Source: http://www.crazydaysandnights.net

What legendary diva (who is not a one hit wonder) was overheard at a party telling a guest she hooked up with that one named permanent A+++ list musician on several occasions from the late ’70s to shortly before his death?

She also told the guest that the musician was well hung.

Chaka Khan

Prince

How a Crush Eventually Led to Chaka Khan’s Best-Known Hit: 365 Prince Songs in a Year

To celebrate the incredibly prolific, influential and diverse body of work left behind by Prince, we will be exploring a different song of his each day for an entire year with the series 365 Prince Songs in a Year.

It took a while, but Prince’s long-distance infatuation with Chaka Khan led to a close working relationship – and Khan’s signature song.

Both signed with Warner Bros. in the late ’70s. For Prince, however, the connection went back much further. He religiously followed Khan’s broadcast performances, collected her 45s, and even had a poster from her early years with the R&B group Rufus. One of Prince’s first demos was a take on “Sweet Thing” from 1976’s Rufus featuring Chaka Khan.

In a later talk with the Philadelphia Daily News, Prince admitted to being “a fan and a fanatic, too, because I used to run home and see everything she was on.”

Khan’s work continued to inform his career. During the sessions for Prince’s first album, he reportedly listened to Rufus for inspiration. Years later, a huge mural at Paisley Park Studios featured Prince surrounded by a series of key influences – including, of course, Khan. “He absolutely loved that girl,” engineer Steve Fontano once told biographer Per Nilsen.

Perhaps inevitably, their first meeting – long before Chaka Khan turned “I Feel For You,” from 1979’s Prince, into a No. 3 1984 smash – was an awkward affair.

“He called me at my hotel,” Khan told Billboard in 2016. “I was and still am very good friends with Sly Stone. He knew that, I guess, ’cause he mimicked Sly’s voice completely. I was completely fooled. He said ‘This is Sly; I’m down at Electric Ladyland.’ ‘OK, I’ll be right down!’ And that’s how he got me down to the studio. I get there and there’s nobody there except for one little guy in this room with a guitar. And I said ‘Do you know where Sly is?’ He said to me, ‘Hi, I’m Prince; I called you.’ I was very pissed. And that’s how we met.”

This chance encounter eventually helped save her career. – Source


Read more on these Tags: ,