September 8, 1982 Met Center, I'm there with Mitch and Dan to see John Cougar (who, believe it or not, was opening up for Heart).
He comes walking on to the stage before his band or anyone else, just carrying a huge boom box that he puts on a stool in front of the lead microphone. He smiles at the crowd and says into the mic, "This is the greatest song I've ever heard!" and hits play on the boombox and we're treated to "Little Red Corvette" (the 1999 album came out a couple weeks later).
Aside from being a great story, I think it speaks to the fact that they all KNEW. By "they" I mean all the other artists, even the Hall-of-Famers, the people who studied, worked at, and were great at making songs and music.... they all knew Prince was just on another level.
I only saw Prince in concert four times (ugh, the shame, a Minneapolis music freak who loved Prince and I only saw him four times???), but I did see him play at First Ave and I did see him on the Purple Rain tour. Never saw him at Paisley Park. The last time I saw him live was at Target Center in 2001. I'm 36 at the time and concerts aren't quite as thrilling as they were when you're a teenager or in your 20's, they're just not.
Unless, of course, it's Prince.
Stage dims, the band starts playing quite background music but he's nowhere in sight. After a couple of minutes the stage gets even darker and all of the sudden he darts across the stage in the dark and hides behind a speaker. Small roar. He darts across to the other side, only this time there's a spotlight trying to catch him, but it doesn't (cuz he obviously told them not to)-- hides behind another speaker. Roar building. He does this like three more times, like a giddy little kid on Christmas morning.... then it returns to pitch black for about a minute.
Then into the mic.... "Is this my home town?" Fucking bedlam. First note hasn't even been played yet and the entire arena is stomping and screaming and half of it is bawling.
Second song was Darling Nikki and he sang right up through "met her in a hotel lobby..." then held the mic out to the crowd and grinned, we sang, and he shook his head and said, "ya'll are naughty!!!"
Jimmy Jam saying:
"When we met in junior high, Prince had the biggest afro in the world. I was envious of his hair, 'cause my mom would never let me wear it like that. I was a good keyboard player, but he was on a whole ‘nother level -- and we’re talking 12, 13 years old. He was kind of quiet, didn’t talk a lot, but when he was around music, it opened him up. You could tell that that was his comfort zone.
He was short, but he had confidence because he was a heck of a basketball player -- a point guard who could distribute, had great handles, and could shoot the lights out. Steph Curry reminds me of the way Prince played, literally. He’d run up the court and girls would scream: “Ahhh! Prince!” It was crazy. Where we lived, Minneapolis Central [High School] was known as a basketball school, and if you could play, people respected you."
Other rock stars played your songs on boom boxes in concert and compared you to Steph Curry. C'mon.