"Kiss" started as a rough acoustic demo, with a verse and a chorus written by Prince. He gave his demo to the funk band Mazarati (who approached him in the first place for an extra song for their debut album), and they worked on it with producer David Z at Sunset Sound Studio 2, while Prince was busy working in the studio next to them, Studio 3. Z recalls having one of the band members play a piano part inspired by Bo Diddley's song "Say Man". In the "Sound On Sound" article for "Kiss", he recalled programming the song's beat on a LinnDrum drum machine, but the "Mixonline" article he refers to a Linn 9000. However, it's unlikely either of them were used as the drums sound more like the LM-1, Prince's usual drum machine. In the end, Prince decided to finish the song, retaining David Z's unique, funky rhythm and background vocal arrangement, along with Mazarati's background vocals (David Z recounts how the band had expected a song writing credit, and were "pissed" when it did not materialise); he removed the bass line, and added signature guitar and falsetto vocal. For the distinctive "ah-wah-ah" backing vocals, David Z adapted vocals by Brenda Lee - one of the biggest US chart toppers in the Sixties - from her 1959/1960 hit "Sweet Nothin's", a single from her eponymous album. To make up for the absence of bass, the kick drum was run through an AMS RMX-16 reverb on the non-linear setting. The underlying "keyboard chop" in the background is in fact an acoustic guitar (played by David Z.) run through a Kepex noise gate triggered by the hi-hat track on the multitrack tape - this effect, however, was rather difficult to recreate live on keyboards. The final, minimalist song was a hard sell to Warner Bros., but upon Prince's insistence the song was released and added to "Parade".