Prince
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Epigraph
PART ONE - The RISE
1 - THIS THING CALLED LIFE
2 - DON’T MAKE ME BLACK
3 - EVERYBODY OUT
4 - PRIVATE JOY
5 - I MAY NOT BE A STAR
6 - ALL THE THINGS PEOPLE SAY
7 - PARTIES WEREN’T MEANT TO LAST
8 - BE GLAD THAT YOU ARE FREE
9 - YOU SAY YOU WANT A LEADER
10 - DON’T MAKE ME LOSE MY MIND
11 - EVERYBODY CAN’T BE ON TOP
12 - ANOTHER LONELY CHRISTMAS
PART TWO - The REIGN
13 - THE LADDER
14 - INTERNATIONAL LOVER
15 - AT LEAST YOU GOT FRIENDS
16 - LIFE AIN’T ALWAYS THE WAY
17 - GOTTA BROKEN HEART AGAIN
18 - DON’T DIE WITHOUT KNOWING
19 - WE ALL HAVE OUR PROBLEMS
20 - DEAD ON IT
21 - THERE’S ALWAYS A RAINBOW
22 - I AIN’T GOT NO MONEY
23 - A SPACE TO FILL
24 - PARDON ME FOR LIVING
PART THREE - The RETREAT
25 - LOLITA
26 - RELEASE IT
27 - GIRLS AND BOYS
28 - WATCH THEM FALL
29 - MY NAME IS PRINCE
30 - MONEY DON’T MATTER TONIGHT
31 - TAKE MY FAME
32 - UNSPEAKABLE
33 - UNDERTAKER
34 - WHAT’S THIS STRANGE RELATIONSHIP?
35 - OLD FRIENDS FOR SALE
36 - SOMETIMES IT SNOWS IN APRIL
37 - SEE YOU IN THE PURPLE RAIN
PART FOUR - The RETURN
38 - INTO THE LIGHT
39 - SILLY GAME
40 - IT’S GONNA BE LONELY
41 - THE DAWN
42 - A CERTIFIABLE LEGEND
43 - EVERYTHING AND NOTHING
44 - PLAY IN THE SUNSHINE
45 - BABY I’M A STAR
46 - THIS FRIENDSHIP HAD TO END
47 - LIFE CAN BE SO NICE
EPILOGUE: BETTER WITH TIME
ALSO BY RONIN RO
Acknowledgments
Index
Copyright Page
In this life? You’re on your own.
—PRINCE, “LET’S GO CRAZY”
PART ONE
The RISE
1
THIS THING CALLED LIFE
ON JUNE 7, 1958, AT MOUNT SINAI HOSPITAL IN MINNEAPOLIS, A baby was born. John Nelson faced his son in the crib and named him Prince Rogers Nelson—after his own musical stage name. “I named my son Prince because I wanted him to do everything I wanted to do,” John later explained to Liz Jones.
They lived at 915 Logan Avenue, a humble home in North Minneapolis. John worked at Honeywell, an industrial supplier, and he and his wife Mattie—a former singer that John met while playing parties with his group, The Prince Rogers Trio—together cared for their first son. They were already trying to raise five kids on what John earned at Honeywell when Prince was born, but within a year Mattie was again pregnant. When their daughter, Tyka Evene, arrived in 1960, John saw his dream of a music career slip even further away.
Mattie also gave up her dream—since singing like Billie Holiday wouldn’t pay the bills. She remained social, though, with a “wild side,” Prince told Rolling Stone, while John was quiet, excited mostly by music.
Since John still played shows around town with The Prince Rogers Trio, and still sometimes answered to his stage name, Mattie took to calling their son “Skipper.” Prince obviously knew about his father’s history leading “his own big band, playing around the Midwest and stuff,” and how his mother sang for the group. But he didn’t truly understand what his father did until 1963. One day, his mother took him to a local theater. They took their seats, the lights dimmed, and John emerged from behind a curtain with a smile. People applauded as he sat at a piano. While he played, the curtain moved again, and scantily clad dancing girls came out. “People were screaming,” Prince recalled, according to Per Nilsen. “From then on I think I wanted to be a musician.”
