Prince’s show in Miami is the gold standard
There are no Prince shows which aren’t legendary in some. It’s something you learn when you hear about all the shows — public and private — he performed throughout his life.
There was the time he played Radiohead’s “Creep” at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, sending a crowd of 20-somethings into a frenzy for a musician almost 30 years their senior. His performance at Super Bowl 41 in Miami Gardens set the gold standard for performances at the game. Even his press conference ahead of the Super Bowl in 2007 turned into a jarring concert for the sports writers in attendance.
Just as legendary might be the show that got him the show. It was 2006 and Prince was finally interested in performing at the Super Bowl so a group of executives tasked with booking the show traveled out to Los Angeles to visit the artist in his home. They talked logistics for a little while, then Prince guided them into another room where three members of the New Power Generation, his backing band at the time, waited. He grabbed his guitar and sidled in alongside keyboardist Morris Hayes, drummer Cora Coleman and bassist Josh Dunham.
“We just ran through a few songs, just the four of us,” Hayes said. “It was just this crazy wall of sound and they were like, My God, this is just four people and it sounds like this? They were sitting there with their mouths open, like with four people. It was just like, Oh my God, that was crazy. That’s crazy that this sound just came out of these four people and they were just like sold.
“’Thank you. See you next time in Miami.’”
1. THE SET LIST
Prince’s show isn’t the gold standard because of one particular moment, one particular song or one particular guitar solo.
There have been shows when the artists played more hits or had more elaborate choreography. Marching bands have been part of the show before and others displayed just as good a knack for getting the crowd involved. Admittedly, there probably was never a better guitarist to take the stage.
Prince’s brilliance was in how he combined everything. He played his hits and he played others’. He saved his dramatic flair for the most opportune moments and utilized the
Marching 100, the marching band for the FCS Florida A&M Rattlers, perfection. He nailed the final song — “Purple Rain,” of course — and he got lucky, and took advantage of his luck, in the way only Prince could.
“His genius,” said Don Mischer, who produced and directed the show in South Florida, “was reflected in the songs that he chose to do, how we put them together.”
“We Will Rock You” set the tone with fireworks and lightning effects — in a rainstorm, coincidentally — punctuating each syllable. The organ chords of “Let’s Go Crazy” interrupt the cacophony and Prince rises on to the stage from an elevator.
He does his usual Prince thing. His head is wrapped in a scarf. The Twinz, his backup dancers, spin and gyrate around him. A minute in, he rips into a guitar solo and then a marching band emerges from the dark to back him up on “1999.”
Midway through the show, Prince is doing what you expect. He’s playing a line of Prince hits — “Baby I’m a Star” after “1999” after “Let’s Go Crazy” — then he flips the show on its head. He takes it back to 1969, when he was just 11, and shifts into “Proud Mary,” Creedence Clearwater Revival’s masterful blend of roots rock and rhythm-and-blues influences.
“The really cool process was him going through these song selections. That was really dope because he just wanted to make a good show,” Hayes said. “It wasn’t about playing a bunch of Prince songs and going through all of that. It was just about really making a good show.”
It’s sort of an obvious choice for Prince, himself a master of blending genres. The same is true for “All Along the Watchtower,” which the Jimi Hendrix Experience had made even more famous with its electric-guitar led cover from 1968.
His final cover was baffling. He plays a Foo Fighters song which never cracked the top 15 of the Billboard Hot 100. He appealed to Prince fans and he appealed to classic rock, and rhythm and blues fans. Now he was just flexing as an LED-lit band danced on the field below.
“Things like that he would just do to let them know, like, Yeah, I can do you. You might not be able to do me, but I can do you,” Hayes said. “That’s the thing that he liked to do and he liked great songs, and the Foo Fighters had a really great song there.”
2. THE BAND
When a pop star wanted a marching band to make a statement toward the end of last decade, the Marching 100 was where they turned. In 2006, Kanye West and Jamie Foxx enlisted the 100 to back them up — and really steal the show — for a performance of “Gold Digger” at the 48th Annual Grammy Awards. They danced and were game for whatever. They were unlike anything else, so, of course, Prince wanted their help.
Julian White, the director of the Marching 100 at the time, got a call from representatives for the show near the end of 2006. Prince had a grand vision of a marching band traipsing on to the field in the middle of his performance and the Rattlers’ band, he figured, would be the perfect fit. Mischer called with the news.
“What’s great about these things is when you call up the band director and you introduce yourself — he has no idea why you’re calling — and then you say, ‘You know, we’re doing the halftime show with Prince and we want to know whether your band and your school will participate in the halftime show,’ and, man, that’s the most fun part of the job because they’re just thrilled beyond belief,” he said.
“It’ll be a memory for every member of that band for as long as they live.”
Princes team sent over some MP3 files with the music he wanted to perform and Lindsey Sarjeant, the 100’s arranger, got to work.
The students didn’t find out about what was happening behind the scenes until about a month before the performance. For the most part, they rehearsed like they normally did. Their part of the show was separate enough from the stage they could just practice at Bragg Memorial Stadium in Tallahassee.
