Prince, VIA HIS POSSESSIONS
7,000 AND COUNTING
Last August, when Angie Marchese became direct archives at Paisley Park, the rock star Prince’s studio residence, one of the first things she did was to ge of all the candles. Festooning nearly every room o compound, they came in all sizes, shapes, colours scents (including a few of Prince’s own aromatic blen
“We replaced all the real candles with artificial cand Marchese said in an interview in an anteroom at the c pound. “We still wanted the essence of the candles, how they made the rooms feel, without the fire hazard,” explained. “Prince can burn Paisley Park down, but I ca
Marchese and her team — the same group that o sees Elvis Presley’s Memphis mansion-turned-tou stop Graceland — have been tasked with maintaining grounds of Paisley Park, which Prince built in a rem suburb of Minneapolis in 1987. Once a commercial rec ing studio, with a soundstage also available for hire, Pa Park became Prince’s residence during his final years, throughout its history he hosted hundreds of private certs and dance parties for fans.
In October, the complex opened as a museum that sh cases instruments, clothes, awards and other ephem But, like Prince himself, the process of telling his his was mysterious. How did the team go about discove cataloguing, selecting and displaying Prince’s life via his massive collection of objects?
“The best part about the exhibition at Paisley, like Paisley itself — it’s a living, breathing exhibition,” Marchese said. The goal of the museum isn’t to tell Prince’s story from birth to death, but to capture what it was about his home base that reflected his creativity and vision. To that end “it’s constantly being updated”, she said, noting that Prince’s family has been involved from the beginning. “They’re very aware of our process.”
So far, Paisley’s archival team has catalogued more than 7,000 items — a number Marchese considers “less than 5%” of the building’s holdings. One key difference between Graceland and Paisley Park, she said, is that where Vernon Presley, Elvis’s Depression-weathered father, kept tight to every receipt, most of the Paisley paper trail has been creative: “We’ve got the sketches for the wardrobe, handwritten notes, lyrics on backs of envelopes or notepads, things like that.”
In fact, most of the earliest materials discovered so far are direct remnants of Prince’s private working processes. Marchese mentioned some 20 spiral-bound notebooks from across his career, including one containing the lyrics of his first album, For You, and the famous purple-covered notebook titled Dreams — the working title of the 1984 movie Purple Rain.
“We have on display here his Walkman, with cassette tapes that are dated 1977,” she said. “From what we’re told, he was never far from his Walkman. He was constantly recording himself. He would write lyrics on anything. It’s
like he couldn’t turn his brain off. He was constantly just purging all of his creative energy onto paper.”
“He had beautiful penmanship,” Marchese added. “Gorgeous handwriting.”
A large portion of the archiving time has been devoted to clothing. An entire garage, with a 6m ceiling, was found packed with stage outfits, along with clothes in closets, in wardrobe containers, in boxes and in suitcases. Prince, who died at 57, never stopped dressing the part of pop’s royal peacock. (He didn’t require much fabric; he stood 157cm and had a 56cm waist.) One of the items Marchese displayed at this behind-the-scenes look at the archiving process was a thick sketchbook for Prince’s one-of-a-kind designs, complete with fabric swatches. His seamstresses made the clothes on-site at Paisley Park in a dedicated upstairs room. One member of the team, costume designer Debbie McGuan, who began working for him in the mid90s, has come aboard to help identify outfits.
The number of pieces of clothing may be rivalled only by Prince’s formidable collection of shoes. “Every outfit had a matching pair of shoes,” Marchese said, citing a pair that went with the red-and-black suit Prince wore to his 2004 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, where he paid tribute to George Harrison with a scorching guitar solo on While My Guitar Gently Weeps, and the teal shoes he sported at the 2007 Super Bowl halftime show, designed to match an outfit the colour of the Miami Dolphins’ uniforms. “Most of them are ankle boots and have 3-inch heels on them.”
The process of preserving Prince’s large collection of instruments has involved reaching out to his original guitar techs over the years. Each guitar is cleaned, restrung and, perhaps most surprisingly, played, “because that’s what the instruments were made to do”, Marchese said. “We went back to the people who knew the guitars, the people who actually worked with him and worked with the guitars.”
Indicating a Vox guitar with a psychedelic painting on the front, Marchese described finding it in a basement room with more than 120 guitars hanging on the walls and in cases. And she said her team discovered something unusual when it was cleaning and preparing the pale blue Fender Stratocaster that Prince played at the Super Bowl: water damage.
“It was like, ‘Of course’,” she said. “He played it in the middle of a basic hurricane during the Super Bowl.”