It’s long been speculated that Michael Jackson wrote Bad, the title track from his 1987 album, in the hope that he could perform it as a duet with Prince, and now Sheila E. has given further credence to that rumour while putting another twist in the tale.
Sheila E was a huge part of the Prince universe around that time - she recorded and toured with him extensively - and, speaking on The Jason Time, she recently recalled the time that she first heard Bad at Paisley Park, Prince’s Minneapolis studio complex.
“OK, I’m going to tell something I’ve never told,” she began, before launching into what turns out to be a pretty juicy story.
“So we get the song Bad from Michael, and we’re here at Paisley, and Prince is like, ‘Michael wants me to sing this song with him.’
“So he played it for us, it goes [sings] ‘Your butt is mine’. He said ‘What!? Your butt is mine!?’ And he just walked away. He said ‘uh-uh.’”
Sheila’s version of events tallies with what Prince told Chris Rock when he was interviewed by him in 1997. When asked about the Bad rumours then, Prince said: "The first line of that song is 'your butt is mine'. And I said 'Who's going to sing that to whom?' ... because you sure aren't singing that to me, and I sure ain't singing it to you.’ So, right there we got a problem.”
It turns out, though, that this isn’t quite the end of the story, because, as Sheila E tells it, Prince wanted to hear what Bad would sound like in his hands.
“So we went and we re-recorded Bad,” she reveals. “It was so funky, it was so amazing. It was an incredible rendition of what it should have been.”
That’s something we’d like to hear, so is there any chance that it’s lurking somewhere in Prince’s legendary vault of unreleased music? Sadly not, says Sheila.
“We were like ‘Oh my God, we can’t wait for Michael to hear it.’ And then Prince went like this [mimes pushing record button] and he erased the whole thing.”
Understandably, that particular revelation was greeted by audience gasps, but Sheila goes on to say that, for Prince, this kind of behaviour wasn’t unusual.
“We did that all the time though,” she confirms. “I could name so many songs that we re-recorded that were sent to us. That’s another show…”
Whether any of these other Prince reworks have survived isn’t clear, but Prince certainly wasn’t averse to playing and recording the odd cover in his time. 1996’s Emancipation album, for example, included four - One of Us (Joan Osborne), La, La, La Means I Love U (The Delfonics), Betcha by Golly Wow! (The Stylistics) and I Can’t Make U Love Me (Bonnie Raitt) - and he famously performed Radiohead’s Creep at Coachella and Foo Fighters’ Best Of You at the Super Bowl.
And, if you want to get a rough approximation of what Prince doing Michael Jackson might have sounded like, here he is working 1979’s Don’t Stop 'Til You Get Enough into his performance of The Time’s Cool - a song that Prince also wrote - while on stage in Montreux in 2013. Also listen out to the nod to Stevie Wonder via the inclusion of the horn riff from Sir Duke right at the end...
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