"The kid is in rare form tonight!"
Dec 01 '00
“Were y’all at the show?”
“Oh yeah. Oh yeah.”
“First time you’ve seen Prince?”
“Nah, man. We saw him when he came through in ’97. That was a great show.”
“This one made me homesick.”
“Mmm?”
“I’m from Minneapolis, bruh. I was around when Prince was coming up, before Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis split from The Time. I saw Vanity 6 live – hell, I saw Andre Cymone play with Prince.”
“God, that must have been like 1981.”
“Yeah, long time ago. Y’all was in diapers for sure. But a night like this brings it all back.”
--
You can always count on Prince to be a pain in the ass. He’s like that friend who waits until the last minute to plan everything and then stands back and absolves himself of the ensuing chaos. And his concert last Tuesday at the Savvis Center in St. Louis shaped up to be one more example of Prince’s unique brand of poor planning and disregard for fans. Just before showtime, two thousand fans crowded the venue’s Will Call windows in fragmented, mob-heavy lines, most people tapping the shoulders of the person ahead of them to find out if they were in the right line. Most of these shoulder taps were followed by shrugs and head shaking. No one knew what was going on – all they knew was, they were ready to take that six-dollar “convenience fee” and shove it up Ticketmaster’s corporate ass.
I’d barely read the blurb in Rolling Stone about Prince’s Hit and Run Tour before I saw a local newspaper ad for the St. Louis stop. It was announced nine days before the event, which meant customers who opted to be technology’s b*tch and purchase tickets over the phone or Internet didn’t have the option of having those tickets mailed to them. No, we all had to pick them up at once, thanks to Prince’s inability to plan his tour beyond the date his next gas bill is due.
A friend and I once theorized that he throws a dart at a map of the continental United States and calls the arena venue nearest the dart, telling them to “get ready, I’ll be there on Thursday. Hockey game? Motherf_ck a hockey game. I’m the Artist! Clear the ice, my man!”
Actually, and thankfully, he’s not The Artist anymore. He’s Prince again – he reclaimed his throne last April, and just as I predicted, the whole name-change thing was less an indecipherable artistic statement than a means of getting out of his lucrative 1992 contract with Warner Bros.
We the fans won’t have to see that damned symbol anymore, and it’s one of many signs pointing to the fact that our man may finally be withdrawing his head from his narrow posterior. His last album, Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic, was his most coherent, accessible work in years, and his contribution to the Bamboozled soundtrack topped that. Hell, the notion of such an egomaniac going on a “hits” tour would have seemed ludicrous – he’s been giving such staples as “When Doves Cry” and “Little Red Corvette” perfunctory, dismissive concert treatment since the late 1980s. Prince is not the type that favors playing the same songs over and over.
But here he is, finally cashing in on his old name and the notoriety that went with it. When I saw him in concert three years ago, the age/sex/race demographics of the audience were more random and unkempt than Samuel L. Jackson’s hair in Unbreakable. You’d see an 11-year-old white girl with her parents next to a group of clued-in, twentysomething black males next to preppy college kids next to a group of 30-year-old office coworkers.
This time around, the attendance – in addition to representatives from the aforementioned groups – was noticeably younger and whiter. Lots of sorostitutes, college eclectics and young professionals, most of them probably drawn in by the incessant advertising on St. Louis’ eighties station, The Mall. (Ugh.) If you’re wondering why I point this out, it’s because the 2000 concert was a lot more mainstream an audience, and that points to a likely Prince comeback. I spotted some Britney Spears teenyboppers who weren’t even born when Purple Rain came out. We may be seeing Prince on TRL before the next twelve months are out.
