Jake Brennan (30:25)
John Scruggs, the self appointed leader of the Black gangster Disciple Nation, aka the Disciples, told Sandra White to bring her.22 revolver to tonight's meeting. It was October 13, 1985, just after midnight. Sandra White did as she was told, as any loyal disciple would do when John Scruggs spoke. If Scruggs said jump, you asked how high? So White showed up with the gun and then listened carefully as Scruggs laid out the plan to her and the rest of the group. Three weeks earlier, their street gang had robbed a gun store in their hometown of Minneapolis. The crime was almost perfect, but the cops managed to get their hands on 16 year old disciple Christine Kreitz, and Scruggs was concerned that she had turned snitch. That's why Christine Kreitz had to go. Sandra White and the others would make that happen. They were to take her out tonight with Sandra White's gun. John Scruggs laid it all out. Follow Christine Kreutz home and shoot her dead. This was their mission. Sandra White, Mary Braxton and Graylin Williams did as John Scruggs told them. They followed 16 year old Christine Kreitz back to her place, stopping just shy of her front door at the tennis courts near Martin Luther King Jr. Park in South Minneapolis. There, Graylin Williams took hold of the.22. He thought again of John Scruggs orders. Follow her home and shoot her dead. This was their mission. As Graylon Williams did so, Sandra White and Mary Bruxton lit a joint and tried to look nonchalant. They didn't even notice the moment when Williams pulled the gun to Christine Kreutz's head and pulled the trigger. Nine months later, in the summer of 1986, Prince was reading all about the murder of Christine Kreutz and the arrest of the Disciples gang and the impending trial in the pages of the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Kids killing kids, Prince thought. Man, what the hell was Going on the crime raid in his hometown was reaching a fever pitch, but it was obviously just a small part of a larger narrative happening everywhere. He turned the page to read about ballistic nuclear missiles locked, cocked and ready to fly. U.S. bombs in Libya, AIDS, drugs and famine. Another page, the ongoing investigation into the Challenger space shuttle explosion. Another page. An earthquake out west in 1986. The fault lines weren't just out in Southern California. They lay beneath the ranks of the revolution, many of whom were beginning to feel iced out by the new members Prince was bringing on board, including Susanna Melvoin, Wendy's twin sister, who was also Prince's fiance at the time. Those shaky fault lines were also undermining Prince's unwavering desire to change. Creatively speaking, he knew this just like Brown Mark knew it. As a musician on the come up with a gun in his face, change was survival. Just look at Miles Davis. You change your clothes, you change your sound. Do you think Miles gave two shits about what Columbia Records thought about Bitches Brew? Change is why Prince refused to repeat the playbook for Purple Rain, moving on to psychedelia, funk and pop for around the World in A Day in the underrated Parade. But by doing so, it cost him. First with R and B fans who accused Prince of turning his back on black music, and then it cost his bottom line too. Neither album sold nearly as well as Purple Rain and the movie for which Parade also doubled as a soundtrack, under the Cherry Moon was a box office bomb. And now that commercial failure was putting unexpected pressure on his construction of Paisley park, his 65,000 square foot complex 20 minutes outside Minneapolis, which included three private recording studios. It was nearing completion, a complex into which Prince had sunk $10 million. Financial pain, box office poison, the disgruntled members of his own band. None of it could stop Prince from finding energy in change. But there was another form of energy right now, a dark energy wrestling with the light, the energy of total existential dread staring him dead in the face every time he opened a newspaper or turned on the tv. Prince tapped into them both, the light and the dark, and he used them to power his next move, which was happening behind closed doors in the one place where Prince felt capable of real transformation. The recording studio. So hold up. To understand this, I have to make sure you understand exactly how Prince worked in the recording studio and how his process differed from his peers. First of all, and I don't mean to get into another Prince versus Michael Jackson thing here, but as legendary producer Jimmy Jam observed, when Prince went into the Studio, he would leave at the end of the day with a classic song like 1999, fully written and recorded. Now, when Michael went into the studio, he would