"Don't die with your music still in you."
That's a well-known quote from the late Wayne Dyer, a spiritual philosopher and lecturer that my wife introduced me to many, many years ago. It's probably pretty obvious that by "music", he really means more than just notes and lyrics. In fact, the next line of the full quotation is: "Don't die with your purpose unfulfilled." He's prodding you to dig deep, find the thing that drives you, and make that your life's work.
Easier said than done, right? Most people read those words, and their Soul's first thought is: "I want to do that!" But then one pico-second later, the Ego kicks in. The Wet Blanket. Gozer, the Self-Destructor. The Ego pulls a Will Riker on the Soul's Jean-Luc Picard, belaying that creative order, instead filling your poor confused brain with fear. Pure, unfiltered, why-do-I-even-try fear. When most people hear that sabotaging voice, they cave. Their dreams never go away, but the belief in making them happen has no power to actualize.
I know how strong that sense of fear can be... because I went through it, big time, back in 2004. When my software developer career came to a lurching halt, I had to reinvent myself. And it became apparent that it was time to take a leap of faith, to resurrect my creative side that I'd ignored for so long.
Luckily, I had some good people around me that helped get me over the hump. As a result, I've been able to notch a few victories on my creative belt. I've worked on some cool indie movies. I've edited and co-produced two award-winning documentaries. I've gotten to see my name up on the big screen a couple of times. Not too shabby!
But... I wanted more. After spending a lot of time wriggling around in other peoples' sandboxes, I decided it was high time I built my own damn playground. Don't get me wrong: I had a blast doing all that stuff. I learned a lot, I made a little money, I made some awesome friends. But I knew I needed to get all the nonsense in my head, the images and stories and weirdness, out of my noggin and down on paper.
Sometimes I have good days where everything's flowing, where I lose myself in the typing and the day evaporates. But then there are times when every cell in my brain seems socked in by a San Francisco summertime fog bank. Those are frustrating days! I gnash my teeth, pull my hair, and wish I was one of those geniuses from whom the art just radiates out endlessly. One of those wonderful lucky bastards who made it look so easy, creators whose work I've come to love.
A creator like Salvador Dali, who touched a higher plane of consciousness, and somehow found a way to capture his visits in oil and canvas. Or Howard Stern, who fought an entire industry to reinvent the medium of radio, to create a way of entertaining that he had heard in his head since he was a child. Or Stanley Kubrick, who forged an amazing career in film with a combination of innate talent and sheer focus of will.
Or, the arguably greatest popular musician in history, a man who emerged from the frozen northern midwest of the United States in a blaze of musical talent. A mysterious artist (in the truest sense of the word) who released thirty-eight albums in his lifetime, produced dozens of others, and locked even more unreleased gems away in his legendary Vault. He gifted the world with an amazing body of music that may never be equaled in the years to come.
Some know him as "His Royal Badness". Others have referred to him as "The Purple One". His childhood friends called him "Skipper".
But you and I, the mere mortals that we are, usually just refer to him by his (actual) first name...
PRINCE.
I've got a lot of Prince memories swirling around in my head. I first discovered him when I saw the video for "Little Red Corvette" on MTV. I was in my friend Paul's basement, playing Atari. I was so captivated by his look and his dancing, I passed the controller to someone else so I could concentrate on the video.
Two years later, during the reign of Purple Rain, I heard "When Doves Cry" and "Let's Go Crazy" on the radio every single morning as I was getting ready for work. Seriously, for weeks on end, those two songs were in my ears as I was brushing my teeth. Months later, well into my first semester of college, Purple Rain still held sway: my friend Nancy was captivated by "I Would Die 4 U", while Wendy and Lisa preparing to bathe together in the intro to "Computer Blue" gave me tingles in my boy-parts.
The following summer, "Raspberry Beret" was the unofficial theme song for the beginning of my courtship with my first real long-term girlfriend. While Prince was sheltered in a barn with his chapeau-sporting lady love, my girlfriend and I were taking a blanket into the woods surrounding my neighborhood. (Yes, I was so pathetic, I had to trick women into the dark forest to be Biblical with me.)
Then the next October, as my friends watched in mute horror, I mimed most of the "Kiss" video at a party held at a dairy farm. And months later, sometime during spring break in 1987, I was in the backseat of my friend Angie's car as we drove around downtown, and I asked her to turn up the radio when the deejay announced he was playing "Sign '☮' The Times" for the first time.
Based on all those Prince-centric remembrances, you're probably thinking "Man, Don was some sort of super-fan!" Here's the thing... I wasn't! I didn't own a single note of his music. Not a CD, not a cassette, not even a 45. I mean, I liked his stuff, sure, but my musical allegiances were still elsewhere. Prince was a musician who was on the radio, or that I might run across on MTV. That was as far it went.
