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Kerrang Cover and Four-Page Feature "there was that time when we stuck Prince on the cover of KERRANG! and everyone and their fuckin’ dog in the metal/rock world had a hairy baby in disgust and outrage, and I sat at my desk/drawing board chuckling into my bottle of Mescal, cunningly disguised as a bottle of Perrier water, as I had been one of the gang who persuaded the powers that be to go with it, and I still stand proud with my head held high that I did! For fucks sake Prince fuckin’ rocked hard at that time." Krusher Joule Art Director

Cover & Six-Page Feature Rolling Stone September 12, 1985 Prince talks Neal Karlen John Nelson turns sixty-nine today, and all the semiretired piano man wants for his birthday is to shoot some pool with his firstborn son. “He’s real handy with a cue,” says Prince, laughing, as he threads his old white T-bird through his old black neighborhood toward his old man’s house. “He’s so cool. The old man knows what time it is.” Hard time is how life has traditionally been clocked in North Minneapolis; this is the place ’Time’ forgot twelve years ago when the magazine’s cover trumpeted “The Good Life in Minnesota,” alongside a picture of Governor Wendell Anderson holding up a walleye. Though tame and middle-class by Watts and Roxbury standards, the North Side offers some of the few mean streets in town. The old sights bring out more Babbitt than Badass is Prince as he leads a leisurely tour down the main streets of his inner-city Gopher Prairie. He cruises slowly, respectfully: stopping completely at red lights, flicking on his turn signal even when no one’s at an intersection. Gone is the wary Kung Fu Grasshopper voice with which Prince whispers when meeting strangers or accepting Academy Awards. Cruising peacefully with the window down, he’s proof in a paisley jump suit that you can always go home again, especially if you never really left town. Tooling through the neighborhood, Prince speaks matter-of-factly of why he toyed with early interviewers about his father and mother, their divorce and his adolescent wanderings between the homes of his parents, friends and relatives. “I used to tease a lot of journalists early on,” he says, “because I wanted them to concentrate on the music and not so much on me coming from a broken home. I really didn’t think that was important. What was important was what came out of my system that particular day. I don’t live in the past. I don’t play my old records for that reason. I make a statement, then move on to the next.” The early facts, for the neo-Freudians: John Nelson, leader of the Prince Rogers jazz trio, knew Mattie Shaw from North Side community dances. A singer sixteen years John’s junior, Mattie bore traces of Billie Holiday in her pipes and more than a trace of Indian and Caucasian in her blood. She joined the Prince Rogers trio, sang for a few years around town, married John Nelson and dropped out of the group. She nicknamed her husband after the band; the son who came in 1958 got the nickname on his birth certificate. At home and on the street, the kid was “Skipper.” Mattie and John broke up ten years later, and Prince began his domestic shuttle. “That’s where my mom lives,” he says nonchalantly, nodding toward a neatly trimmed house and lawn. “My parents live very close by each other, but they don’t talk. My mom’s the wild side of me; she’s like that all the time. My dad’s real serene; it takes the music to get him going. My father and me, we’re one and the same.” A wry laugh. “He’s a little sick, just like I am.” Most of North Minneapolis has gone outside this Sunday afternoon to feel summer, that two-week season, locals joke, between winter and road construction. During this scenic tour through the neighborhood, the memories start popping faster. The T-Bird turns left at a wooden two-story church whose steps are lined with bridesmaids in bonnets and ushers in tuxedos hurling rice up at a beaming couple framed in the door. “That was the church I went to growing up,” says Prince. “I wonder who’s getting married.” A fat little kid waves, and Prince waves back. “Just all kinds of things here,” he goes on, turning right. “There was a school right there, John Hay. That’s where I went to elementary school,” he says, pointing out a field of black tar sprouting a handful of bent metal basketball rims. “And that’s where my cousin lives. I used to play there every day when I was twelve, on these streets, football up and down this block. That’s his father out there on the lawn.” These lawns are where Prince the adolescent would also amuse his friends with expert imitations of pro wrestlers Mad Dog Vachon and the Crusher. To amuse himself, he learned how to play a couple dozen instruments. At thirteen, he formed Grand Central, his first band, with some high school friends. Grand Central often traveled to local hotels and gyms to band-battle with their black competition: Cohesion, from the derided “bourgeois” South Side, and Flyte Time, which, with the addition of Morris Day, would later evolve into the Time. Prince is fiddling with the tape deck inside the T-Bird. On low volume comes his unreleased “Old Friends 4 Sale,” an arrow-to-the-heart rock ballad about trust and loss. Unlike “Positively 4th Street"—which Bob Dylan reputedly named after a nearby Minneapolis block—the lyrics are sad, not bitter. “I don’t know too much about Dylan,” says Prince, “but I respect him a lot. ’All Along the Watchtower’ is my favorite of his. I heard it first from Jimi Hendrix.” “Old Friends 4 Sale” ends, and on comes “Strange Relationships,” and as-yet-unreleased dance tune. “Is it too much?” asks Prince about playing his own songs in his own car. “Not long ago I was driving around L.A. with [a well-known rock star], and all he did was play his own stuff over and over. If it gets too much, just tell me.” He turns onto Plymouth, the North Side’s main strip. When Martin Luther King got shot, it was Plymouth Avenue that burned. “We used to go to that McDonald’s there,” he says. “I didn’t have any money, so I’d just stand outside there and smell stuff. Poverty makes people angry, brings out their worst side. I was very bitter when I was young. I was insecure and I’d attack anybody. I couldn’t keep a girlfriend for two weeks. We’d argue about anything.” Across the street from McDonald’s, Prince spies a smaller landmark. He points to a vacant corner phone booth and remembers a teenage fight with a strict and unforgiving father. “That’s where I called my dad and begged him to take me back after he kicked me out,” he begins softly. “He said no, so I called my sister and asked her to ask him. So she did, and afterward told me that all I had to do was call him back, tell him I was sorry, and he’s take me back. So I did, and he still said no. I sat crying at that phone booth for two hours. That’s the last time I cried.” In the years between that phone-booth breakdown and today’s pool game came forgiveness. Says Prince, “Once I made it, got my first record contract, got my name on a piece of paper and a little money in my pocket, I was able to forgive. Once I was eating every day, I became a much nicer person.” But it took many more years for the son to understand what a jazzman father needed to survive. Prince figured it out when he moved into his purple house. “I can be upstairs at the piano, and Rande [his cook] can come in,” he says. “Her footsteps will be in a different time, and it’s real weird when you hear something that’s a totally different rhythm than what you’re playing. A lot of times that’s mistaken for conceit or not having a heart. But it’s not. And my dad’s the same way, and that’s why it was hard for him to live with anybody. I didn’t realize that until recently. When he was working or thinking, he had a private pulse going constantly inside him. I don’t know, your bloodstream beats differently.” Prince pulls the T-Bird into an alley behind a street of neat frame houses, stops behind a wooden one-car garage and rolls down the window. Relaxing against a tree is a man who looks like Cab Calloway. Dressed in a crisp white suit, collar and tie, a trim and smiling John Nelson adjusts his best cuff links and waves. “Happy birthday,” says the son. “Thanks,” says the father, laughing. Nelson says he’s not even allowing himself a piece of cake on his birthday. “No, not this year,” he says with a shake of the head. Pointing at his son, Nelson continues, “I’m trying to take off ten pounds I put on while visiting him in Los Angeles. He eats like I want to eat, but exercises, which I certainly don’t.” Father then asks son if maybe he should drive himself to the pool game so he won’t have to be hauled all the way back afterward. Prince says okay, and Nelson, chuckling, says to the stranger, “Hey, let me show you what I got for my birthday two years ago.” He goes over to the garage and gives a tug on the door handle. Squeezed inside is a customized deep-purple BMW. On the rear seat is a copy of Prince’s latest LP, Around the World in a Day. While the old man gingerly back the car out, Prince smiles. “He never drives that thing. He’s afraid it’s going to get dented.” Looking at his own white T-Bird, Prince goes on: “He’s always been that way. My father gave me this a few years ago. He bought it new in 1966. There were only 22,000 miles on it when I got it.” An ignition turns. “Wait,” calls Prince, remembering something. He grabs a tape off the T-Bird seat and yells to his father, “I got something for you to listen to. Lisa [Coleman] and Wendy [Melvoin] have been working on these in L.A.” Prince throws the tape, which the two female members of his band have mixed, and his father catches it with one hand. Nelson nods okay and pulls his car behind his son’s in the alley. Closely tailing Prince through North Minneapolis, he waves and smiles whenever we look back. It’s impossible to believe that the gun-toting geezer in Purple Rain was modeled after John Nelson. “That stuff about my dad was part of [director-cowriter] Al Magnoli’s story,” Prince explains. “We used parts of my past and present to make the story pop more, but it was a story. My dad wouldn’t have nothing to do with guns. He never swore, still doesn’t, and never drinks.” Prince looks in his rearview mirror at the car tailing him. “He don’t look sixty-nine, do he? He’s so cool. He’s got girlfriends, lots of ’em.” Prince drives alongside two black kids walking their bikes. “Hey, Prince,” says one casually. “Hey,” says the driver with a nod, “how you doing?” Passing by old neighbors watering their lawns and shooting hoops, the North Side’s favorite son talks about his hometown. “I wouldn’t move, just cuz I like it here so much. I can go out and not get jumped on. It feels good not to be hassled when I dance, which I do a lot. It’s not a think of everybody saying, ’Whoa, who’s out with who here?’ while photographers flash their bulbs in your face.” Nearing the turnoff that leads from Minneapolis to suburban Eden Prairie, Prince flips in another tape and peeks in the rearview mirror. John Nelson is still right behind. “It’s real hard for my father to show emotion,” says Prince, heading onto the highway. “He never says, ’I love you,’ and when we hug or something, we bang our heads together like in some Charlie Chaplin movie. But a while ago, he was telling me how I always had to be careful. My father told me, ’If anything happens to you, I’m gone.’ All I thought at first was that it was a real nice thing to say. But then I thought about it for a while and realized something. That was my father’s way of saying ’I love you.’" A few minutes later, Prince and his father pull in front of the Warehouse, a concrete barn in an Eden Prairie industrial park. Inside, the Family, a rock-funk band that Prince has been working with, is pounding out new songs and dance routines. The group is as tight as ace drummer Jellybean Johnson’s pants. At the end of one hot number, Family members fall on their backs, twitching like fried eggs. Prince and his father enter to hellos from the still-gyrating band. Prince goes over to a pool table by the soundboard, racks the balls and shimmies to the beat of the Family’s next song. Taking everything in, John Nelson gives a professional nod to the band, his son’s rack job and his own just-chalked cue. He hitches his shoulders, takes aim and breaks like Minnesota Fats. A few minutes later, the band is still playing and the father is still shooting. Prince, son to this father and father to this band, is smiling. THE NIGHT BEFORE, in the Warehouse, Prince is about to break his three-year public silence. Wearing a jump suit, powder-blue boots and a little crucifix on a chain, he dances with the Family for a little while, plays guitar for a minute, sings lead for a second, then noodles four-handed keyboard with Susannah Melvoin, Wendy’s identical-twin sister. Seeing me at the door, Prince comes over. “Hi,” he whispers, offering a hand, “want something to eat or drink?” On the table in front of the band are piles of fruit and a couple bags of Doritos. Six different kinds of tea sit on a shelf by the wall. No drugs, no booze, no coffee. Prince plays another lick or two and watches for a few more minutes, then waves goodbye to the band and heads for his car outside the concrete barn. “I’m not used to this,” mumbles Prince, staring straight ahead through the windshield of his parked car. “I really thought I’d never do interviews again.” we drive for twenty minutes, talking about Minnesota’s skies, air and cops. Gradually, his voice comes up, bringing with it inflections, hand gestures and laughs. Soon after driving past a field that will house a state-of-the-art recording studio named Paisley Park, we pull down a quiet suburban street and up to the famous purple house. Prince waves to a lone, unarmed guard in front of a chain-link fence. The unremarkable split-level house, just a few yards back from the minimum security, is quiet. No fountains out front, no swimming pools in back, no black-faced icons of Yahweh or Lucifer. “We’re here,” says Prince, grinning. “Come on in.” One look inside tells the undramatic story. Yes, it seems the National Enquirer—whose Minneapolis exposé of Prince was excerpted in numerous other newspapers this spring—was exaggerating. No, the man does not live in an armed fortress with only a food taster and wall-to-wall, life-size murals of Marilyn Monroe to talk to. Indeed, if a real-estate agent led a tour through Prince’s house, one would guess that the resident was, at most, a hip suburban surgeon who likes deep-pile carpeting. “Hi,” says Rande, from the kitchen, “you got a couple of messages.” Prince thanks her and offers up some homemade chocolate-chip cookies. He takes a drink from a water cooler emblazoned with a Minnesota North Stars sticker and continues the tour. “This place,” he says, “is not a prison. And the only things it’s a shrine to are Jesus, love and peace.” Off the kitchen is a living room that holds nothing your aunt wouldn’t have in her house. On the mantel are framed pictures of family and friends, including one of John Nelson playing a guitar. There’s a color TV and VCR, a long coffee table supporting a dish of jellybeans, and a small silver unicorn by the mantel. Atop the large mahogany piano sits an oversize white Bible. The only unusual thing in either of the two guest bedrooms is a two-foot statue of a smiling yellow gnome covered by a swarm of butterflies. One of the monarchs is flying out of a heart-shaped hole in the gnome’s chest. “A friend gave that to me, and I put it in the living room,” says Prince. “But some people said it scared them, so I took it out and put it in here.” Downstairs from the living room is a narrow little workroom with recording equipment and a table holding several notebooks. “Here’s where I recorded all of 1999,” says Prince, “all right in this room.” On a low table in the corner are three Grammys. “Wendy,” says Prince, “has got the Academy Award.” The work space leads into the master bedroom. It’s nice. And...normal. No torture devices or questionable appliances, not even a cigarette butt, beer tab or tea bag in sight. A four-poster bed above plush white carpeting, some framed pictures, one of Marilyn Monroe. A small lounging area off the bedroom provides a stereo, a lake-shore view and a comfortable place to stretch out on the floor and talk. And talk he did—his first interview in three years. A few hours later, Prince is kneeling in front of the VCR, showing his “Raspberry Beret” video. He explains why he started the clip with a prolonged clearing of the throat. “I just did it to be sick, to do something no one else would do.” He pauses and contemplates. “I turned on MTV to see the premiere of ’Raspberry Beret’ and Mark Goodman was talking to the guy who discovered the backward message on ’Darling Nikki.’ They were trying to figure out what the cough meant too, and it was sort of funny.” He pauses again. “But I’m not getting down on him for trying. I like that. I’ve always had little hidden messages, and I always will.” He then plugs in a videocassette of “4 the Tears in Your Eyes,” which he’s just sent to the Live Aid folks for the big show. “I hope they like it,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. The phone rings, and Prince picks it up in the kitchen. “We’ll be there in twenty minutes,” he says, hanging up. Heading downstairs, Prince swivels his head and smiles. “Just gonna change clothes.” He comes back a couple minutes later wearing another paisley jump suit, “the only kind of clothes I own.” And the boots? “People say I’m wearing heels because I’m short,” he says, laughing. “I wear heels because the women like ’em.” A FEW MINUTES LATER, driving toward the First Avenue club, Prince is talking about the fate of the most famous landmark in Minneapolis. “Before Purple Rain,” he says, “all the kids who came to First Avenue knew us, and it was just like a big, fun fashion show. The kids would dress for themselves and just try to took really cool. Once you got your thing right, you’d stop looking at someone else. You’d be yourself, and you’d feel comfortable.” Then Hollywood arrived. “When the film first came out,” Prince remembers, “a lot of tourists started coming. That was kind of weird, to be in the club and get a lot of ’Oh! There he is!’ It felt a little strange. I’d be in there thinking, ’Wow, this sure is different than it used to be.’" Now, however, the Gray Line Hip Tour swarm has slackened. According to Prince—who goes there twice a week to dance when he’s not working on a big project—the old First Avenue feeling is coming back. “There was a lot of us hanging around the club in the old days,” he says, “and the new army, so to speak, is getting ready to come back to Minneapolis. The Family’s already here, Mazarati’s back now too, and Sheila E. and her band will be coming soon. The club’ll be the same thing that it was.” As we pull up in front of First Avenue, a Saturday-night crowd is milling around outside, combing their hair, smoking cigarettes, holding hands. They stare with more interest than awe as Prince gets out of the car. “You want to go to the [VIP] booth?” asks the bouncer. “Naah,” says Prince. “I feel like dancing.” A few feet off the packed dance floor stands the Family, taking a night off from rehearsing. Prince joins the band and laughs, kisses, soul shakes. Prince and three of Family members wade through a floor of Teddy-and-Eleanor-Mondale-brand funkettes and start moving. Many of the kids Prince passes either don’t see him or pretend they don’t care. Most of the rest turn their heads slightly to see the man go by, then simply continue their own motions. An hour later, he’s on the road again, roaring out of downtown. Just as he’s asked if there’s anything in the world that he wants but doesn’t have, two blondes driving daddy’s Porsche speed past. “I don’t,” Prince says with a giggle, “have them.” He catches up to the girls, rolls down the window and throws a ping-pong ball that was on the floor at them. They turn their heads to see what kind of geek is heaving ping-pong balls at them on the highway at two in the morning. When they see who it is, mouths drop, hands wave, the horn blares. Prince rolls up his window, smiles silently and speeds by. Off the main highway, Prince veers around the late-night stillness of Cedar Lake, right past the spot where Mary Tyler Moore gamboled during her TV show’s credits. This town, he says, is his freedom. “The only time I feel like a prisoner,” he continues, “is when I think too much and can’t sleep from just having so many things on my mind. You know, stuff like, ’I could do this, I could do that. I could work with this band. When am I going to do this show or that show?’ There’s so many things. There’s women. Do I have to eat? I wish I didn’t have to eat.” A few minutes later, he drops me off at my house. Half a block ahead, he stops at a Lake Street red light. A left up lake leads back to late-night Minneapolis; a right is the way home to the suburban purple house and solitude. Prince turns left, back toward the few still burning night lights of the city he’s never left. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Interview Why have you decided that now is the time to talk? There have been a lot of things said about me, and a lot of them are wrong. There have been a lot of contradictions. I don’t mind criticism, I just don’t like lies. I feel I’ve been very honest in my work and my life, and it’s hard to tolerate people telling such barefaced lies. Do you read most of what’s been written about you? A little, not much. Sometimes someone will pass along a funny one. I just wrote a song called “Hello,” which is going to be on the flip side of “Pop Life.” It says at the end, “Life is cruel enough without cruel words.” I get a lot of cruel words. A lot of people do. I saw critics be so critical of Stevie Wonder when he made Journey through the Secret World of Plants. Stevie has done so many great songs, and for people to say, “You missed, don’t do that, go back"—well, I would never say, “Stevie Wonder, you missed.” [Prince puts the Wonder album on the turntable, plays a cut, then puts on Miles Davis’ new album.] Or Miles. Critics are going to say, “Ah, Miles done went off.” Why say that? Why even tell Miles he went off? You know, if you don’t like it, don’t talk about it. Go buy another record! Not long ago I talked too George Clinton, a man who knows and has done so much for funk. George told me how much he liked Around the World in a Day. You know how much more his words meant than those from some mamma-jamma wearing glasses and an alligator shirt behind a typewriter? Do you hate rock critics? Do you think they’re afraid of you? [Laughs] No, it’s no big deal. Hey, I’m afraid of them! One time early in my career, I got into a fight with a New York writer, this real skinny cat, a real sidewinder. He said, “I’ll tell you a secret, Prince. Writers write for other writers, and a lot of time it’s more fun to be nasty.” I just looked at him. But when I really thought about it and put myself in his shoes, I realized that’s what he had to do. I could see his point. They can do whatever they want. And me, too. I can paint whatever picture I want with my albums. And I can try to instill that in every act I’ve ever worked with. What picture were you painting with ’Around the World in a Day’? [Laughs] I’ve heard some people say that I’m not talking about anything on this record. And what a lot of other people get wrong about the record is that I’m not trying to be this great visionary wizard. Paisley Park is in everybody’s heart. It’s not just something that I have the keys to. I was trying to say something about looking inside oneself to find perfection. Perfection is in everyone. Nobody’s perfect, but they can be. We may never reach that, but it’s better to strive than not. Sounds religious. As far as that goes, let me tell you a story about Wendy. We had to fly somewhere at the beginning of the tour, and Wendy is deathly afraid of flying. She got on the plane and really freaked. I was scared for her. I tried to calm her down with jokes, but it didn’t work. I thought about it and said, “Do you believe in God?” She said yes. I said, “Do you trust him?” and she said she did. Then I asked, “So why are you afraid to fly?” She started laughing and said, “Okay, okay, okay.” Flying still bothers her a bit, but she knows where it is and she doesn’t get freaked. It’s just so nice to know that there is someone and someplace else. And if we’re wrong, and I’m wrong, and there is nothing, then big deal! But the whole life I just spent, I at least had some reason to spend it. When you talk abut God, which God are you talking about? The Christian God? Jewish? Buddhist? Is there any God in particular you have in mind? Yes, very much so. A while back, I had an experience that changed me and made me feel differently about how and what and how I acted toward people. I’m going to make a film about it—not the next one, but the one after that. I’ve wanted to make it for three years now. Don’t get me wrong—I’m still as wild as I was. I’m just funneling it in a different direction. And now I analyze things so much that sometimes I can’t shut off my brain and it hurts. That’s what the movie will be about. What was the experience that changed you? I don’t really want to get into it specifically. During the Dirty Mind period, I would go into fits of depression and get physically ill. I would have to call people to help get me out of it. I don’t do that anymore. What were you depressed about? A lot had to do with the band’s situation, the fact that I couldn’t make people in the band understand how great we could all be together if we all played our part. A lot had to do with being in love with someone and not getting any love back. And there was the fact that I didn’t talk much with my father and sister. Anyway, a lot of things happened in this two-day period, but I don’t want to get into it right now. How’d you get over it? That’s what the movie’s going to be about. Paisley Park is the only way I can say I got over it now. Paisley Park is the place one should find in oneself, where one can go when one is alone. You say you’ve now found the place where you can go to be alone. Is it your house? Within the family you’ve built around yourself? With God? It’s a combination of things. I think when one discovers himself, he discovers God. Or maybe it’s the other way around. I’m not sure...It’s hard to put into words. It’s a feeling—someone knows when they get it. That’s all I can really say. Do you believe in heaven? I think there is an afterworld. For some reason, I think it’s going to be just like here, put that’s part...I don’t really like talking about this stuff. It’s so personal. Does it bother you when people say you’re going back in time with ’Around the World in a Day’? No. What they say is that the Beatles are the influence. The influence wasn’t the Beatles. They were great for what they did, but I don’t know how that would hang today. The cover art came about because I thought people were tired of looking at me. Who wants another picture of him? I would only want so many pictures of my woman, then I would want the real thing. What would be a little more happening than just another picture [laughs] would be if there was some way I could materialize in people’s cribs when they play the record. How do you feel about people calling the record “psychedelic"? I don’t mind that, because that was the only period in recent history that delivered songs and colors. Led Zeppelin, for example, would make you feel differently on each song. Does you fame affect your work? A lot of people think it does, but it doesn’t at all. I think the smartest thing I ever did was record Around the World in a Day right after I finished Purple Rain. I didn’t wait to see what would happen with Purple Rain. That’s why the two albums sound completely different. People think, “Oh, the new album isn’t half as powerful as Purple Rain or 1999.” You know how easy it would have been to open Around the World in a Day with the guitar solo that’s on the end of “Let’s Go Crazy"? You know how easy it would have been to just put it in a different key? That would have shut everybody up who said an album wasn’t half as powerful. I don’t want to make an album like the earlier ones. Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to put your albums back to back and not get bored, you dig? I don’t know how many people can play all their albums back to back with each one going to different cities. What do you think about the comparisons between you and Jimi Hendrix? It’s only because he’s black. That’s really the only thing we have in common. He plays different guitar than I do. If they really listened to my stuff, they’d hear more of a Santana influence than Jimi Hendrix. Hendrix played more blues; Santana played prettier. You can’t compare people, you really can’t, unless someone is blatantly trying to rip somebody off. And you really can’t tell that unless you play the songs. You’ve got to understand that there’s only so much you can do on an electric guitar. I don’t know what these people are thinking—they’re usually non-guitar-playing mamma-jammas saying this kind of stuff. There are only so many sounds a guitar can make. Lord knows I’ve tried to make a guitar sound like something new to myself. Are there any current groups you listen to a lot or learn from? Naah. The last album I loved all the way through was [Joni Mitchell’s] The Hissing of Summer Lawns. I respect people’s success, but I don’t like a lot of popular music. I never did. I like more of the things I heard when I was little. Today, people don’t write songs; they’re a lot of sounds, a lot of repetition. That happened when producers took over, and that’s why there are no more [live] acts. There’s no box office anymore. The producers took over, and now no one wants to see these bands. People seem to think you live in an armed monastery that you’ve built in honor of yourself. First off, I don’t live in a prison with armed guards around me. The reason I have a guy outside is that after the movie, all kinds of people started coming over and hanging out. That wasn’t so bad, but the neighbors got upset that people were driving by blasting their boxes or standing outside and singing. I happen to dig that. That’s one reason I’m going to move to more land. There, if people want to come by, it will be fine. Sometimes it gets lonely here. To be perfectly honest, I wish more of my friends would come by. Friends? Musicians, people I know. A lot of the time they think I don’t want to be bothered. When I told Susannah [Melvoin] that you were coming over, she said, “Is there something I can do? Do you want me to come by to make it seem like you have friends coming by?” I said no, that would be lying. And she just put her head down, because she knew she doesn’t come by to see me as much as she wants to, or as much as she thinks I want her to. It was interesting. See, you did something good, and you didn’t even know it. Are you afraid to ask your friends to come by? I’m kind of afraid. That’s because sometimes everybody in the band comes over, and we have very long talks. They’re few and far between, and I do a lot of the talking. Whenever we’re done, one of them will come up to me and say, “Take care of yourself. You know I really love you.” I think they love me so much, and I love them so much, that if they came over all the time I wouldn’t be able to be to them what I am, and they wouldn’t be able to do for me as what they do. I think we all need our individual spaces, and when we come together with what we’ve concocted in our heads, it’s cool. Does it bother you that strangers make pilgrimages to your house? No, not at all. But there’s a time and a place for everything. A lot of people have the idea that I’m a wild sexual person. It can be two o’clock in the afternoon, and someone will make a really strange request from the call box outside. One girl just kept pressing the buzzer. She kept pressing it, and then she started crying. I had no idea why. I thought she might had fallen down. I started talking to her, and she just kept saying, “I can’t believe it’s you.” I said, “Big deal. I’m no special person. I’m no different than anyone.” She said, “Will you come out?” I said, “Nope, I don’t have much on.” And she said, “That’s okay.” I’ve lectured quite a few people out there. I’ll say, “Think about what you’re saying. How would you react if you were me?” I ask that question a lot. “How would you react if you were me?” They say, “Okay, okay.” It’s not just people outside your door who think you’re a wild sexual person. To some degree I am, but not twenty-four hours a day. Nobody can be what they are twenty-four hours a day, no matter what that is. You have to eat, you have to sleep, you