Prince: The Hometown Kid

Prince may have been a one-in-a-million talent, but he was also the product of multiple Minneapolis neighborhoods.

by

The city of Minneapolis has an odd shape, sort of like a boxy robot with its left arm raised to hail a passing spaceship. The Mississippi River cascades down around its right shoulder like a sash, and I-35, I-94, I-394, and Highway 55 slice into it from all sides. If you were to draw a heart around the very center of the city, you’d be tracing the blocks where Mount Sinai Hospital once sat and where Prince Rogers Nelson was born on June 7, 1958.

It makes sense that Prince was born in our city’s heart. It’s also fitting that a man who seemed of this place but not of this world spent the first 20 years of his life here. We talk a lot about how Prince transcended creative and social boundaries, but the ways in which he moved through different parts of the city might be just as important in defining his legacy. This was apparent in the hours following his passing, when grief-stricken fans flooded the streets outside of the venue he made world-famous, First Avenue. It was amazing to see folks from north Minneapolis and south Minneapolis, black folks and white folks, the well-off and the marginalized—all squished together to sing, dance, and coexist. It was a rare moment for a city that continues to struggle with disparities and segregation, and it was Prince who brought us together.

Prince, who loved all of Minneapolis fiercely, whose death struck us at our core, whose passing caused the sky to literally glow purple. Prince, whose hometown pride was so radiant that they named his sound after his city. We know what Prince did for Minneapolis, but it got me thinking: Just what did living in Minneapolis do for Prince? 

North Minneapolis

On that fateful day in 1958, Prince Rogers Nelson was born to Mattie Shaw and John Nelson, who took their young Prince home from Mount Sinai Hospital to their nearby apartment on 5th Avenue. Though Prince would spend his first year living in that apartment in south Minneapolis, his family’s roots were already planted firmly in the streets, community centers, and jazz clubs of north Minneapolis.

John Nelson had a decent day job working for Honeywell, but he really came alive in the evenings, playing piano in his jazz group the Prince Rogers Trio, a legacy he hoped to pass down to his son, along with his stage name. In the 1950s it was highly unusual to see a black band performing in downtown Minneapolis, so John Nelson would take the gigs where he could, sometimes playing behind the stage at strip clubs on Hennepin, and more often picking up jobs at after-hours jazz joints such as The Blue Note and the Cozy Bar on Olson Memorial Highway or dances at the Phyllis Wheatley House in the epicenter of the growing African American community in Near North.

Originally a settlement house and later a community center, Phyllis Wheatley has a long history of providing a safe space for African Americans to gather in north Minneapolis. It’s where John Nelson had met Mattie Shaw, a promising young jazz singer who would quickly become his bandmate and second wife. When Prince was still an infant, the couple moved to Near North, buying a house on Logan Avenue midway between the neighborhood’s two thoroughfares, Plymouth and Olson Memorial.

 These were complicated times for the neighborhood, which sits just northwest of downtown Minneapolis but can often feel worlds apart. In the ’50s, the majority of the people living in Near North were Jewish immigrants who had moved to the area in the early part of the 20th century, and the majority of the businesses up and down Plymouth and Olson Memorial were Jewish-owned delis, grocery stores, appliance shops, and other small businesses. Starting at the middle of the 20th century, it also became home to a small but growing black population. As the national civil rights movement heated up, the liberal-minded Land of Sky Blue Waters became an enticing new home for African Americans from throughout the southern half of the country. From 1950 to 1970 the city of Minneapolis experienced a record 436 percent increase in its black population.

John Nelson was one of those newcomers, landing in Minneapolis in 1948 after moving north from Louisiana. The fact that he had to work two jobs to support his young family speaks to how difficult it was for African Americans to earn a living wage during that time. “He worked a day job and then he worked downtown playing behind strippers,” Prince recalled in an interview for Musician Magazine in 1983. “So he was away and I didn’t see him much then, only while he was shaving or something like that.”

At the time, the unemployment rate for young black men was ticking upward, and the tension was palpable between African Americans struggling to make ends meet and the increasingly prosperous Jewish business owners and families living in the northside. Because the black population was still relatively small and sequestered, many of these issues were unknown to those in greater Minnesota until they came to a head on a hot, restless night in August of 1966 and again when many shops on Plymouth Avenue went up in flames during disturbances on the nights of July 20 and 21, 1967.

It’s hard to know the extent to which Prince was aware of the tension in his neighborhood—he would have been 8 when the first unrest broke out along Plymouth in 1966. But he did take advantage of a community center that opened in Near North amid all the chaos. Started by a ragtag group of neighborhood leaders, The Way became the gathering space for black youth in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Prince hung out at The Way after school, quietly observing the older kids as they jammed and eventually picking up instruments himself.