So we waited outside Savvis for a half-hour or more, and the friends I brought with me would have strangled me if the wind-chill factor had been just a few degrees nastier. But we suffered the Will Call window, we suffered the $5.75 beers (I don’t know about you, but I wince if I have to pay more than the minimum wage for a f_cking Bud Light), and we suffered the ignominy of learning the cheap-seat tickets I purchased from Ticketmaster a mere five hours after they went on sale were in the second-to-last bloody-nose row. We claimed closer seats twice before being booted by their rightful owners and finally settled into the second row of a nearby closed-off section whose attendees had decided to open it for business. There were too many of us for the harrowed, by-the-hour security staff to mess with.
We got our jackets off and our $5.75 beers into the cup holders just in time to check the clock – it was 9:05, and the concert had been scheduled to start at 8. At least you could still count on Prince for that kind of fashionably late leeway.
“I hope the sound doesn’t suck this much during the actual show,” I remarked as a poor-quality remix of “P Control” blared from a stack of speakers a quarter-mile away from us.
“The sound always sucks here, or at least when you’re up this high,” replied the friend to my left. “You should have gotten us the $55 seats.”
Leave it to my friends to complain about the tickets I purchased after spending almost the entire fall bitching about how little money they had and (in one very recent case) deferring the cost of a $5.75 beer to my live-at-home, disposable-cash ass.
But I didn’t have time to think about that – the lights were fading, and the introductory mega-mix of Prince songs was just kicking in. I uncapped the binoculars as the friend to my right reached for his one-hitter. Amid all the chaos at the front gate, there was no time to pat down for drugs. We could have smuggled in a six-foot houka and invited the neighboring rows to toke up on us.
The friend on my left was right. The sound did suck, at least at first, and the mixing was off. I could barely recognize the opening number, “Uptown,” which had segued to “Controversy” before they got Prince’s mic up enough. I took the bat from the friend on my right, figuring my experience could only get better under the influence of a little sticky-icky-icky.
I sucked down my first pipeful during “Mutiny,” a James Brown-type dance number that originates from Prince’s obscure 1985 side-project, The Family. And the show began going uphill from that point. It was my first indication that Prince came to play and to entertain, not just to limply run through a back catalogue strung together in medley format. “Mutiny” was the first time Prince let his new band tear up the music, the first time he’d point to a musician and send the person on an improvisational journey. It was far from the last.
The entire show trod that same tightrope, as Prince went out of his way to work in dozens of crowd favorites and still riff with his band on unfamiliar instrumental jams for five to ten minutes at a time. It was a format guaranteed to leave casual and die-hard fans equally pleased, and Prince was our willing ringleader. He ran through “Cream,” his last number-one hit, and tore out a guitar solo before surrendering the stage to his band for a few minutes. When Prince reemerged, the transitory music – which was ethereal but impressively catchy, almost like Pink Floyd’s stuff on The Division Bell – segued right into “Little Red Corvette,” which 10,000 mouths eagerly sang along to.
The weed didn’t hurt, I’m sure, but even in the nosebleeds, I could feel the music. I felt the energy during “Housequake,” the coy lyrical structure of “The Ballad of Dorothy Parker” and the twisted emotion in Prince’s first extended guitar solo. The regularly scheduled show ground to a halt as he turned some moody blues riffs into full-scale musical acrobatics that left our collective jaw dropped. I was literally almost in tears by the end, both because I was blown away by the sounds this man was making and because I hadn’t heard him produce anything like it in years. Prince seems to go out of the way on his records to hide the fact that he’s a virtuoso guitar player, but he’s right up there with Hendrix, Santana and Steve Vai. And with that band he’s got on tour, he could make one hell of a classic rock and funk album if he wanted to. Is that too much for my drug-addled sensibilities to wish for?
“St. Louis, do you like real music?” Prince asked, and the self-conscious boast made us laugh and applaud appreciatively. “Played by real musicians?”
It called for another beer.
--
“Give me another of those $5.75 Bud Lights.”
The vendor nodded and withdrew a 24-ounce paper cup. Another batch of blistering guitar riffs emerged from behind me, and I subconsciously spun my head around, trying to identify the song.
“That’s my boy right there,” the vendor said. “I saw him on the Purple Rain tour and was hooked ever since.”
