Prince’s purple reign transformed music—and our lives. From humble beginnings he created the world he wanted to live in, a funky fantasy that inspired millions
CLEANING UP HIS ACT? Hardly. The 1984–85 Purple Rain tour saw Prince make provocative use of the bathtub from which he so memorably emerged naked in the video for “When Doves Cry.”
“ ‘A strong spirit transcends rules,’ Prince once said—and nobody’s spirit was stronger, bolder or more creative.”
—PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA
EVEN A PRODIGY PRACTICES Teenage Prince spent most of his time playing in the high school music room, recalled a former classmate. He tried to play his father’s piano at age 3 though he wasn’t allowed; by age 7 he was banging away at the keys.
“It would be silly to say that he inspired our music . . . It’s beyond that. He’s somewhere within every song I’ve ever written.”
—JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE
DUTCH TREATS Prince in Rotterdam in 1988 with two of the ladies most important to the Lovesexy world tour: virtuoso percussionist Sheila E. (left) and choreographer and dancer Cat Glover.
“I’ve heard him play piano like Chick Corea or Herbie Hancock, move over to bass and play like Larry Graham, then play guitar like Jimi Hendrix or Buddy Guy.”
—SHERYL CROW
THE ROCK STAR He was still three years away from officially changing his name to the unpronounceable glyph, but by the time of this 1990 concert in Germany, Prince had clearly already settled on the basic design of the “love symbol,” visible on his necklace.
“And just like that . . . the world has lost a lot of magic. Rest in peace, Prince!”
—KATY PERRY
GAME ON When NFL officials worried about Prince playing the 2007 Super Bowl XLI halftime show in a torrential downpour, he asked them, “Can you make it rain harder?” The New York Times wrote, “The heavy rain made the smoke and lights seem mysterious, instead of merely ridiculous. And there was a sneaky thrill in watching Prince steal the field from guys three times his size, if only for a few moments.”
“My friend is gone . . . This is what it sounds like when doves cry. He was my dove.”
—STEVIE NICKS
THE LOOK BOOK Vaguely monastic—except for the Dali-esque glasses—in 2004.
Celebrating his symbolic name change at the World Music Awards in 1994.
In a chain-mail veil (that had to hurt, right?) and policeman’s cap for a 1992 show in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
We are gathered here today to get through this thing called Life
By Eliza Berman
In the pink at the Forum in L.A. in 1985.
WHEN PRINCE DIED AT 57 on April 21, 2016, the world turned purple with grief. The unexpected passing of one of the best-selling recording artists in music history came as a shock to those who had, in Prince’s music, found a soundtrack to their youths, an antidote to their loneliness and permission to simply be: if the world could embrace a man whose every fiber defied easy categorization, then it should be able to embrace any one of us.
Last seen the night before his death, Prince was found “unresponsive” and alone in an elevator at his Paisley Park estate in Chanhassen, Minn., and was unable to be revived from CPR attempts. There were no signs of trauma, nor was there reason to believe the artist had taken his own life. Less than one week earlier, Prince, who had reportedly been battling the flu for several weeks, was hospitalized after his plane made an emergency landing in Illinois. He was later released to recover at home. Before his hospitalization, he had postponed two shows he was scheduled to play in Atlanta as part of his “Piano and a Microphone” tour.
In the week following Prince’s death, officials discovered prescription painkillers in his possession, and speculation whirled about the role they may have played in his demise. And though the findings lent credence to rumors that his recent hospitalization might have been linked to an overdose, it would still be weeks before authorities would release an official cause of death. As fans awaited answers, they found solace in the Purple One’s memory—in all-night sing-alongs in his native Minneapolis and in a show of violet lights cast upon Niagara Falls in honor of the birthday of Queen Elizabeth II but immediately reimagined as a vision of purple rain.
Born Prince Rogers Nelson in Minneapolis in 1958, Prince was immersed in music from a young age. He was named for his father, John Lewis Nelson, a pianist and songwriter who performed under the stage name Prince Nelson. His mother, Mattie Della Shaw, who later became a social worker, was a jazz singer who often sang with her husband. Prince had one full sister, Tyka Nelson, born in 1960, and would have many half siblings later in life.
