The Mail on Sunday

Prince’s purple patch

Tom Chesshyre heads for Minneapoli­s – home town of the little man behind the big hits

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AT BUNKER’S Music Bar and Grill on the corner of 8th Avenue and North Washington Avenue in downtown Minneapoli­s, sweet soul music emanates from a stage in a corner. The singer Margie ‘Ta Mara’ Cox, part of Dr Mambo’s Combo, is launching into a version of The Staple Singers’ 1970s hit I’ll Take You There.

Her smooth-as-silk voice captivates the audience in the packed bar, with its low ceiling and redbrick and wood-panel walls. Guys at a table in front of us are tapping their feet and muttering ‘oh yeah’ every now and then, dressed in snappy red suits with red fedoras placed on their table next to drinks.

They look as though they’re members of a funk band, and they probably are. Bunker’s is the place to go to hear the funk, R&B and soul that has put Minneapoli­s on the music map, with one musician more than any other cementing its getdown-and-boogie reputation: the eccentric, purple-loving, bestsellin­g artist known as Prince.

Born Prince Rogers Nelson in Minneapoli­s in 1958, his acclaim in Britain reached a peak in the summer of 2007, when he sold out London’s O2 Arena for 21 nights. Now he has a less exhausting sixnight UK tour lined up, starting in Glasgow on Friday, before moving on to London and Birmingham.

Tourist officials in Minneapoli­s are not blind to their local hero’s fame, and are keen to highlight the city’s Prince connection­s.

Bunker’s is one part of that (Prince has been known to drop by), as are places featured in his 1984 film Purple Rain, his Paisley Park recording studio, the neighbourh­oods where he grew up, and various venues including – most importantl­y – First Avenue.

Some of Purple Rain the movie was shot at First Avenue, and the album versions of the songs Purple Rain and I Would Die 4 U were recorded live here.

My tour starts at Bunker’s, and it’s a great way to get immersed in the Minneapoli­s sound. Margie Cox is just one of several musicians on an average Sunday night who turn out to have worked with Prince in the past, recording more than 20 songs with the maestro.

Then there’s Dr Mambo’s Combo’s cool-as-ice drummer Michael Bland, who was with Prince for seven years, covering the period of his chart-topping Diamonds And Pearls album in 1991. He’s also worked with Chaka Khan and George Benson.

People who know the Purple One seem to be everywhere. I’m introduced to Matt ‘Dr’ Fink, who was keyboard player for Prince and wrote some of the music for one of the songs, Computer Blue, on Purple Rain.

Now Dr Fink is involved in a Prince tribute band that tours under the name of the Purple Xperience. He recalls being given a demo cassette of Prince’s first album in 1978, before Prince was signed by a record label. ‘I listened to it in my car and I thought, “Wow, this is amazing. Who’s the band?” The guy who gave it to me said, “It’s one guy in a studio playing everything. His name is Prince.” I said, “You’re kidding? How old is he?” He said, “Nineteen.”’

Even though the metropolit­an area of Minneapoli­s, in the state of Minnesota, has a population of four million, the city centre’s population is about 400,000, and if you go to the right haunts and ask around, there’s often someone with a Prince tale to tell. The next morning I hit the Prince trail proper. Much of this is based around sights connected to the Purple Rain film, shot in and around the city. We begin at the house that was depicted as his fictional childhood home on Snelling Avenue, down by a railroad, beyond a warehouse and a grain silo.

IN REAL life, Prince moved about during his childhood, and at the age of ten his parents separated. After this, he first lived with his mother, then his father, as well as with an aunt, and with friends – his father was a pianist and songwriter while his mother was a jazz musician.

Prince captures the rows they used to have in the song When Doves Cry. We take in the film’s simple pebbledash-and-wood house, partially covered in ivy, not far from where Prince went to junior high school, then head off to see Cedar Lake, which also features in the movie.

This is where Prince’s love interest, Apollonia, discards much of her clothing to go for a ‘purifying’ dip in the waters at his behest. It’s also a perfect place for a headcleari­ng walk after a night out on the town listening to funk music.

Cedar Lake is part of a string of lakes just to the west of the city centre, and singer Janet Jackson has a home nearby.

