But the 34-year-old Prince - whose new album, a brilliant distillation of funk, soul and rock, will reach stores Tuesday - has heard this kind of thing before, and not just about his music. The skeptics would be wise to rewind to 1985, Prince's post-Purple Rain heyday, when plans for his $10 million Paisley Park recording complex were announced.
Studio managers said that building such a huge (65,000 square feet), lavish complex in the middle of suburban Minneapolis was an absurd idea - few state- of-the-art rooms have made it outside of New York and Los Angeles. And including a sound stage large enough to mount tour rehearsals or shoot movies? Why would anyone want to shoot a movie in Minneapolis?
Tom Tucker, Paisley Park director of studio operations, who co-owned Minneapolis' busy (and now defunct) Metro Sound when Paisley Park opened in 1987, says he remembers "people not knowing whether this massive investment would work, even though you had to leave town to get the good specialized equipment."
Now, just five years later, Paisley Park is so hot it has to turn projects away. As Prince has done time and again with his art, his investment confounded the conventional wisdom, and has paid off handsomely. Instead of building a recording palace off-limits to anyone but himself, or sinking money into typical rock-star indulgences (drugs, for example), he has created an environment that accommodates his own creative eccentricities and caters to the industry as well.
"You walk into that place and you can feel that work is being done there," says Chris Mars, who recorded his solo debut, Horseshoes and Hand Grenades, at Paisley. "It's not a star trip at all. You don't meet Prince. It feels like a totally professional, efficient situation."
