“Hey,” he said, Mr. Rockefeller–style, noticing the guy’s army tattoos.
I don’t understand how military guys instantly bro down like they do, but within minutes, Daddy had bonded with his new best friends, talking about this division and that exercise or whatever. Jan and I exchanged glances. No party invitation for us. The guys who’d come out to hit on us were now calling us “little sis.”
We held our position in the front row as thirty thousand people poured into the stadium. The opening act was Ketama, a Spanish group that did funk-flamenco fusion with a twist of reggae, so right away, I was dancing. The lights were still up, and Daddy went to get us some sodas, because now we’d been standing there for several hours. Lois Lane, a pop group consisting of two cute Dutch sisters who combined girl-group harmonies with a silky sort of Eurasian jazz, played after Ketama, and then the roadies reset the stage with a big swing unit, a giant heart, and a circular ramp. I didn’t know at the time that this was a minimal set for a star of Prince’s caliber, but that was the whole point, he later explained.
He laughed years later when I told him, “Mama heard it was called the Nude Tour, and she was like—‘we’re going!’”
“Noooo,” he said. “Nude means stripped down. No fireworks, no big spectacle. We’re just down with the music. Nude.”
Prince was all about The Reveal, that moment of abre los ojos—open your eyes—when the artist meets the people for the first time. During one tour, he was rolled out onto the stage in advance, tucked inside a roadie case, which he then burst out of and blew people’s minds. When word got out and ruined the surprise, he had to come up with something else with equal impact, and he always did. Another time, he had me dress up as him, so when I came out, people went wild thinking it was him until I whipped my clothes off, revealing a fuchsia bikini and combat boots. And then he came out for real and they went even wilder. It reminded me of Mama’s rule that you must never allow the audience to see you before your entrance. That moment is important and worth protecting.
That night in Barcelona, it began with a thick blanket of fog that covered the stage. The lights went down, and I felt a sea change in the buzzing energy that filled the stadium, as if thirty thousand souls took one deep breath all at the same time. With the rolling fog came a deep, resonating hum—the sound you’d feel in your bones if you were standing under a power main. It grew louder and deeper until I felt it sinking through my ribs into my heart. It rushed into a series of fast-cut fragments—“For You,” “Partyup,” “Let’s Go Crazy,” “Around the World in a Day,” and a few others that reminded you how many hits he’d had—then a bass line, and then a rhythm, and then he was there, and he was everything. He was wearing tight pants and a scoop-neck shirt that looked almost like a unitard. They had a huge fan below him, blowing his shoulder-length hair back.
A massive roar went up from the crowd.
“I’ve seen the future, and it will be…”
I hear those words now, twenty-five years older (and wiser), and I see myself standing in front of him. I revisit that moment in my mind’s eye, and I can only imagine the perspective from which he now sees it, a perspective beyond time. If his faith in scripture has been rewarded, “a thousand years are as a day,” and his soul knows everything. He sees the grand scheme, and in the context of a thousand lifetimes, he sees this moment when we first saw each other for the thousandth time.
I could have sworn then that he was looking at me, but a great performer is able to make every girl in the audience feel as though he’s looking at her, and knowing what I know now about the power exchange between the stage and the stadium, I know that his focus was entirely on the performance. It had to be, because what he did over the next hundred minutes was—there are no words—it was a marathon jumping into a tornado swallowed by wild horses. It’s impossible to adequately describe the power of Prince in concert if you haven’t experienced it: the exhilaration of funky beats, the skill of a symphony orchestra, the wings of a gospel choir, hard-driving dancers, hard-rocking musicians—and all the while, he danced in these high-heeled platform boots. This man was a beast as a singer, dancer, and musician. I feel bad for anyone who never got to experience it.