93 - Prince and the Technician

The Kitchen Sisters Present

The Kitchen Sisters & Radiotopia

Society & Culture

4.6 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 22 May 2018

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 1983 Prince hired LA sound technician, Susan Rogers, one of the few women in the industry, to move to Minneapolis and help upgrade his home recording studio as he began work on the album and the movie Purple Rain. Susan, a trained technician with no sound engineering experience became the engineer of Purple Rain, Parade, Sign o’ the Times, and all that Prince recorded for the next four years. For those four years, and almost every year after, Prince recorded at least a song a day and they worked together for 24 hours, 36 hours, 96 hours at a stretch, layering and perfecting his music and his hot funky sound. We interviewed Susan, who is now a Professor at the Berklee School of Music in Boston, for our upcoming NPR series, The Keepers — about activist archivists, rogue librarians, collectors, curators and historians. It was Susan who started Prince’s massive archive during her time with the legendary artist.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Radio Topia.
0:02.0	Welcome to the Kitchen Sisters Present.
0:04.0	PRX.
0:05.0	We're the Kitchen Sisters, Davia Nelson and Nicki Silva.
0:09.0	This is Nicki Silva of the Kitchen Sisters present.
0:13.0	Thanks so much to everyone who's already donated to Radiotopia's fall fundraiser.
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0:24.2	The short answer is your donation goes to the Kitchen Sisters present and all the shows in
0:30.0	our network so that we can keep making the audio that you love and listen to.
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0:55.9	Head to radiotopia.F.M. slash donate.
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1:07.0	go to Radiotopia.
1:11.0	In mid- 1983, Prince was just coming off the 1999 tour and he had a hit with Little Red
1:19.6	Corvette on the Billboard Hot 100. He was happily based out of Minneapolis, but his home
1:26.7	studio was in disrepair. He asked his management to find him a technician.
1:32.6	My boyfriend at the time called me up right away
1:35.0	and he said, your dream job is waiting for you.
	...

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