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Sunday, March 22, 2015

"777-9311" by The Time

Song#:  1204
Date:  10/9/1982
Debut:  92
Peak:  88
Weeks:  3
Genre:  R&B



Pop Bits:  This Prince-protégé band had solid success with their self-titled debut album that hit #7 on the R&B album chart. It featured two R&B Top 10's including the #7 "Cool," which sneaked onto the pop chart at #90. Their follow-up LP did even better reaching #2 thanks to this single that also managed to reach #2. Once again, like their debut LP, Prince wrote, produced, and played most everything on the album without any participation from The Time except for lead singer Morris Day. The formula seemed to be working well and the band was killing it on stage on Prince's tour, but they were not breaking through to the masses.

ReduxReview:  This one has Prince written all over it. Now, it is Morris Day singing, but it seems Prince did his best to direct Day to imitate him. This vanity project was basically an excuse to keep writing and recording songs and he strokes his ego quite well with the extended guitar solo on the album version (above). It's a good song but if Prince was looking to score multiple format hits with The Time, something like this was not going to do it. However, it does sound like a warm-up to the work he would do with The Revolution.

ReduxRating:  6/10

Trivia:  Although the phone number used for this song was not nearly has bothersome as the one from "867-5309 Jenny," it did cause a bit of a headache for one person in particular. It seems that when he wrote this song, Prince used the phone number of his band's guitarist, Dez Dickerson. Apparently Dickerson was not happy about his number being used and things got worse when he started to get random phone calls to his number. Eventually, he had to get the number changed.

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