not much. The marriage foundered before Prince was in fourth grade. Thereafter, Prince was pretty much brought up by family friend Bernadette Anderson. Contact with his father was, for the time being, intermittent.
Interestingly, when Prince spoke to the BBC in 1981, he traced his interest in sexual themes to reading his mother’s ‘dirty books’. It’s tempting to think that the stash of porn was really his father’s, but it seems Mattie’s idea of sex education was to give her son Playboy magazines to read. It hardly matters, because Prince quickly tired of other people’s fantasies and started to write down his own.
Purple Rain offers only teasing glimpses of how things might have been or might have seemed to an imaginative boy. There is no complicating sibling in the movie, but two years after Prince was born John Nelson and Mattie Shaw had one other child, a girl christened Tyka (Tika Evene) who pops up in the release sheets for 1988 with an album for Chrysalis and then disappears again. John and Mattie drifted apart and were divorced in 1966, when Prince was nine. More unusual was their son’s behaviour. Rather than split his loyalties, or plump for life with one parent rather than the other, Prince turned his back on both. Having left his mother and stepfather to live with John Nelson for a time, at thirteen he was ostensibly alone and self-sufficient. One persistent story suggests that he lived rough. This is a familiar element of myth, comparable to Bob Dylan’s hobo days and Kurt Cobain’s sojourn under the Aberdeen bridge. In reality Prince was being looked after by a family friend, a South Side neighbour and fellow Seventh Day Adventist called Bernadette Anderson, whose son Andre – later Andre Cymone – was a mainstay of the Grand Central band and Prince’s most stimulating early musical associate.
The exact circumstances are, as usual, not entirely clear. Bernadette Anderson remembers that Prince had regular fallouts with his dad, but that things came to a head when a girl, perhaps the first of many infatuated soul-girls, followed him home after a rehearsal night. According to Bernadette, his father threw the boy out of the house and he came to her. By the time this is supposed to have happened John Nelson had moved out and Mattie was living with a guy called Hayward Baker. He has an important role in the development of Prince the musician, because it seems he took the boy to see a James Brown concert and even put the ten-year-old up on stage to dance with the star, until a security man dragged him off. (According to Brown himself, Prince repeated the experience more officially in 1984, when he and Michael Jackson played guest spots, the three Hardest Working Men in Showbusiness together on the same stage.) However warmly he might have remembered that childhood epiphany, Prince was suspicious of his mother’s new partner, and some former associates suggest that it was Baker and not John Nelson who beat him.
Prince continued to spend time with John. If the two were crashing in what was effectively a bachelor pad, there may well have been tensions if the son brought a girl home; or it may be that Baker was uneasy about a growing boy sharing the house on Fifth Avenue South and it was he who precipitated the final leave-taking. Whatever the case, it seems that Nelson gave his blessing to the new arrangement. As well he might have, since Bernadette Anderson was no ordinary woman, a tough, generous soul with a strong record in community activism. She is explictly thanked on the 1992 album: ‘Bernadette the lady – she told me / Whatever U do, son, a little discipline is what you need.’ (The track is the strange, autobiographical ‘The Sacrifice of Victor’, in which Prince adopts a new identity.)
Prince is not unusual in having, as well as a full sister, an array of step- and half-siblings. John Nelson had three children by his previous marriage – including Lorna Nelson, who claimed, unsuccessfully, to have written ‘U Got the Look’ – but the household also included Vivienne Nelson’s child from a previous relationship; Prince’s childhood companion Duane was later a Paisley Park employee, before falling foul of the law. Is he the brother ‘handsome and tall’ who’s paid back in one of those vicious sexual thrusts in ‘Lady Cab Driver’? Prince was also close to Mattie and Hayward’s son Omar. Casual adoptions are not unusual and children are often raised by grandparents, aunts (Prince briefly attempted to move in with his aunt Olivia) and non-family members. It was generous if not heroic of Mrs Anderson to offer a home to yet another troubled adolescent. Selective versions of his time there provided media profilers with the first clues to what made Prince tick. In a crowded house, lines have to be drawn. The published legend deemed that at least one of them should be literal. Did Prince or Andre really run a strip of tape down the centre of their tiny bedroom? Real or invented, it separated Prince’s fussy order from Andre’s adolescent clutter and separated Prince from his immediate surroundings, an early token of what is either remoteness or a sign of intense powers of concentration. Bernadette later moved him into the basement, where he could order his life more comfortably.
More than any comparable artist, Prince has been a victim of the pop psychologists. Once you hear the work and see the performing self as consolation for a stolen childhood and overcompensation for small stature Prince is reduced to his own fantastical creation. When at the age of twenty he released a record written, performed and produced entirely by himself, the media gratefully seized on an image of Prince as a precocious loner and equally gratefully accepted every perverse tidbit he threw their way. What makes For You (1978) an epoch in American popular music can’t be explained by back-of-envelope psychology. To see Prince as a grubby child excitedly waving the treasure he’s found is to be distracted by the glister. What is interesting about Prince is the dust rather than the gold. To understand him, one needs to understand the industry he helped to transform, and to understand Minneapolis.
3
In 1985 Minneapolis Genius – The Historic 1977 Recordings appeared on the Hot Pink label. This is the kind of tribute LP normally only accorded dead artists like Miles Davis, whose studio sweepings are now boxed and sold at platinum card prices. The music on it was in similar sketchy form, mostly shapeless instrumentals that cried out for a strong-handed producer, though one of them, ‘If You Feel Like Dancing’, later became a club favourite. The material was attributed to a band called 94 East, but the styling of the cover – purplish, with a white dove holding a rose in its bill – coupled with the Minneapolis provenance, was intended to leave potential purchasers in no doubt that this was a Prince product. A couple of years later, the notorious Black Album (1987, released 1994) would become the decade’s most celebrated bootleg, but Minneapolis Genius has a prior place in the story.
There was no risk of ambiguity or confusion in the title. In 1985, there was only one genius in the Twin Cities and that was Prince. Back in 1977, when those tracks were cut, a television series that had strongly conditioned America’s view of Minneapolis was just coming off the air, though only to enter the strange purgatory of the network repeat cycle. The Mary Tyler Moore Show was actually shot in California with a feisty Brooklyn girl as its protagonist, but Mary’s lopsided grin and rueful stoicism in the face of eternal human stupidity spoke volumes about her Minneapolis home and workplace. Those Americans with a more political perspective might have remembered that Minnesota was the heartland of liberal Democrat hopeful Eugene McCarthy, who managed to survive 1968 unassassinated and sweetly irrelevant.
Almost everyone who lived there before the Prince revolution reflects a similar ambivalence. In the 1970s Minneapolis was a safe town and a dull town. An enviable record in civil rights and racial coexistence does not make a place funky. To that extent, Minneapolis was both the right and the wrong place for Prince to grow up: wrong in the sense that it lacked the deep roots in black music that could be taken for granted elsewhere, such as Detroit and Chicago; right in that it allowed him to develop at his own pace and on his own terms. In return, Prince created the brand new something that was called the Minneapolis sound. He also did what local boys made good often do and bequeathed the town a monument to his own success (or in Prince’s case his own hyperactive self-determination), a version of Camelot and a more grown-up version of Michael Jackson’s playpen Neverland. The Paisley Park studio complex sits about half an hour’s ride outside Minneapolis, alongside Highway 5, at 7801 Audubon Road in Chanhassen. It’s now a bigger draw than the city’s celebrated Museum of Questionable Medical Devices.
The extent to which Prince invented the Minneapolis scene has been endlessly debated. The mythological version likes to paint him as a younger, yet more potent version of a Fisher King,