ROYAL PERFORMANCE
When Prince died on April 21, 2016 at the age of only 57, the world was stunned. This prolific, clean-living, supremely creative mind had apparently succumbed to an overdose of the painkiller fentanyl, many years before his time. In the music-making community, we were deprived of the talents of a multi-instrumentalist and composer without parallel. In the specific tribe of bass players, we lost a musician whose grasp of groove and economy made him one of the finest of his generation.
Most of us in the press never met Prince, and regret that fact. He didn’t exactly make himself widely accessible to us, preferring to maintain a mystique about his personality and private life that endures to this day. When he did allow interviewers into his private sanctum, Paisley Park Studios in Minneapolis, they tended to walk away speechless, having spent time with a man who was arguably not quite of this world.
One of these privileged few was Bass Player’s Karl Coryat, whose story is reproduced in full below. Published as His Highness Gets Down! in November 1999, Coryat’s story was a milestone for this magazine, emphasizing BP’s authority in what was then essentially a field of one. Notice that Prince wasn’t calling himself by his given name at the time, making it tricky for anyone to actually address him: He permitted only ‘The Artist’ as a temporary name while he went through a legal battle with his then-record company.
Respect to Karl for rising to the challenge: Could you have pulled this interview off? t started out simply enough. The Artist was coming out with a new record, his people told us, called Rave Un2 The Joy Fantastic. Did we want to come to Minneapolis and do a story on him?
The Artist? Is he material? Yes, he is. The man can play every instrument sickeningly well, bass certainly being no exception. A listen to any of his early-Eighties LPs, on which he played nearly all the parts, bears this out.
