We shared a laugh but a moment later, somehow, we were back to money. He expressed admiration for the music of Erykah Badu, De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, and D’Angelo, then said, “D’Angelo’s really gotta search his heart deeply on being part of the problem or the solution. What’s his whole consciousness? He’s got to own his masters,” he said, referring to master tapes that confer true ownership of a song that are generally owned by the record label and not the artist. “Black Americans are walking away and getting nothin! How can you not own your masters and try to uplift the community? Let’s all of us be part of the solution. Or we gonna get our problems solved for us. The situation in Africa is testament to that. 21 million with AIDS! Don’t that spook you? We got to solve our problems or they’ll be solved for us. And a man can’t solve your problems for you. You and your faith will solve em for you.”
He told me another journalist had asked him, ‘Do you ever get tired of being so flamboyant all the time? Don’t you ever wanna wear a t-shirt and jeans?’ at which point he reared his head back, eyes wide, in mock indignation, as if to say, How ridiculous! Don’t you know who I am? Full of macho bravado, he thrust the cuff of his maroon Prince suit out toward me and said, “Feel that!! If you could wear that every day, wouldn’t you?!”
I felt the cuff. It wasn’t a rare and special feeling. It felt manmade. “What is it?” I asked.
Immediately his entire demeanor switched. He went, in a heartbeat, from larger than life to hushed and humble. It was an emotional stop on a dime.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said quietly, dismissively, feigning ignorance of the fabric of his fabulous garment. “If you have money you should act the same. It’s currency. It’s supposed to move like a current. You ain’t supposed to horde it. You get sick otherwise.”
I walked out feeling as though he’d never truly shared himself. As though I’d been given the day’s propaganda, along with a few tasty side bites, and sent on my way. And today’s propaganda—that insistent business talk—had made me feel as though I’d spoken to Curt Flood, an average baseball player known only for sacrifing his career in the ‘60s to force the introduction of free agency, when I’d planned to meet Willie Mays. I felt I’d attended a well-choreographed, slightly improvised one-man show. I felt I understood what actress Kirstie Alley said, in the role of frustrated interviewer, on his 1992 so-called Symbol album, “Just once will you talk to me, not at me, not around me, not through me?” I flew home feeling used.
By Prince’s design, much of his early life remains an unpenetrable mystery. As associate said, “The background story depends on who you’re talking to. It’s never very clear. Minneapolis is a tight-knit community and people aren’t really willing to talk about him.” Indeed, in researching almost anything about Prince’s pre and non-public life it’s nearly impossible to get a straight answer about almost anything. Just about everyone who comes in contact with The Artist must sign a confidentiality agreement—girlfriends, employees, journalists, anyone—and people tend to take them seriously. Many who knew Prince declined to give interviews because of those confidentiality agreements. Others refused to speak about him because they so closely guard their relationship with him. They either fear being cut off, or want to protect him, but, the point is, most of those who know Prince won’t tell.
We do know this: he was born Prince Rogers Nelson on June 7, 1958, the son of pianist and Honeywell factory worker John L. Nelson and Mattie Shaw (or possibly Mattie Baker), a singer in her husband’s band and later, a social worker. Both are 7th Day Adventists, as is one of Prince’s later guardians, Fred Anderson—the strict faith encourages vegetarianism, abstinence from tobacco and alcohol, and all drugs. (The Artist is a vegan and has always maintained that he has never smoked, drank, or done drugs.) Contrary to lingering rumors, both are black. Prince grew up first in North Minneapolis, in a middle-class multi-racial oasis in the Wonder bread white Twin Cities.
When Prince was 7 the two divorced. His mother (who nicknamed him “Skipper”) soon remarried and Prince began spending lots of time
playing the piano his father had left behind and listening to Minneapolis radio, the latter leaving an imprint on his sound. “In New York, or DC, or Chicago, or Atlanta you had great black radio that was 24-7,” said Alan Leeds. “If you got tired of one station there was another one up the dial. He didn’t have that in Minneapolis. So he was forced to listen to pop radio and absorb pop records as much as black music. So as he grew up, with every James Brown record he heard there was a Beatles record or a Rolling Stones record. And all of that mixed together so that you hear all of these things in his music.” But when his mother’s new husband tired of him, Prince bounced to an aunt’s home, then his father’s, then a friend’s, all the time struggling to find a place where he was wanted.
