Sometimes It Snows In May

Finding a Friend in Prince's Death-Haunted Music

Sometimes It Snows in May: Finding a Friend In Prince's Death-Haunted Music

Until the spring and early summer of 1987, I hadn't fully given in to Prince.

            I was eighteen, renting a bedsit in the Hertfordshire satellite town where I'd lived all my life, and, instead of heading for university like most of my friends, I was working in a steel castings factory on a peripheral industrial estate. My parents were long-separated and my mother was heading for her second divorce, this time from a man who'd been my hated stepfather for many years. I'd also just come out of a tumultuous two-year teenage relationship, my first. So the bedsit and the factory job were my version of escape. Enough, I'd said the previous autumn as I handed over the deposit and the first month's rent. Enough shuttling between the houses of two indifferent parents. Enough abuse and anger from a man who wasn't my father. Enough disharmony and trauma and upheaval. I would live on my own, get a job and rehearse with my band who, I thought at the time, would provide my ticket out of Dodge.

            In many ways, then, I was ready to find Prince, or for him to find me. I was going somewhere, but also heartbroken, angry and lonely. If anyone was the poet laureate of loneliness in the 1980s it was Prince Rogers Nelson; the 'imp of the perverse', to use Edgar Allen Poe's phrase, who had somehow synthesized Little Richard, Stevie Wonder, Sly Stone, James Brown and Jimi Hendrix into a psychedelic cocktail of startling originality. A funky mercurial Prospero, Prince was the presiding musical genius of the times, in the way the Beatles had been in the 60s, and Bowie the following decade. And the subject of solitude was never far from his lyrics, a mirror to his own reputed Howard Hughes-style isolation. The line that resonated most from his mammoth 1984 hit 'When Doves Cry' was always: How can you just leave me standing/ Alone in a world that's so cold? He even wrote a B-side called 'Another Lonely Christmas'. And on the song 'Anna Stesia', which would appear on 1988's Lovesexy, he asked, Have you ever been so lonely that you felt like you were the only one in this world?/ Have you ever wanted to play with someone so much you'd take anyone, boy or girl? They were questions I was starting to ask myself, as by then I had fled town for London and was living girlfriendless in another, even worse bedsit. His lyrics about isolation spoke directly to me - indeed, I felt as if he were singing only for me, ironically a feeling no doubt shared by millions of his fans worldwide. As Zadie Smith wrote: 'Isn't it the case to be a Prince fan is to feel that Prince was your secret alone?'

            But the tipping point, the factor that began my lifelong devotion to Prince, was death. Or rather, how often Prince's lyrics mentioned it, alluded to it, meditated upon it. I'd been resistant to the glittery Purple Rain circus of a few years before, with its Hollywood movie and OTT stage show. The bands I was listening to at the time were REM and the Triffids, so Prince felt too showbizzy, too... de trop. Even the paisley dream of Around the World in a Day and the sui generis cabaret that was Parade failed to fully entice me in. It took until April 1987, and the evening I came back from a gruelling day at the factory to my tiny room - with its gungy mini-oven and bathroom down the hall which I shared with a Caribbean gentleman of indeterminate age - and flipped on the radio to hear the lines, In France a skinny man died of a big disease with a little name, for me to become a convert. The stark words stopped me in my tracks. The voice was familiar, but for some reason I didn't immediately identify it as Prince's. It was squeezed, desperate, yet still hip; laconically worldly. The song was stripped back to its bare bones. Just a Linn drum beat and a squidgy synth bass, strafed by bluesy, crystalline Nile Rodgers licks. The lyrics appeared to be a litany of contemporary ills. Kids high on crack, totting machine guns. A rocket ship exploding. And Time. The urgent refrain, telling us not to waste it: Tie-hum. Tie-hum... Hurry before it's too late... Fall in love, get married, have a baby... And, most terrifyingly, the threat of nuclear destruction. If a night falls and a bomb falls, will anybody see the dawn? Death was literally everywhere.

