We were in Minneapolis for a few days to see friends and catch The Kills at the infamous First Avenue, the club Prince brought to national awareness by featuring it so prominently in the film Purple Rain, where it almost became a character in its own right. And of course any time we travel I also make a point of hittin some record shops with an eye toward picking up albums by local artists, so when I came across a clean copy of The Time’s Ice Cream Castle it was a must-buy.
I of course know of Morris Day and The Time from their stylish dress and performances in Purple Rain. Sure, Morris delivers a few cringeworthy lines in the movie (“I wish that you could see my home. It’s… it’s so exciting. In my bedroom I have a… brass… waterbed.”) – but he wasn’t an experienced actor, and he more than made up for it with the way he carried himself as Prince’s nemesis. What I didn’t know, however, is that The Time was in fact “constructed” by none other than Prince himself a few years before the film, and that the Purple One was very involved in their albums, his producer credits hidden under his pseudonyms Jamie Starr and/or The Starr * Company.
Ice Cream Castle came out the same year as Purple Rain and features some of the key songs from the film – “Jungle Love” and “The Bird”. With only six songs it’s somewhere between an EP and a full album, though the length of the tracks has it coming in at a robust 38 minutes. Sonically Ice Cream Castle is that hyper-polished version of funk played in the 1980s – a strong rhythm section that swings, but with simple, poppy synth chords running wild and R&B-like vocals. This is at its core music to dance to, upbeat and fun. Outside of “Chili Sauce”, of course, which is a sort of weird dialogue between Morris, his date, and a waiter that has all the worst elements of Purple Rain – in fact it uses some of the same lines from the awkward scene between Day and Apollonia referenced above. Normally I don’t like to talk shit about albums, but this track is truly awful and I don’t get the point.
The B side has the album’s two best tracks. “Jungle Love” and “The Bird” are fantastic dance songs. Sandwiched in between is the slightly creepy “If The Kid Can’t Make You Come”, because let’s be real, Morris is talking about an alternate spelling of “come” here. It’s the kind of uncomfortable erotic song that Prince was certainly known for. Did anyone ever find songs like this sexy? It seems hard to believe, but hey, I was in middle school when this came out, so I was hardly in the target demographic.
The Time put out their last album in 1990. They got back together a number of times after that, but seem to have struggled in part due to roadblocks put up by Prince. It’s rumored a new album was completed in the late 1990s but it never saw the light of day, with Prince obstructing it along the way. An album did finally come out in 2011, but the group had to change their name from The Time to The Original 7ven. According to member Jimmy Jam, “Simply, business is business and at a certain point we realized that we’re not going to be able to use the name The Time. The decision was made at that point that we could either continue to, shall we say, negotiate or argue or plead or whatever.”1 Things came to a head again in 2022 when the Prince estate informed Day that he could no longer use the name Morris Day and The Time in any way whatsoever. The estate pointed to a 1982 contract between Day and Prince’s PRN Music Corporation which included a clause stating, “Mr. Day has no right to use or register THE TIME in any form.”2 It appears the parties came to some kind of agreement in 2023, and the group is currently touring under their original name, which is good news.