reads like the Almanach de Gotha: kings, earls, more dukes and counts, and princes, too. The only difference about this otherwise obscure Minneapolis group, which played mostly lounge gigs, reportedly in the smooth manner of the Ahmad Jamal group, was what it bequeathed to pop history.
At 6.17 p.m. on June 7, 1958, Mattie Shaw Nelson gave birth to a boy at Mount Sinai Hospital in Minneapolis. It was the child’s first stroke of luck that his father didn’t play with the Swinging Dixie Cups or the Minneapolis Three because John Nelson decided to name his new son after the band. The birth certificate actually gives the child’s name as ‘Prince Roger Nelson’. It may be that the dropped ‘s’ was deliberate, a concession to Mattie’s preference for a more familiar boy’s name; a clerk’s haste seems equally likely.
Talking to the Los Angeles Times in January 1981, he said, ‘I think my father was kind of lashing out at my mother when he named me’, but typically provided no explanation or context for the remark. John Nelson may have lashed out in other ways as well. If Purple Rain is even notionally autobiographical, it was a sometimes violent household. Some of Prince’s closest associates have hinted at a history of abuse. The artist himself has remained reticent on the subject, beyond a few rumour-fuelling hints in songs like ‘Papa’ on the desperate 1994 Come album, which includes the unexpectedly naked line ‘Don’t abuse children or they turn out like me’. There is more of the same on ‘The Sacrifice of Victor’, the final track on the so-called Love Symbol Album (1992), and on ‘Da, Da, Da’ from Emancipation (1996). It requires no great effort to comprehend that this was genuinely an issue for Prince.
It’s no more than a happy coincidence that a certain uncertainty and fluidity of names was part of Prince’s story from the very start. Later, he tried to abandon the name altogether, overtly to neutralise Warner branding, but maybe to escape his father’s embarrassing self-advertisement, or simply because he didn’t like it. There was more to it than that, though. The Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa used umpteen creative personas to express different parts of his creative personality or different creative personalities. Prince can’t claim quite as many heteronyms, but he has also worked as Alexander Nevermind, Camille, Joey Coco, Christopher Tracy, Jamie Starr, Tora Tora, Victor and the evil Spooky Electric, disguises which only fooled the uninitiated.
The uninitiated sometimes included childhood friends, sections of the press and of the music business. On the South Side streets and at high school, kids would see him coming and call him ‘Princess’. To those tabloids mystified and irritated by the look, the sound and the attention-grabbing antics he became ‘Ponce’ or, recalling his most celebrated album and film role, ‘the Purple Pain’. Perhaps John Nelson was lashing out not at his wife but at the child who would far outstrip his modest fame.
As always with Prince, it’s virtually impossible to separate real events from legend, but in Barney Hoskyns’s Imp of the Perverse there is a small anecdote that adds a convincing detail to the Oedipal drama. Prince recalls sneaking in the back door of a club to watch his father play. He is maybe five years old, certainly no more than nine or ten, standing hidden in a service area, looking at the lights, listening to the jingle of ice in glasses and soft feminine laughter at darkened tables. There he’s found by one of the club dancers, a beautiful girl, scantily dressed, on her way outside for a cigarette. Mock-angry and liking his looks and his sass, she takes the boy outside to wait for his father. Maybe she flirts with him and he precociously flirts back. There might even be a kiss on his cheek or, to embarrass him, on the mouth. Even if it’s invented rather than a genuine primal memory, the story is nicely constructed to fit into Prince’s psychological profile. An illicit act in an inappropriate place, above all an illicit act of looking; an older woman, but not a conventional ‘older woman’ and certainly not a mother figure; precocious desire met with an odd mix of adult denial, gentle humiliation, and permissiveness.
