This was a review of the opening nights of the PR tour from noted journalist, Greg Tate from RECORD music magazine back in 84. One thing that struck me was the last two sentences. More on that later if this thread doesnt go wood/plastic. Since it's the anniversary, here goes:


…And He Was Baa-aad

COPPING MOVES FROM ALL THE GREATS, AND ADDING A FEW OF HIS OWN, PRINCE ROCKS, FUNKS AND ROLLS ACROSS AMERICA – BY GREG TATE


DEARLY BELOVED WE ARE GATHERED here to get through this thang called Prince---three nights worth of the mug to be exact. All of which just went down in Detroit, where your truly caught the opening leg of His Royal Badness’ Purple Rain tour. Since naturally the first thing you want to know is just how bad was he I won’t hold you in suspense: the Kid was baa-aad. Which is to say he put on a bout as exiting a funk-cum-pop-rock-and-roll show as you’re going to get these days. Up front, however, let me warn you of my reservations, because baa-aad as he was, he wasn’t electrifying or awe-inspiring even, just pretty damn good. For the record, though (no pun intended), he had the most massive sound system I’d seen since Van Halen, went through more than half a dozen costume changes (half of which came from Hendrix’ and Sly Stone’s wardrobe closets) and had as many sets and props onstage as you’d need to throw on a Broadway musical. We’re talking purple curtains, back projections screens, fountains, a bathtub, balustrade, spiral stairway, hydraulic lifts up the kazoo, Prince mannequins, confetti, a Star Wars light show and enough dry ice smoke to make the stage look like it was fast on its way to becoming a Transylvanian moat.


The bulk of the set consisted of Purple Rain material, natch, with the exceptions of “1999,” “Delirious,” “Little Red Corvette” and a bizarre ballad medley of “Free,” “Do Me Baby” and “God.” I say bizarre because the vibes projected during this interlude ranged from hammy, lachrymose and blasphemous to asinine and cloyingly confessional. The hammy part came during “Do Me Baby,” where Prince makes like the lyrics’ show of vulnerability so embarrasses him that he just cannot finish the song and must leave the stage before losing face. (Naturally the nubile screaming-meemies in attendance stroked his ego enough to save him from a total wimp-out. Manhood secure, homeboy continued on with the show.) Lachrymose was Prince falling to his knees whining that the powers that be had never given him any awards. Asinine was Prince shaking his little tail-feather and sneering as to how he wondered when they’d be giving out awards for the best ass. The blasphemous portion of the show came when after leading the crowd through a Sunday school hymn (“God made you/God made me/God made us all equally”) our anti-hero went through a Jekyll-and-Hyde bit at the keyboard, became possessed by devilish sexual temptation and asked God if he’d like to take a bath with him. At which point he ascended a staircase, stripped to his caballero pants, lid into this tub for a neon green shower and descended hydraulically to the smoky lower depths beneath the stage (when he came up for “Computer Blue” he was in S&M garb). Now while I ain’t no born-again Christian and certainly don’t think sex is a sin before God, this kinky little tableau put about as chiller a vibe on me as I’ve ever gotten from a concert; not in the least because it was soon followed by backwards running tapes and the arena being plunged into abyssinian darkness. Too weird for the kid y’all.


In any event, for journalistic purposes let me acknowledge that on opening night the Cool Ruler clearly came out nervous and jittery, racing through a raggedy version of “Let’s Go Crazy” and not settling down until about halfway through when he sat at the piano for the ballad medley and thanked Detroit for their years of support, explaining that was howcum he’d chosen to have the tour’s first party there. Trip is, though, the audiences for all three sell-out shows in the 22,000 seat Joe Louis Arena were 90 percent white, so the people Prince were thanking weren’t even the ones who’d been his backbone before Purple Rain proved the power of movies and MTV to make or break you in pop America. Last tour Prince did six nights in Detroit at the Masonic Temple, so the locals told me, and damn near nothing but black folks rocked the house for those shows. So now check this out: while you figure Prince knows he’s conquered this apartheid-oriented culture to the point where there’s gonna be some palefaces showing up at his gigs that weren’t there a year ago, even he didn’t have any notion that the brothers and sisters were mostly missing in action from this year’s Detroit stop. What proved this to me was when Prince tried to get the audience to do the dog chant you’ll hear if you been to any black concerts recently (any post-P-funk’s “Atomic Dog” tour that is). After trying to rouse the crowd into doing the dog with him and getting nothing back but blank stares he asked, “Is this Detroit?!” Which said to me something’s going on here but Mr. Prince don’t know what it is: that on a certain level he might as well have been saying “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore, Toto.”


