FEATURE:
Prince: Five Years Gone
The Hallowed Paisley Park
___________
THE concept of a musician…
IN THIS PHOTO: A purple motorcycle and Prince's outfits from Under the Cherry Moon are displayed in a room named after the movie inside of Paisley Park in Chanhassen, MN. on Wednesday, 2nd November, 2016/PHOTO CREDIT: Paisley Park
having their own estate and this fixed Mecca where they create music seems strange today. I think of musicians having more modest surroundings or recoding at studios. As the fifth anniversary of Prince’s death occurs on 21st April, I am doing a few features prior to that date. I wanted to spend this one discussing a place where Prince called home; where he recorded some of his best work and, sadly, died. Paisley Park is this hallowed and legendary space where Prince could roam and create such wonderful music. As the official Paisley Park website states, it is a most wonderful and intriguing place:
“Paisley Park is a place where art, music, fashion, and culture are celebrated, energized, and inspired by the visionary creative spirit of Prince. Known as his home and studio, Paisley Park now draws people from around the world to attend tours, concerts, and events, and feel the love, awe, and wonder that are expressed in Prince’s emotional words: “Paisley Park is in your heart”.
I will come to an article written a few years ago where a journalist spent some time at Paisley Park. As Variety reports, the public are being offered rare access five years after Prince’s death:
“April 21 will mark the fifth anniversary of Prince’s death — and on that day, Paisley Park, his home, studio and “creative sanctuary,” will invite fans to pay tribute to the late artist in its atrium free of charge. Advance reservations are required.
“On the fifth anniversary of the passing of the incomparable Prince, Paisley Park, his home and creative sanctuary, is opening its doors for fans to pay tribute and celebrate his life,” the announcement reads. “The Paisley Park Atrium, 7801 Audubon Road, will be open for free visitation on Wednesday April 21 from 9:00am – 9:00pm. Advance reservations are required.
“Guests are also welcome to leave flowers, mementos, and other memorial items in front of the Love Symbol statue outside the Paisley Park main entrance.”
In the years since his death, Paisley Park has effectively become a Prince museum, although the pandemic obviously has curtailed those efforts. His estate, which was in considerable disarray at the time of his death, has reached agreements with Warner and Sony Music and has embarked on an ambitious reissue campaign that has produced three excellent boxed sets (for the “1999,” “Purple Rain” and “Sign O’ the Times” albums) as well as a superbly curated website containing a detailed history and all of his official videos, among other projects.
“Prince’s passing remains incomprehensible to all of us,” said Alan Seiffert, Paisley Park Executive Director. “We celebrate his life and legacy every day at Paisley Park, a place that Prince wanted to share with the world. So, on this day especially, we acknowledge the incredible force and inspiration Prince is in people’s lives and open up our doors for them to pay their respects”.
IN THIS PHOTO: Paisley Park is an active museum, state-of-the-art recording studio, and concert venue in Chanhassen, MN. For nearly 30 years, the facility served as Prince’s home, creative sanctuary and production complex. Fulfilling Prince’s vision that Paisley Park would one day be open to the public, the venue today welcomes fans, musicians, and audiophiles for tours, concerts, festivals, and special events. When Prince wrote the song “Paisley Park,” he envisioned a place of love and peace, where there aren’t any rules or limitations for creativity. The lyrics became a reality when Paisley Park opened its doors in 1987. Since then, it has inspired respect, ideas, connection, community, and spirituality and furthered Prince’s legacy of creative freedom/PHOTO CREDIT: Paisley Park
As a Prince fan, I would love to travel to Minnesota and visit a mansion/facility that witnessed such magic. As lord of the manor, I could only imagine the scenes at Paisley Park. In 2016, Forbes published an article that took us inside Prince’s home:
“Paisley Park was Prince’s private palace, a music factory as mysterious as the enigmatic artist himself. Adjacent to Highway 5, the 65,000-square-foot compound (size estimates vary) is a $10 million big white aluminum-and-metal mansion with a nondescript, prison-like façade, few windows, retail-style parking lots, and encircling grassy knolls. The complex’s geometric exterior is as charming as an Amazon warehouse. Its most appealing feature is the purple hue emanating from the structure (which reportedly indicated whether Prince was home).