The family trouble and ensuing struggle to find somewhere he belonged led to a deep interest in music. During his teens Prince taught himself to play 14 instruments and led a band first called Grand Central and later Champagne that often played at Minneapolis’s First Avenue—many times before Prince was legally old enough to get into the club. In high school he voraciously studied the business of music and wowed his music class classmates—including future super producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis—with his ability to play so many instruments so well. Still, late in his high school career he became a total introvert and loner, opting to have his picture omitted from the school yearbooks in his junior and senior year. (But further investigation becomes difficult—details become sketchy, stories begin to conflict. Some sources say Prince was a D student who cared not at all for school. Others call him a good student.) But while he became a loner, he became ever more obsessed with becoming a star. “He sat down as a youngster and designed himself to be a rock star. Not a musician, but a rock star,” said Alan Leeds, who served as Prince’s tour manager and the Vice President of Paisley Park Records from 1983 to 1992. “There was an acceptance and power and security that he envisioned could come from massive appeal. He was ostracized, he was the shortest kid in school, he was an excellent basketball player but nobody took him seriously because he was too short, his older brother got all the girls because he was taller. He was constantly in the shadow of everybody and everything. So, Ok, here’s how I can get back at the world. Here’s how I can get the girls and be the number one guy and get the attention that I never get.”
Music poured out of him. “His every waking moment,” said Leeds, “there was music or lyrics flowing to a piece of paper. If he doesn’t have anything to do he’ll go to the studio. He wakes up in the morning with a melody or a lyric and he can’t wait to get to the studio to turn the tape on. You just wondered how any one brain could process as much music came out of him. All of it wasn’t good. But enough of it was.”
In 1976, shortly after graduating from Minneapolis’s Central High school, he charmed recording studio owner Chris Moon into allowing him to have a set of keys to his Minneapolis studio and Prince ended up teaching himself everything about studio technology. Moon hyped Prince to a local manager as a Stevie Wonder-level talent, and Prince soon had a legal representative: Owen Husney. Husney financed Prince’s demo tape—on which Prince wrote and played every note of some very lewd funk—then flew him out to L.A. and booked studio time. One day, while Prince was recording and rehearsing, Husney quietly brought in some executives from a record company to watch the young phenom. Shortly after, he became a corporate cousin of Bugs Bunny when he signed a record contract with Warner Brothers. In April 1978 the nineteen year-old released the first of his 28 albums, entitled For You. Prince unveiled a new album nearly every year, each one surprisingly different than the one before. Harvard professor Cornel West said, “Like Coltrane, he’s continually journeying and searching. 100 years from now they’ll play all the albums and it’ll be hard for them to realize one person wrote all that.”
Prince’s audience built slowly, but steadily, until more than 13 million people bought 1984’s Purple Rain. Suddenly, it seemed, the whole world had one eye on Prince. Artists old and young took note. 70s funk legend George Clinton told me that he’s been influenced by, “his way of doin pop music and makin it a blues music.” 90s soul legend D’Angelo told me, “Listening to him taught me to not really give a fuck lyrically. He taught me that when all of the music is coming from you that’s the best way. He taught me everything, really. I can’t stress that enough.”
Prince came to be dominated by music. “He lives and breathes music,” said Alan Leeds. “His friendships are not normal. He doesn’t have normal relationships. It’s not like he’s got guys that he hangs out with on Friday night. He’s not one for small talk or casual conversation. If he’s on a tour bus he may have some conversation that’s relatively casual, but nine times out of ten even that will be something related to the show or the album or something. Almost everything in the ten years I was with him, save some very specifically allocated leisure time, almost everything else was somehow about music or the show. He’s so strictly defined by his career that there really hasn’t been a normal life away from that. I sense that with Mayte and the marriage he’s trying to find something like that now. Certainly the Prince that I know is not a guy who just picks up the phone and say Hey, how ya doin? He’s a very distant personality.”