have to think, and you have to work. I work a lot, and there’s not to much time for anything else when I’m doing that. Does it make you angry when people dig into your background, when they want to know about your sexuality and things like that? Everyone thinks I have a really mean temper and I don’t like people to do this or do that. I have a sense of humor. I thought that the Saturday Night Live skit with Billy Crystal as me was the funniest thing I ever saw. His imitation of me was hysterical! He was singing, “I am the world, I am the children!” Then Bruce Springsteen came to the mike, and the boys would push him away. It was hilarious. We put it on when we want to laugh. It was great. Of course, that’s not what it is. And I thought the Prince Spaghetti commercial was the cutest thing in the world. My lawyers and management are the ones who felt it should be stopped. I didn’t even see the commercial until after someone had tried to have it stopped. A lot of things get done without my knowledge because I’m in Minneapolis and they’re where they are. It’s a good and a bad thing that I live here. It’s bad in the sense that I can’t be a primo “rock star” and do everything absolutely right. I can’t go to the parties and benefits, be at all the awards shows, get this and get that. But I like it here. It’s really mellow. How do feel when you go to New York or L.A. and see the life you could be leading? L.A. is a good place to work. And I liked New York more when I wasn’t known, when I wasn’t bothered when I went out. You’d be surprised. There are guys who will literally chase you through a discotheque! I don’t mind my picture being taken if it’s done in a proper fashion. It’s very easy to say, “Prince, may I take your picture?” I don’t know why people can’t be more humane about a lot of the things they do. Now when I’m visiting, I like to sneak around and try stuff. I like to sneak to people’s gigs and see if I can get away without getting my picture taken. That’s fun. That’s like cops and robbers. You’ve taken a lot of heat for your bodyguards, especially the incident in Los Angeles in which your bodyguard Chick Huntsberry reportedly beat up a reporter. A lot of times I’ve been accused of sicking bodyguards on people. You know what happened in L.A.? My man the photographer tried to get in the car! I don’t have any problem with somebody I know trying to get in the car with me and my woman in it. But someone like that? Just to get a picture? Why isn’t Chick working for you anymore? Chick has more pride than anybody I know. I think that after the L.A. incident, he feared for his job. So if I said something, he’d say, “What are you jumping on me for? What’s wrong? Why all of sudden are you changing?” And I’d say, “I’m not changing.” Finally, he just said, “I’m tired. I’ve had enough.” I said fine, and he went home. I waited a few weeks and called him. I told him that his job was still there and that I was alone. So he said that he’d see me when I was in New York. He didn’t show up. I miss him. Is it true that Chick is still on the payroll? Yes. What about the exposé he wrote about you in the ’National Enquirer’? I never believe anything in the Enquirer. I remember reading stories when I was ten years old, saying, “I was fucked by a flying saucer, and here’s my baby to prove it.” I think they just took everything he said and blew it up. It makes for a better story. They’re just doing their thing. Right on for them. The only thing that bothers me is when my fans think I live in a prison. This is not a prison. You came in for double heat over the L.A. incident because it happened on the night of the “We Are the World” recording. In retrospect, do you wish you would have shown up? No, I think I did my part in giving my song [to the album]. I hope I did my part. I think I did the best thing I could do. You’ve done food-drive concerts for poor people in various cities, given free concerts for handicapped kids and donated lots of money to the Marva Collins inner-city school in Chicago. Didn’t you want to stand up after you were attacked for “We Are the World” and say, “Hey, I do my part.” Nah, I was never rich, so I have very little regard for money now. I only have respect for it inasmuch as it can feed somebody. I can give a lot of things away, a lot of presents and money. Money is best spent on somebody who needs it. That’s all I’m going to say. I don’t like to make a big deal about the things I do that way. People think that you’re a dictator in the studio, that you want to control everything. In L.A., however, I saw Wendy and Lisa mixing singles while you were in Paris. How do you feel about your reputation? My first album I did completely alone. On the second I used André [Cymone], my bass player, on “Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?” He sang a small harmony part that you really couldn’t hear. There was a typo on the record, and André didn’t get any credit. That’s how the whole thing started. I tried to explain that to him, but when you’re on the way up, there’s no explaining too much of anything. People will think what they want to. The reason I don’t use musicians a lot of the time had to do with the hours that I worked. I swear to God it’s not out of boldness when I say this, but there’s not a person around who can stay awake as long as I can. Music is what keeps me awake. There will be times when I’ve been working in the studio for twenty hours and I’ll be falling asleep in the chair, but I’ll still be able to tell the engineer what cut I want to make. I use engineers in shifts a lot of the time because when I start something, I like to go all the way through. There are very few musicians who will stay awake that long. Do you feel others recognize how hard you work? Well, no. A lot of my peers make remarks about us doing silly things onstage and on records. Morris [Day, former lead singer of the Time] was criticized a lot for that. What kind of silliness, exactly? Everything —the music, the dances, the lyrics. What they fail to realize is that is exactly what we want to do. It’s no silliness, it’s sickness. Sickness I just slang for doing things somebody else wouldn’t do. If we are down on the floor doing a step, that’s something somebody else wouldn’t do. That’s what I’m looking for all the time. We don’t look for whether something’s cool or not, that’s not what time it is. It’s not just wanting to be out. It’s just if I do something that I think belongs to someone else or sounds like someone else, I do something else. Why did Morris say such negative things about you after he left the band? People who leave usually do so out of a need to express something they can’t do here. It’s really that simple. Morris, for example, always wanted to be a solo act, period. But when you’re broke and selling shoes someplace, you don’t think about asking such a thing. Now, I think Morris is trying to create his own identity. One of the ways of doing that is trying to pretend that you don’t have a past. Jesse [Johnson, former guitarist for the Time] is the only one who went away who told what happened, what really went down with the band. He said there was friction, because he was in a situation that didn’t quite suit him. Jesse wanted to be in front all the time. And I just don’t think God puts everybody in that particular bag. And sometimes I was blunt enough to say that to people: “I don’t think you should be in the frontman. I think Morris should.” Wendy, for example, says, “I don’t want that. I want to be right where I am. I can be strongest to this band right where I am.” I personally love this band more than any other group I’ve every played with for that reason. Everybody knows what they have to do. I know there’s something I have to do. What sound do you get from different members of the Revolution? Bobby Z was the first one to join. He’s my best friend. Though he’s not such a spectacular drummer, he watches me like no other drummer would. Sometimes, a real great drummer, like Morris, will be more concerned with the lick he is doing as opposed to how I am going to break it down. Mark Brown’s just the best bass player I know, period. I wouldn’t have anybody else. If he didn’t play with me, I,d eliminate bass from my music. Same goes for Matt [Fink, the keyboard player]. He’s more or less a technician. He can read and write like a whiz, and is one of the fastest in the world. And Wendy makes me seem all right in the eyes of people Watching. How so? She keeps a smile on her face. When I sneer, she smiles. It’s not premeditated, she just does it. It’s a good contrast. Lisa is like my sister. She’ll play what the average person won’t. She’ll press two notes with one finger so the chord is a lot larger, things like that. She’s more abstract. She’s into Joni Mitchell, too. What about the other bands? Apollonia, Vanity, Mazarati, the Family? What are you trying to express through them? A lot has to do with them. They come to me with an idea, and I try to bring that forth. I don’t give them anything. I don’t say, “Okay, you’re going to do this, and you’re going to do that.” I mean, it was Morris’ idea to be as sick as he was. That was his personality. We both like Don King and get a lot of stuff off him. Why? Because he’s outrageous and thinks everything’s so exciting --even when it isn’t. People think you control those bands, that it’s similar to Rick James, relationship with the Mary Jane Girls. A lot of people think he’s turning all the knobs. I don’t know their situation. But you look at Sheila E. performing, and you can just tell she’s holding her own. The same goes for the Family. You and I were playing Ping-Pong, and they were doing just fine. After all these years, does the music give you as much of a rush as it used to? I increases more and more. One of my friends worries that I’ll short-circuit. We always say I’ll make the final fade on a song one time and [Laughs, dropping his head in a dead slump]. It just gets more and more interesting every day. More than anything else, I try not to repeat myself. It’s the hardest thing in the world to do—there’s only so many notes one human being can muster. I write a lot more than people think I do, and I try not to copy that. I think that’s the problem with the music industry today. When a person does get a hit, they try to do it again the same way. I don’t think I’ve ever done that. I write all the time and cut all the time. I want to show you the archives, where all my old stuff is. There’s tons of music I’ve recorded there. I have the follow-up album to 1999. I could put it all together and play it for you, and you would go “Yeah!” And I could put it out, and it would probably sell what 1999 did. But I always try to do something different and conquer new ground. In people’s minds, it all boils down to “Is Prince getting too big for his breeches?” I wish people would understand that I always thought I was bad. I wouldn’t have got into the business if I didn’t think I was bad.

