It was all going so well. Prince and the freshly assembled New Power Generation had put the finishing touches to Diamonds And Pearls album. They had performed a live set for Warner Bros and its staff at the Burbank lot in Los Angeles. Everything in the garden was rosy.
Then the phone rang. There was a call for Levi Seacer Jr, the New Power Generation’s guitarist and Warner Bros’ designated Prince whisperer. The legendary Mo Ostin, chairman and CEO of the label, was on the line.
Seacer was perplexed. What did Ostin want? Prince had done his bit.
Seacer recalls to MusicRadar: “When Prince was done with his version of Diamonds And Pearls, he sent it off to Warner’s. ‘Okay. Great songs, great music. We like it.’ We flew out to LA to do a patio show. And so they were like, ‘Oh, man, this is incredible!’”
But something must have happened after the show. This wasn’t a straight-up Diamonds And Pearls playback. Prince played a bunch of his earlier songs – Alphabet St., Purple Rain, Partyman, Let’s Work for the first time since 1983 – plus a cover of the Ohio Players’ Skin Tight.
This set featured just three tracks from Diamonds And Pearls – Daddy Pop, Jughead and set closer Get Off.
Seacer thinks the execs had got together again, and had gotten into each other’s heads. They wanted a radio-friendly single.
“As soon as I got home, I got a call from Warner Brothers, and it was Mo Ostin,” says Seacer. “He said, ‘Levi, we got a problem.’ I’m saying, ‘What’s going on?’ He said, ‘We need a first single. We got a solid record, but all the radio guys don’t feel like they have the first single.’ And I said, ‘Well, why didn’t you say something? We just left there!’ [Laughs]”
Well, Ostin and the higher-uppers at Warner Bros had their reasons. They also already had their lead single – they heard it on the lot when Prince played Get Off. But at that moment, clearly, they wanted more, another option. What else did the diminutive pop genius from Minnesota have squirrelled away at his Paisley Park HQ? Ostin would have asked himself, but you know how artists can get, it’s better they hear it from a peer.
“He said, ‘Well, you know, you’re close to Prince, and you have a way of talking with him, and you guys talk your music talk. Because if I say it to him, he probably won’t hear it the right way,’” says Seacer.
He couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
“I said, ‘Oh, man, you’re his president! What can I do? I’m just a weasel! What can I do?’” laughs Seacer. “I’m like, ‘Man!’”
Ever the good soldier, he said okay. He accepted his mission but not with any relish.
“That was a hard one,” he says.
Seacer and Prince had struck up a good relationship. Seacer was exactly the type of player Prince liked having around. He could be in the studio for hours on end with no complaint. He could hang out. He also could play.
Initially, Seacer was drafted to play bass guitar for Prince as he put together a new backing band after the Revolution disbanded in 1986.
As the story goes, Seacer was playing bass in Shiela E’s band. He auditioned for Prince when he was looking for a guitar player for The Family, and he got the gig. Two days later, Prince changed his mind and Seacer is back on bass with Shiela E.
Upon their next meeting, Prince remembered Seacer and noted his surprise – not only at seeing Seacer again but seeing him on bass.
Seacer had been keeping himself busy in Prince’s rhythm section, but there was to be a change. Prince was bringing Sonny T back in on bass. He asked Seacer if he wanted to play guitar.
“Prince had a talk with me,” says Seacer. “He said, ‘Okay, well, we’re bringing Sonny Thompson in, so if you want to go back to guitar, you can.’ And I said, ‘Oh, yeah!’ ‘Well, our first rehearsal is tomorrow.’ I was so excited.”
The rehearsal didn’t quite go to plan for Seacer, but that is another episode that shines a light on his working relationship with one of pop’s most enigmatic personalities. Seacer, if anything, was over prepared.
“I brought every pedal you can imagine to the rehearsal,” he says. “And we started playing. I swear, this is a true story. The stage was about maybe five feet off the ground. It’s pretty high, and we’re in the big room at Paisley. Prince was across the room. He said, ‘Okay, Levi, take us home.’
“I’m like, ‘Oh yeah!’ I cracked my knuckles. I’m getting ready to go in. So, I’m soloing with my head back. I’m all into it, man. This is in another world! And I feel something tapping my toes and I’m like, ‘What the hell?’ And I opened my eyes, came out of my zone, and I looked down.
“Prince was looking at me from the floor of Paisley – y’know, because [the stage is] five-feet higher. He was looking at me, tapping on my toes, and he said, ‘I do the rock thing. You play the funk and jazz. Got it?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, I got it.’”