The show took a hold of Prince, and for weeks after he tried to play any instrument within reach. He eventually settled, like his father, on the piano, and he would practice in the living room on John’s. Then, in department stores, while Mattie shopped, Prince would rush to where the radios and instruments were kept to listen to music or play organs and pianos until his mother would get him. But piano wasn’t enough. Prince would put two rocks in his hands, then smash them together to create a melody. He called this noise his first song. Soon, he’d use larger rocks to tap out a rhythm.
But while Prince was taking his first musical steps, John was finding the pursuit a rough life. He was, according to local reporter Neal Karlen, “a Jazz musician in the whitest metropolitan area in the country” With a wife and six kids to support, he continued to work at Honeywell, but he couldn’t accept that he wouldn’t someday be a music star. So he kept creating new melodies. Despite a limited income, John did things like install a TV in the living room wall. Or he’d parade around in new suits and shoes, as if about to take the stage. By 1966, John had bought himself a snazzy new white Thunderbird convertible. His dream seemed by turns impossible and just within reach. When he saw that Prince and his younger sister Tyka were interested in music, he encouraged them to play his piano, realizing he’d have to live his dream vicariously through them. While young Prince tapped out melodies, Tyka told City Pages, she sang, “because that’s what my mom and dad did.”
But just as quickly, moody John would see them bang away on the keys and tell them to get away from the piano. He needed it for his own dream, after all. Though the inner conflict persisted, inevitably he relented, and Prince showed him a melody he had written called “Funk Machine.”
Monday through Friday, Prince attended elementary school, where other students sometimes insulted his diminutive size. By 1967, the fifth grader was being bussed to a school in an affluent, predominantly white suburb. He wasn’t thrilled. One day in class, he turned to a page in a textbook that had a black-and-white photo of a young, dead black man hanging from a rope on a tree.
His sister Tyka recalled, according to Per Nilsen, that other students chased them back to the school bus many afternoons. “I didn’t know it was because we were black,” she said. Some days, other students by the bus protected them. But the next day would always bring another chase and more epithets. Inevitably, Prince tried to withdraw from the experience.
One morning he hid his socks, believing this would give his mother no choice but to let him stay home. No dice. She yelled, “You’re going to get to that school and find some socks!” He sighed and kept dressing. “She couldn’t have them calling me a nigger with no socks on,” he told PAPER Magazine, in 1999.
Sundays, his mother took him to a wooden, two-story Seventh-day Adventist church where he was enrolled in a Bible study class. On these days, eight-year-old Prince bonded over music with his schoolmate, André Simon Anderson, the son of his dad’s former bass player, Fred. “The most I got out of that was the experience of the choir,” Prince said of church, according to Nilsen.
During this period, Prince’s older half brother, Alfred—Mattie’s son from her first marriage—was trying to dodge a few rules. In his room, Alfred sang along to his many James Brown records. He styled his hair in a Little Richard-type conk. He always seemed to have money. He also ignored John Nelson’s curfews. Late at night, Alfred climbed out of a basement window and hit the street. With him gone, Prince and his cousin Charles tiptoed into his room to try on his clothes and play his James Brown records. Sometimes, Alfred caught them in the act. But he didn’t mind.
In the end, things didn’t e
nd well for Alfred, Charles told author Per Nilsen years later. His recreational drug use led to confinement in a local mental institution.
Prince, himself, was born epileptic. As a child, he had seizures. While he trembled and shook, his parents stood nearby, wondering how to help. Still, “they did the best they could with what little they had,” he explained.
There were other stressors. In 1981, Prince told New York Newsday that his father “felt hurt that he never got his break, because of having the wife and kids and stuff.” With Mattie resenting this, “there were constant fights.”
By 1968, Prince was watching things finally fall apart between his parents. They began having high-volume arguments that sometimes left Mattie in tears. Mattie and John had always been different. She was louder and more vivacious, while John was serious and strict. She had set aside music in the interest of her kids, while John did manage to play some shows in local clubs. “I think music is what broke her and my father up, and I don’t think she wanted that for me,” Prince later told New York Rocker. Serious musicians, like his father, could be moody. They needed space. Everything in their environment had to be just right. “My father was a great deal like that, and my mother didn’t give him a lotta space. She wanted a husband per se.”
