How One Night With Prince (and Andrew) Is Still Changing My Life Three Months Later
Jul 17 '04 (Updated Jul 23 '04)
The Bottom Line In which the author discovers better living through funk, and the secret to achieving world peace.
Eventually I knew I would have to write about seeing Prince on his “Musicology” tour. In Indianapolis (a five hour drive). With Andrew (who I was meeting in person for the first time). For free. (With infinite gratitude to Kristina.) But, maybe needless to say, I had a hard time wrapping my brain around the experience. It all seemed a little incomprehensible in the immediate aftermath, so instead, I copped out, and only reviewed the free copy of Prince’s new album ("Musicology") which was distributed to ticketholders as they entered the venue.
And then, this morning, while heading into the home stretch of a 35 minute cardio work-out, with the sweat from my forehead pouring into my eyes and stinging them, little streaky pools of sweat on the floor mirroring the cyclical motions of my arms, feeling somewhat hypnotized watching my heart rate fluctuate on the LED display, I broked my gaze from the little red numbers and looked up to the TV monitor instead – permanently (and unfortunately) set to the Fox News Channel, which at that moment was apparently reporting a story of someone (VH-1 probably) who’d come up with a list of the 50 Greatest Frontmen of All Time. The closed captioning was off, and I didn’t have any headphones plugged in, so I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but they were playing footage of Mick Jagger.
Okay.
So I went back to my workout. My heartrate was 152, 153, 155, 154, and I was thinking about who I thought were the greatest frontmen – 151, 152, 150, 149 – Mick Jagger was certainly the quintessential frontman, I thought. David Bowie. 150, 152, 151. The Beatles were great, but neither Lennon nor McCartney were really frontmen. Steven Tyler. 151, 150, 148, 147. Jon Bon Jovi comes to mind. David Lee Roth. 149, 150. And I looked up again, and there he was, microphone in hand, snapping his fingers to some inaudible groove, and flirting – yeah, that’s it, he’s flirting. But not just with that particular audience in the footage, but with me. Personally. Again! And the sight of him creates a familiar warm, tingly feeling in my shoulders and neck, and trickling down my back. And then I think – 153, 154, 155, 156 – of course: Prince. Prince, who to my, admittedly biased mind (after all, I’ve never experienced Mick Jagger from the second row), is probably the greatest frontman ever.
It’s hard for me to write about Prince without sounding like my parents who, throughout my Smash Hits-buying pre-adolescence, disdainfully asserted that my generation would never have the kinds of musical heroes they had when they were growing up. Even though I sometimes have the same feeling about the current musical climate, I know better, having lived long enough to see my parents proven wrong. I used to think that it was musical ignorance that made my parents think like that.
But I know better about that too. I’m not musically ignorant. And I know that there are musical heroes out there right now, who, in twenty years time, will be (rightly) canonized among the giants of popular music. But they will never be as heroic to me as Prince is. They will simply never be able to make the kind of impression "1999" and "Purple Rain" made on me when I was 9 or 10 years old. Their songs will never be the kind of cultural signifiers to me that “Little Red Corvette” and “Raspberry Beret” are.
- - - - -
Now, overcast days never turned me on, but despite the oppressive cloud cover, and an unseasonably sharp chill in the Indianapolis air, everything about that Monday in April - three months ago now - feels a little magical.
How weird it is to drive five hours from home to a city I don’t really know, where I don’t really know anybody, to meet someone just as foreign to the city (and almost as foreign to me) at an airport. And then to realize a genuine affinity for that person, (even as I’m endangering his life with my unintentionally reckless driving), have an overpriced hamburger ($10), an overpriced Canadian beer ($4), and a lively conversation (priceless) with him, and then to have, what for both of us at least, was a transformative concert experience in his company. Only to further endanger his life afterwards with more unintentionally reckless driving, and then to get semi-naked in the same really nice hotel room (an experience which, rest your weary mind Amy, was far more harmlessly titillating for me than it was for him).
But Prince moves in mysterious ways, and he can bring otherwise sensible, practical people to do surprisingly (and liberatingly – not a word, I know, but go with it) non-practical things. Like all of the above.
Yes!
