As you may have heard, we recently launched a physical magazine, the first issue of which is dedicated to eclectic art and writing inspired by the music of Prince. So, to celebrate a successful launch–and to get us back in podcasting mode after an unplanned six-month leave of absence–we invited Erika Peterson, a friend and contributor to the magazine, to talk about her work and the most funny/surreal moments of Celebration 2018 at Paisley Park. We also talk about Dystopian Dance Party’s ongoing beef with Questlove, and do our best to try and beat him at his own game of guessing Prince songs from their opening seconds. It doesn’t go well.
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Well, folks, it’s our first-ever Jheri Curl June podcast–and before you ask, yes, we’re talking about Prince again. This time, though, we’re shedding light on a somewhat less-discussed side of his career: the series of (very) thinly-veiled side projects and ghost productions he released in the early-to-mid-1980s under various pseudonyms, most famously “Jamie Starr.” If you’re even an intermediate-level Prince fan, some of these records are essential listening; so settle in, turn up your headphones, and get ready to take a bite of our purple rock.
But first, a word of warning, as I’m afraid there’s a factual error in this one: I was speaking from memory in the section about Sheila E, and incorrectly stated that “Noon Rendezvous” began life as a Revolution outtake. It was actually co-written by Prince and Sheila for the Glamorous Life album; the Revolution just happened to cover it in concert. Oops! Anyway, I left that bit in because I still like the song, so just enjoy the music and try to ignore the fact that I’m blatantly lying to you. Finally, if you like this kind of content (with less inaccuracies), check out my new side hustle: dance / music / sex / romance, a chronological exploration of every (known) song in the Prince oeuvre, which I expect to be updating a couple times a week until it actually kills me.
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If it wasn’t official before, it is now: 2016 is a terrible year for musical icons. Callie and I were blindsided by the news of Prince‘s untimely death last Thursday; it hit us even harder than the news of David Bowie‘s passing back in January (and that, as you might recall, hit us pretty damn hard). It’s difficult to overstate just how much Prince means to both of us. He’s easily our favorite solo artist in all of pop music; check our frequently used tags on Dystopian Dance Party, and you’ll see that he’s the most talked-about topic by some distance. All of which fails to adequately capture the feelings we have for his body of work, and the sense of loss we feel now that he’s gone.
Unlike with Bowie, we weren’t actually planning on podcasting about Prince this month–but we had to, if only so we could talk through all the emotions we’ve both been feeling for the last week. The podcast we originally recorded earlier in the month, on Nintendo‘s Legend of Zelda series, will be posted eventually, when it all feels a little less meaningless. But for now, dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called life…
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By 1987, Shalamar’s classic lineup of Howard Hewett, Jody Watley, and Jeffrey Daniel had disbanded. The lineup for Shalamar’s ninth studio album, Circumstantial Evidence, consisted of Sidney Justin, a former backup singer for the group who replaced Hewett when he left in 1985 to pursue his solo career; DeLisa Davis, who auditioned to replace Watley after her departure in 1983; and Micki Free, a rock guitarist who was discovered by Gene Simmons while in a band that opened for KISS, and later joined Shalamar under Simmons’ counseling despite his hard rock sensibilities.
The main reason we celebrate Jheri Curl June in June is because, let’s face it, we are only human, and are as susceptible to the siren song of alliteration as the next group of hack Internet writers. But there’s also a pretty good justification for the timing, because the birthdays of two of jheri curl music’s most important innovators fall in the first week of June. We covered the first of those innovators, Prince, in last year’s inaugural Jheri Curl June Special. So this time around, we’ll be discussing the other one: James “Jimmy Jam” Harris, born June 6, 1959.
