Publication: San Jose Mercury News [US]
Date: April 21, 1997
Section:
Page Number(s):
Length:
Title: "The Former Prince in Fragments: The Grooves Don't Gel At San Jose Show"
Reviewed By: Joel Selvin

That little fellow everybody used to know as Prince may no longer really matter in the grand scheme of the pop music world, but there certainly is something likable about the sprightly funkman.

He is the final link with the pre-hip-hop days of rhythm and blues, the last in a long line of descendants of James Brown and the great days of gospel, funk and soul. He can be a nervy, pesty weirdo, but he threw away more good musical ideas in the course of his funky, more than two-hour performance Saturday at the San Jose Event Center than many musicians summon forth in an entire career.

Dashing off some jazzy glissandos on piano, screeching out arena rock riffs on his customized glyph-shaped guitar, the soul auteur spread himself a little thin during the benefit concert, rescheduled after being postponed from April 19 at his mercurial command because of scalped tickets. He would spit out a verse of "Purple Rain," launch a wrenching, stinging guitar solo and return to start a fragment from another song.

This kind of crazy-quilt medley was alleviated by the occasional full-song performance and also by lengthy one- chord jams in which Prince carefully cultivated the illusion of spontaneity while keeping his powerhouse six-piece band tightly locked into the groove.

He mixed new material from his "Emancipation" album, like "Jam of the Year," "Get Yo' Groove On" and "Holy River" with vintage stuff like "The Cross," "Raspberry Beret," "Sexy MF" and "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World," and added some tunes as yet unrecorded. He tinkled away at the piano, playing portions of some songs like a demented bar singer.

He stalked the stage end to end while the band pumped out crashing, intimidating rhythms. He sprawled atop the piano. He rolled on the stage. Dressed in a lavender flash of purple see-through paisley, he looked regal and acted imperial. He preached religion and mimed sex.

But something has eaten away at the heart of this mischievous former enfant terrible of soul who who provided a funky antidote to the antiseptic hegemony of Michael Jackson and "Thriller" with the multiplatinum "Purple Rain" in 1984.

The weirdness at the core of his best songs has now consumed him, from his insistence on rejecting conventional nomenclature for his name to the bizarre hush that surrounded the death of his infant child last fall.

His cancellation of the original date and insistance on the entire concert being resold because a few dozen tickets reached the hands of scalpers reeked of Captain Queeg and the missing strawberries. The voucher system to foil scalping meant his fans not only had to buy tickets to the concert twice, but wait in line at least a half- hour just to get into the place.

His new album, "Emancipation" is a bloated three-disc set in which he rummages through enough styles to fuel a dozen lesser careers, from laid-back lounge grooves to unlikely remakes of an old Philly soul ballad and the recent Joan Osborne hit, "One of Us."

Then he shows up to play a concert advertised as a purely musical experience and doles out his songs as if they were bits of food he dropped into a Cuisinart.

The show had no pace, just a hectic atmosphere. Although he and the band seemed to move along a carefully scripted game plan, he managed to maintain the appearance of chaos and disorder.

When he left the stage, it was with all the drama of snapping off a light switch. The audience sat in stunned silence for a long, quiet stretch before they realized they needed to applaud for an encore.