#Warren zevon raspberry beret youtube tv

He was the sole ‘80s superstar to decline Quincy Jones’ request to appear on “We Are the World”. Some concerts devolved into acerbic jazz-odyssey and caustic funk-rock meandering.

He released a string of albums in the ‘00s that were messy and self-indulgent. He went long stretches of refusing to play his hits. Weird in the way that he wrote a song nearly every day of his life or wore flankless onesies on stage or would break into a serpentine-coitus crawl or wrote “Let’s look for the purple banana until they put us in the truck” or put his keyboardist in surgical scrubs or a million others things that made Prince rock’s most fascinating creative force. Yet his eccentricities - his isolation in Minneapolis, his occasional religious intensity, his name-change to an unpronounceable glyph, his scrawling “Slave” on his face - caused people to see Prince as crazy. Much of the mystique that made him seem otherworldly, of course, was his elusive nature, his insistence on privacy, the rarity of his sitting for an interview. Prince was not a woman he was not a man he was something you can never understand. Prince paid no attention to which gender role he was supposed to play he just wanted to know if the water was warm enough yet. Prince knew no limits on the stage or in the sack, putting an androgyny on display that went deeper and realer than the preening glam rockers before him. Needless to say, her body would never be the same. His first single, “Soft and Wet”, came out in 1978, and “Head” on 1980’s Dirty Mind described Prince deflowering a virgin who was on the way to get married to some other man. But Prince had already been as nasty as he wanted to be for years. Legend has it, Tipper Gore caught her daughter listening to “Darling Nikki” one day and marched out to form the PRMC, so the “Explicit Lyrics” label starts with Prince. Everyone has their favorite filthy Prince lyric, but Nikki masturbating with a magazine in 1984 was the dirtiest thing I’d ever heard come out of my stereo. No male rocker ever bent gender harder while playing the role of the girl-crazy sex fiend, declaring a manifesto of “D.M.S.R”: dance, music, sex, and romance. As Prince tells his lover, “I wanna be your brother / I wanna be your mother and your sister, too.”

#Warren zevon raspberry beret youtube tv

Because Prince wasn’t normal.įrom the moment he first appeared on TV in 1980 on The Midnight Special, Prince was already a fully-formed sex-funk freak, commanding the stage in zebra-striped bikini bottoms and Jaclyn Smith hair, singing “I Wanna Be Your Lover” in a falsetto that, like his cat-in-heat dance moves and his licentious hump-all-night lyrics, boldly went where no man had gone before. It was impossible to imagine Prince doing the things that normal people did. But with Prince, we couldn’t be too sure (especially in the ‘80s, since his pants were often assless).

Celebrities, we are often reminded, put their pants on one leg at a time like everyone else. What kind of human was this? No one ever saw him eat, for instance. In fact, no one was sure if he was actually real or not. Literally speaking, no one touched him because you couldn’t get close to him. Prince created himself as we knew him by harnessing his own wildest (and probably wet) dreams, his lifelong anxieties, and the riot of music continually rushing through his head. Add to that a totally unique vision of what a human being can look and sound like. But I did touch him, by god.įiguratively speaking, no one touched Prince because no one in the rock era ever achieved such greatness across so many categories - as a singer, a songwriter, an instrumentalist, a record producer, a dancer, a live performer, a visual designer, a videomaker - with the blinding genius of Prince.

But no one had it on a bucket list to touch him, even if they wanted to. Did I ever tell you about the time I touched Prince? Plenty of people have had it on their bucket lists to see Prince in concert.