A Decade Without Prince
‘Life is but a party, and parties weren’t meant to last.’
It’s been 10 years today, April 21st, the day we all got the shocking news of Prince’s death. And quickly, the realization that his Purple Reign was over.
Even if, maybe, his virtual reign — of the pop charts, of our collective consciousness — had ended some years before that. He made, by my count, 40 studio albums — and lord knows how many bootlegs — but after the striking start in the late ’70s and early ’80s — who WAS this diminutive singer-guitar hero-multi-instrumentalist with a dirty mind and a spiritual bent? — and its continuation into the ’90s, by the early ’00s he was putting out a lot of music that fell on deaf ears.
Arguably, the last album people really cared about was Emancipation in 1996. Though, to be fair, he had a comeback with 3121 in 2006 and four more than hit the top 10. It’s just he wasn’t any longer at the center of the controversy.
That is, until he died from an accidental overdose of what was later to be determined to be fentanyl, maybe counterfeit fentanyl. He’d been found unresponsive in an elevator at his Paisley Park home in Minnesota, with toxicologist reports indicating an “exceedingly high” concentration of the drug in his body, likely from counterfeit pills. Among other thoughts: Wasn’t he a Jehovah’s Witness and aren’t drugs very much verboten in that faith?
So, wherever he was in 2016 artistically, we learned that personally/medically speaking, he was not a good place. He was the most charismatic and athletic of performers — James Brown, Little Richard, Mick Jagger rolled up into one unique diminutive package — and all that stage work took its toll on his body. He was in pain, and he needed painkillers. At 57, he was like an aging athlete, unwilling to give up the game he loved.
There were health concerns floating about prior to his death, but he seemingly quelled those. Though his private plane recently had to make an emergency landing as we were told Prince had the flu, the pumped-up noise over that just seemed to be overblown, internet-fueled hysteria. He was released from the hospital after three hours and it was assumed he’d be on the road again soon. He had a party in his hometown compound Paisley Park the Saturday before he died and reportedly said, “Wait a few days before you waste any prayers.”
At his best, there was no one better. think of Prince and today we think back to “Let’s Go Crazy,” “Little Red Corvette,” “Kiss,” “When Doves Cry,” “Raspberry Beret” or, yeah, “Purple Rain.” Or, the non-hits, the long funky jams. And concerts and after-party concerts, where if you were lucky and invited in, he and his band would wail away into the wee hours. I saw one of these in New York after a 1988 Madison Square Garden show.
VIDEO: Prince and The Revolution “Purple Rain”
It was at the Roseland Ballroom. Prince showed up at 2 a.m. for another hour-and-a-half set. This one was looser, more stripped-down, less showy. It was as if Prince were out to prove he can do the exotic, large-scale shows and still get down in the wee hours sans props. And prove it he did, whipping through The Temptations’ “Just My Imagination,” James Brown’s “Cold Sweat” and Aretha Franklin’s “Chain of Fools.” There were deep cuts from his own catalog and long-and-winding funk jams.
Prince was an arena act in the mid-80s but he loved to treat fans to smaller gigs and he did this one with the Revolution at the 1500-capacity Metro club in Boston in 1986. This was my lede for the review in the Boston Globe: “In a word: steamy. In another; exhausting. And a third: exhilarating. … A long, hot bath of sensual, highly rhythmic funk-rock … Prince is also one of the most mercurial, enigmatic men in pop music today.”
Then, there was this: In 1988, Prince played a special gig at the same club, then known as Citi, after a Worcester Centrum show. It was a benefit set up in the name of Frederick Cameron Weber, a Berklee College of Music freshman saxophonist-pianist who was struck by a car and killed while waiting in line to purchase tickets for the Centrum concerts.
