The Origins of Prince and the Minneapolis Sound, according to Sue Ann Carwell
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What is the Minneapolis sound? I asked Sue Ann Carwell
Sue Ann Carwell is a legend. As a teenager in the summer of 1978, she became Prince’s early protegée. She was also a vocalist in the Enterprise Band of Pleasure and was briefly associated with Flyte Tyme, two bands which contained the future members of the Time as well as other famous Minneapolis musicians.
As a solo artist, she’s released some incredible music: my favorite albums of hers are Blue Velvet (1988) and Blues in My Sunshine (2010), both of which are collaborations with Jesse Johnson, plus Painkiller (1992), which features the P-Funk Horns. In the 1990s, she became a sought-after studio vocalist and arranger, arranging vocals for artists like Whitney Houston, Aaliyah and Celine Dion.
I was lucky enough to get the chance to interview Sue Ann, and I wanted to ask her about the origins of Minneapolis funk, and what it was like to be there as Prince and other musicians shaped this hugely influential sound. (For more about early Minneapolis funk, I highly recommend the book Got to be Something Here by Andrea Swensson and the compilation Purple Snow: Forecasting the Minneapolis Sound.) Also, if you want a detailed rundown of Sue Ann Carwell’s whole career, check out her two-hour interview with the podcast Truth In Rhythm, which includes some wild stories, like the time Prince made her sit outside in the cold for two hours because she couldn’t recreate a vocal run she’d just sung (even though he had recorded that vocal run on tape.) It’s fascinating and highly entertaining.
What was the Minneapolis sound?
"I have asked myself that same question," Carwell says. "I just think that it's [what] originated from the people that were there in the beginning. I don't think it started being talked about until after Prince. We never really discussed it. We just did it."
Carwell adds that Minneapolis funk is more "mixed up" with influences from rock and pop. When she was growing up, local radio didn't play a lot of Black music, so she mostly heard bands like Steppenwolf, Pink Floyd and Blood, Sweat and Tears. "We weren't really Motown people, because they didn't really play a lot of Motown that I remember."
There also weren't a lot of clubs playing new music — instead, there were a ton of local bands, which tended to play current funk hits by groups like Confunkshun, Parliament-Funkadelic, Cameo and the Commodores. "When we were doing local gigs, we'd just do all of those songs," says Carwell. "I think we just incorporated our pop part with the funk part." So Minneapolis funk is, in part, "a conglomerate of just a bunch of different types of music."
"We just kind of made our own [style of music], because we didn't have a lot of discos, but we had a lot of bands," says Carwell. "So we just kind of came into our own thing, and we were all friends. We were competitive, but we were friends at the same time, so I just think we just kind of fed off of each other. And that's how I look at it as what the Minneapolis Sound is."
At the same time as Carwell was joining bands with other teenagers and young adults, she was also hanging around the older generation. When she was fifteen, she started singing blues music in a dive bar where older people hung out, including Prince's mother. Her father, Bob "Sticks" Carwell, played in a jazz trio with Prince's father. Carwell's mother dated B.B. King's manager and used to hang out with Dizzie Gillespie.
The bands that shaped the sound
When Carwell started singing in the Enterprise Band of Pleasure (which was sometimes called the Enterprise Band or just Enterprise), she was fourteen or fifteen years old. Fellow singer Alexander O'Neal was nineteen. She tried to compete wtih O'Neal, but "they all treated me like a little sister." She also hung out a lot at the home of Sonny Thompson (Prince's future bass player) eating Thompson's mother's cooking and getting bass-playing lessons from Thompson.
The compilation Purple Snow includes one song credited to Carwell, "Should I or Should I Not?" "I have no memory of that song," Carwell says. "It's like a blank."
One band that's featured heavily on Purple Snow is Mind and Matter, which Jimmy Jam was in. Mind and Matter would blow everybody away at the Battles of the Bands by playing its own original songs instead of covers. "We'd be looking at them like, 'Are you kidding me? We don't even understand those songs.' ... I think they did a lot of studio work.
