The Rise of Prince 1958-1988

by Hahn, Alex

  Prince began by telling his Melbourne audience that “Someone dear to us has passed away, I’m gonna dedicate this song to her.” He delivered an anguished version of “The Beautiful Ones” and then proceeded, more lightly, to tell a story about ordering his bodyguard Chick Huntsberry to throw Matthews into a pool after a fight in which she taunted him for being too small to do it himself. “I probably shouldn’t be telling this story,” he said, “But she’d want us to celebrate her life and not mourn her.”[34]

  Although repression had always been Prince’s favored means of coping with loss, something was different this time; at a minimum, the passing of this friend seemed to make death less abstract for Prince. And there was another element of poignancy; his mother, Mattie Shaw, had died 14 years earlier on the same date, February 15.[35]

  “Vanity” was a concept and a template created by Prince, one that he would use in some fashion across most of his career. With great redundancy, Prince would bring sexually attractive women into his fold and then squander time and energy recording albums with them that were often forgettable. As Prince aged, the female counterparts did not, and the overall contrivance changed little. But with Matthews’ passing, something became clear: while concepts such as “Vanity” are timeless and changeless, the same cannot be said of human beings.

  ***

  From Melbourne, Prince travelled to Sydney, where he performed at the iconic Sydney Opera House on February 20. He and his small entourage then flew across the Tasman Sea to New Zealand, where he performed in Auckland on the 24th. Then, in a bizarre scheduling decision, the tour proceeded back to the far side of Australia for a show in Perth the next night. Prince had insisted on these arrangements simply because he had never played Perth before.

  Because Prince’s piano was too large for a private jet, it was impossible to get the instrument to Perth in time for the show. Undaunted, Prince ordered that another piano be flown from Chanhassen to Australia for the show.[36] When all was said and done, in the course of 24 hours, Prince played shows in two different continents and flew about 3,400 miles – greater than the length of the entire United States.

  It had been ten days since Prince had received the painful news of Denise Matthews’ passing. Now, it was time to return to America and to begin a proper, albeit brief, period of mourning.

  February 27, 2016: Union City, California

  The memorial service for Matthews in the Bay Area brought together many of Prince’s former associates, united in grief and a sense that some profound demarcation in their lives had occurred. These included several women from Matthews’ heyday – Apollonia Kotero, Jill Jones, Brenda Bennett, and Susan Moonsie. In fact, Moonsie and Jones had been among Prince’s most significant romantic partners during the 1980s. The bouyant “Private Joy” (from the 1981 album Controversy) was about Moonsie, and Jones had inspired the blistering rocker “She’s Always In My Hair,” a 1985 B-side.

  If jealousies had ever characterized the relationships of these women to one another – or to Matthews, for that matter – such feelings were either long gone, or had been rendered entirely irrelevant by their shared loss. None of Prince’s girlfriends had exuded feminine vitality – and, more to the point, sexuality – in such a visceral manner as had Denise Matthews. She had inspired some of Prince’s most salacious lyrics. A former Prince bandmate who had also dated Matthews still marveled, decades later, about the time he had spent three straight amorous days in bed with her. Now, this force of nature was gone.[37]

  Prince himself was not present at the memorial. But his friends and former lovers consoled each other at the service, seeking to manage the memories and emotions that had surfaced. Kotero broke down after entering the church and was embraced in a group hug by Bennett and Moonsie. “Don’t cry,” both women repeated to her several times.[38]

  The women and their friends managed to lighten the mood afterward by having dinner in San Francisco and sharing a midnight walk from Fisherman’s Wharf to Ghirardelli Square. The next night, the reunion of Kotero, Jones, Bennett, and Moonsie took on another dimension as they attended Prince’s performance at the Paramount Theatre in Oakland. The show quite literally brought them from laughter to tears over its epic length, and the sense of the women reconnecting – both with Prince and each other – deepened.[39]

  Backstage, however, the atmosphere was more ambivalent. Jill Jones, now 54, had not been in touch with Prince for the better part of three decades. She had been both a musical collaborator and lover, but the relationship had not infrequently been characterized by friction. She eventually returned a friendship ring he had given her, effectively severing a once-powerful bond.[40]

  For Jones, any resentment had drifted well into the past, and seemed moot against the backdrop of Matthews’ death.

