Happy 30th Anniversary to The Time’s fourth studio album Pandemonium, originally released July 10, 1990.
Until The Time’s grand reunion Pandemonium showed up on July 10, 1990, their albums were generally created the same way. Prince wrote six songs and played all the instruments. Then Morris Day sang them, and…well, that’s pretty much it. No matter where on the artwork they stamped “The Time” in red Futura Heavy capital letters, it was basically a Prince record. The band was only employed to perform live.
When the group was forged in 1981, Morris Day was the drummer. Then virtuoso guitarist Jesse Johnson, bass player Terry Lewis, and keyboardists Monte Moir and James “Jimmy Jam” Harris III were recruited. Future Minneapolis R&B star Alexander O’Neal was lead vocalist until he got belligerent with Prince about salary demands. Day was reassigned as lead. His friend George Johnson, better known as Jellybean, would take over the drummer throne. Terry Lewis’ half-brother Jerome Benton started as a roadie, but quickly made himself crucial to the band’s aesthetic and live show.
This crack team of wickedly proficient musicians was only sharpened by Prince’s unyielding work ethic. In no time, they were upstaging their mentor. He would admit years later to Rolling Stone, “The Time, who were opening for us, beat us up every night. They would laugh about it; it was a joke to them. Our show wasn’t together. I had to stop the tour and get things tightened up.”
If Jurassic Park demonstrated anything, it’s that when you grow monsters, they never stay caged. After 1984’s Ice Cream Castle, Day and Johnson traded band life for solo careers separate from The Purple One’s influence. Benton shifted into another Paisley Park outfit, The Family, and co-starred in Under The Cherry Moon. The remaining members became free-standing music producers, most notably Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis who were famously fired before they could participate in Purple Rain.
While gestating that film’s ersatz sequel Graffiti Bridge, Prince decided to reactivate The Time, ending a five-year hiatus. As always, he began cooking up tracks with Morris Day. The resulting concept album Corporate World was submitted to Warner Bros. and assigned a November 1989 release date. But then there was a hitch.
Upon hearing it, Warner Bros. decided it would be better if the original seven got involved. Those once-green players Prince picked as musical mannequins were now gold- and platinum-sellers in their own right. After a meeting with Warner, Jam & Lewis, Moir, and Johnson took this opportunity to storm the gate. Corporate World was shelved and the reunion project began to take shape.
During the documentary that accompanied the special edition of The Original 7ven’s 2011 album Condensate, Jellybean gives insight into the group’s perspective, “The Pandemonium album was great because I felt that we had more control this time … we had proven ourselves to Prince that we could make hit records too.” Finally, they would be allowed to give the creative input they were previously forced to feign.
Savvy Paisley Park fans know not to trust credits as printed. False ones may be added, and true ones omitted. That initial trio of Time discs claimed they were “Produced by Morris Day & The Starr Company,” despite Day having only limited input. Day explains in his autobiography, “If Prince sang [“Cool”], it might make him seem arrogant or egotistical. But coming from the character he was creating—me—it worked.”
Prince often hid his brilliant work under a pseudonym like Jamie Starr, but any fan could recognize his uncredited vocals. Such Easter eggs are stashed throughout Pandemonium as on the “Love Bizzare”-like jam session “My Summertime Thang,” and the second single “Chocolate.” The back of its packaging reads “Produced, Arranged, and Written by The Time,” but they merge so well, it’s difficult to distinguish Prince’s handiwork from that of his disciples.
In truth, much of the production on these ten songs was handled by Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis. Their Flyte Tyme sound is most recognizable on the celebratory title track that crashes in like Janet Jackson’s “Escapade” with steroid rage. Its fist-pumping limerick chant, lifted from Prince’s “Murph Drag,” confirms that the hubris fans fell in love with remains intact (“Fellas! / I'm back / The aristocratic black! / My whip ain't got no crack, but we got a hell of a bang”).
