#lppsaturday

It's #LPPSaturday and #BlackLivesMatter ~ Celebrating the #Legacy and #Genius of #Prince and #TroyGua 'til the world stops spinning ~ Inspiration: #PaisleyPark . From Goldie's Parade: Paisley Park: Prince commissioned Bret Thoeny, 23-year-old architect at the firm of BOTO Design Inc of Santa Monica, California, to draw up blueprints to accommodate a fully operational studio complex. Construction got underway in January 1986, building at 7801 Audubon Road in Chanhassen, a vast 65,000sq ft recording, rehearsal space and filming facility. During this time, Prince continued to rent another warehouse until April 1987 when the construction of Paisley Park was finally complete, built by local construction firm Bossardt-Christenson. . From Billboard, The Inside Story on Designing Prince's Paisley Park: Exclusive Interview with Bret Thoeny, by Shira Karsen: Q: What was the building process like? A: We built it from scratch. All white aluminum, metal panels on the outside to compliment the simplicity of the landscape. Very few windows because recording studios don’t have windows, but also because it was his place, and he wanted privacy. We constructed a large sound stage like the Hollywood Sound Stage, two recording studios, a dance rehearsal hall, costume spaces, offices, and his office. He would do films there and tour rehearsals, all his costumes, all his clothes remained there. And he was very involved in the collaboration process. He’d come check out the construction site when he was on tour, climb up on the roof to see the space, all sorts of things. Q: What was so special about Paisley Park for you? A: I continue to do this for entertainment clients and producers and different people creating their own complex, a whole center where they can work, but back then, 25 years ago, this wasn’t done. Artist’s weren’t building their own compounds, only large companies and record labels were. But Prince, Prince had this vision to have everything under one roof. And this was decades before it was common for any individual to do that. . #Prince4ever #LePetitPrince #LPPisART #TroyGuaArt #Surrealism #Photography #Sculpture #PopArt https://www.instagram.com/p/CUz8Uuxlayf/?utm_medium=tumblr

It's #LPPSaturday and #BlackLivesMatter ~ Celebrating the #Legacy and #Genius of #Prince and #TroyGua 'til the world stops spinning ~ Inspiration: #Madhouse • Love this? #SupportArt and become a #Patreon member at #ClubLPP 💜👉  patreon.com/clublpp • From princevault.com: Madhouse was originally a 'faux' jazz rock group conjured up by Prince in late 1986 in Minneapolis to be an outlet for some jazz material he had recorded with Eric Leeds. A live version of the band was made up when Madhouse was slated as a support act on the Sign O’ The Times Tour. The line up of the band comprised Eric Leeds (baritone saxophone), Dr. Fink (keyboards), Levi Seacer, Jr. (bass), and Dale Alexander (drums). • From the Current's 'Prince: The Story of Sign O' The Times, Episode 7': From June 19 to 22, 1987, Prince took over a soccer stadium in Utrecht, Holland, setting up chairs to host nearly 15,000 fans each night. I've gotten the chance to connect with a handful of Dutch fans who were actually at the show on June 20, 1987, which was recorded and has been remastered and included in the Super Deluxe reissue of Sign O' The Times. The opening act for the Sign O' The Times Tour was Madhouse, Prince's experimental jazz side project. The original live lineup of Madhouse included Eric Leeds, Dr. Fink, Levi Seacer, and drummer Dale Alexander. . [Dutch fan] Patrick Jordens: ‘I was watching Madhouse like my life depended on it because I loved it. I lot of people were not paying attention, but when I was looking at Madhouse, I looked to the side of the stage, and I see Prince, and he's watching Madhouse from the side of the stage, and he's hanging on some kind of bar. He's swinging, and then he jumps off and he stands there a little bit, and no one sees him but me, I think. So I tap Roald, and I say, you know, "Hey! Look over there it's Prince." And he sees me getting Roald and pointing at him, and then he waves at us — never forget it! It was beautiful!’ • #Prince4ever #LePetitPrince #LPPisART #TroyGuaArt #Surrealism #Photography #Sculpture #PopArt #ArtImitatingLifeImitatingArt 💜👉 https://troygua.com/le-petit-prince https://www.instagram.com/p/CWyKVTIlNDZBzR-YlvDVWkiRVsO1h-TMiNGxZM0/?utm_medium=tumblr

