28 October 1986, the voice sped up, the outro left long
On 28 October 1986, at Sunset Sound, Prince cut Rebirth of the Flesh as Camille and kept the long ending. The trick was an old one. He recorded the vocal, then sped the tape so the voice sat higher and sharper, less easy to pin on the singer in the room. Eric Leeds played saxophone. Atlanta Bliss played trumpet. Prince played the rest, in Studio 3. The day before, he had recut Feel U Up. The same Wednesday also produced Rockhard in a Funky Place. Two days later, on 30 October, he was still at Sunset Sound cutting Good Love. The week was a stack of Camille and vault songs, not one tidy album date.
The ending is the part that would not sit still. The tape runs past five minutes, horns still in the room at the point where a tighter pop edit would have faded. Susan Rogers and Coke Johnson engineered the Sunset Sound dates. On 2, 3 and 4 November they were back in for mixes and more horn overdubs. When Prince assembled the album he wanted to release as Camille, around 5 November, Rebirth of the Flesh opened it, but with that ending shortened. The album was shelved.
By 30 November the same piece, still shortened, opened the first disc of a triple set called Crystal Ball. Warner Bros. would not ship a triple. Prince cut the project down to the double Sign o’ the Times, and Rebirth of the Flesh was one of the songs that did not survive. The full tape, the one with the original outro, stayed in the vault. The 2020 super deluxe is only the year that tape finally came out. The song itself is this week in the autumn of 1986.
Camille was an imp. A mischief maker.
(Susan Rogers, The Telegraph)
In early 1987 the band rehearsed the song at the Washington Avenue Warehouse in Edina. That run-through later came out on the NPG Music Club in 2001, under the misleading title Rehearsal ’88. It runs about four minutes. Sheila E., Levi Seacer Jr., Miko Weaver, Dr. Fink, Boni Boyer, Cat, Wally Safford, Greg Brooks, Leeds and Bliss are in the room with him. It is a working version, not the Sunset Sound tape.
He later reused the opening lines in Escape. That is a scrap from Camille, not a second life for the full track. The studio recording with the long ending is the one that matters here: a sped-up voice, two horns, and an outro Prince liked enough to keep even when the album it was meant to open never came out. Rogers heard the character in the alias. The imp got an opener, then the opener lost its ending, then the whole album disappeared. The long tape did not.