Before long, The Way had an official band—the Family—that merged covers of songs by Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, and Earth, Wind & Fire with its own R&B originals. It was a magnet for talented black youth in the city, starting with a core group of northsiders, including Joe Lewis Jr., Randy Barber, Pierre Lewis, and Sonny Thompson (Thompson would go on to perform in Prince’s The New Power Generation). 

“Guys like André Cymone, Jimmy Jam, Terry Lewis—they used to come to that back room,” recalls Joe Lewis Jr. “It was an open-door policy. I can remember Terry Lewis coming, and he wanted to learn some songs. He came and sat in probably two or three days of rehearsing and then got some songs down, taking them off and being in another band that spun off. André Cymone, same thing. He’d come down, watch us, slap on the bass, play with me for a while, move on.”

*****

When he was 10, Prince’s parents divorced, and he started bouncing from home to home, staying at his dad’s apartment on Glenwood and his mom’s house on 8th Avenue North, where he butted heads with his new stepdad, Hayward Baker. By age 12, he was hanging out at multiple after-school programs that gave him access to many different instruments.  

When I spoke to Prince in 2014, he stressed this point. “There were instruments strewn about,” he said of the various schools and community programs of his childhood. He said he tried picking up the saxophone in elementary school but couldn’t stand the way it chafed his lip, so he switched over to the piano, then the bass, and then the instrument he would master more proficiently than most other humans: the guitar. Clearly, these early musical experiences had a lasting imprint on his growth as a musician.

Even though many of the musicians we now regard as architects of the “Minneapolis sound” grew up within a few city blocks of one another in north Minneapolis, Prince wouldn’t unlock his musical destiny until the city started bussing kids between north and south Minneapolis in an effort to integrate the deeply segregated city’s public schools.

South Minneapolis

In September, Sheila E. visited Minneapolis to announce a benefit concert that she would perform at Orchestra Hall to raise money for some of Prince’s favorite youth-oriented nonprofit organizations in the Twin Cities. Her choice of location for the press conference was a poignant one: Sabathani Community Center on East 38th Street in the Central neighborhood of south Minneapolis. Prince attended school here back when the building housed Bryant Junior High. And before that, he spent the majority of his elementary school years being bussed from north to Kenwood Elementary, which was located in a predominantly white, affluent neighborhood.

When he was young, Prince balked at the idea of having to grow up in the vanilla Midwest. “I was born here, unfortunately,” he would tell his high school newspaper, The Centralian, undoubtedly giving the reporter his famous side-eye as he spoke. But later on, he would reflect on the significance of the bussing program and being introduced to these different worlds at a young age.

“I’m as much a part of the city where I grew up as I am anything,” he told Minnesota Monthly in 1987. “I was very lucky to be born here because I saw both sides of the racial issue, the oppression and the equality.”   

To think of a young Prince adrift in this between space, his home life crumbling, staring out the windows of a city passing him by, it’s easy to understand how he slowly detached from day-to-day concerns that plague most teenagers and wandered into a musically obsessed dream state. Shuffling from home to home, school to school, neighborhood to neighborhood, it’s no wonder that even his earliest musical explorations weren’t bound by genre or rules.

It was in this between space where he met his first musical peer, André Cymone. When he was 12, Prince attended his first and only year at Lincoln Junior High in north, and Cymone was a new kid whose family had just moved to the neighborhood from the projects.

*****

“We met the first day of school,” remembers Cymone. “I didn’t know anybody then, literally. Mr. Lee, who was gym teacher, gave you your schedule and said, ‘Stand against the wall.’ And I’ll never forget it, because I looked along the wall and there was like, I don’t know, 40, 50 people . . . and I just didn’t know anybody. And I finally saw this one guy, and I thought he looked interesting . . . like somebody I could probably hang out with. So I went and stood next to him.”

“I said, ‘Hey, man, how you doing? I’m André.’ He says he’s Prince. I said, ‘Prince. OK. What are you into?’ He says, ‘I play music.’ I said, ‘That’s interesting. I play music too.’ He said, ‘Oh.’”

After playing it cool for a few minutes, Prince and Cymone eventually decided to meet up after school and jam at Prince’s dad’s apartment, where Prince would show off his favorite tunes on the piano and Cymone felt out bass lines on an old four-string acoustic guitar. Prince had a cousin, Charles Smith, who could play the drums, and Cymone’s sister Linda knew piano. Before long their first band, Grand Central, was born.