Finally John and Mattie called it quits. After thirteen years of marriage, they decided to separate and filed for divorce. John packed his stuff and moved into a small apartment near Minneapolis’s downtown. Prince was shocked when John left. He didn’t even take his piano. “Everything was cool I think, until my father left, and then it got kinda hairy,” Prince said.
At home, it would now be only Prince, his mother, and Tyka. “He left when I was seven, so music left with him,” Prince said. “But he did leave his piano.” Prince faced the abandoned instrument. In the past, John had often kept the kids away from it. For good reason: they would just bang on it. With his father gone, Prince approached the piano; he was the only one that seemed to notice it was there. And he started to play it in earnest.
Meanwhile, Mattie took three jobs.
Prince spent much of his time nearby on his cousin Charles’s street. He told people not to call him “Prince.” Referred to as “Skipper,” he developed an acerbic sense of humor and coined numerous put-downs. But back at home, he’d return to being his father’s son, playing melodies on the piano John left behind. At some point, Tyka stopped joining him. Though she never said who, someone, she said, had crushed her dream of singing, saying she was crazy to think she could be on stage. Prince taught her to draw and write stories. But he didn’t abandon his own musical dream. Soon, he started practicing drums, playing on a box of old newspapers.
Mattie, however, didn’t support Prince’s musical aspirations. She wanted him in school, and later in college. She sent him to different schools, where he maintained high grades, but Prince viewed his studies as “pretty much my second interest. I didn’t really care about that as much as I did about playing.” Since music had destroyed his parents’ marriage, he explained, “I don’t think she wanted that for me.”
Mattie eventually met Heyward Baker. With her divorce now official, Mattie married Baker and he moved into the house. Baker always brought the family presents. But, Prince told Barbara Graustark, “I disliked him immediately because he dealt with a lot of materialistic things.”
Prince tried to build a relationship with Baker, as close as the one he had with John. But when Prince tried to engage Baker in conversation, Prince claimed, the man seemed to merely tolerate him. He mostly spoke up, Prince claimed, when Prince did something wrong. “I don’t think they wanted me to be a musician,” he said of Baker and his mother. They didn’t want him to be like John. But the more they pushed, the more defiant Prince became. Before long, he felt rejected, and bitter. He began to rattle off things he disliked about his new stepfather and “it kind of hurt our relationship.”
Years later, Prince credited Baker for helping to improve the family’s quality of life. The only time he had money during this period, Prince said later, “was when my step-dad lived there, and I know I was extremely bitter then.”
By 1969, Mattie was pregnant with Baker’s child, and Baker really started telling Prince what to do. In 1970, Mattie gave birth to Heyward’s son, Prince’s halfbrother, Omarr Julius Baker.
Over time, Prince became more and more impatient with his family’s demands. One day, his mother told him to be home at nine. Prince told his cousin Charles that he was running away. Are you gonna come with me? he asked. Charles said he’d meet him at a certain time. But when he didn’t show, Prince went downtown to his father John’s small apartment. John heard him out and agreed to let his son move in. Prince transferred to Bryant Junior High.
During this period, Prince told Musician magazine, John was still working a day job but moonlighted in a downtown club “behind strippers.” For weeks at a time, Prince barely saw John, except occasionally when John stood over the sink and shaved. “We didn’t talk so much then.”
Prince always liked sports. At Bryant, he made the junior varsity basketball team. His coach felt that even though Prince was short, he made for a good sixth or seventh man. Everyone on the team liked him, but he still had to work hard to prove himself. He had bigger kids taunting him, calling him Princess, or claiming he had the face of a German Shepherd.
The girls—on the other hand—loved him. But the bullies wouldn’t let up. Soon, he was scared to walk up the steps and into the school.
In the seventh grade, Prince took up the saxophone, but that summer, he abandoned it, recommitting to keyboard. His musical skills continued to develop, though John still didn’t take his son’s music seriously, claiming he wasn’t very good. “I didn’t really think so either,” Prince later admitted.
