by Hahn, Alex
Nelson began to scapegoat the demands of family life for his inability to advance his career. Mattie’s resentment grew as the burdens of childcare fell almost entirely on her. The smoldering anger between the couple began to erupt into occasional physical violence. Between the fights, there was mainly tension; the separate silos occupied by the spouses within the household hardened, and the differences soon became irreconcilable. Finally, the marriage fractured, prompting John Nelson to move out when Prince was just seven years old.[100] For the second time in his life, John Nelson had ended a marriage and left his family.
Ironically, many years later, Prince would recall feeling some sense of relief at his father’s departure, perhaps because the pervasive hostility in the household had finally broken.[101] But at the same time, Prince had lost his primary role model and source of guidance.
One benefit of his father’s departure, however, was that Nelson had left behind his piano. Previously, Prince had only been able to longingly look at the instrument, but now he could play whenever he wanted. Following Nelson’s exit from the household, Prince developed an almost immediate aptitude for the instrument. One of the first songs he learned was the theme to Batman, one of his favorite television programs. In the absence of his father’s affection the piano provided an outlet, a means of soothing the conflicted emotions that were increasingly taking hold in young Prince’s psyche.[102]
For her part, Mattie Shaw was plunged back into adverse conditions not unlike those she had faced growing up in a Minneapolis project. Shorn of John Nelson’s substantial income, she worked several jobs in order to care for her children, causing a palpable strain on everyone in the household.
Nonetheless, the community around the family was a tightly knit place where neighbors looked out for one another, ensuring a steady supply of friends and neighbors as Prince grew up. The family now lived at 2620 8th Avenue North, a home that John and Mattie purchased shortly before their separation. Prince started at John Hay Elementary School at 1014 Penn Avenue North, only a half mile from his home. Hay, which was part of a strong public school system, served about 700 students and had a relatively diverse population.[103]
Prince was turning out to be a small and thin boy, taking after his father. In class photos, he was routinely placed in the front row so as not to be obscured by other students. He wore a closely cropped, well-groomed Afro, and dressed impeccably. His mother, no less than John Nelson, earnestly sought to have her son make a positive impression on the world.[104]
Among Prince’s classmates and early friends was Terry Jackson, who lived on Russell Avenue North, also a short walk from Hay Elementary. Jackson’s family, unlike Prince’s, was strong and stable, with his father Leroy being the first black prosecutor for the City of Minneapolis. Even as a child, Jackson immediately noticed seemingly contradictory personality traits in Prince. Around teachers and adults he did not know well, he appeared to be shy and almost meek. But among friends, he was talkative and playful, as well as someone who liked to pull pranks.[105]
The shy persona, Jackson detected, reflected his distrust of adults and served as a way to avoid unwanted attention from authority figures. In truth, Prince was not an inherently quiet or withdrawn child. Instead, he oscillated among multiple personality traits to achieve his goal in a given situation.[106]
Prince remained free to visit his father, who moved into a one-bedroom apartment at the Glenwood Terrace Apartments at 1707 Glenwood Avenue on the Northside. But Nelson continued to spend large swaths of time on the road, and while he regularly provided Prince a small financial allowance, emotional support was another matter. And Nelson’s absence would be even more glaring when a radical shift took place in Prince’s home.
In 1968, with Prince now ten, Mattie Shaw married another Minneapolitan, Hayward Baker, who also had children of his own. This improved the household’s economic fortunes, but was jarring and disruptive for Prince.
While there was little chance that Baker ever could have served as a substitute for John Nelson in Prince’s eyes, he failed to connect with his stepchildren on any level, and perhaps failed to even try. He would occasionally give Prince and his sister expensive presents, but these efforts came across as crass rather than heartfelt. His interest was in Mattie, not the children; Prince began to feel more and more alienated from the adults in his home.