Had Prince stayed at Lincoln Junior High, Grand Central might have remained a strictly north Minneapolis band. But soon after his fateful meeting with Cymone and the formation of Grand Central, Prince was once again at the mercy of the city’s bussing program. Prince was bussed to Bryant Junior High, where his participation in the school basketball team would be captured in a now-iconic yearbook photo. It was also where he met James “Jimmy Jam” Harris, who would later become a musical rival, and where he further expanded his musical horizons, listening to the latest rock music from Carlos Santana, Grand Funk Railroad, and Chicago on KQRS to keep up with his classmates’ favorite pop music.

“We had to play top 40 songs,” he told Musician Magazine in 1983. “Anything that was a hit, didn’t matter who it was. We played everything because we were playing for white and black audiences at the time. Minneapolis is mostly white anyway.”

By the time Prince reached Central High School, Grand Central was notorious. The group played for teenagers all over Minneapolis and St. Paul and even played at the Minnesota State Fair. It played proms in gymnasiums full of well-off white kids one weekend, then street dances at The Way or Phyllis Wheatley the next. And as Cymone tells it, the band even picked up the occasional gig at the Elks Club off Plymouth and Penn, where Cymone’s mom would host card parties for her friends.

After high school, Prince spent most of his time in south Minneapolis. His first real mentor, Pepé Willie, gave Prince one of his first paid recording gigs at Sound80 in Seward, laying down guitar parts for Willie’s band, 94 East. Willie would also let Prince and his first touring band rehearse for 10 to 12 hours a day at his house off Lake Calhoun. “That’s where we auditioned his band members—Bobby Z, André Cymone, Dez Dickerson, Gayle Chapman, and Matt Fink,” Willie told Rolling Stone earlier this year. During this time Prince hooked up with producer Chris Moon and manager Owen Husney, both of whom would help usher in his solo career.

When Prince started to take off, he got his own place two blocks south of 50th and France, and he logged hours in his unfinished basement recording demos. In the early ’80s, Prince planted a flag in one of the city’s hippest neighborhoods, opening a store on West Lake Street that was simply called “New Power Generation.” The Uptown neighborhood would become the literal and metaphorical center for Prince’s most grandiose vision for Minneapolis.

Uptown

To listen to Prince sing about Uptown is to imagine a multicultural hotbed on par with any major metropolitan city in the world. Uptown is where you go to be free—free from oppression, free from judgment, free from boring cultural norms and pants that cover your entire butt. In Prince’s mind, Uptown was the freakiest, funkiest place on earth.

Never mind the fact that Prince’s version of Uptown bore little resemblance to real life. According to a 1980 census, only 1,500 (4.19 percent) of the total 35,784 citizens living in the Calhoun-Isles neighborhood were minorities. The poverty rate was increasing, and the poorest neighborhoods in the city were clustered in the still-segregated areas of north Minneapolis and parts of south. And Prince had yet to cross over and receive radio airplay in the Twin Cities or be accepted by white rock fans in his own hometown.

 Prince was quite cognizant of the fact that the music industry was a restrictive place for black artists, especially in Minneapolis. He had seen musicians from his father’s generation struggle to break out of the underground circuit, and he watched as one of his own black musical peers, “Funkytown” vocalist Cynthia Johnson, was quietly omitted from Lipps, Inc.’s music videos and album covers and replaced by white dancers.

“I was brought up in a black and white world. Black and white, night and day, rich and poor,” he told MTV in 1985. “And I listened to all kinds of music when I was young. And when I was younger I always said that one day I was going to play all kinds of music and not be judged for the color of my skin but the quality of my work. Hopefully that will continue.”

From the beginning of his career, he set out to do things differently—to make an intentionally integrated band, to run with people on both sides of the tracks, to assemble a ragtag crew that looked just as punk-rock gritty as it did stylish and funky. 

In Prince’s mind, “Uptown” was also where everything he loved could catapult him higher: rock, funk, R&B, gospel, new wave. Gay, straight, genderqueer. Black, white, Puerto Rican, everybody a-freakin.’ For a young black man who grew up in the poorest areas of a segregated city, setting out to create genre-demolishing music and an inclusive scene was revolutionary.

As The New York Times wondered in a 1981 headline, “Is Prince leading music to a true biracism?” “Prince’s black-white synthesis isn’t just a picture of what could be, it’s a prophecy,” the paper wrote. Prince imagined a better and more equitable world, and his lifetime quest for freedom was sparked by the challenging and distinctly Minnesotan experiences he had as a black citizen, student, and artist.

As Prince sang/dreamed in his early career hit, “Controversy”: “People call me rude, I wish we all were nude / I wish there was no black and white / I wish there were no rules.” 

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