By then, press was possibly beside the point. After all, in 1980, Robert Christgau, in his review of Prince’s Dirty Mind for the Village Voice, declared: “Mick Jagger should fold up his penis and go home.”
But, this. This was big, even for the glitzoid, over-the-top ’80s. The story that would emerge, “Prince Talks: The Silence is Broken,” would be Neal’s first of three cover stories for Rolling Stone about Prince. And it would mark the beginning of a friendship that would last 31 years until Prince’s death alone in an elevator in Paisley Park, his compound in Chanhassen, Minnesota, in a manner that Prince had predicted in that very first interview, while speaking about the tunes and tones in his head that caused him to make music all night, sometimes for 20 hours straight, with the help of studio engineers who worked in shifts. “‘One of my friends worries that I’ll short-circuit. We always say I’ll make the final fade on a song one time and ...’” stretching out on a recording console, as Karlen wrote: “limbs awkwardly splayed like a body ready to be chalked by the coroner, he crossed his eyes and stuck his arm out.”
Which is pretty much what happened, give or take a few details.
And now, Neal has published a memoir, This Thing Called Life, a compulsively readable reconstruction of the relationship between the two Minneapolis natives, alternately middle-of-the-night confessional, hysterical, and athletic. “You want to play ping pong?” Prince would ask during lulls in the action. On one side of the ring was “the universally acclaimed genius” and “personification of hip” to whom other “intergalactic hipsters offered unashamed gush.” Prince was the “cultural icon who defied and cross-bred genres from fashion to funk … 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 of downtown Minneapolis glow purple.”
On the other, pencil ever behind his ear, was the “flamboyantly engaging” motor mouth, Brown graduate, and former bar mitzvah tutor (Hebrew name Natan Shmuel), whose Yiddish-speaking grandfather made Shabbos wine under special governmental dispensation during Prohibition for his local Minneapolis synagogue. As a special Christmas gesture, he carried Mason jars of the runoff—“let’s be honest, several illegal batches”—to neighbors in his mostly Black neighborhood of North Minneapolis. This earned him the moniker “the Wine Jew,” a designation that “guaranteed my grandmother and him, both octogenarian foreigners, safety and popularity in the neighborhood.” Years later, a check of his grandfather’s logs revealed that one regular recipient of the Yuletide wine was Prince’s father, John Nelson.
The magna carta of the tale is the initial RS interview, birthed out of the same sorts of betrayals, double-crosses, and acts of true faith that characterized post-WWII international agreements—and most of Prince’s life, which Karlen followed and participated in, to a degree, until the musician’s death from a fentanyl overdose five years ago today.
In the summer of 1985, Neal was already working on a story about Prince’s women—Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman—his musical collaborators and bandmates in The Revolution. Eager for a vehicle to promote his new album, Around the World in a Day, since he would not tour it, Prince had agreed to speak to Rolling Stone through Wendy and Lisa, and to appear on the cover with them. But the two apparently liked Neal and mentioned this to Susannah Melvoin, Wendy’s identical twin sister and Prince’s then fiancée, who apparently recommended that Prince come out of his cone of silence and speak as well.
And suddenly, the cover interview would feature the man himself.
“By recommending to Susannah Melvoin (and perhaps positing the idea to Prince personally) that the Little Big Man talk to me,” Neal writes, “Wendy and Lisa did the unthinkably generous: They gave up their own cover story. True, they would make it the following year [a story Neal also wrote], but they didn’t know that, and once you give up the cover of any major magazine, it’s always doubtful that the wheel will come around again. People in rock and roll just don’t give up being on the cover of Rolling Stone.”
Shockingly, not more than a year later, after the galaxy of hits that had put Prince and The Revolution on a par with the Beatles, Prince would disband the group, forever affecting his relationship with the two women. Yet Prince could also express unshakable loyalty. When Neal arrived in Minneapolis to meet Prince for the interview, he was shocked to learn that Rolling Stone planned to yank the rug out from under him and send the music editor to poach the blockbuster interview with Prince for himself. But Prince whispered nyet and shut that idea right down.
Neal wrote: “Prince lived a life where nobody—nobody!—knew more than 15 percent of what was going on in his life and brain. Still, that 15 percent could encompass a lot of surprises.”
For two days after Neal arrived for the interview, (“Just get enough,” Jann Wenner had told him, “that we can put ‘Prince Talks’ on the cover,”) Prince observed him, but wouldn’t speak to him. Neal gamely sweated out this further indignity, until, finally, Prince greeted the reporter and invited him to go for a spin in his car. Before turning on the ignition, Prince stared straight ahead through the windshield of his 1965 bone-white Thunderbird, murmuring, “I’m not used to this, I really thought I’d never do interviews again.”
by Emily Benedek, Tablet | Read more:
Image: Neal Karlen
[ed. See also: Karlen's 1985 Rolling Stone interview - Prince Talks: The Silence Is Broken]
