Prince

by Ronin Ro

  Now, major concert promoter SFX was offering lots of money for a few shows.

  Wendy had every band member interested, she claimed. But Prince refused, she added. By August 11, Entertainment Weekly reported on the failed reunion.

  That autumn, Prince planned a “mini road trip dubbed the Hit and Run Tour,” MTV explained. He had a new lineup for his New Power Generation and pitched the Bravo cable network on a documentary. Nothing came of their talks so he moved on to trying to find a label to release The Rainbow Children. And despite complaints about Arista’s “lackluster” promotion of Rave, as he put it, MTV claimed he was “deep in negotiations with Clive Davis’s new J Records, according to a source close to the talks.” But nothing ever came of these alleged meetings, either.

  Prince finished The Rainbow Children by early April 2001. A facility was mastering it, prepping it for release, but he was already working on another album. This batch of songs was mostly about relationships. At the piano, Prince stomped a foot, creating a backbeat, and exhaled into the mic. “U’re Gonna C Me” had him pining for an ex. “Young and Beautiful” urged a young girl to remain abstinent since “they only want your virginity.” “Here on Earth” expressed gratitude for a great relationship. “Objects In the Mirror” described a couple brushing their teeth during a postcoital moment.

  He also threw in a cover of Joni Mitchell’s 1971 work, “A Case of You.” He had played it during the 1983 First Avenue concert filmed for Purple Rain but spent a career ignoring fan cries for a recording. Now he dedicated it to his father, John.

  Then he offered “Avalanche,” a jarring departure with cracking falsetto that called President Abraham Lincoln a racist, and claimed the late music industry legend John Hammond signed black artists to unfair deals. His closer, the instrumental “Arboretum,” went from classical to easy listening. Then Prince taped himself rising, walking away, and shutting a door.

  One Nite Alone was a respite from the overproduced trendiness of his recent albums. At piano, he offered gentle, moving works that told simple stories of love, loss, and life. The songs didn’t break any new ground—everyone had heard him at piano on haunting classics like “Condition of the Heart”—but his fans were especially happy to see him release music that didn’t include tons of face-saving backup vocals, excessive melodies, rap beats and slang, or ponderous album concepts.

  Prince kept working on albums he’d release on his site or with smaller labels. He also kept touring. On the road, there were some teens and fans in their twenties, but “most looked desperate to fend off middle age,” one reporter noted. Some men wore bright rayon, wrinkled linen, and battered shoes. Women in paisley-patterned skirts wobbled on thick heels. “It was a Star Trek convention for over-the-hill hipsters,” a writer for City Pages noted. Regardless, Prince pulled fans onstage to dance during encores. He had the largest cult audience out there and could live on this fan base. And he did just that, said Steve Perry, former editor of City Pages. “That’s what these many recent tours are about.” Prince had no new records or songs to promote. But people in various cities wanted to see him. Perry felt Prince still deserved to be “in the pantheon with James Brown and Louis Armstrong. But among those guys, I can’t think of anyone who suffered a more precipitous fall in a shorter period of time.”

  June 6, Prince had publicists fax media outlets an invite to the next day’s press conference at Paisley Park. It said he’d field questions about his weeklong “Prince: A Celebration” and his forthcoming The Rainbow Children. Only one national reporter showed up, a stringer from Newsweek.

  Publicist Stephanie Elmer told twenty or so writers that there were no advance copies of the album. They should limit questions to topics in the release. Prince wouldn’t discuss religion. But if he did, they’d eject anyone with follow-up questions.

  Prince entered. He was clean-shaven with feathered, shoulder-length hair. He wore a velvet red shirt with translucent sleeves, matching pants and boots, and a thick chain with a diamond-emblazoned “NPG” (New Power Generation) medallion.

  He spoke for ninety minutes. He kept saying he wanted to “put the focus back on the music,” then digressed. Without interruption, he grew impassioned. But follow-up questions made him withdraw and mutter, “no comment.”