leave at the end of the day, having spent the entire session obsessing over the volume of the hand claps on the track. I'm not saying there's anything right or wrong about either method here. I'm just illustrating the difference. As Jimmy Jam's example demonstrates, Prince's genius was largely rooted in inspiration. But, and this is the second, second thing, Prince's genius was also the result of impatience. You know why? Prince used real drums on some songs, in a drum machine on others, the call was made based solely on whichever one his engineer, Susan Rogers, got set up first. If the drum machine was plugged in and ready to rock, the drums were made by a machine. He simply could not wait for a drummer to get his or her shit together. And third, when inspiration struck at any time of the day or night, he'd call Susan again, his engineer, who would meet him in the studio to get to work. It was like a constant flow state. And there's one particular account of a day in the studio when Prince recorded four songs simultaneously without saying anything to anyone, without having anything written down. He had Susan roll tape and then he sat behind the drums and recorded the drum track for one song and. And the tape kept rolling and he proceeded to record the drum track for the next song and so forth. And then he went back and put down the bass for the first song and then the next song and you get the idea. He started at 4pm and nine and a half hours later, at 1.30am, he had four brand new completed songs with all the instruments, all the vocals, the whole nine. And these are the first four songs on the Parade album, if you want to go take another listen now that you know how they were made. By September of 1986, six months after the release of Parade, the new songs he was recording were really piling up. And there were so many that he planned for his next release to be a triple album. Bruce Springsteen's new five record live box set set the precedent as far as Prince was concerned. But Springsteen was just coming off the incredibly successful Born in the usa a triple album from a guy like Prince, whose last two records had underperformed. That was the kind of thing that gave the executives at Warner Bros. Heartburn. But Prince was unfazed. He kept his head down and his vision tunneled. Warner Brothers, like his father, could go ahead and try and tell him what he could and couldn't do. And ditto for his fans clamoring for another Purple Rain, for a return to his Dirty Mind roots, to anything that wasn't what he'd been doing. He used it all. He used the pain of whatever was going on between him and Susanna. He knew the relationship was ending just as the revolution was ending. But there was another revolution happening right here in the studio, where Prince was alone, save for his loyal engineer, Susan Rogers. He told Susan to roll tape, and he laid down a pattern on the Linn ML1 drum machine and then to the Fairlight digital workstation for a bubbling synth sound and a bluesy bass line. And he kept building more tracks, more instrumentation. But then he abruptly stripped most of them away until the song was reduced to just the drums, the Fairlight, and his guitar, most likely his iconic Hohner Madcat telly model. And he mixed the music down onto a cassette, popped it into the tape deck of his Ford Thunderbird, hit the gas and rode around town listening to the mix. While writing lyrics in his head, Prince thought again about the Disciples gang. He thought about bombs and missiles, health crises and society on the brink. And the collective pain of a world that needed healing. He was calling this one sign of the times. He knew he was on to something new, something that could match the power of Purple Rain, even if it sounded completely different. So much so that he did something he didn't normally do. He played the song for Lenny Wonder Warrenker, then president of Warner's, the father figure, the gatekeeper. And Lenny listened. Four minutes and 56 seconds later, when the song ended, Lenny was speechless. It totally freaked me out, he later said. When I heard the record, I thought, oh, my God, he's gone to another, just another zone. It was just on Believable. On March 31, 1987, a police officer in Baltimore was placed on medical leave after being stuck with a hypodermic needle hidden in the pocket of the perp. He just arrested a perp who had tested positive for the AIDS virus. Over in Chicago, elementary school students fearfully pass through an infamous playground on their way to class, where just months earlier, a kid was attacked by a local street gang, beaten so badly with a baseball bat that he lost an eye. In New Jersey, 21 men went on trial for running drugs, gambling and other illegal activities out of the Hole