CHAPTER ONE: BEHIND THE SCENES OF THE O(+> ALBUM

Photo: Herb Ritts

Meeting O(+> album star Kirstey Alley
On 12 May 1991 Prince recorded the song Blue Light which would get re-recorded during the October 1991 sessions for the O(+> album and end up on that album. On 19 July 1991, the 33-years old Prince was scheduled to perform at the Special Olympics in Minneapolis. Before his performance, Prince met actress Kirstey Alley from the TV sitcom Cheers. She was one of the celebrity guests at the event. Prince’s drummer Michael Bland recalled her presence in a 2024 interview with Funkatopia on YouTube: “She walked out with, like her little crew, her little entourage and they sat, like crosslegged on the astroturf at the Metrodome while we soundchecked and I didn’t see any interaction between her and Prince at that point. She just looked, you know, like in awe the whole time.”

Kirstey Alley herself recalled their meeting in her 2012 autobiography The Art Of Men (I Prefer Mine al Dente): "I was sitting all alone in the middle of an enormous arena," she wrote. "I'd come to participate in the Special Olympics. The rumors were that Prince was shy and never approached people. He walked right up to me. I looked up and there he was. 'Hi, I'm Prince,' as if I wouldn't recognize him, 'and this is my father.'"

After Alley introduced herself, Prince replied, "I know who you are" and after the show, Kirstey Alley was invited to an afterparty at Prince’s Paisley Park studio facilities in Minneapolis. The two struck up a fast friendship and stayed in touch over the years, visiting each other on the set of Cheers, at his Paisley Park studio and at her house in Encino. They would collaborate on Prince's 1992 O(+> album with Kirstey Alley portraying reporter Vanessa Bartholomew in segues strewn throughout the album and in the video for the song My Name Is Prince. At the 1994 VH1 Honors award show, she would also present Prince with an award for his educational philanthropy.

"He is the most interesting person I've met to date," Alley wrote in her book. "I needn't speak of his talent because it's evident. What you might not know is that he is electric. His being radiates and lights up the room. I mean that literally. He lights up a room like a firefly in a jar. ... Prince taught me that I was unique, just by being the only 'me' in the universe. I love him."

O(+> recordings without Rosie Gaines
Singer and keyboard player Rosie Gaines from Prince’s New Power Generation band (the NPG) had approached record companies about a possible contract. She was eager to pursue a solo career and wanted to leave Prince’s employ. Prince found out that she had been in meetings with record labels and they had a falling-out. However, they reached an agreement that she would remain in the NPG for a planned Diamonds And Pearls tour, but leave thereafter so she wasn’t involved at all in the sessions for the O(+> album that took place in the latter part of 1991 and in 1992. She would still be contracted to Paisley Park Records for a projected solo album, however.

The song My Name Is Prince which would become the opening track on the O(+> album was recorded at Paisley Park on 18 September 1991 with NPG member Tony M. listed as co-writer for his rapping on the song. The original version lasted 9 minutes and 56 seconds but was edited down and remixed by Keith “KC” Cohen as Original Mix Edit for release on an October 1992 maxi-single. The album version which was released that same month would be an edit of the Original Mix Edit and a single edit was also made for the original single release 29 September 1992.

Other tracks recorded in late September 1991 included Gett Off’s Cousin which was recorded 27 September, Boom Box – a Prince and Eric Leeds instrumental which was the only recorded track intended for Brass Monkey, an aborted Madhouse-style project, as well as Letter 4 Miles, an instrumental featuring Prince on piano and NPG member Michael Bland on drums. The latter track was bootlegged as Miles Is Not Dead. It was a tribute to jazz musician and recording artist Miles Davis who died on 28 September 1991 after having been a great inspiration to Prince.

Photos: Herb Ritts

The origin of the NPG Hornz
On 9 September 1991, Prince And The New Power Generation appeared on The Arsenio Hall Show. They watched the show at Prince’s house in LA. “After we did Arsenio, there was a plan to announce a US tour,” drummer Michael Bland recalled in a 2019 interview with Podcast On Prince. “We were all at Prince’s house in LA and the show just finished and we were ‘Wooo! Man, we killed that.’ I said, ‘Well, when are we gonna tour the States?’ Prince just looked at me and said, ‘We just did. There was 50 million people watching. We’re going to Europe.’ And that was it. That was when the Diamonds And Pearls tour went to Europe. And Japan. And Australia.”

