This Thing Called Life: Prince's Odyssey, On and Off the Record

By Neal Karlen

A warm and surprisingly real-life biography, featuring never-before-seen photos, of one of rock’s greatest talents: Prince.

Neal Karlen was the only journalist Prince granted in-depth press interviews to for over a dozen years, from before Purple Rain to when the artist changed his name to an unpronounceable glyph. Karlen interviewed Prince for three Rolling Stone cover stories, wrote “3 Chains o’ Gold,” Prince’s “rock video opera,” as well as the star’s last testament, which may be buried with Prince’s will underneath Prince’s vast and private compound, Paisley Park.

According to Prince's former fiancée Susannah Melvoin, Karlen was “the only reporter who made Prince sound like what he really sounded like.” Karlen quit writing about Prince a quarter-century before the mega-star died, but he never quit Prince, and the two remained friends for the last thirty-one years of the superstar’s life.

Well before they met as writer and subject, Prince and Karlen knew each other as two of the gang of kids who biked around Minneapolis’s mostly-segregated Northside. (They played basketball at the Dairy Queen next door to Karlen’s grandparents, two blocks from the budding musician.) He asserts that Prince can’t be understood without first understanding ‘70s Minneapolis, and that even Prince’s best friends knew only 15 percent of him: that was all he was willing and able to give, no matter how much he cared for them.

Going back to Prince Rogers Nelson's roots, especially his contradictory, often tortured, and sometimes violent relationship with his father, This Thing Called Life profoundly changes what we know about Prince, and explains him as no biography has: a superstar who calls in the middle of the night to talk, who loved The Wire and could quote from every episode of The Office, who frequented libraries and jammed spontaneously for local crowds (and fed everyone pancakes afterward), who was lonely but craved being alone. Readers will drive around Minneapolis with Prince in a convertible, talk about movies and music and life, and watch as he tries not to curse, instead dishing a healthy dose of “mamma jammas.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Oct 6, 2020
• ISBN: 9781250135254

Neal Karlen

Neal Karlen was speaking Yiddish at home well before he was a staff writer at Newsweek and Rolling Stone. A regular contributor to the New York Times, he has studied Yiddish at Brown University, New York's Inlingua Institute, and the University of Minnesota's Graduate School of Journalism, where he teaches nonfiction writing.

Book preview

1

MEMOIRS OF AN AMNESIAC

Uptown—Set your mind free.

—Uptown, 1980, by Prince

WINTER 2019

"Another book about Prince?" asked a friend of a friend in Sebastian Joe’s, my local Uptown Minneapolis coffee shop, after I answered his query about what I was working on.

Yup. Another book about Prince.

Prince, the universally acclaimed genius deemed worthy of genuflecting toward even by other acknowledged global geniuses. Prince, the personification of hip to whom other intergalactic hipsters offered unashamed gush. Prince, the international cultural icon who defied and cross-bred genres from fashion to funk to apparent Three Stooges lunacy—and whose death made the Eiffel Tower, the cover of the New Yorker, the front-page above-the-fold headline picture of the New York Times, and all downtown Minneapolis glow purple.

Yes, I said, another book about.… him.

Prince at that point been gone for more than two years; a pretty compelling biography of his post-mortem life could probably already have been written about all that had happened to his name and in his name since his demise.

Why—my coffee shop interlocutor went on, honestly, genuinely curious—"do we need another book about Prince? I mean … sorry. But why?"

I hmmed and took no offense.

That, I told him, is a very good question.

I glumly gathered my papers and notebooks, stowed my laptop in my backpack, and slowly, haphazardly ambled, with my head down, six blocks home to my apartment in Uptown, which Prince had made famous long ago with a joyful eponymous ode to that Minneapolis neighborhood.

I got to my apartment and turned on the lights. It was the middle of the afternoon, but I felt spooked into a morbid darkness. I then got in the shower to start the day over, felt the hot spray splatter my face, stared at the ceiling, and burst into tears.