Prince’s childhood wasn’t easy. He suffered from epilepsy and would later attribute his flashy performance style to an attempt to reclaim his voice after years of being teased in school. Life at home brought its own set of difficulties. He would later tell People that his father had trouble showing emotion, and his parents split up before he was 10. After being passed between friends and relatives, he moved in with a neighborhood family, the Andersons, whose son Andre—later known as André Cymone—would become a close musical collaborator during their teenage years and beyond.
Despite the instability at home—and the rotating addresses at which home could be found—Prince found a constant in music. He wrote his first song, called “Funk Machine,” on his father’s piano at the age of 7. He formed his first band, called Grand Central and later Champagne, with Anderson and a cousin, Charles Smith, while the trio were students at Central High School in Minneapolis. By then he played piano, guitar and drums. He eventually mastered enough instruments to populate an orchestra, if only he had that many hands.
Prince’s early years brought friendships with several musicians upon whose careers he would have a major influence. One of them, James Harris III—better known as producer Jimmy Jam—met Prince in junior high, a time when the former describes the latter as having “the biggest Afro in the world.” Jam remembers Prince as a quiet young man, and perhaps the only pursuit that brought him to life as much as music was basketball, which he would continue to play throughout his adult life. What the 5'2" high-school player lacked in height, he made up for in skill and tenacity—and a teased-out ’do.
Though Prince would come to embrace his hometown and build a life there, he worried that it would be difficult to break out from Minneapolis. That fear would prove unfounded: at age 17, he entered into a contract with local businessman Owen Husney, and he soon recorded a demo that would land him at Warner Bros. in 1978. On his first album, For You, Prince not only produced, composed and arranged the music but played every single instrument required to record the songs—a grand total of 27. His first big hit would come soon after, with the release of his second album, Prince, in 1979. “I Wanna Be Your Lover” sold more than a million copies and earned the musician a spot on American Bandstand the following year.
The 1980s saw Prince propelled further into stardom with the release of his album 1999, in 1982, and the 1984 release of the musical film Purple Rain and its accompanying original soundtrack. The movie, which earned accolades for its cinematography of live performances, garnered an Oscar for its music, which included the singles “When Doves Cry” and “Let’s Go Crazy,” both of which would become among the artist’s most iconic songs. By that time, Prince’s highly sexualized lyrics had established his image as a provocateur, and his blend of funk, pop and rock was beginning to bear influence on fellow pop and R&B artists, in particular Minneapolis-based artists like Janet Jackson.
In 1993, Prince changed his name to an unpronounceable icon, a mashup of the symbols for male and female. The change was largely read as a slight to Warner Bros., with whom he had disagreements about the rate at which new albums would be released, but it also spoke to his androgynous presentation and inclination to play with established gender boundaries. The dispute with his label was so bitter that Prince took to appearing in public with the word “slave” written across his face. He would reclaim his name in 2000, after getting out of his contract with Warner Bros. Though he released albums prolifically throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, he would also reclaim a limelight that had somewhat waned, with a performance alongside Beyoncé at the 2004 Grammy Awards and his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by Alicia Keys that same year.
Prince was as private about his personal life as he was demonstrative onstage. He famously prohibited reporters from recording interviews. But the basic details of his romantic attachments are known. He was linked to many women—among them Madonna, Kim Basinger and Sheena Easton—and he married twice, first to Mayte Garcia in 1996 and then to Manuela Testolini in 2001.
He met a 16-year-old Garcia backstage at a concert in 1990, and she began working for him as a backup dancer two years later. After marrying on Valentine’s Day in 1996, the couple had a son, Boy Gregory, who died at one week old from Pfeiffer syndrome, a rare genetic disorder. They experienced a miscarriage soon after, and the tragedies took their toll on the relationship. After finalizing his divorce from Garcia in 2000, Prince married Testolini the following year; their marriage lasted five years.
