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Washington Avenue Warehouse
Prince transferred to a warehouse at 6953 Washington Avenue South, Edina, Minnesota, in May 1985, four miles from the previous facility at 9025 Flying Cloud Drive that he had bought outright and demolished to make way for the construction of a larger and more professional studio complex. That site proved too small for a new studio complex and a new location was settled on, in the leafy suburb of Chanhassen where the construction of Paisley Park Studios was began in January 1986. In this intervening time Prince rented an industrial warehouse that was built in 1972 at Washington Avenue off Highway 169. Prince loved its high walls, which he decorated with stage curtains and used for staging tour rehearsals as well as a larger recording facility offering enough space to accommodate the full band, than able to accommodate in his home studios at Kiowa Trail and from late 1985, Galpin Blvd.
The initial use of the facility was to provide a space for his side project, The Family, to rehearse for their planned tour, although this tour never materialised. When Prince returned from Hollywood after working on the Parade album at Sunset Sound, a new Soundcraft TS-24 recording console was purchased and installed into the warehouse at Washington Avenue, along with the MARA MCI JH24 24-track recorder removed from the demolished Flying Cloud Drive studio. The studio had been prepared by his sound engineer Susan Rogers.
On his return to Minnesota, Prince and The Revolution took up residence at Washington Avenue and recorded the first track at the facility, Girls & Boys, on 8 July 1985. This was quickly followed with Splash then more tracks for the Parade album were recorded here: Christopher Tracy’s Parade, Do U Lie?, Love Or $, Mountains, and instrumentals Alexa De Paris and Venus De Milo. The stage rehearsals for the album’s promotional tour was likewise staged at the Washington Avenue facility.
Superfunkycalifragisexy, the first track recorded to end up in the configuration of The Black Album was recorded at Washington Avenue in September 1986, as was two tracks later intended for The Revolution’s compilation album Roadhouse Garden – Splash and Empty Room – were recorded here in August 1985. The track for Dream Factory was recorded at Washington Avenue in November 1985 and conceived what became the unreleased fourth LP of Prince and The Revolution. These sessions also conceived The Question Of U and We Can Funk, which were later reworked and incorporated into the configuration of Graffiti Bridge album in 1990.
Prince’s last use of Washington Avenue was to conduct his stage rehearsals for the Sign O’ The Times tour during the spring of 1987, for which the stage was dressed with the backdrop borrowed from Chanhassen Dinner Theaters’ production of Guys And Dolls. This very setup was captured on the cover of the Sign O’ The Times album, when photographer Jeff Katz famously took a blurred closeup of Prince sat on a crate in the foreground, with the backdrop and instruments laid out on the stage behind him. Once Paisley Park Studios was operational in the latter half of 1987, Prince no longer needed the Washington House facility. Its Soundcraft TS-24 console was transferred to Paisley Park where it was installed in Studio C. From this point all Prince’s tour preparations were staged at his purpose built $10m studio complex.