If Prince was jheri curl music’s architect, then Jimmy Jam and his longtime musical partner Terry Lewis were the brilliant engineers who shaped the structure to its fullest potential. Their take on the “Minneapolis Sound” developed by their former mentor added a new level of polish and sophistication; and when Prince shifted his own music away from traditional jheri-curl and toward neo-psychedelia in the mid-’80s, Jam and Lewis went in the opposite direction, crafting ever-more-flawless pop-friendly tracks that kept JCM in the top of the charts and, ultimately, evolved into the next dominant R&B sound, New Jack Swing.
André Cymone, Prince‘s childhood friend and original touring bass player from ’79 to ’81, is one of a very long list of Prince casualties: including Jheri Curl June veteran (yes, that’s a thing) Jesse Johnson, Mark “Brownmark” Brown, Morris Day, Vanity, and others, all of whom were pissed off at Prince just enough to leave his musical empire and go solo… only to end up making second-rate Prince music on their own, some of which was even written by the Purple One himself. On a side note, it’s eerie that all these people also happened to look like second-rate versions of Prince–with the possible exception of Brownmark, although he could arguably have passed as a chubbier version.
Anyway, before we get too far into diss territory, let me say that Cymone’s 1982 solo debut, Livin’ in the New Wave, is a freakin’ awesome album. Until I heard Livin’ in the New Wave, I had only heard unfinished bootleg versions of the Prince-authored tracks “So Fine” and “Trouble,” which gives it big Prince-nerd appeal. While it’s not a totally groundbreaking album, every song is at the least very listenable, and chock-full of interesting synthesizer blips and harmonies.
Well, here we are: the last day of Jheri Curl June, and I don’t think there could be a better band to go out with than the greatest band in the world, the muthafuckin’ Time. Today’s selection, “Jerk Out,” comes from the earliest of the Time’s many reunion albums, 1990’s Pandemonium: their first release as a group since 1984’s Ice Cream Castle, and the first time the supremely talented live band were allowed to play their own instruments on record. Like Full Force, the Time during this period represented a transitional moment, bridging the last gasps of jheri curl with the rise of New Jack Swing: just check out singer Morris Day’s hair in the video below, an unholy combination of a flat-top and a pompadour with a tiny rat-tail in the back that would never have passed muster in the first half of the ’80s. But the song itself dates from 1981, when ghostwriter Prince recorded a demo for the band’s second and greatest album, What Time is It? In a way, then, we’re taking “Jheri Curl June” full circle, with a song from the golden age of one of the genre’s greatest innovators, brushed off and updated by his most accomplished disciples to mark the end of an era.
And what a way to go out: “Jerk Out” isn’t just a standout track on Pandemonium, it’s one of the best jheri curl songs ever. It perfectly captures both the Time’s smooth-as-silk funkiness and Day’s ludicrous persona of a squawk-laughing pimp daddy who coordinates the color of his suit with the color of his BMW (though not, it must be said, in the video, which is maddening if you’re even the slightest bit OCD). The song’s glossy production demonstrates all the tricks Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis learned during their (then) seven years as hitmaking producers for the likes of Janet Jackson and the Human League. The video, too, has everything a Time fan could possibly ask for: Morris preening in a selection of smoking jackets, a bewildering cameo by a Jack Nicholson impersonator in a Batman T-shirt, and of course, the obligatory post-48 Hrs. scene of Jesse Johnson playing one of his sexy solahs in a country and western bar while angry rednecks pelt the stage with beer bottles. And yes, of course, Jerome brings Morris a mirror before it’s all over.
So there we have it: the end of Jheri Curl June. There are a lot of great jheri curl artists we have yet to cover, and we both had a lot of fun doing this, so I’m happy to announce that we’ll be doing it all over again next year. Yep, you heard it here first: I’m committed to keeping this blog up and running for at least another year, if only to give myself an excuse to spend another month writing about jheri curl music next summer. In the meantime, we hope you’ve enjoyed this maiden voyage of the S.S. Jheri Curl. Check out the now-finished Spotify playlist after the jump, and we’ll see you again next summer! (Or…you know, later this week, since we do post other things throughout the year. Seriously, don’t wait a whole year before coming back to this blog.)