“He has no control over his life,” an associate explained. “The music is channeled through him. When the music tells him to play, he does. When the music tells him to sleep, he does. He considers it a blessing and a curse.”
Alan Leeds recalled occasionally seeing a jovial, glib, outspoken side of Prince. Every once in a while, Leeds said, he’d cancel the almost-constant rehearsals in favor of a cookout and some hoops. “Once,” Leeds remembered, “we were rehearsing for a tour and suddenly there was the first warm day of the year and when everybody showed up for rehearsal we found out that Prince and his assistant had bought 10 baseball gloves, a couple softballs, a couple bats, and we went to the local schoolfield and played softball all day.
“But,” Leeds continued, “in the midst of that, he’s constantly talking about the last record he did and the tour we’re gonna do and what should we do tomorrow in rehearsal. That function never ends. You’re at a club somewhere, when he suddenly says, Hey, you got a notepad? And he starts dictating orders of what we’re gonna do the next day in rehearsal.”
After the explosion of Purple Rain the high school outcast was, as he’d long dreamt, one of the biggest stars in the world. An international icon, he toured the world putting on concerts that were explosions of funk and sex and soul and Baptist church-like ecstasy—and then, after the concerts, he’d pop up, unannounced, at some tiny local club and do another two hours for free. It only exponentialized the thrill of seeing him perform. He was awarded his own vanity label, called Paisley Park, which, as an imprint of Warner Brothers, released his albums. He opened up nightclubs in Minneapolis and Los Angeles, called Glam Slam, where he often strolled in, unannounced, to jam. He made four movies—the stunning, semi-autobiographical “Purple Rain” in 1984 (the title song netted him an Oscar for Best Song), in 1986, the forgettable “Under the Cherry Moon” co-starring Kristin Scott Thomas (from “The English Patient” and “Four Weddings and A Funeral”), in 1987, the Sign of the Times concert film, widely considered one of the most brilliant concert films ever, and in 1990, the silly “Graffiti Bridge.” He became a modern Casanova dating a legendary string of gorgeous women, some of whom he would make famous, at least for a moment—Vanity, Apollonia, Sheila E, Carmen Electra, Cat, Nona Gaye—some of them already famous—actress Kim Basinger, singer Sheena Easton, model Troy Beyer, actress Vanessa Marcil. How much of the sexual legend was overblown? “Like most things it’s exaggerated,” said Alan Leeds. “But he’s got a very impressive scorecard.”
History will record that at the very top of the 80s solo megastar mountaintop, Prince’s sole company was Michael Jackson. In his comprehensive history of black music The Death of Rhythm & Blues, Nelson George called the two the most important artists of the 80s as well as the era’s, “finest music historians, consistently using techniques that echoed the past as the base for their superstardom.” In a 1984 Village Voice essay called “Stagolee Versus the Proper Negro,” Greg Tate opined, “Although Michael may have kicked the door in [for black rock n’ roll to come in], Prince done stormed the castle and come back handing the brothers and sisters the keys to the rock-and-roll kingdom (or, to paraphrase Bill Murray in Ghostbusters, he came, he saw, he kicked ass.)” (For the record, in our interview, The Artist
refused to consider Jackson his main competition, saying he wasn’t “worried” about people as famous as he, but other guitar killers. “I’m just a guitar player,” he said. “I look out for the Johnny Langs tearing up the guitar. I don’t stress nobody else.” [Lang is a teenage blues phenom from Minneapolis].)
Still, Prince was unhappy. “The person I met,” said Leeds who joined Prince shortly before Purple Rain, “was suspicious and paranoid of people and life in general and sarcastic and cynical and clearly troubled by his personal demons. And of course the more we learned about his background—his mother basically walked away from him, and his father struggled to raise him and threw in the towel, and the kinds of rejection he suffered as a youngster—that certainly don’t add up to a very secure, well-rounded individual.”
