I have been thinking about Prince a lot this weekend, and listening to his music. I was so shocked when I heard he had died, I guess I must of thought of him as much as a “force of nature”, as human. But as “force of nature” as his performances could be, those little flashes of joy when he couldn’t keep back the smile were very endearing.
I appreciate all the memories/thoughts/analysis/links that people have posted here and in other threads. I felt a need to pay my respects to the passing of this stunningly gifted artist who touched me emotionally so many times, and spending time here helped me to do that.
Damn. That song already makes me cry half the time I hear it. I am not a musician but I think the guys did a great job on it. A fitting last song for my Prince-centric weekend.
It’s sad that we lost him, also that now that he is dead his songs are available on YouTube and other channels, where as it was hard to find. Prince would not allow his songs to be readily available. I hope it stays permanently on so fans and people who only recently discovered him, can listen to his msuic.
The Daily Mail is a disreputable gossip paper, right? Mr. brown likes to to read it, and he keeps distressing me by reading me articles in which a supposed drug dealer details his sales of opioids to Prince over the years, etc., starting in the 1980s. I don’t want to start a fight with Mr. brown over his choice of newspapers, but I want to think that this is all just made-up bullshit. It is, isn’t it?
Every time a musician dies someone is eager to step up and claim drug abuse.
According to those who knew him, Prince was not a drug user or abuser (outside of legitimate prescriptions).
The only angle that seems even remotely plausible to me would be an accidental overdose of legally prescribed painkillers - which still does not mean he was an addict or an abuser because you can accidentally overdose and/or have a bad reaction to drugs given for legitimate reasons. In such a case, the pharmaceuticals would be dispensed by a legal pharmacist, not a drug dealer.
Keep in mind, drug dealers are unsavory criminals and that you probably shouldn’t trust what they save without evidence to back it up, and that such a person has much to gain from lying, such as free publicity.
“accidental”? What does that mean? If you take your pills and forgot you took them and take them again that is accidental. But Prince could well have been taking the drugs day in and day out at two or three times or more times the rate the doctor prescribed them. Is that still an accident?
We don’t even know for sure he was on any sort of pain medication at this point.
That’s the stupidity about the whole rumor - yes, it’s possible but there is exactly zero proof at this time, just rumors and unnamed sources.
As for “taking more than he should” - over a hundred people a year in the US die from an overdose of Tylenol, a perfectly legal, over the counter drug that it is appallingly easy to overdose on. Not all of those deaths are suicides, some are people taking OTC drugs they don’t realize all contain acetaminophen and winding up taking too much. It’s been the nation’s leading cause of acute liver failure for years.
So yes, people can and do take more than they should of a variety of medications and some of them wind up dead from it. In other words, it doesn’t have to be opiates and it doesn’t even have to be prescribed by a doctor to kill you if you take too much.
But, to say it again, we don’t know if Prince even took anything. Is it too much to ask people to wait a couple weeks for an actual tox report? Or is it more fun to speculate on what killed a man and repeated unsubstantiated rumors about a man who by all accounts was a decent human being?
The Current (Prince’s local public radio station) has put out a multi-part podcast with short interviews with people who worked personally with Prince. They all revere him as a prodigiously talented musician and express very little criticism of his personality. They say that he could be difficult to work with when he was stressed, but they never say that he was cruel or abusive. — Prince Remembered: A podcast about his music, life and legacy
By the way, I can answer the question about Prince’s habit of reaching down and lifting his guitar a bit. That’s a groove-related nervous tic - that’s the technical term ;). When you play a groove you have to work hard on NOT playing on the correct beats, too. When you are working out a groove, your hands develop the equivalent of “um’s” and “ah’s” - non-moves that keep your hands busy so you are not playing on that beat.
I have an upstroke pause that looks like an idiotic flourish because it was the only way I could keep my damn hand from doing the next downstroke.
When you have your own tic vocabulary, you can pick it out in others. On the same topic, Prince has the most intuitive connection to his guitar - especially his favorite Hohner Tele-knock-off. It’s a part of his body.