Jesse Johnson conjured up funk-rockers “Blondie” and “Skillet.” The latter explains Pandemonium’s madcap cover art where the seven members stand in a flame-encircled cast iron pan as utensils and condiments orbit about (“Fellas? / (Yeah!) / Are we cooking food? / (No!) / What’s cooking? / (We’re cookin’ up the groove in this skillet!) / Stir it up then!”).
Day also takes culinary potshots at younger singers on “Skillet.” Neneh Cherry’s critically-acclaimed 1989 album seems to be in the crosshairs of the quip, “‘Raw like sushi’ my ass! Y’all better put it in the skillet and cook it!” Moments later, he parodies “Your Sweetness,” a 1989 R&B hit from The Good Girls: “Sweeter than honey, sweeter than cake, sweeter than sugar, baby!” This cocky prankster energy drove The Time’s group effort.
The rampage continued on their hilarious lead single “Jerk Out,” originally a racier demo Prince wrote for Mazarati, but kept chained up in his vault. The Time liberated and put a radio-friendly sheen on it. The percolating smash about stealing all the fine women in the club proved ideal for Day’s flamboyant shtick with Benton’s comic foil (“Don't you all just hate it when we walk in y'all's joint and just jerk out everything in sight? Don’t it make you mad?! It’d make me mad”). “Jerk Out” became The Time’s highest Billboard Hot 100 chart entry, as well as their only #1 R&B single.
Day’s inflated ego usually only lets the air out for one track per album. The persona got vulnerable on “Oh, Baby” and the ’82 hit “Gigolos Get Lonely Too.” Pandemonium’s third act lets him shed a tear once again on the satisfyingly bluesy “Sometimes I Get Lonely,” co-written by Monte Moir.
Another downtempo surprise is a candlelight ballad about romancing a gold digger, called “Donald Trump (Black Version).” Although the title bedraggles this salvage from Corporate World, Morris Day writes of it, “He was famous for his sexual exploits …used any means necessary not to realize social justice but to make himself filthy rich. The black version… gets [the girls] because they can’t resist the color green.”
In November 1990, all seven guys appeared in Graffiti Bridge. The film referenced Pandemonium in the plot, but rather than promote those songs, four tracks created for Corporate World (“Love Machine,” “Shake!” “Release It!” and “The Latest Fashion”) were instead lifeboated onto the Graffiti Bridge soundtrack and credited to The Time.
The battle of egos continued when Paisley Park overlooked candidates from The Time’s record to instead promote “Shake!” as a single in January 1991. Cartoon images of all seven players adorned the artwork, though none but Morris Day actually performed on it. Despite that backhand, Pandemonium was certified gold, reaching #6 on the US R&B Albums chart, #18 Pop.
The Time wouldn’t reunite on wax again for another 21 years. But when they did, Paisley Park denied them legal use of the brand name they worked so hard to build. To borrow a line Jerome Benton deadpanned to Prince in Purple Rain, “That was fucked up, what you did, man. Morris doesn’t like it and I don’t like it either.”
They opted to change their name to The Original 7ven and soldier forward releasing Condensate independently in 2011. Day, Benton, Jam, Lewis, Moir, Johnson, and Jellybean had become masters of their sound, capturing and modernizing the same saucy rah-rah that makes Pandemonium worth its spins.
One might characterize their 1990 reunion as a family spat on wax. Prince called the shots as a big brother, and wouldn’t let his younger brothers, The Time, run with the ball. So one day when they got bigger, they just took the ball from him. Maybe they slam-dunked it a few times just to show him they could, got a few payback punches in, and called it a day.
These two entities were rivals, but they weren’t bitter; they were just big. They loved and inspired each other to be their best, biggest, and baddest. In a competitive partnership like this, the clashes become essential to the art. Some of those fights got ugly, but that only assured that whatever survived, was gonna be extra, extra funky.
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