***
As John Nelson continued to try to forge a professional jazz career and his son showed early signs of musical talent, major changes were afoot in African-American music. Moving away from the straight 4/4-time signature that was standard in blues and jazz, a young James Brown and other musicians began to use syncopated rhythms to create a new idiom, one that would become known as funk.
In 1967, this style had what might be considered its definitive birth with the release of James’ “Cold Sweat.” Over the next two years, as improbable as it seems in a city with a very small black community, Minneapolis became one of the more important outposts of this new style outside of the old South. A local station, KUXL, became a key part of the scene, playing Minneapolis artists like Mojo Buford, Willie Walker, and Maurice McKinnies, all of whom had helped develop this new musical form.[107]
Prince, now ten years old, became particularly enamored with a KUXL deejay named Jack Harris, who went by “Daddy Soul” on the radio.[108] Harris was also a musician, and developed an outsized influence by writing music for other artists as well as recording his own. Songs like Harris’ “Get Funky, Sweat a Little Bit” helped define the Northside’s unique form of funk.
Meanwhile, a local record label called Black and Proud Records emerged in 1968 and released a series of notable 45 RPM records by Harris and other artists. Prince was growing up in a minor funk hotbed, and nearly half a century later, the sounds he heard in those days, including the voice of Harris emanating from a radio, would remain fresh in his mind.
***
As the 1960s continued, the social changes that were convulsing the United States – including efforts to fight racism and widespread protests against the Vietnam War – began to penetrate the Northside. Economic opportunities for African-Americans had begun to shrink, and some felt that Jewish-owned businesses in the neighborhood treated blacks in a discriminatory manner. Simmering anger over these issues boiled over on July 19 and 20, 1967, when a protest against economic inequality turned violent. Acts of arson occurred, including the outright destruction of several Jewish-owned businesses.
It is unclear how, or if, these events impacted Prince and his family, but other social upheavals affected him directly. The Minneapolis public school system, like so many others around the country, began to undertake active efforts to desegregate its schools. For Prince, this resulted in being bussed several miles away to Kenwood Elementary School, which was predominantly white. Fortunately, close friends like Terry Jackson were bussed with him to Kenwood, and the relatively short distance between his home and the new school allowed him to keep his social life centered around the Northside.[109] And only a year later, both Prince and Jackson were back at Hay Elementary.
Prince and his friends began to see important musicians perform live. He and other friends, including his cousin Charles “Chazz” Smith, surreptitiously entered a Sly Stone performance through a fence. Terry Jackson’s mother, Glenda, took the boys to a James Brown concert, where they were treated to the stage moves and microphone mastery of the greatest funk master of the era.[110]
At the Brown show, Prince startled his companions by jumping on stage. “He started doing the mashed potato,” Jackson recalled, referring to a dance style popularized by Brown that involves stepping backwards with one heel turned in. Prince’s friends – and Brown himself – looked on incredulously as the small ten-year-old grabbed the crowd’s attention. Eventually a stage hand peaceably removed Prince, who rejoined his friends near the front of the stage.
In the summer of his sixth grade year, when he was 12, Prince attended a summer camp program at Camp Ojibway
in Siren, Wisconsin. The Rev. Art Erickson, a community leader who worked with the Minneapolis school system to create afterschool programs, supervised Prince and other students there, and found him to be a happy and unguarded child, filled with playful energy. In a video taken by Erickson, Prince is seen riding on the shoulders of a peer, his face full of joy.[111]
But in the coming academic year, Prince’s relationship with Mattie Shaw’s new husband began to deteriorate. In order to punish Prince for some transgression, real or imagined, Baker would frequently lock him alone in a room, often for long stretches of time. The only saving grace was that there was a piano in an adjacent room that remained accessible. Prince began to associate the instrument with loneliness, and the rudimentary improvisations he created reflected this.[112]
Baker continued to inflict other forms of punishment on Prince, some bizarre. Among other things, he would force Prince to pick dandelions in the yard for long stretches of time. By doing so, Baker deliberately isolated Prince from his friends and his music.[113]
Years later, in January 1993, Prince wrote a song “Papa,” which makes reference to a four-year-old boy being locked in a closet and beaten. It describes an abusive father who “crucified every dandelion in the yard.” But in “Papa,” the strange punishment that Baker applied is inverted, with the abusive father picking dandelions.
