Prince or king of the road?
Hot tour on track to be the year's biggest

By Mark Brown, Rocky Mountain News
August 27, 2004

Fans of Prince recall the 1988 Lovesexy tour as one of his best. Besides coming at a critical peak in his career, the in-the-round format made for great seats and visuals for everyone.

That's one of the reasons he's revived the format for the Musicology tour. It's a different stage and a different band, obviously, but unlike many tours, it's all live, from all angles.



"Everything is better in the round," Prince told the News in an interview in Milwaukee recently.

When he plays on a conventional stage now, "it feels like I'm moonlighting," he said. "The round experience is unparalleled. I've never been so comfortable on a stage as this one. It's like an outer-space lounge room. It's really laid-back, and it's small."

Other artists, including Metallica, Rod Stewart and Luther Vandross, have done in-the-round gigs, but few had the firepower of the Lovesexy tour, an eye-popping mélange of theatrics, music and crack playing.

"In '88 I had Sheila E in my band, with amazing guitarists, amazing vocalists," Prince says.

This tour is similarly amazing, and fans are turning out. Prince is grossing more than $1.5 million in every city, according to the concert-industry magazine Pollstar, putting him on track to have the biggest tour of 2004. It started in late March and is scheduled to go through mid-September. It's the most extensive U.S. tour he's done, in fact, since Lovesexy.

"It's the first serious tour he's done where he's announced the dates more than a few days in advance and does the proper promotion," says Pollstar editor Gary Bongiovanni.

And in a limp summer that's turned into a promoter's nightmare, Prince stands out.

"I wish we had about 20 Princes on the road," Bongiovanni says. "It's really a phenomenon, and it's across the board. Prince's business is terrific everywhere. It's a renaissance for his career."

Prince's higher profile of late has helped, along with well-chosen TV ads for the tour, but none of that explains the huge demand that has broken records across the country, Bongiovanni says.

Fans wanting to hear the tour can go to www.npgmc.com and buy live video and audio as well as online-only albums.

Besides his classics, Prince is tossing in a few cover songs, always a fan favorite. Fans still worship an after-show recording from 1988 where Prince played a small club and did a version of Just My Imagination that included a four-minute guitar solo that would be the centerpiece of a lesser musician's entire album. For Prince it was just another throwaway; it has still never been officially released. His guitar solo on While My Guitar Gently Weeps from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony this year had Jeff Lynne and Tom Petty watching in amazement.

The new tour features covers of Soul Man and a mind-bending guitar solo on Led Zeppelin's Whole Lotta Love - a bizarre choice, even by Prince standards. Is he a Zep fan?

"Naw," he says with a shrug. "I just wanted something to play a long guitar solo on. I don't know their music, really." When he goes into a familiar song like that, he says, "some nights they just explode."

Prince has a somewhat spotty history with Colorado. We got some shows that no one else did but got skipped for years, too, says Denver Prince fan Jesse Esparza, who will be at both shows this weekend (Nos. 26 and 27 for him).

Prince played the Rainbow Music Hall on the Dirty Mind tour, and fans found the band after the show.

"They kinda had to make a run for it. They got chased through the streets over by the Rainbow," Esparza says. Prince later recorded some demos at a studio in Boulder, according to guitarist Dez Dickerson's book My Time With Prince.

Esparza's first show was the "triple threat" tour with Prince, Vanity 6 and The Time at the Auditorium Theatre in '83. The Purple Rain tour skipped Denver in '84 and '85 even though three shows were penciled in for McNichols Arena. Prince brought the rare Parade tour here in '86.

That concert happened almost by accident. MTV was doing a "win a date with Prince" contest and someone in Sheridan, Wyo., won. Under the Cherry Moon made its debut there.

"The only reason we got the show was, the girl won the contest in Wyoming," Esparza notes. "Since they were in Sheridan, they did a hit-and-run show two days later here. It wasn't even really a tour."

It was Prince and the Revolution, Sheila E guested on her Prince-written hit A Love Bizarre, and Prince idol Joni Mitchell joined him to sing backup on Purple Rain - the only time the two have performed together.

The Sign o' the Times tour never came to the United States, so Lovesexy was the first taste Denver got of live versions from that album, as well as then-unreleased songs from The Black Album.

Then came the drought. Prince didn't play in Denver for nine years, doing small tours and one-off dates in larger markets. He returned for a Fiddler's Green show in '97, followed by an after-show concert at The Church.

He sold out Magness Arena in 2001, and both Pepsi Center shows tonight and Saturday are close to being sold out (though some great "production hold" seats should be released by about 3 p.m. today).
[This message was edited Fri Aug 27 6:53:20 2004 by EverlastingNow]

AWESOME!!!!!

Who is this Jesse character? I don't know him.

I know I got more stuff than he does. He must be a rich mf cause I've seen Prince 14 times... tonight will be 15 & tomorrow 16 for me. He must've traveled all over the country during Denver's "drought."

Thanks for posting the article EverlastingNow.
[This message was edited Fri Aug 27 8:49:32 2004 by LovesexyIsThe1]

LovesexyIsThe1 said:

I'll tell you who I'm NOT, I'm NOT the guy standing next to the brotha in the underoos!