by Ronin Ro
Former Revolution band member Wendy Melvoin told the Minneapolis Star Tribune that she called Prince’s guitar tech to say the original Revolution and his ex-girlfriend Susannah wanted to attend a party he was throwing at West Hollywood’s House of Blues (an informal gig before his well-rehearsed run of arenas). They hadn’t really spoken since the failed Revolution reunion attempt in 2000. Someone called drummer Bobby Z, she continued, to say he and the old band could attend, but only Bobby would get in free. Wendy thought, What the hell is this? Still, they went. (And no one had to pay.) But it was hard getting in. They felt a little ignored, especially in light of their history with the man of the evening. They watched stars like Steven Tyler and Beck walk in effortlessly. Eventually, someone led them to another room, but “there wasn’t a seat for us and we all just had to stand there.” During his show, Prince called various people onstage, but not his former bandmates. Wendy thought, Well, that’s it.
Then Mani came up and introduced herself. Wendy said tell him thanks for the tickets and good-bye.
After the party, however, Wendy’s phone rang. According to her, Prince’s guitar tech said, “Prince would like you to come down to the recording studio and rehearse with him on acoustic guitar for a benefit he’s doing for The Tavis Smiley Show.”
What the hell is this? Wendy remembered thinking.
But she went, and she saw Prince to be “remarkably kind and open.” He gave her a huge hug, she explained, and let her sit in with the band. For two hours, he taught her the song. The next day on the set, Wendy said of Prince, “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.” She held, kissed, hugged him, and kept repeating she loved him.
Hundreds of reporters squeezed into Prince’s press conference at LA’s El Rey Theatre. As usual, Prince claimed this new tour marked the last time he’d trot out the hits. “Our last tour was based on the music from The Rainbow Children,” he claimed. Now, he’d get to hear his new band play his early work “in a newer way.” With that, he called them out for “Kiss,” “Sign O’ the Times,” and other classics.
Meanwhile, he continued to approach major labels with Musicology. And with the media lauding his duet at the Grammy Awards and reporting he’d soon play the Rock Hall ceremony, getting meetings was easier. He figured a major could handle Musicology’s distribution while he toured and promoted the album with interviews.
Many reporters still frowned on his decision to write “slave” on his face during the 1990s. But during meetings, he noted one advantage of having done so: Label executives entered talks knowing they wouldn’t own anything; that any deal they struck had to be advantageous to him, otherwise he could release music on his own label and keep the majority of profits. “Maybe at one time they could get Little Richard for a new car and a bucket of chicken,” Prince joked. “We don’t roll like that no more.” Now, he was the content provider. They couldn’t exert pressure. They had no power over him. He felt confident enough to tell executives at competing labels that he wanted all of their companies to release Musicology—“the notion being,” he explained, “that the pie, the market share, should be shared by all.”
Away from meetings, Prince actually hoped to find just one distributor excited enough to get out there and promote his work. After working five to six months on it, he didn’t want to “give it to somebody to mess up in two weeks” with shorthanded promotions.
Prince also wanted to sell it online, charging ninety-nine cents per song (or seventy-seven cents for fan club members). Then he considered giving it away. “The thinking behind that being the people who buy concert tickets have been with me for over twenty years. So it’s just my way of saying thanks.”
While making the rounds, Prince reportedly met with Bruce Lundvall, head of Blue Note (enjoying success with piano-playing newcomer Norah Jones). “We talked for about an hour,” said Lundvall. And what he said about the industry was “pretty profound. I don’t think you can ever count this guy out.”
Ultimately, Prince’s lawyer negotiated with Columbia, where Sony Music U.S. president Don Ienner was eager to work with Prince. But Ienner noted, “There are certain things we don’t talk about. Obviously, he doesn’t feel the same way about us as he does about [his old label].” Prince called for industry reform. Ienner didn’t necessarily agree with everything he said. In the end, they signed a deal for Columbia to manufacture, distribute, and market Musicology domestically.