Another famous musical connection in Minnesota is Bob Dylan, who comes from Hibbing, a small city 200 miles to the north of Minneapoli­s. Dylan attended the University of

Minnesota from 1959. He also once owned our next stop on the Prince trail – the beautiful Orpheum Theatre, which was where the backstage shots of Purple Rain were filmed. Dylan sold the theatre to the city, which restored the interior and musicals are now staged there.

Next, I drop in at the Electric Fetus music shop, just south of the city centre. Inside, row upon row of vinyl records and CDs are for sale including Prince’s 1999, Purple Rain and his most recent Hit N Run. Funk albums of all sorts are for sale, as well as rap and Dylan. It’s a perfect place for American musiclover­s to while away an hour.

Lunch is at the Mall of America, one of the largest indoor malls in the US (being indoors is important as temperatur­es drop to minus 10C and below in winter). While you may wonder what Prince tie-in there might be here, this soon becomes apparent at its Hard Rock Cafe, where flamboyant stage costumes from his Purple Rain and Sign O’ The Times tours are displayed in cabinets, as well as one of his ‘artfully ruffled’ shirts.

HIS orange Sign O’ The Times outfit has ‘Minneapoli­s’ written down one arm. Prince is proud of his background and still has a local home, as well as one in California, say people I meet (though he’s secretive about his private life).

A panel next to the outfit says: ‘Though Minneapoli­s has been the home of some absolutely incredible artists, one name stands alone as the undisputed master: Prince. Throughout his career, he has created some of the most challengin­g, provocativ­e and infectious music in the history of the art form.’ The Hard Rock Cafe’s manager once met Prince, she says. She’s a saxophonis­t and her husband worked for a while as a sound recordist at Paisley Park studios.

‘I talked to him [Prince] once. It wasn’t a deep conversati­on,’ she says, sounding in awe. ‘He’s so short he didn’t seem real.’ Prince is 5ft 2in.

Paisley Park is our next port of call, 20 miles from the city centre in the western suburbs of Chanhassen. This excursion really is for diehard fans only as all you see is an unflashy, whitewashe­d building with smoked-glass windows behind a wire fence. The only hint to who may be lurking inside are purple flower beds by the entrance.

Yet it’s staggering to think that he has recorded about 30 albums here, and I’m not the only one curious enough to make a pilgrimage. A week after my visit, Madonna attended a late-night jam session at this out-of-the-way spot. According to Rolling Stone magazine, Prince performed his latest hits while Madonna watched and her tour dancers pranced about. Madonna and Prince are rumoured to have dated in the 1980s.

Over the years, musicians including Rita Ora, George Clinton and Mavis Staples have recorded or played at Paisley Park. And Prince does occasional­ly invite fans for impromptu late-night shows. You just have to be in Minneapoli­s at the right moment and hear about it through the grapevine (though nobody, including the tourist board, is quite sure how this works).

Aside from a visit to Bunker’s, the highlight of any Prince tour of Minneapoli­s has to be a visit to the First Avenue club, with its motto: ‘Your Downtown Danceteria Since 1970.’ This is a cavernous space with blackened walls and a regular line-up of latest acts – Ratatat, a Brooklyn-based rock/dance group, is playing when I visit.

Prince’s name is on the club’s outside ‘wall of stars’ to have performed there, as are the names of Paul Simon, John Lee Hooker, Ice Cube and The Pretenders. Inside, his presence somehow lingers. It is, after all, the club where much of Purple Rain was filmed and there’s a plaque by the bar commemorat­ing this.

It’s a great evening, with all that’s missing being one key ingredient: a certain artist… who goes by the name of Prince.

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 ??  ?? GIFTED: Prince, aged just 17, shot in Minneapoli­s in 1975
GIFTED: Prince, aged just 17, shot in Minneapoli­s in 1975
 ??  ?? FICTIONAL ROLE: Prince’s childhood home in Purple Rain
FICTIONAL ROLE: Prince’s childhood home in Purple Rain
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 ??  ?? ON DISPLAY: Prince costumes at the Hard Rock Cafe, and Prince in the film Purple Rain, right. Left: The skyline of Minneapoli­s
ON DISPLAY: Prince costumes at the Hard Rock Cafe, and Prince in the film Purple Rain, right. Left: The skyline of Minneapoli­s

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