Around this time, Michael Bland was asked to put together a possible warm-up act for the upcoming Diamonds And Pearls tour. Prince wanted a Madhouse style group but with a larger horn section. “I'll tell you exactly what happened,” Michael Bland told The Current in 2017. “Prince stopped me in the hallway at Paisley and said, ‘You need your own band, you need an instrumental group, like with a horn section.’ And I had been working with Steve Strand and Mike Nelson and Brian Gallagher, rest his soul, on another project at that time. I said, ‘I know three’ and he said, ‘You need five.’ And he turned around and walked away from me. So, then the Jensens, Dave and Kathy, were employed so I had five horns. We were working up arrangements of some of the Madhouse material and we were recording the rehearsals from day to day. And Tommy and Sonny were also playing with me, so it was me and Tommy and Sonny and the horns. And Prince was getting these cassettes of rehearsals for about a week, and he comes in at the beginning of the following week and says, ‘Can you have those dudes come to the studio tonight?' And I knew as he was walking away from me again that my band was done — he was going to hijack the horns and they were going to become a part of the larger picture. So yeah, not only did I observe it, it's my fault. [laughs]”

Songs for O(+> and a ballet
On 1 October 1991, the Diamonds And Pearls album was finally released and on the same day Prince recorded three new songs at his Paisley Park studios, Do U Wanna Rock?, Sweet Baby and I Pledge Allegiance To Your Love of which Sweet Baby ended up on the O(+> album. I Pledge Allegiance To Your Love would get released on the 2023 Diamonds And Pearls Super Deluxe Edition. Do U Wanna Rock? remains unreleased.

The opening track on the Diamonds And Pearls album was the song Thunder and on 5 October 1991 Prince extended the existing version of Thunder with new portions, making it almost eleven minutes long. The song was contributed to The Joffrey Ballet dance company which Prince was introduced to through Patricia Kennedy, a Los Angeles member of the company. She had leased one of her two Bel-Air homes to Prince and invited him to attend a performance – it was the first ballet he had seen. The Thunder Ballet would get included in The Joffrey Ballet’s Billboards production which premiered 27 January 1993 and was filmed and subsequently shown on TV in many countries.

Then Prince recorded The Max which was different from his 1988 track of same title and updated Blue Light. Additional work would get done on The Max in early 1992 and both songs would get included on the O(+> album. He also recorded She Spoke 2 Me, but it didn’t make the album. The full version was released on the The Vault… Old Friends 4 Sale compilation in 1999 instead after an edit had been released on the 1996 Girl 6 soundtrack.

In early November 1991, Prince spent a week in Paris. He attended a Jean-Paul Gaultier fashion show and met a model, Francesca Dellera. He hired a local cinema to see Flesh, a movie she starred in, before sending her a note asking for a date. They went to restaurants and a number of clubs during the visit.

 

Photos: Herb Ritts

10-hour recording session for O(+>
Upon returning to Paisley Park, Prince had a long recording session with his band The New Power Generation which spawned three songs. Drummer Michael Bland recalled it in a 2024 interview with Funkatopia on YouTube and called it “the longest recording session of my life.” He explained that besides Love 2 The 9’s, “We recorded Johnny in that session, and we also recorded 3 Chains O’ Gold in that session. So, it means not just the time to track it, but the time to build the arrangements. Really! You know, Prince just kind of walked into the studio with (a cassette deck). He’s sitting down and he is going back over some parts that he played on piano at his house and he is working them out and then he gets to like, ‘Okay, I’m hearing this kind of rhythm’. (…) We worked at it until we get the beat for Love 2 The 9’s. And then Kirk falls in on the congas (…) and then he starts showing the band… You know. They all fall in. We’re just taking instructions at this point. We had to assist him in the arrangement of that and also 3 Chains O’ Gold. We kept trying to record it and every time somebody would make a mistake because it was a lot to remember. He’d be like, ‘That’s not really working. These two sections back-to-back that’s not really working. What if we do this? And then record it that way?’”

