“Yes…” I hedged, “and I really, really loved… Mavis Staples! She was so awesome. Seriously. I loved that part. And the part where… the umm… oh! ‘Elephants and Flowers’! And ‘Tick, Tick, Bang’! Yeah, that choreography was like… wow.”
I sat there on the phone, barely breathing, not wanting to say anything that would hurt him. This was pre-Twitter, thank God, but I couldn’t imagine what it felt like to put your work out into the world and get horsewhipped by the media. Prince didn’t have to imagine it, of course. He’d been in this business, which can be a brutal business, since he was a kid like me. He told me about getting booed off the stage when he opened for the Rolling Stones ten years earlier at the Memorial Coliseum in LA. He was on the roster with George Thorogood and The J. Geils Band, so it was kind of an odd mix, but the Stones were known for that. Prince came out onstage wearing tiny underpants and a trench coat and started his set with “Bambi” and “When You Were Mine,” which were already not sitting well with the crowd when he launched into “Jack U Off,” and then things really got ugly. He tried to soldier on with “Uptown,” but by that time, people were hurling beer bottles, food, and garbage at him, yelling, “Get off the stage, fag!” and the road manager pulled the plug.
Twenty-five years later, when Prince died, Mick Jagger said in a series of tweets, “I am so saddened… Prince was a revolutionary artist, a wonderful musician and composer. He was an original lyricist and a startling guitar player. His talent was limitless. He was one of the most unique and exciting artists of the last 30 years.”
He must have seen all that in Prince back in 1981, because they kept him on the tour. I don’t know if they encouraged him to wear pants after the LA incident, but I do know he never changed anything about himself or his music to please an unhappy audience—whether it was an audience of one or an audience of ten thousand. When it comes down to it, I was probably more deeply wounded than he was by my classmates’ response to Graffiti Bridge.
“I’m sorry,” I said with a lump in my throat. “They just didn’t get it.”
“Nah, it’s okay.” He sighed heavily. “You can’t look at yourself through other people’s eyes. When you’re working at a certain level, you find that people live through you, and if you don’t act like they expect you to, then you’re the bad one.”
It was an educational moment for me, how he didn’t wallow in it. He was already on to the next project. Sometimes, when he was very excited to share something with me, he’d buy the package an airplane seat, and I’d have to drive all the way to the airport in Frankfurt to pick it up, as if it were an unaccompanied minor.
“You could send it FedEx,” I tried to gently suggest.
“I wanted you to have it today.”
“But it must have cost hundreds of dollars. To send a cassette tape. Seriously.”
“Yeah, but did you listen to it?”
It was the seed of an idea for a song called “7.”
“What do you think?” he asked.
“What do you think I think? I was like, Are you kidding me? I get to hear this? It’s beyond insane.”
That’s as far as it sank in then, but when I listen to it now, I hear a strand of myself: a Middle Eastern vibe and an almost scriptural sort of storytelling, a mythology spun from threads of our many long conversations.
I had a lot of holiday parties in December, and I danced on Christmas for triple pay. The next day, I had a long talk with Prince, and before we hung up, he said, “I’ll call you in a few weeks.” But the next day he called me and said, “Can you get on a plane tomorrow?” This was something he did from time to time. There were many spur-of-the-moment excursions, starting with that impromptu trip to Switzerland, but this one stands apart in my heart. It was my first visit to Paisley Park.
It irked Prince when people asked him why he stayed in Minnesota or expressed that it was an odd place for a rock star to have a home base. “Music is music. A place is a place,” he used to say to his friends, but he’d say to the person interviewing him, “The cold keeps all the bad people away.” When I visited, I finally got the joke. Germany is cold in the winter, but not Minnesota cold. Minnesota cold reaches into your chest by way of your tingling nose and tightens every muscle in your torso. It stabs your little legs. I was trying to be cool and sophisticated, but when I walked out of the terminal building at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport, I sucked in a deep, freezing breath and screamed all the way to the limo. I was wearing a short skirt and a jacket, which was fine for winter in Wiesbaden. Not so much for Minnesota.
That was my first time in a big limo, so I couldn’t keep myself from pushing buttons and exploring the fancy accessories. When I accidentally raised and lowered the window between us and the front seat, the driver asked, “Would you like me to close it?”