Prince’s ‘1999’: How the Artist Leveled Up on His Breakthrough LP
With the release of a new box set devoted to the album and its era, Prince’s guitarist Dez Dickerson and engineer Peggy McCreary look back on the Purple One’s revolutionary genius
When audio engineer Peggy McCreary was recording Prince for his 1999 album, she didn’t immediately recognize his genius. “I had no idea who he was when I first started working with him,” she recalls. She had met him around the time he made his third LP, Controversy, and unlike Prince, who was in his early twenties, she had a string of hit albums in her list of credits, including Van Halen’s debut and Elton John’s 21 at 23. She watched Prince jump from instrument to instrument, recording and mixing songs all by himself in a day, but it wasn’t until the record was done and she saw him on a stage that the full scope of his talent became clear to her.
“For a Christmas present, he sent for me to come out on the road to see him, all expenses paid,” she remembers. “It was New Year’s Eve in Dallas for the 1999 tour. That’s when I totally got it. I had never seen anybody give so much to an audience. I got weak in the knees. I was by the soundboard and the soundman got me a chair. Then I was literally up screaming with the crowd and dancing, and it was like, ‘Oh, my God. This guy’s incredible.’ That’s when I realized who I was working with.”
The 1999 album, which came out just before Halloween in 1982, was also when the world caught onto Prince. He’d scored a hit with “I Wanna Be Your Lover” in 1979, but his Dirty Mind and Controversy albums, with their explicitly sexual lyrics, failed to make waves in the mainstream. With 1999, his most explicit desire was to write hits. Despite being a double LP, 1999 became a Number Seven hit and went platinum within a few months on the strength of pop anthems like “1999,” “Little Red Corvette,” and “Delirious.”
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Prince’s ‘1999’: How the Artist Leveled Up on His Breakthrough LP
With the release of a new box set devoted to the album and its era, Prince’s guitarist Dez Dickerson and engineer Peggy McCreary look back on the Purple One’s revolutionary genius
When audio engineer Peggy McCreary was recording Prince for his 1999 album, she didn’t immediately recognize his genius. “I had no idea who he was when I first started working with him,” she recalls. She had met him around the time he made his third LP, Controversy, and unlike Prince, who was in his early twenties, she had a string of hit albums in her list of credits, including Van Halen’s debut and Elton John’s 21 at 23. She watched Prince jump from instrument to instrument, recording and mixing songs all by himself in a day, but it wasn’t until the record was done and she saw him on a stage that the full scope of his talent became clear to her.
“For a Christmas present, he sent for me to come out on the road to see him, all expenses paid,” she remembers. “It was New Year’s Eve in Dallas for the 1999 tour. That’s when I totally got it. I had never seen anybody give so much to an audience. I got weak in the knees. I was by the soundboard and the soundman got me a chair. Then I was literally up screaming with the crowd and dancing, and it was like, ‘Oh, my God. This guy’s incredible.’ That’s when I realized who I was working with.”
The 1999 album, which came out just before Halloween in 1982, was also when the world caught onto Prince. He’d scored a hit with “I Wanna Be Your Lover” in 1979, but his Dirty Mind and Controversy albums, with their explicitly sexual lyrics, failed to make waves in the mainstream. With 1999, his most explicit desire was to write hits. Despite being a double LP, 1999 became a Number Seven hit and went platinum within a few months on the strength of pop anthems like “1999,” “Little Red Corvette,” and “Delirious.”
Read more: www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/prince-1…
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