prince

Yo, while me and Q-Tip were performing 'Vivrant Thing' in Vegas last night...this n-a Prince walked out on the stage, took the guitar from our guitar player and just started rocking! None of us knew he was there until he popped up on the stage...then the n-a vanished like Batman, LOL!

The sound crew said Prince was in the balcony watching the show from the very beginning (The balcony was closed off). Then when 'Vivrant Thing' came out, he just came backstage and walked out on stage.

None of us knew what was happening, then when we finished the show he was gone LOL!

that is awesome

that is Prince!

i guess when prince takes a guitar from you, you let him

this n-a

this n/a

i wonder what would happen if somebody refused to give prince his guitar.

no one's seen tevin campbell in years.

any excuse to post this:

Just another relaxed day at home:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/photos/uncategorized/2009/01/08/prince_ann_500.jpg

And he talks a bit.

nice. i am anticipating MPLSOUND.

also watch 'em while you can:

lol @ the pains taken to avoid his purple majesty's bare cheeks

I'm very curious about what he does with ProTools. Could be really interesting.

not like it's the first time, he's been using it since 3121 at least

earlier i had a crossword clue that was "part of TAFKAP" and even after i had filled in "ARTIST" it still didn't register for a minute

Utterly of non-interest to anyone anywhere. Unless you are, you know, alive and breathing:

http://www.thedailyswarm.com/headlines/watch-while-you-can-prince-rehearsal-videos-1984/

Is Matos sittin' down?

Cool. Extended "When Does Cry" and "Erotic City" sound good.

http://twitter.com/PRINCE_OFFICIAL/status/8476096110

Shhhh, don't tell Prince about the Youtube videos

Like his little routine in "17 Days."

His James Brown rooted and updated moves were/are always fun to watch plus the extra little hopping and running around stuff here

Cave17 Matt C should be checking these videos out also

Matos, what do you think?

oh dear lord. this is fantastic.

I love how he goes through his moves, knowing they're already mastered, and keeps a more critical eye on the band. what a fun loving task master!

......aaaaand they're gone

got to see 5 of them, haha. oh well. hopefully someone capped 'em while they were up

Damn, I only got to watch "When Doves Cry". I hope these can make their way onto Dailymotion or something.

new song to debut friday on The Current radio:

http://www.startribune.com/blogs/85053272.html?elr=KArksLckD8EQDUoaEyqyP4O:DW3ckUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aULPQL7PQLanchO7DiUss

.....and it's awful:

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/radio/services/the_current/features/2010/02/prince-cause-and-effect/index.shtml

man he has so completely and totally lost it.

bad wrong false prince

wow yeah that is bad

WTF is Prince using MS Songsmith now?

i want to say "nothing can ever erase the work he did in the 80s" but i somehow wonder if this song is actually capable of erasing the master tape to "if i was your girlfriend"

With the amount of stuff going on in the background it sounds like he recorded over the top of something. In case anyone is wondering what the reverse bit at ~3:30 is, it's Prince saying "contracts just make you smaller".

the problem with all of prince's stuff from the 90s on is that i think he fundamentally misunderstands what made him great at one time.

he's a great minimalist that thinks he's a maximalist.

eh he's done some good minimalist stuff since the 90s - Black Sweat, for ex.

but yeah I agree that in general he's better when he's doing less

Am I crazy or has Prince benn listening to:

http://www.youtube.com/watch#v=CXCiS2FpmIc&feature=related

eh he's done some good minimalist stuff since the 90s - Black Sweat, for ex.