What, I shouted toward the ceiling, "do you want me to say?!"

I was talking to Prince: Seventy-eight days before a finished manuscript of this book was due, and I’d finally cracked.

Thank God I didn’t hear an answer.

Instead of voices or a vision, the obvious response came to me in a memory on purple stationery inside a purple envelope on which Prince had written in a childlike scrawl, NeAl. It was the first letter he’d ever written me, and I’d put it in a $3.99 Target frame after he’d died. It had hung for two years above my desk, easy to see but hiding—the way Prince used to do himself—in plain sight.

After my first interview and story about Prince came out in Rolling Stone, he’d written me a note, which—unlike the third-grader’s handwriting of my name on the envelope—was filled with the florid ink flourishes of the charmingly affected penmanship he’d been practicing since junior high.

Thanx 4 telling the truth! he’d written. Love God, Prince.

It was the first thank-you note I’d ever received from anyone I’d written about. It was the only note I’ve ever received thanking me for telling the truth. I never expected one: It’s kinda sorta the gig.

And there was my answer.

Thanx 4 telling the truth!

That I can do.

---

This is a work of nonfiction.

That’s a grandiose claim to be sure, considering I am purportedly presenting a historically sound and journalistically accurate account and accounting of Prince, who ranks among the most seemingly unknown and unknowable people of our time: Prince, this … Genius. Clown. God. Demon. Riddle. Joke. Teller of immutable truths. Purveyor of temporal lies. And everything in between.

I also want to make clear this is not a work of "creative nonfiction," a genre of writing I have taught here and there in assorted MFA and journalism programs. I lack the moxie to claim that what follows is creative. If this book is remembered at all, I’d much rather it be for its accuracy than its creativity.

This book is also not Mezz Mezzrow–style nonfiction. It pains me to slur the name of Milton Mezz Mezzrow, author of the 1947 classic jazz memoir, Really the Blues, a wonderful tale of an astonishing jazz figure. So swell a read are Mezz’s memoirs that in 2016, New York Review Books reissued Really the Blues, complete with toney introduction by New York Times music critic Ben Ratliff.

Most memoirists enter a complicated relationship with the truth, Ratliff wrote, especially when they are not household names, and when the key events they describe are not a matter of public record.… (The most dubious assertions here—[include] that Mezzrow had a role in the invention of the term ‘jam session,’ and that he was directly responsible for the popularity of [Louis] Armstrong in Harlem.…) But the reader probably expects some rearrangement of the verifiable truth.

It doesn’t especially blacken the brilliance of Really the Blues when one quickly just senses that Mezz is blowing a fair gale of bullshit. After all, he was Mezz Mezzrow.

Finally, I’m also not writing a clip job of my own previous scribblings on Prince, which I guess would be easy enough to do—but how sad! A clip job is a book or story with stories or anecdotes wholly lifted from other publications. When I quote from Rolling Stone I say so—among other things it means the quote was fact-checked. Once upon a time Rolling Stone had the best fact-checking department in the business.

But that’s another story.

And frankly, I’m not good enough a writer to want to swipe my own stuff from thirty years ago, when I was even worse.

For real.

That’s how we roll in Minneapolis. We begin by apologizing.

Perhaps I sound as if I protest too much. But when it comes to Prince, and the truth, and the connection between the two, I don’t think it is possible to protest too much. The contradictions elucidated by too many credible sources are just too mighty.

To many trustworthy sources, he was simply unable to tap into anything emotional. Over the years, Alan Leeds served Prince in virtually every critical executive role imaginable, not to mention duties as one of his few trusted confidants. In 2017’s When Doves Cry, a curious biopic/documentary, Leeds movingly, humanely described Prince’s inability to simply discuss feelings without sounding obnoxious.

