At some point in the sweltering afternoon, the show stopped. The massive audience that filled the outdoor football arena didn’t know the reason for the lengthy intermission, but backstage, people were milling about, drinking, eating stadium food and gossiping about the Isleys not going onstage until they got paid.
That’s when I noticed him. The 18-year-old one-man-band I’d heard Warner recently signed calling himself Prince (when his record came out, nobody believed that was his real name) was standing alone next to a small huddle of people, eavesdropping as they discussed what they’d heard about the drama. Prince stood near but just away, obviously trying to read lips and listen, like the new kid in grade school who, while shy about making friends, wants someone to talk to but is ignored.
Sporting a full afro, thin, neglected mustache and wearing the funky ensemble one is left with when they can’t afford to achieve a desired effect, Prince resembled a diminutive, after-taxes wanna-be. He appeared lonely and out-of-place, like a corny, singular hanger-on to be avoided.
With Funkadelic and Bootsy being fellow Warner acts, I figured Prince, new to the label, was either given tickets and backstage passes or was actually brought to the show by Warner reps wanting to give the label’s latest addition a glimpse of the Big Time. I considered going over and introducing myself, but I was too busy taking in everything else.
I didn’t exactly glimpse him and say, “Wow, there’s music’s next big thing.” Prince himself could not have known that someday he’d actually help out two of the acts performing that day: Chaka Khan in 1984 would hit with a cover of his “I Feel For You”; in 1989 George Clinton would sign with Prince’s Paisley Park label.
After the April 1978 release of For You, his first album, I kept an eye on Prince. I was there for his dismal garage band debut L.A. performance at Hollywood’s Roxy Theatre, where, in knee high stripper boots–accompanied by childhood friend Andre Cymone on bass along with guitarist Dez Dickerson, Gayle Chapman and Matthew “Dr.” Fink on keyboards and Bobby Z. on drums–he employed every clichéd rock star pose and stripped down to nothing but animal print bikini underwear and his now trademark Hohner Telecaster guitar. The next day people were talking about that show-—how horrible it was.
On the upside, Prince exhibited quite the full-bodied perm hairdo, which he played like an instrument, flipping it around as he shimmied and shook.
I was there for his redemption in early 1982 at the 3,000-seat Santa Monica Civic Auditorium during the Controversy tour. That’s when I first witnessed the Prince whose budding onstage prowess and finesse would only mature with every album and tour. By the time he broke into the funky, smoldering “Let’s Work,” I was hooked. I left that concert in a daze, trying to remember everything I saw and heard.
In the ‘80s Prince spent quite a bit of time in L.A. I’d see him at hot spots on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip-—Le Dome restaurant and bar, the chic music industry hang; El Privado, the exclusive club above Carlos n’ Charlie’s restaurant, where he’d sit in smug indifference inside a roped off section, usually with a pretty girl, and his menacing-looking wrestler turned bodyguard “Big” Chick Huntsberry. Occasionally he was joined by Eddie Murphy.
I never bought into the farcical notion that I could not speak to Prince. Sometimes he’d nod. Most of the time, though, his reply was a solemn gaze that begged, Why are you talking to me?
By the way, let me dispel the myth right here and now: Prince. Was. Not. Shy. Ever. He was not. He was funny and for a short cat, talked a whole lot of shit. The shy thing, like every other element of his public persona-—how he dressed, gestured, walked, talked, what he said and didn’t say–was of deliberate, calculated design. From the beginning, Prince, a true student of show business, set out to create a mysterious aura about himself, which he achieved brilliantly.
The shy bit officially started during Prince’s 1979 appearance on the iconic TV dance show, American Bandstand when, after his lip-synced performance of “I Wanna Be Your Lover,” a mute Prince frustrated host Dick Clark during the post-performance interview, communicating mostly with hand gestures and nodding his head.
Clark, gracious during the taping, was furious off camera, vowing that Prince would never again appear on a Clark-produced program. All was forgiven years later when the by-then superstar Prince and the Revolution’s performance was the highlight of a Clark-produced American Music Awards telecast.
In Los Angeles in the 1980s, Prince seemed to be everywhere. One afternoon I happened to look out the window of Black Beat’s sixth floor window at Sunset-Vine Towers in time to catch a custom-painted purple 1980s Fleetwood Cadillac pull into the parking lot of a McDonalds across the street, on Vine.
Bodyguard Huntsberry got out of the front passenger side, went into Mickey D’s and returned with a big bag of fast food. He handed it through the window of the back door on the right side of the car and got back in the front passenger seat. The purple Fleetwood sat in the lot for a good 30 minutes before moving on, completely ignored by people walking through the lot.
Prince was a huge favorite of Black Beat readers, its editor—-me–being his biggest devotee. However, Beat, a “fan” magazine by definition, didn’t sip the purple Kool-Aid mindlessly. We covered “His Royal Badness” and his various acts–the Time, Shelia E., The Family, Jill Jones, etc.-—with an objectivity that, so I was told, didn’t always sit well with Prince. I figured he had a hard-on for me, hence my unwillingness to make the trek to Paisley Park.
And, I didn’t like the no-interview bullshit. It wasn’t like Prince wasn’t doing them at all; he talked to Rolling Stone and other “pop” (read: white) publications. It just seemed like more of the same inequitable treatment the Black press usually got from certain Black entertainers and their handlers in the ‘70s and ‘80s, which usually went like this: before the “pop” market knew who they were, these artists would be elated to see themselves in and on the cover of such Black publications as Ebony, Jet, Black Stars, Essence and Soul Newspaper.
That Time Prince Invited Me To Hang Out At Paisley Park was originally published on blackamericaweb.com
