Piepenbring Dan - The Beautiful Ones

Copyright 2019 by NPG Music Publishing LLC

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

S piegel & G rau and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Text and photo credits are located on .

Hardback ISBN9780399589652

Ebook ISBN9780399589669

randomhousebooks.com

Designed by Triboro, adapted for ebook

Cover design: Triboro Studio

Art direction: Greg Mollica

Cover photograph: Prince Rogers Nelson

v5.4

prh

Contents

I Last spoke to Prince on Sunday, April 17, 2016, four days before he died. That night I was lying in bed when my phone shuddered and lit up with a 952 area code. Hed never called my cell before, but I knew at once it was him. I scrambled for a pen and paper and plugged my phone into the wallmy battery was almost depleted. But my charging cord was only a foot long, so I couldnt stand up when I used the phone. I spent our final conversation hunched in the corner of my bedroom, taking notes by pressing the paper to the floor.

Hi, Dan, he said, its Prince. Much has been written about Princes speaking voicethe strange whispery fullness of it, reedy but low. Nowhere was this paradox more apparent than in that simple introduction: Hi, Dan, its Prince. He always used it. I wanted to say that Im alright, he said, despite what the press would have you believe. They have to exaggerate everything, you know.

I had some idea. In the month since Prince had announced that my brother Dan was helping him work on his memoir, Id seen it reported that Itwenty-eight years his junior, and whitewas literally his brother. But the news now was of another order of magnitude. A few days earlier, Princes plane had made an emergency landing after departing Atlanta, where hed just finished what would be his final performance, part of a searching, contemplative solo tour he called Piano & A Microphone. Hed been hospitalized in Moline, Illinois, supposedly to treat a resilient case of the flu.

Within hours of the story breaking on TMZ, Prince had tweeted from Paisley Park, in Chanhassen, Minnesota, saying that he was listening to his song Controversywhich begins, I just cant believe all the things people say. Subtext: He was fine. Some residents of Chanhassen had seen him riding his bicycle. And the night before he called me, hed thrown a dance party on his private soundstage, using the opportunity to show off a new purple guitar and a purple piano. Wait a few days before you waste any prayers, hed told the crowd.

I was worried, but I saw on Twitter that you were okay, I told him. I was sorry to hear you had the flu.

I had flu-like symptoms, he saida clarification that Id dwell on a lot in the months to come. And my voice was raspy. It still sounded that way to me, as if he was recovering from a severe cold. But he didnt want to linger on the subject. Hed called to talk about the book.

I wanted to ask: Do you believe in cellular memory? He was speaking of the idea that our bodies inherit our parents memoriesthat experience is hereditary. I was thinking about it because of reading the Bible, he explained. The sins of the father. How is that possible without cellular memory?

The concept resonated in his own life, too. My father had two families. I was his second, and he wanted to do better with me than with his first son. So he was very orderly, but my mother didnt like that. She liked spontaneity and excitement.

Prince wanted to explain how he emerged as the synthesis of his parents. Their conflict lived within him. In their discord, he heard a strange harmony that inspired him to create. He was full of awe and insight about his mother and father, about the way he embodied their union and disunion.

One of my lifes dilemmas has been looking at this, he told me as I sat on my floor, scribbling away. I like order, finality, and truth. But if Im out at a fancy dinner party or something, and the DJ puts on something funky

Youll have to dance, I said.

Right. Like, listen to this. He held the phone up to a studio monitor and played a few bars of something that sounded boisterous, brassy, and earthy, like a house party from many decades ago. Its funky, right? Thats from Judith Hills new album. Its the first time Im hearing it.

He paused for a moment. We need to find a word, he said, for what funk is.

The quest for that word was never far from Princes mind in those days. His asides to the crowds at his Piano & A Microphone shows often found him reflecting on the rudiments of funk. The space in between the notesthats the good part, he would say. However long the space isthats how funky it is. Or how funky it aint. Unpacking these ideas is part of what made him want to write a book in the first place.

Though Prince had published several photo books, and though hed entertained the notion of something more substantial at various points in his career, the genesis of this project came in late 2014, when his manager and attorney, Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, sought out a literary agent to represent him. Prince chose Esther Newberg, of the talent agency ICM Partners. She represented his friend Harry Belafonte, and he liked her old-school sensibilityplus, she appealed to him as a matriarch in a patriarchal industry. By early 2015, Prince had signed off on a concept, a book of lyrics with his own introduction and annotations. Newberg and her colleague Dan Kirschen shopped the idea to eager publishers, but Princes camp never finalized a deal, and for most of 2015 he focused on music.

In mid-November, he turned to the book with renewed enthusiasm. He would like to fast-track a project, Ellis-Lamkins wrote to Newberg. Working with Trevor Guy, an aide who helped with business affairs, Prince, Esther, and Dan expanded the books nebulous purview. What if it included not just annotated lyrics but unpublished sketches, photos, and ephemera? The word memoir wasnt part of the conversation yet, but Prince wanted to begin work on the project right away. Trevor suggested convening a group of editors at Paisley Park to discuss it in person.

The book coincided with an inward turn in Princes music-making. Having traveled the world in recent years with his electrifying band 3RDEYEGIRL, he was electing to play alone now. He envisioned a tour comprising just him and his piano. The intimate, amorphous sets would span his career without the constraints and pyrotechnics of an arena show. Hosting a group of European journalists at Paisley Park, he explained that he relished the thrill of taking the stage unadorned, paring his songs down to their essential components and reinventing them on the fly. Hed been practicing into the night, playing alone for hours on end, his piano filling the vast darkness of his soundstage until he found something that he described as transcendence. This was what he wanted to share.