Member-only story
In the Studio with Prince, Part 2
Femi Jiya was Prince’s engineer when I joined Paisley Park in 1988. I was eventually put on the Prince project as an assistant engineer. See Part 1 for more of the run up.
My fellow engineers, Tom Garneau and David Friedlander, also worked on the Prince project. When Femi disappeared one day, the three of us all worked together and separately helping Prince get stuff done. It was the hot seat. Prince was very intimidating, the things we were doing were ambitious and no one wanted to disappoint Prince. Tom, Dave and I were a great team. We called each other out if we “burned” each other, by not zeroing the console or a million other tasks. We wanted to be perfect and we needed the other guy to be perfect, too. We managed to do this without creating bad vibes. We were kind of competing for the job of being Prince’s main engineer, but we felt totally on the same team and we supported each other as much as possible.
I recall one time we were getting live drums sounds with Prince and all 3 of us in the room. One at a time he ridiculed us as we tried to make the drums sound good in 60 seconds with him looking over our shoulder! It was a nightmare. He was very dismissive and demeaning towards us. This would be a theme throughout our relationship — Prince ridiculed me pretty relentlessly, especially at first.
