Prince's Genius For Happy Accidents In The Studio [Highlight From Episode 320]

Discover how Prince's ability to turn accidents into musical gold in this episode highlight featuring author John McKie.

Listen to Episode 320: The Enigma of Prince: What Makes 'Sign O’ The Times' Timeless?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Here's a highlight from a recent episode of book don Rock.
Our guess is John McKay's the author of Prince's Sign
of the Times. Prince could turn a mistake into art.
Michael Bland, his drummer Princess Drummer from the nineties, told
you there was no such thing as an accident in
the studio.

Speaker 2 (00:16):
Yeah. One of the things the book does is that
for those listening who decide that they don't like Prince
and that's okay, I would still encourage you. They out there, well,
I don't understand it. Species, I don't really understand.

Speaker 1 (00:29):
But something wrong with them, what's going on?

Speaker 2 (00:31):
I can't help them. But what fascinated me was that
the other musicians that Prince has got in common with,
and Prince was also around that time a Sign of
the Times that was mooted to do a record with
Miles Davis, And so when I went into research for
the book, I became fascinated by Miles Davis as well.
And the reason I mentioned Miles Davis here in an
answer to your question, which I will come to answer

(00:53):
your question, is that Miles Davis didn't talk when he
worked with bandmates about mistakes. He talked about interesting choices,
and you know, he would talk about if you play
a wrong note, make it sound like you meant to
play it. The same note in Jay Graden that I
mentioned a minute ago, said that he would when he
played a wrong note or a mistake note, whatever you
want to call it, he would didn't play it as

(01:14):
part of a sequence to make it sound like that's
what he'd meant to do all along.

Speaker 1 (01:17):
Isn't that amazing?

Speaker 2 (01:18):
It is amazing. And so the happy accident, as I
call it, is something that I became fascinated by and
just the opportunity to kind of write about how you
know that the several songs on sound at the times
where quote unquote mistakes are turned into making it sound
like it's meant to sound. So the Ball of Dorothy Parker,

(01:42):
Susan Rogers, who was his engineer at the time, had
installed a new console and this sound was dull and flat,
and Prince just didn't even comment on it. So she'd
kind of made a quote unquote mistake, and he said, oh,
the console sounds, you know, different. But again, part of
the reason that the Ball and Dorothy Parker sounds so

(02:02):
weird maybe to do with that Forever in My Life,
which again is got central stage of the movie. There's
a refrain that he sings as part of the chorus,
and that is an accident, and it's turned into a
recurring theme. And again, you know, I interviewed I was
lucky enough to interview Patricia Russian, the great Patrician Russian,

(02:24):
and she talked about Freddie Washington's base playing on Forget
Me Notes, and that was actually the start of a mistake. Now,
I don't think anyone could listen to Forget Me Notes
by Patricia Russian, which has been sampled to turn into
number one hits by George Michael and by Will Smith,
and go that was a mistake. You know, that's someone
who's an A grade musician, knowing what to do and

(02:46):
knowing how to turn it into gold.