MY DAY WITH PRINCE. AND IT WAS FUNKY
The recent announcement that "Purple Rain" is to be made into a Broadway musical got me thinking back to the time I went to Minneapolis to hang out with Prince. And bounce on his trampoline.
I went to Paisley Park, Prince’s Minneapolis recording, writing and performing complex, back in the summer of 1991. I met Prince. I got all tongue tied and made a bit of a fool of myself. I touched his guitar. I got to test out his gymnastics equipment. How did this happen? I wasn’t a jaded hack, or a beard stroking music scribe or a curious guitar fetishist. I was a besotted kid. A fan. A down-on-my-knees Prince devotee. A fully signed-up, 24/7, Prince OB. SESS. IVE.
During Prince’s “imperial phase” (™ Neil Tennant”) between 1984’s “Purple Rain” and 1988’s “Lovesexy”, I played his records endlessly. I had rare recordings and live bootlegs (if you never heard the guitar solo on the “Small Club” rendition of “Just My Imagination” you really haven’t lived.) I collected extended play 12” mixes (“Mountains”, The William Orbit re-do of “The Future” and “Computer Blue - Hallway Speech” version are all highly recommended) and hunted down obscure Prince-related songs and albums by long-forgotten acts like Mazarati, Margie Cox, Madhouse and The Family. I even gave Prince-penned songs sung by Martika and Sheena Easton a fighting chance.
I went to see Tim Burton’s clunky “Batman”, the cruelly slated James L. Brooks musical movie “I’ll Do Anything” and Michael J. Fox in “Bright Lights, Big City”, just for the Prince soundtracks. I got into Joni Mitchell, solely because Prince had referenced her work on “The Ballad of Dorothy Parker”.
I knew every funky lick, every drum kick and yelp. Of every hit and album track. Frequently, I would actually dream about Prince.
When he came to London and played a week-long residency during the imperial-period “Parade” tour I went to three shows. I also saw him play an after party at the intimate Camden Palace theatre in North London. When the “Sign ‘O’ The Times” shows at Wembley Stadium were cancelled I travelled to Switzerland to catch a show in Zurich. Over the years, I saw him live at least 15 times. But actually meet Prince? In Person? I was on the phone to Barbara Charone at his London press office pretty much every week. Eventually, I think the record company just took pity on me.
Prince was the story that every major newspaper and music mag was chasing back then. Mainly because Prince didn’t do anything as boring or predictable as conventional interviews.
He was aloof, taciturn, mysterious, controversial, and delightfully elusive. He’d even turned down Live Aid so it was unlikely that he was ever going to say yes to me.
But endless begging and pleading the press office in the London offices of Warner Brothers records, along with a campaign of tactical, brownie-point garnering interviews with Prince acolytes such as Jill Jones, Taja Sevelle, Sheila E and the Bangles over the years, had finally paid off. The fact that I’d reviewed Prince’s “Sign O The Times” movie and included the line “the greatest concert movie ever made" in my copy - later quoted on cinema marquees worldwide and on the film’s VHS cover - had helped also. (I had written this dizzy, hyperbolic sentence, btw, not as bold and critically informed appraisal but more as a transatlantic friending exercise. Surely, Prince himself would read it and say to his paisley people…”we really should get this guy over here and hang out.” )
Of course, I was never promised a formal question and answer sit down, per se. But young, dumb and hopeful, with purple coursing through my veins, I flew to Minnesota with a hundred questions on my notepad. I never got to ask a single one of them.
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