Marie Rodgers was a freshman at the time, playing french horn in the 100. She remembers learning they’d play with prince during a band trip down to West Palm Beach. The 100 went to rehearse at Palm Beach Lakes Community High School. She found out it was so they could start getting their full travel routine down ahead of playing the Super Bowl.
“My parents kind of freaked out,” said Rodgers, who now plays the french horn professionally. “They knew that I was going to be in the 100 at FAM, they knew it was a big deal, they saw them at the Grammys a year before, but it doesn’t hit you until it hits you and when I told them that I was performing with Prince, that was all she wrote.”
The actual encounter with Prince was brief. They rehearsed at Dolphin Stadium, now Hard Rock Stadium, ahead of the game and Prince cruised over to the band in a golf cart.
“He was like, ‘You guys are going to do great. I heard so much great things about you and I’m looking forward to us having a great show,’” said Ralph Jean-Paul, a tuba player who went to Miami Central High School and now teaches Tuba at Florida A&M, “and he said ‘us,’ so that’s what made us feel like we were really inclusive into the thing.”
The 100 was Prince’s secret weapon — so secret not even the New Power Generation knew it would be a part of the show.
Hayes didn’t find out about their inclusion until he showed up at rehearsal and saw the mass of brass instruments. Mischer had the idea to outfit them illuminated tape to make sure everyone could see their formations and dance moves in the dark.
They marched out as “1999” began, and tagged along for “Baby I’m a Star” and “Proud Mary.” They receded into the background, but kept dancing and then reentered for the climax of “Purple Rain.”
“They were fantastic, man,” Hayes said. “It was like they just added a whole other dimension to it, the pomp and circumstance part of it, and it really made it a big event to have a whole marching band with the lights on their suits and just playing along. The whole thing as to how something that huge can come together in such a short amount of time is really fascinating.”
3. THE (PURPLE) RAIN
It was impossible to script and the reason for panic all across the production of the halftime show. A torential downpour was descending upon the stadium and it was going to coincide with halftime. Would the guitars burn out? Could the Twinz dance on the slippery love symbol-shaped stage for 12 minutes? What would happen in Prince, wearing a pair of high heels, fell and broke his leg?
Prince didn’t care.
“I was standing with Prince. The guy was saying, Look, man, this could get pretty hairy. The storm’s rolling in. We may be able to beat it — this that and the other,” Hayes said, “and Prince was like, ‘See if you can make it rain harder.’”
Mischer sat in the truck panicking about what might happen. “Let’s Go Crazy” wasn’t even over by the time he realized this neardisaster was actually going to elevate the show.
“I got really nervous and I said, ‘Oh my God, what’s going to happen here? This is really, really unfortunate,’ and then we started and about 45 seconds in I started to say, ‘My God, this could be a blessing. This rain — it’s creating this ethereal look,’” Mischer said. “It created wispy clouds that drifted over the stage. It created little prisms of light that caught the light and glinted the rain drops on the lenses and stuff like that, and I started to realize this had really been a gift. They’re able to perform in it, that it’s really making this show — it’s giving it a feeling that it never could have actually produced.”
Eventually, the biggest concern for Mischer became how it would affect the signature visual from the show.
More than a decade earlier, Don Mischer Productions produced the 1996 Summer Olympics opening ceremony in Atlanta and a signature visual then was inspired by the Olympics’ Greek history. They created a series of 55-foot sails, which would rise around a 10,000-watt xenon lamp. Behind the sails, performers would pose as if they were throwing a discus or javelin to project massive shadows in the style of Greek Olympic silhouettes.
He mentioned it to Prince and Prince liked the idea. He would perform the iconic guitar solo from “Purple Rain” behind a curtain with his silhouette projected on it. With the rain, Mischer was just worried the curtain wouldn’t rise at all.
“When we were coming up on that part I was just saying to myself in the truck, Oh my God, I just hope this works,” Mischer said. “If this is heavy with water, this thing may not even blow up. It might not even get up in the air.”
It’s the signature image from the performance. The Federal Communications Commission received more than 100 complaints for it. As astute viewers noticed, the way Prince held his love symbol-shaped guitar casted a particularly phallic image.
“Purple Rain” was the obvious closing song. Two years earlier, Mischer produced Paul McCartney’s halftime show at Super Bowl 39 and convinced him to close with The Beatles’
“Hey Jude.” He got exactly the response he was looking for as the entire crowd in Jacksonville sang along for the chorus.
“Purple Rain” produced the same effect. Purple-lit rain poured down as the Marching 100 blasted their horns. Prince shredded through his solo and pointed to the crowd, and 74,512 serenaded him. “Woo, hoo, hoo hoo.”
“For it to actually rain during the Purple Rain part of the halftime,” said Marching 100 director Shelby Chipman, who previously taught at Miami Central, “you just can’t pay for that.”
Said Hayes: “It’s like something out of a movie. It’s just like you can’t ask for better. It never rained at a Super Bowl game prior to that and it just was like perfect, man. Our gear got toasted, water got in everything and burned out when we turned it off, but it worked during the show, so nobody cared. It was perfect. You can’t ask for a better outcome.