No one I talked to in Detroit gave me an adequate explanation for why so many bloods chose to miss out on presumably the biggest concert event of the year. Unlike the Michael Jackson fandango, it wasn’t because of ticket prices or venue: $17.50 was tops in the first balcony and Joe Louis Arena is in the heart of downtown Detroit. The answer may lie in a combination of factors. Some said it’s because us black folks are notorious for waiting until the day of the show to cop tickets (though in my hometown of Washington, D.C., the brothers and sisters bought 130,000 seats in six hours for Prince’s mid-November shows there). Others I talked to said they’d seen him seven or eight times already and didn’t feel pressed to catch him this time around. Still others professed that while Prince had made his bones with Detroit’s hardcore funk crowd, the ratio of rockers to funk numbers on Purple Rain just plain turned the mugs off; maybe even cost him some of his black audience. It’s a mystery to me just what the real deal is far as this racial imbroglio goes, but I do know that before he came back for his encore that first night, bloods were screaming at the top of their lungs for Prince-funk like “Erotic City,” “Lady Cab Driver” and Irresistible Bitch.” One brother in fact wanted to hear the latter so bad he got to hurling obscenities at Prince—as in “Play Irresistible Bitch’ you bitch, you faggot mutha!” Listening to Detroit’s black radio stations, however, you didn’t get any sense that he’d lost a black audience: flipping from station to station you could hear “Erotic City” non-stop, like it was damn near on a city wide tape loop. And in fact one local deejay of reknown, “The Electrifying Mojo,” nightly devoted his entire graveyard shift to nothing but the music of Prince, with maybe a little Time, Sheila E., Apollonia 6 thrown in to relieve the routine of radioactive splendor.


If the Detroit shows proved anything—besides the fact that next to Michael Jackson Prince is the biggest black crossover act in pop history—it’s that he’s out to prove himself the living embodiment of every baa-aad mutha who ever rocked, funked and rolled the American stage. I mean this cat done copped all the moves, man—James Brown’s, Jimi Hendrix’, Sly Stone’s, Little Richard’s, Elvis’, Mick Jagger’s, Cab Calloway’s, the Nicholas Brothers’—and got a few of his own to boot, like the humping-the-speaker, holding-one-leg-behind-his-back bit he does during “darling Nikki,” which I’ve seen turn women from 16 to 60 into quivering bowls of Jell-o. Funny thing is, for all his eroticism Prince really doesn’t come off as any more electric a performer than Michael Jackson, as everybody has been predicting he would. Reason being that Michael not only got just as much fire but more grace and precision, not to mention originality. In his moves; and the media saturation of him on film and video for lo these many months undercut Prince’s dynamism in an arena, where intimacy is lost alongside the novelty of his routine. As energetic as the shows were, they also had a air of the perfunctory about them, not so much because I felt like he was going through the motions, but because he had shot so much of wad in the movie. Making me realize that this was the first time he’d ever gone out on tour having to top himself. In sum, while Prince rose to the challenge—dancing, singing, and playing his booty off—there was an emotional depreciation to experiencing the event that, again, I think derives from how dramatically the film set up his moves and music. Where the live performance transcended the film though, was in the encores of “I Would Die 4 U” and “Baby I’m a Star,” and then the second encore of “Purple Rain.”


“Baby I’m a Star” is especially killer because it’s like Prince’s version of the James Brown/Sly Stone revues combined: I’m saying here’s where the brother bust out with his fanciest amalgam of dance steps yet, the splits, the breaking, the works. Even gets to telling the band to give him five stoptime breaks on the one, just like the Godfather of Soul does. For the second night’s encore he even brought on Jerome Benton, Billy Sparks, Apollonia 6 and Sheila E. for some impromptu jamming and throwing down. And matter of fact, soon as Jerome hit the stage I thought to myself (while boogying along) how sorry I was that the original Time had disbanded; because while Prince might be more versatile, Morris Day and crew got the funk in their bones like no other band I’ve heard since Parliament-Funkadelic. And anybody want to talk choreography knows the Time’s unison steps so smooth, supple and slick they make Prince look like he got two left feet for days. Another problem I had with Prince’s act now, matter of fact, is that he’s really the only one up on stage who throws down visually in terms of that terpsichore.

Guitarist Wendy Melvoin and bassist Brown Mark look cool and doohickey on the frontline, but the Prince band with Dez Dickerson and Andre Cymone was too chill.

