Morris Day won’t let you forget him

When Morris Day and The Time last released an album, it couldn’t do so under the group’s own name. Prince, Day’s longtime friend, occasional patron, sometime rival and owner of the name “The Time,” wouldn’t allow its use on recorded material (though the group is allowed to use it for live performances).

The band, assembled by Prince, wound up calling itself the Original 7ven, a reference to The Time’s founding lineup, which had newly reformed. The name change confused fans, irritated Day and probably contributed to disappointing sales of the 2011 release, “Condensate.”

Anybody who thinks Day could have just called up Prince and straightened the whole thing out has never met Prince.

“At the time there was a part of me that wanted to call and say, ‘Are you serious, dude?'” Day recalls in a recent phone interview from Las Vegas, where he lives. “But now I’m happy the whole thing went down the way it did.”

The Prince/Day/Time kerfuffle is symbolic of Day’s career in general: brief periods of fame, often in the shadow of someone bigger, and too much time spent buffeted by events of someone else’s making. Thanks to a handful of classic pop-funk hits, the evergreen appeal of The Time’s career-launching Prince vehicle “Purple Rain” and the nostalgia of Gen Xers, Morris Day and The Time have endured.

A cameo in the 2001 film “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back” endeared the group to stoners and kids. Day’s recent appearance on “Jimmy Kimmel Live” — performing the Time’s hit “Jungle Love” with Haim — helped introduce the band to millennials.

“We keep getting these little shots in the arm, so people can say, ‘Oh (expletive), I forgot about them!'” Day says.

The success of “Uptown Funk,” the Mark Ronson/Bruno Mars hit whose resemblance to “Jungle Love” cannot be overstated, has focused renewed attention on the original. “Uptown Funk” flirts with outright mimicry, but, “I never felt it was close like that,” Day says. “I know that the influence was there, I know that Bruno Mars and Mark Ronson are both pretty big fans. … To be honest, I was happy that it happened.”

Day, 57, started out as a drummer. He was a teenager in Minneapolis when he met Andre Cymone, and through Cymone, Prince.

“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.”

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.

The original lineup reunited for a performance with Rihanna at the 2008 Grammys and would later record “Condensate,” but it never felt right.

“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.”

The Original 7ven is on a more or less permanent hiatus, but Day plans to record a new album, which he hopes to release in 2016, with the latest incarnation of The Time. If he does, it will be a Morris Day and The Time album, says Day, legalities be damned.

“If it turns into an ugly court battle, so be it. People will see that it’s not me being ugly in this scenario.”

Prince has his reasons for denying them the use of their name, Day figures, even if he’s not exactly sure what they are.

“I’m a firm believer in ‘Things happen the way they’re supposed to happen.’ There’s a greater reason that’s yet to reveal itself. I’m just waiting on that.”

Stewart is a freelance writer.

When: 8 p.m. Saturday

Where: Arcada Theatre, 105 E. Main St., St. Charles

Tickets: $29-$79; 630-962-7000 or oshows.com