Critical Mass

Why we grieve when famous strangers die: An elegy for Prince

Super Bowl XLI fans got a rousing show by Prince at halftime on Feb. 4, 2007.
Super Bowl XLI fans got a rousing show by Prince at halftime on Feb. 4, 2007.

The pure products of America

go crazy --

-- William Carlos Williams, "To Elsie"

And if the elevator tries to bring you down,

Go crazy.

-- Prince, "Let's Go Crazy"

I was 18 years old on the day that Elvis Presley died.

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AP

Prince performs in Inglewood, Calif., on Feb. 18, 1985.

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AP

Prince was a presenter at the American Music Awards on Nov. 22, 2015.

And I didn't feel all that bad for Elvis. If I felt anything at all. I might have even thought that it was about time, that the real Elvis, whatever that might have been, had died a long time before, probably about the time he went into the Army, certainly by the time he'd started making those awful movies. I counted the Elvis of the '60s and '70s, the Elvis who met with Richard Nixon hoping to become some kind of special hippie busting-drug narc, as an embarrassing has-been sell-out. I thought he'd wasted his gift. I thought he was show biz.

I thought all the bluehairs and the memaws crying over him was silly. Elvis was older than my dad. Elvis was "kitsch" -- a word I'd just learned and deemed useful. While I understood that there was a man submerged in the myth, a human being who surely felt and ached in ways similar to other people, I also understood that people die, and that some people thought that was sad but there was no getting around it. Elvis' tragedy was not that he died too young but that he had outlived his glory.

I was so much older then. By the time I was 30 I understood why and how Elvis mattered and how stupid I had been. Man changed the world. Man was an artist. Man deserved better than my snotty 18-year-old self was willing to allow. It was my loss. I never saw Elvis perform live, though I had a few chances.

I was in New York when I heard Prince had died. I felt gut shot. I felt cheated. I felt lonely. Angry even -- I wanted to hit something. But I just sat in a movie theater and let the sound and light bathe over me. I went to a cocktail party and ate shrimp off toothpicks and drank vodka and cabernet. I went to sleep with our hotel windows open to the incessant music of the city, the hum and rumble -- squeak and sqwonk -- of the traffic on Broadway and Canal.

...

From a Facebook post by my friend Danny-Joe Crofford, a serious Prince fan: "I have a ton of stories I could tell about him, including him once telling me I was singing too loud. I have a great story about the first time I met him. I have a funny story that includes the legendary Rufus Thomas. I have a story about being locked in a sound check during a tornado ...

"I fell in love with his music when I was 5. I have spent the last 35 years collecting every studio recording ever released in every country. I have thousands of songs never released. I have the holy grail of bootlegs and unreleased albums. I have every soundboard recording. I have every tour on DVD. I have his white cloud guitar. I have his tambourines. I have his guitar picks. I have a lifetime's worth and I would give everything up to see him one more time live."

...

There's no reason to believe that what some of us perceive as a cluster of celebrity deaths is anything unusual; it's just the way the world works. It seems like my Facebook feed has been dominated by tributes and memorials this year as David Bowie, Merle Haggard, Glen Frey, Alan Rickman, George Martin and Prince have all died. There were others too -- the guitarist Lonnie Mack, Negativland's Richard Lyons, Pete Zorn of Steeleye Span and the wrestler Chyna all died within the past week or so.

They may not have been the sort of A-listers who command front-page obits, but they all had people care about them. They all mattered in mysterious ways to people they'd never met.

Sometimes you throw heads four times in a row, but over time it evens out. There's an old myth about the famous dying in threes, but the truth is you start to see patterns when you begin looking for them. Because Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison and Amy Winehouse all died at the age of 27, there's a widespread belief that famous pop musicians are more likely to die at that age than at, say, 26 or 28.

But statisticians who've studied the phenomenon have discovered it really isn't true -- or rather, that while slightly more musicians have died at age 27 than they would have predicted, there are similar clusters occurring at ages 25 and 32. So while a rock 'n' roll lifestyle may increase your chances of dying young and leaving a good-looking corpse, the 27 Club is more coincidence than anomaly.

According to Time magazine, 2016 isn't really an especially bad year for celebrity deaths. It said that through April 22, 2015, was slightly worse than 2016, with 24 celebrity deaths as opposed to 21 so far this year. (It didn't say how it defined "celebrity," although it did allow that "the celebrities who have died so far this year are unusually prominent, beloved figures.")

Maybe we first need to acknowledge that a lot of this anguish is just a form of self-pity. It has been a hard year for some of us, what with all these people we didn't know dying. One of the reasons we ache so when someone like Prince or Hag or Bowie dies is because it reminds of us of our own mortality and the inescapability of death. And it becomes especially acute when you reach a certain age, when you begin to understand that according to the actuarial tables it is likely you have already gotten more than halfway through this thing called life. (Prince was 19 when Elvis Presley died. Haggard was 40. You can do math.)

But let's set that to the side right now and understand that there's good reason to feel bad when an artist whose work you cared about dies. Prince made me happy. He mattered to a lot of people who never imagined they'd ever know him or meet him. You can make people love you through your work; it's allowed.

And we're allowed to mourn the people we love, even if our relationship with them was strictly one-way. It's not a zero sum game. Just because it wrecks you to find out some pop idol has died doesn't mean you don't care about the suffering of nameless multitudes. You needn't run out of empathy.

