Prince Read online

  There’s sometimes confirmation in omission or denial. The one thing the movie version takes away from John Nelson is performance. Purple Rain is no more than semi-autobiographical, if it is even that, but it scatters important clues. Prince is cast as ‘The Kid’, a sulky, selfish wannabe who turns the basement of a shabby frame house into a softly lit laboratory of music and seduction. Upstairs, his parents fight and make up, fight and make up, and it isn’t clear which disturbs The Kid more or whose attention he really covets. When he intervenes on his mother’s behalf, he is slapped down. She is light-skinned (certainly light-skinned enough to be Italian, and actually played by a Greek actress) but passive and curiously anonymous. We last see her sitting wretchedly in the street with her back turned, perhaps to hide her bruises but also to suggest that she matters less to this story than the brooding figure of the man who beats her.

  By contrast, the camera lingers on Francis L., a powerful, handsome man, caught between utter stillness and explosive violence, elegantly dressed for a world he seems disinclined to enter. The Kid’s father is a frustrated and self-destructive artist, shut away in his own basement, playing exquisite piano in the darkness. The boy tracks him down there, roaring ‘Motherfucker’ through the empty house like some disco Hamlet. His fury abates as he listens to Francis play, but underneath the tenderness of the moment – for all its raunch, the movie’s only convincing love scene – there is an act of denial. When The Kid asks if he writes down his songs, Francis puts a forefinger to his head: they’re locked away there. It’s a highly ambiguous gesture in the circumstances. A little later, Francis puts a gun to that same temple and shoots himself. In the aftermath, The Kid/Prince finds a locked trunk of unperformed compositions in the cellar, all of them signed Francis L. We see him take his father’s place, creatively if not Oedipally. The most important object in the movie isn’t the growling purple motorbike or the equally phallic guitar bought for him by Apollonia, the girl who sets free his oddly passive libido and then becomes a rival performer. The most important object in the film is Francis L.’s piano, its clinching frame another turned-back shot, this time of the son going about his father’s business.

  When the success of Purple Rain allowed Prince to move into a brand-new custom-built mansion, John was given the old purple house down from Paisley Park and a similarly coloured BMW; in return he gave Prince the white Thunderbird mentioned in 1988’s ‘Alphabet St’. John continued to show up in the star’s entourage, with ever younger girlfriends. He was there for the ceremonial unveiling of the completed Around the World in a Day (1985), on which John L. Nelson has two co-writing credits. The father–son partnership continued on Parade with ‘Christopher Tracy’s Parade’ and ‘Under the Cherry Moon’, and the rapprochement seemed firmly cemented by the time of the Batman soundtrack, made in 1989, which has one track, ‘Scandalous’, credited to Prince and Nelson Sr. Inevitably, though, like almost every Prince associate, John believed that other songs were at least partly his work and the relationship foundered. John wasn’t present on Valentine’s Day 1996 when his son married Mayte.

  For a time, Prince had seemed keen to foster his father’s career. There were other motives behind the call, but a decade earlier, Prince had picked up the phone to a former manager and sometime collaborator and asked him to listen to John Nelson’s tapes and consider producing an album. Chris Moon was the mildly eccentric Englishman and adoptive Minneapolitan who wrote the original lyric to what became the title song of Prince’s first album For You, or at least so he claimed. He and Prince parted company amicably enough – though there were copyright wrangles later – and it was Owen Husney who brokered the soon to be controversial contract with Warner Brothers. Whether Prince retained an affection for Moon, nursed a grudge or a sense of guilt depends on how you read the signs scattered in the work (the ‘Christopher’ pseudonym and the money obsession of Under the Cherry Moon). It is telling that Chris Moon should have been his first thought as the man to kick-start John Nelson’s stalled career.

  How much in turn Nelson had helped his son with his developing passion for music isn’t known, presumably not much. The marriage foundered before Prince was in fourth grade. Thereafter, Prince was pretty much brought up by family friend Bernadette Anderson. Contact with his father was, for the time being, intermittent.

  Interestingly, when Prince spoke to the BBC in 1981, he traced his interest in sexual themes to reading his mother’s ‘dirty books’. It’s tempting to think that the stash of porn was really his father’s, but it seems Mattie’s idea of sex education was to give her son Playboy magazines to read. It hardly matters, because Prince quickly tired of other people’s fantasies and started to write down his own.

