Prince's Black Album

"Hello? Mista George? This is yo conscience, Mutha...."

 

Prince used to do Bob George live quite often back in the day during the Lovesexy tour.

 

A very pleasurable listen for me.

Tight funky beats with some sexual injection... has to be in every Prince fan's collection, period.

 

I know that most people think Lovesexy was a big step down after Sign O' The Times, but I feel like The Black Album is inferior to Lovesexy and would have been received even worse than Lovesexy was had it been officially released at the time. It's not as daring as Dirty Mind or 1999, and while "Bob George" is fun, I think a lot of people would have had a serious WTF reaction to it.

I got the album years ago for about $10 in a used bin. I remember racing home to hear it, because even though it had been officially released by that point, it still wasn't easily found. I assumed the album would feel dangerous and sexy and non-stop funky. Well, it had some funk, but it didn't feel dangerous or particularly sexy, more quaint than anything.

Lovesexy gets a bad rap for being the rushed replacement for TBA, but IMO it's the superior record. However, I haven't heard TBA in some time, so I'll give it another listen soon.

 

You know, I completely forgot I had the Black Album CD. I thought I had sold it years ago, but here it is.

 

The 1994 CD was only in print for a short time. I see them going for $150-200.

 

That is too much....

 

Sure it did. "Limited" was assumed to mean "limited to how many we can sell."

Remember the "limited" Bob Marley box set, Songs of Freedom, that ended up selling hundreds of thousands of copies and is still in print?

 

That's what I saw them selling for...dunno if people are buying them. Supply and Demand I suppose.

 

Looks like we might be in luck! Of course we have to wait until September, so...
Amazon - Prince: Black Album (Vinyl)

I'm still blown away that he has passed. I just can't believe it. At the same time, while not wanting everyone to make money off someone's death, I'm honestly hoping this will allow WB to re-release some of his work, especially on vinyl. For You is out this week (on vinyl.) Prince (self-titled) is out next month. Now it looks like the Black Album will be out in September, Rhino/WB had already reissued Dirty Mind, Controversy, Purple Rain and 1999 on vinyl a year or two ago. I'm hoping this trend continues. Unfortunately when you hit the "post-WB" albums, it'll get a bit messy. I have the Erotic City Records vinyl bootleg. Bought it over fifteen years ago! The cover is a bit beat up, but the vinyl is still perfect!

 

(thread drift)

Whoa. Looks like this might actually be happening! WB has listed on Amazon that Lovesexy (Oct.), The Love Symbol album (Dec.), Graffiti Bridge (Nov.), Batman (Oct.), Parade (July), Around the World in A Day (June), will all be released on vinyl this year! Wow.

 

Billboard did a great interview with Mo Ostin regarding his death - it covers a lot, including what happened with "The Black Album."

Here's the link and relevant excerpt:

Former Warner Bros. CEO Mo Ostin Recalls His Long Relationship With Prince: 'He Was a Fearless Artist' »

Things didn’t go quite as smoothly with [1987's] The Black Album, which Prince abruptly recalled just days before it was released.
What happened was, we had a marketing campaign in connection with the Sign O’ the Times record release, and then there would be a whole new marketing campaign connected with the [release of the Sign O’ the Times concert film, later in 1987]. But while we were [promoting] the record, he went to a bunch of discos -- he would always do that -- and he wouldn’t hear his records being played, and he was very upset. So he decided he wanted to make a record that was [more dancefloor-friendly], and he made The Black Album. He insisted that we release it at the same time we were working Sign O’ the Times, and it would have disrupted our entire marketing plan. We tried to talk him out of it: “You can't put a record out to interfere with the existing record.” But he insisted, and we again went along with him.

But then, he had a change of heart. After we had manufactured records all over the world for the release, he called us and said he wanted to hold off and wait until we completed our campaign. We told him we had spent a lot of money getting this thing ready for market, and he said “Look, I want you to take all those albums and destroy them and I'll pay for whatever cost you guys incurred in manufacturing.” And he actually paid us out of his royalties.