I remember when Kim Basinger had been his significant other for a while, living in Minneapolis and holding an office at Paisley Park, he remembered. And that relationship, for whatever reason, ended abruptly.

And he came into my office and just sat on my desk, Leeds continued, and I said, ‘Hey man, you okay?’

According to Leeds, Prince veritably spat out the words with overmacho venom: "How do you think I’d be? and walked out. He wasn’t, Leeds said, okay with compassion. [What I said] was intended as ‘Do you want a hug?’ You know, a brotherly, ‘You okay, dude?’ And the only thing I could get back was a very snide ‘How do you think I’d be?’"

Alternatively, there is the take of André Cymone, the loudest echo from his past, who reached a rapprochement with Prince in the last year of his life: If you were close, Prince wanted to talk, he said—but Alan Leeds, whom he’d blown off, had been close.

It was good for me, because I never did find too many people I could relate to on a lot of different levels, André continued. And [Prince] was one of the few people throughout my life I could relate to. He was one of the few people throughout my life that I could connect with.

He could talk from the heart, discuss life and death in the middle of the night, but he could also vent from the spleen, spewing bilious comments to those who only meant to express concern about his well-being.

He had myriad levels of relationships over the years, so contradictory that it seems impossible that all those facets could be held in one personality. I don’t think it hurt that I wasn’t on his payroll, kept my distance, and never wanted anything except to do what needed to be done so I’d never have to write about him again, or talk about a friendship I was never sure I had in the first place.

And yet here I am, writing a book, contradicting myself.

Yet in many ways, contradictions were the very essence of Prince. Yes, he was astonishingly unknowing, yet also shockingly wise. He was cruel, and he was kind.

And I know what I know.

---

Taking stock of the eruption of paper in my living room, I paused, looking at the three faded and cracked pieces of luggage long ready for the glue factory. They had looked so shiny and bound for glory, sitting there in the Columbus Avenue store window on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, when I lived only a block away—and a planet away from Minneapolis.

Now the baggage was tattered with age, over- and misuse, its once-efficient packing compartments overflowing with thousands of sheets of paper. There were transcripts of several formal, days-long questionings of Prince for a half-dozen interviews sometimes bound for publication, sometimes not.

Reporter’s notebooks spilled out of the battered suitcases, organized, sorted, and re-sorted so many times over the last two years that I had no idea if there was an order there or not. Perhaps Prince’s story was all there in my living room, somewhere; perhaps it wasn’t; perhaps there was no Prince story or tidy narrative to explain what had been?

---

Poking out from other baggage were other interview transcripts, printed on a 1986 dot-matrix printer, stained with the coffee I’d been drinking when I first looked over the interviews I’d recorded back when with … who can remember? I looked at the pages.

Ah, yes, threescore pages of interviews with the Revolution’s Lisa Coleman and Wendy Melvoin, for a Rolling Stone cover story in 1986—thirty-three years before. Under those were the quotes I’d scribbled down on index cards during my last conversation with Prince, three and a half weeks before he died on April 21, 2016.

The baggage held hundreds and hundreds of those index cards, each with a date, a note, a quote, a half-thought, or full paragraph scribbled on it, many of them barely decipherable, taken down while on the phone in the middle of the night. Many, I knew, made no sense at all, even when I could make out the words.

There were great wads of toilet paper spilling out of one of the suitcases. Over a quarter-century before, I’d taken secret notes on the tissue, hiding from Prince and pretending I had to pee in the cavernous hotel bathrooms of whatever grand hotel suite in Paris or converted castle in Switzerland he was staying in as he conquered Europe on his 1990 Nude tour. I’d been tagging along for weeks, conducting an interview for Rolling Stone.

Except—Prince told me five seconds before our interview began—I couldn’t record or take notes of our conversations. I knew he was fucking with me, but it wasn’t funny.

This isn’t funny.

That tour was the last time I’d publish a word he said until he died thirty-one years later.

