Publication: Newsweek [US]
Date: April 29, 1985
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Title: "Rock's Mystery Prince"
Written By: Jim Miller with Janet Huck

Who's the man behind the erotic, messianic myth?

They call him "His Royal Badness" -- Prince, the 5-foot-2, 26-year-old from Minneapolis who is one of the most extraordinary figures in pop music today. He has the visionary fervor of a Bob Dylan, the glittery flair of a Liberace, the apparently inexhaustible melodic gifts of a Paul McCartney, the grace and reclusive quirkiness of a Michael Jackson -- his only real competition. He also has the chilling, demagogic air of a self-proclaimed messianic zealot.

A well-publicized bundle of contradictions, Prince flaunts a slapstick pornography onstage and praises God in the same show. During his just-completed "Purple Rain" tour, which spanned five months and 32 American cities, he toyed with props like an onstage bedroom, a bathtub and a specially built guitar -- when he rubbed its neck, water squirted into the crowd. Yet for all his erotic clowning, Prince's message is often somber and fervently religious. Themes of death and resurrection appear frequently in his lyrics. Two of his best-known songs -- "1999" and "Purple Rain" -- evoke a cleansing nuclear apocalypse. On his recent tour, Prince made a point of singing a medley of original religious songs, including a hymn entitled "God."

Saint or sinner, one thing is certain: the diminutive singer is reaching a vast audience. Warner Brothers, his record label, has sold more than 10 million copies of "Purple Rain," his sixth album. His latest, greatly anticipated record, "Around the World in a Day," is being released this week. The movie "Purple Rain" has taken in more than $65 million at the box office; the video cassette has sold almost 500,000 copies. Millions of Americans saw him looking like a pint-size druid, peering out from beneath a purple hood, on the recent Academy Awards show, where he won an Oscar for his score for "Purple Rain." And, by the end of the "Purple Rain" tour, he had performed for more than 1,692,000 fans, breaking records in several cities.

One of the decade's few true musical originals, Prince has helped define a new genre: "Beigebeat," as one British critic has called it. A blend of black and white, the genre is symbolized by the interracial composition of Prince's band, the Revolution. Laced with free-floating synthesizers and whiplash rhythms, it's music with the slick surface of disco, the bluntness of hard rock, the sweetness of old-fashioned pop. Nobody does it better than Prince -- as witness his new album. An eerie attempt to recapture the mood of utopian whimsy that characterized the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper" album, the subtly textured music is playful, sensuous and strangely melancholy. The record's psychedelic centerpiece, "Paisley Park," depicts a "place in your heart" where "there aren't any rules" -- shades of "Strawberry Fields Forever." But the record's last two songs deliver a far sterner message. One, called "The Ladder," is a Gospel-drenched fairy tale about the quest for salvation: "The love of God's creation will undress you." And the album's finale, "Temptation," closes with a dialogue between the singer, who is lusting for a lover, and God(?): "You have to want her for the right reasons." "I do." "You don't. Now die."

'The Ladder': There's no denying Prince's attention-grabbing music, or his even more attention-grabbing performances. Yet as the glare of publicity has intensified, he has become increasingly remote. Last month he announced an indefinite retirement from live performance. "I'm going to look for the ladder," he told one of his managers. When the manager asked Prince what he meant, the inscrutable idol said only, "Sometimes it snows in April."

The man behind such cryptic mutterings has remained an enigma. By blocking all press access for the past three years and by exploiting the myth-making resources of the mass media with unrivaled skill, Prince has artfully contrived a coy, larger-than-life image of himself. The process began in 1977, when Prince Roger Nelson and first manager Owen Husney (who left for "personal" reasons) dropped his last name. From the outset, he was reported to be two years younger than he actually was, to shore up his image as a musical prodigy. Since 1982, Prince has not only refused to talk to any journalist, but has also clamped tight controls on every single person working for him. " Prince does it to create controversy," explains one insider. "He's P. T. Barnum hawking the bearded lady."

The child of a broken home, Prince grew up in an inner-city residential section of Minneapolis. His father, John L. Nelson, led a jazz combo called The Prince Roger Trio -- hence the boy's name. His mother, Mattie Shaw, was once the trio's singer. (In "Purple Rain," Prince portrayed himself as the product of a mixed marriage; in fact, his mother has said that both parents have always considered themselves black.) In interviews, he has dated his passion for music from his parents' separation: his father left behind a piano on which Prince, at 10, began to pick out tunes. He later ran away from home, unhappy with his mother's new husband. Shy and introverted, as local acquaintances remember him, Prince lived in turn with his father, with an aunt and finally with the mother of his friend Andre Cymone, another aspiring musician who helped Prince form his first group.

X-Rated: When a local producer hired the 18-year-old to dub a tape, he discovered a one-man band -- Prince plays guitar, bass and drums as well as keyboards. Demo tapes touting Prince as the next Stevie Wonder landed him a Warner Bros. contract. In 1979 "I Wanna Be Your Lover" from his second album became a No. I hit on Billboard's soul chart. His career seemed set. But then Prince astonished everyone with "Dirty Mind," an album of X-rated lyrics. Although critics raved, it took the public longer to catch on. The breakthrough came in 1983, when "Little Red Corvette" from the album "1999" became Prince's first top 10 pop single.

Prince today divides his time between Los Angeles and Minneapolis, where he owns a Tudor-style house, painted dark purple, 15 miles outside of town. When he goes out, it's usually in his purple limousine and with one of his burly bodyguards. In Minneapolis, his favorite nightspot is First Avenue, where the club sequences of "Purple Rain" were shot. But these days, he is more likely to be working than relaxing. He will be back in the studio recording next week and is also busy sifting through various film offers.