It's #LPPSaturday and #BlackLivesMatter ~ Celebrating the #Legacy and #Genius of #Prince 'til the world stops spinning ~ Inspiration: #FAIRLIGHT #NewSounds • Love this? #SupportArt and become a #Patreon member 👉 #ClubLPP 👉  patreon.com/clublpp • From Duane Tudahl's 'Prince and the Parade and Sign o' the Times Era Studio Sessions 1985 and 1986': "Prince got a FAIRLIGHT! This was the coolest sampler keyboard monster ever! We loved it and it inspired a lot of unique ideas. The type of songs that used sound effects and flutes and orchestral samples, etc. It was a brand-new box of crayons in a preschool with no grown-ups around to tell us not to color on the walls...Because we were also really high on the popularity of Purple Rain, we had all of this momentum, so as musicians we were really bold and brave. I think other musicians can feel that when they listen [to Parade]. There's an irreverence to it, and it's all over the place. It's the kind of stuff that record companies hate, but musicians love." ~Lisa Coleman • Prince had been using the Fairlight keyboard but sometimes struggled with how to stretch its potential and decided to bring in an expert to help, according to Todd Herreman. "I got a call from Alan Leeds saying 'We got this Fairlight from you guys, but Prince needs somebody to run it, could you recommend a programmer?' and I just said, 'Well, that would be me.' So they flew me up for an interview and I got the gig." "My first session with him blew my freaking mind. I get called at five or six in the morning and it's Susan and she said that Prince wants to record. So this is like being thrown into the deep end, I mean it was my first week there, I had no idea what I was in for and I really didn't know Prince as a musician at that point and I really had no idea what this man was capable of. And he was making the extended mix of "Mountains" for the 12-inch. And I just sat there the whole time with my mouth open and my jaw hitting the floor. I can't believe I'm seeing him do this." • #Prince4ever #LePetitPrince #LPPisART #TroyGuaArt #Surrealism #Photography #Sculpture #PopArt #ArtImitatingLifeImitatingArt • 💜👉 https://troygua.com/le-petit-prince https://www.instagram.com/p/CRt1N57leGgP_no7jK1ikjYJmkYn2bRH9mdQ2w0/?utm_medium=tumblr

It's an #LPPSaturday ✌️4☝️ (swipe for both) and #BlackLivesMatter ~ Let's celebrate the #Genius of #Prince and #TroyGua 'til the world stops spinning ~ Inspiration: the #Excitement and #LOUDNESS of the #PurpleRain Tour . Love this? Join the club - literally! 👉 #ClubLPP 👉  patreon.com/clublpp • From Rolling Stone: Prince’s Epic ‘Purple Rain’ Tour: An Oral History by David Browne, June 22, 2017: . Lisa Coleman: It was one of the loudest things I’ve ever heard. It’s like when sports teams come out onto the field. We were hitting the stage and it’s as if we were coming out from the locker room, you know? People were screaming and hanging over the rails and reaching for us. They knew our names, more than ever because of the film. We all kind of glanced at each other like, “Holy shit!” . Wendy Melvoin: When they turned the lights off and you’d stand by the side of the stage and hear, “Ladies and gentlemen …,” it was deafening. To this day, I have never heard anything like that. It was so loud that my ears became distorted at one point. . Mark Brown: It was hard to hear yourself onstage. The audience would settle down after the first couple songs, but still … I had a huge bass rig. And even with all of that equipment, I would only hear it if I walked back by the bass amp. You’d feel the beat, but there were moments where you could get lost. . Matt Fink: The loudest white noise possible. . Bobby Z: Then Prince would rile them back up. He’d shake his ass or do a costume change or something, and people would go nuts again. . LeRoy Bennett: The hair stood up on my arms. It still does thinking about it. It was just insane because none of us had experienced anything like that before. Suddenly we were elevated to a much higher level than we ever anticipated and it was a bit overwhelming. You had to really fight hard to concentrate on what you were supposed to do during the show, because you couldn’t believe what was going on. • #Prince4ever #LePetitPrince #LPPisART #TroyGuaArt #Surrealism #Photography #Sculpture #PopArt #ArtImitatingLifeImitatingArt @therevolution @leleroybennett • 💜♾ 👉  https://troygua.com/le-petit-prince 🌹🙏🏼☮️💜♊😎 https://www.instagram.com/p/CLPOa6ilVQB/?igshid=shhjxe0qtxk5