Prince- makes the people- come together. Prince makes the bourgeoisie and the rebel, and the perilous driver and the imperiled passenger, the Texan and the Cheesehead, the hetero and the homo come together (platonically- in separate beds- watching “A Mighty Wind”). The very diversity of the audience of a Prince show has been widely reported. But something else I noticed about the people surrounding us that night. Yes, they represented people of all shapes, colors, and sizes. But even more than that, they were all happy and good-looking. There was not a single unhappy, non-beautiful person in the entire Conseco Fieldhouse that night. Coincidence? Maybe...
But maybe that was just an effect of the music. Maybe it was just me seeing the world through Musicological lenses that made me kinda-sorta fall in love with everyone around me for two and a half hours – even that security guy who kept on trying to say stuff into my ear. I couldn’t really hear anything that he said, but he said a lot, and it was probably all really nice stuff too.
From the moment Prince and his band took the stage (to Alicia Keys’ emphatic Hall of Fame induction speech – “there have been many kings, but there’s only one Prince”) with a nearly how-long jam which found him slicing and dicing and copying and pasting bits and pieces of who knows how many of his classic hits, interspersed with longer jams of lesser-known songs like “Shhh…” (from “The Gold Experience”), Prince was a seismic epicenter of all-encompassing love, love that he radiated to every cubic centimeter of the Fieldhouse, love that he shot like invisible missiles at every single one of the thousands of hearts and bodies in the room.
There is something almost Machiavellian about Prince’s power of projection, and lines about “true funk soldiers”, song titles like “We March”, and the chanted chorus of “D.M.S.R.” - sounding almost like the Four Pillars of some new, revolutionary political platform, a kind of potent, hedonistic propaganda (DANCE! MUSIC! SEX! ROMANCE!) - only enhance the feeling that, for those couple of hours at least, we were all part of the Prince Nation, all dancing to the same beats – albeit with our own individual (stop laughing, Andrew) steps - with a vaguely militaristic sense of selflessness. By the end of the night, we were all true funk soldiers, and we’d come to fear, love, and respect the man who’d made that happen.
And did I happen to mention that Prince is sexy? Not, you know, I-wanna-do-him sexy (the little guys don’t really do it for me), but the kind of sexy that makes you personally feel way sexier than you normally would (or should). And after that opening jam, his (impossibly) extended acoustic solo set in the middle of the show felt – well – post-coital. Like that hour (or more) you spend in bed with your parter - afterwards, wink, wink, nudge, nudge - feeling lighter, giddy and euphoric, where every inch of your body feels ticklish, and neither of you can stop touching or giggling. With nothing but a purple acoustic guitar, Prince tickled all of us with surprising renditions of “Little Red Corvette” and “Delirious” (re-done as a one-man rockabilly rave-up), before giving us “On the Couch”, a slow-burning, tragicomic, southern-style blues number that began with bad breath, and ended with the most soulfully – and hilariously - desperate pleading this man’s ever heard.
The last third of the show was basically a big ol’ dance party. The band was joined by a couple dozen girls (and one boy of about 10 or so) on stage, and they plowed through a bunch of newer songs (most notably “Life o’ the Party” which doesn’t sound like much on record, but blew me away live).
But, without question, the most transcendent moment of the show came with the encore, when in “Purple Rain”’s famously magnificent coda, the band had everyone in the audience singing that familiar descending falsetto – oooh-hoo-hooo-hooo – in a glorious approximation of unison.
And for about ten minutes, world peace seemed possible. Probable, even. I could feel it in being part of that very diverse audience, all of us getting lost and losing all the petty defense mechanisms that would normally keep us from singing together in any more mundane context, those defenses that, in essence, keep us separate - all of us together in one magnificent collective falsetto.
That moment has made me a happier, better-looking, more optimistic person.
I thank Prince for that.
I thank Andrew for that.
I thank Kristina for that.
My memory of the concert may have been fuzzed a little in three months, but the feeling of the concert is still beautifully vivid. That incredible feeling of just – you know – generalized love. Music may be Prince’s vehicle, but that kind of love is his message. And that’s what I’ll remember from the concert way more than the setlist. And it's something that everyone should experience - be it through Prince, or some other performer - at least once in their lives.
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
plorentz
|
 - Top 500 |
|
Member: Paul Lorentz
Location: The Land of Limburger and Leinenkugel's
Reviews written: 952
Trusted by: 277 members
About Me:
Somebody turn the lights on...
|
|
|
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.