― dead clown handjob (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, February 26, 2010 5:44 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

black sweat....and....black sweat...and..um...black sweat ; )

j.k. but yeah that's the only song i've heard in years i thought was GOOD good not just "hey this is pretty good for prince now, i guess"

i can't listen to this at work but it's probably for the best.

it's funny, i just listened to mplsound again and thought it wasn't that bad (if you have no expectations except for dad-prince).

oh what the fuck

like I could put up with the verse and I could put up with the chorus, but not both together in the same song; that is exactly the wrong thing to do, dude

i should do a poll, this song versus his vikings playoff song, which sounded like the work of a slightly deranged lutheran church choir director

at least the Vikings playoff song was awesome in its insanity; this is boring, mild-mannered shit that thinks it's shit-hot

replace lutheran w/ witness and you just about summarized prince 2010

j.k. but yeah that's the only song i've heard in years i thought was GOOD good not just "hey this is pretty good for prince now, i guess"

title tracks of musicology and 3121 were pretty good and stripped down imho. there was some other track on musicology that I liked but I'm blanking on it at the moment... but yeah his hit-to-miss ratio is pretty sad.

i've cooled on him since his death tbqf

yah great post Kate

Excellent post Kate.

Also, just in case it wasn't known, Prince was raised as a Seventh-day Adventist, so he was probably surrounded by very social conservative brands of Christianity his entire life. And IIRC the Star-Tribune published an epic oral history after Prince's death where Wendy Melvoin mentioned that during one attempt at reconciliation (well after Prince had converted to JW), he asked her to renounce her sexuality and convert as well - pretty bad, but it's probably something I would've predicted given what was publicly known about his faith. It was a bittersweet remembrance though - Wendy knew the path he had taken and what it meant in terms of their friendship, that things would remain a mess, but she forgave him.

Thanks to Kate and bird for the nuances

https://polishedsolid.substack.com/p/my-2023-prince-year-in-review

The person who does this Substack just had a Prince conference this weekend in NY and am seeing lots of folks speaking highly of it online

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zi9nlmMA12Y

A good bit of pre-1999 concert footage is out there, but it's usually in-house video feeds or video shot from a distance, so professional multi-camera videos like this are kind of startling for me to see for the massive jump in production quality. I really hope they do an early Prince box set soon, especially of the Dirty Mind era - for whatever reason I gravitated more towards that stuff when I was binging Prince the week after he died. Just amazing to see them as this hungry little band that was still trying to make a career of their music. (And tbf, at least one of them ended up with a regular day job despite their talents.)

According to IMDb, this was his first national TV appearance. I think he did American Bandstand shortly afterwards, and a little over a year later he was co-musical guest (with Todd Rundgren!) on the notorious episode of SNL where Charles Rocket said "Fuck" on-air (supposedly Rocket said he only did so because we thought it was okay since --he believed-- Prince had already just done so in his performance of "Partyup").

I have an incredible pro-shot single-cam video (torrent) of:

PRINCE LIVE DIRTY MIND TOUR
NEW YORK
THE RITZ
MARCH 21 1981

but have never seen any other early stuff out there

Wolfgang's Vault has a whole show from the end of the Controversy tour - they may have taken down the complete show and left up a selection of clips, but other channels have uploaded a copy of the complete show:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdUPjdEciqA

Also, from the tail end of the Dirty Mind tour (basically the European leg), this show from Théâtre Le Palace, Paris, France (June 4, 1981)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6w2THFyyy24

assless chaps or GTFO ;)

Should mention, the first show is from January 30, 1982 at the Capitol Theatre.

Prince on American Bandstand

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krEXzOEsP9I

DICK CLARK MADE HIM WEAR PANTS

The further we get from it the more 80s Prince feels like a miracle, an impossible thing

Here's the "Partyup" from SNL, which is actually live, unlike the Midnight Special and Bandstand performances.

https://www.facebook.com/share/v/TdDTtEYLRZd42znK/?mibextid=oFDknk

ah here's the Ritz show, assless chaps start at 17:44

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9x1P84W5fa8

Technically, all chaps are assless

pedantry

That guitar solo at 42:30 is worth a few minutes of your time.

wow at that Ritz video!

holy shit i don't think wow quite covers it but yes wow at that ritz video!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGm-2UTjacY

Late to the above convo but the New Orleans show from that tour from that era bootlegged as jack u off is INCREDIBLE

The way they were doing Annie Christian live holy shit

Oh my god. The fact that we’re not going to be able to see this.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/08/magazine/prince-netflix-ezra-edelman-documentary.html?unlocked_article_code=1.JE4.gVHo.5X-AaTOPSm7l&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb

Was just rushing here to post that. God, I hope this sees the light of day.