Under the toilet paper in the baggage were more notes, these scribbled days, months, or years after the fact. Here was the time, memorialized on a four-by-six-inch index card, when Prince brought to my attention the curious coincidence that we’d met as preteens.

That would have been the late 1960s. We’d both been on the fringes of groups that hung out in the Dairy Queen parking lot on Plymouth Avenue, the main boulevard of Minneapolis’s mostly black Northside, one door down from my immigrant grandparents’ Oliver Avenue shack. (My behind-my-back nickname was Casper, Prince told me in his laugh/sneer, I had noted on one card.)

Paper, quotes, notes taken in real time—a treasure trove of the being and nothingness, the in-betweenness, the contradictions, of Prince’s life.

And then there were the tapes of Prince and me talking, dating back to 1985. I hadn’t listened to them since transcribing the first cassette some thirty years before.

I tried to listen for almost a year after he died. But I couldn’t stand hearing the ghosts—not just his, but mine as well. I felt haunted, hearing the past me, my everything-will-work-out-fine optimism. And why not? Especially on those first tapes. I was just twenty-six, Prince was twenty-seven, and both of us were in love for what we were sure was the first and last time.

Then there was a floppy disk with a rock opera we’d collaborated on, which he liked, produced, and which got the worst reviews of anything he ever did, a fact I am perversely proud of. Underneath that were typewritten, never-used liner notes for a greatest-hits collection.

He’d hated my liner notes, my midcareer summation of his career, and the collection came out, annotated by the wise Alan Leeds, a highly reliable narrator who has served as everything from James Brown’s road manager to president of Paisley Park Records.

And then, spilling out of a large shoulder bag that was hip at roughly the same time as Don Johnson jackets, were the notes that held our private conversations—conducted for nobody, neither on nor off the record—talks that went on until the last weeks of his life.

What had come from those discussions were the hundreds upon hundreds of manuscript pages on which I’d been typing, fourteen hours a day, for most of the past two years: every memory, story, quote, inflection of his, reflection of mine, plus everything I’d ever been told about Prince by someone I trusted.

---

What a fucking mess, I thought.

The papers literally flowing out of the sad-sack luggage reminded me of a molten lava of facts and acts and quotes and articles signifying … a great artist who almost escaped history.

Except I wouldn’t let him, and I won’t let him. We always exacted playful if spiteful revenge upon each other for wrongdoings, and this was no exception. The only not-terrible thing about knowing Prince, in the end, was simply knowing Prince.

That part was fun.

---

Having shitty, personal, untrue things written about you in your hometown paper since you were twenty-six wasn’t so fun, I knew from personal experience, stemming directly from being granted direct journalistic access to Prince. So I will have my revenge on the purple guy for subjecting me to slurs simply for him giving me the honor of quoting him directly. Prince will not be allowed to run away from history, as he’d planned.

And besides, it’s what he really wanted, I think.

Thanx 4 telling the truth! I remembered again.

---

I took a nap.

Revived, I dared myself to look at the streams and reams of paper taken down in informal interviews Prince and I had done for no reason at all, taped or contemporaneously noted, in the last thirty-one years of his life. There were printouts of jungles of verbiage from others, too; reflections from those he loved and who had once loved him back.

True, a certain number of those folks had evolved from loving Prince to wishing they could kill him. Ironically, it wasn’t until 1999 was over that Prince actively began learning empathy, becoming aware that others exist for reasons beyond using or being used. Until then, he usually thought any bad karma directed at him came simply from others’ thwarted professional ambitions.

It wasn’t his fault. Just be glad you weren’t on his payroll or in one of his bands. As longtime Prince saxophonist Eric Leeds explained: In order to do production rehearsals we would start to perform the show and literally every 30 seconds or every minute he would say, ‘STOP,’ and then would say ‘Okay, continue.’ We’d pick up the song where we left off, we might get a minute into it, and he’d say ‘STOP.’ And that would go on, eight or ten hours a day, day after day.

