Few musicians worked as closely with Prince than Levi Seacer Jr. A co-founder of the New Power Generation, he was headhunted from Shiela E’s band to play bass guitar, later making the move to six strings.
In a way, this was what Seacer had in mind all along. He originally auditioned for Prince on guitar, got the part, only for Prince to have a change of plans two days later. Rotating back to Sheila E’s backing band, it would not be long before the pair would cross paths again.
When Prince saw him playing bass with Sheila E, he was intrigued. Wasn’t that the kid who auditioned for the Family on guitar?
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They first collaborated together in 1985 for the sessions for The Flesh, an instrumental jazz-funk projected headed up by Prince and Eric Leeds. Sheila E was there on drums and percussion. Lisa Coleman was on keyboards. Wendy Melvoin was on guitar, with Jonathan Melvoin on percussion. Seacer was on bass.
Those sessions at Sunset Studios told Prince everything he needed to know about Seacer. He could play. He was also cool, and that mattered.
“Prince, he judges you on your work ethic,” says Seacer, joining MusicRadar over Zoom. “Or he judges you in a real working environment. Like, ‘Okay, you funny, whatever, but how are you going to be if I work next to you?’ Because he’s working all the time. So he can’t have some crazy person working next to him.”
When you think of Seacer onstage with Prince and the New Power Generation, you think of him with the powder blue Epiphone Sheraton. But he had to wait for the next band reshuffle before picking up the electric guitar. Seacer smiles at the memory. Sonny T was coming back in on bass. He was getting his big chance.
“I’ll share a story with you,” he says. “Before I went to guitar, Prince had a talk with me. He said, ‘Okay, well, we’re bringing Sonny Thompson in, so if you want to go back to guitar, you can.’ And I said, ‘Oh, yeah!’ ‘Well, our first rehearsal is tomorrow. And so I was so excited.”
Seacer describes his rig as “super simple” in the New Power Generation days, and there’s a very good reason why. It goes back to this first ever rehearsal as Prince’s guitarist.
“I brought every pedal you can imagine to the rehearsal,” he says. “And we started playing. I swear, this is a true story. The stage was about maybe five feet off the ground. It’s pretty high, and we’re in the big room at Paisley. Prince was across the room. He said, ‘Okay, Levi, take us home.’”
Mission accepted. Seacer was ready to bring it on home. This was his big moment. And it was a big moment, just not quite how he imagined it.
“I’m like, ‘Oh yeah!’ I cracked my knuckles. I’m getting ready to go in,” he says. “So, I’m soloing with my head back. I’m all into it, man. This is in another world! And I feel something tapping my toes and I’m like, ‘What the hell?’ And I opened my eyes, came out of my zone, and I looked down.
“Prince was looking at me from the floor of Paisley – y’know, because [the stage is] five-feet higher. He was looking at me, tapping on my toes, and he said, ‘I do the rock thing. You play the funk and jazz. Got it?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, I got it.’”
The next day, his rig was a lot simpler, and it would stay that way, and all things considered Seacer didn’t have much to complain about. He knew where he stood. And besides, in the months to come, Prince was going to give Seacer ample opportunities to show the world what he could do on lead guitar.
“I told my sound techs, I was like, ‘Take all this stuff away. Take all my pedals away!’” says Seacer. “I didn’t mind, because I like playing clean – but he set the record straight, what we were gonna do. He was gonna do the lead stuff or whatever. But you know what was funny? Later on, he gave me a lot of lead parts.”
Next up on MusicRadar, we’ll bring you the story of one of those solos, when Seacer was asked to provide the “chicken grease” to Sexy MF. He did that and then some.
- Timeless is out now via Legacy Recordings and comprises 10 tracks of rare and unreleased studio recordings from the Prince archive.