The show ran for more than two hours, with Prince declaring from the stage, “So what if the police come and get to us!” It was a stripped-down, almost casual, funk-pop excursion — hotter near the early-morning end, with Duke Ellington’s “Take the ‘A’ Train” and “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be,” and a James Brown/”Wizard of Oz” jam — than it was during the slow-groovin’ beginning. It was not a “hits” show; Prince and his band stuck pretty much to covers, grooves, blues and obscurities. Somewhere along line, “Rock Me, Baby,” this great B.B. King song made its way in: “Rock me baby/Rock me all night long/Can you bend me over backwards baby? / Like my back ain’t got no bones.”
***
Prince died just three-and-a-half months after another shocking death, that of David Bowie. Prince was a generation down from Bowie, but his sudden death hit people in Bowie-esque proportion. Prince, in fact, loved Bowie, singing “’Heroes’” at his concert in Atlanta the week before he died.
I first saw Prince play Boston in 1981, at the Metro (the club he returned to for the special show five years later, see above) where House of Blues now stands. He was one of Warner Bros. rising stars, but this was before the superstardom that would come with 1999 and Purple Rain (both the movie and the record), when he was just building his reputation: A genre-slashing, funk-soul-rock guitar hero, singer-songwriter. He just released his third album Dirty Mind.
He took the stage in a black leather trench coat and a black leather jockstrap. Prince was all of 20 and he was a diminutive dynamo (5’2”), a modern-day Little Richard/James Brown/Jimi Hendrix/Sly Stone/George Clinton wrapped into one package. An androgynous guy in heels and a high hairdo who could dance like Jagger (or Tina Turner), play blistering guitar and dip into sweet falsetto vocals.
Spirituality would later become one of Prince’s calling cards, but salaciousness was always part of it. Long before the rappers took sexuality into the XXX zone, Prince was there with songs like “Head” (oral sex) and “Sister” (incest) and “Darling Nikki,” with his protagonist in a hotel lobby masturbating in a corner with a magazine.
AUDIO: Prince and The Revolution “Darling Nikki”
Trivia note: Tipper Gore’s daughter brought Prince’s mainstream breakthrough album Purple Rain home in 1984. Tipper later heard “Darling Nikki” and was aghast, and it was the catalyst for her to form the Parents Music Resource Council and thus beginning a fierce debate about rock lyrics, censorship and record labeling.
A later Prince song was called “D.M.S.R.,” or “Dance, Music, Sex, Romance” — the four letters fairly summing up Prince’s thematic thrust. In the title song of 1999, he sang: “Everybody’s got a bomb / We could all die any day / But before I’ll let that happen / I’ll dance my life away.”
At that 1988 show at Madison Square Garden, after playing “Head,” Prince led a cheer for Jesus and said, “God is alive. He lives inside you; he loves inside you; he just wants to come out and play.” It was a head-spinner, for sure, but for Prince, spirituality was the other side to the carnal coin.
Prince packed everything into that show — one medley consisted of “Little Red Corvette”/ “Controversy”/ “U Got the Look”/ “Superfunkicalifragisexy”/ “Controversy.” The medleys sometimes gave short shrift to the hits, so it was particularly compelling when Prince let songs develop properly, such as the rhythmically entrancing, Velvet Underground-like “The Cross” — which gradually ascended to a shattering climax — or the stinging blues guitar riffs Prince peeled off on “If I Had a Harem.”
“When You Were Mine,” the hit Prince wrote for Cyndi Lauper, had a lilting melodic appeal. He closed that with “Purple Rain” — elegiac and regal as always — and “1999,” the party-till-the-bomb-drops funk-rocker. Then he encouraged the crowd, urging “New York, cross the line, cross the line. God will take care of you.”
When I wrote about that tour — dubbed the “Lovesexy Tour ’88” after his current album — I said it might well be called Brother Prince’s Traveling Salvation Show and R-Rated Revue. A Prince show was a constant swirl, a dizzying mix of hard funk and giddy pop, of theatrical precision and drop-to-the-knees passion, of familiar hits, obscure B-sides and unreleased material, of blues and jazz. What you got was Prince: singer, songwriter, guitarist, pianist, arranger, re-arranger, sex symbol, activist (anti-war and anti-heroin at times) and, of course, child of God.