I hope so, too.

Best hope is probably a leak, sadly.

Awwwww, I want to see all 9 hours....

9 hours is about 7 hours too long. What could possibly fill that ridiculous amount of time

Based on the article? Quite a fucking lot!

(And the comparison point is right there with the director's previous work on the OJ: Made in America documentary, which IIRC is seven hours long and went deep.)

How long was that Beatles thing I still haven't watched?

OJ Made In America was incredible, Edelman is the only one who we could hope to do this right, or at least provide all the shades of grey that are needed to even slightly understand the (mortal, flawed, human) Prince. i hope this project gets released but it is a real day ruiner knowing that it probably won’t

Excellent article and makes me want to experience it so bad, especially how they describe the effect of seeing an accumulation of his brief “mask off” moments. And what must be incredible performances juxtaposed with newly complicating emotion instilled in the viewer. We need so much more of this kind of narrative to change the narrative. If anything, demystifying artists makes the great art even more mystifying to me.

^OTM!

One of the things I think about a lot is how challenging it is to be a creative artist these days and get your work seen by the public
The battery of lawyers Vera Drew needed to release "The People's Joker"
Coyote v. Acme
Youtube videos where you can't say Stalin's name
They used to say, you know, "If you can't say 'Fuck' you can't say 'Fuck the Government'"
And these days, you can't say Stalin or "fuck", or you get age-restricted and demonetized
I try not to think too hard about it.

Maaaan I hope this comes out someday, somehow

A few people are all "Well hopefully it'll leak, in fact it should be leaked" and I'm all "Yeah and Edelman would immediately get sued out of existence by Netflix AND that one half of the estate. Put yourself in his shoes." This story is as much as can be done right now.

That may have been the best Prince article I've ever read.

yeah it’s really well written

yeah people who are all like "oh this should get leaked" don't necessarily understand the repercussions of that stuff

I won't lie, if the complete version of Edelman's film leaked, I'd be downloading that shit immediately, even if it meant staying up all night and missing work just to make sure I get it all before it gets taken down.

Having said that, Kate's completely right - it's a given the filmmakers and especially Netflix are very careful about managing who gets access and making it very traceable if the footage somehow gets leaked. The repercussions would definitely involve prison time (just as it did to the guy charged with leaking that Wolverine movie), but with millions spent on this film, there'd be at least one painful lawsuit to answer to. If Edelman was found liable, it seriously could very well ruin his career or at least plunge him into debt for the rest of his life (and even after).

And yes, article's great. Just a few things I wish an editor would've flagged:

There were so many unexplained oddities... (follows with sizable list)

This isn't entirely true. At the time the things they listed happened, I think the mainstream press generally covered them like they were quizzical oddities, but in the years since, all of these things were demystified by numerous accounts. The name change alone is directly tied to his disputes with Warner Bros. - he was literally trying everything he can to get out of his contract, and one Hail Mary plan was to work under an alias that was in no way referenced by that contract. His battles with Warner Bros, that's pretty self-explanatory, as well as expressing his displeasure with the word 'slave.' I've never seen a fan wonder why his work became uneven after he went independent. He was always massively prolific, but I don't think anyone believed every inch of tape was perfection - when he started releasing even more music (like the three-hour, 36-song Emancipation), it just seemed like he needed to do a better job of curating. And as the article eventually explains, he needed fentanyl to manage actual and excruciating pain, and unfortunately, Prince became another victim of the opioid epidemic exacerbated by the aggressive and misleading marketing of the pharmaceutical industry - this was widely reported soon after he died. A sad irony given his stance on drugs, but not a mystery either.

Edelman’s team found footage from a local news channel of him as a boy, age 11, being interviewed along with other children at his school.