The keyboards were a key ingredient
Jimmy Jam would be DJing at the Taste Lounge, and "he'd be up there with a Casio [synthesizer], playing in the DJ booth," playing along with the records. "We thought he was crazy. It's like, 'Come on, dude, you're spinning records and you're playing keyboards with them. But he knew something we didn't know. He was way ahead of his time. Because they do that now: they play the track and the keyboards on top."
And heavy keyboards are definitely a key ingredient in the Minneapolis sound. "They'd play the super heavy bottom, like the Minimoog or the Oberheim," says Carwell. "You know, Prince liked that Oberheim sound. So all of [the other musicians] just kind of followed suit." There had been synth bass on records before, like "Superstition" or "Flash Light," but the Oberheim had a different kind of sound. "It was like I was saying: it was pop. It was a pop side of us with the more rock radio," says Carwell.
Going to Funky Town
Carwell was there when the Minneapolis band Lipps Inc. launched in 1979 — in fact, she sang the demo version of their hit "Funkytown." When the band got ready to record, Carwell was already signed up with Prince's former manager Owen Husney, who was getting ready to record her debut album in L.A. Husney gave Carwell $75 to tell Lipps Inc. creator Steve Greenberg that she couldn't do the band because she was focusing on her solo career. As a replacement, she suggested Cynthia Johnson, who had been one of the main singers in Flyte Tyme.
"I don't think that they ever gave [Johnson] the recognition she deserved from that song, because it was her voice. She's the voice of that song," says Carwell, who later saw Lipps Inc. touring with other vocalists. "I just hope that one day, somebody gives her her flowers, because she's a part of us too."
The unsung innovators in Minneapolis
Carwell is working on a memoir, which includes a section where she shines a light on Johnson and musicians who helped originate the Minneapolis sound, but never got any recognition.
For example, Carwell mentions two brothers, Rockie Robbins and Ronnie Robbins, both of whom have songs on Purple Snow. Ronnie was in a group called Cohesion, and he used to mess with Prince by addressing him by his full name: "Prince Rogers Nelson." "Prince used to say, 'Why does that dude always call calls me by my whole name?'" Carwell says Ronnie came up with the heightened language and voice that Morris Day adopted in the Time. Also, Day's signature laugh came from a bass player named Jeffrey McRaven.
Back then, everyone was competing, but also being influenced by each other, says Carwell. "We all kind of got a piece of each other on a lot of stuff. You know what I'm saying?"
Working with a young Prince
Prince approached Carwell right after his first album, For You, had come out, and he was determined to write and produce her album (as he would later do for many other artists.) Carwell eventually rebelled against Prince's attempts to control her image and change her name, but meanwhile, she got to spend hours with him in the studio at the start of his career.
"It was incredible. It was incredible, because I mean somebody that young who's got an ear and an eye, it's like that kind of person only comes from the heavens," says Carwell. He had an incredible ear for music and an eye for style. "And everybody else was not even paying attention to you all of this time — you know, until it was time."
"I didn't know the stuff that he knew. He would go into Sound 80 and have me come in and do some [vocals]." Prince and David Rivkin (who was part of Lipps Inc. and later did a ton of production work for Prince under the name David Z) would be playing with the SL console, and he knew his way around the board better than anybody. Prince "had a way, where he just really studied. He was doing something that we weren't doing right, but we caught on later. He was an introverted person that was just brilliant."
Like Carwell, Prince had grown up in a musical family. "His dad was an incredible keyboard player who was very jazzed out — like played real hardcore jazz. Like the notes were crazy." But Prince was also "into technology" and was self-taught as a studio musician. "He just embraced it and really went in and he was determined and focused and just had this vision," which came in part from watching George Clinton launch so many different musical groups at once. "I think he was trying to pattern that whole thing."
Prince "wanted a female singer, and he saw me at a club," says Carwell. For a brief moment, Carwell was in Prince's band — or as she puts it, "I was in the Revolution before the Revolution started." But she didn't want to be in the back, supporting Prince — she wanted to be a lead singer in her own right.
