The Rise of Prince 1958-1988

by Hahn, Alex

  This was exactly what longtime associates had hoped for. If he could more forthrightly acknowledge his own feelings, creative wellsprings could be unlocked that Prince, despite all his talents, had not accessed frequently enough. Maybe his insistence on controlling every domain of his life could be relaxed, leading to more authentic relationships.

  In the end, Prince would not let go of his obsessive self-reliance soon enough. Part of him wanted to be more revealing, but another part wanted to retreat to the literal and figurative cocoon that was Paisley Park. Despite his provisional movement towards greater openness, he would continue to insist on approaching crises as he always had – alone.

  2.

  Since 2013, Prince’s primary touring band had been comprised of three young women: guitarist Donna Grantis, drummer Hannah Welton, and bassist Ida Kristine Nielsen. Together, he dubbed them 3rdEyeGirl. They divided fan opinion, with some feeling that Grantis, Welton, and Nielsen were competent but unimaginative musicians. Others argued that the chemistry between Prince and the band members was obvious, and that he seemed rejuvenated by their presence. The group’s ability to lay down a funk groove was dubious; instead, anchored by Welton’s thunderous drumming, their style veered more toward hard rock. At the same time, the trio operated with a spatial economy that opened a large, airy pocket where Prince’s vocals and lead guitar sat comfortably and clearly.

  Meanwhile, as Prince solidified his relationship with the band during 2014, he had also developed a creative partnership with then 24-year-old Josh Welton, Hannah’s husband. Welton was a skilled producer of contemporary R&B music, and Prince saw the collaboration as a means of reaching a younger audience. For the first time, Prince was letting someone else – a very young man at that – in effect serve as co-producer. The results were sometimes pedestrian, but on cuts like “X’s Face” and “June,” Welton and Prince achieved a meaningful stylistic synthesis.[6]

  Josh Welton’s stamp was unmistakable first on Art Official Age (2014) and then HitnRun Phase One, which was released in September 2015. Not only had Prince forged a vibrant community among himself, Welton, and 3rdEyeGirl, but something fundamental had changed in his relationship to his musicians. Over the decades, many had left his employ feeling demeaned and underpaid. Some were troubled by his religious dogmatism and moral condescension, traits that also showed up in song lyrics.[7]

  But these tendencies had gradually abated, and working with 3rdEyeGirl represented an important signpost on his path to a more inclusive approach. Onstage, he allowed each member of the band time in the spotlight, and sometimes even elevated them above him on risers. All told, Prince loosened his grip and became less of a dictator and more of a leader.

  In late 2015, Prince reached out to another innovative young musician, the Memphis, Tennessee-based Dwayne Thomas, Jr., a bassist who worked under the stage name MonoNeon. Thomas’ compositions and visual methods, such as wearing gas masks onstage, owed debts to the Dadaist and Surrealist art schools, making him the most brazenly experimental artist Prince had worked with.[8]

  By this point in the year, 3rdEyeGirl was effectively on hiatus with Hannah Welton having become pregnant and Ida Nielsen pursuing a solo record. A new ensemble thus took shape with Dwayne Thomas on bass, Donna Grantis on guitar, and Kirk Johnson on drums. Prince rotated between guitar and keyboards. The result, particularly in comparison to 3rdEyeGirl, was loose, funky, and improvisational.[9] All told, Prince’s compound percolated with new musical possibilities.

  But if there was a downside to Prince’s cultivation of so many younger musicians, it was the lack of a peer in his own age group who could do something other than look up to him. “Prince obviously wanted to do a lot of mentoring, but I think the problem became that no one was there to mentor him,” said Jill Jones, a close friend and collaborator during Prince’s earlier years.[10]

  Indeed, Prince’s inner circle was comprised primarily of people decades his junior. The exception was Kirk Johnson, 51, who had served as a musical collaborator for decades, primarily as a drummer. He had been a friend of Prince since childhood, served as the best man at Prince’s wedding in 1996, and eventually became the estate manager of Paisley Park. An athletic individual who taught classes at a gym in Chanhassen, he also served as a de facto bodyguard.[11] And yet, despite the centrality of his position, Johnson was an employee rather than a true intimate, and certainly was not inclined to challenge any of Prince’s more mercurial behaviors.

