Planetguy wrote:i don't mean to kick a guy when he's taking a dirt nap.....but i never got what the big deal was about prince.
"genius"??? really? nah...he always struck me as a watered down version of James Brown, Sly, and Michael Jackson. and his music.....bad dumbed down pop music. "Oh, Sheila"? "Raspberry Bouquet"? "Little Red Corvette?....genius????? nah, i don't hear it.
i remember people gushing over how creative and amazing it was that he left the bass off "When Doves Cry". I guess they never heard that other "creative" tune w/o bass that preceeded it...."Old Time Rock & Roll"! 
I loved the movie Purple Rain. Who didn't in 1983? or was it 1984?
Mark, the thing about Prince was the entire package. His talent was more than a great singer/guitarist/pianist. He was the penultimate performer. He oozed sex appeal and danced like James Brown while playing like Jimi Hendrix and singing with a wider range than almost anyone else in pop music in his day. Not really my style, but I "got it" that all the ladies liked him.
ANYONE can play a guitar, and some people can even sing....but I had enormous respect for Prince's ability as a creator and producer. Yeah...he could do R&B, funk, psychedelic, and then burn on some rock like no black guitarist had done since Hendrix, but his success was based on his ability to produce constantly. He treated every song seriously and I don't know of anyone who left us with a thousand songs written, ready, and yet unreleased like he did.
The real question here is; Why is it the most rich and famous Creative Musicians Need to Be Eccentric?
Why do Plain Jane musicians no matter how skilled, never make it rich?
I could answer this but it's almost pointless. Until you've changed residence every day of your life for a decade or more you will never be able to understand the life of a recording artist. There is no such thing as a regular schedule so you have no idea what normal
is. Those normal guys you allude to? They change over time, or they drop out and go play jazz.
After about 5 or 6 years of constant traveling, you become very disoriented to time, circumstance, and protocol. You live by the hour, and you're unaware of how odd you've become to what the rest of a society calls "acceptable".
In your mind, the years and the cities and the people and parties have all become a blur. To the people who shared even a second of it, you are often expected to remember their presence somehow. But it's impossible, even though you may have seen them a dozen times over the last decade. Some people will start projecting expectations (based on their normal schedule) that you could never fulfill in the very, very, very short timeframe you are with them, and you just need to hurry for a 7 hour ride to the next place.
So you end up withdrawing into your own timeless planet. Most hours of a day you deal with a public and reality, but the end of the day is still lonely in a strange place. You're just hoping that you can get a shower today and more than 4 hours of sleep in a night this week. No one else walks with you because they can't keep up. Oh, they think they can....
That is how it has been in my little world, so multiply that a few million times for Prince and you start to understand.
On top of that, someone like Prince has an image to uphold. It was expensive to build, with many years of promotion and publicity so he can't let that down for a moment, or he ends up like Brittney Spears. Well, unfortunately, it's not so easy to live up to being "genius" and "greatest hope since James Brown" so he over-acted at times. Big deal. Narcissism isn't confined to creative types. We just live our lives in public.
I think I've seen some eccentricity from everyone in my life, including you.
Grace! That's what we all need to get and to give. May He rest in peace. I hope to jam with him and Curtis Mayfield one day.