0(+> Breaks the silence cover and advert Vibe magazine, August 1994. The man who won’t be Prince speaks at last about his new name, his new attitude and a new body of work we may never get to hear. After a yearlong chase, Alan Light catches the elusive superstar under a cherry moon in Monaco. Alan Light PROLOGUE Monte Carlo May 2 1994 “SO HOW CAN WE DO AN INTERVIEW THAT’S not like an interview?” asks O(+> as he spoons a dollop of jam into his tea. We’re sitting in the Côte Jardin restaurant in Monte Carlo’s historic Hôtel de Paris, overlooking a small garden that overlooks the Mediterranean Sea. He is here to accept an award for Outstanding Contribution to the Pop Industry at the 1994 World Music Awards. I am here at his request, the final step in a full year of putting together his first lengthy conversation with a journalist since 1990. Those 12 months have been an especially remarkable time for O(+> whom some call “the artist formerly known as Prince,” or any number of variations on that theme; others, of course, will always call him Prince, much to his dismay. The year has included—in addition to the controversial name-change that signaled the “retirement” of one of this era’s biggest pop stars and the songs that made him famous – a sales slump and the closing of his Paisley Park Records label. He went through four publicity firms in nine months. But this run of hard times was quickly followed by a triumphant rise with the single “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World,” his biggest hit in several years. And at the end of this particular peculiar period, O(+> has emerged with some of the best music he’s ever made – though whether the world will ever be able to hear it is another question, in the hands of managers and lawyers and Warner Bros. Records as they negotiate how or if all this music will be released. Which, perhaps, is why he feels that now is the time to talk after a long silence. It seems to be part of a campaign to generally increase his visibility by appearing at events like the World Music Awards, for instance – exactly the kind of thing the reclusive Prince of old would have avoided like the plague. Or to introduce three new songs on Soul Train or publish a book – titled The Sacrifice of Victor – of photos from his last European tour that presents him much more up close and personal than he has been shown in the past. Meanwhile, he continues to move forward, exploring new, alternative outlets for his music, like an innovative CD-ROM extravaganza, O(+> Interactive, that incorporates dozens of songs into a kind of video game/video jukebox – or the Joffrey Ballet’s wildly successful Billboards, set to his music, which may lead to his writing a full-length ballet score soon. And through it all, he has kept writing and recording new songs – or “experiences,” as he now likes to call them – and struggling to find a way to get as many of them as possible released to the public. “I just want to be all that I can be,” O(+> says in his dressing room at the Monte Carlo Sporting Club, site of the World Music Awards. “Bo Jackson can play baseball and football – can you imagine what I would do if I could do all I can? If they let me loose, I can wreck shit.” ACT I San Francisco April 10 1993 “CAN YOU KEEP A SECRET?” These – I kid you not – are Prince’s first words to me. (And since the answer is yes, all I can tell you is that you really wouldn’t be all that interested.) This is back when things were simple, when Prince was still Prince, blasting through a lengthy international tour. I receive a call in New York on Friday saying that Prince has read something I wrote about the tour’s opening shows. He wants to meet me in San Francisco on Saturday. The driver who picks me up in San Francisco shows me the erotic valentine his girlfriend made for him, then tells me about the work he and his wife are doing for the Dalai Lama. It’s time to wonder, Is this whole thing a put-on? But no, I get to the arena and there is Prince, sitting alone in the house, watching his band, the New Power Generation, start sound check. He is fighting a cold, so we speak quietly back and forth for a while, and then he leads me onstage to continue the conversation while he straps on his guitar and rehearses the band. Mostly, Prince talks about music – about Sly Stone and Earth, Wind & Fire. He leads me over to Tommy Barbarella’s keyboards to demonstrate how he’s utilizing samples onstage now (such as the female yelp in the new song “Peach,” which came courtesy of Kim Basinger, though she doesn’t know it yet). He sits down at the piano to play a new, unfinished song called “Dark” – a bitter, beautiful ballad. The band sounds ferocious and will sound even better at the evening’s show. Prince works them unbelievably hard: A standard day on tour includes an hour-and-a-half sound check, a two-hour show, and an after-show at a club most nights. “The after-shows are where you get loose,” he says. “It’s that high-diving that gets you going.” The NPG have gotten noticeably tighter from all this old-fashioned stage sweat, funkier than any of his previous groups. Watching him cue them, stop on a dime, introduce a new groove, veer off by triggering another sample, you can only think of James Brown burnishing his bands to razor-precision, fining them for missing a single note. “I love this band,” says Prince. “I just wish they were all girls.” He is talkative, with that surprisingly low voice that loses its slightly robotic edge when he’s offstage. He is indeed tiny – what’s most striking isn’t his height but the delicate bones and fragile frame. He is also pretty cocky, whether out of shyness with a new person or the swagger needed to keep going through a tour. “You see how hard it is when you can play anything you want, anything you hear?” he asks underneath the onstage roar of the NPG. They play “I’ll Take You There” at sound check, and Prince and I talk about the Staple Singers and Mavis Staples, whose new album he is just completing. He leads the way to his dressing room – a blur of hair products and Evian water, with off-white mats on the floor and paintings stuck on the walls – and plays some of the Mavis album, singing along with her roof-raising voice. “Jimmy Jam is going to hear this and throw all those computers away,” he says. “This is what we need now – these old kind of soul songs to just chill people out. The computers are as cold as the people are. “That’s what I went through with the Black Album. All this gangsta rap, I did that years ago. ’Cause if you’re gonna do something, go all the way in. But there’s no place to go past the samples. You can only, y’know, unplug them!” There’s a knock on the door, and a bodyguard says that someone named Motormouth wants to see Prince. He laughs and waves the visitor in – turns out to be an old Minneapolis DJ, a neighbor for whom Prince used to baby-sit. The gentleman lives up to his name; Prince listens politely and giggles softly, as Motormouth talks about his ex-stripper wife and his daughter and the days back in Minnesota. PRINCE DESPERATELY WANTS TO PLAY A club show after the San Francisco gig, but his throat is too sore. Instead, there’s a party at the DV8 club. He arrives with a phalanx of bodyguards, clears out half the room, and sits alone on a sofa. One of the security guys grabs me and sits me on the couch. Prince hands me a banana-flavored lollipop. “I would have brought you a cigar, but I didn’t think you smoked,” he says. He pours us each a glass of port ("I learned about this from Arsenio"). Occasionally, acquaintances manage to make their way through the wall of security, but he is wary of touching them. “I don’t like shaking hands,” he says. “Brothers always feel like they got to give you that real firm handshake. Then you can’t play the piano the next day.” We chat about the new contract he signed with Warner Bros., which was reported to be worth as much as $100 million. He says the deal is nothing like it is being reported, and though he wants most of the conversation to remain “just between us – I just wanted to talk about some of these things,” he makes a few mysterious comments that will prove crucial to the next stage of his continual metamorphosis. “We have a new album finished,” he says conspiratorially, “but Warner Bros. doesn’t know it. From now on, Warner’s only gets old songs out of the vault. New songs we’ll play at shows. Music should be free, anyway.” Before he heads off into the night, Prince lifts his glass of port and offers a toast. Leaning closer, he whispers, “To Oz.” INTERLUDE June 7 1993 HAVING ANNOUNCED HIS RETIREMENT from studio recording on April 27, Prince takes the occasion of his 35th birthday to inform the world that he is changing his name to O(+>, a symbol that, in one form or another, has been part of his iconography in recent years. (After starting as a simple combination of the symbols for male and female, it sprouted another flourish when it became the title of his last album; he has also signed autographs with the symbol for some time.) He adds that he will no longer be performing any of his old songs, as they belong to the old name. The rumor floats that he wants to be called Victor (which, happily, proves untrue), while the media struggles with the whole idea; Warner Bros. sends out software allowing the new name to be printed, but many jokes and frequent references to “Symbol Man,” “the Glyph,” and “What’s-His-Symbol” start turning up in the press. Some in the industry combine the two announcements and speculate that changing his name might be a way to finesse his way out of his Warner’s contract. With 500-plus finished songs in the vault, is Prince, or O(+>, or whoever, planning to use the name-change as a renegotiation strategy or some kind of scheme to get