“To what?”
He indicated the cover of the album we’d been working on.
“But… how do you pronounce that?” I asked.
“You don’t.”
“Ah. Okay.”
He smiled and touched my chin. “I bet you’re the only one who won’t try to talk me out of it.”
We sat on the piano lid talking as the sun went down and the stars came out over the ocean. Years later, in our wedding program, he wrote:
All alone, staring at the ocean, he implores the heavens 4 an answer—
“What is the symbol? What does it really mean?”
A voice says to him, “It’s your name.”
He told me he’d heard this voice before, when he was writing “Purple Rain,” and he knew not to question it. I asked him where he believed the voice came from. “Was it God or an angel or some part of the subconscious?”
“Maybe all those things,” he said. “Maybe the Holy Spirit. Maybe my own spirit.”
… sometimes freedom moves in mysterious ways and in the end it’s “whatever peanut butters your jelly.” Most understanding of all is Mayte—his true soulmate, who simply says with a smile, “ never called you Prince anyway.”
After the holidays, I went back to the Minnesota ice and snow, and we spent the rest of the winter making music videos. A lot of acts were doing live shows and direct-to-video compilations. Renting videos was still a thing then, and the market for music videos was hot. We were always filming bits and pieces, scenes and images that appealed to him even though he didn’t know how or even if they would ever fit together. Some were done on location in Australia, Japan, and LA—running on a beach, holding hands at the zoo, that sort of thing—but most of the work was done on the huge soundstage at Paisley Park.
One day there was a big hydraulic lift with a glass chamber on the set. Prince kept changing wardrobe, going up and down in this elevator sort of thing with fog machines billowing all around it. None of us had a clue what he was doing, but he looked cool doing it, so we just went along. The song “7” had been produced the previous year, and the way 3 Chains o’ Gold was unfolding, it was a natural climax for the story. Warner Bros. was getting behind the production of this music video in a big way.
“Let’s put some money in it,” Prince said, which was more about energy and time and thought than it was about finances.
We shot “7” on a massive soundstage in LA. I wore my spectacular yellow Madame Abla outfit, which had been properly cleaned by this time, thank God. Both our costumes were reproduced in miniature for seven little boys and seven little girls who danced with us on an elaborate set that featured the model city of gold. (You can see Prince and me and our merry little group of mini-me dancers on the cover of the album.) Everything I can think of that I most love in this world was in that video: these beautiful children; Prince; the rich, Arabic-inspired music; belly dancing with my sword; rocking my beautiful dress; doves—oh! I got to kiss a dove! Where do you even go for dreams after you kiss a dove?
I loved that Prince played an acoustic guitar in this music video. It was so rare to see him playing an acoustic guitar on video or onstage. People expected to see him shredding a sparkly Stratocaster or one of his many custom-made guitars—his iconic Cloud guitars made by a luthier in Minnesota and the purple Love Symbol guitar made by a German craftsman. But when he was at home or in a hotel or on the tour bus, he often played an acoustic guitar like the one Jan played when we were kids. The sound was soft and organic in contrast to the urgent blare of an electric guitar.
“The acoustic guitar is my favorite,” I told him. “I like that little squeaking sound when you slide your fingers up and down the neck. It’s so personal.”
Between takes, he played it for the children. We spent half their union-allowed time laughing and monkeying around with them. Prince got a huge kick out of seeing me with those kids. The director rolled film on a lot of that and recently sent me some of the unedited footage: Prince watching me dance with the little boys and girls, taking my hand, leading them toward the golden city. He’s looking at me in a way he had never looked at me before.
“There’s so much love there,” she said. “You can see it.”
And I do see it. We look like a happy family. There’s lightness in the way he walks away at the end, after he’s let go of all his crap and slain these seven selves who didn’t know how to be with us.
… words of compassion words of peace…