In our interview The Artist said, “People think I must miss the old days. No way. One time I was doing the 75th Purple Rain show, doing the same thing over and over. For the same kids who go to Spice Girls shows. And I just lost it. I said I can’t do it! They were putting the guitar on me and it hit me in the eye and cut me and blood started going down my shirt. And I said I have to go onstage, but I knew I had to get away from all that. I couldn’t play the game.”
After Purple Rain he continued making great music—journalist Anthony DeCurtis said, “Between ‘82 [1999] and 87 [Sign of The Times] he was in the zone. It was that moment when the Zeitgeist flows through you and as it moves through you you’re shaping where it goes once it passes you. He was channeling, man.”
Sign of The Times was a towering zenith. After a two quirky, but brilliant records—1985’s Around the World In A Day, 1986’s Parade—Sign was a critical watershed that remains the favorite Prince album for many musicians and non-musicians. “His best album to me is Sign of the Times,” said Ahmir. “That’s his look-ma-no-hands record. No one but him would put that coda at the end of “U Got the Look.” No one but him would use the method called vary speed which, thus, you get the Camille sounding voice. Basically it’s just him singing with the tape slowed down. That’s some sick shit. No one but him would omit the hi-hat in “It.” No one but him would put backward drums on “Starfish and Coffee.” No one but him would write a song like “Starfish and Coffee!” And put that shit six on his record! Artists today put all their eccentric shit way towards the end cuz they’re all worried about makin sure the first six songs are absolute bangers. Meanwhile, he covers the whole spectrum of music in the first four songs. He covered Santana, James Brown, Curtis Mayfield—just as far as styles—Joni Mitchell, Pink Floyd, all within the first five songs. No one does epic shit like he does. I consider that an unbelievable record.”
But in retrospect, Sign of the Times, , was Prince’s last climax, so far. It did not sell incredibly and, despite the brilliance of 1988’s Lovesexy, and near-scintillating moments on 1992’s so-called Symbol album, he would never again sell superstar truckloads or unveil genius albums—91’s Diamonds and Pearls, a critical disappointment, moved more than two million albums, but then his subsequent seven albums moved a combined 3 million—some, like 1996s Chaos and Disorder, moving a mere 100,000. Part of the problem, as with all superstars over time, is not simply that Prince has changed—at 40 years old it’s certainly much more difficult for him, or anyone, to interpret and create the Zeitgeist, and thus make great pop music, than it would be for a talented 29 year-old, as he was when he created Sign of the Times. Just as the 25 year-old Michael Jordan of today isn’t as great as 29 year-old MJ. But, in The Artist’s case, we, his audience, have changed, too.
“When he came out,” said journalist Nelson George, “he was the most controversial artist of the time dealing with incest and raw sexuality and sexual ambiguity and racial ambiguity. All that worked for him. And then a new movement came in called hiphop. Once the Rakim, Run-DMC, Big Daddy Kane era came in the whole level of masculinity was different. There was no room for ambiguity. There was definitely a cultural backlash, among men. A lot of people suddenly said, Prince? He’s a sissy.” However, George added, not all Prince fans changed with the times: “Of all the artists I know, I don’t know anyone who’s had so many unabashed women fans who love him to death.”
Warner Brothers believed Prince’s sales were slipping after Sign of The Times, because he was oversaturating the marketplace—between 1978 and 1992 Prince released thirteen albums, two of them double sets, while Bruce Springsteen, known for his hard work, released only eight. For years Warner had given him unusual latitude. “He was less a slave than any black artist I know of!” says journalist Nelson George. “There’s no other black artist you can look at during his era who had more artistic freedom than Prince. They really let him have control of his career in ways that black artists never have. They let him pick the singles. With the Sign of the Times album, “Housequake” was never a single. It was the biggest record in the country at one point, but never a single. “Adore” [many people’s favorite Prince ballad] was never a single. They put out “If I was Your Girlfriend” as a single, which was a great record, but it wasn’t an obvious direct commercial single. And those are his calls.”
