Two Nights of Prince’s Welcome 2 America Tour: A Review
Almost thirty years ago, in the Fall of 1981, a mostly unknown Prince Rogers Nelson was awarded the distinct privilege of being the opening act for the Rolling Stones’ three night gig at the Coliseum in Los Angeles. Prince was about to play to the largest crowds of his career thus far. But the Stone’s mostly white rocker fan base wasn’t having any of it. Those who knew who Prince was might have known him as the artist behind the 1979 R&B/Disco hit “I Wanna Be Your Lover”, but in 1981 Disco was a very dirty word to white Reagan America. Most others at the show probably just saw a skinny black guy wearing nothing but a black thong and a trench coat, singing songs like “Sexuality” and “Jack U Off.” The booing from the hostile crowd started quickly into the set, and eventually people in the front rows were throwing things at the stage. Prince and his band had to leave the stage for their own safety, tail between their legs. Concert promoter Bill Graham came out and chewed out the crowd, saying that within a few years they would all be paying good money to see Prince perform. Well they didn’t need to wait a few years; the very next year Prince released his breakthrough mega hit album 1999, containing the title hit song as well as Little Red Corvette. I can only hope some of those garbage throwers realized what utter fucking morons they were. Because the rest, as they say, is history.
Flash forward thirty years to today, and Prince is as much the Rock n’ Roll Royalty as the Rolling Stones, commanding arena audiences that rival theirs. Sure, he hasn’t had a top ten song in 15 years, but so what. He doesn’t need to. He has the kind of catalogue of classic songs that most artists today will never, ever have. Although he has played shows here and there over the past few years, he hasn’t mounted a full scale tour of the States since the brilliant 2004 Musicology Tour. At the time, that tour was the best concert experience I’d ever had. I’ve waited patiently since then to see if Prince could out do himself with another show on the same scale.
And with his new 2011 Welcome 2 America Tour, he SO just did… and then some. Two weeks ago he announced a “21 Night Stand” of the tour at the Forum in Southern California, essentially announcing a residency in LA for as long as we’ll have him. I was fortunate enough to go to the first two nights of these gigs, and frankly am looking forward to more. The following recounts the first two shows from this leg of the tour.
Night #1: Thursday, April 14th at the Forum in Inglewood CA
Prince was supposed to go on at 7:30 p.m. But punctuality is for stuffy white people with a stick up they ass. That is so not Prince. He doesn’t go on till 9 p.m. His opening set starts with D.M.S.R. (Dance, Music, Sex, Romance) from the 1999 album. Oh HELLS yes, this is how you start a show! He follows with Pop Life, Musicology, Extraordinary, and then Uptown, one of Prince’s first singles from his brilliant 1980 album Dirty Mind. I was very much not expecting him to play anything off that particular album, so at this point I’m beyond psyched. Prince is just killing it, dancing around like a man half his age. He doesn’t look a bit like his 52 years, and he knows it. he quips to the crowd “Everyone ages except me!” And looking at him, who can argue?
Next we get into Raspberry Beret, and Prince coaxes the audience into singing a good portion of the song along with him (and instead of him, in some parts) Next comes a particulary funky version of his 1991 hit Cream, with his new dancers “The Twinz” dressed as flappers and givin’ it their sexy best. I’m guessing The Twinz are the 2011 version of his sexy dancer pair from back in the day, Diamond and Pearl . (Geek Trivia Time! “Pearl’s” real name was Robia la Morte, and she went on to play Jenny Calendar on the first two seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Betchya didn’t know that) This leads into a version of Morris Day and The Time’s hit song Cool. This isn’t really a cover, since (despite their fake on-screen rivalry in the movie Purple Rain) Prince was responsible for just about every song Morris Day and the Time ever did, and owns the publishing rights for all their songs. This was but the first time in these set of shows he would do a song he wrote and produced but was made famous by someone else, as if to remind the audience just how much he’d contributed to the success of others.