  “Thank you for giving me all of these women,” Jones said of her companions, all of whom she had met as a result of her association with Prince.

  “So now you’re okay with it?” he responded, a reference to past conflicts over Prince’s womanizing.[41] The retort straddled humor and resentment.

  Jones found herself concerned about Prince’s appearance; he looked haggard and fatigued. His make-up – which Jones had known Prince to always apply immaculately – looked chalky and inconsistent. Most worrisome of all, Jones felt sure Prince was on some kind of drug. He was not visibly inebriated, off-balance, or slurring his words, but his manner palpably indicated the presence of something artificial.[42]

  During her years with him, they had often stayed up for nights on end, but nothing stronger than coffee had fueled these activities. “I never want to do drugs, because I’m afraid I would like them,” Prince had once told her during a discussion of Jimi Hendrix’s excesses.

  Later during the backstage encounter, when Prince’s attention was drawn elsewhere, Jones huddled with Kotero, Moonsie, and Bennett to express her concerns. Prince quickly returned to the group, breaking up the conversation.

  “What are you talking about?” he asked playfully.

  “You,” Moonsie replied.

  The conversation became lighter, as Jones proposed that they all vacation together from time to time, and perhaps go skydiving. “I’m not gonna go skydiving, that’s for sure,” Prince responded.

  By this time in the conversation, Prince had become genuine and gregarious; Matthews’ death, while a loss for all of them, had created some renewed sense of community. But when the women asked Prince to join them for dinner, something in his manner shifted, and he demurred.[43] When they left, Prince told Jones he had some things to discuss with her, and would be in touch in a couple of months.

  Jones later drove back to Southern California with Kotero and voiced her concerns about Prince. Kotero responded that Prince’s hip pain provided a suitable explanation for the use of any medication that might be causing side effects. Jones harbored deeper suspicions, but she lacked sufficient evidence – let alone access – to confront Prince and try to render assistance. But the backstage interactions had made clear that Prince, despite his cocksure arrogance being intact, was vulnerable. And both Jones and Kotero remained hopeful that they could, in coming months, renew ties and offer him a form of unconditional support – to say nothing of seasoned advice – that Prince was missing in his small entourage of paid employees, female companions, and youthful bandmates.

  4.

  With the Piano and a Microphone tour having completed two full legs – Australia and California – it was increasingly clear that the tour was, in some tangible sense, about legacy. There was no reason to think that Prince did not have decades of performing left in him. At the same time, these shows were self-evidently a statement about Prince’s entire body of work, his abilities as a musician, and his intimate bond with his audience.

  So much of Prince’s career had been a series of transitions – some of them abrupt and rushed – between concepts, styles, bands, and albums. But now there was a clear sense of pause. And as a result, an air of crystalline imm
ediacy pervaded the theatres and opera houses where Prince performed.

  “The space between the notes – that’s the good part,” Prince said at several of the concerts. And these words certainly could have served as a metaphor for these performances, in which he used silence as deliberately as any of the notes on his keyboard. Whether or not Prince was aware that the phrase “music is the space between the notes” had originated with the French composer Debussy, it was certainly apt. And the comment that often followed was pure Prince: “How long the space is – that’s how funky it is or how funky it ain’t.”[44]

  But for all the laudatory reviews and word-of-mouth that the tour was generating, signs of Prince’s physical discomfort began to mount. On March 3, Prince appeared with companion Damaris Lewis at a Golden State Warriors basketball game. He made his way to a courtside seat with a cane and wore large sunglasses throughout the contest. Prince licked his lips repeatedly during portions of the game when he was shown on camera, an indication of dry mouth, and wore several layers of clothing, including a long-sleeved, collared shirt and gloves.[45] And while neither of these is necessarily abnormal in themselves, they are considered indicia of excessive use of prescription opioids.