Ienner was pleased. Publicly, the executive predicted people would “respond to it as a twenty-first-century Prince record.” Prince was just as happy. “I feel at peace,” he said. “I knew it would take time, and I had to deal with a lot of ridicule. But this feels like peace right now.” He’d receive no payment from Sony but had full ownership of the album. He would receive $7 from every $10 sale. And online sales were his so he let NPG Music Club subscribers have it first; charging $9.99 for a download, a discount compared to the CD’s “suggested retail price” of $18.98.
At her desk in Los Angeles, publicist Ronnie Lippin booked him on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno for February 26. Then, March 3, Prince was on the syndicated talk show Ellen. But not as “part of some master strategy,” he said publicly. Ellen asked if he’d perform and he said yes. Print reports kept describing a comeback, and at his NPG Music Club site, Chicago-based webmaster Sam Jennings said sales were “steadily growing.” But Rolling Stone’s editor Joe Levy differed, saying people respected Prince “for the work he did twenty years ago.”
He hadn’t “had a radio hit in ten years,” the Star Tribune’s Chris Riemenschneider explained, but fifteen days before his first Musicology show, arenas in five of thirty cities were 75 percent sold out.
As he had for five years, Prince had to decide what hits to exclude. There wasn’t enough time to play everything fans wanted so he retired “a good portion of them,” he explained. But when a reporter asked if this was really the last time he would play certain hits, he said, “Well, it is called the 2004ever Tour. And time is forever,” he quipped.
“So this probably isn’t the last time?”
“Probably not.”
44
PLAY IN THE SUNSHINE
MONDAY NIGHT, MARCH 15, 2004, PRINCE ARRIVED AT THE WALDORF Astoria for the nineteenth annual Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, a fifteen-hundred-dollar-a-plate event that attracted a thousand industry professionals and artists, many in black tie and lingering on the red carpet out front. Novelist Tom Wolfe, cast members from HBO’s The Sopranos, Lenny Kravitz, and Hall of Fame members Robert Plant, Robbie Robertson, George Clinton, and Bruce Springsteen were among those present that night.
For his part, Prince arrived in a white suit that had one long tail and one short. He was the first to perform that evening. He played a strong-willed medley: his rock-fueled party song, “Let’s Go Crazy,” his sobering “Sign O’ the Times,” an instrumental refrain from Sam and Dave’s “Soul Man,” and his irreverent “Kiss.” His guitar solo had the normally staid crowd on its feet. Reporters saw Mick Jagger execute his signature stilted dance moves. Yoko Ono (in silver-lamé jacket and big sunglasses) bounced. Soon, most of the crowd was dancing. And when his ten-minute set ended, they gave a standing ovation.
Prince was the first artist of the night to be inducted. It began with a video tribute, with sound bites from rare interviews. Then rap duo Outkast, recent recipients of an Album of the Year Grammy, took the stage. Andre 3000 and Big Boi openly discussed loving Prince’s music, both as kids and now as best-selling stars.
Their introduction was followed, at Prince’s request, by twenty-five-year-old Alicia Keys (Best New Artist at the 2001 Grammy Awards). By this point, she had covered “How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore,” and joined him for a few art-show parties in midtown Manhattan. She took the podium and, reading from a TelePrompTer, said, “There are many kings: King Henry VIII, King Solomon, King Tut, King James, King Kong, and the Three Kin
gs. But there is only one Prince.” By defying rules and restrictions he had created music “so superbad that he makes us feel super-good.” He was an inspiration “that generations will return to until the end of time.”
With introduction complete, Prince took the dais, where he shook hands, gave hugs, and set his award on the floor. Everyone in the room had witnessed his ups and downs. The tragedies and the triumphs. The media and his own audience’s attacks on him. The skepticism that greeted his unveiling of ideas—ideas that now helped many of them earn more money in this business.
Prince faced the crowd, opened a red book, and said, “All praise and thanks to the most high Jehovah. Thank you, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. This is definitely an honor.” When he first started, Prince continued, he was most concerned with freedom: Freedom to produce, play every instrument, and sing what he pleased. “And after much negotiation, Warner Brothers Records granted me that freedom and I thank them for that.”
