reign
We could all die any day
But before I’ll let that happen,
I’ll dance my life away
Yeah. Prince died yesterday. 2016 has been a pretty terrible year for losing rock and roll icons; icons that actually resonated with me, rather than old do-wop guys who were influential to the medium but, to be honest, meant relatively little to me on a personal level.
Bowie. Prince. Glenn Frey. Merle Haggard. Lemmy (yeah, last week of 2015, but he gets grandfathered in), not to mention non-musical folks like Alan Rickman and Gary Shandling.
Logically, I know this is primarily a symptom of the fact that as I get older, the artists whose work was positioned to hit the sweet spot of my own coming of age (early to mid 1980s) are hitting the age where death is a real possibility. Emotionally, it feels like a hell of a lot of heroes and formative influences are being yanked away with alarming regularity; that so many of them disappeared in the first quarter of 2016 feels a little too frequent to me, like the universe looked at the so-called “rule of three” and said “screw this, I’m cleaning house.”
Anyway, either way, it sucks. Like a lot of these guys, Prince came to me later than his true heyday; I always enjoyed the tunes, but when his videos were in seriously heavy rotation on early-days MTV, I was a little too young to really get how boundary-pushing (“Sugar Walls”? yeah, it took me years to get that one…) and competent the stuff was. It was only later when I got my hands on copies of “Purple Rain” and “1999” in my 30s after accumulating a bunch of life experience and twenty-odd years of musical training did I realize how well put-together and virtuosic all that stuff was, even with the early 80s synths and drum programming. God, the guitar playing on those records; so understated, but so freakin’ amazing – it was like when I really listened to Zappa the first time; that’s the only comparison I can make, and I don’t make such comparisons lightly. That eccentric little guy from Minneapolis with the unbridled love of basketball and pancakes was an irreplaceable talent, and seriously knew his way around a telecaster:
I don’t have all that many interesting Prince stories. When I was in middle school, a couple of kids in the neighborhood, inspired by the single off of “1999”, used to tease me about my torrid affair with “the girl in the Little Red Corvette” because it was funny when I got flustered and embarassed – this was before I realized that most Corette owners are retired real estate guys with greying ponytails who bought the automatic because they can’t drive stick looking to recapture lost/never had youth and not hot chicks (I was twelve or thirteen; “hot chicks” at that point were interesting, but largely theoretical to me) but the memory, weird as it is, has stuck with me for decades, even if I always liked “Raspberry Beret” better.
Also, strangely enough, my first purchase from a dealer’s room at a con was a copy of Prince’s “Batman” soundtrack on cassette at a Star Trek convention in Scranton/Wilkes-Barre PA at some point in high school. I’m sure there were a bunch of other more interesting things around (dealer rooms were a little more wild wild west back then – I can only imagine the interesting and illicit bootleg crap I could have gotten my hands on instead!), but for some reason, that’s the thing I gravitated toward. I listened the hell out of that tape, and for some reason, “Arms of Orion” sticks with me the most all these years later, even though it wasn’t even in the movie (which blew my 15 year old mind back then).
So yeah, my Prince stories aren’t all that cool, compared to the couple of people I know on social media who had the opportunity to meet the guy over the years. Whatever.
Going back to the heroes thing – Prince was one of those guys, along with Bowie, who, even if I wasn’t necessarily cognizant of it at the time, passed on the lesson that there were ways to be “a man” beyond the traditional stereotypical definitions of masculinity, and that “weirdness” could be a virtue to be reveled in, celebrated, and admired. I think I, and whole generations of people, needed that kind of example, and I appreciated it, even if I wasn’t always conscious of it.
It’s really a shame they’re gone. There are plenty of people out there carrying on the example these days for weird kids to look up to, but guys like Prince set the standard.
Oh yeah, it’s friday. Random ten:
- “Best of Both Worlds” – Van Halen
- “So. Central Rain (I’m Sorry)” – R.E.M.
- “Livin’ On A Prayer” – Bon Jovi
- “Summer of ’69” – Bryan Adams
- “Never Say Never” – that dog.
- “Thunderstruck” – AC/DC
- “Lord of the Blacksmiths” – Falconer
- “Little Hell” – The Badlees
- “Ironic (live)” – Alanis Morrissette
- “Iris” – Goo Goo Dolls
