PRINCE, one criticism runs, was too talented. Ideas flowed through him like rain passing through a leaky roof, so much so that he would struggle to find enough pots and pans to catch them in. It is true that few artists have been so prolific. On average, he released a studio album every year between his first, “For You”, in 1978, and “HITnRUN Phase Two” in 2015, the last before his death on April 21st, aged 57. Perhaps he could have been a better filter for his material. By the end, the deluge became overwhelming, and albums stopped catching the mood of the public as his earlier work had. Even “Sign o’ the Times”, his 1987 double-length masterpiece, said the doubters, might be thought of as one of the greatest single-length albums never released.
But what those with lesser creativity didn't understand was that such a flow is not so easily staunched. To listen to Prince was to hear an orchestra of one. He liked working in solitude because it cut him off from outside voices, or perhaps because there were too many in his own head. He was, as he wrote on the back of his first demo tape, writer, producer, arranger, musician and singer. Even without four of those titles, he would be remembered as one of his generation's great guitarists.
Prince Rogers Nelson was born in Minneapolis, the son of two Louisiana-bred jazz musicians. Listening to his parents play, he knew early what life held for him. One demo, recorded in 1976 at the age of 17, and on which he played every instrument, was all it took to sign a manager. Success followed swiftly. In 1979, his second album, “Prince”, a work of raunchy R&B, went platinum. Yet for all his solitudinal studio habits, his purplest patch came when he recruited The Revolution, a band including Jill Jones and Lisa Coleman. That brief period, between 1984 and 1987, encompassed the albums “1999”, “Around the World in a Day” and “Parade”. Above all, Prince and the Revolution made “Purple Rain” in 1984, selling 13m copies and launching a film of the same name, with Prince in the starring role. It made him a global star—one of the first black musicians to rule in the age of MTV.
It was not only in Paisley Park, his studio in Minneapolis, that he proved tireless. On the road, too, he was relentless. It was difficult to know which was his more natural home: the stage or the sound desk. He toured 28 times between 1979 and 2015. Anyone who saw him wondered where he found the energy to strut and grind through three hours of crowd-pleasers. Yet even that didn’t exhaust him. Within an hour of coming off stage at some enormodome or other, he could often be found playing an after-show set for a small crowd in a nearby club, working his guitar just for the pleasure of it.
Yet he was intensely private and shy. Rarely did he give interviews. When he did, he found it hard to hold the interrogator's eye, mumbling nervously. He preferred to speak through his music. On that score little ground was given. In 1993 he changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol, in protest against Warner Brothers, his long-standing record label, who had the temerity to suggest he stagger his output so as not to saturate the market. At that time, it was said, he had a surplus of some 500 songs waiting for release.
His music could range from the whitest rock to the blackest soul. (Although when asked whether white people could understand his music, he replied that of course they couldn’t: “You have to live a life to understand it. Tourists just pass through.”) That made him a slippery character to grasp. He was the teetotaler, and later a Jehovah's Witness, who sang of women “in a hotel lobby masturbating with a magazine”. (Those lyrics would persuade Tipper Gore to campaign for the introduction of Parental Advice stickers on albums.) But sex was his thing; the thread linking it all. Some suggested his obsession for the libidinous stemmed from his mother who had, the story goes, taught him the facts of life by buying him pornographic magazines. Or maybe it was a way of compensating for his stature (he stood just 5’2” [1.57m]). But more likely he just enjoyed it. If Jimi Hendrix had acid and Keith Richards had Jack Daniels, Prince’s muse was to be found in the carnal.
It wasn’t always subtle. In "Gett Off", for example, he sang: “I like 'em fat, I like 'em proud / You gotta have a mother for me / Now move your big ass 'round this way so I can work on that zipper, baby / ‘Cos tonight you're a star, and I'm the Big Dipper". Maybe these lyrics should have stayed in his notebook. Bad ideas and good, neat and dirty, they all flowed though his mind, voice and guitar for a 40-year run the likes of which few musicians will ever equal. Musically or sensually, saying no was never his way.