It's #LPPSaturday and #BlackLivesMatter ~ Let's celebrate the #Genius of #Prince 'til the world stops spinning ~ Inspiration: #PurpleRain Tour kickoff in #Detroit (and MJ) • Love this? Join the club - literally! 👉 #ClubLPP 👉  patreon.com/clublpp • From Duane Tudahl's 'Prince and the Purple Rain Era Studio Sessions': . "Detroit! My name is Prince, and I've come to play with you." ~Prince . "The tension the first night was astronomical," remembered Lisa Coleman. "But after the first chord, everything was okay." As he had with his last two tours, Prince decided to launch [the Purple Rain tour] in November, and this time he stacked the cards in his favor and premiered with a seven-night series at the Joe Louis Arena in Detroit. To give some perspective, Prince had played the same venue the previous year and sold out a single performance. Prince always had a very personal relationship with Detroit, on occasion referring to it as a "second home." The show was a tremendous success, overshadowing everything he'd done so far in his career. • Some other found quotes: . “Before we set out on the Purple Rain tour, it was a case of Prince wanting to see what Michael and the Jacksons were doing in terms of production, lighting, staging and everything with the Victory tour...There was a feeling in our camp that while what they were doing was a very solid stadium production, there was nothing really cutting edge about the technology. The Varilites, which was a brand name for a type of computerized lighting, was the gold standard in the industry at that time. And we made sure we had all that shit. But the Jackson's production didn't. Prince had a lot of respect for Michael, but he was mildly impressed with the show.”  ~Alan Leeds • “Michael attended many of the Purple Rain concerts...Michael knew Prince was a serious threat.” ~Questlove • “During the Purple Rain tour of America, Prince repeatedly threw down a single glove in mockery of the other's trademark.” ~The Glasgow Herald (19th July, 1988) • #Prince4ever #LePetitPrince #LPPisART #TroyGuaArt #Surrealism #Photography #Sculpture #GloveDrop #PopArt #ArtImitatingLifeImitatingArt  • 💜♾ 👉  troygua.com https://www.instagram.com/p/CKrJ_eplke-/?igshid=h5o9dasjqbnq

It's #LPPSaturday and #BlackLivesMatter ~ Let's celebrate the #Genius of #Prince and #TroyGua 'til the world stops spinning ~ Inspiration: Inspiring #UnderTheCherryMoon • #SupportArt 👉  patreon.com/clublpp • From the webinar series @thepurpleparadigm | Ep. 6 | feat. Susannah Melvoin, St. Paul Peterson, Eric Leeds & Jerome Benton ~ Susannah, in response to Dr. Mauri's comparison of #UTCM to Billy Wilder's Some Like it Hot: "No, I have to say, I know first hand what that was about - 'The Philadelphia Story' is what influenced him." • From 'Banana Skirts and Cherry Moons: Utopic French Myths in Prince's Under the Cherry Moon', by Karen Turman in Spectrum: A Journal on Black Men Vol. 7, No. 2 (Spring 2020), Published By: Indiana University Press Partial Abstract: Paisley Park is in your heart, or perhaps in France? The cinematic aesthetics and themes of [Prince’s second] film reveal a more acute transcription of a Paisley Park utopia defined by freedom of oppression based on class, race, and gender. The film's visuals echo jazz age entertainment reminiscent of performances by the Nicholas Brothers, the Berry Brothers, and Josephine Baker from the 1920s through the 1940s. The French locale adds yet another layer to the equation: during the interwar years, Paris became a haven for Black entertainers, artists, and intellectuals who discovered an almost utopian experience in comparison to the violent racism in the US. This essay examines class, race, and gender in Under the Cherry Moon through comparative analysis of Black writers and entertainers during the Harlem Renaissance and the French fetishization of Black American expatriates. In addition to Josephine Baker's performances and legacy, this study will consider Claude McKay's Banjo (1929), a narrative reevaluating Blackness and contextualizing the ideals of the Harlem Renaissance in the south of France. • #Prince4ever #LePetitPrince #LPPisART #TroyGuaArt #Surrealism #Photography #Sculpture #PopArt #ArtImitatingLifeImitatingArt • 💜👉   https://troygua.com/le-petit-prince https://www.instagram.com/p/COVe2PblOTD/?igshid=1cx3o3oisjd0u