Clues to Prince's real personality are hard to come by. According to journalist Jon Bream, who has known him since 1977, "he's like Sybil. You never know what to expect. Sometimes he's like a shy, normal person. But at other times, he'll walk right by you with that blank stare on his face." He is reputedly obsessed with being seen and being on center stage; at one Rick James concert, Prince had his bodyguard carry him down front to his seat so everybody would notice him. "He thinks he's Greta Garbo," says an insider who worked on "Purple Rain": "He has to make a smaller-than-life personality bigger than life by being mysterious. He grew up watching Bob Dylan making cryptic comments. He wants to control people through his pathological paranoid personality. Doing business with him got very tiresome very fast."

Prince presides over a small, popular stable of carefully groomed acts -- the Time, Sheila E., Apollonia 6 -- that has already spawned a number of independent spinoff acts, including the Jessie Johnson Revue, Andre Cymone, Vanity, Morris Day and the popular soul producers Jimmy (Jam) Harris and Terry Lewis. Members of his entourage aren't allowed to talk without Prince's permission, and at least one ex-band member signed a legal document preventing him from mentioning the name " Prince" to the press. In an interview with Rock magazine, Cymone, who played bass with him until 1981, described a self-absorbed dictator: when Cymone appeared on a television show early in the band's career wearing only a pair of bikini briefs, for example, Prince had orders delivered to him not to dress like that again -- only to begin performing in underwear himself shortly afterward.

That seminude style of performance helped to make Prince, almost overnight, into a media celebrity -- the raunchiest man in show business. Yet insiders stress that, paradoxically, Prince is above all a man of burning religious convictions. Before each show, the band joins hands backstage in prayer. Apollonia, one of his current protegees -- all of whom dress in sexually explicit, next-to-nothing outfits -- remembers finding a Bible in her motel room opened to a Scripture that Prince wished her to study. When an actress who auditioned for a role in "Purple Rain" and then turned it down because it was "way too pornographic" was interviewed by Rolling Stone magazine, she, too, emphasized Prince's religiosity. "He means well," she said, "and he's genuinely talented, but he's got a lot of problems. He's really hung up on God, for one thing. I think he thinks he's related to God in some way."

That idea seems preposterous -- until you start listening to what the music really says. Although all of his albums have been dedicated to God, Prince first frankly revealed his religious beliefs in "Controversy," his 1981 sequel to "Dirty Mind." The title song included a recitation of the Lord's Prayer. Another song, "Sexuality," proclaimed a "new age revelation . . . The second coming, anything goes." Like the Free Spirits, a heretical Christian sect of the Middle Ages, Prince implies that God is manifest in all things natural -- including a promiscuous eroticism. On his sexually supercharged "Controversy" tour in 1981 and 1982, Prince closed each concert by spreading his arms in front of a backlit silhouette of a cross.

Sermon: Similar themes have surfaced on every subsequent album. On "1999," the title song introduced what has become Prince's trademark image of the nuclear "judgment day/The sky was all purple -- there were people runnin' everywhere." The "Purple Rain" film and sound-track album both open with churchlike organ and a sermon: "Dearly Beloved, we're gathered here today to get through this thing called life . . . But I'm here to tell you that there's something else . . . the afterworld." In the film's title song, Prince welcomes the coming nuclear holocaust, singing to his lover, "You say you want a leader . . . I only want to see you underneath the purple rain." The topic of joyous death and resurrection reappears in "4 The Tears in Your Eyes," a song about the Crucifixion of Christ that Prince contributed to the recently released USA for Africa album -- after creating a small scandal by skipping the original "We Are the World" recording session.

That his religious motifs have gone largely unremarked isn't too surprising. Many fans don't pay attention to the meaning of lyrics and simply latch on to the hedonistic surface of Prince's music. Prince himself seems indecisive about how strongly to stress his religious message: the sermonette that opens the album and film of "Purple Rain," for example, includes a jokey, deflating reference to a shrink in Beverly Hills. Most journalists have preferred to praise the erotic aspects of his act -- after all, the sexy bad boy is a familiar rock-and-roll stereotype.

Yet it would be a mistake to think that Prince's religious message isn't hitting home. A friend recently found his teen-age daughter in the bedroom playing the album "Purple Rain" backward, like her pals at high school, in order to hear the secretive coded message Prince had left there. She was shaken to hear Prince say, "Hello, how are you? I'm fine, 'cause I know that the Lord is coming soon, coming, coming soon." Another friend reports that her adolescent son will not listen to Prince because he is upset by the cultlike fervor with which classmates recite the lyrics. And watching an audience of 12,500 at a recent concert standing on its feet, joyously jabbing arms in the air and singing "I Would Die 4 U," is a very creepy experience. The song's lyrics, which most of the crowd had memorized, include lines like "I'm not a human/I am a dove/I am your conscious/I am love . . . I'm your messiah and you're the reason why." At one point in the concert Prince fell silent and stood passively listening as the fans chanted the chorus: "I would die for you."

Prowess: At such moments, Prince is America's most disturbing celebrity. Perhaps the crowd cheerfully singing along to "I Would Die 4 U" is oblivious to the song's morbid implications -- it's easy to treat it as a simple ballad. Perhaps the song in concert occasions a ritual display of theatrical prowess, staged largely to amuse His Royal Badness. But this is the most artful and ambitious rock star in America today. Surely he knows the meaning of the moment. And watching it happen, it is hard not to wonder where Prince is heading -- and just how far his millions of fans will follow.