Morris Day: Color of Success

Morris Day: Color of Success

1985

Warner Bros

Format I Own it on: Vinyl

Track Listing: 1. Color of Success  2. The Character  3. The Oak Tree  4. Love Sign  5. Don't Wait For Me  6. Love / Addiction

 "JEROME! BRING ME MY MIRROR!"

(I love the dollar-bill font on the front cover! I should do my whole blog in the  dollar-bill font! I think it would make rambling on and on about ancient Supertramp records seem much more ballin'...)

Like everybody else on Planet Earth, my fascination with Morris Day started the moment I first saw "Purple Rain" as a kid...

To me it wasn't about Prince, or purple motorcycles or Apollonia wearing lingerie on stage...

(Me and my wife were discussing how groundbreaking the  Apollonia 6 were...They look like modern pop stars! This is about the maximum amount of clothes you can wear if you want to make it in today's pop market...)

No, it was all about Morris acting like an asshole! That scene where he has Jerome throw that girl in the dumpster is the funniest scene in anything ever (closely followed by the scene where Prince's dad slaps Prince...)...I know it's unbelievably misogynist and disgusting, but that's the point! He's the film's charismatic villain and it's just an incredibly ass-holish thing to do...And it's even more fascinating that he plays this evil character under his REAL NAME!!  It's not Morris Day as Diabolical Glitter-Suited Band-leader...It's Morris Day as Morris Day! Which is brilliant when you think about it...After that movie came out everybody knew who he was...

Anyway,  this was Morris' first solo album after the Time broke up (which is covered in a news report during the title track...Man,  that's the problem with the news these days...Too much Vladimir Putin and not enough Morris Day)...It's the exact type of slicked-up, smoothed-over,  neon-suited, shoulder-padded, funk-pop that he made his name on, playing the same recognizable egotistical, lover-man character as always...The type of music that can only exist in the 80's....

 "You wanna make love or what?"

We're mercifully subjected to only one seven-minute slow jam ("Don't Wait For Me", which at least has a pretty good extended guitar solo to save it somewhat...) ...The rest of it is straight uptempo party music like "The Oak Tree" which introduces his latest dance (which basically consists of just waving your arms in the air...Watch the video for visual reference (and the chance to see the Pope, Ayatollah Khomeini and Nancy Reagan doing the oak tree))...

Yea, yea, yea...It's just "The Bird" part 2...Who cares?! Who doesn't want to hear "The Bird" again? I'm telling you, those were the days...We didn't know how good we had it! Gasoline was $1.20 a gallon and once a year we'd get a brand new dance from Morris Day!

It's been nothing but a big downhill electric slide since then! Five bucks a gallon is nothing to twerk about! Oh well...We still have our Morris Day records to fall back on...What day isn't made a little brighter by chanting "THE COLOR OF SUC-CESS!!" in your lowest baritone? You feel invincible! It was so effective that for a moment I thought it that it might just be acceptable to wear a canary-yellow zoot suit to a job intereview!

"Ain't nobody bad like me!"

So, if you're looking for introspective lyrics and complex, mathematical time signatures, you might want to check out "In the Golden Halls of Apollonia" by Xerus...If you want boyish, synth-heavy, lite-funk, look no further...Chances are you can pick up a used vinyl of this in any well-stocked dollar-bin and it's an 80's night party starter for sure...

Here's "The Color of Success" by Morris Day...Enjoy...