            When the song was over, I wanted to hear it again. And again. But by then Whitney Houston was yelping about wanting to dance with somebody who loved her. The following morning, I went out, flush with my factory wage packet (an actual windowed green envelope bulging with notes and coins) and bought Prince's new album, Sign O' the Times, the title track of which had floored me the previous night. As with many people, the moment was revelatory. It was like stepping through the Looking Glass into a world of colour. Just as the Beatles had made the shift from the monochrome Revolver to the pulsing lysergic hues of Sgt Pepper twenty years before, Prince had made the same move from the black-and-white imagery of Parade to the kaleidoscopic Sign O' the Times. The music came at you in a cavalcade of confidence and virtuosity. Track after glorious track. A whole double-album's worth. The entire package was mesmerising; from the extravagant sleeve, with its Jeff Katz photo of a blurred Prince before his lightbulb-festooned stage set, to the inner bags with their peach-and-black colour scheme, to the paisley teardrop label on the vinyl as it span around. On this record, Prince could do absolutely anything and everything, and with such panache and verve it made nearly everyone else's efforts redundant. Masterpiece is a soiled superlative, but in this case it was clearly applicable.

            The album became the soundtrack to a summer of toil; a summer in which I went out and found all of Prince's previous albums on vinyl. Sitting at sunset on the sill of my bedsit's single high window, with its view of the tawdry streets behind the station, my hands calloused and black from the factory, I would drop the needle on 1999 or Controversy or Around the World and wipe the sweat from my forehead with the first beer of the evening. They were lonely, haunted, jungle nights; nights made less lonely by the voice of my newfound friend. At eighteen, you're as sex-troubled as you'll ever be, so it did me a lot of good to discover there was a madman out there in the universe even more afflicted than me. Poor bloke, I thought. I almost felt sorry for him and his erotic plight. But lucky bloke, too. Prince was doing it all while I lived vicariously through his adventures. He sang about an endless list of conquests. There was the girl with a pocket full of condoms from 'Little Red Corvette'. Or the raspberry beret-wearing temptress who wasn't too bright but knew how to get her kicks. Or the nameless subject of the song It, who makes him guilty for his honesty. The near sexual mania of Prince's vocal on this track (I wanna do you baby all the time, all right!) will always remind me of those hot nights, with the mad blood stirring, never to be satisfied.

            And beneath all the lust: death.

            Eros and Thanatos. While sin and salvation, sex and redemption, had always been a central trope of Black music, from gospel to Marvin Gaye, no one was as explicit as Prince in exploring this binary opposition. It was a directness that formed an analogue with his sexual explicitness. The sheer ubiquity of death in his songs is overwhelming if you go looking for it. Of course, others in the 80s such as Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Ultravox, and even Sting were singing overtly about nuclear catastrophe and the end of the world. But they confined themselves to single songs, often clunky polemical statements. For Prince, to quote Bellow's Humboldt's Gift, death is the dark backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything. Indeed, the ghostly, slightly discordant synth wash on 'Sign O' the Times' and other songs from that era seemed to correlate, for me at least, with this notion. Always low in the mix, the sound was nonetheless there, making its eerie contribution. The presence of death justified the frivolous joy of so much of Prince's music, underlining his seriousness as an artist. It's significant that death is not really present in the work of Prince's exact contemporaries, Madonna and Michael Jackson, apart from the absurd zombie-chic of 'Thriller'. They were purely bright, future-facing, poptastic beings. They remained in light.

***

Ian Penman, in his essay 'The Question of U: The Mirror Image of Prince', refers to Prince's songs of apocalypse angst such as '1999' and 'Sign O' the Times' as representing a kind of 'pop eschatology'. In the same piece he suggests the Sign O' the Times album was imperfectly sequenced when placed next to the peerless Parade. He states that the doomy title track should have been followed by anything but the exuberant 'Play in the Sunshine'. However, this overlooks the crucial line that adds weight and depth to the latter song: Before my life is done/ Some way, somehow, I'm gonna have fun! There's no true fun without fearing the Reaper, Prince seems to be saying. So not such a frivolous choice after all. All throughout Prince's career there are songs that exhort the listener to seize the day and enjoy the light before it wanes. This goes beyond the time-honoured poetic conceit of let's screw before we're dead, embodied in Marvell's poem 'To His Coy Mistress' (The grave's a fine and private place/ But none, I think, do there embrace). Prince takes this hoary injunction to new heights of hysteria. I don't wanna die/ I'd rather dance my life away! he shrieks famously on '1999', a song which tackles Judgement Day head on. Despite its terrifying tableau of people running everywhere, while its narrator tries to flee from his destruction, it even manages to be slyly funny. Party over oops out of time. That 'oops' still arrives like a stoke of comic genius every time I hear the track.

