Prince: A Flashback

Something many people don’t know about me is that I used to sing in a band. For reasons that remain unclear to me, slightly older friends who had recently formed a trio that played mostly three-chord 50’s and 60’s covers recruited 15-year-old me to play keyboards, which I did badly, and sing, which I did not do at all. Well, I sang at home and in the school chorus. But to sing into a microphone was beyond my imagining, a terrifying and unthinkable magnification of me for which I was wholly unready.

But my bandmates were clever and desperate. So as we rehearsed in the drummer’s garage, they placed a mic fifteen feet away from me, and I sang aloud without fear of being picked up. Then each time we met, they would inch it closer. I ignored it, laughing at their game and worrying vaguely that it would work. Within a few weeks, I could catch my voice in the speaker, and liking how it sounded harmonizing with the other guys, I shed my fear and put my lips to the metallic wand.

At first, I sang backing vocals. When using the mic was second nature, I sang lead. We recruited more musicians: a terrific guitarist who didn’t last, then an even better one who did; a genius keyboard and horn player who bumped me, to my relief, from piano duty; and two other singers, male and female. We updated our material, doggedly learning hits from the radio and developing a pretty solid white suburban funk punk dance pop sound. We played at proms, bars, weddings. We made people dance, which is, I can tell you, something you should experience some day. We played music we liked, and people liked us.

Now, it is an article of faith that audiences project their fantasies and desires onto performers. But when you play covers, you get a wonderful gift, which is to try on the persona of the original artist. Even if you don’t imitate them, when you sing their words, leap their intervals, pump their rhythms, you do a three-minute frenzied little dance in their skin. Maybe people get this from karaoke, I don’t know, but that’s a different energy, drunk and silly. I can tell you that I transformed when I made music for people, trying on identities that were otherwise foreign and frightening. Blondie indulged my cosmopolitan aspirations, Elvis Costello my nerdy superiority, and Eurythmics the tantalizing impossibility of being a cool woman.

Prince made me sexy.

Dig, if you will, a picture of teenaged me, repressed, virginal me, costumed and coiffed, playing at being a player. I confidently take the mic, my old enemy, and raise an eyebrow toward a gelled lock of hair curling right where I pasted it to my forehead. The beat swells, and I breathe, “I guess I should have known by the way you parked your car sideways that it wouldn’t last…”

And I would survey the crowd with bedroom eyes that had never been in a bedroom with another person, safely blinded by the glare of the lights. And precisely because there was no one pair of eyes bedrooming back at me, I could lose myself, singing, cooing, growling, pleading. Closing my eyes I remember when you drove me to the place where your horses run free… “Believe it or not, I started to worry” — and even virginal me could play that as a put-on, a wink to get us all to the next idea, the sudden and welcome excuse that “it was Saturday night, I guess that makes it all right…”

And by the time the band had driven me to the last verse, I would shake my big, damp, sticky head ecstatically, boldly — what have I got to lose? — and declare, “Move over, baby, give me the keys, I’m gonna try to tame your little red love machine…”

I left the band when I left home at the age of nineteen, shortly after finally knowing what it meant to know someone who parked his car sideways. Part of me regrets not having stuck around long enough to play 90’s Prince — after all, what grown-up man would not want to tell a lover, “I bet that if you threw that ass in the air, it would turn into sunshine,” or promise an audience, “Tonight you’re a star…and I’m the Big Dipper”?

Of course, by that time, I might have grown self-conscious about “doing” an artist like Prince: black, sexy, gifted in ways too great to approach. But Jesus, am I glad I tried him on at seventeen. There was no cape, no heels, no eyeliner. There was a bit of hair and a callow approximation of his genius. I never thought much about him as a person — how close in age we really were, what loves and fears he might have had in his private life. After all, he was a blank page for me, a screen onto which I projected fantasies and desires, a child playing in Daddy’s closet. I felt like a little boy seated at his platform boots, looking up at his wry smile expectantly. What can I say now? The brother made me a man. I certainly never thought he would die.