Angelic voices, #5: Prince's "Darling Nikki"

Back in 1984, when Prince was at the height of his commercial stardom with the blockbuster album/movie “Purple Rain,” the song "Darling Nikki" was best known for its lyrics. The opening words about a woman caught masturbating in a hotel lobby turned heads and fed the reactionary, right-wing hysteria that led to the creation of the Parents’ Music Resource Center, congressional hearings, and content labels on records.

Overlooked amid the sound and fury was the potency of the song, including Prince’s vocal.

  

“Nikki” begins with a mischievous keyboard-and-guitar harmony that saunters along with the drumbeat, happy to take its time. The first verse’s spare instrumentation—a lone percussion line—gives Prince’s voice space to breathe and puts the story front and center. Once the lyrics trail off, a balls-out funk riff and crashing drums come in, as if foreshadowing, before quieting back down for the next verse.  

The song upshifts at the conclusion of the fourth verse as Prince lifts his voice into the upper registers, culminating at 2:38 in one of the most spectacular shrieks of ecstasy ever recorded.

Most songwriters would have finished with the hyped up drum-keys-guitar jam outro that follows, but Prince had the compositional chutzpah to go further. Rather than simply fade out, Prince closed the song with a counterintuitive segue into a gospel chorus singing backward over rain and a howling wind, making “Nikki” a symbolic nod to his two favorite subjects, sin and salvation.

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                                      Other "Truth and Beauty" vocalist profiles:

                                        Angelic voices, #4:  Aretha Franklin performs 
                                             before Barack Obama and Carole King 

                        There must be something in the water:  the magic of "Muscle Shoals" 

             A look back at "Strange Fruit" on the 100th anniversary of Billie Holiday's birth

                                     Angelic voices, #1:  Ella sings "Summertime"

                       Angelic voices, #2:  Marvin Gaye sings "The Star-Spangled Banner"

Angelic voices, #3:  Janis Joplin sings "Cry Baby"  

   More music appreciation on "Truth and Beauty":

         Click here for "The Second Coming:  Stevie Ray Vaughan," 
a first-hand account of Vaughan's final concert

here  for "Great Guitar Solos, #10: Prince attacks 'Whole Lotta Love'"

here for "The underappreciated ingenuity of Robbie Krieger"

here for "Great Guitar Solos, #8: Freddie King's 'San-Ho-Zay'"

                       
  here for "Link Wray's 'Rumble'"
                  

here for "Great Guitar Solos, #1:  Eddie Hazel (Funkadelic)"

here for "Great Guitar Solos, #3:  Hiram Bullock" 

here for "Great Guitar Solos, #5:  Alvin Lee"

 here for "Great Guitar Solos, #6: Neil Young's 'Hey Hey, My My'"

Great Guitar Solos, #10: Prince attacks "Whole Lotta Love"

For years, I didn't know that Prince was a bad-ass guitarist. I listened to him primarily during the height of his commercial popularity ("1999" and "Purple Rain"), before concert videos were readily available, and rarely heard stand alone solos that demanded attention; his leads on vinyl tended to be short lines that added color to the compositions. I was under the impression that he used the guitar mainly for songwriting, or as a prop to hide behind onstage, like Bruce Springsteen. 

Boy was I wrong.

The epiphany came when I first saw the video below, from the 2004 Rock Hall of Fame ceremony. Watch as Prince comes in at 3:38 with mad shred:

I viewed the clip several times, eyes (and ears) wide, and then filed it away in the mental recesses where treasured YouTube performance videos go to die. 

Flash forward to last April. I wasn't a huge Prince fan, but his passing hit me harder than the

deaths of other musical eminences this year. George Martin was 90; I was grateful he had lived as long as he did. David Bowie was 69 and had had drug problems early in his life, so I wasn't that surprised when he died. Paul Kantner had lived a full life and his best work was forty years in the rear view mirror. Ditto for Keith Emerson and Maurice White.

Prince, by contrast, was relatively young and appeared to be still vibrant. Every time I saw him in media appearances, he was dressed to the nines and looked healthy. I had never read

anything about him using drugs or alcohol; I suspected he was a straight edge like most Jehovah's Witnesses. Just six weeks before his death he played the Paramount Theater in Oakland. Walking past the theater on my way to work, I saw his name on the marquee and assumed he would kill it, as he always did. 

As the shock set in in the days after his death, I came across a concert video I had never seen, Prince's rendition of "Whole Lotta Love." I'm generally skeptical of Led Zeppelin covers—because so few musical acts are capable of doing justice to the original songs—but this performance is an exception. 

The above video captures much of what made Prince unique. The wicked falsetto vocal. The dandy threads. The beautiful, slinky women in Prince's backing band. The throwback psychedelic light show. And the sick lead guitar. Launching with the words "no format tonight," at :56, Prince puts on a guitar clinic of Hendrixian proportions, bringing a big, bold sound with soaring bends, tight vibratos, tasteful hammer-on pull-offs, and electrifying stagecraft. 

Considering the decline of the original batch of '60s six-string gods, and the dearth of new ones, Prince's passing may have robbed us of one of the last true guitar heroes. 

Other Truth and Beauty guitar essays:

         Click here for "The Second Coming:  Stevie Ray Vaughan," 
a first-hand account of Vaughan's final concert

here for "The heaviest New Year's Eve guitar jam ever: Hendrix

does 'Machine Gun'"

here for "The underappreciated ingenuity of Robbie Krieger"

here for "Great Guitar Solos, #8: Freddie King's 'San-Ho-Zay'"

                       
  here for "Link Wray's 'Rumble'"
                  

here for "Great Guitar Solos, #1:  Eddie Hazel (Funkadelic)"

here for "Great Guitar Solos, #2:  Frank Zappa"

here for "Great Guitar Solos, #3:  Hiram Bullock" 

here for "Great Guitar Solos, #5:  Alvin Lee"

 here for "Great Guitar Solos, #6: Neil Young's 'Hey Hey, My My'"

and here for "Shut Up 'N Play Yer Guitar - The Six-String Wizardry of Frank Zappa, Part II"