For at least three decades, no Minneapolis musician could pretend for an instant that he or she would be as famous as Prince. Or as cool as Prince. Or as innovative. That kind of total cultural dominance messes with a city's psyche. The man put Minneapolis on the map. Right next to it, in big purple letters, he wrote, “Population: Prince.” And we never stopped loving him for it. When we learned of his death, we wept for him all day in front of Paisley Park, his home, and danced to his music all night in First Avenue, the club he made a national music landmark.
Minneapolis likes to claim Dylan as a hometown boy, but Bob was just an outstate kid who crashed here on his way to New York, treading the path to glory familiar to so many midwestern overachievers. Minneapolis yearns for his approval like an abandoned child. Dylan went out for a pack of smokes one morning and never came home, but he calls every couple years on a day he mistakenly thinks is our birthday.
Prince, on the other hand, only left us briefly, relocating to Los Angeles first for a short time early in his career, and again in 2007. But he came back both times. And anyway, what matters is that Prince didn't move to a coast and become a star according to the established patterns. He would become famous by making Minneapolis famous. America did not love its dwindling cities in the '80s, especially the forgotten ones in the middle, and for Prince to align his stardom with Minneapolis was an act of civic solidarity that inspired an unshakable local loyalty.
It was also a brilliant career move. Like his rival for Reagan-era stardom Bruce Springsteen, Prince recognized that every superhero has an origin story, and Minneapolis was both his Krypton and his Smallville. If Bruce had to struggle to transform Jersey from punchline to poignance, Prince was more fortunate: He worked on a blank slate. The year that Purple Rain came out—1984—Minneapolis was known for what? The Mary Tyler Moore Show and a former vice president who would go on that November to secure one fewer electoral vote than McGovern had?
Maybe no one in the rest of America really believed that Prince came from a town where stylish black musicians hustled for dominance of a thriving party scene, but they didn't had any image of Minneapolis to compare it to. Prince invented himself by inventing Minneapolis. And now, every performer who walks onstage at the First Avenue Mainroom—in other words, almost every notable performer of the past 30 years—walks out onto Prince's stage, and more than a few of them have noted that over the years, almost always with nervous excitement.
Prince allowed white Minnesotans to see themselves differently. “How could you be an uptight, repressed Midwestern square when you had a photo of a skinny guy in his underwear on your bedroom wall?” my friend Brad Zellar asked on Facebook yesterday. But more importantly, he allowed black Minnesotans to be seen, period. As Mayor Betsy Hodges phrased it in her official statement yesterday, “Prince was one of us.”
Nearly everyone around town has a Prince story, often a surprisingly entertaining one as far as celebrity anecdotes go. Most creative people here worked on some unfinished/barely started Prince-related project over the years. Every major R&B and soul act who comes through town wants Prince to be watching from the VIP. Sometimes he is. Sometimes he isn't and the performer says he is anyway.
To be a music journalist in the Twin Cities was to be forever aware of Prince's eye on u. He had his faves and his foes. He'd been an international superstar for more than a decade when he felt compelled to record the transcendentally petty “Billy Jack Bitch” about a local gossip columnist, the Star-Tribune’s “C.J.” But maybe it's just that Minneapolis could always hurt his feelings. What doth it profit a man, if—as he bragged on 1999—all the critics love him in New York, yet some hometown dweeb in City Pages is making fun of his glyph?
Even when Prince returned from L.A., we sometimes wondered how much was he with us. In his fittingly freaky way, Prince established a dominant-submissive relationship with his fellow Minnesotans. A loving one, surely, but one powered by a teasing exertion of control, a withholding of affection, a seductive manipulation. Prince didn't just need fans—he needed devotees. Though these existed worldwide, there was no greater concentration than around Minneapolis. And so he established Paisley Park.
“Paisley Park is in your heart,” Prince once sang, but it's actually in Chanhassen, a nice-enough-suburb-if-you-like-suburbs about 21 miles from Minneapolis. Prince built the studio/performance complex in 1988, and he would announce last-minute performances, which often started hours after he'd gathered his fans in his oversized lair. To attend recent Paisley Park shows, you had to drive out to a park-and-ride and take a coach bus to the compound. He banned cellphones and alcohol on the premises. He exercised control over us, as though testing our limits.
I've sometimes grumbled that Prince needed Minneapolis because we would never not put up with his shit. And I felt that Minnesotans submitted to Prince's restrictions because we needed his reflected stardom to feel special. But maybe it was more that Prince needed Minneapolis because we understood him, recognized that his sometimes infuriating control issues were rooted not in grandiosity but in a quintessential Minnesotan reticence. Brash but shy, he needed to keep us at a distance to maintain his emotional equilibrium—a true Gopher State quality if ever there was one. And we were willing to sacrifice if that’s what he needed to create for us. It's a big deal for a Minnesotan to invite you into his home. You should at least be polite and follow his rules while you're there. It’s just the neighborly thing to do.
And in 2016, Prince felt more like a neighbor than he had in years. He was hosting regular performances and parties at Paisley Park that began and ended as scheduled. He was seen more often around town at shows—or, at least, the silhouette of an entourage that suggested the presence of Prince at its center was seen.
The last time I saw Prince perform, at his solo Piano & a Microphone show at Paisley Park in January, I connected to him more as an individual, and less as a virtuosic conduit for an audience's throbbing desires, than I ever had before. That emotionally revealing performance stripped away all the fictionalized melodrama of Purple Rain to focus on his real-life struggle with his father, pianist John L. Nelson, to become his own kind of musician and his own kind of man. Through that story, he worked back through the history of African-Americans in Minneapolis and the music they had created.
When Prince took his final bow that night, he looked more approachable or human than ever before. He looked like you could walk right up and hug him. He looked like he wanted you to. He looked like one of us.
Find more on Prince and his legacy here.