Michael Bland had also told Guitar World about the recording process for 3 Chains O’ Gold in 1994: “O(+> tends to go for spontaneous, first take, live-in-the-studio tracks - even when he’s cutting a complex, episodic piece like 3 Chains O’ Gold from the O(+> album. That’s one of many we had to do in one take. We had to cut that all-in-one big hunk, and it was murder man. All O(+> had was all these little sections that he’d written while he was in Paris. We had to piece it all together and then play it.”

As for Johnny, belly dancer Mayte recalled in her 2017 book My Life With Prince – The Most Beautiful that she wasn’t a huge fan of Johnny “which is this crude song about condoms. The first time I heard it, I wrinkled my nose and said, ‘What’s up with that? My father’s name is John. Your father’s name is John. I don’t like that.’” Johnny would later get re-recorded or overdubbed and released on the 1993 The New Power Generation: Goldnigga album.

While working on recordings with Carmen Electra at the Record Plant in Los Angeles in November 1991, Prince recorded the song Race on the same day as Go Go Dancer, 8 November. Tony M. rap was added on 4 January 1992, but it didn’t get used on the O(+> album. It was saved and re-recorded in May 1993 for Prince’s next album, Come.

Enter: Mayte – Prince’s future wife
Mayte, a girl trained in both ballet and belly dance, had entered Prince’s life in the summer of 1990 when she was just 16 years old, and he was 32. "I saw him in Spain, on the Nude Tour," Mayte revealed in a 1995 interview for Uptown #21. "I saw his concert there with my family and my mom just said, "You have to give him a video of your dancing! Just give it to him.’"

At the time, Mayte was living with her Puerto Rican parents in Wiesbaden, Germany, where Mayte's father was posted as a pilot in the US military. Mayte's parents brought her to another Prince concert, and they managed to get invited backstage by Prince's roadies and got Prince to watch a video tape of her dancing. "It was my mother who did it," Mayte told Uptown. "My mother made me give him the video of my dancing. I met him five minutes later."

After their initial meeting, Prince would send her tapes of his new songs and she would send him videos of her dancing to his songs. When she turned 18 on 12 November 1991, Prince invited Mayte to visit him at Paisley Park. "I was more shy than he was," Mayte confessed in Uptown #21. "He was very nice, very polite."

"Prince was very protective of me and my father was happy to place me in his care. I was given my own apartment and within weeks I was off on (the Diamonds And Pearls) tour to Australia and the Far East (in April 1992) as a dancer in his band," she recalled to Daily Mail Online. "He was very precise about what he wanted, in private too, because it was all work. Being with him was like being at the center of a 24-hour creative machine; if we weren't on stage, we were rehearsing, if we weren't rehearsing, we were in the studio. I've heard people say he's demanding, but I never gave him reason to be demanding, I was always on point. I loved it."

The first song Prince had Mayte work on upon her arrival in Minneapolis was However Much U Want which he had initially recorded as a rock and roll piano jam along with a piano demo of And God Created Woman. "That was a duet that we did when I first came to Minneapolis," Mayte revealed about However Much U Want in Uptown #21. "It was supposed to be on the O(+> album, but it didn't make it."

Photos: Jeff Katz

Recordings for O(+> start in earnest
Besides the However Much You Want duet with Mayte and And God Created Woman, Prince also recorded three other songs on 1 December 1991, embarking in earnest on his next album project. Rave Church Style was a re-recording of the 1988 song Rave Unto The Joy Fantastic that didn’t make the O(+> album, but a later version of Arrogance which was originally recorded this day did. Finally, (Excuse Me Is This) Goodbye was recorded on 1 December. It was ultimately left off the O(+> album but would receive overdubs by Clare Fischer in December 1994 and get included on an unreleased January 1995 album entitled New World that morphed into the 1996 Emancipation album. The song was titled simply Goodbye on early configurations of Emancipation before also getting left off that album. It was finally released on the 1998 Crystal Ball compilation.

Meanwhile, work on putting The NPG Hornz together also progressed. Trombonist Michael B. Nelson related his version of the story to Rolling Stone in 2016: “The impetus of him getting a horn section was they were rehearsing for the Diamonds and Pearls tour. There was a concept that Michael Bland would front an instrumental warm-up group. So, when Prince said, ‘Put a bigger horn section together,’ Michael called us. They were very simple funk tunes. So, I arranged them for five horns, and we rehearsed with the band a couple times, and they’d sent tapes to him in Paris. The next thing you know, we come out and walk into the soundstage and the whole Diamonds and Pearls four-level set is set up and it’s like, ‘Oh, my God!’”

