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Prince had read something I wrote about his tour’s recent opening shows. He wanted to see me in San Francisco on Saturday, the first step in feeling me out for what would eventually become an interview that ran in Vibe magazine, his first lengthy on-the-record conversation with a journalist in over four years.
    The driver who picked me up from the airport showed me the erotic valentine his girlfriend had made for him, then told me about the work he and his wife were doing for the Dalai Lama. It was time to wonder: Is this whole thing a put-on? But no—I arrive at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium and there is Prince, sitting alone in the empty house, watching his band,the New Power Generation, start its sound check. He’s fighting a cold, so we speak quietly back and forth in our seats for a while, and then he leads me onstage to continue the conversation while he straps on his guitar and rehearses the band.
    Mostly, Prince talks about music—about Sly Stone and Earth, Wind & Fire, and other classic soul favorites we share. The NPG plays “I’ll Take You There,” and we discuss the Staple Singers and Mavis Staples, whose new album he has just finished producing. He is talkative as he jumps from guitar to piano to the front of the stage to listen to his group, with that surprisingly low voice that loses its slightly robotic edge when he’s out of the spotlight.
    As all reports indicate, he is indeed tiny—what’s most striking isn’t his height but his delicate bones and fragile frame. He is also pretty cocky, whether as a defensive move to cover his shyness with a new person or with the swagger needed to keep a performer going during a tour. Underneath the onstage roar of the NPG, he leans over to me, his fingers not leaving his guitar, and says, “You see how hard it is when you can play anything you want, anything you hear?”
    Which is, in many ways, the question underlying Prince’s lifelong creative journey, from his days as a prodigiously gifted high school student leading a band on the weekends to his years spent fighting the conventions and restrictions of the music industry. First came the years of striving for maximal communication through music, then came the efforts to keep up with the constant flow of creativity that resulted.
    Prince Rogers Nelson was born in Minneapolis on June 7, 1958, to pianist and songwriter John L. Nelson, whose stagename was Prince Rogers, and singer Mattie Shaw. In a 1991 television interview with A Current Affair , his father said, “I named my son Prince because I wanted him to do everything I wanted to do.”
    Let’s get this out of the way right now, since it would later come to dominate so many conversations about Purple Rain : both of Prince’s parents are black.
    Not that he was always forthright about that fact. Early in his career, eager to avoid any possibility of being pigeonholed as a “black” artist with a limitation on his potential audience, he was quoted as saying that his mother was white, and also that she “is a mixture of a bunch of things.” Even after Purple Rain was released, People magazine referred to him as a “mulatto.” He told Rolling Stone that he was the “son of a half-black father and an Italian mother.” (Former girlfriend/protégée Jill Jones claims that he borrowed this mix from her: “When we met, he was like, ‘You’re half what?’ and I was like, ‘Oh, I’m half Italian and black,’ and it was like, ‘Oh, okay, I can see that—I can make this work.’ He went on tour, and when he came back, he was Italian and black.”)
    Regardless, what is clear is that the racial composition of the Twin Cities, and the pop and rock music he heard on the radio (there wasn’t even a round-the-clock black station in the city with a strong signal—just the low-wattage KMOJ), made for a complex blend of