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I regret to say that July 27th, 2004 was the first time I saw Prince (1958-2016) perform live. I regret it not because the show was sub-par, rather the show was so blatantly great that I can’t believe it took me this long to get on the Prince train.
Sure the guy was a bit wacky – I remember a moment during this concert when he sat on the stage in a big easy chair, nonchalantly reading a newspaper and shunning the screaming crowd, shaking his head as if to say, “oh no, you can yell all you want but it’s just not enough to get me out of this chair and up playing again.”
And then there was the symbol thing, the “slave” tattoo, and a thousand other stories of a man clearly out of step with “normal” rockstarisms.
But what can you make of a guy who could astound people on up to twenty different instruments while he was still a teenager? A guy who had record companies eating out of his hand before he was old enough to legally drink? A guy who all but took over the 80’s scene and yet still got compared to Jimi Hendrix? Movies, albums, songwriting, choreography, and much, much respect within the industry as a whole, and all the while in a constant fight with lawyers and businessmen for tighter control of his music.
It’s interesting to note that one of his biggest beefs with Warner Music was their unwillingness to release music at the pace that he was making it, and the record company’s contractual insistence that Prince keep to just one album every year or two.
I didn’t officially ’get’ Prince until I saw Purple Rain on VHS when I was well into my twenties, and even then it was just a matter of taking him out of the Who Cares category and placing him precariously into the He’s Okay bin of artists that I still all but refused to listen to.
And so it wasn’t until this concert that I became a fan.
What really blew me away at this show was his musicianship. The guy was just so remarkably good I can’t believe he wasn’t already all over my radar from guitar magazine covers and top-10 “best player” lists, but I guess the widdley-widdley Van Halen/Steve Vai media machine took even longer than I did to appreciate Prince’s talents.
At this show he was playful and energetic and he commanded the stage-in-the-round like the seasoned pro he was. He was playing for his recently adopted hometown Toronto crowd and he seemed to be having a good time, and so was I.
I walked out of there knowing that I had a lot of ground to make up for and for the next dozen years I kept my eyes glued to the internet watching and waiting for his sporadic and sudden show announcements.
When Prince died in 2016 it hit me harder than any of the countless musician deaths that seemed to flood in one after another that year. A trip to New Orleans had prevented me from attending either his Montreal or Toronto piano concerts, and that only adds to the regret.
Todd Man Out 