13 July 1986, the drums sped up and he kept them
On 13 July 1986, at Sunset Sound in Hollywood, Prince cut The Cross without a click track and left the speeding drums in. Susan Rogers was engineering in Studio 3. He played the drums himself, then the guitars, then the rest of the track. The tempo does not sit still. It leans forward as the take goes on, the way a band leans when nobody is watching a clock.
It was a Sunday, and it was not one of his all-night marathons. The same session produced Everybody Want What They Don’t Got. The Cross is the hymn of the day. Prince sings it and plays it alone: drums that rush, guitars stacked until the chorus feels crowded, a bass line that walks instead of strutting. Rogers thought he would throw the track out because of that rush. He heard a performance and kept it.
Five days later, on 18 July, the song opened the second disc of a configuration called Dream Factory. That album never came out under that name. Through the autumn the tapes were rebuilt, stretched into the triple Crystal Ball, then cut back hard. When Paisley Park and Warner Bros. issued Sign o’ the Times on 30 March 1987 in Britain, and the next day in the United States, The Cross was still there: fifth on disc two, four minutes and forty-six seconds. It was not a commercial single. Those were Sign o’ the Times, If I Was Your Girlfriend, U Got the Look and I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man.
The drumming speeds up, but he wasn’t using a metronome. I thought he was actually going to scrap it. But he was happy with it.
(Susan Rogers, Rolling Stone, 2017)
Prince kept the song in front of people anyway. The concert film Sign o’ the Times, which he directed, closes on a band version running past six minutes. Most of that movie was reshot at Paisley Park after the footage from the Ahoy in Rotterdam was judged unusable. The film premiered in Detroit on 29 October 1987 and opened in the United States on 20 November. On the Lovesexy tour he was still playing it, including the night of 9 September 1988 in Dortmund. A South African promo single paired it with Adore. In 1996 Spike Lee put the studio take on the Girl 6 soundtrack.
What Rogers heard in those Sunday drums is the character of the record. The Cross does not behave like a sequenced 1986 dance track. It breathes, then it hurries, and the guitars pile up because the singer has decided the room should be louder than the clock. The take that nearly got scrapped for rushing became the last word of the film, and one of the few moments on Sign o’ the Times where the sermon is allowed to sound unfinished.