  The same was true of Prince’s romantic partners. With apparent sincerity, in 2014 he told Rolling Stone that he had become celibate, but he still continued to socialize publically with attractive young women.[12] These included then-24-year-old Damaris Lewis, a former swimsuit model who maintained to the media that the relationship was platonic, and singers Andy Allo, 25, and Judith Hill, 30, with whom he collaborated musically. But neither Hill, Allo nor Lewis, whether they were muses, friends, or something else, were able to meet Prince on equal footing.

  One of the most obvious patterns in Prince’s life had been his resistance to genuine romantic intimacy, as opposed to serial dalliances with much younger partners who often resembled one another. He had been twice divorced, following the pattern of his father, John L. Nelson, who had abandoned two wives with similar appearances, including Prince’s mother, Mattie Shaw. Prince’s paternal grandfather, Clarence Nelson, had also left his wife and family. Due perhaps in some measure to this multi-generational pattern of romantic strife, in 2016 Prince lacked a strong female partner – or a strong partner of any kind, for that matter – when one would be most needed.

  ***

  During the autumn of 2015, even as he engaged in multiple collaborations at Paisley Park, Prince also began planning a solo piano tour. Shorn of the large bands, visual displays, and amplified sounds that typically characterized his shows, he would perform entirely alone. Although he had done solo piano segments before during conventional concert sets (such as during the 1988 Lovesexy tour), never had he attempted such sustained intimacy with audiences.

  Energized by this impending challenge, Prince summoned a small group of European journalists to Paisley Park during the second week of November 2015 to describe his plans. Shortly on the heels of this meeting, it was announced that the tour would begin in Vienna, Austria on November 21.[13]

  Within days, however, everything changed. On November 1, tragedy struck Paris in the form of a coordinated series of terrorist attacks by ISIL. Prince, along with many other American acts, cancelled European dates.[14]

  A more personal note of mortality was interjected at home. On November 19, Prince’s former girlfriend Kim Upsher died of a brain aneurism at Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis. Upsher, with whom Prince had attended high school, had been one of his first serious lovers, and one of the few friends with whom he had stayed in touch over the years. It is unlikely the event did not shake him in some manner.[15]

  After the European attack, plans were laid to undertake the piano tour in Australia instead. He began drilling on songs from across his canon, assembling a huge line-up of songs that he planned to pick and choose from concert to concert. The tour would in some ways be a return to his roots, as the piano had been the first instrument he had mastered as a child. But at the same time, he was planning a touring schedule that would take him almost as far from home as it was possible to go.

  3.

  Despite his bankability as a performer, money had long been a problem for Prince. His payroll and other expenses often outstripped revenues, and he sometimes failed to pay vendors. He took a casual approach to running his affairs, for example continuing to own – and pay property tax on – numerous pieces of fallow property throughout the Minneapolis area.[16] And none of the four albums he released during 2014 and 2015 (Art Official Age, Plectrum Electrum with 3rdEyeGirl, and the two HitNRun albums) had been a commercial success. He was hardly broke, but his funds were spread across a complicated sprawl of business entities and subject to various obl
igations. His personal cash reserves were low, and he was hesitant to liquidate his most readily available asset – a collection of gold bars worth nearly $1 million.

