Prince was my first icon when I was in middle school back in 1983. How in the entire actual sequence of the contemporary historical timeline of actual fucks did I not hear this amazing cut back then??

This would have changed my entire life and my whole musical worldview altogether, swear to God it absolutely would’ve. It would have deterred me from all that heavy metal stuff, because the piano was my first instrument. I haven’t really talked much about this in any of these blog posts that I’d been writing all this time. When I was 4 years old, my parents used to take me and my brother to our Grandparents’ house every Sunday after church. My Grandfather had a nice Cable upright piano that I would plunk around on and they took me to see this psychopathic little globe of a man with a bad toupee and a harsh demeanor that always gave me the good sense that he didn’t like children very much. But although I saw him do some pretty frightening shit to some of the other kids, he was halfway decent to me. Scary AF, but not so bad because according to him, I was a natural. At least that’s what she used to brag to her friends and kinda Mom me with over and over later on in life. But perhaps he was right, because by the time I was 7 years old I had already started taking up the violin. I like the violin, but you know, violin boy doesn’t get the girl. So naturally, by the time I was 13 I had begun teaching myself the guitar. I’m no John McLaughlin or Michael Hedges, but I play it and I subsequently taught myself how to play the bass guitar, the mandolin, the ukulele, and once upon a time I could fake it well enough on a sitar I used to have before I had to sell it to pay a bill once. But Prince was my first icon, and when I say icon, I even picked up a habit of acting a little freaky too. I had my freak flag flyin’ even though it wasn’t a freak flag to me, it was just the 80s, whaddaya want from me, huh? When I heard this one just about a week or so ago, I about lost my shit. I guess we only get what the companies want you to hear. I loved Purple Rain, had it playing ever night on my auto-reverse cassette deck where I could sleep to it every night. I used to alternate between Prince’s Purple Rain cassette or Morris Day and The Time’s Ice Cream Castles cassette, which perhaps might account for my difficulty falling asleep at nights sometimes. It’s hard to sleep to music you could totally get up and dance to, kinda like if I were to attempt sleeping to the JB’s today.

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MORE TO COME…