He was all diamonds and pearls and paradoxes.
He was every bit the rock/funk/pop renaissance man I imagined him to be, and every bit the flawed human being I knew he was. The time I had with him was glorious enough. “But he said to meet him here! That he wanted to hang out with me…” The security guard gave me a look that said, “Yeah, right.” I walked away embarrassed, amused, and really rather thrilled out of my mind. I was totally telling the truth, but somehow I felt like a total liar, or like billions of other groupies before me. I showed my press badge and such to the security guard and explained the situation, that Prince had invited me backstage. After the final encore, I waited for the arena to clear and then went to the proverbial velvet rope. I’m going to hang out with Prince! AFTER THE SHOW! I never once thought to ask about the protocol for how this might happen. I drifted out of his presence excited and terrified of this prospect. When our time was over, he invited me to come back to his dressing room after the concert and hang out with him and the band. Our time together was a weird juggle of trying to engage him conversation, trying to record his every word on a yellow legal pad, trying to stay present in the moment. Prince famously refused to let journalists record his voice, but he did let me take notes. It would have been my sixth Prince concert. I wanted to see him in his current “Piano and Microphone” tour. His freak flag pride, his model of mutable, evolving identity and masculinity, his mad want for affirmation and transcendence, his struggle with his spirituality and sexuality - with wanting to love God and wanting to get laid - his insecurities, his failures, his offenses, his terrible pride, his whole sprawling, complex, glorious, hypocritical, profoundly human mess means more to me than I feel comfortable expressing in print, especially in this moment, as I’m trying to make sense of the fact that he no longer here, that he’ll never write another song, he’ll never make another record, he’ll never again have a chance to transform into something new, or to cut loose with guitar and piano or the dozen-plus other instruments he taught himself to play, or to describe with his thrilling, adventurous, wholly unique musical language what it means to be alive here and now, or just him, and I am devastated. His comebacks and his persistence in recent years have brought me back to him here in my humbled forties. His Symbol days and his bitter years confused me and betrayed me in my know-it-all twenties. His voice, his guitar, his angst, his humor, his raunch and soul kept me company in my loneliest hours. It was with that record I became an obsessive, a fanboy lover and a fanboy hater. Sign of The Times, so eclectic in its range of styles, blew my mind and opened it up to all music. It’s well-traveled from decades of moves and warped from sun exposure and resides permanently in the glove compartment of my car. I still have the cassette I got for my 13th birthday. Purple Rain was the soundtrack to my adolescence - and my arrested adolescence. No pop artist has exhilarated me more or exasperated me more or meant more to me than Prince.
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