The early 2000s also brought a major change in Prince’s spiritual life, as he embraced a new identity as a Jehovah’s Witness in 2001. Though Prince’s parents had raised him as a Seventh-day Adventist, both his career and his public persona throughout the 1980s and 1990s demonstrated a departure from the strict religious environment of his youth. As a convert to his new faith in later years, Prince became “Brother Nelson” and sometimes donned a conservative suit and tie as a door-to-door evangelist.
An outspoken supporter of animal rights, Prince was for many years a vegan, but his new religious identity brought with it further restraint in daily habits. He limited his drinking and installed a “cuss bucket” in his studio in Paisley Park: the utterance of a swear word in his presence could cost a visitor anywhere from $3 to $10. Some who were close to him attribute the exacerbation of issues with his health to his adherence to another tenet of his faith: his refusal to accept blood transfusions during surgery. After decades of athletically taxing performances, the musician experienced a great deal of pain in his hips. And although he often walked with a cane, he never underwent the double hip replacement that might have brought him some relief.
Whatever pain Prince may have faced did not hold him back as a performer. His 2007 Super Bowl halftime performance at Dolphin Stadium in Miami, during which he played a rousing medley of classics by Chuck Berry and Bob Dylan as well as his own songs—including an emotional rendition of “Purple Rain” while nonchalantly getting drenched by a chance thunderstorm—is widely regarded as the most impressive halftime show in history.
In recent years, Prince kept issuing new albums—including four in the last 18 months of his life—and touring globally, up through the tour cut short by his death. Even as the albums released later in his career produced fewer recognizable hits than his earlier work, his peers continued to regard him as a genius, an innovator and an artist in the truest sense of the word.
In a career spanning five decades, Prince sold more than 100 million records worldwide and won seven Grammys, a Golden Globe and an Academy Award. He achieved the status of a legend long before reaching his late 50s, transcending genre and bucking convention in every aspect of his music, even while maintaining an eccentric and often inscrutable persona.
If that mask sometimes obscured the man at its core, it seemed only to enhance his status as an icon. In the three days following Prince’s death, sales of his deep catalog spiked a reported 42,000%, the purchase of millions of tracks almost like a collective effort on the part of humanity to erase the fact that the man was truly gone.
Though he won’t be able to complete the memoir he announced in March, he has left the world with a gift that can hardly be captured in words—not that, with the dozens of albums he leaves behind, we ever really needed it to be.
BECOMING PRINCE: on the eighth-grade hoops team.
Smoldering in 1979.
THE SHOW’S THE THING: in 1983 on the 1999 tour.
The Swiss were anything but neutral at Prince’s July 1990 show in Basel.
Opening the 2004 Grammys with Beyoncé
The rain—purple and otherwise—came down at 2007’s Super Bowl XLI in Miami.
CONNECTICUT’S LUCKY NIGHT Performing at the Mohegan Sun Arena in Uncasville in 2013.
Some Princely Numbers
By Mahita Gajanan
100,000,000 Prince records sold worldwide
7 Years Prince went by an unpronounceable glyph
39 Shows on Prince’s last major tour, “Hit and Run”
7 Grammy Awards
1 Academy Award, for Best Original Song Score for “Purple Rain” from Purple Rain
3 Razzies, all for Under the Cherry Moon
1 “Sexiest Vegetarian” title from PETA
11 Minutes Prince performed at Super Bowl XLI
80 Months between the time Prince announced he was retiring the song “1999” (on New Year’s Eve 1999) and the time he performed it again
1 Unforgettable episode of New Girl (above) in which Prince played himself
42,000% Amount sales of Prince’s music surged in the three days after his death
NEXT TO LAST TIME Giving his penultimate performance, the early show at Atlanta’s Fox Theatre, on April 14, 2016. “ I’m just so glad I took that photo I shouldn’t have taken,” said fan Amiee Stubbs. “ Everything we love about him, it was there, even though the style was so different.”