  This precarious and confused financial situation prompted Prince to accept lucrative bookings such as the one that took place on December 31, 2015 on the tiny island of Saint Barthélemy (often called St. Bart’s), the Caribbean’s most elite and most expensive island. The Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, who owned an estate overlooking a beach on the island, had commissioned Prince to perform the New Year’s Eve show, and doubtlessly provided ample compensation.[17] The travel, however, would be onerous: three legs of plane travel to the island, and four on the return trip.[18]

  On the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, wearing a long zippered leather jacket and carrying a silver cane, Prince exited a helicopter at the island’s airport and headed to the estate. He and the band performed an energetic 20-song set that, appropriate to the essentially commercial nature of the occasion, was heavy on hits such as “Let’s Go Crazy,” “Kiss,” “1999,” and “Purple Rain.” The concert took place on a large patio overlooking the beach, and Prince, as if to take the edge off the night air, wore a black beanie cap, a vest and long sleeves, sporting sunglasses throughout.[19]

  By this time, there were subtle signs that Prince’s health was not perfect. His use of a cane had begun, some years ago, ostensibly as a fashion accessory. But it was an open secret among his larger circle of associates that he had long experienced hip and joint pain.[20] Meanwhile, his efforts to exude constant vitality and boundless energy were not always successful. During a lengthy interview with Arsenio Hall in 2014 he appeared drawn and tired, and his efforts at humor perfunctory. Meanwhile, Prince’s chef, Ray Roberts, began to notice Prince frequently suffering from colds and flus, and requesting foods that were easy on the throat.[21]

  The concept of a piano tour was itself perhaps an accommodation to aging. Indeed, this format by nature would place a minimum of strain on his 57-year-old body, allowing him to remain seated throughout the performances. The schedule that Prince created, however, was anything but restful. He could have limited the performances to the United States – and perhaps even the Midwestern states near his home – and still attracted ample audiences from throughout the world for these intimate shows. Instead, he planned a tour that would require staggering amounts of airplane travel across four countries. The 2,600-mile return trip from St. Bart’s to Minneapolis was just the beginning.

  ***

  Upon returning from St. Bart’s, Prince began actively recording new music with Dwayne Thomas, Kirk Johnson, and saxophonist Adrian Crutchfield. A suite of up to seven songs was quickly completed, and Prince released the song “Ruff Enuff” to the TIDAL streaming music service in early January, just days after its recording was completed. By this time, Prince was also preparing to preview the piano show at Paisley Park. A sense of excitement pervaded Prince’s compound and the Minneapolis area as fans anticipated the debut of this unique concept.[22]

  Outside Paisley Park’s gates, however, music and popular culture suffered an unexpected loss: David Bowie, one of rock’s icons, died on January 10, 2016. Bowie had been a musical innovator, pop craftsman, and cultural pioneer in one package. And while he was one of the best-selling artists in pop history, his influence on other musicians was perhaps the most significant part of his legacy.

  Ten days after Bowie’s death, on January 20, Prince was immersed in meticulous preparations for his first solo piano show, which was to take place the next day. The main performance room of Paisley Park had been carpeted and generally rendered more atmospheric in preparation for the event. Prince spent hours testing sound as well as planning the set list together with sound technician Scott Baldwin.[23]

  During these preparations, Prince advised Baldwin of a point in the set where he would be mentioning David Bowie, but made clear that the reference would be short and simple, and that he would not perform one of Bowie’s songs. “I’ll leave it to all of those other artists to do their tributes,” Prince, said, rolling his eyes in disdain at the idea.[24]

  Prince had always been congenitally resistant to eulogies. When asked by Rolling Stone in 2014 about Michael Jackson’s death – which had occurred five years earlier – he simply said, “I don’t want to talk about it. I’m too close to it.” The same distancing occurred following the death of one of Prince’s heroes, Miles Davis, in 1991. Rather than attending the funeral, Prince sent a friend to read a poem.[25]

  And yet, events would soon show that Bowie’s passing, and the subject of mortality, had been on Prince’s mind perhaps more than even he himself had at first realized.

  January 21, 2016: Piano and a Microphone Show at Paisley Park

  Even at the time, the historic nature of what would be Prince’s final concert before an audience in his home state quickly became clear to the assembled fans. He began with a portion of the theme from the television show Batman, which was among the first pieces of music he had ever learned to play after gaining access to his father’s piano at age seven. Next came a cover of the Jackson Five’s 1969 song “Who’s Loving You?”, another song that served as part of the sound track of Prince’s youth. And then came “Baby,” a very rarely played number from Prince’s debut album. It quickly became clear that Prince was leading the audience in a chronological procession through his musical and personal development.