  Purple Rain offers only teasing glimpses of how things might have been or might have seemed to an imaginative boy. There is no complicating sibling in the movie, but two years after Prince was born John Nelson and Mattie Shaw had one other child, a girl christened Tyka (Tika Evene) who pops up in the release sheets for 1988 with an album for Chrysalis and then disappears again. John and Mattie drifted apart and were divorced in 1966, when Prince was nine. More unusual was their son’s behaviour. Rather than split his loyalties, or plump for life with one parent rather than the other, Prince turned his back on both. Having left his mother and stepfather to live with John Nelson for a time, at thirteen he was ostensibly alone and self-sufficient. One persistent story suggests that he lived rough. This is a familiar element of myth, comparable to Bob Dylan’s hobo days and Kurt Cobain’s sojourn under the Aberdeen bridge. In reality Prince was being looked after by a family friend, a South Side neighbour and fellow Seventh Day Adventist called Bernadette Anderson, whose son Andre – later Andre Cymone – was a mainstay of the Grand Central band and Prince’s most stimulating early musical associate.

  The exact circumstances are, as usual, not entirely clear. Bernadette Anderson remembers that Prince had regular fallouts with his dad, but that things came to a head when a girl, perhaps the first of many infatuated soul-girls, followed him home after a rehearsal night. According to Bernadette, his father threw the boy out of the house and he came to her. By the time this is supposed to have happened John Nelson had moved out and Mattie was living with a guy called Hayward Baker. He has an important role in the development of Prince the musician, because it seems he took the boy to see a James Brown concert and even put the ten-year-old up on stage to dance with the star, until a security man dragged him off. (According to Brown himself, Prince repeated the experience more officially in 1984, when he and Michael Jackson played guest spots, the three Hardest Working Men in Showbusiness together on the same stage.) However warmly he might have remembered that childhood epiphany, Prince was suspicious of his mother’s new partner, and some former associates suggest that it was Baker and not John Nelson who beat him.

  Prince continued to spend time with John. If the two were crashing in what was effectively a bachelor pad, there may well have been tensions if the son brought a girl home; or it may be that Baker was uneasy about a growing boy sharing the house on Fifth Avenue South and it was he who precipitated the final leave-taking. Whatever the case, it seems that Nelson gave his blessing to the new arrangement. As well he might have, since Bernadette Anderson was no ordinary woman, a tough, generous soul with a strong record in community activism. She is explictly thanked on the 1992 album: ‘Bernadette the lady – she told me / Whatever U do, son, a little discipline is what you need.’ (The track is the strange, autobiographical ‘The Sacrifice of Victor’, in which Prince adopts a new identity.)

  Prince is not unusual in having, as well as a full sister, an array of step- and half-siblings. John Nelson had three children by his previous marriage – including Lorna Nelson, who claimed, unsuccessfully, to have written ‘U Got the Look’ – but the household also included Vivienne Nelson’s child from a previous relationship; Prince’s childhood companion Duane was later a Paisley Park employee, before falling foul of the law. Is he the brother ‘hand
some and tall’ who’s paid back in one of those vicious sexual thrusts in ‘Lady Cab Driver’? Prince was also close to Mattie and Hayward’s son Omar. Casual adoptions are not unusual and children are often raised by grandparents, aunts (Prince briefly attempted to move in with his aunt Olivia) and non-family members. It was generous if not heroic of Mrs Anderson to offer a home to yet another troubled adolescent. Selective versions of his time there provided media profilers with the first clues to what made Prince tick. In a crowded house, lines have to be drawn. The published legend deemed that at least one of them should be literal. Did Prince or Andre really run a strip of tape down the centre of their tiny bedroom? Real or invented, it separated Prince’s fussy order from Andre’s adolescent clutter and separated Prince from his immediate surroundings, an early token of what is either remoteness or a sign of intense powers of concentration. Bernadette later moved him into the basement, where he could order his life more comfortably.