  His use of such drugs had, at various points in his career, been an open secret amongst his friends. He had first been exposed to them at the height of his fame, during the 1985 Purple Rain tour, when he suffered both a leg injury and ongoing orthopedic strain as a result of jumping from stage risers while wearing four-inch heels. Thus started a cycle of on-and-off use that would continue in some measure during the ensuing decades.[46]

  Prince’s use of the drugs again reportedly became heavy in the late 1990s and into the year 2000, leading to explosions of anger and consistent irritability that friends attributed to opioid overuse. While his use of these drugs had begun out of medical need, at least some of the time he acquired them illicitly, in one case using a girlfriend as a regular intermediary for several months in early 2000, paying her $100 per pill of Percocet.[47]

  Still, Prince was again able to stop short of a crisis, and friends felt that his behavior moderated considerably starting with the 2004 release of Musicology, which also helped revive his commercial fortunes. Whether he ever stopped using the drugs entirely is unclear, but Prince’s performances in ensuing years were never visibly marred by substance abuse.

  ***

  In an even more explicit sense, Prince addressed the question of his legacy shortly after concluding the California shows. On March 18, appearing at the club Avenue in New York’s Meatpacking District, Prince told a crowd of about 300 people that he had signed a contract with Random House to write a memoir. The idea seemed fanciful; Prince was notoriously resistant to introspection and was generally opaque in his written communications. But he seemed to embrace the idea with gusto. “The good people of Random House have made me an offer that I can’t refuse,” he told the audience, referencing a line spoken by Don Vito Corleone from The Godfather, a film that recurred in songs and characters across his career.[48] And just as the movie had told the saga of a family patriarch, Prince was now clearly feeling an impulse to tell his own story in some epochal fashion.

  Shortly after this event, the tour resumed with shows in Montreal on March 21 and 22. Along with the many miles travelled on the tour, a great amount of emotional territory had been traversed as well. From the loss of Kim Upsher in November 2015, to the death of Bowie in January 2016, and then the passing of Denise Matthews in February, there was a sense of emotional gravity surrounding the tour, even apart from Prince’s impassioned renditions of his songs. And gradually, those feelings were coming to the surface.

  March 25, 2016: Toronto

  During many of the shows on the tour, the audiences were raucous, resulting in a festive atmosphere and sometimes causing parts of songs to be drowned out by applause. Tonight, however, the crowd was reverently silent during many of the songs, allowing Prince to concentrate even more intently.

  The openers on the 25th, “I Would Die 4 U” and “Baby I’m a Star,” were typical set list choices, but Prince quickly veered off into the obscure territory that most delights his hardcore fans. “Four” (played fourth in the set, in a wink to aficionados) was taken from an instrumental jazz album recorded under the moniker Madhouse in 1986. The fifth number, “Dolphin,” was better known, but primarily among serious fans. From The Gold Experience (1995), the song is partially a study of reincarnation.

  Tonight’s rendition of the song contained an unexpected twist. Midway through “Dolphin,” Prince abruptly segued into David Bowie’s “Heroes.” This was just the sort of thing that Prince had spoken of dismissively in January when telling sound engineer Scott Baldwin that such tributes should be left to other artists. But something had shaken loose, and Prince began to explore the meaning of Bowie’s loss.