“That was November 1991,” he continued. “Then we recorded that Symbol album which was just loaded with horns. The first song we recorded with him was Sexy M.F.,” Michael B. Nelson recalled about the December 1991 O(+> album sessions.

The stories behind Sexy M.F.
NPG keyboard player Tommy Barbarella recalled the back story to the recording of the song Sexy M.F. to Star Tribune in 2016: “The NPG wasn't a collective by any means, but he loved the band concept. With Michael Bland on drums, he had a band that could do anything musically on the drop of a dime. On Diamonds and Pearls and that next record, he would come in with the tunes, pretty skeletal, and we'd try this, try that, throw out ideas. We had played together so much, we got to know what he wanted. Things would happen very fast. We cut entire records in a day sometimes. Sexy M.F. was one take.”

Prince reveled in the bawdy humor offered up by Levi Seacer Jr. and other members of the NPG ensemble. When Levi took to greeting colleagues in the halls at Paisley Park by bellowing, “You sexy motherfucker!”, Prince found this hilarious and built Sexy M.F. around this phrase which garnered a co-writing credit for Levi Seacer Jr. as well as for Tony Mosley who wrote a rap for the song.

“Levi was always joking around with some phrase he thought was funny,” Tommy Barbarella recalled to Rolling Stone in 2016. “He’d start doing some simple little riff, stop and say the phrase. Sexy M.F. was like that. It was recorded in about 20 minutes, half an hour. I hated my organ solo on it. I wanted to make it better and fix it. But Prince was like, ‘No, it’s fine, just leave it.’ He wanted that spontaneity with that band.”

“There were a lot (of favorite moments on a Prince record) on the symbol album because we did quite a bit of that live and all the parts evolved as we were going to tape,” Tommy Barbarella told Q in 1994. “Some of that was really spontaneous.”

Prince himself talked about Sexy M.F. to Interview in 1997: “The music I make a lot of the time is reflective of the life I am leading and Sexy M.F. came during the period I had the Glam Slam disco, and I was hanging out there a lot. There was a dance troupe there, and the sexier the dancers, the bigger the revenues and the noisier the crowd. It’s funny, but you have to remember that was during the time when the biggest club song was Bitch Betta Have My Money. When you hear something constantly, you can get swayed by the current. I was swayed by hip-hop at the time.”

‘People hear the sex in my songs much more than I ever write it. If you listen to the words in Sexy M.F., you’ll see they’re about monogamy rather than promiscuous sex,’ he added to the Observer.

Photos: Herb Ritts

Previews of O(+> songs
More recordings for the O(+> album followed in December 1991, including an updated Love 2 The 9’s which featured Tony M. auditioning Mayte for a part in The New Power Generation. An unreleased single edit was made of the song which got released on the O(+> album, as did The Sacrifice Of Victor and The Morning Papers which were also recorded in December. On 18 December, overdubs were made on the previously recorded Rave Church Style, but it still didn’t make the album. Neither did Go-Go Rap.

Other songs that didn’t make the O(+> album were The Dance and Face 2 Face. The Dance was originally recorded during the 1989 Batman sessions, but now it was updated in a Middle Eastern style for Mayte to dance to. It would later get re-recorded for inclusion on the 2004 The Chocolate Invasion album. Face To Face was based on a sample from Forever In My Life, structured like the 1989 outtake I Wonder and included lyrics that would get used in Space on the 1993 Come album.

On 31 December 1991, Prince recorded a song titled Goodbye with the NPG and hosted a New Year’s Eve party at Glam Slam in Minneapolis. Several new songs were previewed, including The Max. Then, in January 1992, the Herb Ritts photos used for the 1993 The Hits/The B-Sides compilation were originally published in Vogue.

“I did see someone asking, ‘Was there any tracks on the Love Symbol album that Rosie had vocals on that might have been taken off?’,” NPG drummer Michael Bland said in the 2024 interview with Funkatopia on YouTube. “The Sacrifice Of Victor would be the one,” he answered. The Steeles ended up doing background vocals on that song instead.