  Before long, he did indeed talk religion, a subject many had become curious about. He said he loved Psalms. But then, City Pages reported, he said the Bible outlined “very clear roles” for men and women. “Twenty-first-century women do not want to live by a role,” he continued. “They want to say to men, ‘Let’s switch our roles.’ But things don’t work that way. You have to know your role and make it work. It’s the same thing with the music industry. You have to find the good roles that work and go with them.”

  After the conference, he shook hands with departing reporters. Pulse’s Erin Anderson, last in line, asked if they could someday sit and talk religion. No better time than the present. They talked for thirty minutes. But Anderson told City Pages, which reported the events of the conference, that she felt interrogated. At times Prince listened “but for the most part I felt like he wanted to hear himself speak.” When she left, she considered throwing her Prince CDs in the trash. She couldn’t play them anymore. “It’s like watching a train wreck. He’s working himself into eventual obscurity.”

  He moved on to focusing on his birthday party. His mother Mattie attended, despite health problems. She and her husband Heyward continued to live in a home Prince bought them in the late 1980s. She had finally retired (after twenty years of social work in local schools). But she had also undergone a kidney transplant. “She didn’t stay long, but he introduced us and had us sit together,” said an attendee. Prince saw his father John there, too. And he couldn’t help but reflect on their knotty relationship. They had reconciled by the time Prince toured for 1999 and John joined him, Wendy, and Lisa during a sound-check jam. Prince also included John in credits for “Computer Blue.” He let him have the purple house on Kiowa Trail. He bought him a custom-made purple BMW and had him fly to Paris and Los Angeles and, as author Liz Jones wrote in Purple Reign, Prince gave John royalties for songs like “Around the World in a Day,” “The Ladder,” Parade’s “Christopher Tracy’s Parade” and “Under the Cherry Moon,” and even his Batman ballad “Scandalous.”

  But they had fallen out again by 1996, so John missed the February wedding to Mayte. They were still at odds when Prince went on Oprah that November. But John still lived in Prince’s old purple house. He had health-care workers watching over him. And royalties brought in checks. Prince also made sure his wardrobe department kept John in nicely tailored suits. But when he saw his aging father at his big celebration at Paisley Park, Prince sensed the end was near.

  After the party, Prince faced fallout from his comments at the press conference. Someone showed him Melissa Maerz’s June 13 City Pages column, which began, “This is a story about control.” Maerz ridiculed his many “spiritual transformations,” quoted his comments, and claimed he had a “general scorn for feminist women.”

  Within a day, his publicist had called Maerz.

  Prince wanted to see her.

  Maerz could do it tomorrow.

  It had to be that night at nine.

  At the appointed time, Prince entered the small conference room at Paisley Park. He exchanged niceties, and sat by Maerz on a couch. She began to write in a notebook, Maerz recalled, but Prince said this was off the record. Their thirty-minute talk went from friendly to confrontational, Maerz felt, and ended abruptly. “It became clear to me that the only reason he invited me out there was so he could have the last word. It was a total power trip.”

  Again, Prince was planning a tour. But the Warner Catalog Group chose this moment—when his next album The Rainbow Children was about to arrive—to release The Very Best of Prince on their label Rhino Records. The seventeen-track album featured everything already included on 1993’s The Hits volumes, along with his Diamonds and Pearls number “Money
Don’t Matter 2 Night.” But nothing from after 1993.

  As planned, his Prince: A Celebration Tour would end August 5 in Anchorage, Alaska. But after a July 6 show in Canada, at the Montreal Jazz Festival, Prince spent four days thinking things through. Then he suddenly canceled the last sixteen dates. Industry gossip called it a deliberate reaction to Warner’s second greatest hits collection. His press release said, since Warner owned his masters, he would have earned “virtually no money” from the album. The tour would have provided free promotion for Warner’s product. Some industry workers disagreed. Even without the tapes, every sale would bring Prince money for being the artist and songwriter and for his involvement with publishing rights.

  The Very Best Of Prince landed at No. 66 on Billboard’s Pop Chart. But rather than support it, Prince had New York—based publicity firm Susan Blond, Inc. steer any reporter that called for comment to his NPG Music Club Web site. There, fans in a chat room blasted his former label. But at unauthorized, independent fan site Prince.org, people frowned on the cancellation. “Whether he wants to admit it or not,” one fan wrote, “Prince has been well compensated for those hits. I know this is easy for me to say, but I wish Prince would just get over it and focus on what he can do now that he’s free.”