  Vocally, it was amply clear in this unmediated setting that Prince’s falsetto had not been in the least diminished by age, with his lower register providing a rich, soothing counterpoint. The sound quality and balance in the room were immaculate, owing to the hard work he and Scott Baldwin had put in the day before. Prince even elicited a round of applause for Baldwin, a remarkable display of generosity to a behind-the-scenes figure.[26] Meanwhile, Prince’s piano work displayed an oceanic depth that was surprising even to some longtime fans. It was not mere virtuosity that captured the audience; rather it was the triangular emotional bond that formed among Prince, his instrument, and his listeners.

  Between songs, Prince revealed aspects of his interior life that he had seldom shared, such as by relating stories of his childhood. “I thought I would never be able to play like my dad, and he never missed an opportunity to remind me of it,” Prince lamented ruefully prior to performing Ray Charles’ “Unchain My Heart,” a song he recalled playing with his father.[27]

  The reference was surprising. Prince rarely ever mentioned his late father, the jazz pianist John L. Nelson, with whom his relationship had oscillated between estrangement and reconnection. But acknowledging him in this setting with wry fondness seemed like a gesture of reconciliation, as well as another means of bringing parts of Prince’s life full circle. The visual and aural image of his father, playing a piano in the family living room, was likely one of Prince’s earliest memories. And Prince was paying this homage before a local audience at Paisley Park, not far from the Minneapolis jazz clubs where his father played in the 1950s, nor from the community center where John had met Mattie Shaw, Prince’s mother, late in that decade.

  Prince performed two marathon sets that night, covering a remarkable amount of material across his nearly four-decade career. If there was any disconcerting element, it might have been Prince’s appearance. According to longtime Prince follower Jefrey Taylor, who sat only five feet from the piano and who had observed him from close quarters several times before, the artist appeared to have shed a fair amount of weight from his already lean frame. “He looked gaunt and had lost some muscle tone, it was a noticeable difference,” Taylor said.[28]

  Midway through the opening set there was an unusual interjection. “How many of you have lucid dreams?” Prince asked the audience. “I like dreaming now more than I used to. Some of my friends have passed away and I see them in my dreams.” Prince then segued into “Sometimes It Snows in April,” the song that concludes his film Under the Cherry Moon and tells of the death of his alter-ego Christopher Tracy.[29] />
  The second set of the evening, which focused less on Prince’s biography and more on rarely performed songs, concluded with “Free Urself,” a fall 2015 single release. At the end of the song, Prince engaged the audience in a prolonged chant of the phrase “free urself.” As the swell of the chanting grew, Prince stopped singing and playing, and simply listened.[30]

  As the energy reached its peak, he stood up at the piano and abruptly left the stage with a single word: “Bye.”[31]

  February 15, 2016

  After completing the Paisley Park preview shows in January, Prince soon left for Australia – a grueling flight of nearly 24 hours – where he was to play a number of tightly spaced shows before moving on to New Zealand. Mere hours before he took the stage for the first set of the tour in Melbourne, bad news arrived: Denise Matthews, the former female protégé whom Prince had dubbed Vanity, had died at age 57.[32]

  Of all of Prince’s muses, perhaps none was more inextricably linked to him than Matthews. Although she was replaced by Patricia Kotero as the female lead of Purple Rain, Matthews’ erotic energy still loomed over the film. Prince’s pained screams during “The Beautiful Ones” could not have been stimulated by the blank slate that was Kotero – Matthews was a much more likely catalyst for one of the most powerful displays of emotion in his career.

  Matthews, who had long since left music to propound her Christian faith, died of renal failure, an illness linked to her heavy use of crack cocaine in the 1980s and 1990s. That substance abuse had begun during a 1982-83 tour in which she was the front woman for Prince’s “Vanity 6” side project. The demands of her role and the intoxicating atmosphere around Prince’s entourage overwhelmed Matthews’ volatile psyche, along with those of many others.[33]