            And then there's 'Let's Go Crazy' with its unforgettable sermon parody for an intro. One only needs to hear the words Dearly Beloved to remember it all verbatim. Here, undercover of a ripe satire, Prince digs deep into the essential paradox of earthly existence, while providing us with a singular vision of eternity: We have gathered here today to get through this thing called life... But I'm here to tell ya, there's something else. The afterworld. A world of never-ending happiness, you can always see the sun, day or night... What to do with the boredom of eternal contentment, Prince seems to ask. Even though you have the comfort of being in God's House, might it not pale next to the world we know? Apparently not. In this life, he barks in his trademark 'tough-guy' voice (a voice he surely stole from Jagger while supporting the Stones on an early tour), you're on your own! And all this before the song has properly begun. And on a multi-platinum album that outsold just about every other record in 1984. When the song eventually explodes into life, it's message is clear: Rage, rage against the dying of the light. But even here there's still complexity. Why is Prince so excited? Well, it's because we're all gonna die, of course. Life only gains meaning - or becomes thrilling - when we accept its finitude.

            These two overt examples of Prince's pop eschatology are well known, even a little tired from over-familiarity. However, if one delves down into his body of work, one finds there are sly refences to death dropped in just about everywhere. Here's an (incomplete) list. 'Controversy': Some people want to die so they can be free... 'Lady Cab Driver': Trouble winds are-a blowin'/ I'm growing old/ Get me out of here/ I feel I'm gonna die... 'The Beautiful Ones': The beautiful ones you always seem to lose... 'I Would Die 4 U': (No explanation required). 'Paisley Park': He died without knowing forgiveness and now she is sad/ Maybe she'll come to the Park and forgive him/ and life won't be so bad... 'The Ladder': Everybody's looking for the answers/ How the story started and how it will end... 'Under the Cherry Moon': Maybe I'll die young/ Like heroes die/ If nobody kills me or thrills me soon/ I'll die in your arms under the cherry moon... 'Sometimes it Snows in April'. Tracy died soon after a long-fought civil war/ Just after I'd wiped away his last tear... 'Sign O' the Times': Some say a man ain't happy unless a man truly dies... 'I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man': He was all she ever had and now she wanted to die... 'Adore': Until the end of time...'I Wish You Heaven': (Again, say no more). 'The Future': And if there's life after we will see/ So I can't go like a jerk... 'Nothing Compares to You': All the flowers that you planted, mama, in the back yard/ All died when you went away...

            And then there's a late classic. Never a man to experience time as other mortals, days, weeks, months and years seemed to be a continuum for Prince. Quondam bandmates Wendy and Lisa commented more than once that he never slept. He lived for work. This is reinforced by a line from his ecstatic 1994 single, 'The Most Beautiful Girl in the World', released in his doldrum years when he was fighting his record label over artistic autonomy and lipsticking the word 'Slave' on his face. In the first verse, amidst this joyous paean to female pulchritude, Prince's seraphic falsetto arrives at the line: When the day... turns into the last day of all time... And there it is again. Death. The dark backing. Always there.

            Out of all the above songs, the one that constitutes Prince's most thorough meditation on death is surely 'Sometimes it Snows in April'. While he investigated his own death-drive on Parade's wonky, Kurt Weil Threepenny-Opera pastiche, 'Under the Cherry Moon', the closing track on the same album is still Prince's most elusive statement about the everlasting. Recorded on 21st April 1985, with just a string arrangement plus Wendy and Lisa's mellifluous acoustic guitar and piano for accompaniment, the song appears to be nothing less than Prince's elegy for himself. Given that the character Christopher Tracy is Prince's avatar in the film Under the Cherry Moon, he seems to be looking back on himself from eternity, safe in the hands of the Lord: I often dream of heaven now I know that Tracy's there/ I know that he has found another friend. While the opening lines about Tracy dying after fighting a civil war always put me in mind of cancer, and the body's battle against its own rebellion, later lines hint at suicide. He used to say so strong/ Unafraid to die/ Unafraid of the death that left me hypnotised. Was the civil war in fact a struggle within the soul, a psychomachia? Each line seems to contradict the one preceding it. And there's loneliness there, too, as always: I used to cry for Tracy 'cause he was my only friend/ Those kind of cars don't pass you every day...

