She also asked if I was a fan. I have liked Prince since the day I heard "1999" when I was eight years old, but I never really considered myself a fan. However, the more I thought about how much his death impacted me, the more I realized that perhaps I was. So I wrote her an email and in response, she told me it was so well put that I should post it.
This, of course, is a blog about running and Phish, but there is a connection to Prince. Phish has covered "Purple Rain" several times and "1999" once (on 12/31/1998, natch). I got to see them do the former on 12/30/1994 (at Madison Square Garden, where I would see the man himself do it a decade later), in which Jon Fishman did a solo on the vacuum cleaner that was not only startlingly musical but truly soaring; and 7/4/2012 at Jones Beach, as part of my favorite first-set ever. Oh, and as my friends Meredith, John and Marshall can confirm, I found myself dancing on a table to "I Wanna Be Your Lover" at the M Lounge at last year's Phish festival, Magnaball.
So with that connection in place, here was what I had to say about Prince in the wake of his death:
Prince is one of those musicians that transcends time and pop culture and genres and fads. He simply “is”. I can’t even bring myself to use the past tense.
So yes, I guess I am a fan. But the fact of his constant being kind of led me to forget about him for a while. You don’t think about the sun and the moon every single day, but they are always there. And when you stop to take notice, you realize how amazing they can be at any given moment, especially in those moments like a beautiful sunset or a bright full moon. That is Prince.
I have all the albums from the golden era of 1984 (Purple Rain) to 1992 (that symbol thing). Around the World in a Day was a total musical game changer for me and I was only 10 years old. I was obsessed with "Raspberry Beret" in particular.
After 1992, I dropped off, but came back every so often and each time I did, I was just as blown away as before – like with the triple-CD ‘Emancipation’ album from 1996 and ‘Musicology’ from 2004.
The latter finally get me out to MSG to see him play an incredible live show. The dude did everything – tore it up on electric guitar, piano and bass, and even did a little acoustic set in the middle of the show. After he played a super-sexy slow jam (I think it was “On the Couch”), I turned to my friend and said, “I think Prince just made love to me.” He was that intense and intimate in his delivery.
The question came up about how we can mourn someone we do not know. But if you believe that a true artist like Prince puts his heart and soul into his music, then the question is irrelevant because we do know him. On some emotional or even spiritual level, we know him. We know his desires, his fears, his loves, his losses.
Maybe some of the sadness comes from the fact that we connect with him on such a raw, personal level but he never knew us - that we never got to tell him our own hopes and dreams and loves and how they were shaped by his art. We’re extremely affected because his music touched our lives in a personal way; and even though we know that millions of other people feel that same connection (so how personal can it really be?), we are totally OK with the one-way love affair that we all share for this one magnetic personality. We are not only OK with it, but we embrace it and, when he dies, each other.
The beautiful thing about art, though, is that it’s forever. For the rest of my life, I can keep going back and listening to all those great Prince records and keep feeling that feeling. In a sense, I suppose I was right – he is immortal.
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