That all changed, however, thanks to Sammy.
I don’t have a picture of me and Sammy, so please enjoy this approximation of how much fun we had together. (I’m the one on the left.)
I have to back up a little bit to introduce Sammy to this already-too-long diatribe. The sad thing, I can't recall exactly when or how I met him. That's the way things went in my dorm... you sort of absorbed friends from other friends by virtue of living communally. Suffice it to say, by late 1985, Sammy and I had formed some sort of weird bond. Here was this young black man who'd spent a good portion of his life in New York, somehow finding common ground with this nerdy Bible Belt scarecrow whose idea of "seeing the world" was a yearly family trip to South Carolina. I guess I made Sammy laugh, and that was enough to seal the deal.
We wound up spending a lot of time together. We didn't share any classes... while he was learning the ins and outs of textile science, I was banging my head against the crappy machines in the computer science lab. No, most of our knocking around happened after the schooling was over. We'd go to the dining hall, we'd hang out in the basement of the dorm, we'd wander over to the open-air mall.
And we listened to music. But Sammy came from a completely different background than me, so he wasn't listening to Queen and Men Without Hats... he was jamming to Prince and Ice T. Sammy was the man who introduced me to rap. Sitting in the hall, we listened to the Beastie Boys' License To Ill the week it came out, over and over and over. Sammy gifted me with my own personal Black Lives Matter lesson when he took the time to explain to this clueless white kid from the 'burbs the anger and the passion that fueled Public Enemy's It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back. Being exposed to this entirely different genre and mindset was exactly what my dorm's multi-cultural program was created to do.
But it wasn't all fun and games. If Sammy and I had anything in common, it's that we weren't what you'd call "financially secure". We were both from lower middle class families. I know what you're thinking: "Hey, you're in college, Brainiacs, so you must have a lot of dough!" I can't speak for Sammy - I think he had secured loans to pay for school - but I was working summers at lumber stores and grocery stores to sock enough away for tuition. I was submitting multiple cartoons to the school paper, getting a whopping $4 a strip and using that to buy food. We had the clothes on our backs, maybe a couple of bucks tossed our way for books, and that was it. There was no "fun money".
There's one Sammy moment that's seared into my memory. He and I were cramming for finals in spring 1986. It was super-late in the evening... or super-early in the morning, depending on how you look at it. We were sprawled out in the hallway, papers and books strewn everywhere. We were cold. We were brain-dead. And we were starving. I'm pretty sure I hadn't eaten anything that wasn't a soda for a couple of days. Our stomachs grumbling in unison forced us to bring up the subject of food. Sammy said he had a can of Campbell's Cream Of Potato soup, but no pans or anything to cook it in. I told Sammy I had no food, but I did have a spoon I'd stolen from the dining hall. (It was for an egg race in the dorm. I lost.)
You'd think that would be it. Game over. No soup for us! Well, I hate to tell you, but you'd be wrong. We made an executive decision, informed by our mutual hunger: we cracked the can open, and spent the rest of the evening sharing it. Raw. One bite at a time. I'd take a small spoonful of the off-white lumpy goo, I'd hand the can and the spoon to Sammy, and he'd do the same. We made that damn can of Campbell's last for over an hour. It wasn't much, but it kept us going. (And I aced that particular final, by the way.) That night of uncooked soup was perhaps the most dire moment I can remember in my entire college experience... yet it was also oddly reassuring. Thanks to my friend, and our mutual cooperation, we made it through another day.
God bless you, Joseph Albert Campbell. God bless you.
So now, let's flash-forward to the summer of 1987. I'm in summer school, trying to knock out a few electives and one of the harder computer science core classes. Sammy's in summer school, too, living in an apartment not far from campus. We run into each other one day, and he tells me, I have to come over to his place. I have to. There's something he wants me to listen to. He's on the verge of grabbing me by the arm and dragging me away right then and there.
And that's how I wound up sitting in his apartment, promising to concentrate, as he played bits and pieces of Prince's new-ish Sign '☮' The Times album. Sammy was exultant, almost rapturous, as he forwarded and reversed the tape, pointing out all sorts of little creative tricks and production details that Prince had peppered his songs with. I was certainly enjoying it, but I wasn't where Sammy was. Not even close.
Everything changed, however, when he played a snippet from the song "Play In The Sunshine", a small musical moment that he was sure was two or three side-by-side notes being played at once, just enough to sound different but not so dissonant that it ruined the song. At first I was like, "Okay, sure, whatever you say". But he played it again. And again. And again. And then... something happened. Like looking at one of those Magic Eye pictures... I heard it! Or maybe I only heard it because Sammy was programming me like a cult leader. Whatever the case... it was there!
