For pop music lovers, the early months of 2016 have not been good ones. It seems we were still absorbing the new of David Bowie’s death in January when, on April 21, we learned that Prince had passed away in his home. This remarkably talented and versatile songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, and front man who had remained active since his 1978 debut album was still playing concerts shortly before his death. In fact, his last show took place on April 14 at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta, as part of his Piano & A Microphone tour, just a week before his passing.
Prince could rock an entire stadium, and his stage shows were often as colorful as his music. This was different, though. In a career that kept evolving, the last phase of his concert career featured just Prince and a piano. Those solo performances in small to modest-sized venues were the kind of intimate performances fans live for, and for someone as enigmatic as Prince to get up close and personal, well, that was even better.
Knowing that he touched the audiences so closely at the end makes it all the sadder now that he has left us. The musician who gave us hits like “Little Red Corvette,” “When Doves Cry,” and “Kiss,” who made the types of albums (1999, Purple Rain, and Sign o’ the Times among them) where you savored every cut, who played concerts where people who previously liked a couple hits were transformed into hardcore fans, is gone. All that’s left is his music, and there’s a lot of it. In upcoming months many Prince fans will return to the songs that were huge in the 1980s, when he was one of the highest-selling artists and reigned on MTV. These hits have held up well, and they definitely deserve our attention. At the same time, they were only a small part of his musical universe. For Prince the muses were never silent, making it difficult to work with record labels that prefer to release LPs at what must have seemed like a glacial pace. In spite of the vagaries of the music industry, he put out dozens of albums, and the amount of music that remained in the vaults is apparently staggering.
Prince’s detours and side projects are as engaging to some listeners as his better-known material; for me an example would be the instrumentals that became more common later in his career. If you’ve heard Prince deliver the goods on Billy Cobham’s “Stratus,” Wayne Shorter’s “Footprints,” and various songs by Santana, you know he could play funk, jazz, and Latin rock with authority; in fact, he could have modeled a whole career around his guitar playing. The fact that his instrumental excursions represents only a small portion of his musical output gives some measure of the scope of his talents. As we return to his discography—and, should the vaults be opened, hear previously unreleased music—our appreciation of his artistry will increase.
Photo Credit: NPG Records
By Jeff Wilson
This will take some explaining, but I can connect the dots between pawing through LPs at a headshop called Elysian Fields in Des Moines, Iowa, as a seventh grader, and becoming the Music Editor for The Absolute Sound. At that starting point—around 1970/71—Elysian Fields had more LPs than any other store in Des Moines. Staring at all the colorful covers was both tantalizing and frustrating. I had no idea who most of the artists were, because radio played only a fraction of what was current. To figure out what was going on, I realized that I needed to build a record collection—and as anyone who’s visited me since high school can testify, I succeeded. Record collecting was still in my blood when, starting in the late 1980s, the Cincinnati Public Library book sale suddenly had an Elysian Fields quantity of LPs from people who’d switched to CDs. That’s where I met fellow record hawk Mark Lehman, who preceded me as music editor of TAS. Mark introduced me to Jonathan Valin, whose 1993 detective novel The Music Lovers depicts the battles between record hawks at library sales. That the private eye in the book, Harry Stoner, would stumble upon a corpse or two while unraveling the mystery behind the disappearance of some rare Living Stereo platters made perfect sense to me. After all, record collecting is serious business. Mark knew my journalistic experience included concert reviews for The Cincinnati Enquirer and several long, sprawling feature articles in the online version of Crawdaddy. When he became TAS music editor in 2008, he contacted me about writing for the magazine. I came on board shortly after the latest set of obituaries had been written for vinyl—and, as fate had it, right when the LP started to make yet another unexpected comeback. Suddenly, I found myself scrambling to document all the record companies pressing vinyl. Small outfits were popping up world-wide, and many were audiophile-oriented, plus already existing record companies began embracing the format again. Trying to keep track of everything made me feel, again, like that overwhelmed seventh grader in Elysian Fields, and as Music Editor I’ve found that keeping my finger on the pulse of the music world also requires considerable detective work. I’ve never had a favorite genre, but when it comes time to sit down and do some quality listening, for me nothing beats a well-recorded small-group jazz recording on vinyl. If a stereo can give me warmth and intimacy, tonal accuracy, clear imaging, crisp-sounding cymbals, and deep, woody-sounding bass, then I’m a happy camper.
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