Speaking of rivals, Prince next goes into a cover of Michael Jackson’s Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough. The audience goes nuts for this, although for a child of the 80’s like me, it is weird to see Prince cover Michael Jackson. Actually, hearing him do MJ makes me a little sad. I remember thinking about Michael Jackson a lot too during Prince’s 2004 Musicology Tour (which was happening at the same time as Madonna’s Re-Invention Tour) During my childhood, the “Holy Trinity” of Pop Music were Michael Jackson, Madonna and Prince. In ’04, Both Madonna’s tour and Prince’s tours were playing to packed houses, while Michael was showing up to court wearing pajama bottoms and having his trial for alleged molestation charges being re-enacted nightly on the E Network. Now seven years later, Prince is playing old MJ songs, and Michael isn’t on trial, he’s fucking dead, and his soulless family is pimping his likeness and music for video games and God knows what else. I kind of hate being reminded of that in this happy moment. I’m way ready to move on to the next song now.
And now we’re into overdrive…We get an awesome version of his funk classic Let’s Work, leading into U Got The Look (With striking bald African American singer Shelby J. standing in for Sheena Easton, and doing an amazing job) and finally a 15 minute long rendition of Prince’s signature song Purple Rain. The entire arena is filled with hands waving back and forth, holding up their cells phones, making the stage appear to be surrounded by thousands of twinkling stars. I’ll admit I’m fighting back tears here, and I ain’t the emotional type. Purple Rain is my favorite album of all time; I’ve owned it on vinyl, then tape, then CD, and finally to its final resting place, as mp3’s in my ipod. Hearing it like this, with thousands of fans singing along, it’s an emotional/spiritual moment. The show could have ended here, and I would have been happy. But that’s not what happened.
Prince comes back, and does a string of iconic top ten hits back to back to back: Let’s Go Crazy, Delirious, 1999, The Beautiful Ones, and finally a slowed down, sexier version of Little Red Corvette.Then he breaks out the dances moves and gives us Kiss. For a long time Prince fan like me, this is all pure bliss.
He vanishes beneath the stage again, but it isn’t long before he re-emerges, to the sounds of When Doves Cry. He next starts playing snippets of his older, nastier songs…songs that he won’t play the full versions of due to his current Jehovah’s Witness beliefs. He plays a bit of Vanity 6’s Nasty Girl (Like with The Time, Prince was responsible for everything Vanity did except for vocals. He even came up with the name Vanity when the record company said there was no way they would go with his first name choice, Vagina, pronounced Vag-eena. True story.) Then he plays his classic Sign O’ The Times, before cruelly teasing us with a bit of his Tipper Gore-angering classic Darling Nikki. I’m sorry if this makes me religiously intolerant, but knowing I will never hear a full version of Nikki again, much less favorite dirty Prince songs of mine like Erotic City, Gett Off and Head, is kind of really making me hate on the Jehovah’s Witnesses right about now. He finishes this portion with one of my absolute favorites from the Sign O’ The Times album, If I Was Your Girlfriend.
He continues with a trio of “slow jams” –not my favorite Prince musical genre, but hearing them live is another thing all together. First is Insatiable from Diamonds and Pearls, the he pulls Scandalous from the Batman soundtrack out of his ass, and finally Adore. The lights go up. This was a perfect show. Hell, this was a perfect night.
But it STILL ain’t over. 15 minutes after the lights go up, and half the place has cleared, Sheila E comes out and gives us her (Prince written and produced) hit The Glamourous Life. And then the little man himself comes out and, guitar in hand and just kills it with a rendition of Peach. I’m shocked. I can’t remember a concert I’ve been too where the artist comes back after house lights are up, especially with the lights up this long. After this point it’s getting late, and we feel safe in leaving. It turns out we missed Three More Encores. Prince kept playing until they were cleaning the stage and there were maybe a hundred or so people left, including songs like Baby I’m A Star, Sometimes in Snows in April and a cover of Sylvester’s Disco Heat. While I’m sad I missed those, the truth is I got so much I can’t really complain.
Prince just brought the house down tonight. There is simply no other way to describe it. He showed his prowess with the guitar, the piano, and his voice sounds as good as it ever did. And he dances around with the energy of a twenty year old. I’d say it was sickening, if it wasn’t so fucking awesome. All I know at this point is that I can’t wait to see him again next week…and next week I’ll know better than to leave when the house lights go up.
Night #2, Thursday, April 21st, 2011 at the Forum. Inglewood CA.
