{"id":58528,"date":"2016-04-22T11:00:49","date_gmt":"2016-04-22T16:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=58528"},"modified":"2016-04-22T10:59:48","modified_gmt":"2016-04-22T15:59:48","slug":"some-say-a-man-aint-happy-til-a-man-truly-dies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=58528","title":{"rendered":"Some Say A Man Ain’t Happy, Until A Man Truly Dies"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Prince is like your generation’s version of Elvis dying”.<\/span><\/p>\n

That’s what my daughter said as I was eating dinner last night. \u00a0And she’s got a great point.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

We’ll come back to that.<\/span><\/p>\n

Everyone in the Twin Cities, it seems, has a “when I met Prince” story. \u00a0Mine’s pretty mundane; it was a First Avenue, not long after I moved to town. \u00a0I probably noticed the people Prince was with long, long before I noticed Prince himself – he was, like, 15 inches shorter than me.<\/span><\/p>\n

My\u00a0better\u00a0<\/em>“Prince” story was more of a one-degree-of-separation tale:<\/span><\/p>\n

The other guitar player in my band worked at a coffee shop located by where all the Twin Cities record labels were based, and where groups like Husker Du and the Replacements were based. He did it for the music networking. \u00a0\u00a0One day I was having a cup of coffee, and my guitar player\u00a0introduced me to a new waitress, a dizzyingly attractive latin-american woman. She was a musician. I started trying to work whatever magic I had at that time of my life.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI have a demo tape I\u2019m going to give to Prince\u201d, she said.<\/span><\/p>\n

You and me and every other musician in town<\/i> I thought; \u201cI\u2019d love to hear it sometime\u201d, I said. She played me something on her Walkman. I resolved to come back and talk more.<\/span><\/p>\n

A few weeks later, news made the rounds that she was dating Prince; they lived together for a bit, and he produced at least one album for her.<\/span><\/p>\n

So close, but yet so far.<\/span><\/p>\n

I Was Working Part-Time At The Five And Dime<\/strong>; \u00a0\u00a0More seriously?<\/span><\/p>\n

If I had a nickel for every blog post I’ve begun over the years with “They didn’t have much “black” music\u00a0in North Dakota when I was a kid”, I could skip a year’s worth of pledge drives.<\/span><\/p>\n

But the confluence of MTV, Top40 radio making it to Fargo, and kids from out of state moving to North Dakota when I got to college, introduced me to the radical notion of someone who was:<\/span><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. A black guy<\/span><\/li>\n
  2. From Minneapolis<\/span><\/li>\n
  3. Who played funk that rocked,<\/span><\/li>\n
  4. and rock that was intensely funky<\/span><\/li>\n
  5. that was completely marinated in S<\/span><\/li>\n
  6. E<\/span><\/li>\n
  7. X<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    And so I listened.<\/span><\/p>\n

    And as I got into my early twenties, and started to ponder where it was that I wanted to start my adult life, and thought “a music scene that can spawn the likes of not only the\u00a0Replacements, the H\u00fcskers, but\u00a0this<\/em>…:<\/span><\/p>\n