Prince – For You

Prince For You Album Chat Transcription

Hello, what are you doing? Welcome to Funkatopia Live.

You are more than welcome to be able to call in and participate in tonight's festivities, which basically is me taking a sip of water. That's the first thing, here we go.

And then on top of that we are going to be talking about the one the only legendary man that we are here to honor pretty much every single day we just with the mere existence of our radio show, and Funkatopia Live, Prince.

And tonight, we are actually going to be talking about his debut album, For You. And I kind of wanted to preface this a little bit with, you know, if you guys really want the full experience, what I can tell you is that you should go back and you definitely should listen to the interview that I did with Chris Moon.

Not too long ago, actually, probably about a month ago or so ago. And I sat down with Chris Moon and Chris Moon was the gentleman who actually discovered Prince and kind of just, you know, talked a little bit about how he went through the recording process and how exactly he wanted to make sure that, you know, Prince could actually be heard when he was being recorded and their stories about him actually trying to focus on he wanted to record Prince.

And essentially what he did was, is that he would step into the studio and asked Prince to sing and he couldn't hear him at all. And so he just kind of had to kept going back in there. And he was checking the cords, and he was checking the cabling, and he was checking the microphones and he didn't know what was going on. And then when he finally realized that it wasn't the microphones, and it was Prince that he was just so shy and so quiet, that he just would sing really super softly when he's singing.

And so, you know, the whole process that Chris had to go through to kind of, you know, break him out of his shell, and also teaching him everything about recording. All of that is there. And I think it's really, really important that you go back and you take a listen to that recording. It's such a such great, it's a great interview, it's a great story. I'm not patting myself on the back. It's just sometimes you get done with an interview and you go, yeah, that was everything that I thought it was going to be plus a little bit more. So I'm very happy with the outcome of that particular interview. So definitely go back and check that out. It's a great, great interview, please check it out. It's really awesome.

Then what you probably want to do is you also want to additionally go and listen to the interview before that, that I did with Owen Husney. Now Owen is or was Prince's first manager. And so he is very, very integral to the part of the story for you. And I did actually reach out to him today. I didn't get a response. And we're in a different time zone. He could be out of state or he could be out of the country. For all I know, I don't know what's going on with him. But I did invite him to be on the show and he may show up or he may not show up. Most likely he probably won't, because I didn't get a confirmation. And he's a very, very busy dude. He's not dealing with little peon folks like myself too much. But I didn't, I did actually get an opportunity to be able to interview Owen. And you can actually find that interview on Funkatopia as well.

It's a very, very detailed interview. But I think one of the reasons why I actually even bothered to reach out to him for the interview tonight wasn’t for an interview, but to just kind of be here, as we're talking about this album, is because he was there for this whole entire process. He was there for everything that went on during this creation of this album that was just out of control.

I mean, it was you're talking about a scenario where it was a kid, an 18 year old kid, who was very, very talented. He played all of his own instruments, and did so on this first down. Now you want here's another thing you have to realize as well. The only other person that I can think of I'm sure there's others, I'm sure there's others I'll probably get lit up in email and everything else, that's fine. But this was something that was very, very unusual for somebody brand new to be able to come in and actually record his entire debut album, he had access to all of Warner Brothers resources to be able to create the album that he wanted to create. And instead, he decided that he just wanted to do his own thing.

And that album is For You. And he wanted to record all of the instruments, he wanted to do all the vocals, he wanted to do everything. So it's important to understand that there were so many things that kind of could have gone haywire with this album. And for the most part, there were some things that went haywire for this album, for instance, one of the main things that was really interesting about this particular project, and it kind of makes you laugh just a little bit, was that Prince was given a three album contract, which back in that day was very unusual out of the gate, because most people that got that type of most people that it didn't happen, it just didn't, it was just extremely unusual.

And they gave him $180,000. That's $180,000. To record, these three albums, that's essentially what he was given, which is obviously very, very extensive. I mean, in today's dollars, you're talking about, like, $640,000, in, in, in today's dollars, so that's just and you can hear, you're gonna hear me crinkled papers, and, and whatnot, because I want to make sure I have liked all the details and everything, I don't want to go too much off the top of my head, even though I know a lot about it,