I remember where I was the day Prince died the same way people a few generations back remember where they were when JFK was shot. I remember the reports that someone was unresponsive at Paisley Park, the struggle to keep up hope that maybe it was someone else, or maybe Prince would pull through, or maybe it was all just another one of The Purple One's legendary impish misdirections.
Then the word came that he was gone, and I sat in my rented house in Harker Heights, Texas, texted my friends that I wouldn't be able to meet them for drinks and trivia that night, and cried as the tributes poured in.
That was 10 years ago, and while it's been a decade since His Royal Badness floated away into The Afterworld, Prince feels more alive than ever. Like David Bowie, who passed away earlier that same year, he retains a preternatural aura, and his legendary capacity for recording music and then storing it in his Paisley Park vault means that we can still hear his voice anew. He's not gone, he's just on another plane, leaving us with many, many ways to remember him.
Personally, I'm choosing to do it with videos like this:
Like a lot of Prince fans, when I heard that he'd passed, I went down a vast YouTube rabbit hole of rarities, live footage, and music videos. Much of it was bootleg back then thanks to his tight control over his image and music, but in the years since his passing his estate has made much of it officially available. That includes these gems from an acoustic set Prince recording in 2004 for a TV special commemorating the release of his album Musicology.
So, what makes this performance, live at New York's Webster Hall, so special? At the time, seeing Prince stripped down to just a man, a stool, and an acoustic guitar was rare. He was, and is, known for showmanship that included a full band and stage show, and his enigmatic persona meant that for much of his career, intimacy was not his strong suit. Prince felt like a giant because he presented himself as larger than life, an unknowable virtuoso who only revealed himself in very select, very controlled moments.
At Webster Hall, that veil came down, or at least thinned a bit. Prince, for at least a little while, reveled in the closeness of his audience. He made jokes, he told stories, he encouraged them to sing along, even turning the microphone around to catch their voices over his own. In what's perhaps the set's best moment, he invited the audience to sing the backing vocals on "Cream," then smirked and shook his head when they were off-key, stopping the song for a moment to give them another chance. It is Prince at his most unguarded, still every bit the rock god, but letting that short kid from Minneapolis through just a little more, so we could see that he was still just a guy who loved playing music, and wanted us to love it too.
We miss you, Prince. Thanks for leaving us with moments like this.
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