Seacer knew who was in charge. And there he was, with Ostin’s words ringing in his ears, giving Prince the bad news. Historically, things do not go well for the messenger.
“The next day, Prince was in the studio working, and I just kind of popped in,” says Seacer. “He said, ‘Hey, Levi, what you doing here?’ I said, ‘Uh, we need to talk about something right quick. I said, ‘I talked to Warner Brothers… I talked to Mo, and, umm, they love the album, but they don’t feel like they have a first single.’”
Prince was incredulous.
“I said, ‘I didn’t go behind your back. They called me.’ And he knew I had a relationship with them, and every now and then I would talk to Mo,” Seacer adds.
Prince understood this. He could trust Seacer. Nonetheless, he was not best pleased. Which artist would be?
“He was kind of hot about that,” says Seacer with a chuckle. “‘What? What do you mean? We just left there – and we slayed them!’”
Some reports put the numbers of Warner Bros employees in attendance at 400. That’s a memorable afternoon at work. These days, table football, fruit bowls and a fridge full of pop is the sign of a cool office. This was ’91. Labels had money, and money means clout. Warner Bros could call in Prince to play for the rank-and-file. And now this? So much for gratitude.
Prince said he didn’t believe it. Seacer did his best to explain. He told Prince: “The radio guys listened, and they loved it. They love it! But they need a lead-off signal. I’m just a messenger!’”
Having duly delivered the news, Seacer made good on his exit.
“He was a little frustrated,” Seacer admits. “I just left. I don’t think I even said goodbye to him.”
Prince was left to stew in the studio. Seacer didn’t have to wait long to hear from his boss again. The phone went the following morning at 7am. The New Power Generation were many things but they were not morning people. They were used to playing through the night if the session demanded it.
“I was just waking up,” says Seacer. “It was a lot earlier than we normally do sessions.”
But the day previous, Prince was steamed. He wanted Seacer’s ears on something fast. Prince had a track to play him.
“I said, ‘Okay.’ I came in. I’m tired,” says Seacer. “ I sat in the chair and he played Cream for me, on 10. It was loud. I was like, ‘Oh my God!’ He said, ‘Well, what do you think of that?’ I said, ‘Oh, man, they gonna love that.’ I mean, I knew it right when I first heard it. I said, ‘Yeah, yeah, they gonna be happy!’”
The story of Cream, or at least the order of events that led to its creation, has a whiff of the apocryphal. There is an interview with Billboard which NPG vocalist Tony Mosely is quoted as saying that they wrote it on tour in Europe, but that timing doesn’t quite fit.
Seacer’s own accounts have differed over the years. He told Rolling Stone that Prince wrote it in six or seven hours, and Wax Poetics that he sent the band out of the room as he scribbled on something and needed an hour to get his head straight and the idea for the song down on paper.
But we've got to appreciate that everything happened so fast with Prince. Seacer said that the basic tracks for Diamonds And Pearls came together in a week-and-a-half. They tracked Money Don’t Matter 2 Night, Willing And Able, and Horny Pony all in one night. Paisley Park was open all hours to contain this great efflorescence of Prince's creativity.
One thing is certain. When Seacer heard the propulsive funk by way of glam-rock stomp of Cream, he knew they had a hit. He could feel it in his bones.
“Yeah, I just knew. You know when you. You can tell,” says Seacer. “You’re like, ‘Yeah, whatever that is, that’s the magic. I mean, it hit all the check marks when you listen for a hit. When Prince comes out with something, the first thing fans are listening for is for something kind of funky, something up-tempo, something with slight religious or spiritual twist to it, and something with nice lyrics and catchy. And that song checked off all the boxes.”
And it ended up in a box. This was the analogue era. They stuck a recording into a package and sent it via FedEx to California. Then they waited.
“Today, you can just email stuff. We couldn’t do that,” says Seacer. “So we had to wait a day. And when Mo got that heat, oh man, they were jumping up and down.”
As ever, the critics were divided on Cream; it was often the way of it with Prince. But champagne was getting opened in Burbank. “You could hear all the corks coming out the bottles,” laughs Seacer. “Pop, pop, pop!”
Cream had the magic. It would become Prince’s his fifth (and final) number one hit on the Billboard Hot 100, a classic cut in a discography full of them, and Mo Ostin and Warner Bros got their hit.
- Timeless is out now via Legacy Recordings and comprises 10 tracks of rare and unreleased studio recordings from the Prince archive.