"I don't think many people know, but [Prince] used to take his bus to Detroit and sit in the back of United Sound," the studio where George Clinton and others would record, "and listen to who was in there. George was in there one time, and somebody said, 'There's a purple bus out there. A purple van or something.' George said, 'Yeah, I know who it is.'"
Prince did so much to help so many musicians in Minneapolis, and Carwell calls him an "angel for people in Minnesota." Prince was "a gift," she adds. "An angel that came here and did what he needed to do, and his time was up and he left it with us to take it."
Becoming a studio vocalist and arranger
[Prince] was like from some other planet, for real. And just to see him work was a turn on because it was like, 'I want to be like that one day... I want to be great like what he does playing bass, playing drums, you know, playing all these instruments and composing songs and putting songs together.'" But, says Carwell, it wasn't until years later that "I found my niche in arranging" and started learning how to use her ear. "I don't know how to read [sheet music], but I just knew how to separate the notes and just listen to the keyboards in a track, and how to arrange vocals" the way Prince used to.
When Carwell got older, she reached a point where she'd be working with musicians like Rod Stewart, David Foster and Annie Lennox, and they would "just let me go." They'd go off to lunch and leave Carwell alone in the studio to work out the arrangements on her own.
In 2000, Patti LaBelle released a whole album of songs written by Diane Warren, called When a Woman Loves. In the studio, Carwell found herself in the middle of a disagreement with Warren over the notes that LaBelle was singing.
"I had to defuse it," she says. LaBelle was singing one of Warren's songs, "and all of a sudden Diane said, 'Wait. No, no, no.' I said, 'What are you doing?'" Warren protested that LaBelle was singing the wrong note. "I was like, 'Okay, we'll get her to sing the right note.'"
This whole time, Patti LaBelle could hear the entire conversation over the studio speakers. "The speaker was on. I'm going, 'That's Patti LaBelle! What are you talking about, Diane?'" Finally, Carwell told Warren, "Just go on out, man. I got this. I got this. Don't worry about it. I'll make sure she sings the right note.'" After that, LaBelle asked Carwell to handle all of her vocals for the rest of the project. "I'm like, 'I got you, Patti. Don't worry about it.'"
Says Carwell, "To me, the Minneapolis sound is just who we who we are — just how we grew up. I can't even really explain what that would be. You know, it's just us: the people that were there in the beginning, who just created sounds without knowing that we're creating this Minneapolis sound. You know, we didn't think of that — but Prince thought of something because he sure really made this movement bigger than life. I'm proud of our town."
(Interview transcribed by stellartranscriptions. I cleaned up some of the quotes here and there.)
Further Listening
Seriously, Sue Ann Carwell’s music is worth tracking down. As I mentioned before, I’m a huge fan of the album Blue Velvet, which has a similar sound to some other Jesse Johnson productions of the time but is elevated by Carwell’s soaring vocals. Her cover version of Aretha Franklin’s “Rock Steady” takes the song in a whole other direction.
Her 1992 album Painkiller feels as though she’s coming into her own musically, with a bit more of a jazzy feel at times and more of a mature vocal sound. On the song “7 Days, 7 Nights,” I love everything she puts into the line, “Sacrifice is like a friend of mine/Telling me it’s the price I pay/For the breakthrough.” And there’s a killer cover of Chaka Khan’s “Some Love,” featuring Khan’s former bandmate Tony Maiden on guitar. Carwell’s 2010 blues album Blues in my Sunshine is hard to find, but absolutely killer. It’s her and Jesse Johnson reuniting to do something that plays into his strengths as a guitarist and her strengths as a songwriter and arranger, and it slaps.
Carwell told me she’s working on a new album, and I really hope it comes out soon.
Oh, and once again, I’d encourage listening to her interview on the Truth in Rhythm podcast, which has so many fascinating stories that I didn’t ask her to tell a second time.
Also! In 2020, she did a lot of vocals on one of my favorite releases of the past several years, Detroit Rising: A Cosmic Jazz-Funk Adventure. Check it out: