It may sound nice, but it was a disappointment. Prince was writing and recording a ton of music in the year or two before Purple Rain and one disc of outtakes was underwhelming, barely scratching the surface. No demos, no rehearsals, no evidence of how some of his most famous songs evolved.
A couple of Purple Rain's songs were presented in their original form, before Prince edited them down for the album. "Computer Blue" clocked in at 12:18 (the label used a descriptive term (the "Hallway Speech" version) that had been in use for years among die-hard fans who had the outtake in their collections). "Let's Go Crazy"'s original running time of 7:35 (as it appeared on early configurations of the album (November 7, 1983 and March 12, 1984), but not on the final version of June 25, 1984) was called the "Special Dance Mix".
An expanded version of 1999 (Prince's fifth album, the one before Purple Rain, released in late October 1982) has been released and it appears to be a much better representation of its creative time period.
Jon Pareles, the long-time chief pop music critic of the New York Times, writes that even after 37 years, the music on 1999 "still sounds contemporary and alive". (A song from 37 years before this album came out would have been from 1945.)
1999 was apocalyptic, sexy, funky, funny, innovative, earthy, electronic, sly, righteous, euphoric and almost entirely — give or take a few vocals and a guitar solo — a one-man show by Prince Rogers Nelson on every instrument and vocal. Every song exults in the architectural savvy of a musician who, from the drumbeat up, seemed to know exactly how he'd be jamming with himself as he built the song. ...Pareles's comment about Prince's 40-year-old drum machine patterns sounding more contemporary than last week's chart-topper is interesting. I distinctly remember being struck by the unique drum pattern that serves as "1999"'s foundation when I first heard the song in late 1982. There was absolutely nothing in pop music that sounded like that at the time. (Indeed, five years later, there was still nothing in pop music that sounded like what Prince was (or had been) doing. Prince took some inspiration from "Monday Monday", a 1966 hit for The Mamas & The Papas, for the main keyboard line, but it was his Linn LM-1, and that distinctive tumbling pattern, that made and instant impression. The often-complex drum pattern repeats through the entire song, verses, chorus, solos, breakdown, it never changes.
The "super deluxe" version of the 1999 reissue — five CDs or 10 LPs plus a grainy DVD video of a 1982 concert in Houston — reaches into Prince's vault of unreleased recordings, unveiling a dozen songs that haven't appeared officially in any form, although Prince performed some of them live. A handful — including the absolute standout, "Purple Music" — are gems; none is a dud. Other vault material includes alternate takes of previously released songs, usually quite different from what appeared during Prince's lifetime. ...
The newly released vault material doesn't challenge the choices Prince made about 1999 (though I'd have been tempted to swap in "Moonbeam Levels," a stately plea for humanity, for "Free" on 1999). The alternate takes of the album's songs were less adventurous than the versions Prince chose for the album. But Prince on his most ordinary day was better than countless musicians at their best, and now that he's gone, being able to hear more Prince equals more pleasure. ...
[T]he American pop universe of the early 1980s was de facto segregated. Rock radio had declared war on disco, while the revelations of black culture were broadcast largely to African-American radio listeners. Prince's fusion of funk, rock, disco, new wave, synth-pop, gospel, jazz, soul, lust, community and joy faced barriers that shouldn't have stopped it, and soon could not. With 1999 those barriers fell; the album sold in the millions. ...
But commercial triumph wasn't the sole measure of 1999. Prince was expanding his musical ambitions, writing odd-angled melodies (like "Let's Pretend We're Married") and toying with ambiguous harmonies, as in "Something in the Water (Does Not Compute)." ...
Prince was also finding new sounds: pushing his voice into multiple personalities, from sweet falsetto to punk snarl to preacherly exhortation, and deploying sounds from the latest synthesizers. He had one of the first drum machines, the Linn LM-1, which made it possible to program realistic sampled sounds quickly. (One reason 1999 sounds current is that many pop songs are still driven by brittle, metronomic drum-machine beats.) ...
The vault material reflects Prince's remarkable early 1980s multitasking, pouring out material not only for his own albums but also for groups he was producing: the Time and Vanity 6. He often wrote and recorded a song in a day. Crisp funk workouts like "Feel U Up" and "Rearrange," from the vault, could have easily ended up on a Time album, though Prince didn't treat them like demos. He finished the tracks with a flourish; "Rearrange" turns into a feedback-slinging lead guitar freakout. ...
Other songs put Prince's stamp on all sorts of idioms ... ["Turn It Up"] urges someone to "Work me like a radio" and "Come and play with my controls." (For Prince, every machine was a sex machine.) "Vagina" celebrates a character he meets who is "Half-boy, half-girl — the best of both worlds," while Prince makes two guitars and a bass — recorded one by one — sound like the Rolling Stones jamming in a dressing room. ...
Prince wrote himself a manifesto in a 1982 session. "Purple Music" ... is 10 minutes of motoric, minimalistic funk with a drum-machine beat, subtly scrubbing rhythm guitar, a bass part that goes from a few notes to busy little runs, and an ever-changing overlay of keyboards — chords, syncopated vamps, scurrying lines — that goes polytonal and nearly atonal.
Prince sings through the lyrics a few times; we'll never know, but perhaps at the time he thought he'd edit down the 10 minutes to the best takes. Apparently the song didn't strike him as right for 1999; it went into the vault. ...
I love about two-thirds of 1999 — and it's the first two-thirds. Like Pareles, I'm not a big fan of "Free" and if I never heard the fourth side of the double album again, I wouldn't miss it. But side one — "1999", "Little Red Corvette", "Delirious" — is nothing short of fifteen minutes of pop perfection. The album opens with God speaking: "Don't worry. I won't hurt you. I only want you to have some fun." (The Almighty returns, about four minutes later, to offer some quick, subtle background vocals!) "1999" slides into "Corvette", and, again, the hypnotic drum pattern is effortless, with a stuttering, skitchy sound that I have always imagined was a sanding block.
There are outtakes with titles that have circulated for a while ("Yah, U Know", "Teacher, Teacher"), but these are earlier, different versions (though not radically different) of those songs.
Throughout this album, and throughout his most fertile period (for me, through 1988), Prince layered numerous vocal tracks, sometimes high, sometimes low, and the cameos of his sped-up voice in "Automatic" and "Irresistible Bitch" are the first evidence of what he would do much more extensively years later on Sign O The Times and the unreleased Camille album.
(Speaking of experimenting with voice manipulation, check out this short snippet of "Cosmic Day", an unreleased song recorded on November 15, 1986. The effort put into a song that apparently was not part of any album project or considered for another artist is remarkable. Just an idea and a day's work, apparently ... and on to the next thing. Prince recorded "Adore" and "Play In The Sunshine" before the week was out.)
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