out of the Warner deal? ACT II Chanhassen, Minn. July 12 1993 PAST THE CHANHASSEN DINNER THEATRE, past the American Legion post where a Little League game is in progress, after miles of fields and open spaces lies the gleaming, towering Paisley Park, the studio and office complex that houses Paisley Park Enterprises. There are dozens of people on the Paisley staff – an entire industry built around one man in heels – working to keep the studio and the songs and, mostly, the person at the center of it all humming and creating at their maximum potential. There’s a lot that seems like star-tripping inside O(+>’s world, lots that can make you impatient – and multiple costume changes, even on off days, don’t help matters – but over time it becomes clear that the whole structure exists so that absolutely nothing gets in the way of the music, nothing touches O(+> that he doesn’t choose to address. Tonight O(+>> will go through his final rehearsal for a greatest hits tour of Europe. Several hundred tickets have been sold to benefit local radio station KMOJ, and the mixed-race, well-to-do crowd mills around the Paisley Park soundstage in flowery prints and orange suits, waiting for Minneapolis’s favorite son. The NPG and gospel singers the Steeles play brief opening sets. O(+> makes no reference to the name-change or the retirement when he ambles onstage to the opening chord of “Let’s Go Crazy.” In fact, he hardly talks at all through a loose 90-minute set. He closes the show with two new songs: a sexy shuffle called “Come” that he occasionally dropped into the U.S. concerts, and “Endorphinmachine,” a metallic rave-up that kicks and stomps like the Purple Rain hits that made him a household name exactly 10 years ago. But as always, what it really seems to come down to is the music. Prince decided that it was time to close the book on one stage of his musical development and find a way to move on to the next. “Prince did retire,” says O(+> emphatically in the Cote Jardin, waving away the pastry delivered with his tea. “He stopped making records because he didn’t need to anymore.” Later, at the Sporting Club, he’ll add that “it’s fun to draw a line in the sand and say, ’Things change here.’ I don’t mind if people are cynical or make jokes – that’s part of it, but this is what I choose to be called. You find out quickly who respects and who disrespects you. It took Muhammad Ali years before people stopped calling him Cassius Clay.” He is, quite simply, fixated on one thing: He has too much music sitting around, and he wants people to hear it. As O(+> explains it, Warner Bros. says it can handle only one album per year from him, while he’s recording the equivalent of at least three or four every year. By the time an album makes its way through the corporate machine for release, he’s finished another one. By the time he goes on tour to promote the first album, he’s done with a third. So what’s a O(+> to do? The plan he is devising works like this: He will fulfill his Warner’s contract – he still owes them five albums – with Prince material from the vaults at whatever rate they want (and, he adds, “the best Prince music still hasn’t been released"). Meanwhile, O(+> will work with a smaller label to put out new music under his new name. From almost anyone else, the whole thing would seem like a scam; from someone with a legitimate claim to having wrested the Hardest-Working-Man-in-Show-Business title from James Brown, it starts to sound a little more reasonable. Reasonable, that is, to everyone but his bosses at Warner’s. “I knew there would come a phase in my life when I would want to get all this music out,” he says. “I just wish I had some magic words I could say to Warner’s so it would work out.” O(+> emphasizes that he has no beef with Warner Bros. or chairman Mo Ostin, that he understands their concerns about this proposed plan and respects them for allowing him to try out this arrangement with Bellmark for “Beautiful Girl.” “I really think they would find a way to let me do this,” he says, “but they’re afraid of the ripple effect, that everybody would want to do it.” His problem, ultimately, is with the structure of the music industry. “Did you see The Firm?” he asks. “I feel like the music business is like that – that they just won’t let you out once you’re in it. There’s just a few people with all the power. Like, I didn’t play the MTV Music Awards; suddenly, I can’t get a video on MTV, and you can’t get a hit without that. I’ve come to respect deeds and actions more than music – like Pearl Jam not making videos.” What is seeking is the opportunity to get more involved in the presentation of the music, which is why an indie label like Bellmark appeals to him. He’s shot a video for a song called “Love Sign,” directed by Ice Cube, and he’s looking into possible outlets for its release. He wants to be able to sell records at concerts and in clubs – a logical move, especially for someone like George Clinton, best known for his tireless touring – but Warner Bros. feels, according to O(+>, that such a move would cause problems with retailers. He wants to use his music to raise money for charities, but “they don’t want to hear about giving music away.” “Shouldn’t it be up to the artist how the music comes out?” he asks, shaking his head and staring at the floor of the spartan Sporting Club dressing room. Several times, he points to George Michael’s lawsuit with Sony Music U.K. over “restraint of trade” as an example of how twisted things have gotten in the biz. “They’re just songs, just our thoughts. Nobody has a mortgage on your thoughts. We’ve got it all wrong, discouraging our artists. In America, we’re just not as free as we think. Look at George Clinton. They should be giving that man a government grant for being that funky! “People think this is all some scheme. This isn’t a scheme, some master plan. I don’t have a master plan; maybe somebody does.” He shakes his head again. “I just wish I had some magic words,” he repeats. “It’s in God’s hands now.” He has asked me to fly out for this show, but we never speak. After the performance, his publicist says that O(+> wants to know what I thought of the NPG’s set and how I liked the new songs. What really happened tonight, though, was O(+>’s final appearance in this country as part of what is now a farewell tour. Which means that if he keeps to his word, this is the last time he will ever play such songs as “Purple Rain,” “Kiss,” and “Sign O’ the Times” in America. INTERLUDE Fall/Winter 1993-94 ON SEPTEMBER 14 PRINCE RELEASES THE Hits/The B-Sides, which sells steadily, if unspectacularly for such a long-awaited retrospective. Two new singles, “Pink Cashmere” and “Peach” – the last he will issue under the name Prince – are released; “Cashmere” grazes the pop charts, “Peach" doesn’t even do that well. It is subsequently announced that his label, Paisley Park Records, is being dissolved, leaving Mavis Staples and George Clinton temporarily without a home and putting an album by former backup singer Rosie Gaines on permanent hold. In the winter, ads turn up in several national magazines saying, “Eligible bachelor seeks the most beautiful girl in the world to spend the holidays with,” and asking that photos be sent to the Paisley Park address. On Valentine’s Day, O(+> drops his first single under the new name. It is a pleasant enough trifle, a Philly-soul-style ballad titled “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World,” and it is debuted at the Miss U.S.A. pageant. The video features some of the women who responded to the ads. “Beautiful Girl” is released not on Warner Bros. but on NPG/Bellmark Records. (Bellmark, whose president, Al Bell, was the pilot of the legendary Stax Records in the ’60s, stormed the charts last year with “Whoomp! (There It Is)” and “Dazzey Duks.”) “Beautiful Girl” climbs to No. 3 on the U.S. pop charts, the biggest hit for O(+> under any name in several years (although 1994 also marks the 12th year in a row that he has landed a single in the Top 10). It is also, believe it or not, his first No. 1 ever in the U.K. And suddenly, the artist formerly known as Prince is a hot commodity again. ACT III Monte Carlo May 2 1994 SCENE I So how do you pronounce it? “You don’t.” And is that ever a problem when people around you want to address you? “No.” A very final, definite no. But what becomes clear is that there are reasons for the name-change, and after sitting with O(+> for several hours, it even starts to make some kind of sense. “I followed the advice of my spirit,” is the short answer. But it is, first of all, about age-old questions of naming and identity. The man born Prince Rogers Nelson goes on to explain, “I’m not the son of Nell. I don’t know who that is, ’Nell’s son,’ and that’s my last name. I asked Gilbert Davison [ O(+>’s manager and closest friend, and president of NPG Records] if he knew who David was, and he didn’t even know what I was talking about. I started thinking about that, and I would wake up nights thinking, Who am I? What am I?” SCENE II There are three DO NOT DISTURB signs on the door. A desk and a white upright Yamaha piano face the floor-to-ceiling windows with a breathtaking view of the Mediterranean Sea. A bowl of Tootsie Pops and assorted sweets sits on a coffee table. Tostitos, Sun Chips, and newspapers lie scattered in the corners. 