  More than any comparable artist, Prince has been a victim of the pop psychologists. Once you hear the work and see the performing self as consolation for a stolen childhood and overcompensation for small stature Prince is reduced to his own fantastical creation. When at the age of twenty he released a record written, performed and produced entirely by himself, the media gratefully seized on an image of Prince as a precocious loner and equally gratefully accepted every perverse tidbit he threw their way. What makes For You (1978) an epoch in American popular music can’t be explained by back-of-envelope psychology. To see Prince as a grubby child excitedly waving the treasure he’s found is to be distracted by the glister. What is interesting about Prince is the dust rather than the gold. To understand him, one needs to understand the industry he helped to transform, and to understand Minneapolis.

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  In 1985 Minneapolis Genius – The Historic 1977 Recordings appeared on the Hot Pink label. This is the kind of tribute LP normally only accorded dead artists like Miles Davis, whose studio sweepings are now boxed and sold at platinum card prices. The music on it was in similar sketchy form, mostly shapeless instrumentals that cried out for a strong-handed producer, though one of them, ‘If You Feel Like Dancing’, later became a club favourite. The material was attributed to a band called 94 East, but the styling of the cover – purplish, with a white dove holding a rose in its bill – coupled with the Minneapolis provenance, was intended to leave potential purchasers in no doubt that this was a Prince product. A couple of years later, the notorious Black Album (1987, released 1994) would become the decade’s most celebrated bootleg, but Minneapolis Genius has a prior place in the story.

  There was no risk of ambiguity or confusion in the title. In 1985, there was only one genius in the Twin Cities and that was Prince. Back in 1977, when those tracks were cut, a television series that had strongly conditioned America’s view of Minneapolis was just coming off the air, though only to enter the strange purgatory of the network repeat cycle. The Mary Tyler Moore Show was actually shot in California with a feisty Brooklyn girl as its protagonist, but Mary’s lopsided grin and rueful stoicism in the face of eternal human stupidity spoke volumes about her Minneapolis home and workplace. Those Americans with a more political perspective might have remembered that Minnesota was the heartland of liberal Democrat hopeful Eugene McCarthy, who managed to survive 1968 unassassinated and sweetly irrelevant.

  Almost everyone who lived there before the Prince revolution reflects a similar ambivalence. In the 1970s Minneapolis was a safe town and a dull town. An enviable record in civil rights and racial coexistence does not make a place funky. To that extent, Minneapolis was both the right and the wrong place for Prince to grow up: wrong in the sense that it lacked the deep roots in black music that could be taken for granted elsewhere, such as Detroit and Chicago; right in that it allowed him to develop at his own pace and on his own terms. In return, Prince created the brand new something that was called the Minneapolis sound. He also did what local boys made good often do and bequeathed the town a monument to his own success (or in Prince’s case his own hyperactive self-determination), a version of Camelot and a more grown-up version of Michael Jackson’s playpen Neverland. The Paisley Park studio complex sits about half an hour’s ride outside Minneapolis, alongside Highway 5, at 7801 Audubon Road in Chanhassen. It’s now a bigger draw than the city’s celebrated Museum of Questionable Medical Devices.

  The extent to which Prince invented the Minneapolis scene has been endlessly debated. The mythological version likes to paint him as a younger, yet more potent version of a Fisher King, bringing energy and (purple) rain to a musically arid and sexless place. The more sober version points to a quiet infrastructure of studios, joints and rehearsal rooms, the world in which John Nelson worked away quietly. As so often in American stories, the mythological version wins out.

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  Remarkably, given where it sits on the North American continent, Minnesota is washed by the Mississippi. The great river is integral to black America and black American music. In slave narratives and sociological treatises, in the testimony of educated freedmen and in musical histories, the journey north is portrayed as a mystical portage up from bondage and towards liberation, a salmon ladder in terms of cultural evolution. It was, you’ll still read it argued, the journey against the flow of the Mississippi that helped turn inchoate field hollers and marching tunes into Chicago blues and New York bebop, ultimately Detroit and Philly soul as well. If those cities far away from the headwaters felt its influence, why not Minneapolis?

  In 1963, a year of acutely sharpened ethnic awareness in America and Prince’s first year at grade school, the collective population of Minneapolis and St Paul was still well shy of two million. That figure included only about 50,000 African-Americans, mostly clustered up on the North Side, which made Minneapolis just 3 per cent black. Mattie Shaw was an exception. As black southerners moved north in search of economic opportunity, Minnesota stood aside from the demographic mainstream, as it had been since it became a territory (not yet a state) in 1849; in that year, just forty free persons of colour lived there. Between 1860 and 1870, deeply troubled years in American history, the censused black population rose from 259 to 759, largely as a result of freed slaves travelling north with Minnesotan soldiers. In the early years of the twentieth century, the black population of the state experienced a significant drop.

