This is a really good art...ling Stone, using quotes from Michael B., Michael B. Nelson (NPG Hornz), Tommy Barbarella, Les Garland (former head of MTV, and then at Box video), and his then managers. I love stuff like this, right from the people around him, and their perspectives. The bathroom stories (there are two) are quite funny.

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It's a long-ish article. Here's a couple of snips for you:

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Michael Bland: He was really into the Pretenders at some point. He talked about how much he liked Chrissie Hynde and the songwriting. He played me some of the first Sly Stone records I ever heard. That was an education I couldn't have received anywhere else. We held meetings, and we would watch random videos people would send. Michael Jackson loved sending Prince old footage of Sly. Prince would just stop everything and bring everybody to his office. One time we watched the Jackson 5 Goin' Back to Indiana special.

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Les Garland: I called him Prince until he changed it [to a symbol, in 1993]. Like a lot of people when he did that, I was shocked. My take was: Big mistake. We were on the phone one day and I said, "How are people going to find your albums in record stores?" There was a long pause and he goes, "Hmmm … They'll find them." I said, "OK, but what are people going to call you? What do you want me to call you?" He said, "You can call me anything you want." I asked him if he could just be "Roger Nelson." He said no. But I looked at the symbol as so futuristic. He was so far out in front of everything in the world. It wasn't practical, but it was brilliant.

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Tommy Barbarella: One of the things he would say before we went onstage was, "Recording tonight. No mistakes. Perfect show." I'm sure he recorded every night, but there were nights where it was literally perfect. Not one mistake. And it happened a lot.

These days a band will have several keyboard players or most of it will be in the tracks. It'll be running Pro Tools, and you just play along with that. Back then it was all live. I ended up doing way more than I ever thought I could do. I was nailing eight parts on a song, jumping all over the place, playing the keyboard, triggering this sample, and trying to hit some choreography. You figure out ways to do it. Once you do that, he'll ask for a little more. And then you get to a point where you're like, "Holy shit, I never thought I'd be able to do all this." But you were doing it.

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Randy Phillips (co-manager, 1990-1): He had just left his previous managers. I don't know if he fired him. He just stopped talking to them, which was very Prince. His attorney came to me and my partner Arnold Stiefel and we said, "How can you hire us? We haven't met with Prince yet." We flew to Paisley Park and we ended up sitting in a conference room waiting for him for eight hours. Then we get summoned to his apartment on the top level. You walk into this room that's all white. It was like a Fellini movie. There's a heart-shaped bed and in bed, in gold lamé, was Kim Basinger, reading a magazine. Prince is in the back of the room, sitting at a Plexiglas desk in a heart-shaped Plexiglas chair.

We go in there and say, "Let's talk about the Nude Tour, the European stadium tour [summer 1990]." He looks at me and says, "You know what? You're a manager. Then go manage." And that was the end of the meeting. We got back in our car and went to the airport.

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Bland (on rumors that Prince installed microphones in the bathrooms at Paisley Park): I've heard as much. And if that was true, Prince had to have an ego made of steel. Every day wasn't super pleasant, and we spoke freely amongst each other. A fellow musician who was in one of Prince's bands afterwards said he'd heard Prince had saved a recording of us talking about him and held onto it because he thought it was so funny. He said he and Prince were sitting there listening to us just go off.

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Thanks - see here: http://prince.org/msg/7/425028