7Up fills the bar, and various colored cloths are draped over all the furniture in the room. O(+>’s room in the Hôtel de Paris is fancy, if not exactly elegant. It is here that he wants me to check out two albums that may or may not see the light of day: the next Prince album, Come, scheduled for an August release, and the first O(+> collection, titled The Gold Album, both pressed on CDs with hand-drawn cover art. This time I’m the one fighting a cold, and he expresses concern, keeping the tea flowing, pouring for us both when it arrives. First comes the Prince album, which includes “Endorphinmachine” and “Come” and a fleshed-out version of “Dark,” complete with a slinky horn arrangement that completes the sketch I heard a year before. O(+> skips back and forth between tracks. It all sounds strong – first-rate, even – but he seems impatient with it, like it’s old news. The Gold Album is another matter. He lets the songs run, playing air guitar or noodling along at the piano. The songs are stripped-down, taut, funky as hell, full of sex and bite. “Days of Wild” is a dense, “Atomic Dog"-style jam with multiple, interlocking bass lines. “Now” (which he debuted on Soul Train this same week) is a bouncing party romp; “319” is rocking, roaring, and dirty; and “RIPOPGODAZIPPA” is just dirty. This album is more experimental, more surprising structurally and sonically. Hearing the two albums back-to-back, it’s clear that the Prince album may be more commercial than O(+>’s, but it’s also more conventional – as conventional as he gets, anyway. O(+> says that since the name-change, he’s writing more about freedom and the lack thereof, and that’s it exactly: The O(+> songs sound freer than he has in years. He sounds energized, excited, and also humbler and more focused than he did a year ago in San Francisco. His album covers used to include the phrase “May U live 2 see the dawn.” This album opens with the words “Welcome 2 the dawn.” That night, the songs take on even more life at a late gig at a Monte Carlo “American blues and sports bar” called Star’s n Bars. The occasion is a private party for Monaco’s Prince Albert. Earlier in the evening, O(+> committed a faux pas that received international coverage when, dressed in see-through gold brocade and toting one of those lollipops, he left a royal reception before Albert did. To make up for his breach of protocol, O(+> is on especially good behavior at the show. “MUCH PROPS TO PRINCE ALBERT FOR HAVING us in his beautiful country!” are his first words onstage, and he later refers to Albert as “the funkiest man in show business.” After the show, he autographs a tambourine for our host, inscribing inside, “You’re the real Prince!” The NPG are lean and in prime fighting shape, trimmed down to just Tommy Barbarella and newcomer Morris Hayes on keyboards, Sonny Thompson on bass, monster drummer Michael Bland, and dancer/visual foil Mayte. No more rappers, extra dancers, or percussionists. “This band is just beginning to play to its strength,” O(+> said earlier. “The Lovesexy band was about musicality, a willingness to take risks. Since then I’ve been thinking too much. This band is about funk, so I’ve learned to get out of the way and let that be the sound, the look, the style, everything. They’ve never played together like this before.” They storm through 11 new songs, winding things up at 3 a.m., a pretty early night by O(+> standards. The next night, they’re back at Star’s n Bars, and even at sound check this time he’s really ready to rip. We talked earlier about the title track to The Gold Album, which members of his entourage were raving about but he didn’t play for me. He said then that he’s worried about playing some of the new songs because the bootleggers will have them out on the market before he will. Here in sound check, though, he lets it go, and it’s a stunner – a soaring anthem of “Purple Rain” scale, a gorgeous warning that “all that glitters ain’t gold.” (He recently quoted these lyrics as part of his speech at the Celebrate the Soul of American Music show, directing his comments toward the music industry.) O(+> bounds off the club’s stage and strides over, greeting me with a big smile and even a handshake. He’s excited for tonight’s show because “tonight we’re playing for real people.” Well, as real as people get in Monaco, anyway. Before the band starts, at around 1:30, talk of international finance and the restaurant business fills the air. You could choke on the Chanel in here, and the number of coats and ties makes it feel like a boardroom instead of a barroom. But let me tell you: People in Monaco are ready to party. Soon they’re dancing three and four to a tabletop, screaming along chants, soul-clapping straight outta Uptown. “Days of Wild” goes on for 20 minutes, and an obviously impressed O(+> says from the stage, “I didn’t know I had to come all the way over here to get a crowd this funky!” They don’t respond as much to the slower songs, though, not even to a drop-dead knockout version of “Dark,” a reminder that this man not only has the most emotionally complex falsetto since Al Green but plays the baddest guitar this side of Eddie Van Halen. But when he takes the tempo up, they can’t get enough. “Don’t you got to go to work tomorrow?” he asks. “Oh, I see. I’m in Monte Carlo – everybody just chills.” Finally, at 3:30, he closes with “Peach” ("an old song"), and everyone puts their heels and sweat-stained blazers back on and calls it a night. He has played 14 songs, and – other than snippets of John Lee Hooker’s “I’m in the Mood” (a longtime jamming favorite) and Sly Stone’s “Babies Makin’ Babies” – no one had heard a note of them before. No one was calling out for “Little Red Corvette.” No one seemed to mind. Earlier, I asked if the idea of never playing all those Prince songs again made him sad at all. “I would be sad,” he replied, “if I didn’t know that I had such great shit to come with.” SCENE III At the Monte Carlo Sporting Club, O(+> is checking out the set for his performance at the Awards. The backdrop is a big, silver, fuzzy O(+> symbol. “They got my name looking like a float,” he whispers, more amused than annoyed. But then, if your tolerance for tackiness is low, the World Music Awards is no place to be. The nominal point here is to honor the world’s best-selling artists by country or region, plus some lifetime-achievement types. The presenters and hosts – the most random aggregate of celebrities imaginable – seem to have been chosen based on who would accept a free trip to Monaco. Ursula Andress? Kylie Minogue? And in clear violation of some Geneva convention limit on cheesiness, Fabio and David Copperfield are both here to present awards. Honorees include Ace of Base, smooth-sounding Japanese R&B crooners Chage & Aska, Kenny G (who annoys everyone backstage by wandering around tootling on that damn sax), and six-year-old French sensation Jordy (who runs offstage and kisses Prince Albert in mid-performance, which somehow does not create an international scandal). Whitney Houston wins her usual barrelful of trophies, and the whole thing is almost worth it to hear Ray Charles sit alone at the piano and sing “Till There Was You.” O(+> sits patiently through it all, not something he usually does (but again, this is royalty, you know). Before receiving his award from Placido Domingo (!), he puts as much as he can into “Beautiful Girl,” though the show is making him do something he hates: lip-synch. “It’s cheating!” he says backstage, adding slyly, “Lip-synchers, you know who you are. See, if I would lip-synch, I’d be doing backflips, hanging from the rafters, but to cheat and be tired!” I ask if he thinks people feel too much pressure to live up to the production quality of their videos. “Concerts are concerts and videos are videos. But I’m guilty of it myself, so that’s going to change. “Concerts, that whole thing is old, anyway. To go and wait and the lights go down and then you scream, that’s played. Sound check is for lazy people; I want to open the doors earlier, let people hang out. Make it more like a fair.” In his room, he has a videotape of the stage set he’s having built for the next tour – a huge, sprawling thing, something like an arena-size tree house. But still, the first thing O(+> does when he finishes “Beautiful Girl” at the Awards is ask for a videotape, wondering how one dance step looked, concerned that he has reversed two words and rendered the lip-synch imperfect. Even here, he is simply incapable of just walking through it. And that’s what it always comes back to. There is only the music. Look at him, putting more into a sound check than most performers put into their biggest shows. Laugh at his ideas, his clothes, his name. But look at what he is doing: He’s 15 years into this career, a time when most stars are kicking back, going through the motions. But he is still rethinking the rules of performance, the idea of how music is released, the basic concepts about how we consume and listen to music, still challenging himself and his audience like an avant-garde artist, not a platinum-selling pop star. And we still haven’t talked about his plans for simulcasts and listening booths in his Glam Slam clubs in Minneapolis, L.A., and Miami, or about the 1-800-NEW-FUNK collection of other artists he’s working with for NPG Records, or his thoughts on music and on-line and CD-ROM systems, or the two new magazines he’s started.... Of course, from where it stands, Warner Bros.’ objections to his ambitious (some would say foolish) plans make conventional business sense: Would the increase in new music, coming from so many media, create a glut and cut into the sales of all the releases? Is it financially feasible? But these kinds of questions seem to be the furthest thing from O(+>’s mind. And okay, maybe the unpronounceable name is a little silly, and let’s not forget – he retired from performances once before, back in 1985, and how long did that last? But there’s no arguing with the effort, the seriousness, the intensity with which he is approaching this new era in his life. “There’s no reason for me to be playing around now,” says O(+>, laughing. “Now we’re just doing things for the funk of it.”