George continued, “As the stories go, Prince could do anything he wanted to and Mo [Ostin, then the President of Warner Brothers] would co-sign it. Prince would go in his office and literally get on top of his desk and dance and sing for him and make Mo spend money. They never pigeon-holed him as a black artist, at least internally. They put out two-sided singles and double albums and gave him mad tour support. They supported him as an artist to the highest level for most of his career. But the freedom they gave him at Warner he became a victim of it. They’d spoiled him so long and indulged him so long that when they started trying to rein him in they couldn’t.”
In ‘92 Warner signed Prince to a new record contract, reportedly worth $100 million, and thus, announced as one of the richest in record business history. He received a reported $30 million in cash upfront and a $10 million advance per album, but only if the previous one sold over $5 million.
The size of the deal made Warner more interested in slowing Prince’s release schedule, so that they could have more time for their promotion and marketing, and they pressured him to slow his release schedule. But to Prince, the problem was how Warner was promoting the records. And besides, impeding his creative process was completely unacceptable. The situation would only get worse. “He’s on some hardcore militant shit now,” said Ahmir. “Like, you got to control your shit and let no one else control your shit for you. I was like, Yo man, what brought this on? He was like, I’ve been through hell and back and I’ve been through hell and back again.”
Prince made some major changes. In 1993 it was announced he was changing his name to an unpronounceable symbol (he was soon called The Artist Formerly Known As Prince and, eventually, The Artist). In our interview he said, “I changed my name to get out of the contract. [Once he’d changed the name and began to be known as the symbol] they said, We don’t want any more Prince albums. I said, That’s the name on the contract. They said, That’s not the name people know you by now. I said, You didn’t sign him.”
In ‘94 Warners struck back, dropping its distribution deal with his vanity label Paisley Park, and, afraid he would never record again, releasing a pair of albums against his will: the long-underground Black Album, and Come, a collection of outtakes. At the time The Artist told a journalist, “You don’t know how much it hurts not owning your own material. When a record company goes ahead and does something with a song you wrote... it can make you angry for a week.” The disagreement deepened when Warner consented to allow The Artist to release a single, “The Most Beautiful Girl In The World” on another label, the tiny Bellmark, and it was an international success. Proving to The Artist, at least, that his decreasing record sales were not his fault. At the time, Bob Merlis, the senior vice president of Warner Brothers, told the New York Times, “He wanted to release more albums than his contract called for... Eventually we agreed that his vision and ours didn’t coincide.” Warner agreed to end the contract, though it retained ownership of his voluminous, and lucrative back material.
He signed a deal with EMI for them to distribute the records he put out on his label, NPG. He would finance his own albums and videos and release them as his own whim. EMI, which allowed The Artist to retain ownership of his master recordings, got a small cut for employing its own distribution system. At the time The Artist told journalists they were like, “hired hands, like calling a florist to deliver flowers to my wife.”
On Valentine’s Day 1996, he married Mayte. She grew up around the world, a military brat stationed longest in Germany, who, as a very young girl, belly danced on “That’s Incredible.” In her teens she became a prima ballerina with the Wiesbaden Ballet in Germany. At a show in Germany he caught sight of her and said to a friend, “That’s my wife.” She was 16. Now 24, and taller than her husband, she has an angelic smile and a shapely, unforgettable dancer’s body, two overly friendly Yorkshire terriers, Mia and Mary, who scamper around Paisley at will, a hot pink BMW 750il, a 5 carat wedding ring, and a sweet, just slightly Spanish accented voice not unlike Jennifer Lopez’s. Described as an “iron fist in a velvet glove,” she choreographs for the NPG Dance Company, in which dancers move to Prince’s music in ways based on classical, modern, and hiphop style, and directed the video for her husband’s latest single “The One” and will make others. “Their marriage is the best thing that could’ve happened to him,” said a former girlfriend, who said that her background as a mover is part of his attraction to her. “That woman obviously is for him. All that has transpired in the last four years, in making him more human and willing to be open, is because of her.” In our interview, The Artist, asked how he knew Mayte was the one, said, “God tells you who’s the one. If you don’t have a relationship with God you’re in trouble. That gives you something to put everything in line.” Then asked if he enjoyed being married, said, “I’m not afraid of the rain anymore because my wife built me a garden. Now the lightning and thunder put energy in the vegetables and give me energy to talk to you.”