  At a casual glance, the city seems to fit the usual urban American sociological stereotype of rich-white-quarter abutting poor-black-quarter. According to her recollection, in 1967 Prince and his sister Tyka were part of a ‘bussing’ experiment to desegregate Minneapolis schools. There is also a reference to this on ‘The Sacrifice of Victor’ from the album (1992). This was the direct result of a 1954 decision in the case of Brown vs the Board of Education in Topeka, Kansas, in which Supreme Court Justice Warren ruled that segregation of schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution and that the principle of ‘separate but equal’ was unconstitutional. The idea was to prevent the insidious ghettoisation of the inner cities by moving black schoolchildren into basically white catchments, and vice versa. Twenty years later, Milliken vs Bradley’s revelation that there were deep flaws in that ruling were pounced on by the Reagan administration as it took a cost-cutting scythe to social services. The picture since has been one of steady resegregation, though slower, significantly enough, in the Twin Cities than elsewhere.

  This is consistent with the area’s long history of political liberalism. A decade after Milliken vs Bradley, Minnesota stood alone in its opposition to Reagan’s presidential candidacy, pulling the switch for another forgotten man of American politics, Democrat Walter Mondale. In his study The Negro in Minnesota (1961) Earl Spangler points out that Minnesota was the first state to grant full suffrage to blacks under the terms of the Fifteenth Amendment. A similar picture emerges in June Drenning Holmquist’s 1981 They Chose Minnesota, a survey of the state’s ethnic groups, and in David Vassar Taylor’s Blacks in Minnesota (1976)
and his more recent African-Americans in Minnesota (2002) (Minnesota Historical Society/Press). There were notorious lynchings near Duluth in 1920, sparked as such episodes often were by alleged ‘gross insult’ to a white woman, but the obsessiveness with which these incidents are reasoned away as pathological aberrations in Minnesotan histories suggests that such acts of crude violence were by no means the norm. Here was a state with a markedly good record in interracial relations, if not quite a colour-blind paradise.

  Five years after Prince and Tyka graduated from John Hay Elementary and started taking the bus a few blocks downtown to Bryant Junior High School, riots flared in Minneapolis as they did almost everywhere in urban America. Several businesses were burned and the police department, reckoned to be the most holstered and restrained in North America, went out and cracked heads. If raw statistics and the chaos theory of dissent mean anything, the violence in Minneapolis in 1968 wasn’t a direct reaction to adverse social conditions. Clearly it was more than a television-fuelled carnival of destruction given a political and sociological rationale after the fact, but it was certainly not the ideologically driven ghettos-on-fire picture that had emerged that year across the continent. However few in number, blacks in Minneapolis enjoyed an easier coexistence with the white majority than they could have expected almost anywhere else. They lacked the critical mass to be defined as a major problem or to sustain a completely autonomous cultural development. And yet, in his song ‘The Sacrifice of Victor’, Prince refers explicitly to the riots as his moment of politicisation.

  Compared to the average African-American teenager growing up in the larger cities of the north, Prince’s musical heritage was disproportionately white. If it seems self-evident that his main influences as a performer were Sly Stone, Rick James and Jimi Hendrix, it’s arguable that what he learned from each of them (and from Rick James at closer quarters when he opened for him on tour in 1979) was more about presentation than about music. The fact remains that much of the music Prince and his Minneapolis contemporaries listened to as teenagers was white pop and heavy rock. In February 1981, as Dirty Mind was taking off, Prince built on his nascent White Negro hipster-hoodlum persona by telling Rolling Stone that he’d grown up on an ethnic borderline. ‘I had a bunch of white friends and a bunch of black friends. I never grew up in one particular culture.’ It may have contributed to the mythology, but this part of it at least was true. It’s worth remembering that Jimi Hendrix, born in Seattle long before Seattle was a real music town, made his name with English musicians and a pale Geordie manager, the late Chas Chandler.