  Then, continuing a literal and metaphoric cycle, Prince quickly transitioned back to “Dolphin,” and then back to “Heroes” again. That he intermingled Bowie’s song with “Dolphin,” a song about reincarnation, seemed entirely deliberate, as if he were telling the audience that Bowie’s spirit, in some manner, would return.[49]

  Across his recorded canon, Prince’s references to death usually came in an almost tragicomic manner, depicting hedonism as the only logical response to mortality, as reflected in songs like “1999” and “Let’s Go Crazy.” But rarely had he addressed this topic in an earnest and reflective fashion. In two such examples, he uses the same metaphor – the final month of the year – to evoke the end of life. The first, “The Same December” (from the 1996 release Chaos and Disorder) speaks of a “Same December” from which all of us originate, and where we all eventually return. The similarly titled “Last December” (from the 2001 album The Rainbow Children) raises the perennial question of a life’s legacy – that is, what one feels they have accomplished when the end is in sight.

  Both of these songs find Prince at his most vulnerable, grasping for a way to understand the human condition. And on March 25, moving from “Dolphin” to “Heroes” and back again, Prince returned to an emotional space he had only rarely visited.

  And yet, despite the emotional impact of the Toronto show, something had shifted in his performances. Prince still hit his falsetto notes with ease, but his midrange – which had sounded relaxed, round, and full in Australia – at times began to sound rough, strained, and certainly more nasal.[50]

  From January through late March, Prince had traveled nearly 30,000 miles, a greater distance than the earth’s entire circumference. Multiple stressors were acting synergistically – drug use, travel demands, and generally weak health. Prince now weighed about 112 pounds, down from a peak of about 130 some years ago, meaning that he had effectively lost about 15 percent of his body weight.[51]

  With the Canadian leg of the tour now complete, Prince returned to Minneapolis. The next stint had already been planned, this time to cover the American south, starting with an appearance in Atlanta on April 7. But instead, his tour coordinator contacted the show’s promoter on the morning of the show with bad news: Prince had the flu, and needed to postpone. It was, by some accounts, the first time in at least a quarter century that he had cancelled a concert for health reasons.[52]

  Determined to make up the show as soon as possible – and worrying above all about disappointing his fans – he directed his representatives to reschedule the concert for April 14, just a week after the initially scheduled event. At the same time, Prince was conscious that he needed medical help, and on April 7, he saw a Minneapolis doctor, Michael Schulenberg, who was reportedly treating him for opioid addiction.[53]

  On April 11, following four days of public silence, he used Twitter to laud a new release by the singer Sidibe. Prince had been using this social media platform for several years, posting media articles about himself, promoting events, and occasionally communicating directly with individual fans. Now, he sought to shape public perceptions of recent events, including the
cancelled show. On April 12, he tweeted about the arrival of a new purple Yamaha piano at Paisley Park, declaring that he had achieved a “resounding” sound while performing “Boom” from the album LotusFlow3r.[54]

  The message was clear – notwithstanding the cancelled show, Prince was enjoying his new instrument, raring to play, and feeling fine.

  Thursday, April 14, 2016: Fox Theatre, Atlanta

  Upon taking the stage at the Fox Theatre for the first of two shows, Prince apologized profusely for the missed show a week earlier. He then did everything he could to make up for it, delivering yet another bravura performance.[55]

  The Atlanta show again presented a sampling from multiple eras, giving serious and casual fans alike ample points of entry. “Muse 2 the Pharaoh,” from The Rainbow Children (2001), made an extremely rare appearance. And funk workouts like “Controversy” and “Kiss” were translated eloquently for the piano.

  A cane was visible near Prince during the show, but his mobility did not seem compromised; at various points, he stood up and took a lap around his piano, seemingly unable to contain the energy caused by his music.[56] However, he unexpectedly and uncharacteristically left the stage at several points during the set. “Sometimes I forget how emotional these songs are,” he said after one of these breaks.[57]

  Prince delivered a stirring performance of Joni Mitchell’s “A Case of You,” a song with special significance for him. He had attended her concerts as a young boy, and he would continue to emulate her lyrical approach throughout his career. And in the year 2001, the year that John L. Nelson died, Prince dedicated a recorded version of the song to his father.