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North Arm Drive Home Studio
He wanted to be as far away from people as he could be
Prince begun renting properties since the outset of his career. First sharing an apartment with Andre Cymone in downtown Minneapolis, 2012 Aldrich Avenue at the time he signed to Warner Bros. Come the release of his first LP, Prince’s growing fame necessitated him to move away from the crowds of the city, and so Bobby Z sourced Prince his first rental, 5215 France Avenue South in the upmarket quiet suburb of Edina. The property was a wooden house dating from 1941 Prince occupied from the summer of 1978, a matter of weeks after the release of his inaugural album For You. Prince lived at this property with Kim Upsher, his first serious girlfriend and who he had known since his schooldays. She helped decorate the property and make it homely while Prince installed his “studio”. His first home studio was indeed a basic affair, comprised simply of a TEAC 4-track recording unit. Upsher was a key inspiration behind many of the songs for his second album Prince, which was released in 1979, having recorded it at Alpha Studios in Burbank, California throughout April and May that year. Band rehearsals which often ended with the police answering noise complaints led Prince to move out of France Avenue in September 1979 and into a larger property, 680 North Arm Drive, in the rural suburb of Orono, on the northern reach of Lake Minnetonka. That November, he embarked on his first promotional tour, which continued through to May 1980 and infamously culminated with a brief stint as the support act for the Rolling Stones.
Prince’s time at Orono, Lake Minnetonka, of course inspired that famous initiation scene in which Apollonia was challenged to purify herself in its waters in the movie Purple Rain, the shores of which backed onto the grounds of the rented home on North Arm Drive. This property was spacious and more importantly provided a secluded haven from the city. Warner funded Prince to setup a studio at the back of the house, next to the living room, and upgraded the recording unit to a Ampex MM-1100 16-track and a Soundcraft series 200B console. Prince also hired his first full time sound engineer, Don Batts. The drumkit was rigged-up in a booth located in the basement. Unfortunately, this particular space suffered dampness compounded by poor drainage caused by a disused cesspit, as the property was not yet connected to the city’s sewer system. Sandbags had to be laid along the booth’s exterior walls and brought Prince into immediate conflict with the landlord – Prince demanding the city authorities intervene. By 9 June 1980, the situation with the drainage had been resolved and it was in this inglorious circumstances Prince recorded the entirety of the Dirty Mind album in his North Arm Drive home studio, throughout May and June 1980. It marked a crucial epoch, being Prince’s first album recorded in Minnesota and furthermore not in a professional setting, allowing him to develop his trademark ‘Minneapolis sound’. Prince even gave North Arm Drive a recording credit in the album notes of Dirty Mind, as “Somewhere in Uptown”. It was a key moment, creating his albums in his own studio and at largely his own expense. To Prince, the quality of the recording came second to the emotion that was captured, even if that mistakes ended up in the finished recording. Prince had no desire to lay down take after take, and so began a prolific rate out output to get music laid down whilst the creative flow was still hot. In 1993, this ethic would become totemic during Prince’s feud with Warner. To Prince’s mind, having created his music using his own studios and at his expense since 1980 meant the label could stake no claim to ownership of that work.
Just personal songs that I wanted to have
Because of the rudimentary setup of the North Arm Drive studio, it was not Prince’s intention to create an album from the material he recorded there but to keep these as demos. His equipment was by commercial standards basic and ageing – held together with baling wire and often failed. Its smallness, unable to accommodate a piano, and the near constant flooding exacerbated the many limitations of the studio and therefore a larger facility was required. Prince moved out of North Arm Drive in December 1980 when embarking on the Dirty Mind Tour and purchasing a large two-storey ranch house at Kiowa Trail in the suburb of Chanhassen, which he moved into following the tour’s conclusion, when his new home studio was installed and complete.
The North Arm Drive premises was seriously damaged by fire in early 1982 and subsequently razed and redeveloped into a new property.
