Prince Track by Track: “D.M.S.R.”

(Featured Image: The U.K. 12″ for “D.M.S.R.”; © Warner Bros.)

Over the weekend, I not only recorded an episode of my own podcast, but also a couple of guest appearances on someone else’s: Darren Husted’s Prince: Track by Track. If you haven’t listened to Track by Track, it’s another effort in song-by-song Prince chronology, albeit with much better time management than my own humble project: Darren is already done with Purple Rain and starting on Around the World in a Day this week. For my inaugural appearance on the show, we talked about a song that is obviously very near and dear to my heart: “D.M.S.R.” Check it out, and the rest of Track by Track, right here:

I believe I’ll actually be making another appearance on Track by Track before the week is out; I’ll also be posting my own podcast on Friday. And yes, at some point, I will write another proper post; Darren’s progress has filled me with the appropriate amount of shame to get my ass back into gear.

Bambi

(Featured Image: “Can a handsome, virile man come between two women who love each other passionately?” Cover of The Other Kind by Richard Villanova, Beacon, 1963; photo stolen from Pulp Covers.)

The sessions for Prince’s second album went much more smoothly than those for his first, but they were not completely without incident. Prince’s new managers, Bob Cavallo and Joe Ruffalo, had initially booked 30 days at Alpha Studios; but as the deadline approached, only rough mixes of the album’s nine tracks had been completed, and another client was scheduled to use the facilities. According to Alpha’s owner and engineer, Gary Brandt, Cavallo and Ruffalo “insisted that I give Prince any amount of time he wanted in the studio to mix the album. They wanted me to cancel everything and give it all to Prince” (Nilsen 1999 55). But Brandt was unable to extend the studio time on such short notice, so sessions were moved downtown to Hollywood Sound Recorders.

HSR’s staff engineer at the time, Bob Mockler, would become a figure of some significance in Prince’s early career: he would also assist with recording and mixing on both 1980’s Dirty Mind and 1981’s Controversy. Prince’s appreciation for Mockler can be inferred from the credit that appears on the final album, “Remixed by Bob Mockler and Prince”; as Mockler put it to biographer Per Nilsen, “That’s probably the last time he ever put anybody’s name before his” (Nilsen 1999 55). Indeed, Mockler seems to have had more creative input on the recording process than any of the artist’s collaborators since Chris Moon. Along with his aforementioned work on “When We’re Dancing Close and Slow,” his influence can be heard on one track in particular: the pulp-flavored cock rocker “Bambi.”