June 6, 1997: Prince performs in Montreal

HISTORY THROUGH OUR EYES

On June 6, 1997, the Artist Formerly Known as Prince, as he then called himself — having decided to replace his name with an unpronounceable “love symbol” — performed at Salle Wilfrid Pelletier in Place des Arts. The concert had been announced only two days prior, after rumours the previous month of an impending visit to Montreal had been dashed. Montrealers rushed to buy the $75 tickets; 2,800 people attended.

This photo by Marcos Townsend of the performer in concert accompanied Mark Lepage’s review in the next day’s Montreal Gazette.

“There was little drama to last night’s show, just crescendo after bumped-and-ground crescendo, myriad translations of the pleasure principle. Whamming and bamming, he celebrated his own virtuosity,” wrote Lepage.

Prince sang medley after medley as he “whipped through a boggling array of styles, all of them his own.”

“The miraculous effect of the show was to make all the trappings of Princedom — the foppery, the outlandish over-emoting, the style — seem not just normal, not just sane, but absolutely necessary. As Take Me With U morphed into Raspberry Beret, there was also the strange foreboding that we were witnessing something we might not again, an artist and the Artist playing with his discography like it was a grand and wonderful toy,” Lepage wrote.

Prince reverted to his original name in 2000, and it was indeed his name. He was born Prince Rogers Nelson in Minneapolis in 1958.

After a brilliant and eclectic career, the singer perhaps best known for Purple Rain died of an accidental fentanyl overdose at the age of 57 in 2016.