The tragic reality of Prince’s death

WHEN Prince walked off stage in Melbourne, there was the distinct feeling you’d just seen something that you would never see the likes of again.

WHEN Prince walked off stage in Melbourne in February for his solo show there was the distinct feeling you’d just seen something that would never be repeated by the kind of artist we’ll never see the likes of again.

Tragically, that’s now reality.

Prince’s death is, right now, surrounded by as much mystery as his life.

Like fellow gone-too-soon genius David Bowie, Prince was an enigma who just didn’t function like everyone else. Thankfully.

His last Australian tour was announced just weeks before it happened. Why? That’s how Prince operated. Every day practicalities like venues not being available when he was didn’t bother Prince, who just wanted to play. He performed two shows a night on what was his final Australian tour, partially due to demand, partially due to venues not being available for multiple nights on short notice. And, of course, because he could.

Some baulked at the $400 ticket price. In hindsight, it was a smart investment.

At the first Australian show, in Melbourne on February 16, Prince had just learned of the death of one of his first major girlfriends, Vanity, born Denise Matthews. Like Prince, she was 57 when she died.

They met in 1980, he renamed her Vanity as he said looking at her was like looking in the mirror.

At that show Prince, who’d spent his career never talking about his personal life, was uncharacteristically candid.

“She loved me for the artist I was, I love her for the artist she was trying to be,” Prince told the audience before changing song lyrics to reference her name. He told a story about a fight the “headstrong” pair had where he threatened to throw her in the pool. “You can’t throw me in the pool, you’re too little,” Prince recalled Vanity saying, before asking his six foot bodyguard Chick to soak Vanity.

Authorities release Prince 911 call

Vanity inspired many early Prince hits, including Little Red Corvette and much of Purple Rain — she was meant to be the lead in the Purple Rain movie until the pair broke up.

Purple Rain’s classic ballad The Beautiful Ones was one of the songs Prince dedicated to Vanity in Melbourne, that was also the title of Prince’s memoirs which was due to be released next year.

Prince fan Michael Pantalleresco said yesterday some fans now believe the superstar may have known his time was running out.

“Maybe he knew he was dying,” Pantalleresco said. “He was being so open with fans. The whole Piano and a Microphone tour would never have happened even four years ago. He would have never done a solo show where he’d talk to the audience about his life. He would have never written a memoir.”

Indeed as recently as 2014 Prince was actually suing his own fans for sharing bootlegs of his live performances, even though he had no plans to release himself, always preferring to move forward rather than look back. If anything he’d re-record old songs not release vintage unheard material.

Pantalleresco admitted there is a secret invite-only society of Prince fans who share every single concert he has ever performed right back to 1979, as well as the hundreds of songs that never got released (he was playing some in the latest tour).

“He did try to sue fans, but just recently he came out and said he was cool with bootlegs as long as people were sharing them for free and weren’t making money from them.”

Prince is arguably one of the most prolific artists of all time.

Molly Meldrum befriended Prince to the point where he was hired as the Australian talent scout for Paisley Park records. Meldrum recalled going to Prince’s Paisley Park HQ, home to the infamous vault where every single song Prince recorded was safely secured.

“The thought was there were several thousand songs in there because he was so prolific,” Meldrum said. “And that was in the ‘80s. He never stopped recording. He’d record all the time, even if he was on tour. He’d book a studio to go and record after the concert and after the after-party. It was unbelievable.”

Prince signed to Warner Brothers aged just 17, and by the time albums like 1999, Purple Rain, Parade and Diamonds and Pearls were selling tens of millions the superstar realised how unfair his deal was. He wrote ‘Slave’ on his face and during the early ‘90s was contractually obliged to release albums he didn’t want to issue and the label didn’t want to promote.

He signed with EMI in 1996 and then pinballed between other major labels and his own independent operations. At one point he released an album as a free giveaway with a newspaper, some were made available only as fan club downloads. This year’s Hit N Run Phase Two, remarkably his 39th studio album, was given away to those who came to his Australian shows.

In 2014 he entered a deal with Warner Brothers again, with the promise of deluxe reissues of his iconic ‘80s and ‘90s albums with the label. Purple Rain was meant to be the first, instead he released two brand new albums.

“It’ll be interesting to see what comes out of his vaults now,” Pantalleresco says. “They could do a six album box set out of just the songs he recorded for Purple Rain that weren’t used and the concerts he filmed around that time.”

Monte Morgan of Melbourne band Client Liaison was heavily inspired to get into music by Prince; he was called on stage three times by the superstar.

The long-term fan also noticed a change in Prince lately.

“He definitely had a sense of his own mortality in the last few years,” Morgan said, “His whole demeanour changed. He was talking about his father a lot. He was writing an memoir when he never wanted to talk about the past. He was doing two shows a night and then an after show at a club and reportedly was staying in that club all night not a hotel, then flying to the next show. That can’t be good for your health when you’re 57. Maybe it just wore him down?”

As with Michael Jackson (who, like Madonna and Prince, was also born in 1958) rumours always surrounded Prince, exacerbated by his secrecy and dislike of interviews. For some interviews he refused to let journalists record the conversation, asking them to commit it to memory.

