I went to Paisley Park, Prince’s Minneapolis recording, writing and performing complex, back in the summer of 1991. I was a 26-year-old rookie journalist but a fully signed up Prince obsessive.
As a lowly pop magazine writer I had no right to be there. Prince was the story that every major newspaper hack was chasing back then. Mainly because Prince didn’t do anything as boring or predicable as interviews. He was aloof, taciturn, mysterious, controversial, and delightfully elusive.
Damn, he’d even turned down Live Aid. But endless begging and pleading the press office in the London offices of Warner Brothers records, and a campaign of countless brownie-point garnering interviews with Prince acolytes such as Jill Jones, Sheila E and the Bangles over the years finally paid off.
Truth was I was less an aspirant hack after a scoop interview and more a fan, a Prince obsessive. I played his records endlessly. I knew every lick, every drum kick and yelp. Frequently, I would dream about Prince.
When he came to London and played a week-long residency during the Parade tour I went to three shows. When the Sign ‘O’ The Times shows at Wembley Stadium were canceled I flew to Switzerland to catch a show in Zurich. Eventually, I think the record company just took pity on me.
Of course, I was never promised a formal interview, per se. But young, dumb and hopeful, with purple coursing through my veins, I flew to Minnesota with a hundred questions on my notepad. I never got to ask one. Instead I got something much, much better.
Paisley Park the building isn’t, as the eponymous song goes, the “place in your heart”…where a “girl on the seesaw is laughing 4 love is the color” the “place imparts.”
Admission certainly isn’t “easy.” Prince HQ is located in a decidedly un-funky part of suburban Minneapolis and its pastel, light industrial architecture makes it look more like a 1980s multiplex cinema than the HQ of the world’s most prodigiously talented songwriter and musician.
Instead of simply saying “U Believe,” to get past the doorman you have to sign waivers and nondisclosure documents. I was relieved of my recording device and discouraged from using my notebook.
One thing was clear as soon as I stepped through the door. Prince was not in.
Politely I was shown around; the atelier where full time seamstresses sat at sewing machines making Prince’s bespoke stage wear, jeweled microphones and accessories. I saw the basketball hoop in the parking lot where Prince liked to play with musicians in between recording sessions (sometimes in heels, I was informed) and then went into a recording studio where I flicked through a rhyming dictionary sitting idly on the mixing desk.
Still no Prince. In a boardroom with a ceiling painted like the cloudy sky on the Around The World in Day album cover I was gifted an exclusive play back of the new album. I nodded along to Gett Off, Cream, Thunder, etc. which was fun…but I hadn’t come all this way to listen to a CD.
Now four hours had passed. Prince was very definitely not in the building. I went out to dinner and had a drink at First Avenue, the Minneapolis club that had featured in the Purple Rain movie, and headed back to my hotel, bitterly disappointed.
The phone call to return to Paisley Park came just as I was about to retire for the evening. Prince had arrived and he was ready to meet me.I was whisked through reception, through the recording studio and into a cavernous rehearsal space.
Prince and the New Power Generation’s peach-and-black rig, complete with mini trampette for Prince to bounce on, was set up and ready to go. Drummer Michael Bland thumped the snare and nonchalantly, apparently appearing out of nowhere, Prince strapped on his phallic, yellow guitar. There were no more than 10 people in the room.
The six or eight numbers he played went by in a delirious blur. I sat on a sofa 15 feet from his vertiginous stack heels, close enough to watch his plectrum dance across the strings on his fret-board. I could see the slenderness of his fingers. Smell the Afro sheen of his bouffant.
When it was all over I clapped and whooped, a lone voice and hands in amongst the technicians and engineers for whom all this was business as usual. I sat glued to my sofa, not knowing what to do next.
And then he was standing next to me. All the questions I’d memorized dried up. All the conversations I’d imagined were wiped clean from my dazzled, star struck hard drive.
We exchanged a few words about his new guitars but Prince spoke so softly I could hardly make out a word. There was a pause. Prince grinned. He could see I was struggling.
So he helped me out. “Hey,” he said playfully. “D’y’all wanna try ma tram-po-leen?”