As the Forum begins to fill up for the second night of his “21 Night Stand,” I wonder if there is any way Prince can top last Thursday’s show for me. As the lights go down, and the screaming of the fans starts, his bands starts to play a funky, sexy groove I’ve never heard before. The music continues for awhile, and finally Prince emerges….slowly walking around the stage, sexily leering at the crowd, walking towards the microphone and then walking away…he then gets on the floor and does a puppy crawl, evoking images of Prince getting out of the bathtub in the When Doves Cry video and crawling towards the camera. I imagine at this point there are a lot of wet seats at the Forum. And Prince hasn’t even started singing yet. Ten years into his career, Elvis Presley was a fat bloated, drug addled version of himself…and here is Prince, 25 years after his hey day, pulling the same sexy moves he did then, and it doesn’t look absurd. Amazing.
Finally, Prince takes the microphone and begins to sing, and it is a song I’ve never heard before called When Eye Lay My Hands On U (and as a hardcore Prince fan who owns nearly all his albums, that is saying something. Turns out it was an internet only release. Who knew.) It doesn’t matter that most of us have never heard this song before…he is selling the fuck out of it, and he is owning the crowd. For the next eight songs, Prince doesn’t repeat a single tune he played the week before. He goes into a cover of Crimson and Clover, one of the best things from his 2009 release LOtUSFLOW3ER, once again showing the crowd just how unmatched he is when playing the guitar. He follows with the Purple Rain classic Take Me With U (minus Appolonia, who was probably busy signing autographs at an auto show or something) Guitar, Shhh (from his under rated 1995 album The Gold Experience) and two absolute favorites of mine from Parade, his 1986 soundtrack album, Anotherloverholeinyohead and Mountains. I’m so shocked and happy that he is playing these two forgotten classics that I’m speechless. Next is Nothing Compares 2 U, a song he wrote back in 1985 that went to worldwide acclaim when covered by Sinead O’Connor in 1990. Just like the week before when he performed the Morris Day and the Time song Cool, he is reminding us of songs he he created that were made famous by others. At this rate, as the tour progresses he might do the Bangles’ Manic Monday or Stevie Nicks’ Stand Back just to remind us all who made these hits possible.
The rest of the show more or less follows the same set list as the prior week, although this week’s versions of Purple Rain and Little Red Corvette are slightly less epic than the week before. He sprinkles the rest of the show with a few different hits missing from the week before, like I Would Die 4 U, Hot Thing, and The Most Beautiful Girl in the World. He encores with Kiss and Controversy…not as many encores as the week before, but the renditions of the songs this week are mostly tighter, and the overall show feels more polished. And still just about three hours long. I honestly can’t believe he pulled off a possibly more awesome show than the week before
The words “genius” and “Icon” are thrown around these days for any new artist with the slightest hint of talent and style, whether they deserve it or not (sorry GaGa, I love ya, but the jury is still out on whether you are either. Let’s talk in ten years or so) Prince earned these accolades and titles long ago, and his Welcome 2 America Tour once again proves why. And the most shocking part of this entire thing is that tickets for these shows were mostly priced at $25. These days, shows like these are priced in the range of $80 to a $100 dollars at least. The fact that I just saw 6 hours of Prince in rare form for fifty freakin’ bucks is mind boggling. While I pray that what Prince does here in terms of ticket prices is going to influence other artists to do the same, I highly doubt it.
Am I kissing Prince’s midget ass too much here? Look, Prince is sometimes freaking stupid, and often just plain nuts; Changing his name to an un pronouncable symbol (which is actually typed like this: O+> …I sort of hate myself for knowing that.) Writing “Slave” on his face when fighting with his record label, declaring the internet “dead”, and often treating his loyal, hardcore fan base with contempt. Not to mention the fact that he is sexist and possibly homophobic (although, in fairness, he has never used his music or celebrity to spread intolerance or hate…this is all just rumor and assumption on the part of many. He employs many women and LGBT people in his band, and I give him the benefit of the doubt until I hear him say something negative myself.) Why do we forgive him all this? Because of the music, plain and simple. Because he rocks it like almost no other artist alive today. Like he said the other night in Inglewood, “ain’t no party like a purple party”. I’m inclined to agree.
