Happy 35th Anniversary to Morris Day’s debut solo album Color of Success, originally released September 11, 1985.
Funk band frontman Morris Day was a star well before his 1984 role in Purple Rain made it obvious. His stage presence with The Time was undeniable, so Prince kept them on his shortest leash. That meant no writing, no producing, and no creative input unless His Royal Badness approved it. Prince even dubbed his own playing over their “live” performance of “The Bird.” A parade of defecting bandmates ensued.
A month after The Time released Ice Cream Castle (1984), Day was plotting his exit too. “I’m getting ready to go in the studio and do the Morris Day album,” he announced to David Letterman during a Purple Rain promotional stop. When Letterman asked if he’d ever work with Prince again, he responded on national TV, “I mean, I’m not against it, but I don’t think so.” Having reached peak frustration with his puppeteer, Color of Success was the sound of the snip that freed him to run amok, for better or worse.
Not so fast though. He had to navigate an obstacle course first. Color of Success was recorded secretly in Los Angeles, far from his Minnesota cohorts. Day told Billboard in 1985, “I didn't want to use any of the old guys because everybody was expecting me to, and not just as a safety maneuver. I didn't want anybody back home to know what I was doing.” Wise move, because Prince could be tacitly vindictive, and if Day wasn’t at the top of his game, he would be mercilessly dragged.
The feeling of both hands on the steering wheel wasn’t cheap either. It cost $300,000 to emancipate Day from his Prince contract before he could sign his own deal with Warner. Once the album arrived on September 11, 1985, would it be enough to differentiate him as his own entity?
Musically, it would betray The Time’s fans if he didn’t deliver the Minneapolis sound. But he would be branded a reductive imitator if he only delivered that. That balance was tough to strike, but he split the difference well on lead single “The Oak Tree.” The club-ready R&B #3 was accompanied by a “shake your leaves” dance, demonstrated to mostly intentional comedic effect in its campy music video.
Prince swooped on the opportunity to lampoon his frenemy during a performance of “A Love Bizarre,” and used Day’s former partner-in-crime Jerome Benton to do it. “Jerome, somebody told me they got a new dance here!” Benton mimics a nancy parody of the Oak Tree. “I’mma chop that oak tree down this evening and make a wooden leg out of it.” Moments later, Prince was doing the Wooden Leg across the stage with Benton, Sheila E., and others. Such ignominy. Such horror. Such hilarity.
That was assassin-level shade and though it stung, Day was socially bound to pretend it didn’t. Cool was his main commodity. If you listen closely to “The Character” though, you can hear him breaking the fourth wall (“Maybe what you're seeing is a bit of grandiosity on my part / Or maybe it's just an image of what you'd like for me to be / I'm not sure / but if it works for you / then it works for me”).
He finally lays “The Character” bare in his autobiography On Time: A Princely Life in Funk, saying that the song “best expressed the confusion in my heart and head… I had to live up to my image as a playa/cutup/cool cat… looking in that mirror and liking what I saw was part of the act. I admit that I wasn’t sure the act was working.”
Nonetheless, committing to that act yielded the LP’s most satisfying single. “Color of Success” punches through with intent, pulsing electronic bass, and funky, metallic synthesizers on this ballsy declaration of independence. Day approaches the song as an urbane Lothario, slithering his voice across each verse perfectly. Its gloriously gaudy pop refrain is so in step with the Zeitgeist, you can hear shoulder pads, testosterone, and capitalism singing background. To be fair, everything’s gonna wanna sing along with the vamp (“If I want to get crazy sometimes / It's alright / It's my life / I play to win”).
All six cuts are fine examples of mid-‘80s funk-pop, but half the tracks subsist on programmed drums, basslines, and synths, that remain mostly unadorned. A Time album would move and shift organically, but there are static portions of Day’s debut that wear its emptiness proudly like minimalist fad fashion.
Expert players like Greg Phillinganes and Rickey “Freeze” Smith stepped in to fill the musicianship void, but if that were the only issue, they couldn’t fix it—one does not simply replace Prince. Listeners might cite the lack of his buttressing genius as the source of the record’s hollow center, but they would be depriving another player of its starring role in the album’s creation: cocaine.
Color of Success scores the darkest period in Morris Day’s career, marked by multiple rehab stints during its recording. He admitted that a line from Prince’s “Pop Life” was about him (“What U puttin’ in your nose? / Is that where all your money goes?”). Before revealing this, one might have listened to the driving “Love / Addiction” with its flat-pounded beats, believing it was only a cautionary tale about manipulative lover (“Don't let her turn you out / You know what that girl's about / Don't let her lead you on / Keep you hangin' on and on”).
“Given my battle with drugs, I saw the act of completing Color of Success as a success… the album isn’t half bad. It was my effort to write, sing, and produce every track,” he says in his book. It’s easy to get distracted and forget Morris Day is a musician. He wrote the rocking “Partyup” from Dirty Mind; that was the bargaining chip he exchanged to have Prince build The Time around him. Unlike the switch from Vanity 6 to Apollonia 6, one does not simply replace Morris Day either. The Time had to be shuttered until he returned for 1990’s Pandemonium.
All things considered, Color of Success peaked at #37 Pop, #7 R&B. Like Prince’s albums, the credits say “Written, Produced, and Arranged by Morris Day.” To accomplish that while grappling with heavy conflict inside and out—and to look good doing it—is impressive. Later discs Daydreaming (1987) and Guaranteed (1992) would find him more present and fleshed out musically, but Color of Success is a specific triumph that captures him as he is best known, bumptious and cocksure.
Only that kind of temerity can walk up to a global superstar like Prince at the height of his Purple Rain fame, bend down to look him in his eyes, and give him the one-finger salute. That’s Morris Day. When he says, “Ain’t nobody bad like me,” he means nobody.
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