“Yeah, most people just plain miss out on this sh*t. I’m so glad he blew the dust off his guitar tonight.” I unfolded my wallet and forked over another five and one. “You need to see my ID or anything?”
“Nah.” He waved away the notion. “Your honest opinion…”
“Yeah?”
“Who’s better on the guitar, Prince or Carlos Santana?”
“I don’t know, I love Prince and all, but I think Carlos has a slight edge.”
“Aw, come on, man.”
“Sorry, I call it as I see it, and Santana has just a wee bit more emotion going on. But the little guy is definitely blowing me away tonight.”
“Wish I was in there.”
And, retreating from the 35-year-old African-American vendor, I joined two Caucasians a bit older than me in the men’s room. We were three total strangers, lined up at urinals, and one of us began whistling the closing synth line from “I Wanna Be Your Lover.” Not ten seconds had gone by before the rest of us followed suit.
I’ve been conditioned to bear shame for my Prince fandom because of the man’s ’90s output and less than impeccable image. The Versace sh*t, the hair, the high heels, the Duran Duran-proportion makeup. But there, less than halfway through a very fine concert, I’d stumbled into some kind of Prince mecca. And, barring a pilgrimage to Paisley Park, I’m sure it will only happen once in my lifetime.
--
I came back into the arena to the painstakingly replicated sounds of the guitar solo from “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man” and stared down off the ledge, sipping approximately 45 cents worth of Bud Light and bobbing my head before I headed back up to my squatter seat.
There was still a lot of concert left – after another costume change, Prince returned to perform a silky-smooth version of the ballad “Do Me, Baby,” which brought me briefly back into the arms of mary jane. Then he pulled a random honey out of the audience and crooned “Scandalous” to her, dancing and shrieking and breaking into impressive histrionics. A glance through the binoculars revealed a look on the girl’s face that was half-impressed and half-freaked out. I couldn’t blame her.
The next two songs had me and the friend on my left longing for Rosie Gaines, the full-figured gospel singer who helped save the Diamonds and Pearls album from sinking under its own pseudo-hip-hop weight. He ran through the title track and “Nothing Compares 2 U,” the ballad first recorded by The Family and later popularized by Sinead O’Connor. On both tracks, Prince achieved a proper emotional and vocal balance with Gaines, but he high-tailed it through “Diamonds and Pearls” and was content to let the audience just sing along to “Nothing Compares.”
Prince strapped on the guitar again for “Gett Off,” a randy 1991 dance number, and invited some female dancers out of the audience to accompany him. None could hold a candle to the dancer Prince brought with him, a sexy woman who I believe occupied the most binocular-gazing time between my friends and me.
Memories of the small-club Wyclef concert I attended in Columbia earlier in the month make the comparison inevitable, but it seemed like Prince was really reaching for a block-party segment here. After “Gett Off,” he put the call out for a freestyle rapper (“I heard St. Louis got some rappers”) and grabbed a guy from the front row who promised not to “waste our time.” Lo and behold, the guy launched right into some rhymes and was almost as off-the-cuff impressive as the brother from Lawrence, Kansas, that Wyclef recruited during his concert.
“That guy’s such a ringer,” declared the friend on my left as Prince disappeared from stage once again.
I had my doubts – would someone so ego-charged as the Purple One trust his show to a no-one from the front row while he went backstage to stock up on bottled water and tofu? And, minutes later, our question was answered. The rapper launched into an intricately rehearsed back-and-forth with Prince and started some crowd chants that were a little too self-serving. Plus he was up there for like twenty minutes.
Turns out it was Doug E. Fresh, the last down-and-out mofo still riding Prince’s coattails – guess he kicked Chaka Khan and Larry Graham off the paisley apple cart sometime in the last year – but he won the crowd over by launching into a cover of “Lodi Dodi.” It was a surreal experience that conjured up the ghosts of Slick Rick and Snoop Doggy Dogg and led to the least-expected crowd sing-along (or, if you will, rap-along) of the night.