In 1996 Mayte became pregnant. Prince sampled the baby’s heartbeat for a song on his album Emancipation and transformed Paisley Park into the eye-popping wonderland it is now. In our interview he said, “There was no color in this building before I got married. It was all white with gray carpet. For 15 years I was just in the studio every day, on a grind, not even thinkin about it.” But though he spoke of the changes in Paisley, it was made clear to journalists that they were not to ask about the sad event that had inspired the changes. According to published reports, in October of 1996, Mayte gave birth to a boy with Pfeiffer’s Syndrome, a skull deformity. After seven days on life support, he passed. The Artist has said that “Comeback,” a short, lonely, beautiful ballad from his oft-sublime acoustic album “The Truth,” the fourth disc of the Crystal Ball set, is about the child: “Spirits come and spirits go/ Some stick around for the after show/ I don’t have to say I miss you/ Cuz I think you already know.” The refrain is, “If you ever lose someone dear to you/ Never say the words they’re gone/ They’ll come back.” There are plans to build a children’s hospital on the land across the street from Paisley, where vacant shacks stand now. “It’s part of his commitment,” a friend said, “to get his own money and spend it the way he wants.”
Needing more quotes and more substance, I email The Artist 12 questions, mostly about music. Then, at the last moment I tack on one more—Will you play one on one basketball with me?—and zap the queries into cyberspace.
Two days later answers float back. On music he’s a little more open, shunning any specific discussion of his past songs except to express an awe toward his own oeuvre, as though it was created by someone else. He writes “Ultimately, spiritual evolution is the axis on which inspiration and creativity spin... there r so many songs that I've written and recorded, sometimes it is hard 4 ME 2 believe it comes from one source!” And, intriguingly, “All of my musicality comes from GOD... the blessing/curse ensued when I kept sneaking back in2 the talent line dressed as another person... I got away with it several times be4 they caught me!!”
Then, at the bottom, in response to my hoop question he wrote “Anytime, brother... : ).” Anytime? He didn’t mean it. I’d get to Paisley and there’d be some excuse. Could I risk not trying? History awaited. I stuff my basketball in my overnight bag and leap on the next flight to Minneapolis.
For three hours the Icon photographer sets up in a Paisley Park sideroom, adjusting the lights, prepping the film. Then, suddenly, a white BMW Z roars up to Paisley and in strolls Prince. Not That Artist who’s offered us this awkward parody of a name that seems designed to militate against familiarity, but a real person—Prince. Journalist Anthony DeCurtis said, “The name thing has become a punchline. I mean, can you imagine an artist who’s sold tens of millions of records suddenly confronting his audience with the problem of how to say his name? That’s deep.” Anyway, word is that friends and family still call him Prince. According to Ahmir, “He lets black people call him Prince.”
So Prince, in a long, flowing, buttoned-up basketball-colored top that stretches down to his knees and cream heels, sits down in front of the camera and, for twenty minutes, lets the wall down a bit, keeping us in stitches with his dry, quick-witted humor. Outside of interview mode he shows off more of the changed man, the Glasnost Artist, a freer, more relaxed man, prepared to really chill.
Already wearing one Prince earcuff earring in each ear he contemplates adding a hoop to his right lobe. He holds it up to his ear and asks in a deep voice, “Earring or no?”
“Yes!” the female assistant says. “Wear it.”
“Who buys the magazine?” he asks.
“Men,” he’s told.
Right on beat he drops the earring to the ground. “Women always get me in trouble,” he teases. In a womanly voice he adds, “Oooh, you look so nice in that.”
A Paisley employee runs in. Prince says to him, “Ask them to clear out in the back to play basketball.”
A moment later, flipping through Vanity Fair with Chris Rock on the cover, he comes to a story about Ronald and Nancy Reagan.