At the conclusion of “Papa,” the father shoots himself. Something similar happens in an early draft of Purple Rain, when Prince’s father’s character murders his wife before committing suicide.
The next year at summer camp, Prince bore the emotional scars of this mistreatment, and seemed a very different person to the Rev. Art Erickson. “He went from a smiling kid to a deeply introverted kid,” Erickson recalled. “You could see it in his looks.”[114] Erickson took another video, and this time Prince stared blankly and without expression into the camera.[115]
Concerned, Erickson approached Prince privately and asked what had happened. Prince responded that his stepfather had been locking him in his room for long stretches, letting him out only briefly to eat. Erickson, while stunned, did not believe there was anything he could do, as the norms and laws of the times made it difficult to intervene in family affairs. He did, however, take Prince under his wing and encourage his scholastic and athletic development.[116]
Prince described the same details of being locked in a room by Baker to Paul Mitchell, a close friend during high school. And later, shortly after Prince was signed to Warner Bros. Records in 1977, Erickson encountered him at local movie theater. Erickson reached out to say hello, and in a brief conversation, brought up the past.
I said to him, ‘You told me a story in 7th grade about being locked in your room and all that stuff. Are you going to stick with that? Did that really happen?’” Erickson recalled. “He said, ‘Yeah, that really happened.’”[117]
Did Prince also suffer abuse at the hands of his biological father? Prince during some interviews made passing references to physical punishment by John Nelson, but was never specific. And at the very time when Prince was reporting Hayward Baker’s abuse to Erickson, no reference whatsoever was made to any problems with John Nelson.[118] In short, there is little evidence that Prince experienced traumatic abuse at the hands of his father.
There is, however, ample evidence that Prince was locked in a room for long periods of time by Baker, and that this deeply scarred him, along with various other punishments meted out by Baker. But he shared this with relatively few people. Despite all that he revealed during his life, this tremendously formative and traumatic experience would remain largely hidden.
3. Basements
Fred Anderson, surely one of the very few African-Americans to be born in Fergus Falls, Minnesota during the 1920s, would become, like John Nelson, something of a frustrated jazzman. A skilled stand-up bassist, Anderson eventually moved to Minneapolis and began performing with local groups. Eventually, however, Anderson’s dream of becoming a professional musician would become secondary to family responsibilities.[119]
In 1948, Anderson married Bernadette Early, a lifelong Minneapolis resident with a civic-minded personality, boundless energy, and a radiant smile. Their family grew rapidly, prompting Anderson to focus on his job with the U.S. Postal Service. Still, he played in downtown clubs whenever time allowed, and became a respected member of the city’s vibrant jazz scene of the 1950s.[120]
The Andersons eventually divorced, leaving Bernadette in economically challenged circumstances not unlike those experienced by Mattie Shaw after her separation from John Nelson. Bernadette worked as a maid for a Jewish family, and aspects of her family life were troubled; one of her sons would end up in prison and another would suffer mental health problems as a result of serving in Vietnam.[121] But she obtained a college education and would come to play an outsized role in urban Minneapolis.[122]
The youngest of Bernadette’s six children was Andre, who as a boy became a mixture of a hooligan and neighborhood hustler – someone who took cars on joy rides and boosted bicycles to make some cash. Such activities were known in the neighborhood as “the five-fingered discount,” and Andre became an expert at it. Andre combined a wide variety of traits; he was garrulous and profane – a tough neighborhood kid who was nobody’s fool – but also had a softer, more reflective side.