“I can’t believe all this entire audience knows the words to ‘Lodi Dodi’,” said the friend to my right.
“Come on,” I replied, “you know all these white bastards own a copy of Doggystyle just like you.”
Doug E. and the dancers stayed onstage through a seemingly impromptu version of “Come On,” from 1998’s NewPowerSoul, and Prince brought up some guys from the audience to interact with the ladies. Some tepid grinding was all we got while Prince finally took back the reins and launched into a spirited version of “Kiss.”
Another brief band intermission followed, as the stage cleared of riff-raff and Prince’s prodigy saxophonist, Najee, got his solo. I’ve heard him billed as “the black Kenny G,” but I have respect for anyone who can rotate the same breath for a good two minutes and get the audience on its feet when they didn’t even come to see him in the first place. Honestly, my musical tears of joy welled up once again, and I was glad to be in the dark. I would rather not have explained why I was on the verge of sobbing at the hands of a teenager named Najee.
Prince returned to get to the real meat of the show, the Purple Rain hits. He shuffled the sequencing a bit, but he ran through every song on the album except “Baby I’m a Star.” Surprisingly, though, Prince was in and out of “When Doves Cry” within a minute – I guess even a “hits” tour has its humbling limitations – and one of my absolute favorites, “Computer Blue,” was relegated to an instrumental-only version. But who could argue when we got “The Beautiful Ones,” “Darling Nikki” (complete with dancer writhing in a Catholic school girl outfit) and “Purple Rain” back to back to back?
He closed the concert with “I Would Die 4 U,” just like in the movie, and for once I could use the words of the Purple Rain club owner – “The Kid is in rare form tonight!” – with my own metacommentary touch of irony.
The lights came back up at exactly 11:05, and my first impulse was to declare it a shorter set than I’d been expecting. But then I thought back on all I got out of the show and how little of the usual Prince bullsh*t we were put through. You go into a Prince concert expecting to endure at least two nonsense speeches about God and spirituality, the evils of the record industry, and so on. These speeches I could accommodate if they were delivered with brevity and a hint of intelligence, but the average concert-goer would be hard-pressed to made hide nor hare of the sh*t. Luckily, the only missive we were treated to during the St. Louis show was his declaration that anyone who liked to wear fur or eat chicken was welcome to leave.
Otherwise, it was all good. It’s like he’s finally entered that humble stage of megalomania where you know you’re the sh*t but realize you still have to give the people what they want in order to survive, and you collaborate with your band to get the best possible results. The man put on a Show. Thousands of us walked out of that concert with the same spectrum of looks on our faces – stunned, awed and satisfied.
--
“Seeing Prince is such a religious experience.”
“I know. You told me that before, but I never realized it. It’s just, man… Prince…”
We took the MetroLink, St. Louis’ only excuse for mass transit, back to the airport station. None of us particularly wanted to drive downtown, and I had figured the return ride would be an interesting experience. Who wouldn’t want to be trapped in a subway car crammed full of Prince fans for a half-hour?
Our miracle of foresight was to walk a half-mile up the road to the next MetroLink station, thinking everyone else would merely walk to the Kiel/Savvis Center station, and we were right. What we didn’t count on, though, was that the MetroLink car picking us up would already be brimming with bodies. My friends packed themselves into one door, and I scrambled down the platform to the next one. That’s where I met the college beatnik pair who spoke the above.
“When he does ‘Purple Rain,’ you can always tell who the believers and non-believers are,” said the male of the pair, betraying a slight lisp. “The believers will have a completely different reaction to it, like they’re in the presence of the Lord.”
“Yeah… It’s just, man… Prince.”
I’m the biggest Prince fan I know, and I entered the concert a skeptic. But, like these freaks, I left a believer. I deliver a toast (via $5.75 beer, of course) to Prince finally learning to pull his head out of his ass.
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