Light, costume, glamour, sex – the only element missing from the picture/memory is the one in which Prince was seemingly fated to spend the rest of his life. What music was John Nelson playing? Was it his father’s performance rather than that conveniently archetypal dancer’s attentions that turned Prince on? However ambivalent he felt about Nelson, the boy seems to have related to his father’s performing and went to extraordinary lengths to surpass it.
There’s sometimes confirmation in omission or denial. The one thing the movie version takes away from John Nelson is performance. Purple Rain is no more than semi-autobiographical, if it is even that, but it scatters important clues. Prince is cast as ‘The Kid’, a sulky, selfish wannabe who turns the basement of a shabby frame house into a softly lit laboratory of music and seduction. Upstairs, his parents fight and make up, fight and make up, and it isn’t clear which disturbs The Kid more or whose attention he really covets. When he intervenes on his mother’s behalf, he is slapped down. She is light-skinned (certainly light-skinned enough to be Italian, and actually played by a Greek actress) but passive and curiously anonymous. We last see her sitting wretchedly in the street with her back turned, perhaps to hide her bruises but also to suggest that she matters less to this story than the brooding figure of the man who beats her.
By contrast, the camera lingers on Francis L., a powerful, handsome man, caught between utter stillness and explosive violence, elegantly dressed for a world he seems disinclined to enter. The Kid’s father is a frustrated and self-destructive artist, shut away in his own basement, playing exquisite piano in the darkness. The boy tracks him down there, roaring ‘Motherfucker’ through the empty house like some disco Hamlet. His fury abates as he listens to Francis play, but underneath the tenderness of the moment – for all its raunch, the movie’s only convincing love scene – there is an act of denial. When The Kid asks if he writes down his songs, Francis puts a forefinger to his head: they’re locked away there. It’s a highly ambiguous gesture in the circumstances. A little later, Francis puts a gun to that same temple and shoots himself. In the aftermath, The Kid/Prince finds a locked trunk of unperformed compositions in the cellar, all of them signed Francis L. We see him take his father’s place, creatively if not Oedipally. The most important object in the movie isn’t the growling purple motorbike or the equally phallic guitar bought for him by Apollonia, the girl who sets free his oddly passive libido and then becomes a rival performer. The most important object in the film is Francis L.’s piano, its clinching frame another turned-back shot, this time of the son going about his father’s business.
When the success of Purple Rain allowed Prince to move into a brand-new custom-built mansion, John was given the old purple house down from Paisley Park and a similarly coloured BMW; in return he gave Prince the white Thunderbird mentioned in 1988’s ‘Alphabet St’. John continued to show up in the star’s entourage, with ever younger girlfriends. He was there for the ceremonial unveiling of the completed Around the World in a Day (1985), on which John L. Nelson has two co-writing credits. The father–son partnership continued on Parade with ‘Christopher Tracy’s Parade’ and ‘Under the Cherry Moon’, and the rapprochement seemed firmly cemented by the time of the Batman soundtrack, made in 1989, which has one track, ‘Scandalous’, credited to Prince and Nelson Sr. Inevitably, though, like almost every Prince associate, John believed that other songs were at least partly his work and the relationship foundered. John wasn’t present on Valentine’s Day 1996 when his son married Mayte.
For a time, Prince had seemed keen to foster his father’s career. There were other motives behind the call, but a decade earlier, Prince had picked up the phone to a former manager and sometime collaborator and asked him to listen to John Nelson’s tapes and consider producing an album. Chris Moon was the mildly eccentric Englishman and adoptive Minneapolitan who wrote the original lyric to what became the title song of Prince’s first album For You, or at least so he claimed. He and Prince parted company amicably enough – though there were copyright wrangles later – and it was Owen Husney who brokered the soon to be controversial contract with Warner Brothers. Whether Prince retained an affection for Moon, nursed a grudge or a sense of guilt depends on how you read the signs scattered in the work (the ‘Christopher’ pseudonym and the money obsession of Under the Cherry Moon). It is telling that Chris Moon should have been his first thought as the man to kick-start John Nelson’s stalled career.
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