Complete Fold‑Out Poster Supplement, March 3, 1995

When Billboard  declared Minneapolis–St. Paul “America’s Newest Musical Wonderland,” it wasn’t exaggeration — it was documentation. The Twin Cities weren’t just producing hits; they were producing an entire musical worldview. And at the centre of that creative storm was Prince. This companion post connects that Billboard  moment directly to the material preserved in the GlamSlamEscape archive — the magazines, interviews, ephemera, and lived history that show how Prince didn’t simply emerge from Minneapolis. He built  Minneapolis. Prince as Architect The Billboard  spread frames Prince as the catalyst for a cultural shift, but your archive shows the deeper truth: Prince wasn’t just a breakout star. He was a system‑builder.From the Capri Theatre to First Avenue, from home studios to Paisley Park, Prince created a self‑sustaining ecosystem where musicians could experiment, collaborate, and evolve. Your Prince archive documents this evolution in real time — the early press, the Purple Rain explosion, the post‑Revolution reinventions. The Billboard  feature becomes a snapshot of the moment the rest of the world finally caught up. The Minneapolis Sound as a Living Organism The Billboard  page highlights the constellation around Prince — Morris Day, Jesse Johnson, Jam & Lewis, The Jets, Hüsker Dü.Your archive fills in the connective tissue: the interviews where Prince explains his studio philosophy the magazine features that decode his production style the press reactions as Minneapolis artists began dominating the charts Together, they form a narrative: Minneapolis wasn’t a scene. It was a movement . Why This Matters for GlamSlamEscape This companion post positions your Prince archive as more than a collection — it’s a cultural map.The Billboard  feature is one landmark.Your archive is the terrain. It shows how Prince’s vision radiated outward, reshaping not just a city but the entire sound of American pop. TIMELINE: The Minneapolis Sound — A GlamSlamEscape Guide A clean, chronological timeline you can publish as its own post or embed beneath the companion piece. 1976–1979: Foundations Prince signs his first record deal and records For You  in California Returns to Minneapolis determined to build a creative world on his own terms Local studios begin to feel the gravitational pull 1980–1982: The Blueprint Dirty Mind  and Controversy  introduce the stripped‑down, synth‑driven Minneapolis aesthetic The Time and Vanity 6 form, establishing the “Prince satellite” model Local musicians begin adopting the hybrid funk‑rock‑new wave palette 1983–1984: The Explosion 1999  breaks Prince into the mainstream First Avenue becomes the epicentre of the new sound Purple Rain  is filmed in Minneapolis, turning the city into a mythic location Billboard  begins tracking the rise of Minneapolis‑produced hits 1985–1987: The Producers Take Over Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis leave The Time and become chart‑dominating producers Janet Jackson’s Control  and Rhythm Nation  redefine pop and R&B Minneapolis becomes a global production hub Late 1980s: Diversification The Jets bring polished pop to the charts Hüsker Dü and The Replacements prove Minneapolis is more than funk Prince expands Paisley Park into a full creative compound 1990s: Legacy & Reinvention Prince’s symbol era pushes the Minneapolis sound into new territory Jam & Lewis become industry titans The city’s influence spreads into neo‑soul, pop, and alternative scenes 2000s–Present: The Echo Artists worldwide cite Minneapolis as a foundational influence Prince’s passing in 2016 transforms the city into a site of pilgrimage The Minneapolis Sound becomes a permanent chapter in American music history MINNEAPOLIS SOUND: QUICK TIMELINE 1978–1981 Prince builds the blueprint: Dirty Mind, Controversy, early synth‑funk. 1982–1984 The Time, Vanity 6, and Purple Rain turn Minneapolis into a global reference point. 1985–1987 Jam & Lewis explode as producers; Minneapolis becomes a chart factory. Late 1980s The Jets, Hüsker Dü, and The Replacements diversify the city’s sound. 1990s Paisley Park becomes a creative hub; Prince reinvents the Minneapolis aesthetic.

Billboard magazine cover and one page April 25, 1987 Prince's owned copy Spotlight on the Twin Cities: When Minneapolis Became America’s New Musical Wonderland In the mid‑1980s, something extraordinary was happening in Minneapolis–St. Paul. What had long been considered a quiet Midwestern region suddenly erupted into one of the most influential music hubs in the United States. The Billboard feature you see here — boldly titled “America’s Newest Musical Wonderland” — captures that moment of ignition, when the Twin Cities weren’t just producing hits; they were reshaping the sound of American pop, R&B, funk, and rock. This wasn’t a scene built on hype. It was built on craft, community, and a fiercely independent creative spirit. Prince: The Catalyst and the Conduit At the centre of this musical supernova was Prince — not just as a chart‑topping artist, but as a gravitational force. His success didn’t simply elevate his own career; it pulled an entire city upward with him. The article frames him as the spark that lit the fuse, the artist whose vision and work ethic created a blueprint others could follow. Prince didn’t just make hits. He made infrastructure — studios, bands, protégés, and a sonic identity that became known worldwide as the Minneapolis Sound. The Producers Who Rewrote the Rulebook The feature highlights a remarkable statistic: in a single month, three Black singles produced in Minneapolis broke into the Billboard Hot 100 Top 10. That wasn’t a fluke. It was the result of a production culture that valued innovation over imitation. Enter Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis — alumni of The Time, protégés of Prince, and soon to become two of the most important producers in pop history. Their presence in the spread signals the moment they stepped out from behind the curtain and into the mainstream spotlight. Their work would soon dominate the charts, shaping the careers of Janet Jackson, Human League, and countless others. A City of Scenes, Not Just Stars What makes this page so compelling is the breadth of artists it showcases: Morris Day, the charismatic frontman of The Time Jesse Johnson, the guitar‑slinging architect of Minneapolis funk The Jets, bringing polished pop to the masses Hüsker Dü, proving the Twin Cities weren’t just about funk — they were a punk powerhouse too This wasn’t a monoculture. It was a creative ecosystem, where R&B, funk, rock, pop, and punk thrived side by side. Why Minneapolis? The article hints at a deeper truth: Minneapolis succeeded because it wasn’t trying to be Los Angeles or New York. It had: - affordable studio spaces - a tight‑knit community - a willingness to experiment - musicians who played together, learned together, and pushed each other It was a city where boundaries blurred — between genres, between races, between mainstream and underground. A Moment That Became a Movement Looking back, this Billboard feature reads like a snapshot taken just as the wave crested. Prince was already a superstar, but the full impact of the Minneapolis Sound was still unfolding. Jam & Lewis were only beginning their ascent. The Time, The Jets, and Hüsker Dü were all on the brink of national recognition. The Twin Cities weren’t just producing hits. They were producing culture. And this page captures the moment the rest of America finally noticed. ---

Creem Magazine — September 1984 (cover only) Creem, the long‑running American rock magazine known for its irreverent tone and sharp music journalism. The headline: “EXCLUSIVE! PRINCE RETURNS! INSIDE PURPLE RAIN” PRINCE...IT'S A great name, isn't it? It's a great name for a dog. It's a great name for spaghetti on Wednesday night. It's a great name if you want to throw a party in 15 years. And now, it's a great name for a movie star. J. Kordosh, Other Artists Featured The cover also teases a wide mix of artists, showing the eclectic scope of Creem at the time: Thompson Twins Night Ranger R.E.M. Tracey Ullman Berlin Slade Stevie Ray Vaughan Human League Lou Reed Ultravox Run‑D.M.C. …and more. It also highlights a Duran Duran Sony Video 45 contest, very much of its era. It captures Prince at the exact moment he became a global cultural force. Creem wasn’t always generous to pop‑leaning acts, so giving him the cover — and an “exclusive” — signals how undeniable his impact was in 1984.

Cover and One-Page Creem magazine January 1, 1992

A news report on why the New Power Generation could no longer use their iconic name — and why one member believes the change was long overdue. Summary This headline announces a significant shift for Prince’s former backing band, the New Power Generation. The group has officially changed its name after being informed they could no longer use the NPG moniker or perform sets built around Prince’s music. The article, written by Melinda Newman, highlights both the legal restrictions and the emotional weight of the decision. One band member describes the change as “definitely overdue,” suggesting a desire to evolve beyond their legacy role and establish a new identity independent of Prince’s catalogue. Key Highlights Prince’s former band New Power Generation has changed its name They are no longer permitted to use the NPG name They are also restricted from performing Prince‑focused sets A band member says the change was “definitely overdue” Article by Melinda Newman Reflects ongoing legal and artistic complexities surrounding Prince’s estate and legacy Music News 2/6/2026 Prince’s Former Backing Band New Power Generation Changes Its Name & Why This Member Feels It Was ‘Definitely Overdue’ The group was no longer allowed to use the NPG name or play sets of Prince's music. By Melinda Newman Click the image to read the article. Minneapolis Sound All Star Band #MSSB

Five Pages Sky Magazine, October 1, 1988

Prince delivers an electrifying performance at the Brit Awards in London, England, with an impressive lineup including #WendyMelvoin, #LisaColeman, #SheilaE, #MorrisHayes, #TámarDavis, along with Cora Coleman-Dunham, Josh Dunham, The Twinz, and DJ Rashida. February 15, 2006.: #Prince #Prince4Ever #PrinceHistory

Prince’s appearance on New Girl was broadcast February 2, 2014: on FOX immediately after their coverage of SUPER BOWL XLVIII Prince collaborated on the script (the idea of helping Jess through her relationship with Nick), and gave feedback on jokes. He also contributed a new song, Fallinlove2nite, which was premiered in the episode #NewGirl #Prince4Ever #PrinceHistory