As a youth, Andre Anderson’s life in many respects moved in parallel to that of Prince Rogers Nelson. Like John Nelson, Fred Anderson kept his musical instrument off limits to his son, but Andre took liberties in this area as well, playing his father’s bass after school and quickly becoming proficient. One day, however, Andre dropped the instrument and broke it, justifiably enraging his father. To avoid further trouble, Andre acquired an electric bass. He also began to learn guitar and several brass instruments while attending Harrison Elementary School.[123]
After living for many years in a rougher part of Minneapolis, eventually the Andersons moved to 1244 Russell Avenue in the more middle-class Northside, where Andre could attend Lincoln Junior High starting in seventh grade. Terry Jackson, Prince’s longtime friend and elementary school classmate, lived next door 1248 Russell.
Lincoln Junior High was far enough from Andre’s old neighborhood that he expected few if any of his friends to be enrolled there. He thus started school that year with a mixture of expectation and apprehension.[124] On his first day, upon reporting to the school gymnasium to be assigned a homeroom via a roll call, Andre looked for familiar faces, but saw none as he scanned the large group of students lined up against a wall. Spying a small student at the end of the line, Andre somewhat arbitrarily decided to stand next to him and strike up a conversation.[125]
Prince Nelson, who was now trying to shed “Skipper” in favor of his birth name, was quickly charmed by Andre’s casual humor, and their mutual interest in music was quickly established. The two even shared the same birth month and year, with Prince having been born on June 7, 1958, and Andre on June 27.
Within days of meeting Andre, Prince invited his new friend to John Nelson’s apartment. The tight space was dominated by a large piano and an impressive stereo system; there was no couch. There was also a guitar, and the youths began to tentatively play together, taking turns on the two instruments. Both discerned the other’s talent, and they developed a rapid synergy, both musically and personally, as they began to play together in the days and weeks that followed.[126]
During one of these afternoon sessions, Andre saw a photograph of John Nelson’s band on the mantelpiece. He noticed that one of the musicians looked like his father, albeit with more hair. Prince, not sure who it was, said they could ask his father when he returned from work.
When John Nelson arrived, all three were stunned to learn the coincidence – Andre’s father had once been part of the Prince Rogers Trio, and the fathers had been close friends. Yet another parallel had been established between Andre and Prince.[127]
***
As Prince’s relationship with Andre Ande
rson began to flourish, his situation at the Shaw-Baker household had reached a point of crisis. No longer willing to accept punishments from Baker that ranged from petty to severe, and worrying that things might further escalate, Prince decided to leave.
He appealed to his father to let him move into John Nelson’s one-bedroom apartment, and Nelson grudgingly agreed. But the small space was ill-suited to cohabitation. And Nelson remained ambivalent at best about being a father.[128] When he came home from work early one afternoon to find Prince in bed with a girl from school, Nelson used this as a pretext to declare that his son would have to live elsewhere.[129] Nelson arranged for Prince to be taken in by his older sister Olivia Nelson, who was in her mid-60s and living on the south side of Minneapolis.[130] But this was an ad hoc, unsatisfactory option; Olivia was a disciplinarian who required him to focus on his schoolwork, and there were no instruments available at her residence.[131]
Prince remained close friends with Terry Jackson, with whom he had attended elementary school, and he now asked to move in with the Jackson family at 1248 Russell Street on the Northside. This arrangement would have been perfect; John Nelson’s apartment was nearby, and Andre Anderson lived next door.[132]
But Terry’s mother, Glenda, rejected the idea. Prince had been a regular playmate of Jackson’s over the years, and Glenda had seen his behavior become increasingly arrogant and rebellious; she felt that reining in these impulses would be too difficult. “She was worried she would have to physically discipline him, and she didn’t want to do it,” Jackson recalled.[133]
Next door, Bernadette and Fred Anderson had separated, but Bernadette had emerged as a central figure in the life of the Northside, becoming known as “Queen Bernie” in the community. Her radiant energy filled the residence, and her benevolence was well known throughout the neighborhood. Prince, perceiving an opportunity in her generosity, asked Andre if he could move in.[134]