I saw Prince play maybe a dozen times, and met him just once, upstairs after one of his Boston shows in a private booth at what was then the Roxy club, now Royale. He had his shades on and was with a few people in his entourage. Off-stage he was notoriously shy — Saturday Night Live did numerous skits featuring Fred Armisen as a super-shy Prince — and Prince brought out the shy in people he met. I’ve met and interviewed enough superstars and I’m not intimidated by talking with them. But all I could manage was a cautious approach, a mumbled “Hi, love your music” and a weak handshake. He was courteous, but this wasn’t going to go further and that was fine. Even on the rare occasions he granted interviews, he stipulated there be not only no recording, but no note-taking. (He did do some TV interviews in the 2000s.)
My friend, the late George Skaubitis, was a Warner Bros. radio promotion man in New England during the glory years of radio and rock. “I worked every Prince record from the second [eponymous] album, Prince. and its first single ‘I Wanna Be Your Lover’ until 1997. That took some work. No one heard of Prince before, but we brought it home.”
Keep in mind, too, the unspoken but undeniable racial divides so prevalent then. Prince became one of the few black artists who broke through on essentially what was white rock radio. He also scored in multiple formats, from Top 40 to alternative. He was the ultimate crossover artist.
“I met him a couple of times,” Skaubitis said. “One time backstage at Metro, we sat for 15 minutes, but I wouldn’t call it a free-flowing conversation. He was cordial, very soft-spoken, polite, reticent to the point of being shy.”
In the summer of 1993, Prince declared himself a subservient of Warner Bros. — had SLAVE painted on his cheek — and declared he would no longer use his name but a perplexing glyph, forcing those of us in the media without access to the symbol, to refer to him as The Artist Formerly Known as Prince or TAFKAP. (I believe Warner Bros. sent Rock & Roll Globe the software to enter the glyph into its system, but we stuck with the above.)
Along the way, there were multiple Grammies, a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, a Super Bowl performance. He shuffled bands frequently, sometimes coming out as a solo artist, other times as part of The Revolution or The New Power Generation.
***
As Prince didn’t do interviews, I talked with his backup singer-dancer Cat Glover in 1988. He picked her out of a Los Angeles club and made her his virtual costar for the “Sign O’ the Times” tour and movie, and the Lovesexy tour. On stage, Prince and Cat were a most synchronous and sexual duo. They acted out romantic trysts and conflicts; they bounced off one another; they bounded after one another across the stage.
VIDEO: Prince “Glam Slam”
“Sometimes, we can just look at each other and tell what we’re going to do,” she said. “He can make a move, and I’ll just react on. I don’t think there’s a better team out there today.”
He didn’t do interviews, Cat said, because “Prince doesn’t have to do interviews. If you listen to his music, his music speaks for himself. Anything you’d like to know, you can find out through his music. That’s enough for him. I’ve been listening to his music for a long time, and it let me know the part of him I wanted to know, and that’s basically all I want to know.”
Variously, she described him as “a perfect 10… like a Mozart to me… and a perfectionist. He’s not the type of person that will let you slide by with anything. He can hear every little note. If you’re playing something wrong, he can hear it. He’ll tell you: ‘I think you better just listen to what you played.’ He’s not mean or anything. He’s a very nice guy, really funny and a lot of fun. He’s very passionate, very giving. He has a tendency, if he doesn’t like someone, he’ll let you know it. He doesn’t bite his tongue. He has a lot of discipline.”
And that, really, is all a performer owes us. Sure, we like to see the veil lifted, find out what makes someone tick, but Prince enticed us, confused us, dazzled us and made us dance like it was 1999, back when 1999 was just some date off in the future and we were all awaiting the fun (or peril) a new millennium was going to bring.
- A Decade Without Prince - April 21, 2026
- Rob Hirst Was the Engine of Midnight Oil - January 23, 2026
- The Spectre of Phil Spector - January 16, 2026
You May Also Like
-
June 8, 2018 -
May 14, 2019 -
April 21, 2021
