Torsten Schmidt

When you showed up there in Minneapolis, you had done how many recording sessions?

Susan Rogers

I had done very few, and only basically as an assistant engineer. He hired me as his technician. He asked his management, “Find me someone from New York or LA,” because the locals weren’t as fluent in pro audio techniques, the local Minneapolis folk, so he wanted someone from the industry, and I’d been in the industry five years now. At this point I was working for Crosby, Stills & Nash, their studio in Hollywood. I heard through the professional grapevine that Prince was looking for a technician and I just jumped on it, because I knew he liked working with women, he was my favorite artist in the world and I wanted that job so badly. I was qualified for it, so his management hired me. They interviewed me and hired me, so I had done practically no sessions.

The first thing I did was I pulled out an old console and then installed a new one. I repaired his tape machine. There was some stuff with his outboard gear that I fixed, and just basically got the studio up and running so he could continue recording on the Purple Rain record. He just put me in the engineers seat at that point, because he didn’t like to work with too many people. If you knew how the gear worked he assumed you knew how to run it, so be the engineer. That was really a dream come true.

Torsten Schmidt

Did you have a moment of, “Oh shit, this is what we’re doing”?

Susan Rogers

Hell yeah. I remember the very first... I finally had finished setting up everything and he gave me instructions to put up a vocal mic. The vocal mic... At that time it wasn’t that rare, but now it’s extremely rare, it was Tube U47, the Neumann. They’re very expensive now, so beautiful. I put up the tube mic to do a vocal and hung it on the boom stand over the console the way he said he wanted it. I kept thinking, “Oh, no. The engineer’s going to walk in any minute and catch me. I’m going to be in so much trouble and I’m going to have to tell this engineer, ‘Prince told me to do it. I had to.’” He told me to get a sound on the mic, I’m thinking, “Oh my God, I’m going to be fired now, this engineer is going to tell on me.”

It was my boss who was telling me to do it, so I did. I got a sound and he came in and finally I asked him, “Who’s going to record it?” He said, “You.” I said, “OK, fair enough chief, off we go.” That’s how it began. I had the dawning realization after a while that, “He doesn’t know that I’m not an engineer.” Then a second dawning was, “He knows and he doesn’t care.” I felt very fortunate every single day I was with him.