Behind the Gates of Paisley Park
Nearly as inscrutable as its owner, the gleaming white compound, rising from a field in suburban Minneapolis, hid within its walls Prince’s epicenter of creative cool
By Nolan Feeney and Julia Zorthian
PURPLE HQ Paisley Park’s 55,000 square feet includes expansive recording studios, a video-production soundstage, exhibits of Prince’s costumes, a cinema and a pyramid that glowed purple when the owner was in residence. Upon the news of his death in an elevator at Paisley, the private retreat and workplace he’d had built from the ground up, stricken fans traveled to pay tribute from many miles away.
MUSICIANS LIVING AND dead have had their estates transformed into tourist attractions, but Prince never wanted any of that. His massive residence, Paisley Park, located just outside his hometown of Minneapolis in Chanhassen, Minn., was inconspicuous from the outside. During a 2015 visit, Entertainment Weekly described its exterior as resembling “a telecom center, or maybe a place where dental supplies are manufactured” while comparing the interior of the house to the inside of “the bottle of a genie.” All of Prince’s awards, the fancy recording studio, the purple decor—you’d never tell from looking at the place what it housed.
That was by design. According to what one aide told TIME in 1990, Prince didn’t want visitors “to feel like they’ve walked into Graceland.” Yet now, after his passing, fans are indeed making Graceland-esque pilgrimages there, gathering outside the property to mourn and leave bouquets of purple flowers.
The California architecture firm Boto Design completed the 55,000-square-foot complex in 1987, and at the time it was valued at around $10 million. The design reflected some of Prince’s unique tastes: a glass pyramid atop the structure glowed purple whenever Prince was inside, and at one point a wall featured an illustration of Prince’s eyes with a “godlike sunburst beaming out from between them,” according to a TIME description from 1996. Paisley Park seemed fit for a monarch with its “marble floors . . . trompe l’oeil waterfalls and purple columns,” as People wrote in 2000. There was Prince’s private office with its stained-glass doors, its oversize desk and sofa and, of course, three beds—one of them round, another king-size with a mirror on the ceiling above it. There were real treasures too. Next to the locked basement room that held all his platinum records and those many awards were, “almost like tablets in a tabernacle,” as TIME wrote in 1990, “tapes of an estimated 100 unreleased songs, plus two complete albums—enough to keep Prince in royalties for years, even if he never writes another note.”
That surreal sense was still apparent when Entertainment Weekly critic Leah Greenblatt paid a visit in 2015: “In the lobby, there are a lot of celestial motifs—walls painted like clouds, area rugs covered in stars—tufted cushions and oversize chairs in swoopy, Dr. Seussian shapes.” And his love symbol? It’s all over the place.
A song on Prince’s 1985 album Around the World in a Day inspired the name of the property as well as his record label that ran from about 1985 to 1994 and put out releases from Sheila E., Mavis Staples and Prince himself. In addition to a recording studio, the Paisley Park premises also housed soundstages and a production facility for shooting music videos. Instead of leaving his hometown for Hollywood, Prince brought a little of Hollywood to his hometown. Though he kept residences elsewhere as well, Paisley Park Studios served as the central location for Prince’s work. And it wasn’t just for him. The artist’s choice to center his production in Minnesota effectively put the state’s music scene on the map. Prince conceptualized the music haven, paid for it to be built and recorded almost 30 albums there, continuing to do so even after Paisley Park Records closed. He was apparently able to capture things in the flush of inspiration: each room was reportedly wired so that Prince could record at any moment, no matter where he was in the building.
In his final years, Prince held concerts and parties on location, including the “Dance Rally 4 Peace” show in 2015 in response to the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore and the national conversation about police brutality. Often the gatherings would last until the wee hours. “It was always really late,” producer Jimmy Jam, who played with Prince after first meeting him in junior high school, recalled to Entertainment Weekly. “You had to hang until 2 or 3 in the morning. Generally it was worth it. There were always events. It seems weird to say that, but recently he had been doing a lot of those. He’d always been driven by the love of music, and it was always his motivator.”
INSIDE PURPLE WORLD: the “Foo Foo Room,” a museum of gold records and Grammy Awards.
The vaunted Vault, said to contain master recordings of hundreds of unreleased Prince songs.
A recording studio circa 1990.
The stage where Prince rehearsed for tours.
