I can’t believe it’s been a year.
I can still remember sitting at the Mango Tree restaurant having a lovely night out with Shalamar. I promised Howard Hewett, Jeffrey Daniel, and Carolyn Griffey that I would be giving them my attention – 100% attention. Just before I turned my phone off, my colleague Gary Vincent from Magic sent me a text, it read “you might wanna give me a call”. Reluctantly I got up from the table and called Gary who said “Prince has died”, to which my reply was “Prince who? Prince Charles?”. “No” he said, “your purple man Prince”. Oh My Goodness. My heart sank and tears began leaking from my eyes. I went back to the table and the Group just knew something was wrong.
You have to understand that I loved Prince. I listened to anything he played: from his hard rock and screaming guitar to his love ballads to his top of the pops hits. He enthralled me with his music and I knew that now he was gone, music would never be the same.
I could go on and on and on about how he was different, how he was so utterly talented, singer/songwriter/musician extraordinaire. But that’s been talked about by everyone. I want to share with you how he made me FEEL.
Before all of his musical genius, I saw purple.
Not the sound (at first), but visions of a hue of colour that wasn’t “masculine”. All of a sudden there was this bright swath of colour running through my life. It was the boldness of purple that first drew me to Prince, the bravery of a man with an awesome name wrapping himself in an awesome colour – with 6 inch heels and attitude! You see it wasn’t just a colour, as we would soon find out, purple was a state of being, a shade of dark that the establishment didn’t want you to explore. Blue skies, red passion, green with envy, yellow was happiness… but what in the world did purple represent besides royalty? Purple was sensual, not specifically feminine or masculine. Purple was mysterious and intense and exciting and wild. Prince embraced purple and the world was never the same.
I loved his music, his sweet almost shy demeanor during interviews and his unique way of being. I loved his absolutely breathtaking genius as a performer. The greatest gift was to see him onstage. When he came onstage appearing magically from the billowing clouds of dry-ice, he was a force of nature… almost like a weather system in his own right.
On Instagram I had to leave a tribute:
Miles Davis had it right:
Prince was some otherworldly blend of James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, Marvin Gaye, and Charlie Chaplin. How can you mess with that?
Make sure you catch Soul Town tomorrow night on Magic Soul. I’ve been taking requests all week from my listeners favourite Prince songs and I will be playing a full hour of back-to-back Prince songs. I’ll even be sharing people’s names (or twitter handles) on the air!
Don’t miss it – from 6-8 pm tomorrow night! Tweet me on Twitter, during the show using the hashtags #RememberingPrince and #SoulTown. You can always find me on Facebook and Instagram too!