You’d been down that road before with Neil Young -- didn’t he scrap hundreds of thousands of copies of 1978’s Comes a Time because he decided he didn’t like the mix?
Yeah, we'd been down that road with several artists. I don’t know if you know Frank Sinatra cut a recitation of Gunga Din, the Rudyard Kipling poem, after [Sinatra's 1966 Grammy-winning No. 1 album] Strangers in the Night! [laughter]. And he wanted it released!

Really?
Yes! I held it up, and then he and I had a… [chuckles] … a pretty hot discussion about it because I had interfered with his wishes. He really got angry, he told me he wanted the album out immediately. So we prepared it for release, we sent it to radio, and we got such negative feedback. The record still was at the distribution centers, it had not yet gone to retail, so I called him and said "Frank, we’re getting a terrible, terrible response to the Gunga Din record," and he said “Mo, if that’s the case, see if you can kill it and pull it back.” So we’d been through that before.

Is there any specific Prince memory or moment that stands out among the others?
Well, there was a situation with The Black Album. Time Inc. and Warner had merged, and we were at a sort of [corporate] bonding conference with Time magazine in Jamaica, I think it was. And there were lots of people there and Lenny was in a conversation with a guy who was a very important writer and editor for Time magazine called Dick Stolley -- he was the guy who actually [acquired and released] the tapes of the Kennedy assassination; I think he also came up with the idea of People magazine. Somehow The Black Album came up -- and Stolley of course became very interested and asked if we would send him a copy. Well, Prince had asked us to destroy them so we said no. But he said "Please send me the album, I’ll keep it under wraps," all kinds of things. Finally, I said, "Well, we can trust Stolley, he's a guy who has an incredible reputation and a lot of integrity. Let's let him have it."

We still had some records in our warehouses -- we had destroyed most of them but we kept some, just to have them, and we agreed to send Stolley a copy. Not long after that, Prince showed up at our office with Kim Basinger. He had just finished [the] Batman [soundtrack] and had made a disco recording with her that ran about 20 minutes [“The Scandalous Sex Suite”] and he wanted to play it for us. We were in Lenny's office and as he was playing the record, Prince got up from where he was sitting, went up to Lenny's desk -- and there on his desk was the copy of The Black Album that we were going to send to Stolley. He looked at it, picked it up, put it back on the desk and made no comment. I came up with whatever excuse I could make, I told him that this was somebody we could trust and might be valuable in getting exposure for Prince, maybe a cover of Time magazine, who knows? It turned out to be less of an issue than we thought it might, but our hearts dropped when we saw him pick up that album.

Do you have any idea how many original copies you held back?
No I don't. It might have been a hundred, I have no idea. It was the guy in the manufacturing [plant] who actually did that.

 

You must have realised when you wrote that, that many people would read "Prince used to do Boy George live quite often back in the day during the Lovesexy tour".

 

Yes, I have a European one. Details can be found on Discogs.

 

The Marley set went out of print for several years. I know all too well, as I paid too much for it during the OOP years, about a year before it was reissued.

 

Not to derail the thread, but the original version was limited, and is a bit hard to find. The later versions (there have been three additional reissues) all have different packaging.

 

I've seen a listing by an online retailer for one of those escaped 1987 Black Album vinyl pressings going for $2500. I'd been watching it for a while, and the price is actually down from $3000 after Prince's passing. This place also has a 1994 pressing for about 1/3 the price. I also saw in other Prince threads that The Black Album will be reissued later this year.

 

I bought it for $4.99 at a used CD store about 10 years ago. My copy isn't in perfect condition though. I didn't realize it was so rare, either.

Apparently there was a vinyl release in Europe as well as plenty of coloured US promos in 1994....

 

And I have two of them! ".....that rich fat daddy with all the gold in his mouth, Don't try to play me for yesterday's fool, 'Cause I'll slap yo ass into the middle of next week, Sorry baby, That's the rules......" - "Bob Grorge". My favorite cut on the "Black Album". Song went through my head all day st work.

 

Audiophile USA has the Black Album for $2500 last I seen a while back.

 

WB did officially release this on CD in 1994, then quickly pulled it.

 

Always sounded dangerous enough to me.

 

The original CD is even more rare, even though it's hard to tell it apart from the 1994 release.