52 Weeks Of Prince: Week 39

Week 39: NEWS

I bought Prince’s album NEWS on the day of its retail release, a few days before my birthday in 2003. I was straight out of college and basically broke, so I had no money for the $100 NPG Music Club subscription, but Prince’s various websites kept me informed of his output. NEWS was included in the subscription, and in prior years, albums that were club – exclusive felt like they took ages to finally (or, indeed occasionally never) available at retail. NEWS on the other hand, dropped only a month after club members got their shipments. It was a strange album, but soothing, and it was a welcome change from the noise of the rest of my life at the time.

Chicago in 2003 was a surreal adventure for me. I was fresh out of college and the economy was in free-fall. Great time to be a person with an arts degree and the threat of student loan repayment looming. My mother especially worried about the move because I would be going to “The Big City.” Mind you, my mother’s threshold for an urban area qualifying as “The Big City” is notoriously low, but in this case, I couldn’t have argued with her even if she would have listened to me.

Chicago is indeed “The Big City.” If you don’t believe me, ask any Chicagoan. My rural Midwestern upbringing allowed me to believe that I was a bit more sophisticated than most people who surrounded me as I grew up. I still think that’s probably true, but it did leave me with a severe lack of perspective. The seemingly easy transition to “urban” life in Terre Haute (I know, I know) when I moved to college further reinforced my delusion: I was a City Boy who happened to have been raised down on the farm.

Furthermore, Chicago seemed like the place to be as graduation approached. In retrospect, I could have fled south to Louisville, where some brilliant theatre continues to be produced, but everyone in my program really felt like Chicago was where everything was happening. So my girlfriend at the time and I moved to Chicago. Really, that was the extent of the thought I put into it.

So much of the move is a blur to me. I remember driving my 1996 Ford Taurus to Chicago maybe a month before we were scheduled to move. We had no apartment, no jobs, no savings…nothing. What we did have was my friend Jenn. She had been there for a few years, and she was happy to put me up for a minute while I searched for literally everything we would need for an adult life in The Big City. Jenn remains awesome. Hi, Jenn!

I won’t mince words: I was in no way prepared for any of these tasks. I mean that literally. I have vivid memories of consulting the printed MapQuest directions to Jenn’s house, but I can’t recall printing them. Where did they come from? Did we have a printer? I couldn’t even make it to Chicago without getting hosed in the face. I was supposed to get to Jenn’s place in Chicago’s Andersonville neighborhood at roughly 3 p.m. I made it there juuuust after 11. Took a wrong turn in to East Chicago. It’s a long story involving a desperate effort to get directions at an all-night gas station and a nonsense conversation between me, two fossilized drunks and a baffled Korean teenager behind suspiciously thick bullet proof glass. Maybe I’ll get to that some other time.

When I began writing this, I wondered how I was going to explain the decision to move to Chicago. Now I’m wondering how we even made the move at all. I know she is the one who found the apartment. I have no idea how we paid for it. It was a nice place, actually. Garden apartment with the very sweet landlady who lived upstairs. Free laundry. (You guys? Free laundry. FREE. In Chicago. CHICAGO.) The neighborhood was Humboldt Park, and if my mother had known the reputation of Humboldt Park, she would have been sent into a panic attack that likely would have done permanent damage, even though I never felt endangered there. I visited the park itself once, and the depressing number of dirty syringes in the pond there sent me away, never to return.

My first job in Chicago was a horrifying telemarketing job that I quit just after my first paycheck. I just could not hack it. Then I ended up temping for a minute and through the temp service landed a job on Wacker Drive, diagonally across from the Sears Tower. You know that bit in the Dark Knight where there’s a burning bus in the road and the chase scene kicks off? I worked right there. I got lucky: I was a desk drone.

The commute to the Loop was a little more than an hour, but considering most of the office lived in the suburbs and had a two to three hour commute to work every morning, my co-workers assured me (as did so many other Chicagoans about so many things) that it was “not that bad.” At first, riding the trains was a tongue-biting anxious nightmare. I’ve never had a problem with heights, but being twenty or so feet in the air, hurtling along at a reckless speed, especially when a turn in the track caused everyone to lurch into the turn and squash their neighbors caused horribly detailed daydreams every time I crossed the threshold into the innards of the aluminum dragon. Even though the job itself was also anxiety-inducing, overall I finally felt a slight easing of the gut-wrenching terror that had gripped me since we threw all of our possessions into that rattletrap Taurus and lumbered out of Terre Haute.

I still couldn’t afford the NPGMC subscription, but with a little advance notice I could swing an $18 CD. And there was a music store on my ridiculous commute, so as I left the store with my copy of “NEWS,” I felt like I had genuinely earned my purchase. My less-than-twenty-dollars-with-tax purchase.

Ah, youth.

I remember climbing to the elevated tracks just outside the music store and popping the CD into my Discman as I waited for the next train. Ten minutes into the first track (“North”) I actually managed to tune out the world. I forgot I was traveling in the belly of a swaying, screeching metal beast. I found peace and stability, even when the dapper man halfway up the car threw up into the aisle.

The album itself was (and is) a bit out of place in the discography. Like “Xpectation” it is an instrumental album, but this one is much more in line with the kind of electric jazz of Miles Davis’ late 60’s to early 70’s albums. It’s a connection Prince wanted the listener to make. The liner notes are so sparse as to barely exist, but the phrase “Directions in Music” appears, which will be familiar to anyone who has scrutinized Davis’ albums post-“Kind of Blue.” But let's be honest - unless you're interested in listening to Prince taking an hour-long jazz odyssey, this album can be a tough sell.

Prince’s confidence in basically begging people to compare him to one of the grand masters of American music is impressive, even considering his usual level of regard for his own talent. In this case, however, he also is extending that regard to include his band. NEWS is one of the few albums that I can say could not have been made without this exact band backing him.

On bass, Rhonda Smith, on the keys, Renato Neto, drums by John Blackwell and the smart addition of Eric Leeds on saxophones all got together at Paisley Park in early February of 2003 and recorded the entire album in a single day.

In spite of what Prince would probably have us believe, it’s not really a jazz album as such. As Leeds has said before, Prince was not a jazz musician; he simply did not possess the musical vocabulary to really play in that style. Instead, what you get is just under an hour of jazz-inflected instrumental pop music. It’s easily the best instrumental album of his life apart from (arguably) Madhouse 16.

This was an interesting time to be a Prince fan. He had intentionally dropped off the popular music radar. His tours were smaller, his albums were experimental – either lyrically or musically. For the hardcore fans, this was great. He had completed the job he had begun in 1994 and broken completely from the need to be a massive star selling out arenas. We loved it – mostly because it felt like finally we had him all to ourselves.

Then the nominations for the 2004 Rock N Roll Hall of Fame were released.

NEXT WEEK: Another 180-degree turn as Prince roars back to super stardom.