That evening of being inundated with Sign '☮' The Times stuck with me for the rest of the summer. And the rest of the year. And the rest of college... Hell, the rest of my life! I became a Prince acolyte like Sammy was. I went to every concert I could get to. I spent outrageous money on bootlegs. I scoured the Internet for leaked tunes from the Vault. Prince's music became an obsession that's been with me for three and a half decades now.
Before I started working on this article, I checked iTunes to see just how big my Prince collection is. If you include not only the officially released albums, but also the bootlegged concert recordings, the hundreds of unreleased songs, and the albums by proteges like The Time, Vanity 6, The Family, and others... I have a total of twelve days, one hour, forty-four minutes, and fifty-two seconds of Prince music. By any metric, that's a lot.
But out of all that amazing music, Sign '☮' The Times is far and above my favorite. It's one of the most varied collection of songs that any major musician has ever released. The title track is a surprising top three hit... it's spare and haunting and not very positive. (Hell, change "Reagan" to "Trump" and "horse" to "crank", and it could have been written this year!) But Prince's mood doesn't stay in the dark for long. He's exuberant in "Play In The Sunshine" and "Adore". He's lustful in "U Got The Look" and "Hot Thing". He's reverent in "The Cross" and "Forever In My Life". He's stream of consciousness in "The Ballad Of Dorothy Parker" and "Starfish & Coffee".
One of the reasons Sign '☮' The Times is so present in my mind and heart is because there's a new super deluxe edition that hits the shelves this week. Not only does it contain a remastered version of the original album, it's got dozens of remastered and never-before-released tracks from his Vault! Hours of music that he recorded and then stored away. Here we are, years after he left us, and we're still experiencing the gifts of his monumental talent. I can't wait to sift through all the music. (And the big-ass book that accompanies the set.)
At the risk of sounding like I'm foaming at the mouth nuts, one of the reasons I consider Prince a genius and this album as his crowning achievement is because, in the span of sixteen diverse songs, he explores so many facets of the human experience. He was always pegged by the press and the general public as a reclusive oddball. But listen to the frustration and pain of the narrator in "If I Was Your Girlfriend", or the joyous connection with his fans in "It's Gonna Be A Beautiful Night". Those are two of the most "human" things he ever wrote. Maybe Prince didn't let you into his world through interviews, but he sure as hell did through his music.
Damn. This is the part of the story I've been dreading: the very unhappy ending. I've rewritten this bit four times now. Because it seems like I can't in any way skillfully relate on the printed page how deeply I'm still reeling from the fact that, over the years, I wound up losing both Sammy and Prince.
Whoa, hang on. Sorry, I made it sound like Sammy died. No, he's still with us. He's just not with me. Not long after I graduated from college, I began to discover that behind the scenes, Sammy had... pulled some shenanigans, let's say. He had done and said some things that didn't sit right with me. Things that hurt me. Things that outright upset me. And I was so devastated, so disappointed... I walked away. I haven't spoken to him in almost three decades. I don't hate him, though. I wish him the best, I really do. He brought a lot of great stuff into my life, stuff that to this day I'm still grateful for. That can of soup alone should get him into whatever Heaven may be up there.
But my experience with him, and others since him, has made me rethink the concepts of friendship and connection. I think my time with him was meant to be finite. Like I tell my wife when there's not a Rob Roy in my hand by 5 PM sharp every day, "Nothing lasts forever." (I usually pull down my glasses and give her a look, just to put an emphasis on my point.) Some people are part of your circle for life, but some fulfill a purpose for a limited time. And then things change, and you both move on. But it's change. It's life. Sometimes it's mutual, sometimes it's a dumpster fire. Losing Sammy was somewhere in between.
Losing Prince the way we did... that was a dumpster fire. Was it avoidable? Maybe? Probably? Who knows? It's easy to look back and point fingers and play armchair psychologist Karen. At the end of the day, the only real truth is that a terrible man-made creation got its molecular claws into an insanely talented human being, and took him from us far too early.
Prince died with so much more music inside him. But we're lucky he shared with us what he could.
BIO
Don Stroud is not the famous actor and world-class surfer of the same name. He is the non-famous California transplant who became an award-winning film editor and struggling amateur screenwriter. He loves cats, sushi, comic books, movies, music, and Cherry Coke. What's that, dear? Oh yes: and his wife. You can follow him on Twitter, where he pops up sporadically, at @DonStroud2.