When you hear the words “Morris Day & The Time”, many of us get transported back in time to the 1980’s where you hear the flamboyant singer Morris Day singing hits like, The Bird, COOL, Gigolo’s Get Lonely Too, and Fishnet.
Lead singer, Morris Day has been singing and dancing for over 30 years and shows no signs of slowing down. Still, on tour going from city to city, or doing virtual concerts, Day is on a quest to live healthily and continue to have high energy as he went into his sixties.
Morris, now 66, started out as a drummer. He was a teenager in Minneapolis when he met Andre Cymone, and through Cymone, he collaborated with Prince.
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“I played drums all day, every day. I would skip school to do it. … What changed it was meeting guys my age who were just as serious as I was. When Prince came into the equation, that dude was all music.“
It’s not your imagination, Day says: There’s something mysterious and essentially unknowable about Prince, even to his childhood friend.
“He was weird back then too. … He’s an interesting kind of cat.”
Back in the day, a 15-year-old Morris Day skipped school to go hang out with this band his friend André Cymone formed called Grand Central.
Cymone invited Day to come check out the band and even had him play the drums. Cymone was blown away by Day’s skills. The feeling was mutual. “They were, like, 14-, 15-year-olds and they played like they were in their 20s,” Day said of the band.
Because their other drummer, Charles Smith—Prince’s cousin—was always late, Cymone invited day to join the band. Prince was also in Grand Central and didn’t give Day the warmest reception, however.
Day says that Prince gave him his signature side eye and Day tried to figure him out, but he couldn’t. Day also says that Prince wasn’t the easiest person to get along with. However, eventually the two became the best of friends and Day was able to anticipate Prince’s swinging “Gemini” moods.
In January 2016, Morris Day got a surprise call from Paisley Park: Prince wanted his childhood friend, musical compadre and on-screen rival to come to Minneapolis with his band, the Time, and play a private show.
“It was the first time in a while that we’d had a chance to sit down and chat,” Day tells The Post. “It had been a few years since I’d seen him. I questioned why he was calling me up at the time. In hindsight, it’s almost like he felt something or knew something was up.”
And just like that, in April 2016, Prince was dead.
“In retrospect, I thought maybe something wasn’t right. I thought, he looked thin, even though he always looks fragile. After he passed away, I just wondered if he knew something that he wasn’t telling me. I just felt like he knew. Like he knew that something wasn’t right. Maybe he said it in just being adamant about seeing us again. Maybe that was a sign in itself.”
Prince assembled The Time in 1981, though the group didn’t get its big break until “Jungle Love” and “Purple Rain,” in which Day had a showy role, took off almost simultaneously in 1984.
Day played in “Purple Rain” the role he still performs in life: a steamy, strutting peacock, expensively suited, ultimately benign. He soon went solo, kicking off a complicated three-decade period of breakups and reunions.
“There was too many chiefs,” Day says. “It didn’t used to be that way in the old days, but now that everybody’s gone out and had success individually, it was nightmarish having all those huge egos in the room. We had a lot of good times, don’t get me wrong, but creatively there was a lot of kicking and screaming going on.”
“I still do the dance moves every day,” Day went on to say not only doing the dance moves keep him…
… feeling young, he also drinks glasses and glasses of water to stay hydrated. It also keeps his skin smooth as silk. Water: it’s one of nature’s gifts that keeps on giving.
Morris Day and The Time (or The Original 7even) remain true funk trailblazers, emulated most recently by Mark Ronson’s “Uptown Funk,” which features Bruno Mars echoing Day when he (literally) checks the time and asserts, “Gotta kiss myself I’m so pretty.”
“I’d say to any young person, be prepared”, explains Morris. “If you think you’re at the top of your game, at the point where you can be out there and your music can sell records and stuff like that, I say be prepared. Have a nice production, if you’re a songwriter or a singer, always with you, because you never know when Morris Day or whoever might be coming down the escalator at the mall or something.
You might meet somebody who can get your music to the next step. So do your homework first, be good at what you do, and then be prepared.”
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