  On August 25, 2001, Prince received bad news. His eighty-five-year-old father John died in Minneapolis. The cause of death was never publicly revealed. The news threw Prince for a loop. He had just seen John at the big celebration. Now he was gone. Then Prince saw his mother Mattie arrive at John’s funeral, in a wheelchair. Her health was failing, too, he saw. Then, on a mid-September day, as Prince was still coming to terms with the fact that John was gone, an airplane crashed into the World Trade Center.

  41

  THE DAWN

  THE NATION WAS SENT REELING BY THE SEPTEMBER 11 ATTACKS. America was on its way to war. Many celebrities wondered if it was appropriate to release upbeat products on a shell-shocked populace. Studios delayed a few motion pictures. Radio stations stopped playing a few songs.

  For Prince, it was a time to refocus on his positive new album The Rainbow Children. His first “Prince” project in years, it contained heartfelt personal music and bold religious themes. Instead of pop hooks and traditional song structure, Prince filled this latest rock opera with funk and jazz.

  As an executive, Prince was just as excited about finally being free of all contracts. “I’m the record company now,” he said. And during this new phase, he would clear seven dollars from every ten-dollar CD, rather than the pennies he said a traditional contract might bring. October 16, Prince avoided fan criticism by letting NPG Music Club members have the album first, via download. But with Arista now out of the picture, he worked to find a label.

  November 20, The Rainbow Children arrived in stores with Red Line Entertainment handling distribution. Prince decided against singles or videos, insisting it stand on its own, remembered for its sound and story. What reviews there were compared it to Weather Report and Steely Dan, critic Per Nilsen recalled. But critics were torn. Some rejected its odd music and lack of hit sounds. One called it an “arcane, for hard-core-fans-only album.” Many hard-core fans were just as torn about its quality. Some were delighted. They preferred this mature, experimental, noncommercial Prince. But others judged the melodies and ideas as dull, with Per Nilsen opining “the actual songs illustrate the continued lack of fresh inspiration in Prince’s songwriting.” In the end, few people spent money. Sales of about 130,000 kept The Rainbow Children out of Billboard’s Top 100 (his first album since 1978’s For You to not appear).

  By December, Prince was recording yet another new record, Xenophobia (“fear of strangers”). Its jazz and systematic titles (all began with the letter X) evoked his Madhouse days. So did its title track, a riff created in July 1987 for Madhouse’s 16.

  But with Mattie ailing, Prince set the tapes aside. According to the Daily Mirror, Mattie told Prince she wanted him “to become a Jehovah’s Witness, as she had been for most of her life, and to see him married.”

  Prince did indeed propose to Manuela Testolini, and she accepted. They had known each other for three years and those close to Prince noticed the bond that was forming between them. He had let her start designing products for his NPG brand. After Prince recorded a song called “Gamillah” for his canceled album High, Manuela had formed a company with the very same name (Gamillah Holdings, Inc.). With Manuela around, Prince seemed more confident, less hesitant to discuss religious beliefs in public, and ready to finally fire most of the bodyguards that kept the outside world, and overzealous fans, at bay.

  Still, the upcoming private ceremony surprised many close to Prince, who hadn’t seen him so committed to anyone since Mayte, but were well aware of his free-wheeling tendencies. They traveled to Manuela’s hometown, Toronto, and looked at a few houses. On an upscale, tree-lined street called the Bridle Path, they both loved a gray stone mansion that had been on the market since September. The property was also “a five-minute drive from Mani’s parents’ tiny apartment,” the Daily Mirror explained. Gamillah Holdings—the new company where Manuela worked as president—forwarded a $1.3 million down payment.

  New Year’s Eve, they married in Hawaii. “It’s all a bit surreal,” one UK-BASED fan opined. “She was just a fan who posted a couple of messages and then suddenly she was working at his Paisley Park recording studios … and then she was his wife.” She was also eighteen years his junior.