For two minutes, he thanked artists that inspired him for “a journey more fascinating than I could ever have imagined.” Then he said, “A word to the wise: Without real spiritual mentoring, too much freedom can lead to the soul’s decay.” He told young artists: “a real friend and mentor is not on your payroll.” The crowd applauded. A real friend and mentor would care for their soul, he added. “I wish all of you the best on this fascinating journey.”
Then, with the crowd applauding, he rejoined Mani at their table. Her black outfit with white trim matched his white suit and black shirt. Nearby, Anita Baker and Larry Graham offered congratulations. Then Keith Richards approached for a few words.
Prince soon had to leave the hall. The four-hour ceremony was at its halfway point, and he had to change for his next performance.
While others were inducted (Traffic; the Dells, Bob Seger, ZZ Top, and Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner) Prince slipped into a black suit, red hat, and matching shirt, preparing to make history again.
By the time he left backstage, Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne had posthumously inducted former Beatle George Harrison, who played in their eighties ensemble the Traveling Wilburys. Prince went out and joined them, and Lippin’s other client Eric Clapton, for a show-closing rendition of the Beatles’ “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.”
Prince was sharing the stage with some of rock’s most distinguished guitar players, but his solo stunned every guitarist in the room and stole “the entire evening,” Alan Leeds recalled. “But his arrogant slamming of the guitar at the end was tasteless and disrespectful to the other artists on the stage with him.”
His cocky attitude was “rock and roll,” but in light of the circumstances—that the song was a tribute to the only recently deceased George Harrison—many viewed it as not only disrespectful to others onstage but to Harrison’s memory. “It should have been enough to let his guitar solo speak for him,” Leeds felt. “It was the one time he should have been a team player.” It wasn’t, Leeds added, “very grown up.”
Either way, the media again described Prince’s performance as the highlight.
David Bowie had no problem with the performance. “I’m always floored every time I’ve seen him live,” Bowie said. “There’s very few people to touch him.”
Back in Minneapolis, Prince finalized plans for his tour and made time to join Mani at Bible study class. The couple also performed field service, door-to-door visits to local residents with church elder Ronald Scofield and security guards in tow. One day, Prince left the limo in a tailor-made suit and trademark heels. He walked up to one of the modest picket-fenced homes on this street, knocked on a door, and waited. A resident opened and looked shocked.
“Would you like to talk about Jesus?” Prince asked.
From the sidelines, church elder Scofield nodded with pride. “He uses the scriptures very well,” Scofield said, and he was growing spiritually.
Prince continued to refine his set list for the road. He wanted crowds to hear new songs and ideas but accepted that “Let’s Go Crazy” had become “like a piece of Americana in a way.” But he was through with the old act. He also toned down the crowd-pleasers. “That’s not me anymore.”
Times had changed. As a young man, he did what no one else was doing with these lyrics “and I knew that would get me over.” He offered “Darling Nikki” when television’s most risque show was Dynasty and saw critics equate it with “porn” due to its lyric about “masturbating.” Today, Dynasty looked “like The Brady Bunch” and there were no more envelopes to push. “I pushed it off the table. It’s on the floor. Let’s move forward.” And with parents bringing kids to shows, he didn’t want to perform anything these adults would find difficult to explain on the way home. “I’m not trying to be obscene to anybody.” He also remembered a 1992 tour. The band played “Sexy MF” with “seventy thousand people yelling that at me, and I don’t need to hear that anymore.”
In addition to the set list, he decided to run with an idea he first considered in 1994. He’d give every ticket holder a free copy of Musicology; build its cost—about $9.99—into the ticket price, then report every ticket sold as an album sale Billboard had to count on their charts. “See, if I sell four hundred thousand tickets to my shows, that would make me number one on the charts before I even release a CD into record stores. You feel me? Then Norah Jones is gonna have something to worry about.” Tour promoter Randy Phillips was amazed by his level of thought. “Prince is ahead of his time and thinks outside the box.”
