version points to a quiet infrastructure of studios, joints and rehearsal rooms, the world in which John Nelson worked away quietly. As so often in American stories, the mythological version wins out.
* * *
Remarkably, given where it sits on the North American continent, Minnesota is washed by the Mississippi. The great river is integral to black America and black American music. In slave narratives and sociological treatises, in the testimony of educated freedmen and in musical histories, the journey north is portrayed as a mystical portage up from bondage and towards liberation, a salmon ladder in terms of cultural evolution. It was, you’ll still read it argued, the journey against the flow of the Mississippi that helped turn inchoate field hollers and marching tunes into Chicago blues and New York bebop, ultimately Detroit and Philly soul as well. If those cities far away from the headwaters felt its influence, why not Minneapolis?
In 1963, a year of acutely sharpened ethnic awareness in America and Prince’s first year at grade school, the collective population of Minneapolis and St Paul was still well shy of two million. That figure included only about 50,000 African-Americans, mostly clustered up on the North Side, which made Minneapolis just 3 per cent black. Mattie Shaw was an exception. As black southerners moved north in search of economic opportunity, Minnesota stood aside from the demographic mainstream, as it had been since it became a territory (not yet a state) in 1849; in that year, just forty free persons of colour lived there. Between 1860 and 1870, deeply troubled years in American history, the censused black population rose from 259 to 759, largely as a result of freed slaves travelling north with Minnesotan soldiers. In the early years of the twentieth century, the black population of the state experienced a significant drop.
At a casual glance, the city seems to fit the usual urban American sociological stereotype of rich-white-quarter abutting poor-black-quarter. According to her recollection, in 1967 Prince and his sister Tyka were part of a ‘bussing’ experiment to desegregate Minneapolis schools. There is also a reference to this on ‘The Sacrifice of Victor’ from the album (1992). This was the direct result of a 1954 decision in the case of Brown vs the Board of Education in Topeka, Kansas, in which Supreme Court Justice Warren ruled that segregation of schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution and that the principle of ‘separate but equal’ was unconstitutional. The idea was to prevent the insidious ghettoisation of the inner cities by moving black schoolchildren into basically white catchments, and vice versa. Twenty years later, Milliken vs Bradley’s revelation that there were deep flaws in that ruling were pounced on by the Reagan administration as it took a cost-cutting scythe to social services. The picture since has been one of steady resegregation, though slower, significantly enough, in the Twin Cities than elsewhere.
This is consistent with the area’s long history of political liberalism. A decade after Milliken vs Bradley, Minnesota stood alone in its opposition to Reagan’s presidential candidacy, pulling the switch for another forgotten man of American politics, Democrat Walter Mondale. In his study The Negro in Minnesota (1961) Earl Spangler points out that Minnesota was the first state to grant full suffrage to blacks under the terms of the Fifteenth Amendment. A similar picture emerges in June Drenning Holmquist’s 1981 They Chose Minnesota, a survey of the state’s ethnic groups, and in David Vassar Taylor’s Blacks in Minnesota (1976) and his more recent African-Americans in Minnesota (2002) (Minnesota Historical Society/Press). There were notorious lynchings near Duluth in 1920, sparked as such episodes often were by alleged ‘gross insult’ to a white woman, but the obsessiveness with which these incidents are reasoned away as pathological aberrations in Minnesotan histories suggests that such acts of crude violence were by no means the norm. Here was a state with a markedly good record in interracial relations, if not quite a colour-blind paradise.
Five years after Prince and Tyka graduated from John Hay Elementary and started taking the bus a few blocks downtown to Bryant Junior High School, riots flared in Minneapolis as they did almost everywhere in urban America. Several businesses were burned and the police department, reckoned to be the most holstered and restrained in North America, went out and cracked heads. If raw statistics and the chaos theory of dissent mean anything, the violence in Minneapolis in 1968 wasn’t a direct reaction to adverse social conditions. Clearly it was more than a television-fuelled carnival of destruction given a political and sociological rationale after the fact, but it was certainly not the ideologically driven ghettos-on-fire picture that had emerged that year across the continent. However few in number, blacks in Minneapolis enjoyed an easier coexistence with the white majority than they could have expected almost anywhere else. They lacked the critical mass to be defined as a major problem or to sustain a completely autonomous cultural development. And yet, in his song ‘The Sacrifice of Victor’, Prince refers explicitly to the riots as his moment of politicisation.
Compared to the average African-American teenager growing up in the larger cities of the north, Prince’s musical heritage was disproportionately white. If it seems self-evident that his main influences as a performer were Sly Stone, Rick James and Jimi Hendrix, it’s arguable that what he learned from each of them (and from Rick James at closer quarters when he opened for him on tour in 1979) was more about presentation than about music. The fact remains that much of the music Prince and his Minneapolis contemporaries listened to as teenagers was white pop and heavy rock. In February 1981, as Dirty Mind was taking off, Prince built on his nascent White Negro hipster-hoodlum persona by telling Rolling Stone that he’d grown up on an ethnic borderline. ‘I had a bunch of white friends and a bunch of black friends. I never grew up in one particular culture.’ It may have contributed to the mythology, but this part of it at least was true. It’s worth remembering that Jimi Hendrix, born in Seattle long before Seattle was a real music town, made his name with English musicians and a pale Geordie manager, the late Chas Chandler.
The Twin Cities bequeathed Prince an unusual perspective on American popular music. Minneapolis is what is known in the business as a vanilla market. British observers of the American scene are still perturbed by how sharply and how overtly the music industry is segregated. At one time ‘race records’ were cut exclusively for a black market but even in the 1970s and 1980s, there were separate charts for rock and r’n’b, which despite an enthusiastic take-up of black music by white teenagers was still tantamount to segregating audiences. Radio airplay was crucial and radio stations were more than ever in the grip of advertisers armed with demographic models and spreadsheets. As Dave Hill put it in Prince: A Pop Life, ‘Specific audiences were identified and catered to, in line with the dictates of commercials. And that “specialisation” effectively meant the resegregation of radio along racial lines that were no less rigid for justifying their informal apartheid with free-enterprise logic.’
In line with that relentless equation, Minneapolis had no infrastructure of black music stations. KMOJ had a virtual monopoly and thus a fairly safe, chart-driven playlist. For a time, KUXL offered smooth soul, classic Motown and some lite jazz to the small better-off black community on the South Side. All of which meant that even African-American youngsters of Prince’s age were drawn to a diet of white progressive rock on KQRS. His early band Grand Central, which some remember, probably wrongly, as Grand Central Station, was around too soon to have been named after Larry Graham’s mid-1970s funk unit Graham Central Station, though that might explain the confusion. (Graham later became a friend and something of a spiritual mentor, leading to the revelation in the late 1990s that Prince had followed his example and joined the Jehovah’s Witnesses.) The band’s later name-change to Champagne may well have been precipitated by optimistic recognition of a possible market clash, though it actually took place when Prince went to Central High, presumably so that it wouldn’t sound like a school band. The original name – or rather the second name since the group briefly went out as Phoenix – may also have been a nod to white bicep rockers Grand Funk Railroad, later known by the fans’ preferred short form Grand Funk. Theirs was the kind of heavy, anthemic rock that Prince and his friends dabbled in, and who knows, the later addiction for performing half-naked and glossed with oil might just be a screen memory of Grand Funk guitarist Mark Farmer stripped to the waist and sweating his way through a falsetto ‘Mean Mistreater’. Skinny kid looks at Charles Atlas advertisement and dreams.
For Prince’s contemporaries, Grand Funk, Iron Butterfly and the James Gang, British acts like