On his previous release Mplsound Prince was making it abundantly clear that he was reaching towards his classic one-man-band Minneapolis sound as a means of progressing into the future. After jamming to the first album a couple of times during that first week of having it,I went over to and had the following to say about it: And that seems that they did because I managed to pick it up. My local record store Bullmoose would’ve had to ordered the magazines themselves to even sell copies of this. And even for that as a covermount CD on British magazines like the Daily Mirror. It was released shortly after Prince received a Lifetime Achievement Aware at the 2010 BET Awards. This was a difficult album for me to find. This is also one of very very few times I saw Prince return to the musical sound that made him so famous. The 20Ten album provided a possible 34th reason-that being most contemporary hip-hop/R&B music with it’s stripped down drum machine/synthesizer sound is based on the same early/mid 80’s Minneapolis sound that Prince pioneered,and then returned to with this album. Questlove wrote an article in Wax Poetics magazine five years ago about the 33 reasons why Prince was hip-hop. RIP Rick Stevens!Ģ0Ten is one of my favorite Prince albums of the new millennium before his 2014 comeback on Warner Brothers. Though Stevens presence in TOP was comparatively brief, his story ended up being an abbreviated career that did end in a redemptive journey of sorts. Later in the day after finding this out, my friend Henrique and I got to talking about how he framed some TOP album covers on his wall- in tribute to his local Oakland funk heroes. He’d found out about the singers passing via fellow TOP member Lenny Williams online post,after Williams had received the call from Stevens son. The news of Stevens death came to me through by a writer and Facebook friend A. He released a CD with them entitled Rick Stevens Back On The Streets Again Vol. He spent his touring Northern California with his new band Love Power. He spent over 30 years in prison, where he converted to Christianity and swore off drugs. Sadly a year later, he was arrested for his involvement in a failed and fatal drug deal. After leaving the TOP, he became part of another local horn oriented band in the Bay called Brass Horizon in 1975. Songs such as “Your Still A Young Man” remained Stevens signature songs throughout his time with the band. He was a strong vocal presence on their first two albums,especially in terms of ballads. And recorded with a number of bands and, after an aborted time with one such band in Seattle, he moved back to San Francisco and joined Tower Of Power in 1969. His maternal uncle was the iconic R&B/soul singer Ivory Joe Hunter, for whom young Stevens held much admiration for and who came to visit him between touring. But grew up in Reno, Nevada where he began singing in church during childhood. But his own story, first discovered by me in Wax Poetic magazine, is a far grander one to tell. Thought about doing one of the songs Stevens sang lead on in Tower Of Power. Sadly he passed away on September 5th at age 77 of cancer. Steven’s was a lead singer for the band from 1969 up to 73. Warner Bros released 1,000 copies of this album with the wrong cover by mistake before withdrawing it. Why he wasn’t seen on the cover has to do with the fact he’d left the band before Tower Of Power’s eponymously titled third album of 1973 came out. Rick Stevens the man in the center of this album cover.
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