  The next morning, New Year’s Day, Gamillah Holdings started making payments on the $4.1 million mortgage for the mansion in Toronto. Work crews arrived soon after to perform renovations.

  Prince found that he liked it in Toronto. It was cosmopolitan, diverse, filled with great music, eateries, and nightclubs. Winters were milder. But fate soon returned him to Minneapolis: His mother Mattie was now in a hospital.

  Away from fans and the media, Prince had always maintained a loving relationship with her: He invited Mattie to shows, film premieres, and events at his studio complex. Since she’d retired, Mattie’s health began to slip. She underwent a kidney transplant. But she still accepted invitations to functions at his studio complex, and even his wedding to Mayte. And even as her health worsened, Mattie continued to be a sounding board for ideas, to offer consolation and support, to listen to him describe personal and professional woes. Most recently, she had attended John’s funeral in a wheelchair. Along with kidney problems, she was suffering from arthritis. Now, doctors thought her condition serious enough to hold her at Fairview Southdale Hospital in Edina.

  Prince and Manuela soon arrived at Kingdom Hall, the temple for Jehovah’s Witnesses, in Chanhassen, Minnesota, just west of Minneapolis. They were reportedly there for a private baptism ceremony. Only 167 parishioners were present. A small pool was ready. With knee-length robes over swimsuits, they entered the water and, in so doing, became full members of the church, satisfying Mattie’s alleged hope. For church elder Ronald Scofield, any baptism was exciting. “But this was exceptionally exciting because it was someone who has made a lot of changes to their life.” The congregation had seen Prince study the Bible and undergo dramatic change. “It’s something to be very proud of.”

  But on Friday, February 15, just six months after John Nelson’s death, eighty-year-old Mattie died at Fairview Southdale Hospital in Edina. Prince was stunned.

  Away from his career, and the public, he had privately relied on both parents for support, advice, even company during hard times. With both gone, those around him worried how he’d react. “They really kind of kept him together emotionally,” local newscaster Robyne Robinson said of his parents.

  Prince reacted the way he had to all of his life’s challenges: through song. He entered a nonverbal jazz phase. Whether he did it to somehow honor his father, or because he couldn’t muster the energy for his usual come-ons or his more recent optimistic piety is unclear. But recording instrumentals allowed Prince to express himself, and work through his loss. />
  He planned the One Nite Alone With Prince Tour, to start in Saginaw, Michigan, on March 1, and end May 4, in Vegas. But he’d perform on an emptier set. He’d emphasize music over fashion. He’d play what he wanted. He also looked ahead to a live album. On March 11, in Indianapolis, recorders taped four songs. Twenty days later, in Washington, he captured “Rainbow Children.” More relaxed, and confident, Prince told the crowd, “For those of you expecting to get your Purple Rain on, you’re in the wrong house!” Then: “If you drove up here in a ‘Little Red Corvette,’ you might be surprised at what you find!”

  April 4, in Lakeland, Florida, he added his religious love song, “1+1+1 Is 3.” Five days later, in New York, he recorded even more. As the tour continued, he kept jousting with his hard-core following, and his past. One night, while introducing his 1982 rock ballad “Free,” he quipped, “Ain’t none of us free.” Another time, Per Nilsen reported, his rendition of “How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore” seemed to evoke Alicia Keys’s recent cover. When it ended, Prince said, “I don’t want to leave you worrying about some stupid fool calling you up on the phone. This is how we want to leave it.” “Anna Stesia” followed, urging people to believe in God. Where he generally eschewed releasing live work, these tapes inspired him to plan a three-CD set that ran over three hours.

  In May, the NPG Music Club started offering albums. May 14, One Nite Alone … Solo Piano and Voice by Prince was the first. Club members dutifully ordered CDs then hit the boards to praise it as tender and honest. Just as many judged the album as forgettable compared to old, personal favorites. They complained that “Young and Beautiful”’s chorus sounded like his earlier classic, “Little Red Corvette.” “Have a Heart” and “Objects in the Mirror” seemed to share a melody. “Pearls B4 the Swine” sounded more like The Truth. “Somewhere Here on Earth” used the same whining synthesizer as remixes for his ballads.