Prince’s former sound engineer recalls legend’s reign
McGill graduate Susan Rogers returns to Montreal to discuss her time working on some of the Purple One’s biggest albums
Nearly two years after his death, Prince remains in the news and in the hearts of his fans.
For some fans, the highlight of Sunday’s Super Bowl halftime show was Justin Timberlake crooning Prince’s I Would Die
4 U, accompanied by a massive video projection of Prince performing the tune simultaneously. Other fans viewed this as sacrilege, since Prince eschewed the use of holograms (even though this wasn’t really one).
Prince, the pride of his hometown of Minneapolis (the site of Sunday’s Super Bowl), may have got a kick out of the controversy.
Susan Rogers, as big a Prince fan as there is, enjoyed the tribute. Unlike most fans, however, she spent five years in as close proximity as any to Prince, working as his sound engineer and technician on such classic albums as Purple Rain, Sign o’ the Times and Parade.
“It was wonderful (to see the Super Bowl tribute), and yet it just breaks my heart (to be reminded of him),” Rogers says. “We’ve lost a lot of major celebrities, but Prince was so really loved because he was so sincerely and genuinely himself. He was unapologetically himself. I just hope he knew just how loved he was. … He had always been my favourite artist in the world.”
Rogers, a McGill University PhD grad in psychology, will share memories of working with Prince from 1983-’88 in One on One with Susan Rogers, Saturday at 2 p.m. at Espace culturel GeorgesÉmile-Lapalme in Place des Arts.
The free event is part of Montreal’s Black History Month programming, wherein Prince plays a major role.
Also on tap is the multimedia presentation Prince: His Purple Majesty, which is on display from Friday to March 9, also at Espace culturel Georges-ÉmileLapalme.
And Feb. 28 at Club Soda, there’s a Prince tribute concert by the Brooks.
Rogers’s involvement with Prince is a story unto itself. A self-taught sound technician, she was working with Crosby, Stills and Nash in Hollywood when the call went out that Prince was looking for someone with solid experience to help on the recording of Purple Rain. The job would require her to move to Minneapolis.
“A friend called to tell me that my dream job was waiting for me in Minneapolis, that Prince was looking for a technician. Amazingly, I got the job, packed my bags and moved to Minneapolis.” So was it a dream job?
“Oh my gosh,” replies Rogers, now the director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory. “Every minute of every day, I said to myself: ‘I can’t believe I’m here.’
“I had just turned 27. Prince was just 25, and he was already one of the biggest artists in the world then, along with Madonna, Michael Jackson and Bruce Springsteen. We weren’t those guys with a team of L.A.’s or New York’s finest. We were in Minnesota, working in a warehouse, yet still competing at the highest level. We were determined we were going to hang with everyone else and work harder. This was the product of youthful energy, ambition and quite a lot of desperation.”
Rogers, a native of Anaheim, Calif., was also able to relate to Prince on a personal level. Their childhoods weren’t always blissful.
“We knew the future was something that we would have to make for ourselves.”
Rogers credits Prince’s record company, Warner Bros., for allowing him to chart his own path.
“The spotlight of attention on Prince was white hot just before I came aboard, and (Warner Bros.) was visionary enough to give a green light to, at that time, a 24-year-old kid, to make a semiautobiographical film (Purple Rain) about his own life, which could have ruined what was looking like a meteoric rise.
“We were making the film and the record simultaneously. We kept thinking that this better work. But there was great optimism in the air. He was such a great leader and a genius. We would have followed him anywhere.”
Their optimism was well founded: the CD and the film both turned out to be monster hits.
Fine memories notwithstanding, Prince was a taskmaster who pushed his troops to the limit. Rogers recalls him fining members of his crew $50-$100 for messing up.
“One day in studio, Prince fined me $50 for not going fast enough. I just lost it. He had my whole life. I was with him constantly. I had no private life. And if I wasn’t with him, I was either sleeping my four hours a night or I was either driving to him or from him.
“I’m a very level-headed person, but I just snapped and threw whatever bills I had at him and dramatically spun out of the room. I felt stupid and came back to the room a few minutes later. But he took it well and understood and never pushed me that hard ever again.”
After her stint with Prince, Rogers went on to record, mix and/ or produce for such artists as the Jacksons, Laurie Anderson, David Byrne and Barenaked Ladies.
But she decided to change the direction of her career by going back to school. In 2004, she came to McGill to study music cognition and psychoacoustics under the aegis of the renowned Daniel Levitin and Stephen McAdams. She received her PhD in psychology four years later.
With business partner Matthew McArthur, Rogers started Boston’s first non-profit recording studio, the Record Company, to provide low-cost facilities to local musicians and free technical instruction to area teens.
“It was great to make hit records, but I thought I would also enjoy the life of a scientist,” said Rogers. “I like being alone in a room with a microscope and data, as I liked being alone in a room to make a record.
“But since I was going to have a short science career, it made sense to take music knowledge I already had and bring that to a conversation of the brain science of music writing, performing or listening. Now I can teach record production, which I do, and I can also teach music cognition and psychoacoustics.”
Rogers suspects Prince would have been able to relate to this aspect of her career.
“When asked once in an interview what he would do if he could do something else, Prince said he would like to be a teacher. He was bright, sensitive, warmhearted and an original thinker. He would have been a really good and generous teacher, too.”