            Ian Penman calls 'Sometimes it Snows in April' a 'kind of phantom love letter, addressed to some lost or jettisoned part of himself... a dark and wistful snowsong'. Its power to haunt is significantly increased by the knowledge that, thirty-one years to the day after recording it, on 21st April 2016, Prince was found dead in the lift of his Paisley Park recording complex in Minnesota after an overdose of prescription opioids. About as lonely and wretched an end as one can imagine. This spooky serendipity always put me in mind of Hardy's observation in Tess of the D'Urbervilles regarding Tess's ignorance of the date of her own death: 'A day which lay sly and unseen among the other days of the year, giving no sign or sound when she annually passed over it; but not the less surely there'. This is a universal mystery, but Prince - extraordinary being that he was - seemed to intuit his own death day with uncanny accuracy.

***

Ten years after Parade was released, on 16th October 1996, Prince experienced the unimaginable tragedy of the death of his own son. Born with Pfeiffer syndrome type 2, a genetic defect that causes the foetus's cranial bones to fuse, the boy lived for only six days. Prince's reaction to the death was bizarre and unreadable. Clearly unable to process the event, at least in the public eye, he fronted it out with Jehovah’s Witness platitudes, having become a convert earlier in the decade as a result of his friendship with bassist Larry Graham. During his interview with Oprah Winfrey, he ascribed the death to 'God's will'. Soon after this, he was back to promotional duties as usual.

            Given his obsession with death during his imperial phase in the 80s, it's an unaccountable, anomalous reaction. Even chilling in its perfunctory dismissiveness. Perhaps one of the most telling quotes from his heyday comes during a 1985 Rolling Stone interview when he said: 'If I died, it would be interesting.' The word still haunts me when I think about his own untimely demise at 57, struggling with chronic hip, joint and hand pain from years of punishing dance moves and playing music. Towards the end of his Piano and a Microphone tour, during his last spring on earth, Prince had a near-death experience when he overdosed on the opioids used to treat his condition. His tour jet was forced to make an emergency landing in Illinois after Prince passed out; his body registering only four heartbeats per minute. He was only revived with dangerously high doses of the opioid antidote, NarCan. After the experience, he commented: 'I left. My soul left... I could hear everybody talking and I kept saying, how am I going to get back to my body? It was the hardest thing...' The neutrality of his testimony, his own dispassionate attitude towards it, brings to mind that word again. Interesting.

            A week later, he was gone.

            Back in the late spring of 1987, however, Prince Rogers Nelson was very much alive, at least to this lonely boy in his Hertfordshire bedsit. He was nothing less than a life force. The force that through the green fuse drives the flower. With the world erupting into blossom all around, the peach and pear trees confettiing pastel petals onto my mullet as I cycled to the factory, Prince's songs would be on a loop in my mind all day. One in particular would never leave my head. The track that really takes me back to '87 is perhaps Sign O' the Times' most daring inclusion, the live track, 'It's Gonna Be a Beautiful Night'. Now, I've always loved 'It's Gonna Be a Beautiful Night', but I'm aware this is not a consensus opinion. Disparaged by purists as the album's weakest link, as filler, or a generic muso-workout, I beg to differ. Listen to it again in the right mood. It's astonishing. Seven minutes of non-stop soul and funk energy over an airtight groove that just floats. It's a gas, one I'll never tire of.  

            Sitting on the sill of my bedsit window, with darkness now fallen, another freezing beer in my hand, I would play side four of Sign O' the Times over and over; inhaling the heady, fertile, nocturnal perfume of May. Prince was giving me hope that everything would be all right; that, despite evidence to the contrary, every night could be a beautiful night. And there it was again: a line slipped so surreptitiously into the familiar, exuberant importuning to lose our sorrow and have some fun. To live, live, live while there's still time. Tonight there's no tomorrow, he urges, this is gonna be the one! Yes, he can never stop reminding us: eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.

            For the record, it didn't snow in April 1987. After a cold snap in January, for most of the country, April was buoyant with sunshine; the incipient sap of spring rising everywhere. I remember it well. But it did, apparently, snow in May. After the sunbath of April, temperatures started to drop the following month, until, during the Bank Holiday weekend, there was snow in Manchester. However, this didn't matter much to me. Not only was I hundreds of miles away, but I'd discovered a new friend. A friend who would last a lifetime.