Blogarhythms

As longtime Blogarhythms readers may remember, my mother Deborah passed away around mid-August of last year. Now, other than singing to me once or twice when I was a kid, or absentmindedly reciting her favorite song lyrics around the house, my mom never made much in the way of music. So I can’t rightly pay her the same tribute I would some deceased music legend if I were giving one of their classic LPs a write up in this space. But my mom did love music, so it makes sense for me to honor her by honoring that love of music which she passed on to me.

Above and beyond any other musician, Prince was the one my mother loved best. The man’s musical prowess was a big part of her infatuation, as was his sexy image I’m sure, but for my mom it went way past that. She related to his lyrics personally. Their birthday’s were only a few days apart. For her, they shared some kind of weird connection. She couldn’t help but love him. That being the case, my house was always pulsating with the sound of the Minneapolis genius’ music, and the rack-space under my mother’s prized hi-fi system was always overflowing with his records. She took me to see him perform live twice, once on his Purple Rain tour in 1985 and again on his Lovesexy tour in 1988. I caught shit from assholes at school for wearing the tour tee-shirts. Yes kids, in the days before the internets you had to call someone a “f*g” to their face if you thought the music they liked was “gay.” But I digress, the point I was trying to make was that it would have been hard for me to grow up under the woman’s guidance and not think Prince was the shit.

Because of my mother I knew more about Prince than anyone I’d met until I encountered the truly obsessive fans who published ‘zines about him and eventually those lurking on the ‘net. Because of her I saw his movies and concert films more times than is healthy for a young boy, or anybody else for that matter. In fact, it was this time of year, late Summer of 1986, when I was taken by her to see Prince’s second cinematic effort, the retro, black and white, art-deco-styled musical/romance/comedy/tragedy Under the Cherry Moon, at a second-run theatre (the only one in the area that was showing the film) in suburban Connecticut. The flick was not a critical or box-office success. But my mom (unsurprisingly) loved it and would eventually purchase a VHS copy of it for her collection. Not before she’d take anybody she could, including me and other family members, back to that bargain theatre to see it again and again. I haven’t watched it in years, and whatever it’s cinematic shortcomings might be I still have fond memories of it. Far fonder than those associated with Graffiti Bridge I can tell you.

More important than any of that though, the movie produced a soundtrack album, titled Parade, which to this day remains one of my favorite entries in Prince’s extensive and impressively masterful catalog of LPs. I know for many fans and critics alike Sign O’ the Times will always be the man’s singular opus, his defining achievement, a sprawling masterstroke that will stand forever as a testament to his genius. Honestly, I don’t even disagree with such an assertion and could easily be writing about that album right now because the fact of the matter is I could never pick an absolute favorite Prince record. But Parade was and is special to me. Like my mother felt a connection to its creator, I feel a connection to it. At the time of its release my young ears had heard nothing like it. And while the same can be said of a whole host of Prince’s recordings, this one was different. For me Parade was a revelation which became something of an obsession until it wound up taking a place as one of the cassettes I’d routinely fall asleep listening to during my adolescence and early teens.

The hit single “Kiss” was pure Prince; stripped-down Electro-Funk injected with playfully tongue-in-cheek naughtiness wrapped in infectious Pop songwriting. Other songs on the album undoubtedly retained elements of his signature sound; a hybrid of Funk, Rock, Soul, Pop, New Wave, proto-Electronica and progressive Dance Music. Album opener “Christoper Tracy’s Parade” and “Anotherloverholenyohead” still bopped & grooved, “New Position,” “I Wonder U” and “Girls & Boys” were still funky thanks to gut-bucket basslines, chicken-scratch guitars, bizarre electronic flourishes and JB’s-influenced horns, and “Mountains” carried on Prince’s love affair with anthemic Prog-Pop. But now there were string & horn arrangements where there were none before, kettle drums, jazzy interludes and compositions befitting continental cinema of the ’50s and ’60s. The transition from Mardi-Gras-Funk on “New Position” to an amalgam of Orchestral-Pop, Funk, Electronica and Jazz the likes of which wouldn’t become fashionable until the rise of Trip-Hop in the ’90s on “I Wonder U” was mind-boggling to me. And the steamy Euro-dirge “Under the Cherry Moon,” the instrumental New Age-Jazz instrumental “Venus De Milo” and the playful Philly-Soul-inflected Franco-Pop ditty “Do U Lie,” despite their softness, hit me like a ton of bricks.

Ending as it does with the heartbreaking “Sometimes It Snows In April” — a slow piano ballad that held a special meaning in my family due to the fact that the a year previously, just a few days after seeing Prince live at the Hartford Civic Center on the Purple Rain tour it did in fact snow in April, which we recalled immediately upon Parade’s release — it’s arguable that the album is a bit more serious, or melancholy even, than the average Prince album (Purple Rain aside). Sure, he had a penchant for slapping melodramatic hymns and scary apocalyptic messages into the mix on a number of his records, but being stacked with religious rhetoric as they were none of them were quite as personally vulnerable as the tale of struggle, loss, death, longing and ultimately understanding on “Sometimes It Snows In April.” It was always a tearjerker, but having watched such a cherished loved-one as my mother fight so hard against so many forces for so many years only to lose their life at a time when people traditionally retire into ease lends its lyrics all the weight of the world.

Sometimes I wish that life was never-ending
But all good things, they say, never last
All good things, they say, never last
And love, it isn’t love until it’s past