Yet if the loss of Dez and Cymone cost Prince’s show a measurable degree of fire and stage presence, losing his black audience of old to the MTV generation may end up costing him something more precious as far as emotional and spiritual gratification goes. I really didn’t pick up this vibe until the final encore of “Purple Rain,” truly the evening’s transcendent moment all three nights. Principally because it’s there Prince kicks into a torrid and explosively intense 10-minute guitar solo ablaze with Hendrixian fury (albeit if not ablaze with Hendrixian imagination). The spiritual pull Prince exerts stretching out this anthem is both riveting and chilling, because for perhaps the first time in the show you feel as plugged into whatever energy he’s been drawing on a she himself does. The upshot is that on the third night he got so into it his face and body were visibly wracked with pain, suffering, tears and, dare I say it, a need to be loved. And however he came to sense it, he seemed to know that his audience that night was not feeding back to him what he was pouring forth in incendiary ergs. And during the end of the solo he began screaming and cursing at the crowd, the rage clearly evident on his face. I suddenly thought of Hendrix back when he was playing his heart out to stadiums full of drugged-out zombies who could no more reciprocate his energy than catatonics; only this crew wasn't spiritually void by way of substance abuse (I may have smelled but one or two joints each evening) but by way of music videos. Concerts simply aren’t the Events of One’s Young Life as they were when I was coming up. The rock audience of today is so saturated by music, its heroes so accessible by way of television, film and home video that much of the magic of live events seems to have been considerable diminished. Walking out of the show with Prince’s audience I felt none of the excitement or electricity in the air that I know would’ve been there when me and my friends were 16-, 17-, 18-years old; that night I felt like I was with people who were heading home after watching a giant video screen light up then fade to black. And I got to wondering what would happen to Prince when, like Hendrix, he got tired of being the circus freak and just wanted to receive as much respect for his musicianship as for his visual razzle-dazzle and highly sexual showmanship.


One thing I’ve never felt Prince has gotten enough credit for is how much he truly loves music in all its varieties and forms. The Purple Rain album is proof positive of this with all its quotes and homages to Hendrix, Stevie Wonder, Yardbirds, hip-hop, Zep, Keith Jarrett, Chick Corea and hosts of others. I’ve never felt like the physicality of Prince’s talents as a performer were just phony bits of stage business; clearly he loves dancing and showboating for the crowd as much as he does writing and composing—yet the danger is in getting trapped in his audience’s expectations for him to continually play the freak for them, and losing his musicality to the antics in the process. But I’ve got hope that this won’t happen to the Kid. More then any other rock star besides David Bowie (whom I’m convinced Prince has learned a few lessons from), Prince long ago showed himself savvy enough to know that to stay ahead in this business you’ve got to never let people get too familiar with your music or your face. And it’s for that reason that I, like every other Prince fan of old, am waiting to see what he’s going to come up with for an encore, if for no other reason than that he’s capable do so many unpredictable metamorphosis and musical coups. (With “Erotic City” he’s given funk the crossover appeal George Clinton has been attempting for years, and though protégé Sheila E.—who put on a killer show opening for him, sporting the tightest band choreography I’ve seem since the Time—he’s managed a provocative and popular synthesis of Latin pop new wave like August Darnell/Kid Creole has been wanting to get over with for half a decade now.) Meaning that in the final analysis the big question with regards to the Crown Chameleon of Pop is now that he’s got America eating out of the palm of his hand, what’s he gonna feed ‘em next? Stay tuned.

i told yall

"bruthas", "sisters", "bloods", "pale faces" - this guy is basically racist !
would a white journo' get away with using similar words in reverse (if for whatever sad reason s/he wanted to) ? I don't think so.

Lame review : P plays guitar = Hendrix ! YAWN< YAWN ! Oh, but not as good, of course not, 'cuz Hendrix is a real black man, whereas this freak isn't sure he's black - hell he's even got the cheek to play non "black music" (does/should music have a colour?) which gets some of the local "bruthas" very angry - err that's their problem - open your hearts, open your mind and they might enjoy what he's playing !
Lame Review - The Time - oh, come on - they're a Prince band, heck he even helped them learn to dance - they are nothing compared to P - in terms of songs (p written anyway), creativity, diversity, originality, stage presence etc - yet this guy thinks a couple of slick moves and gooning around make them better movers than Prince - oh, come on ! Yes, they are a more traditional R&B band Greg, is that what you want? -something more palettable for you, something that doesn't threaten your perception of what a black guy/band should look, act and sound like? Don't get me wrong, I like the Time and Morris and Jerome have stage presence and great chemistry together !
"you will have heard if you've been to any black concerts recently.." Black concerts???? what are they??? Prick !
Jeeze !
[Edited 7/15/09 11:06am]