“Think Reagan has alzheimer’s?” he asks.
“Yeah.” Who doesn’t?
He gives me a sly look as if to say, don’t believe it. I’d heard he was a conspiracy theorist. I laugh and begin writing.
“Don’t write that,” he says playfully. “I already got enough trouble. I’ll have the Secret Service at my door.” He adopts a mock federal agent voice. “You say somethin about Reagan??”
We all crack up. When the laughs subside I ask, “Why would they lie about that?”
He says, “To keep him from answering questions.”
The shoot concludes and the photo team and I are led into the rehearsal room in the back. When we arrive he’s changed out of the basketball-colored top and into a tight, almost sheer, long-sleeved black top and tight black pants. But then he tucks his gold symbol necklace into his top, slips off his cream colored heels and laces up some old, but not tattered, red and white Nike Air Force hi-tops. And the one-time Central High sixth man, he played guard, is ready to ball. Alan Leeds told me, “He’s not a person who finds it easy to share, whether it’s his thoughts or his time or his energy. If it isn’t within the context of a specific purpose he doesn’t enjoy or solicit sharing life. Everything has an agenda.” But now he seems willing to share. He seems spontaneous and playful. Maybe that’s the agenda. (Don’t put it past him, suggested someone who knows The Artist, to decide now, at this low point in his career, with a men’s magazine watching, let me play basketball with a writer for the first time.) Or maybe he just feels comfortable.
He picks up the ball and makes a face understood in international shit-talking parlance to mean I’ma kick yo ass and starts knifing around the court, moving quick, dribbling fast, sliding under my arm to snatch rebounds I thought for sure I had. He moves like a player and plays like one of those darting little guys you got to keep your eye on every second. Blink and he’s somewhere you’d never expect. Lose control of your dribble for a heartbeat and he’s relieved you of the ball. With his energy and discipline it’s a rapid game, but never manic, or out of control. Still, we’re both rusty so most shots just miss, clunking off the side of the rim, and after a little while there’s not much of a score. Finally, I score on a drive that feels too easy. As the ball drops in I look back at him. “I don’t foul guests,” he says. Then, on the next play I drive again and the joker bumps my arm tough, fouling me.
He and I team up against the photographer (Prince had told him not to take pictures of the game) and Morris Hayes, his 6’ 4” blonde afroed keyboardist. Prince takes the point, a natural leader, sets picks and makes smart passes, showing a discipline street players almost never grasp. Then, he takes it boldly to the hole, twisting through the air in between both opponents, sometimes a bit too aggressive, but exhibiting the confidence of a man who’s taken on the world by himself and won. And sometimes, in those too-bold drives to the hoop, he scores. The game teeters back and forth, one team gaining point-game then the other, until at 13-12, our lead, I pass to him on the baseline and, full of poise, he coolly throws up a jumper and... it swishes in. We win.
He plops down on a nearby couch and blurts, “Now I can put my pimp clothes back on.” Everyone laughs. “That’s a joke!” he says teasing himself. “An old self resurfacing.”
He and I, alone now, walk back toward the front of Paisley Park. After a moment of quiet he’s talking music. “There’s nobody worth seeing anymore. Sinbad’s bringing the Ohio Players back but really there’s no one.”
“If you could get Sly Stone out here, that’d be something,” I offer.
“If he’s still with us. I keep getting conflicting reports.”
We fall quiet. I feel I’m walking with a buddy. I have two million questions, but I hold back. Now I know that’s not how to play the game.
He breaks the lull. “Rhonda plays tennis.” Rhonda plays bass in his band. I love tennis. “I was too small to play,”—he points back toward the basketball court—“in high school. I like tennis better than that.”
Then I say to him, “I thought you were gonna play in heels.” I’d heard he sometimes did.
“Oh, no,” he says. Then, “Can’t play guitar in tennis shoes.”
“Why?”
“Sacrilegious.”
“I’ve heard that you do play ball in heels.”
With a confident smirk he says, “A jealous man told you that story.”
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