It's #LPPSaturday and #BlackLivesMatter ~ Let's celebrate the #Genius of #Prince and #TroyGua 'til the world stops spinning ~ Inspiration: #JoniMitchell • Love this? Join the club - literally! 👉 #ClubLPP 👉  patreon.com/clublpp • From the official @prince Facebook page, April 19, 2019: . “I love all Joni’s music. Joni’s music should be taught in school." — Prince, 2004 . The threads of Joni Mitchell’s influence are woven throughout Prince’s life and career. He first discovered her as a teenager by listening to the Twin Cities rock radio station KQRS in the mid-1970s, when her single “Help Me” became a radio hit, and when she toured behind her album The Hissing of Summer Lawns — an album Prince would hail as one of his favorites a decade later in an interview with Rolling Stone — he went to see her perform in Minneapolis. . “I saw him in an audience at that time,” Joni Mitchell recalled in an interview with the British rock artist Morrissey in 1996. “I believe it was him. Front row to the left. Quite conspicuous because he's got those eyes like a puffin, those Egyptian eyes, those big, exotic eyes.” . References to Joni’s music would appear again and again in Prince’s work. The album artwork for Prince’s 1981 release Controversy contains a small nod to his hero, with her name printed between stars on one of the newspaper headlines in the collage. The title of the 1984 album he wrote for the Time, Ice Cream Castle, was borrowed from her song “Both Sides Now.” On the 1987 album Sign o’ the Times, he quotes her song “Help Me” in the lyrics for “The Ballad of Dorothy Parker.” . And in 2001, he recorded a cover of her song “A Case of You” for his album One Nite Alone…, and would continue performing a rendition of that song throughout his career, [beginning in 1983 and] including at the Piano & A Microphone Tour kick-off at Paisley Park in January 2016 and at his final concert in Atlanta on April 14, 2016. • #Prince4ever #LePetitPrince #LPPisART #TroyGuaArt #Surrealism #Photography #Sculpture #StagedPhotography #Miniatures #PopArt #ArtImitatingLifeImitatingArt  • 💜♾ 👉  https://troygua.com/le-petit-prince 🌹🙏🏼☮️💜♊😎 https://www.instagram.com/p/CKHR6avl6BW/?igshid=njd3hwc4todg

It's #LPPSaturday and #BlackLivesMatter ~ Let's celebrate the #Genius of #Prince 'til the world stops spinning ~ Inspiration: #TheFamily and #ClareFischer (partial @housequakecom interview in comments) • Love this? #SupportArt 👉 #ClubLPP 👉  patreon.com/clublpp • From movingtheriver .com: 'Goin’ For The Duran Duran Money: Prince and The Family' Posted on December 17, 2014 by Matt P: [In the late 1980s] He was embracing jazz, fusion, psychedelia, classic rock and even modern classical, mainly prompted by his collaboration with the very excellent Wendy and Lisa but also other associates Sheila E, saxists Eric Leeds and Eddie M and string arranger Clare Fischer. . The Family slipped out on Paisley Park Records in summer ’85 (just three months after Prince’s Around The World In A Day) to a very low-key critical and commercial reception. These days, the album is known mainly for including an early version of ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’. . But it’s full of far superior fare to that such as the killer opening funk medley, classic near-hit ‘The Screams of Passion’, charming pop of ‘Desire’ and especially instrumentals ‘Yes’ and ‘Susannah’s Pyjamas’ where Prince indulges in some fantastic Sly Stone-meets-Miles bass, guitar and drum grooves. This is the album that led Tutu producer Tommy LiPuma to recommend Prince to Miles as a possible collaborator and it’s easy to hear why. . The Family was put together by Prince when the first incarnation of his massively successful offshoot project The Time split up in the summer of 1984. The band’s keyboardist/vocalist Paul Peterson (renamed St Paul by Prince), drummer Jellybean Johnson and vocalist/dancer Jerome Benton were summoned to Prince’s house along with his then-fiancee (and sister of Wendy) Susannah Melvoin and Leeds. . A band concept was quickly ad-libbed by Prince, who, according to engineer David Rivkin (reported by Per Nilsen in his superb Prince: The First Decade book), issued them with the directive: ‘We gotta go after some of that Duran Duran money!’ • #Prince4ever #LePetitPrince #LPPisART #TroyGuaArt #Surrealism #Photography #Sculpture #PopArt #ArtImitatingLifeImitatingArt • 💜👉 https://troygua.com/le-petit-prince https://www.instagram.com/p/CNxlettlSlz/?igshid=w7erf0h4u95w