Prince started his tour March 27, in Reno’s Lawlor Events Center. Movie theaters in thirty-one cities broadcast the show live via satellite, with high-definition projectors. Fans paid fifteen dollars and received a copy of the CD. Then, two days later, Prince arrived in Los Angeles to play the twenty-thousand-seat Staples Center. He reportedly attracted the venue’s largest audience ever, selling over nineteen thousand tickets.
By now, VHI’s executive vice president for music and talent Rick Krim had received and enjoyed a copy of Prince’s video for lead single, “Musicology.” “The timing feels right.” Krim said. “He was away long enough.” VHi would air it. That same day, Sony released the single to stores while Prince’s own music club site offered two new MP3 albums: The Chocolate Invasion (tracks offered during the Club’s first year) and The Slaughterhouse (more songs from the first year). But with the media not interested in joining a club, or paying fees for review copies, reporters focused on his Sony work, Musicology.
Monday night, two weeks after the Rock Hall induction, four video monitors in the Staples Center aired Alicia Keys’s earnest introduction. The stage was empty save for the old fireman pole and a guardrail on the side with an NPG emblem. Lighting was limited to spotlights. With Keys’s final words echoing (“ … the one and only, Prince”), the crowd roared.
Prince walked into view in white clothes, with a red tuxedo coat and hat, and leaped into “Musicology.” After some dance moves, he wiped his face with a rag, and brushed off a shoulder. “Los Angeles!” he shouted. On cue, the confetti and purple ribbons fell from the rafters. Then he did the Purple Rain medley. After tossing his hat into the crowd, he breezed through other works and invited fans onstage. When he saw a female fan trip and fall during “Take Me With U,” he quipped, “Too many trips to the bar!”
Backstage, Prince heard the crowd yell for more. He slipped quickly into a sleeveless black turtleneck and matching pants. Back onstage, he saw the chair at center stage. Sitting with an acoustic guitar he offered a gentle “Forever in My Life,” written when he thought he and Susannah would be together. Then he did “Little Red Corvette.” The eclectic audience of older and younger fans knew every word. Some audience members wept openly. Finally, his own eyes watered while singing “Sometimes It Snows in April’s” doleful lyric about hoping to see a dead friend again in Heaven. When it ended, he received a standing ovation. He wept at the adulation and struggled to regain his composure.
Eventually, Prince regrouped. The band came out again. After decades
of claiming he resented typecasting, he strapped on his purple electric guitar and admitted, “I love playing this song.” He went right into “Purple Rain” and wound up lying on the stage floor, reaching out to touch a few hands in the crowd. “One more!” he yelled. “One more!” But the show was over. As the band kept playing, Prince made his exit down the fireman pole.
Prince continued to make headlines wherever he went. And by March 31, 2004, The Wall Street Journal joined in welcoming him back. “Baby, I’m a Star, Again,” their headline read. “How a Seeming Has-Been Spent Months Preparing to Reclaim the Center Stage.” But with everyone describing Musicology as a comeback, Prince asked, “Comeback? I never went anywhere!”
To his dismay, writers kept including the term. Prince just shook his head. He had always made music. The media just stopped focusing on him. “Never had a problem filling arenas.” And he never alienated fans, either, he suggested (though message boards might have suggested otherwise). Warner’s “restrictive, one-sided contract” was to blame for the , he claimed.
“No regrets whatsoever,” he said in a virtual chat hosted by the Boston Herald. Any artist, he stressed, would do the same for eight times more money and control of their work. “I wasn’t getting anywhere by telling Warner Brothers that they were abusing me.”
By April 20, 2004, Columbia had filled orders for over a million copies worldwide of Musicology. “And with the first copy shipped, we started making money,” said Don Ienner. The label had “really high expectations for this,” Ienner added, and while there were no guarantees, they hoped to stay in business with Prince for a long time. “How often does an artist of his stature become available on any terms?”