Prince opened the original Glam Slam nightclub in Minneapolis in 1989 so he’d have a place to go when he wanted to go nightclubbing without causing a stampede or when he wanted to jam with people he liked. The place was named after a song on the Lovesexy album, and over the next several years, he opened up Glam Slams in Los Angeles, Miami, and Yokohama.
After the Act II Tour, he asked me to help him reimagine the Glam Slam experience in Minneapolis with a concept we called Erotic City. He gave me a lot of fantastic unreleased music to work with, and I created vignettes with hanging ladders that appeared to be standing into space, a go-go dancer in a birdcage, and a huge skrim where tricks of light created suggestive silhouettes and reality-bending projections. Dancers came down from the ceiling and through the walls. I did a whole thing with a chandelier on my head.
In mid-January 1994, I filmed the show and flew to LA where he was working at the moment, staying at a house he’d bought on Heather Way. We watched the show together, and he was very excited about it. Afterward, he needed to go back to the studio, but I was exhausted, so I went upstairs and crashed. I was sound asleep at four thirty A.M. when a 6.7-magnitude earthquake gripped the San Fernando Valley for twenty seconds that felt like two hours. I huddled on the bed for another twenty-five minutes as aftershocks rumbled through the house. I heard things falling and breaking. And then I heard the front door.
“Mayte! Mayte!”
“I’m up here!” I called back, because I was frozen in place, terrified to step into the dark. He bounded up the stairs and pulled me into the kind of hard hug where you feel muscles and bones. He kissed my face and neck, asking over and over, “Are you all right? Are you hurt?”
“I’m okay. What’s happening out there?”
“It’s bad,” he said. “Light poles were falling. I couldn’t get through. There’s no cell service. I was so worried about you.”
The next day, we flew out of poor, beat-up LA, back to Minnesota, a place that gets cold but remains firmly in place. On the way home, we watched the video from the Glam Slam show again.
“I’m impressed,” he said. “I want you to do this in Miami.”
I was excited about that until he told me the first step was for me to fly down there and fire everyone currently playing and dancing there. I did not want to be that person, but this was an opportunity for me to step out of his shadow a little and take a leadership role in creating something very cool. Besides, I already had a secret plan to rehire most of the dancers after I fired them.
I arrived at Glam Slam Miami a few weeks later with a forced smile on my face and did what had to be done. When the dirty work was over, I went to work on a show for a celebration of ’s first birthday on June 7, 1994. Nona Gaye hosted a simulcast at the LA Glam Slam while we performed live in Miami. He didn’t fall back on any of the old Prince music for this event; it was all about the new music he was creating as —fresh, fire-in-the-belly funk, for the most part.
The night of the birthday party, about a thousand people milled in the street outside the club. Advance ticket sales were big. Unfortunately, fake ticket sales were even bigger. The situation got real as people realized not everyone was going in. Fights broke out, and several people were arrested for disorderly conduct. At half past midnight, security just stepped back and waved everybody in. When my friend and I saw what was happening, we just looked at each other like here goes nuthin’ and stepped out on the stage.
“Hold on to your wigs,” he said, and the place went crazy.
In January 1995, Prince received the American Music Award of Merit. It was a huge honor for him and a major performance for New Power Generation, but beyond all that, it gave a chance to “put Prince to bed,” as he put it. He was proud of everything he’d accomplished as Prince, but by now he was fully invested in this reinvention of himself. He wanted to play live, but the show organizers wouldn’t let him. They wanted him to lip sync so there’d be no surprises and because of union laws.
“I’m not going to fake it,” he said. “If they want lip sync, I’m not using a microphone.”
He took pride in the fact that he wasn’t pretending, but he was still going to deliver a stellar experience for the live audience and the millions of people watching. You can see on the video that he’s brazenly chewing gum, as if to say, “Yeah, we all know I’m not singing right now, but look at this.”
This performance was entirely about the visual. “The Purple Medley” directed by Jamie King involved multimedia technology, a giant staircase, glowing rock walls, fireworks, and Tommy Barbarella flying through the air playing the Purpleaxxe as the climax of a live show that would be broadcast all over the planet. Fifty dancers—many of them from my Glam Slam show—rehearsed in LA while the New Power Generation rehearsed at Paisley Park.