---

Prince never really got it back then, though I think he tried. I can make people famous for fifteen minutes, but I can’t make them famous forever, and they never forgive me, he said to me in 1998, feeling especially lonely, a feeling he said never went completely away, the way the noise in his head, simultaneously holding his next six creative ideas, never abated—the curse of brilliance.

My head feels like a pinball machine, he said. It’s when I think too much and can’t sleep from just having so many things on my mind. You know, stuff like I could do this, I could do that. I could work with this band. When am I gonna do this show or that show? There’re so many things. There’re women. Do I have to eat? I wish I didn’t have to eat.

But other people’s feelings?

He generally didn’t care for or consider them until the calendar page on 1999 literally turned. In 1999 Prince filed trademark infringements in New York state against the Uptown and two other fanzines, and nine fan sites. Ron Herbert, who had worked from Atlanta promoting albums for Prince, said straightforwardly: I would be advising Prince not to sue [his own fans]. There just has to be more to the story than what you and I know.

The ultimate contradiction: He’d turned on his fans, the one demographic Prince always seemed determined to take along for the joyride to wherever he was going.

2

LAST CALL

MARCH 2016

Hi, it’s Prince, said the unmistakable voice on the other end of the line.

But I was mistaken.

Someone who sounded a hell of a lot like Prince—alive for another three and a half weeks—was on the other end, no doubt. Yet it wasn’t quite him: A smidgen of something I couldn’t put a name to was missing from the person and voice I’d come to know over the last thirty-one years.

Someone who sounded astonishingly like Prince was on the other end of the line. But something was undefinably, ineffably off, missing, in the timbre of that voice. This fellow sounded like an excellent simulation of the musician, like the Prince impersonator I once saw in a Las Vegas celebrity lookalike Legends show. The voice on the phone was nearly a pitch-perfect soundalike, a Prince robocall, talking the way you start talking back to before you realize there’s nobody there.

Nearly.

I’ve got nerves that jangle easily, and now, for no specific reason, they were jangling hard. Knock it off, I chastised, reminding myself I hadn’t talked to him in ten months, and during all that time hadn’t had to deduce instantly, the way I usually did, which of the hues in Prince’s profoundly compartmentalized box of emotions he was feeling at that moment. He sounded uncharacteristically flat, as if he was a smushed drawing utensil that needed a spin through a pencil sharpener.

Nah, I was crazy, I thought. I always thought there was trouble when there was none; my major in life had long been worrying over nothing. Paranoia runs deep.

I mumbled nothingisms, not following our usual script for greeting each other.

It’s Prince, he repeated, sounding annoyed.

"Prince who? I finally asked back, returning his It’s Prince" in the telephone shtick we’d been replaying with each other for more than a generation.

"The Prince," he responded in 2016, his annoyance alchemizing more toward the tone of animated bonhomie I’d grown accustomed to when he was in a good mood.

Our telephone shtick had begun in 1985, when Prince, bringing his impatience up to its usual Formula One speed, had called my folks’ house in Minneapolis to find out if my plane had landed yet from New York for our first might-be-if-he-liked-me interview, for an if-he-did-he’d-talk Rolling Stone cover story. When he announced himself to my mother the first time, demanding to know if I’d arrived yet, she said, unimpressed: "Prince who?"

"The Prince," he’d responded.

When I got home to Minneapolis a few hours later, she told me "the Prince had called, a moniker she used, without a hint of disingenuousness, for the rest of her life: Say hello to the Prince!"

Back then, he hadn’t spoken to the press in three years, had vowed never to speak publicly again, and in the meantime, had become via Purple Rain the biggest rock star on the planet. I didn’t know that this interview wasn’t a lock, but rather an audition. I’d falsely figured I’d already landed the story of him finally talking on the recommendation of Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman of his band The Revolution. I’d interviewed Wendy and Lisa several weeks before for their own Rolling Stone