Memoir

I woke up in the tour bus bunk with a message that didn’t sink in right away. I got up and sat there on the bus by myself, surrounded by a beautiful sunny Texas afternoon.  But then the heaviness and the absoluteness of it all just started to fall down on me – the disappearing day turning into night. And then night turned into pitch black. And something inside of you just goes silent.

I moved to Minneapolis in April of 1980 to start working at a Musicland store downtown. I had only been working there a couple of weeks and as a result I got stuck working the late Saturday night shift when a guy and two girls quietly came in and went to the back of the otherwise empty store. It was getting close to closing time so I was doing the usual closing stuff so I get could get the hell out of there before Saturday night was over. A few minutes later the guy, who I noticed was very short with a long blue studded coat with collars up, came walking up to the counter with a huge stack of vinyl. He set the vinyl up on the counter, which was up on a pedestal so this person’s head was barely above it.  I asked him if he found everything he was looking for and he just said a very soft spoken “yes” so I rang it all up. He handed me a charge card and without looking at the name I started to call in for the charge authorization, I finished dialing and with the phone pinned between my ear and shoulder I turned around and asked him for his driver’s license. I turned back around to start manually punching the necessary numbers in credit card box when I took a glance at the driver’s license and read the name. Prince Rogers Nelson. What? I read it again. Prince. Rogers. Nelson. Now keep in mind that this was a few months before Dirty Mind came out so he wasn’t the massive star he was about to become in the next 4 years, but I still had a brief moment of idiot paralysis as I read it one more time. Prince Rogers Nelson. Yeah that guy who had just two months ago had done a packed instore at this very same Musicland. It was before I started working there but my fellow employees were still talking about it. In my head this voice was saying “Okay, okay – just take a deep breath and hang up the phone”, which I did. I turned around and said “uhh, yeah I think everything’s good”. I bagged up the vinyl in three or four bags and handed then to him – and then Prince and Wendy and Lisa walked out the door to Hennepin Ave.

There are so many more stories…one night I had gone down to see someone at First Avenue and was just hanging around finishing a drink and was about to leave when all of a sudden the curtains went open and there was Prince and The Revolution in full regalia. I ran upstairs and got on the pay phone to call some friends saying, “you’re not gonna believe who just went on”. They played a full hour and a half set. It turned out it was the final full rehearsal for the Stones tour that they were about to be the opener for.
Over the next few years there would be many more incredible surprise shows. Word would often leak out in the afternoon, and it was always “hey man don’t tell anyone else, but you know who is doing a surprise show”. Some of the memorable ones were a 2 1/2 hour show before Boys and Girls came out, another full set for Sign O’ The Times with full stage backdrop. Later, after he opened Glam Slam they would always be there. I think the most memorable one was for the Gold Experience record, with full band including horns – I think he played somewhere between 3-4 hours of non-stop funk jams. That night he also played some amazing slow blues. Then he built Paisley Park and all the shows started to be out there. There was also the legendary Emancipation listening party at Paisley. He had just signed with EMI and delivered them a triple cd epic. We all got to sit in the control room of the studio as he talked about many of the songs in between the playing. That afternoon started with him kicking out the main Minneapolis music critic who had recently written something Prince hadn’t appreciated. After the listening party was over, I will never forget, Prince and music industry legend Charles Koppelman walking away arm in arm. Charles was given all the credit for signing the un-signable Prince (post Warner Bros.), and Mr. Koppelman was pretty damn proud of himself. That relationship lasted all of one record.

Two short years later I found myself working on the Crystal Ball box set. This was when he was trying to figure out how he wanted to distribute is records without major label involvement. He ended up doing a deal with Best Buy for a window of exclusive distribution and we started working with him on it. I remember when he said he wanted to release it in a round clear ball. After calling around to every possible manufacturer, no one could do it, and we were more than a little nervous that it would blow the deal when we had to tell him that. We did find a clear round plastic box and that was good enough to get it done.

A couple years he later when we had created a label within Best Buy, he came back again and asked if we were interested in doing a deal for the Rainbow Parade record. We went out to Paisley Park for a big meeting to discuss the deal and logistics etc. His father had just died a week or so earlier so he was very somber. When we asked him when he wanted to release the record, he said “last week”. It was the very end of August 2001 and he was also aware that Michael Jackson was releasing his first record in ten years, Invincible, on Oct 30th and he really wanted Rainbow Parade to come out the week before – but there was no way possible to get it out that fast. But again, he decided we were his best option.

That was the most unforgettable meeting I will probably ever be part of. At one point the conversation turned to his vault of recordings and he asked if Best Buy could give him his own 4-foot browser section in every store because he just wanted to release it all – and whenever he wanted to. It was at that point in the discussion that I asked him if he had heard about what Pearl Jam and recently done – releasing an entire tour of double live albums. He said he hadn’t, so I explained that they had just put 86 live albums all at once. He asked how well they did, and I said they did surprisingly well. He turned to me and said “do the math”, it caught me off guard as at first I wasn’t sure what he was asking, but then realized he wanted to know the numbers. I said “they averaged about 10,000 copies across all 86 and the wholesale cost was about $12.00, so $12 times 860,000 was about $10 million dollars”. He said “how would you all like to split $10 million?” There was a brief moment of silence and then we all kind of said “Well yeah, that’s sounds great”. That gives you an idea of how much he thought he had in the vault. A short time later the meeting kind of broke up and I had a few minutes of one on one time talking to him about the vault recordings, which he was now very excited to talk about. He said “Man, I got everything, those records I just gave Warners were nothing, I’ve got tons of stuff way better than those”. He also told me about a solo piano record and also how he had recorded every live show that he and The Revolution had ever done. That was 15 years ago, and it’s staggering to think what might be there now.

When someone significant in your life passes it becomes a time of reflection and I’ve spent that last three or four days thinking about those “Minneapolis years”. Until now, I had never really realized how intertwined Prince was in my life and the lives of all my group of friends. From the minute I moved there and was the dumb kid behind the counter, to the time I left – one of the last shows I saw before I moved away was the Musicology tour, and it was a very different but as usual, fantastic show. I remember being struck by how personal it was.

All through those years we watched him explode from local boy makes good to mega-superstar and it was something to witness. All through this years each release, every album, every single, every video was a message from down on high. For twenty plus years we grew up with him – we danced, partied, laughed and cried and often times scratched our heads. But never ever stopped listening and watching. But we never stopped listening and watching. He never left Minneapolis and he never really left our lives. He was ours.

– Tom Overby (Lucinda mgmt.)