On 11 January 1992, the Diamonds And Pearls show which did feature Rosie Gaines was previewed at Glam Slam, Minneapolis. Thirty-one years later, the show would get released on both CD and Blu-Ray as part of the Diamonds And Pearls Super Deluxe Edition. The NPG was augmented by The NPG Hornz, Mayte and record-scratching DJ William Graves. The setlist included the newly recorded The Sacrifice Of Victor with The Steeles providing backing vocals and Sexy M.F. The performance of Cream was also noticeable for including snippets of the songs Well Done, I Want U and In The Socket which are covered in Chapter Seven: Recordings For MPLS, Rosie Gaines And Other Artists on this blog.

A live recording of Nothing Compares 2 U performed as a duet between Prince and Rosie Gaines similar to the Glam Slam performance of the song, but from a 27 January 1992 show at Paisley Park would get released on the 1993 The Hits compilation.

Photos: Herb Ritts

The first O(+> album configuration
Recordings for the O(+> album continued in January and February 1992 while rehearsals for the Diamonds And Pearls tour also continued. Tony M. worked on Arrogance and Race on 4 January 1992 before the first known O(+> album configuration was compiled in March 1992. It included The Continental featuring Carmen Electra of which an unreleased Dance Remix was also made. A 1994 remix of The Continental by Kirk Johnson of The Game Boyz entitled Tell Me How U Want 2 B Done was released on the 1998 Crystal Ball compilation.

Clare Fischer added orchestral overdubs to 3 Chains O’ Gold in February. Other songs recorded for the O(+> album included Damn U, a new take on the Diamonds And Pearls outtake The Flow and a new version of the upcoming hit single off the album, 7 which had originally been recorded in December 1990. 7 included a drum loop sampled from the 1967 song Tramp by Lowell Fulson. At some point, a single edit was made of 7. Additional work was also done on The Max from October 1991 with Tony M. adding a rap before it got included on the O(+> album.

On 29 January, a song called Check It Out was recorded and The NPG Hornz added horns to Letter 4 Miles in February. The latter would get released on the 2023 Diamonds And Pearls Super Deluxe Edition. Nine segues were also recorded that told the story of an underage Princess Mayte's arrival in Minneapolis and subsequent romance with Prince. Damn U was extended with one of these segues and Kirstey Alley did overdubs on Arrogance besides the segues she participated in as reporter Vanessa Bartholomew. Sexy M.F. was edited shorter to make room for it all.

In The Middle Of The Night and There were left out, but However Much You Want had yet to be removed from the album. It would next appear as the B-side on an unreleased summer 1994 Mayte: If Eye Love U 2night single before getting re-recorded and released on Mayte’s 1995 Child Of The Sun Album.

The track list for the O(+> album in March 1992 was as follows:

Prince And The New Power Generation: O(+> (March 1992)
1. Album Intro (1:40)
2. My Name Is Prince (6:38) (Prince/Tony Mosley)
3. Sexy M.F. (5:25) (Prince/Levi Seacer Jr./Tony Mosley)
4. Segue (0:58)
5. Love 2 The 9’s (5:45)
6. The Morning Papers (3:57)
7. The Max (4:30)
8. Blue Light (4:38)
9. Segue (0:21)
10. However Much U Want (3:33)
11. Segue (2:00)
12. Sweet Baby (4:01)
13. Segue (0:39)
14. The Continental (5:31)
15. Damn U (4:03)
16. Segue (0:22)
17. Arrogance (1:35)
18. The Flow (2:37) (Prince/Tony Mosley)
19. Segue (0:40)
20. 7 (5:09)
21. Segue (0:15)
22. And God Created Woman (3:18)
23. 3 Chains O’ Gold (6:03)
24. Segue (0:33)
25. The Sacrifice Of Victor (6:01)

Photos: Jeff Katz

A harem of 7 women
On 17 March 1992, Prince previewed several new songs during a party at Paisley Park, including The Continental, Damn U and Sexy M.F. He stood by the DJ table and observed the reactions on the dance floor. Sexy M.F. was destined to be the first single off the O(+> album and two remixes that remain unreleased were made, Sexy M.F. (Dance Remix) and Sexy M.F. (Hardcore Dance Mix). When Prince received the prestigious Heritage Award for career achievement at the sixth annual Soul Train Music Awards held in Los Angeles 10 March 1992, he had approached actress Troy Beyer after the ceremony with an invitation to star in his video for Sexy M.F. She accepted and the video was shot at Paisley Park 20-22 March 1992. It was filmed in the Paisley Park parking garage and in Prince’s own home. The result can be seen on YouTube right here:

