A $5,000 Drum Machine

Prince recorded most of 1999 in 1982 at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles, working with a single engineer, Peggy McCreary. He played nearly everything himself. Many of the songs were built on a Linn LM-1, a drum machine that cost $5,000 when it came out. The double album became his breakthrough.

Locked Out at Sunset Sound

Prince had the studio booked around the clock. “He had the studio locked out, so it was his 24/7 anytime he wanted,” McCreary told Minnesota's The Current in 2019. In another interview she put it more simply: “We did 1999 together, just the two of us.”

He worked fast. “Usually he would come in and start a song and we would finish it in one day, and he was the musician,” McCreary said. “Sometimes he would write the song in the studio, sometimes he came in with lyric sheets, sometimes he would start on the drums, sometimes he would start on a drum machine.”

The days were long. “We rarely revisited a song,” she said. “Usually it was start-to-finish and they were some long days. I worked 24 hours straight with him one time.” Not every song was made in Los Angeles, though. According to McCreary, the two biggest hits, “1999” and “Little Red Corvette,” were brought in from Minneapolis.

The $5,000 Drum Machine

Roger Linn designed the LM-1, a drum machine that played back recordings of real drums. “When I first released the LM-1, it cost $5,000. That was very expensive, particularly in 1979,” he told The Current in 2017.

Most people bought a drum machine to stand in for a drummer. Prince treated it as a sound of its own. “He had the vision to see it as a new sound. A new essential element in creating his record,” Linn said. Prince also changed the machine's sounds instead of using them as they came. The knocking sound on “When Doves Cry” two years later was a cross-stick snare that he tuned down by about an octave.

"He had one foot in the beat-oriented music world, but he had the other foot in the guitar world."

Writing Hits on Purpose

Prince had a hit in 1979 with “I Wanna Be Your Lover.” But Dirty Mind and Controversy, with their explicitly sexual lyrics, hadn't crossed over to a mainstream audience. With 1999, he set out to write hits.

Dez Dickerson, his guitarist at the time, played the solo on “Little Red Corvette.” “He had come into the place of knowing his own musical language well enough that he could make an extremely commercial Prince record without it coming across as calculated, disingenuous, or manufactured,” Dickerson told Rolling Stone in 2019.

1999 came out just before Halloween in 1982. Even as a double album, it reached the Top 10 and went platinum within a few months, carried by “1999,” “Little Red Corvette” and “Delirious.”

After 1999

In the same period, Prince also wrote and recorded albums for Vanity 6 and the Time. Two members of the Time, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, later produced Janet Jackson's Control.

McCreary saw how quickly things changed for him. “After 1999, he became huge,” she said. “With Purple Rain, he became a mega-mogul. That's when the bodyguards came, the purple limos, and the purple motorcycle would come down to the studio. When I first met him, he didn't even have a car here.”