Prince: The Beginning
I know yall don't like to read, but it's interesting!
Hardly into their teens, Prince and Andre (who uses the surname Cymone) had already formed their first group.
The first band had Prince playing lead guitar, Andre himself on bass guitar, his sister Linda on keyboards and the Time's Morris Day on drums. The group was called Grand Central, later renamed Champagne. The musicians all wore suede-cloth suits with their zodiac signs sewn on the back (Prince, born on June 7th, 1960, had Gemini, the twins, on his). For a time, they were managed by Morris' mother, which didn't make Prince very happy. "She wasn't fast enough for Prince," says Mrs. Anderson. "He wanted her to get them a contract right away."
The band practiced in Andre's basement, where Prince had established a bedroom of his own. "It sounded like a lot of noise" says Bernadette Anderson. "But after the first couple of years, I realized the seriousness of it. They were good kids. Girls were crazy about them."
Andre -- whose father had played bass in the Prince Rogers Band -- says that although the family was poor, Prince "dug the atmosphere. It was freedom for him." There wasn't enough money to buy records, but there was a family friend -- a reclusive black millionaire, says one source -- who gave the kids the money to go to a local studio to record a few songs. The studio they picked was called Moon Sound.
Moon Sound was an eight-track studio that charged about thirty-five dollars an hour back in 1976, when Prince and Andre and the rest of Champagne walked in the door. The owner, Chris Moon, was a lyricist looking for a collaborator. "Prince always used to show up at the studio with a chocolate shake in his hand, sipping out of a straw," Moon remembers. "He looked pretty tame. Then he'd pick up an instrument and that was it. It was all over."
Prince soon agreed to work with Moon, and the studio owner handed the seventeen year-old a set of keys to the studio. "He'd stay the weekend, sleep on the studio floor," Moon says. "I wrote down directions on how to operate the equipment, so he'd just follow the little chart -- you know, press this button to record and this button to play back. That's when he learned to operate studio equipment. Pretty soon, I could sit back and do the listening."
One person who heard Prince's early recordings was Owen Husney, who became his first manager. Husney put together an expensive package that included a demo tape of three twelve-minute songs on which Prince sang and played all the instruments, and he went off to L.A. to make a pitch to the record companies.
Three labels -- CBS, Warner Bros. and A&M -- eventually made offers. Prince finally signed with Warner Bros., where, says an executive, they "were taken with the simplicity of his music and a future that looked wide open," and where he was offered a firm three-LP contract, unheard of for a new artist.
