Tommy James at Sunset Sound, with the chorus pulled toward Wild Thing
In August 2008 Prince was back at Sunset Sound in Hollywood, a room he had used hard in the 1980s and then left for years. The book that month included Dreamer, Boom, 4ever, and a cover of Tommy James and the Shondells’ Crimson and Clover. The original is a late-1968 single, written by Tommy James and Peter Lucia Jr., a US number 1 in February 1969, famous for a vocal run through a tremolo so it sounds underwater. Prince keeps that smear on the lead vocal. He does not keep the song still.
Prince Vault lists him on all vocals and instruments, with the usual caution that no official credit sheet exists. The reason is bureaucratic. On the CD of Lotusflow3r the cover is track 3 and runs 3:52. On the download sold through lotusflow3r.com it was swapped for The Morning After. Credits were printed for the download, which did not contain this song, so the CD track has no printed personnel. An uncredited slice of Chip Taylor’s Wild Thing sits in the chorus. That is the swerve: the Tommy James hook, then a Troggs line, then back.
He played it live before the album existed. The first confirmed date is 11 October 2008, after hours at the Hotel Gansevoort in New York. On 18 December 2008 Indie 103 in Los Angeles premiered four pieces on Steve Jones’s Jonesy’s Jukebox: this cover, Colonized Mind, Wall of Berlin, and 4ever. Programmers had heard the record in Prince’s house. Mr. Shovel’s line, picked up by Rolling Stone, was about the whole preview, and the cover was the first song they put on the air.
It’s heavy, rockin’, and our enthusiasm was immediate.
(Mr. Shovel, Indie 103, quoted in Rolling Stone, December 2008)
The album reached shops on 29 March 2009 as a Target-only three-disc set, Lotusflow3r with MPLSound and Bria Valente’s Elixer, priced around $12. There was no commercial single and no tour behind it. The promotion was television. On 27 March he played a short set in the parking lot of The Tonight Show and included the cover. On 22 April he taped The Ellen DeGeneres Show in Burbank, aired the next day, and sang it again. The night before the Target street date he played three rooms at L.A. Live with three different bands: Nokia Theatre, the Conga Room, and Club Nokia.
After that the song stayed an occasional live piece, often bent toward Bob Marley’s Waiting in Vain, through 2015, with a last confirmed Paisley Park performance on 3 May 2015. The record that counts is the August 2008 Sunset Sound take on the CD, not a later download swap. Guitar up front, vocal still wobbling like 1968, and a chorus that refuses to stay inside one song.
