16

DAYDREAMING

They once asked Marvin Gaye what, more than anything, he wanted in life. “Simple domestic happiness” was all he said.

I relate. I was after the same thing. A good woman. Kids. Solid home. Financial security. A chance to make good music. And no drama. Sounds easy. And attainable. But to tell you the truth, very few of my colleagues have reached that goal.

Not hard to figure out why. Stardom isn’t healthy for your head. You confuse the man on the stage with the man off the stage.

U were confused. Not everyone is. Sometimes the man on the stage & off the stage r the same.

I don’t believe it.

I do.

I do too.

But how the hell can you tell if the offstage man remains hidden? No one really knew what you were thinking or what you were doing until you did it.

It came out in my work. It’s all my work. It’s all clear.

Only if we go back over your work and figure out how it all hangs together. But if I do that, you’ll accuse me of being overanalytical. You’ll say I’m reading into your songs shit that isn’t there.

U don’t have 2 do anything but listen 2 it. Y analyze it? Y still try & figure it out?

Cause that’s what human beings do. We think.

Think 2 much. Way 2 much.

I’m thinking the same. Too much thinking don’t do no one no good.

I’m just thinking about myself. Thinking how when I met Judi I knew I’d found what I’d been looking for. A brilliant chick. A chick who was musical and, yes, thoughtful and understanding. We got married in 1986. It’s no accident that while I was making my second solo album, the one I called Daydreaming, Judi was pregnant with our first child. Dreams were coming true.

Judi was the first to see that the man on and off the stage was two separate beings. That worried her. She wasn’t shy to express that worry.

Worried me too. She thought too much. If I was gonna get any action, I could see her getting in my way.

Judi believed in Morris, not MD.

She was a person who did believe in analyzing multilayered emotions. She believed in therapy. Yet therapy worried me. I didn’t want no stranger getting into my business. In that regard, I was with my man Prince. Don’t look too deeply behind the facade. It’s taken a long time to craft that facade. The facade, in fact, is a work of art. The facade is making money and bringing me something I find alluring and maybe even irresistible: adoration.

Adoration is my middle name. I love it. The higher I get, the more adoration I crave. Fact is, adoration makes the high even higher.

That’s another reason stars get fucked up. They’re adored. It’s okay to be adored by your woman or children or your mother and father. Okay to be adored by your friends. But to be adored by a world of worshipful fans—that ain’t real good for your mental health. For sure, it feels good at the time. Who doesn’t want to see a stadium filled with people screaming your name, dancing to your grooves, and calling for more? You feel like a god. But your hungry ego sneaks its way into that feeling of adoration and whispers into your ear.…

You’re entitled to everything. You work your ass off. You bring people music they love. You bring them pleasure. Artistically, you give them all they want. In return, you can have whatever you want. You’ve earned it. Besides, the culture condones it. Stars are expected to have their indulgences. Stars are forgiven those indulgences. Goes with the territory. So go on and ego-trip because without your ego you would never have achieved stardom. Stardom is ego. Stardom is MD. The more stardom, the more ego, the more adoration, the more fun.

The whole thing scrambles the mind. At least it scrambled my mind. It scrambles the minds of most stars.

Speak 4 yourself.

I am. I’m confessing that it was with a scrambled mind that I made Daydreaming. I was still eager to show the world that I could be a star on my own.

But u were already a star. Purple Rain made u a star.

You keep saying that, and maybe it was true. But I wasn’t feeling it. I was feeling I still had something to prove. Besides, the music inside me still needed to come out. And I wanted it expressed the best way possible. That’s why I reached back to Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. A year earlier they’d become the hottest producers on the planet with Janet Jackson. After being fired from The Time, they right away started doing good work. They had big R&B hits with the SOS Band, Alexander O’Neal, and Cherrelle—just to mention a few. But their work with Janet broke the bank. The Janet/Jam and Lewis album, Control, put her on the map. She recorded it in Minneapolis, where Jimmy and Terry brought out her true sweet-salty-sparkling personality. They gave her dazzling dance grooves that inspired her lyrics declaring her freedom. The whole thing was beautiful. And funky. So funky, in fact, that Prince felt a little threatened.

Here u go again.…

You’re saying it ain’t true that you drove over to Jimmy Jam’s house blasting out a track and yelling, “Can you make it funkier than this?”

& if u ask Jimmy Jam, he’ll say that only inspired him 2 cut even funkier tracks. He’ll say it was my spirit that pushed him & Terry 2 do what they did.

We’ll all say that. We’ll all say you were the one who said find another harmony part when we thought we had the harmonies covered. You were the one who made us learn choreography moves until we dropped from exhaustion. It was you who taught us to put together a mind-blowing stage show.

But I believe that after we learned all that shit from you, you got a little crazy. When you saw how good we’d gotten—whether it was me, Jimmy Jam, or Terry—you freaked out. The freak-out came when you thought maybe, just maybe, you’d be outshone. We had too much regard for you to see that possibility, but maybe you did.

Then y would I put u, Jimmy Jam & Terry in Graffiti Bridge? Y would I put u back in the spotlight?

I’ll get to that. I’m not there yet.

You’re dragging.

I’m the drummer. I’m putting the pocket where it needs to be.

I’m also a drummer. & I’m saying u way behind the beat.

The beat slows down when I’m talking about a record like Daydreaming.

A record with some good cuts. But a record the world’s forgotten.

Not entirely. You forget that Daydreaming had me back playing with the cats. Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, between Control and Rhythm Nation, took off time from Janet and wrote and produced two songs, a beautiful ballad, “Love Is a Game,” and the sexy “Fishnet,” which was an R&B hit. On those tracks, Jellybean was back on drums, Jesse Johnson on guitar, and Jerome doing backgrounds.

I was also writing more introspectively, especially on one song I called “A Man’s Pride.”

I heard “A Man’s Pride” & dug it. But like I said b4, I also saw how u used my man Clare Fischer.

Your man Fischer was writing for the Jacksons before he was writing for you. You hardly discovered him. He was a great arranger. His chart for “A Man’s Pride” brought out the power of my lyrics:

When you’re young you make mistakes

That tend to leave you sad

As you grow you learn to take

The good things with the bad

Cause it takes a man

Just to understand a man’s pride

As a man it all begins

to change your point of view

And it seems it never ends

The things you’re going through

To make the sacrifice

The price you had to pay

Only worth as much as

You learn along the way

Cause it takes a man

Just to understand a man’s pride

It’s a man’s pride

Makes him laugh

It makes him cry

It’s a man’s pride that keeps a man alive

I look at those words and wonder what was going through my mind when I approved the album. I say that because the Daydreaming cover photo had me fantasizing about my own jet, a fancy car, and a super-sexy lady—all the elements that made me prideful.

The elements that make me happy.

Yet the song itself goes in a different direction. I was trying to get beyond a superficial understanding of what it means to be a man. I was trying to understand the difference between puffed-up pridefulness and genuine pride. When I was high on drugs, that distinction didn’t exist. It was all about staying high. All about staying in a state of blissed-out fog.

A state you loved.

Yes, but when the fog finally lifted, I began to see that pride—true pride—was necessary to craft the kind of songs that mattered. “A Man’s Pride” mattered. It put the subject on the table. It said I had done things in my younger life that made me sad. I had ruined romantic relationships before they had a chance to blossom. Before Judi, I had never been true to one woman. And yet I understood that whatever mistakes I had made, I required pride—pride to pursue dreams beyond surface thrills.

Daydreaming dropped in 1987. Our son Evan was born in July of that year. I was overjoyed. I knew that Judi would handle motherhood beautifully—and she did.

At the start of 1988, we started off the Daydreaming Tour in London before bringing it back to the States. The crowds were enthusiastic. “Fishnet” was in heavy rotation on MTV. On the video, Jimmy Jam, Jellybean, Jerome, and Terry had my back. We had a ball. We were rolling.

So was Prince. Daydreaming dropped around the same time as his Sign o’ the Times. A friend of mine always reminds me of the danger of “compare and despair.” If I compare the commercial/critical reception of Daydreaming to Sign o’ the Times, I will despair. Prince’s record generated three top-ten hits—the title cut, “U Got the Look,” and “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man.” This was his first project after breaking up the Revolution and proving, once again, that he was only getting better. Strangely enough, though, I didn’t really despair all that much. Prince and I had been running in different lanes. I was proud of the work I’d done. I wish I hadn’t clung so tightly, at least in terms of the cover photo, to the MD of Purple Rain, but I still saw that as my calling card.

Meanwhile, more than ever, Prince’s calling card was sex.

I wouldn’t say that.

I just did. How else you gonna explain that your album right after Sign o’ the Times was Lovesexy? On the cover, you were stark naked, sitting on a bed of oversized white and purple lilies.

That wasn’t the 1st idea.

I know. You told me you wanted to put out The Black Album with an all-black cover. But you dumped it.

I decided 2 make a different point.

Which was?

Ain’t no shame in my game.

And what’s the game?

Expression of myself. All my self. Full disclosure. Full exposure. Nothing 2 hide.

The mystique was still there. You took off your clothes, but that don’t mean you took off your mask.

Fool, I took off everything.

You say no shame in your game, but to me the game was the same we’d all been playing since back in the day. Get noticed. Get bigger gigs. Attract bigger audiences. And hypersexy music illustrated by hypersexy images was still your way of doing all that.

& u weren’t?

I was. I just didn’t do it as well as you. I was still the student. Hell, I will always be the student. But there did come a time, right after Lovesexy didn’t perform as well as you liked, that the student came to the teacher with something the teacher liked.

Lovesexy went gold.

Gold ain’t platinum. You were never happy with anything less than platinum. And you sure as hell weren’t happy when it became your first album since the early ’80s not to hit the top ten. Maybe that’s why you were so receptive when I came to you.

I was always happy 2 hear your ideas, Morris. Besides, u still hadn’t seen Paisley Park. I knew u were dying 2 c it.

No doubt.

So I invited u back home. U’d been out in LA 2 long. It was time 2 reconnect 2 your roots.

You make it sound easy.

It was.

Let me break it down so the people can see for themselves.