Somewhere between March 14th and March 15th, 1986, Prince had a dream. The dream was about a woman and a bathtub and a waitress. When he woke up, he wrote down some lyrics and called it “The Ballad of Dorothy Parker.” He knew Dorothy Parker was a real person but wasn’t really sure who she was. It didn’t matter.
When the lyrics were done, Prince decided he wanted to record. He’d just had a recording console built for his house in Chanhassen, Minnesota, just like the one they had at Sunset Sound in L.A. Nobody had tested it yet. That didn’t matter either.
While he was recording, his engineer noticed the signal sounded murky, like it was under a pillow. Prince didn’t say anything about it, just took the dream and put it on tape.
Listen to the song now and it sounds half-there, like a ghost stuck between two worlds. My favorite part is when the waitress asks Prince what he wants and Prince says, “Yeah, lemme get a fruit cocktail, I ain’t that hungry,” because a fruit cocktail is the only thing I can ever imagine Prince eating.
When he was done recording, Prince went back to bed.
Photo by Richard E. Aaron/Redferns
Prince was good with dance music. “1999,” “Let’s Go Crazy,” “I Would Die 4 U.” You can’t really escape New Year’s Eve without him.
But like the Beatles or Thelonious Monk or Alice Coltrane or Joni Mitchell, he was also an ambassador to the subconscious, someone who could smuggle things from dreams into reality and have them come out miraculously intact. Watching Purple Rain as a teenager, I didn’t care about the live-band stuff as much as I cared about Prince playing a tape of what sounds like a woman laughing but is actually a woman crying, backwards. Mimicry, illusion, things that seem like one thing but are actually their opposites: This was Prince’s secret deck. Originally, the movie was going to be called Dreams, but he wanted the word “Purple” in the title. My dad remembers going to see it in the theater and staying to watch it twice.
Of course, reality isn’t all that bad. For the most part I try and ignore the fact that Prince believed in chemtrails and thought heaven was a real place and that there are exactly 144,000 people there. Or that he didn’t vote and was proud of it. Prince is not someone I would take medical advice from, for example.
As for “The Ballad of Dorothy Parker,” Prince later had someone record a saxophone solo and some complicated horn charts, but he ended up not using them. It turns out the problem with the recording equipment had to do with a power outage. It was snowing hard outside.
*Photo by Ron Galella, Ltd./WireImage *
There’s a funny story about Prince that the director Kevin Smith tells. Smith had been trying to get one of Prince’s songs in a movie of his. One day he gets a call from someone explaining that Prince wants to speak with him and that he should wait by the phone. About 25 minutes later, someone calls and says that Prince will be calling in 19 minutes. Nineteen minutes later, someone calls and says that Prince will be calling Smith that night, at home. Smith sits by the phone for most of the evening. Eventually someone calls and says Prince will be calling in five minutes. Prince calls. They talk about Jesus and snakes. Prince asks if Smith will make a documentary about him. Smith says sure, but forgets to ask if he can use the Prince song for his movie. When he calls back to ask, Prince declines immediately.
The documentary doesn’t really come together and Smith tries to pull out. One of Prince’s assistants explains that she can’t tell Prince that Smith can’t isn’t shooting the documentary. Smith asks why. The assistant says it’s because Prince doesn’t understand reality the way the rest of us do. That Prince is the kind of person who calls at three in the morning in January in Minnesota, asking for live camels, and doesn’t understand why he can’t have them. He isn’t being mean about it or anything. He just doesn’t understand.
Of course, camels are hard to find in Minnesota no matter what time it is. But I want you to do me a favor. I want you to take a page from Prince’s book and close your eyes and imagine a group of them making their way across a field of ice, silhouetted against the moon, and ask yourself: Isn’t it beautiful?
Find more on Prince and his legacy here.