For a while, father and son got along. Prince followed John’s rules. Inevitably, though, tempers flared. Published reports say that one day John found Prince and a girl in bed together. What exactly transpired is unknown, but after this incident, John’s patience with the boy had run out. He kicked thirteen-year-old Prince out of the house—and onto the street.
Prince stood alone on Plymouth Avenue in north Minneapolis, near the McDonald’s. He smelled cheeseburgers, and wished he could afford one. He crossed the street, entered the phone booth on the corner, and called his father. Could he come home?
John said no.
He called Tyka at the old house. Could she call John and change his mind?
It would take a few minutes. Call back.
When he did, he was relieved. Tyka said Prince could call their father and apologize, and John would let him come back home. Prince did, but to his surprise, John still said no.
Tears burst from his eyes, Prince later told Rolling Stone, and for two hours, he sat in the phone booth and cried.
With no other option, he retreated to Charles’s house, where Prince’s Aunt Olivia, his father’s sister, invited him to stay. Olivia was old, and just as strict as John. Eventually, the tension between Prince and his father eased. Sometimes he would visit on the weekends. But with no room for a piano in his new home and without the money to afford one, Prince’s piano playing days were over. To foster his musical interests, John got him an electric guitar. Prince tuned it to an unusual straight-A chord and taught himself to play.
At school one day, Prince was back on piano, playing with a band behind the school choir. His playing awed drummer Jimmy Harris, who was a year younger. Another day, he lifted a guitar and knocked out Chicago’s intricate solo on “Make Me Smile.” On another occasion, Jimmy Harris told the Minneapolis Star Tribune, “I made the mistake of getting up from the drums and he [Prince] sat there [at the drum set] and he killed ’em.” He also had, Harris joked; with a hint of envy, “the biggest Afro in the world. That wasn’t fair, either.”
During this period, Prince reconnected with his old pal, André Simon Anderson, his friend from church. He and André had been in the same school for third grade, and saw each ot
her when both of their mothers took them to the local Seventh-day Adventist church. But then the Andersons moved into a housing project. André’s mother Bernadette and his father Fred, who was John Nelson’s old bass player, then split.
Now, Bernadette was raising six kids on her own and had the family in a big, brick house on Twelfth and Russell in North Minneapolis. André felt they’d “moved up” into “kind of an upper class black neighborhood,” and he was thrilled to see his friend Skipper again.
One day, Cousin Charles recalled, Charles told them both, “Let’s start a band.”
Fine.
So at the age of fourteen, Prince was in his first band. He played his guitar, tuned to that strange A-chord. André played bass. Charles was on drums. André’s sister, Linda, got in on keyboards, while Terry Jackson and William Doughty, two friends, handled percussion. Initially the band was named Phoenix, according to Charles, after Grand Funk Railroad’s 1972 album Phoenix. But really, “we tried to imitate The Jackson 5. Prince was singing ‘I Want You Back.’”
In September 1972, Prince started attending Central High School, near his father’s apartment. According to a classmate interviewed for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, he still had a globular Afro and wispy mustache, and now wore dress shirts with huge collar points, baggy pants, platform shoes, and neckbands. When other students stared at him in the hall Prince would nod. In the lunchroom he sat with the biracial kids.
Despite his reported height of five foot four, he made the school basketball team. Assistant principal Don McMoore joked, “his hair made him look like he was six feet tall.”
Prince reacted to taunts by putting up his dukes and hitting first. “I was a very good fighter,” he claimed. “I never lost … . I don’t know if I fight fair, but I go for it.” Bernadette, Andre’s mother, agreed. “He’d hit and run,” she said, “but he’d get even.”
This all changed once his father John remarried, and his teammate Duane Nelson suddenly became his half brother. People felt Duane (also on the school football team) had Prince’s back. Prince also hung with school quarterback Paul Mitchell. Most afternoons after school, Prince’s basketball coach, Mr. Nuness, would come in and discover the boys had sneaked into the school gym. They were usually in the middle of a game when Nuness chased them out, but they kept “bringing their bikes and their dogs in,” Nuness recalled.