September 9, 2019 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Dan Piepenbring’s fascinating “The Beautiful One,” an account of his experience collaborating with Prince on his memoir. The time frame of the piece – January 29, 2016 to April 21, 2016 – happens to be the last three months of Prince’s life. Piepenbring didn’t know that, of course. Did Prince? At some level, was Prince conscious he was nearing the end? Had he lost the will to live? Piepenbring’s piece hints he might’ve. It reports, 

One of the people closest to Prince told detectives that, after Prince’s first show in Atlanta, he’d said that he “enjoyed sleeping more these days,” and that maybe it meant he’d done all he was supposed to do on Earth; waking life was “incredibly boring.”

Well, it may have been boring for Prince, but it wasn’t for Piepenbring, and it wasn’t for me, as I vicariously tagged along. The second section describing Piepenbring’s first meeting with Prince is riveting. Here’s a sample:

Behind his sphinxlike features, I could sense, there was an air of skepticism. I tried to calm my nerves by making as much eye contact as possible. Though his face was unlined and his skin glowed, there was a fleeting glassiness in his eyes. We spoke about diction. “Certain words don’t describe me,” he said. White critics bandied about terms that demonstrated a lack of awareness of who he was. “Alchemy” was one. When writers ascribed alchemical qualities to his music, they were ignoring the literal meaning of the word, the dark art of turning base metal into gold. He would never do something like that. He reserved a special disdain for the word “magical.” I’d used some version of it in my statement. “Funk is the opposite of magic,” he said. “Funk is about rules.”

The third section is superb, a description of Piepenbring’s visit to Paisley Park (“In a high-ceilinged room adjacent to the soundstage, Jakissa Taylor Semple, who goes by DJ Kiss, was spinning records on a plinth surrounded by couches and candles. Six of Prince’s aides and bandmates swayed to the music next to a tray of vegan desserts. A mural of black jazz musicians from Prince’s “Rainbow Children” era was on the wall; a large silver rendering of Prince’s glyph was suspended from the ceiling”) and, later in the evening, his attendance, with Prince and his entourage, at a local movie theatre to see Kung Fu Panda 3 (“We headed over in two cars and found a lone attendant in the empty parking lot ready to unlock the door. Prince arrived just after the movie began, slipping into the back row”).

What an adventure! It leads to a trip to Melbourne to join Prince for the first leg of his “Piano & a Microphone” tour in Australia, resulting in this memorable scene:

The car pulled into Crown Towers through a special entrance that snaked below the hotel to a bank of underground elevators. I told Prince that I liked the quiet of hotels at this hour. There was something weirdly appealing about wandering their long carpeted corridors late at night. Prince gave a sly smile. “I’ve done it many times,” he said.

The piece brims with wonderful details: “the plastic diamond the size of a Ring Pop” that Prince’s driver wears; the smell of perfume in Prince’s hair; the “fistful of twenty-dollar bills in the cup holder” of Prince’s black Lincoln MKT; Prince’s sneakers, white platforms with light-up Lucite soles,” flashing red. 

Those sneakers play a part in “The Beautiful One” ’s most beautiful sentence: 

As the credits rolled, he rose without a word, skipping down the stairs and out of the theatre, his sneakers shining laser red in the darkness.

God I wish I’d written that. I devoured this piece – one of the best of 2019, for sure.