“Morris Day stands in the shower, steam whirling about his face. He’s 22 years old, matinee-idol sexy with large, dark, bedroom eyes. He headlines a slick techno-funk group called the Time which sports gangster suits and wide-brimmed hats. He’s gifted with a wealth of self-laudatory humour which he uses like a knife, moving through life with a calm but ruthless grace. He breaks into a wide grin. Hair standing up like Don King, he wipes off a hand mirror, regards himself unabashedly as he brushes his teeth.”
So begins the description of Prince’s nemesis, Morris Day, in the screenplay for Purple Rain. “He doesn’t just walk to the curb,” it continues in vivid style, “he slides – his promenade punctuated with a dip at the knees you could snap your fingers to.”
The screenplay was written by Starsky and Hutch’s creator, William Blinn, possibly channelling that show’s superfly streetwise informant, Huggy Bear. Then again, Blinn had met Day before he wrote it. That was all the inspiration he ever needed. Because if Prince, as the film’s troubled protagonist The Kid, was playing a heightened version of himself, Morris Day already was a heightened version of himself.
Unlike the bewildering array of artists Prince would nurture throughout his career, Day wasn’t Prince’s creation. They came up together. Born in Minneapolis just six months apart, Morris Day and Prince Rogers Nelson played in their first band, Grand Central (which also included André Cymone), later renamed Champagne, while still at high school. The band’s manager was Day’s mother.
The duo’s relationship thereafter consisted of back-and-forth favours (and occasional fallings-out). Day wrote the song Partyup for Prince’s Dirty Mind album in 1980, and Prince brought Day in to replace Alexander O’Neal as lead singer of the Time (formerly Flyte Tyme), the band for whom he had bagged a contract with Warner Bros, and which also included future R&B super-producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, who went on to mastermind the rise of Janet Jackson. Any attempts to mould or micromanage Day, however, were always doomed to failure: when Prince sent him for a finishing-school session with publicist Howard Bloom, Day was attacked by Bloom’s dogs as soon as he stepped out of the limousine.
The on-screen rivalry between Prince’s/the Kid’s band the Revolution, as depicted in Purple Rain, was real: when the Time supported Prince on his 1999 tour, during which the idea for the film began to coalesce, Prince genuinely feared being upstaged by them every night.
There are whole essays to be written on Morris Day’s performance in Purple Rain alone. While even the most rabid Prince fan would never argue that it’s an objectively great film, it’s a hugely likable one, and much of the credit for that goes to Day’s comic turn as the Kid’s arch-nemesis. Where Prince is an open wound, Day is a smooth surface: a finger-snapping, cane-twirling playa, exuding gigolo cool in his gold zoot suit with tigerskin lapels, his white silk scarf and his Stacy Adams shoes. Think Kid Creole, think Jim Carrey in The Mask, think every classic pop-culture pimp you’ve ever seen.
He may be set up as a love-to-hate figure, but the viewer’s response quickly tips over towards love. With his slick one-liners (“Your lips would make a lollipop too happy”, “In my bedroom, I have a brass waterbed”), and his extravagant promises of fame and fortune, he almost succeeds in stealing love-interest Apollonia away from Prince, and comes even closer to stealing the whole damn film. From the very start, when he’s seen handling a vacuum cleaner in a manner even camper than Freddie Mercury in the video for I Want to Break Free, he’s a comedy natural. And if some of his scenes, like the moment he orders Jerome Benton, his mirror-toting manservant, chauffeur, valet and wingman, to fling a double-crossed lover into a dumpster, would now be termed “problematic”, others – like the quotable password skit, based on Abbott and Costello’s famous “Who’s on First?” routine – are an uncomplicated joy.
As, indeed, is the Time’s music. Their finest album is their third, Ice Cream Castle, its title lifted from Both Sides Now by Prince’s heroine Joni Mitchell, and Prince’s fingerprints as producer and co-writer are all over it. As well as both their big tunes from Purple Rain, The Bird and Jungle Love, it features an epic sex ballad called If the Kid Can’t Make You Come, in which Day, admiring his lover’s breasts, tells her never to breastfeed. It’s a line that also appears on the original Purple Rain screenplay (but didn’t make the final cut), adding to the impression that Morris Day and “Morris Day” are one and the same.
In many ways, Day has lived the life Prince – the crossover mainstream megastar – wished he could have lived: the leader of a straight-up old-school funk troupe, a shameless showband with no angst, no art, no weirdness. Tellingly, it’s a role Prince allowed himself to play at his late-night afterparties, when he could let his hair down, and only occasionally (The Black Album) on record.
The pair fell out after Purple Rain, seemingly for financial reasons – Prince was heard to yell “You owe me!” at Day – but patched things up in time for the (ropey) sequel Graffiti Bridge, in which Day reprises his original role: there’s a scene in which a woman’s coat is wrested from her shoulders by Jerome and thrown over a puddle to stop Day getting his feet wet.
More than most of Prince’s entourage, Day surfed effortlessly into a sustainable post-Purple Rain career. He scored two Billboard R&B No 1s: the Jam and Lewis-produced solo single Fishnet in 1987, and the Prince-penned Jerk Out with the Time in 1990.
Since then, he’s lived a playboy life of Andrew Ridgeley-like ease, occasionally surfacing to tout Toyotas in a TV ad, or leading a late-night talk show’s house band. As of 2011, he’s reformed the classic lineup of the Time under the name the Original 7ven (playing live at one of Prince’s Paisley Park parties as recently as January), still doing the bird-squawk, still flapping those arms in that zoot suit, still entertaining.
You want a life like Morris Day’s? Say the password, onionhead.
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