You have to pay attention to the things that make your partner respond - and space them out so they come at exactly the right time. He told me that playing a solo is like making love. "Every night I watch how he connects his gift to the crowd. "This is school for me," says Phillips, 27. That's true even for the players themselves. "Take your pick - turntable or a band?" Prince challenges on the album, and his concerts are like a clinic in inciting the sort of pandemonium that only a band can create. Part of the goal of the Musicology album and tour is to connect audiences once again to the power of live music. It made me want to rise up to that level when I came back onstage." But here's one man breathing into an instrument, and the whole room feels alive. So many shows now, they have pyrotechnics, pre-taped vocals and musical parts, and it's so dead. "I was thinking, 'Wow, listen to those people responding, and all he's doing is playing a saxophone.' They can feel that what he's doing is real. "I was offstage, listening to Michael Phillips take his solo," he continues, alluding to the instrumental portion of the show in which the saxophonist takes a long, atmospheric excursion during "God" while Prince changes clothes and takes a break. The room is warm and humid, to keep his throat and nasal passages clear and his vocal cords supple. He's sitting on a couch in his dressing room, shortly before taking the stage in Cleveland.
I had an epiphany last night," Prince says about his appearance in Columbus, Ohio.
And, as always, his enthusiasm is irresistible. After abandoning his name for an unpronounceable symbol, after painting the word "slave" on his face as part of a battle with his record label, after disowning decades of his own work, Prince is enjoying himself again. When he sings, "Don't you miss the feeling that music gave you back in the day?" in "Musicology," he might as well be speaking about his own music. Indeed, the spring of 2004 is beginning to feel like the summer of 1984, when Purple Rain made Prince one of the biggest rock stars in the world. His live shows have become ecstatic parties, sweaty, two-hour romps through the likes of "Controversy," "U Got the Look," "Take Me With U" and a sizzling version of Sam and Dave's classic "Soul Man." Nearly a recluse before, Prince is now all over the media, chatting on talk shows, posing for photographers, being interviewed by reporters. His stripped-down, pleasingly straightforward new album, Musicology, delivers on the promise of his spellbinding performances earlier this year on the Grammy Awards broadcast and at his induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Suddenly, liking Prince doesn't feel like such a chore in fact, it's fun. (2003), as well as the DVD Prince: Live at the Aladdin Las Vegas.īut whether or not you buy the message that Prince never left, it's clear that many of his millions of fans had gone somewhere in recent years, and now many of them are staging a comeback of their own. He's been as busy as ever, using his own label and his Web site, the New Power Generation Music Club, to release CDs such as The Rainbow Children (2001) and N.E.W.S. From a strictly literal standpoint, of course, that's true. Everybody in the Prince camp - most definitely beginning with Prince himself - bristles when anyone suggests that the current wave of Princemania constitutes a "comeback." The official line is that he never went away. But that's how effortless things seem to be of late for the forty-five-year-old musician. He's crisply dressed in a purple tunic and black pants and looks as if he has spent the evening relaxing in his living room rather than burning down a 20,000-seat house. It's just twenty minutes after the show, and, at a time when most performers would be just beginning to cool down, Prince is utterly composed. "What you see is people responding to what this band is - and what we're doing." "Pulverizing! That's good, too," Prince says, laughing again. Hammering only begins to convey the performance's pulverizing rhythmic assault. It was a full-on funk stomp that got the house up and shaking. Prince is responding to a description of the torrid version of "D.M.S.R." - a jam from 1999 touting the virtues of "dance, music, sex, romance" - that he and his backing band, the New Power Generation, unleashed earlier that evening at the sold-out Gund Arena in Cleveland.
It's a perfect metaphor for the electricity that seems to be coursing through the singer at the moment. Those heels, as it happens, are clear plastic, and lights twinkle within them. That's it!" Prince folds over in laughter and stamps his high-heel boots on the floor.
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