The fifth anniversary of my father’s death is tomorrow and as you can imagine, I had thought of him when I was sitting in a Starbucks on Hudson Street between Charlton Street and Vandam Street, about to write a blog post when I saw my friend and colleague Craig Carpenter post a picture of Prince. And as soon as I saw Craig’s post, my initial response was to wonder if something had happened that I didn’t know — and of course, I quickly opened another tab on my web browser typed Prince and immediately was brought to the wikipedia page, which had been edited to include his date of death, and to Reuters article that said an unidentified male was found unresponsive at Prince’s Minneapolis, MN area home/studio/performance area. Strangely enough, my father was 57 when he died and Prince was 57 — and when I saw that age, I was heartbroken.
As a child of the 80s, Prince’s music — in particular Purple Rain, 1999 and Sign ‘O The Times were major parts of my childhood and were among some of my earliest (and most vivid) musical memories. I can remember involve Prince, David Bowie, Talking Heads, The Police, The Cars, Miles Davis, Michael Franks, Parliament Funkadelic, Donna Summer and a number of artists, who my folks either played obsessively or who I caught on MTV. Of course, I wanted to a pay little tribute to Prince with some live footage, including some grainy live footage shot back in 1983 that features Prince, Michael Jackson and James Brown sharing a stage, Prince teaming up with Lenny Kravtiz on “American Woman,” and some incredible live footage of Prince at the Capitol Theatre in 1982 that includes a sultry rendition of “I Wanna Be Your Lover,”
Long live Prince!
