CREEM ONLINE: Prince — The Work 1976-2001

Prince
The Work 1976–2001
2004 Thunderball

It says here in the funny papers that Prince has a new album out called Musicology—an egghead handle with an edifying air to it that conjures up visions of Professor Prince holding class in his best zoot suited Cab Calloway mortarboard attire.

But if you want a real musical history lesson in what Prince is up to every night while the rest of the world is sleeping, then I strongly suggest that you seek out a copy of Thunderball's definitive 20 disc set The Work 1976-2001.

I'll repeat that staggering statistic for those of you who are just picking themselves off the floor. Spanning a quarter of a century, this astonishing set contains a whopping 20 discs of unreleased studio demos and outtakes. That's a grand total of 331 tracks, all presented in strict chronological order. Amazingly, there are no false starts, no incomplete songs, and no duplication with any officially released Prince albums or extended singles—and that includes obscure Internet-only releases like the authorized four-disc set of outtakes Crystal Ball.

With each individual disc clocking in at a full eighty minutes in length, that's over 24 hours worth of music. And for those of you who would like an old school conversion, we're talking the equivalent of 40 full-length vinyl records, or 80 album sides. This mammoth monolith makes Keith Jarrett's original vinyl ten record set Sun Bear Concerts look like a one-sided Ramones single.

And while it's true that some of these tracks have been available on various individual bootlegs for more than a decade, more often than not their muffled tenth-generation sound quality was so inferior as to be almost unlistenable. But as you would except with such a major undertaking as this from Prince specialists Thunderball, the sound quality presented here is almost uniformly of high studio quality.

And what a treasure trove of material we're presented with. Not only are we privy to outtakes and demos from all of Prince's own albums, we're also treated to an extensive array of unreleased songs from virtually every artist Prince has worked with over the years, including The Time, The Family, Jill Jones, and Carmen Electra. And in some instances, this includes tracks from completed follow up albums which were never even released!

In fact, upon listening to all the myriad variations presented here, it's not unreasonable to think that Prince routinely assembles several completely different versions of each album before he releases it.

If anything, Prince is a sonic painter who eschews preliminary sketches, preferring instead to shape each idea directly into a finished canvas. In this regard, his genius is somewhat akin to Picasso's—not only in terms of his sheer voluminous output, but in the content of his various stylistic periods spanning the last 25 years.

Some of the stellar selections contained on The Work include:

•		A percolating screamfest from the 1999 sessions called "Turn It Up" that has Prince exhorting: "Turn it up, turn it up baby! Work me like a radio! Come and play with my controls!"

•		The original demo for The Time's "Chocolate," wherein Prince shows where Morris Day's 'ad libbed' conceited shtick really comes from, right down to that trademarked "Yessssss."

•		The full unedited 12-minute version of "Computer Blue" that restores the missing six and a half minutes which were cut from the end of the version that's on Purple Rain.

•		A marathon 30 minute studio version of "I Would Die For You" that served as the arrangement template for Prince's live television version.

And because that's only four selections from the first three discs, you can just imagine what's waiting for you on the remaining 17. In other words, school's in session, so you'd better take notes because there's going to be a final exam.

And knowing Professor Prince, it'll be oral.