Day: February 14, 2023

Chart Week: February 9, 1980
Song: “I Wanna Be Your Lover” – Prince
Chart Position: #20, 11th week on the chart. Peaked at #11 for two weeks in January and February.

It started here. This was the very first Prince single to crack the Top 40. It took a few years, but eventually just about everyone around the world who owned a radio knew the name Prince.

But in 1980, even the great Casey Kasem got his name wrong.

In this week’s countdown, Casey shared the story of how Prince signed his first record contract. He went back to Prince’s childhood, explaining how the young phenom taught himself to play 27 different instruments. The artist took that audaciousness to the studio and recorded a demo completely on his own, playing every instrument and producing every track, and then shopped those demos to record companies in LA. Four big labels were interested, but he turned them all down when each company refused to give him the freedom to stick to that DIY recording process.

Eventually Warner Brothers saw that his talent was worth the risk. In return for letting Prince loose in the studio, Warner Brothers would retain the rights to his music. Foreshadowing!

The point of this post is how Casey got a few things wrong in his biographical sketch of this exciting new artist. He said Prince was 19 and had graduated from high school the previous year. In fact Prince was 21 and had graduated from Central High in Minneapolis in 1976.

The AT40 host made a far bigger flub, though.

In the minute or so that he related Prince’s path to stardom, Casey kept referring to him as “Roger Nelson,” closing by saying that “… he doesn’t use his real name, though. He bills himself as Prince.”

I’ve heard several countdowns from 1980 where Casey refers to Prince as Roger Nelson. It drives me crazy every time. Because, as every music geek should know, Prince’s real name was Prince. His birth certificate read Prince Rogers Nelson. Rogers. Not Roger.

I’ve always wondered who made this mistake. Did Warner Brothers accidentally call him “Roger” Nelson in their promotional material? Did Prince register his music and lyrics under that name? Did someone at Billboard or AT40 decide to call him that after digging into his biographical details? While promoting this song, Prince was indeed telling people that he was just 19 (see in the video below). Was he also telling people that his real name was “Roger” Nelson? For a man who hated being honest with the media, especially about his personal life, you can never be sure if it was all part of some scheme he dreamed up. Again, foreshadowing!

By mid–1983 everyone at AT40 had figured it out, and soon Prince’s given name was a mainstay on the countdown.

Of course, well after Casey left AT40, Prince’s name became a problem again. When Warner Brothers refused to release his new music as quickly as he wanted, or give him full control of his back catalog, Prince changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol. Thus began The Artist Formerly Known As Prince era.

The song is an absolute jam. It is joyous, cocky, and funky as hell. He’s pleading, but he’s not begging. What makes it all work is the vulnerability that Prince attempts to hide with his swagger. He’s young, he doesn’t have a lot of the material things other dudes might have. But he guarantees that he will rock a lady’s world if she just gives him the chance.[1]

I wanna turn you on, turn you out
All night long, make you shout
“Hey, Lover!”

It is loaded with the innuendo that Prince would become (in)famous for.[2] And while the androgyny that would play a bigger role in his persona in the coming years was a bit muted here, it was still present enough that you couldn’t be sure exactly who he was singing to, or who he was singing as.

Put all that together and it’s remarkable this nearly cracked the Top 10 in 1980. It was certainly well ahead of his time. But Roger Nelson, errr, Prince, was always ahead of his time. 10/10

Totally a coincidence, but “I Wanna Be Your Lover” reached its peak when Michael Jackson’s “Rock With You” held down the top spot. A little preview of how a pretty good chunk of the coming decade would be, with Prince and Michael dominating the pop charts.

I’m sooooo glad that Prince performing this song on American Bandstand is back on YouTube again. Dick Clark said the interview in the middle of this segment was the most difficult of his career. Over the years I’ve heard different explanations for Prince’s behavior. He was super nervous to be on national TV for the first time. He was pissed they wouldn’t let him play live and forced him to lip-sync.[3] He was upset about Clark’s crack about Minneapolis. A bandmate claimed Prince did it intentionally to get more publicity. Whatever the explanation, this appearance is absolute gold. Put it in the time capsule, my friends.