When I watched Prince work, I was always reminded of the great auteurs who had done it all, like Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles. But when we filmed him creating and directing the opening to his Lovesexy tour in London in the summer of 1988, it was Mozart who came to mind.
Prince would arrive onstage in a replica of his Thunderbird convertible on a hydraulic lift to the song “Escape,” then he’d go slinking across the stage to “Erotic City,” and would meet up with Sheilah E and the dancer known as Cat at the center of the stage for some shenanigans. It was just three people dancing on a stage, but it was outrageously funky, entertaining and erotic.
His command and control of every element and aspect of the show was consummate. Songwriting. Music. Sound. Production design. Lighting design. Choreography.
As I watched him put it all together and tweak it to his perfection, I thought, Ah, this is what it must have been like when Mozart directed one of his operas. Prince was the Mozart of pop, rock, funk, and soul.
I would never have had the chance to meet Prince if he hadn’t admired my script for the 1987 documentary, Elvis ’56. As a result, I was hired as the writer of what was to be an authorized documentary about his musical life and times. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work with him. That summer I watched him launch the tour at Wembley—an amazing spectacle—and followed him as he travelled the UK and Europe.
There was a lot of controversy swirling around him after the Black Album and the naked cover of Lovesexy. As Eric Clapton put it when we filmed him, “You either love him or hate him, there’s no in-between” --and Clapton, an unabashed fan, clearly loved him.
The concerts were events that turned out the crème de la crème of the music world. People like George Clinton, Paul McCartney, and Sting were always buzzing around the show, but the real fun was the after-hours jams in clubs. That was where you saw who Prince really was—a devout musician who loved to melt your face with his guitar.
You could see how he had taken all his influences and made them all a part of his palette. You could recognize Miles Davis, Elvis, Little Richard, James Brown, Sly, Earth Wind & Fire, Stevie Wonder, Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, Joni Mitchell, Mavis Staples, Frank Zappa, countless others. Prince could be any one of them, all of them at once, or none of them at all. Prince was Prince, and he inhabited a prolific world of music and musicians that revolved around him like planets around a dazzling sun. He lived for it.
Prince was outlandishly talented but make no mistake, he could be a very weird little cat. Sometimes I’d think he could only have been beamed down from another planet. I always sensed his troubled youth in the part of him that was so withdrawn and standoffish. Conversation with him could be strained and uneasy. He could be vulnerable in his art, but the walls were up around him everywhere else. He was very preternaturally paranoid, but he also understood the power of mystique. It was Randy Newman, another fan, who remarked to us, “He doesn’t appear to be a friendly fella because he’s so remote but there’s great humor in his stuff so you know he couldn’t be a bad guy.”
His manager at the time, Bob Cavallo, told me that when Prince was nominated for Purple Rain, he was hoping it would be the night that America would get to see that Prince was just a regular guy and really connect with him…but then Prince showed up in his purple sequined hood…and that was that. Prince Rogers Nelson was anything but a regular guy.
Yes, he was vain. I never saw him without those platform shoes except for once when I saw him playing basketball and I couldn’t believe my eyes at how tiny he was without them. They must have been six or seven inches high, and when I heard he needed hip replacement surgery a few years ago, I knew it had to be those shoes.
The world of entertainment is populated by divas and control freaks like Barbara Streisand and Diana Ross—I’d been around a few of them, but I’d never met anyone as possessed by it as Prince. I began to understand it more when I went through the recently built Paisley Park, his multi-million-dollar high-tech creative play land. With its recording studios and sound stages it was his own private MGM, complete with a costume department where he designed his own clothes. Nobody could ever tell him what to do. It was obvious that he needed that to feel safe about unleashing his creativity, but there was an obsessive Howard Hughes dimension to it. I had the same feeling when I went through Graceland after Elvis died—of someone who lived entirely and profoundly in his own world.
At the finale of the Lovesexy shows, Prince would get the massive crowds to shout back at him that God is alive. Eighty thousand people shouting that God is alive would be an uncanny thing to witness anywhere but this was not a revivalist convention in Houston or a pilgrimage to Mecca, this was a rock concert. This was Wembley.
Prince would stand there and take it all in—this tsunami of spiritual energy and love that he was able to unleash—and then suddenly disappear. His worshipful fans never knew about the chute that he went down to the packing crate with wheels underneath the stage. Of course it was specially designed by him. The lid would be closed, and he’d be rolled quickly out to a limousine that would whisk him away in a matter of minutes.
I thought of it when I heard that he died, how he would be just vanish while his fans were showering the stage with love, and somehow it seemed a metaphor for many things about him.
His death felt like that, too. Poof, he was gone, and his audience had no idea what had happened or where he was, only that they’d experienced something the likes of which they would never see again…