on the road a few years before his death. “He also grunts, honks, yowls, and hoots, and there are long stretches in many of his songs where he does little else…In the space of a sixteenth note, his voice can shift from a honeyed falsetto to anguished lamentation or bellowing bombast.” It can give the impression of chaos.
During a live performance of “Please, Please, Please”, Gourevitch saw Brown work the audience into a frenzy: “‘I feel like I’m gonna scream… Can I screeeeam?… Is it all right if screeeeeeeam?’ The crowd appears fit to riot. He appears fit to be tied. Then he screams. The scream has a sound of such overwhelming feeling that you cannot believe the man controls it.” Yet he does.
The impression of chaos, says Gourevitch, “is just that: an impression”. Brown could grunt, and the grunts would become music because he was grunting on top of a band grooving with watchlike precision. That’s why he fined his players. “I gotta keep order,” he told Gourevitch. “They don’t spank children no more, that’s why there’s no order.”
We know where Brown got this idea, because he wrote a song about it:
Papa didn’t cuss,
He didn’t raise a whole lotta fuss.
But when we did wrong,
Papa beat the hell out of us.
Unh!
Those lyrics are from Brown’s 1974 hit “Papa Don’t Take No Mess“. In the song “Papa” is Joseph Brown, who had James when he was 21. “Papa” is also James Brown himself, the bandleader who wouldn’t tolerate slip-ups. If he threw up five fingers during a show, that would be five dollars off your paycheck. If he threw them up again, ten. In 1974, ten dollars was enough to buy Thanksgiving dinner for a family of eight.
Prince was Brown’s musical heir. He adopted many of the same physical gestures and some of the same attitudes. Like Brown, he connected this quality with his father, who also went by the name Prince. “He was very orderly, but my mother didn’t like that. She liked spontaneity and excitement.” Prince understood himself as a fusion of both the strict father and the free-spirited mother. Both parents were musicians. Prince was ten when they split.
That same year, his stepfather took Prince to see James Brown perform in Minneapolis. The boy danced on stage until a bodyguard shooed him off. The experience was formative. Brown “inspired me”, Prince recalled, “because of the control he had over his band, and because of the beautiful dancing girls that he had. I wanted both,” he laughed. The interviewer followed up: “Did you ever fine your musicians when they played bum notes, like James Brown used to do?” Prince replied, “No. I don’t have to.”
That may have been true then, but we have heard a different story since Prince’s death. After a show, Prince would review video footage with his band: according to publicist Chris Poole, who worked closely with Prince, “Everyone who played a bum note was reprimanded.” Susan Rogers, Prince’s on-call recording engineer, says, “Prince liked James Brown, and he thought if James Brown did it, he would do it too. He’d point to his band onstage and if they made a mistake, he’d fine them $50.” He fined her, too. Prince may have been a good hang, but he was hard to work for. “He ran through people,” says Poole. “He was relentless.” In public, he came across as a liberator. In private, however, Prince was controlling, a perfectionist.
Funk is stinky and nasty, but it’s never messy.
Works Cited
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Dombal, Ryan. “Machines for Life“. Pitchfork. 10 May 2013.
Fortner, Stephen. “Resonance: Anecdotes and Insights from the Inimitable Q”. Keyboard. May 2016.
Gold, Robert S. A Jazz Lexicon. Knopf. January 1964.
Gourevitch, Philip. “Mr. Brown: On the Road with His Bad Self”. New Yorker. 29 July 2002.
Hann, Michael. “Prince in private: lascivious, relentless, exacting, remote”. The Guardian. 22 April 2016.
Hodgkinson, Will. “Horrifically Attacked by Her Mother, Reviled in the US, and Abused by Prince”. The Times. 3 June 2021.
Piepenbring, Dan. “The Book of Prince“. New Yorker. 2 September 2019.
Richards, Keith, with James Fox. Life. Little, Brown. October 2010.
Roth, Gabriel. “Shitty Is Pretty: Anatomy of a Heavy Funk 45.” Big Daddy, issue 4 (2000), n.p.
Simonart, Serge. “The One and Only”. Guitar World 18. October 1998
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Tolinski, Brad, ed. Light & Shade: Conversations with Jimmy Page. Virgin. October 2012.