‘Sign o’ the Times’ Is A Sad Reminder Of How Much We Lost When Prince Went To The Big Erotic City In The Sky

I grew up in a rock n’ roll household. My older brothers schooled me on the fine points of classic rock while my sister owned just about every new wave record of note released in the early ’80s. However, along with The Beatles and Ramones, the artist whose records got the most traffic in my house, from bedroom to bedroom, was Prince. My oldest brother liked the keyboard textures and production, my other brother liked the guitar playing, and my sister liked the melodies. Throw in dope beats, rebellious sexuality, and great songwriting, and there was something for everybody.

Time is a bastard, and for music fans the past few years has seemed like The Red Wedding, as one artist after another has passed away, sometimes in rapid succession. While death is the natural other side of life, and we shouldn’t be surprised that musicians who cut their teeth decades ago are now succumbing to the ravages of age, it’s still a jolting shock when so many of our memories are linked to the music they made. Prince’s death in April of 2016 due to an accidental overdose of the opioid fentanyl was one of the most surprising as well as the most tragic. Speaking personally, I know it hit me harder than the others, and you couldn’t help think that the man’s work here in Earth wasn’t quite finished.

To witness Prince at the peak of his powers, I highly recommend the 1987 concert film Sign o’ the Times, which is currently available for streaming on Showtime on demand. Filmed on the tour for the album of the same name, it features The Purple One and his new crack band, which replaced The Revolution, and featured protégé Sheila E. on drums. Much like the album material, the new band was funkier, jazzier and more adept at following Prince’s musical flights of fancy, from the deepest of R&B grooves to transcendent gospel passages to out and out hard rock.

At the time of its release, Sign o’ the Times’ dark sonic milieu seemed to herald the looming seriousness of the early ’90s; however, in retrospect, certain aspects of the film’s staging are amusingly dated. The bright stage set look like something out of a Paula Abdul music video and the film occasionally segues into brief scripted moments, which add little and don’t make much sense. Best of all are clips of Prince enigmatically fondling a Tesla plasma globe, like some mad professor in an ’80s sci-fi flick like Weird Science or TerrorVision.

Opening his show with the album’s title track, Prince builds it to a slow burn, before trotting out a full drum line in the middle of the guitar solo to end it with a bang. One thing about Prince, he always put as much effort into the presentation as he did on the music itself, and he put a lot of effort into the music. While the album Sign o’ the Times suffers slightly from late ’80s digital production techniques, the songs sound timeless during their live performances. The rock and soul influences in Prince’s music are on full display here, thanks to the band’s faultless and exuberant execution. Dare I say it even recalls one Jimi Hendrix?

Being a member of Prince’s backup band must have been one of the hardest gigs in music. If you were an instrumentalist, you had to be a complete badass as a player, been familiar with a deep reservoir of material, and been able to play it all while wearing either a full suit or nothing at all. If you were one of his backup singers, you better look as good as you sing, and be ready to perform sexually charged dance routines with your bandleader, wearing little more than a bikini. Actually, on the Sign o’ the Times tour, Prince’s backup singer Cat Glover was also his choreographer, and served as his romantic on-stage foil.

It’s interesting in 2017 to watch the sexually charged performances of such songs as “Hot Thing” and “If I Was Your Girlfriend.” In one Prince rips off Glover’s skirt and chases her around stage, in another he humps her on a bed above the drum riser. I can’t help but think that such sexually aggressive behavior wouldn’t fly in this day and age. At the time though, the overt sexuality alone was shocking enough that people didn’t take time to analyze the implications and perhaps the singer’s diminutive stature and gender-bending leanings soft peddled the inferred sexual violence.

What’s most striking about Sign o’ the Times’ performances is how much they predict the post-modern genre splicing of today’s music. When Prince and band toy with hip hop idioms, they bring out the genre’s sonic debt to classic soul and funk. R&B numbers are given a rock backbeat, thanks to Sheila E., whose drumming shines throughout. It’s telling to considering that the singer, who only two years prior had her own hit record “The Glamorous Life” and starred in the movie Krush Groove, put her solo career on hold to play drums behind her musical mentor. “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man” sounds not unlike noisy Minneapolis neighbors The Replacements at their poppiest, while the “Forever in My Life” works itself into a transcendent spiritual with little more than a beat and a hook. Curiously, the film then shoehorns in the original music video for “U Got the Look,” a duet with Scottish singer Sheena Easton, which seems stiff in comparison to the concert footage.

It’s aesthetically dangerous to keep harping on about how things were better way back when, in the mythical past when everyone knew how to play an instrument and all the other old timer complaints. Things done changed and to judge today’s music by yesterday’s standards will get you nowhere. However, Sign o’ the Times is a sad reminder of how much music lost when Prince Rogers Nelson took the ladder to the big erotic city up in the sky. As a singer, as a musician, as a performer, as an artist, there just isn’t anyone around who compares to him. Like I said, time is a bastard.

Benjamin H. Smith is a New York based writer, producer and musician. Follow him on Twitter:@BHSmithNYC.

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