in the Wall luncheonette in Newark, allegedly as part of the Lucchese organized crime family. Meanwhile, nightly news broadcasts from coast to coast continued to report on the fallout from President Reagan's recent admission that The United States government had been trading arms with Iran in return for hostages. On that same day, March 31, 1987, Prince released Sign of the Times, his ninth studio album, which led off with the title track that Warner Bros. President Lenny Wernicker had described as unbelievable. And that song, which had been released as a single a month prior, was as timely as anything Prince had ever released. It was as potent in 87 as Marvin Gaye's what's Going on was in 71, or Stevie Wonder's Living for the City was in 73. And as a number one single on the R and B chart, it was also sweet revenge against those who kept calling him out for crossing over into the pop world. Sign of the Times the album was not a triple album as was originally intended under its working titles Dream Factory and Crystal Ball, but instead a double album, the first of Prince's career and like many of the greatest double albums in history, the Rolling Stones, Exile on Main street, the Clash's London calling, Sign of the Times is an eclectic set of songs that tackled not just the hot button issues of the day, but sex, God, love and everything in between. Over at the Village Voice, home of the dean of rock critics, Robert Crisco, who just seven years earlier had told Mick Jagger to check his dick into a nursing home, Sign of the Times became the biggest winner in the history of the paper's influential year end Paz and Jop writers poll. It beat out Springsteen's Tunnel of Love for the number one spot by an even wider margin than Michael Jackson's Thriller had beat REM's Murmur in 1983. But although Michael was nominated for his album Bad alongside Prince for Album of the Year at the 30th Grammy Awards a year later, in March of 1988, neither artist won that trophy went to U2 for their blockbuster album the Joshua Tree. Prince again was unfazed. It didn't matter that Sign of the Times didn't win a bunch of awards the way that Purple Rain once had, nor did it matter that it didn't sell as well as Purple Rain. Hell, it didn't sell as well as Parade or Around the World in the Day either. But it once and for all established Prince as a megawatt craftsman and artist in addition to his existing status as a megawatt performer. Baby, he was a star. But he was a star in his own way, not how anyone else wanted him to be. And back at the American Music Awards in 1985, on the night of the recording of We Are the World, the night that one of his bodyguards was arrested and another quit while accepting the award for favorite pop album, Prince told a screaming crowd in that deep bedroom voice of his, for all of us, life is death without adventure. Adventure only comes to those who are willing to be daring and take chances. Adventure, change, impatience, inspiration. Anything less than all that would be a disgrace. I'm Jake Brennan and this is Disgrace. All right, thanks for keeping it purple with me in this week's episode. Just a reminder to Apple Podcast listeners, make sure you get those auto downloads turned on. This week's Question of the week is which artist best nailed their moment? Was it Prince with Sign of the Times? Was it Stevie? Was it Living for the City? Was it Marvin Gaye with what's Going On? Was it someone else? Public Enemy? Lauryn Hill? Lots to choose from. Hit me up and let me know. 617-906-6638 we'll get into it in the After Party. Leave me a voicemail. Send me a text. You might hear yourself on that bonus episode of the After Party coming up right after this episode. You can also send your answers to me @gracelandpod on Instagram x and Facebook. Leave a review for the show on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and win some free merch. All right, here comes some credits. Disgraceland was created by yours truly and is produced in partnership with Double Elvis. Credits for this episode can be found on the show notes page@gracelandpod.com if you're listening as a Disgraceland All Access member, thank you for supporting the show. We really appreciate it. And if not, you can become a member right now by going to Disgracelandpod.com membership. Members can listen to every episode of Disgraceland at free. Plus you'll get one brand new exclusive episode every month, weekly unscripted bonus episodes, special audio collections and early access to merchandise and events. Visit disgracelandpod.com membership for details. Rate and review the show and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and Facebook Disgracelandpod and on YouTube@YouTube.com Disgracelandpod Rock a rock. Roll up. He's a bad, bad man.