Prince suffered from hip problems for the last decade, but reportedly refused to have an operation as the blood transfusions would go against his religion as a Jehovah’s Witness. It was also the reason he self-sanitised his live set, removing any songs with explicit swearing (Sexy MF) or explicit sex (Head, Soft and Wet).

Prince toured Australia four times, starting in 1992. Yesterday his local promoter Paul Dainty called Prince “a true, true icon of the music business.’’

Like his heroes James Brown and Sly Stone Prince liked to keep live concerts as live as possible. On his 2012 Australian tour he’d change the setlist each night, with his band obliged to follow along whenever he’d start playing a song on a whim.

“If you were in Prince’s band you had to be able to do what he did,” Jenny Morris says, “change it up if he felt like it.”

Morris, best known for the hit Break in the Weather, was hand-picked to open for Prince on the European leg of the Diamonds and Pearls tour in 1992.

She confirmed at least one Prince rumour — don’t look him in the eye.

“There was a list of don’ts, one of which was don’t look Prince directly in the eye, don’t approach him, don’t talk to him,” Morris said. “It was in a period of his life when he was very gun shy. He was an intensely private person anyway. I had very little interaction with him. But he was also a really warm person.”

Diamonds and Pearls was Prince’s biggest seller since Purple Rain. It was also the period where he met Mayte Garcia, who would become his first wife in 1996.

They’d have a child, Boy Gregory, who tragically died with Pfeiffer syndrome at just a week old. The married couple went on Oprah talking as though their son was still alive.

Garcia would later say of the interview “We believed he was going to come back, that souls come back. We didn’t want to acknowledge he was gone, it was our way of grieving. Losing a baby is a terrible thing. Some couples are brought closer together after the loss of a child, others are driven apart; in our case the latter happened.”

He married Manuela Testolini in 2001, a marriage that lasted five years.

Prince’s romantic CV had included Susannah Melvoin (twin sister of Wendy Melvoin, who was in Prince’s band The Revolution with Lisa Coleman) as well as rumoured affairs with Kim Basinger (the pair reportedly recorded an intimate moment for The Scandalous Sex Suite from his Batman soundtrack), Susannah Hoffs of the Bangles (who recorded his Manic Monday), drummer Sheila E (whose solo career he’d write for) and Apollonia, who replaced Vanity in Purple Rain and allegedly his bed.

Most females who worked with Prince were linked to him, although Sheena Easton claims it was lazy journalism. She was his duet partner on U Got the Look, he wrote the gynaecologically-charged Sugar Walls for one of her more carnal solo albums.

Prince was certainly attracted to working with female musicians. He worked with everyone from Kate Bush to Beyonce. He recorded songs with Kylie Minogue in the early ‘90s, the Australian superstar a teenage Prince fan. “I was one of those girls screaming in the cinema watching Purple Rain over and over,” Minogue said. “I never had posters of anyone on my wall, but I had a picture of Prince.” Their songs remain in the Paisley Park vaults.

He duetted with Madonna on Love Song, from her Like a Prayer album. The pair also attended music awards together and remained friends — last year he invited her and her touring to Paisley Park for a private show.

“It was unbelievable,” Madonna told News Corp late last year.

“We were in Minneapolis. We invited him to our show, he said he was recording an album and he wasn’t really feeling like going out in public, he was feeling kind of shy and staying at home. But he said I was welcome to come to his house and he’d give us a private show for me and my crew. So we were like ‘OK, twist our arm’. So we did. And he did. It was amazing.”

“It was lot of jazz and improvisational stuff. It wasn’t like he was doing all his hits. And he played every instrument, he just moved around the stage, played piano, played organ, played synth, played guitar, played bass. It was amazing. He’s a genius, no question.”

Madonna was one of countless musicians paying tribute to Prince’s genius after his death.

It’s hard to think of a musician who didn’t take some inspiration from Prince, if not at least respect his artistic visionary.

Darren Hayes, who sold millions of albums with Savage Garden before embarking on a solo career, is a major Prince fan who admired the way the US superstar presented an alternative take on masculinity, saying he “never conformed to gender norms.”

Hayes pointed to Around the World in a Day, Parade, Sign O the Times and Lovesexy as his favourite Prince eras.

“Those albums alone taught me more about the power of standing out and letting your freak fly than any speech or kind word from a stranger,” Hayes said in a passionate tribute on his Facebook page.

“He could have surfed the wave of Purple Rain in to lucrative mediocrity for the last 30 years but instead walked his own path and did his own thing. That has inspired me and my work ethic every single day. It’s fitting his last tour was just him and a piano. Just a genius, and the DNA of the songs he wrote.”

After the death of his hero, Prince was praised for the stance he took on valuing his music in an era of free streaming and illegal downloading.

“He understood completely the value of his music and music in general,” Jenny Morris, who now works fighting for artist royalties at APRA said. “He was a fighter for the cause.”

Hayes said he was thrilled Prince went out still refusing “to be a slave to the old corrupt ways of the music industry” and “left this earth giving the finger to conformity. You can’t find a single one of his recordings on YouTube or Spotify today. He was an artist to the very last second of his life.”