...

On Facebook, Bob Mould, the Minneapolis-based singer-songwriter who in the '80s fronted Husker Du, wrote: "I never spoke with Prince. He always struck me as a private guy. Maybe he was shy around strangers. We never had much actual interaction -- a couple nods in passing, but no real words were exchanged. ... Prince was an artist through and through -- always pushing himself to new levels, often creating controversy through his actions and words, and ultimately creating a lifetime of wonderful memories for the world with his incredible volumes of published (and unheard) works. ... Make no mistake: Prince was the brightest star in these Northern skies. My deepest condolences to his family, friends, and fellow musicians. Prince's music will give consolation and comfort to the collective grief. Godspeed."

...

I never spoke to the alien dude with the high voice, but I was close to him a couple of times. I saw a handful of concerts starting in 1981. In the early morning hours before I saw him play Shreveport's Hirsch Coliseum in 1982, I walked into the Freeman-Harris Cafe (after playing a show with my own band) and saw him sitting at a table with B.B. King, with a plate of fried chicken livers and a velvet-bagged bottle of Crown Royal. (Since Prince famously didn't drink or do drugs, I guess it was King's bottle.)

I didn't speak to him that night -- when I really could have, because he hadn't supernova-ed yet, that was still a year away -- and I don't regret it. I don't imagine we'd have had much to say to each other; I admired him but he operated in a different arena than I did. I saw him a couple more times in the '80s and caught him in the '90s in Little Rock.

I was a fan, but not quite from the beginning. I remember digging his first single, the bubbly, diaphanous "I Wanna Be Your Lover" -- a record that was at once commercially viable and genuinely odd, with lyrics that glided over insinuations of incest and transsexualism: "I wanna be your lover/I wanna be your mother and your sister too" -- but the rest of his debut album, For You, presented him as a light soul singer, touched by Motown pop and apparently poised to make innocuous ear candy for decades. He could have been a minor-league Michael Jackson or Stevie Wonder.

That didn't happen. In 1980, Prince went back to the studio and recorded an album called Dirty Mind -- a new-wave manifesto that stripped away the lushness and toughened up his sound. Now Prince was in crossover territory; a hard punk fist emerged from the velvet glove that had encased his fantasy. With a drum machine thudding in the background, the falsetto became a snarl and the previously suggested proclivities for Hendrix-style guitar were now evinced by brief, squealing riffs crawling over the record like a tipped-over bucketful of baby snakes.

Dirty Mind is one of the most important rock albums ever recorded. It re-established Dionysian swagger in the wake of iconoclastic punk. Rock was born again with Dirty Mind.

The Rolling Stones recognized the affinity that Prince had with their music and attitude -- they invited him to open for them on some dates during their 1981 tour of America. And Prince, the anti-Elvis -- the black man who could pass for a white-boy guitar hero -- was booed by Stones fans who would have preferred the J. Geils Band or George Thorogood, who wondered what the little mincing dude with the attempted mustache and the black bikini underwear was trying to prove.

His blend of nasty mysticism and wanton narcissism, underscored by an apparently sincere belief in the possibility of salvation through sex, was confusing to those gathered to hear "Brown Sugar" and "Satisfaction." Undaunted, Prince blocked out the chiming chords to "When You Were Mine," another twisted love song in which he reminds his former girl that they wore the same size, and indulged outrageous pornographic fantasies onstage.

His next album, Controversy, was a confident star turn, his funkiest work to date. In 1982 came the genuine pop breakthrough, 1999, with the hit "Little Red Corvette" -- his first serious run at the pop charts since "I Wanna Be Your Lover," pushing him into the MTV spotlight. Two years later Prince released the Purple Rain soundtrack, the companion album to his motion picture debut and his first band album, which made him one of the biggest names in show business.

You know the rest, if you're interested.

If we're being downbeat, you could say that's when the persona started to obscure the music, when the pop-star silliness became distracting, when it became difficult to hear through all the hype and hubris. Prince made the journey from junior soulster to funky punk to pop genius: Lawsuits and politics and experiments (ill-advised and otherwise) lay ahead. Prince always embraced silly -- that what he called the "pop life" required a healthy dose of whimsy. He played the androgynous love sprite, the doe-eyed control freak and the sexual Svengali; he posed naked on his album covers and strangled a phallic guitar onstage. He was a libertine and a professed follower of Jesus Christ whose lyrics were shot through with religious imagery.

The music was always pretty great. It was just that there was so much of it. Prince's problems with Warner Bros. stemmed from his tendency to deluge the company with too much product. When they refused to release his work in what Prince considered a timely fashion, he quit recording entirely in an effort to force the company to deal with his recorded backlog. In 1993 (after releasing a single called "My Name Is Prince") he dropped his name and adopted an unpronounceable glyph and became "The Artist Formerly Known as Prince." By 1995 he was performing with the word "slave" scrawled across his cheek.

Make no mistake, Prince belongs in the pantheon of rock 'n' roll heroes. It might be argued that Elvis and Sinatra and Dylan and Woody Guthrie and a few other singers have done more important work, but if one were writing a history of American pop, the guy would rate his own chapter. He was a transcendent figure. Few musicians have ever been as influential. None were ever as playful. Or as pure a product of America.

Email:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

blooddirtangels.com

Style on 05/01/2016

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