This musical landmark’s interior has barely seen the light of day. Only professional musicians, privileged friends, special-invite fans, and journalists have seen and felt its ambiance. Prince forbade virtually all visitors from photographing or recording the inside (and he demanded journalists abandon their cell phones, recorders, and notebooks before entering his purple palace).
Here’s what we do know about Paisley Park. The property was conceived in 1983 during the filming of the Purple Rain movie (for which Prince won an Academy Award for Best Original Song Score)—just as his superstardom detonated. Paisley Park was completed in 1988, designed to Prince’s specifications by BOTO Design Inc. and then 23-year-old neophyte architect Bret Thoeny.
IN THIS PHOTO: Paisley Park Studios covers about 65,000-square feet/PHOTO CREDIT: Paisley Park
The singer’s goal—a one-stop music and film production facility with a Hollywood-style soundstage, two recording studios, a dance studio, custom costume department, and office space all under one roof. Besides music production, the venue is also used for video shoots and TV commercials. Prince produced about 30 albums at Paisley Park, including for other artists like standout singer Judith Hill. But ultimately, Paisley Park was a venue where Prince could create and produce music every single day.
The lobby is reminiscent of a “1950's American diner,” and walls “vibrant reddish purple, flickering candles lined every ledge and the smell of incense filled the air,” according to London newspaper, The Mirror. This description may be lost in translation. More accurately, the super-bright lobby with purple carpeting is a Memphis design style highlighted by a "Raspberry Beret" cloud motif, Love Symbol #2 glyph on the floor, viewing balconies, and wide glass ceiling under the pyramid skylights.
Paisley Park is where Prince produced his mid-career classic hits “Alphabet Street,” “Sign O' The Times,” “Diamonds and Pearls,” and “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World.” His song "White Mansion" pays homage to Paisley Park with lyrics: “But one day I'll have a big white mansion. At the top of the road. I’m gonna wear the latest fashion. I'm gonna be happy, don't you know.”
Prince died in Paisley Park’s elevator which make’s lyrics from 1984’s smash anthem “Let’s Go Crazy” all the more eerie: “And if the elevator tries to bring you down. Go crazy, punch a higher floor.” Could the very religious Prince have done that? You decide. Now that he’s gone, perhaps the public will get a better glimpse of Paisley Park, just as it's posthumously learning about Prince Rogers Nelson, the man.
Paisley Park is already becoming a spiritual shrine for Prince fans, like Elvis’s Graceland. In fact, Prince's family plans to turn the estate into a future Graceland-style museum open to all, according to Prince collaborator Sheila E. This news is ironic considering Prince purposely toned down Paisley Park's exterior to avoid becoming Graceland”.
I guess that fans who get to see inside Paisley Park very soon will not have access to everything. They will get an idea of what it was like for Prince and musicians who spent time there. It is sad that the master himself will never again record from Paisley Park. It will be preserved for decades to come as a monument to a musical genius. Before concluding, I want to bring in a 2018 article from The New Yorker. Amanda Petrusich reported on her time there. Whilst this new revelation about public access being allowed at Paisley Park is exciting, access was allowed after Prince died. Petrusich tells of her experiences and recollections:
“Prince wrote often and eagerly about the idea of sanctuary—places where his spiritual anxieties were assuaged. Back then, Paisley Park was merely an imagined paradise. “Paisley Park is in your heart,” he sings on the chorus.
Three years later, it was real: in 1987, Prince built a sixty-five-thousand-square-foot, ten-million-dollar recording complex in Chanhassen, Minnesota, and called it Paisley Park. It was intended to be a commercial facility—Madonna, R.E.M., and Stevie Wonder all recorded there—but by the end of the nineteen-nineties it had stopped accepting outside clients. Eventually—no one can quite say when—Prince began living there. He wanted to establish a self-contained dominion, insulated from interference or judgment, where he enjoyed total control, and his life could bleed easily into his work.
PHOTO CREDIT: Paisley Park
On April 21, 2016, Prince collapsed and died in an elevator at Paisley Park. He had overdosed on the opioid fentanyl, which he’d been taking for chronic hip pain. He was fifty-seven, had sold around a hundred million albums, and did not leave a will. Shortly after hearing the news, Joel Weinshanker, a managing partner of Graceland Holdings (which runs Elvis Presley’s Graceland mansion, in Memphis), approached Bremer Trust, the bank tasked by a Minnesota court with administering Prince’s estate while his heirs were determined. Weinshanker wanted to make sure that Prince’s things were cared for. The bank agreed to let him visit. “The air-conditioning and the heating system weren’t working,” he told me. “There were leaks in places where you wouldn’t want leaks.”