This sounds like the footage WCCO discovered over two years ago, and the news travelled globally, not just locally. It was very well publicized - if anyone deserves credit for finding it, it's WCCO's production manager Matt Liddy.

McMillan [and Prince's estate] responded with 17 pages of notes demanding changes...They wanted him to take out a part of Wendy Melvoin’s interview, when she talks about Prince’s calling her up after he became more religious to ask her to renounce her homosexuality as a precondition for getting the band back together.

Some of the estate's editorial requests seem like a matter of taste, which honestly feel reasonable (like their objection to tying a lyric from "Let's Go Crazy" to where Prince ultimately died), but some feel like a bald attempt to bury information that's already out there. The article points that out with the criticism of the lyrics in The Rainbow Children, but this anecdote in particular also stands out. We actually talked about this upthread, but to recap, the staff of the Minnesota Star Tribune put together an epic oral history on Prince that the paper was able to publish within 12 hours of his death, and this was one of the big revelations there. It's still up on their site, and per that article:

WENDY MELVOIN: We tried to put together a Revolution reunion tour in 2000, and he declined because of my homosexuality and the fact I'm half-Jewish. It came back: Go have a press conference denouncing your homosexuality and that you're converting to Jehovah. I was like: I guess we'll never hear from him again. And I had to kind of mourn him. It was devastating to think we've kind of lost him.

FYI, about four years later, as told in the same article, again by Melvoin...

WENDY MELVOIN: Me and Bobby Z and Susannah wanted to go see him at the House of Blues [the L.A. club where Prince played on Grammy night]. I called his guitar tech to let Prince know that the Revolution wanted to be there. Bobby got this call saying, "Bobby can go for free, but everybody else has to pay." What the hell is this? So we get there; none of us has to pay, but it was incredibly difficult to get in..We finally got shuffled off to this room where there wasn't a seat for us. He called a whole bunch of people onstage but didn't call any of us. I thought, "Well, that's it." His wife introduced herself, and I told her to thank him for the tickets and goodbye. Then the next day, I get this call: "Prince would like you to come and rehearse with him on acoustic guitar for `The Tavis Smiley Show' he's doing." Curiosity got the best of me. I went down, and he was remarkably kind and open, and gave me a huge hug. He had me sit in with his band, and I hung with him for two hours. The next day, it was just him and me, and he was gorgeous. He was the guy I knew when I first met him. He was the guy who spent the night at my and Lisa's house on our pullout bed. I held on to him and kept kissing him and hugging him and telling him I loved him. I don't know what to think of it. He knows we all love him. (and this is actually how they ended the oral history)

One gets the sense there's pretty much the same dynamic in the way Edelman's documentary tells the story. As Paul Biegler/Jimmy Stewart once said, "people aren't just good or just bad. People are many things." Hopefully Edelman's film will see the light of day, unabridged. In the meantime, the Star Tribune's oral history is highly recommended.

great post, bird

Otm, now that you mention it I had similar thoughts when reading the article (weird to say we don't know why he changed his name when it mentions the record label difficulties in the next breath, and not to mention the hip pain at all).

The testimonies from women in his life remind me so much of other musicians I've known that are talented and emotionally stunted and fucked up to varying degrees.

Sad news that Cat Glover has passed on:

https://www.facebook.com/officialcatglover/posts/pfbid0312jtffugrS9BVMxPViHB17BWwnWXMVwsXWjKTAMA56rThQU8hLeiN4TB872eNQPfl

RIP Cat

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WW4-eEXSzxI

rip :(

Cat Glover was just 62

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/25/arts/cat-glover-dead-prince.html

x-post-- that NY Times piece on Prince had me thinking about this Meshell Ndgeocello response to a 2011 email answer she gave me for a Washington City Paper article regarding a Meshell tour where she did Prince covers--

Ndegeocello, who said in a 2000 interview that her goal was to tour as Prince’s bass player, answered a bit cryptically when I asked if she had ever performed with him. “He’s an amazing musician, an amazing player, an unparalleled creator. He wasn’t the nicest dude to me.”