In October 2020, Prince’s Graffiti Bridge movie co-star Robin Power who also appeared in the Sexy M.F. video told in an interview shared on Lipstick Alley that Prince and Troy Beyer were dating. “Whatever girls that he was dating… I always say he had at least seven in rotation. (…) He was dating Miss Minneapolis. He was dating Troy Beyer. He was dating Jill Jones. He was dating Sheila E. He was dating me. He was still messing around with Ingrid. He also was dating this girl named Karen. (…) Prince had a harem. (…) He had a group of girls. (…) Prince had a variety of women and these are the girls I knew about. What about the ones who lived in other countries? Prince would go to Paris and other places when I wasn’t there. Prince was like an NBA basketball player – he had a bitch in every city.”

“When Mayte first came, and they did the whole video in Egypt… Did you notice he had her in the tub with all these women? Did that not look like a guy who was trying to have a harem again or have her be a part of a harem?” she continued. “The day that Mayte’s mother gave Prince the VHS tape of her dancing, Prince brought the tape to me, put the tape in and said ‘Robyn, I want you to see something.’ And then, when I saw it, I was like ‘wow! Who the fuck is that?’ And he was like ‘I just got this tape. What do you think of her?’ I said, ‘She is beautiful.’ He said, ‘What do you think I should do with her?’ I said ‘Anything, man. Put her in your band – do something! Look at her! Oh my God, she is gorgeous!’ But I didn’t know she was 16 years old. (…) At that time, I was 22.”

This story gives a whole new meaning to the lyric for the song 7 where Prince sings “all 7 and we’ll watch them fall, they stand in the way of love, and we will smoke them all.” Did he mean that he would give up the seven girls in his harem for Mayte whom he would eventually marry?

Photos: Jeff Katz

Mayte on Prince’s harem
Mayte recalled in her 2017 autobiography My Life With Prince – The Most Beautiful about rehearsing for the Diamonds And Pearls tour: “Lori Elle and Robia LaMorte, aka Diamond and Pearl, were Prince’s mascots at that moment. They were on the Diamonds And Pearls album cover and featured heavily in the touring show. It didn’t take long for me to wise up to the fact that Lori and Prince were romantically involved.”

It also didn’t take long before Mayte realized that she had yet another competitor for Prince’s affections: “The Diamonds And Pearls Tour was a great introduction to touring life for me. Even though I was only in a few numbers, I was on the soundstage for every rehearsal,” she wrote in her book. “I did get lonely, though, when Prince was gone out of town or too busy to hang out, and we hadn’t quite figured out my role in the whole Paisley universe, so I had a lot of downtime.”

“I loved coming and going from Paisley Park every day. Rehearsals for the tour were in full swing, and in the studio, Carmen Electra was working on an album. Prince went to LA for a few days to produce something for someone, and before he left, he suggested that Carmen and I hang out while he was gone. Carmen hit me up to go see a movie. I was surprised to learn that she was nineteen, only a year older than me.”

“After the movies, we drank tea in my apartment, and the conversation was eye-opening. I hadn’t realized that she and Prince had a thing, and it never occurred to me before how challenging it was to be his girlfriend. He traveled constantly and worked insane hours. His girlfriend couldn’t call him. Didn’t even have his number. He called, you answered.”

”When he called me later that evening, I asked him, ‘Are you dating Carmen?’ *No, no. She has a crush on me,’ he said. He was so good at this. One could easily take a very cynical view of the way he was with women, but for the most part, you gotta admit, the women weren’t complaining.”

”It was a one-time hang with Carmen. I didn’t see much of her after that. She was sent off on tour to promote her album, even though the reviews weren’t great. Something I eventually learned: Prince’s top girlfriend was always in Minneapolis. When you came to Minneapolis, you were the girl on her way in. When you left Minneapolis, you were the girl on her way out.”

Photos: Jeff Katz