Prince’s sister, Tyka Nelson, and his five half siblings were eventually named his heirs. With the family’s blessing, Graceland Holdings took over management of the property. Because Paisley Park is expensive to maintain, and because the estate was facing a considerable tax bill, the family made one decision quickly: Prince’s sanctuary would become a museum. Six months after Prince’s death, on October 28, 2016, Paisley Park opened to the public.
The Paisley Park tour charges on from the atrium, through exhibit rooms filled with displays—costumes, instruments, notebooks, gold records—that are linked to albums, films, or specific periods in Prince’s career. It snakes into his office and his editing bay, and through three studio spaces. These feel clean, modern, and expensive. One of the highlights of the tour is a chance to play Ping-Pong at Prince’s own table, where he often beat his guests—including Michael Jackson, who visited Paisley Park in 1986, while Prince was working on the film “Under the Cherry Moon,” the follow-up to “Purple Rain.” Prince mercilessly taunted the hapless Jackson, who had never played Ping-Pong before. When Jackson dropped his paddle, in defeat or clumsiness, Prince joyfully walloped a ball into his crotch. (The gift shop now sells canary-yellow Ping-Pong balls branded with Prince’s purple symbol; I bought a set of two for twelve dollars.) Prince was a more gracious basketball player, though no less formidable. “I don’t foul guests,” he told the writer Touré when they played a two-on-two game at Paisley Park, in 1998. The incongruousness of the hobby, and his skill at it, was immortalized in a “Chappelle’s Show” skit from 2004, in which Prince, who was barely five feet three, drifts gently down from the basket after a winning dunk. The bit reiterated a thought many of us had already had: that the laws of the physical world simply did not apply to Prince.
Details about Prince’s personal life remain scant, and there have been surprisingly few posthumous revelations. There is tenderness and lust in his songs, but it’s harder to find those things in the stories told about his life. This makes autobiographical readings of his work difficult. In 1996, he married Mayte Garcia, a twenty-two-year-old belly dancer. She had toured with him since she was seventeen, when her parents appointed Prince her legal guardian. Garcia gave birth to a son, Amiir, in October of that year. He died in the hospital at six days old, of a rare genetic condition. Prince refused to publicly acknowledge his son’s death. Oprah Winfrey arrived at Paisley Park just a few weeks afterward, and filmed an interview with the couple. She gently asked Prince about Amiir. “It’s all good,” he replied. “Never mind what you hear.”
Garcia’s memoir, “The Most Beautiful: My Life with Prince,” was published in April of 2017. It’s one of the only first-person accounts of life at Paisley Park, and the book’s disclosures are sometimes troubling. Under the tutelage of Larry Graham, the bassist for Sly and the Family Stone, Prince became a devout Jehovah’s Witness, and because of his new faith, he discouraged Garcia from seeking medical attention after a miscarriage. He was often demanding and proprietary of other people’s bodies. If his female backing dancers gained weight, Garcia writes, he docked or withheld their pay.
At Paisley Park, he was able to write, rehearse, and record as much as he wanted, without compromise, and on his own schedule. “He didn’t see music as work,” Leeds told me. “It’s just what he did. If you called it work, you were a cynic.” In “The Most Beautiful,” Garcia includes a note that Prince sent her early in the couple’s relationship: “A secret—when I have a disagreement with someone—it’s usually only one. Then they’re gone”.
Five years after Prince’s death and the world will be paying tribute to an icon. On 21st April, I know there will be vigils, articles and articles dedicated to his memory. I think that Paisley Park plays such an important part in his legacy. Although some may not have been keen on everything they witnessed at Paisley Park, for diehard fans, having the chance to visit such a crucial part of Prince’s life is priceless! I can dream of what scenes unfolded when Prince was recording classic albums and concocting new songs. After all these years, there is nobody who has his same genius and set of talents. He is sorely missed by everyone. In memory of the upcoming fifth anniversary of his passing, I wanted to take a moment to look inside the very special…
PAISLEY Park.