I had a theory a year or more ago that the first musical artist who "sat down on me like a couch" and left a deep impression behind, would be Prince.
Now that's a gross oversimplification. One of the few rigid expectations made of me in my youth was regular attendance in the church choir.
I remember now that it wasn't Prince who first pushed a large body of work into my head. It was choir. Every wednesday evening for an hour. Pretty much ANY day after school if we weren't at the nursing home, we were at choir. Assorted Sundays during the year, too. Then once a spring the whole sermon-in-song shebang. (My first taste of a walk-on speaking part left me with a migraine...)
I had a headful, a batch of songs to learn, practice, memorize and be off-music from before performing them. Either in front of some subset of the community or in front of the whole sanctuary full of churchgoers.
Then there was the huge holiday concert in December. So big we couldn't all fit into the church, it had to be held in the auditorium at the high school. And we still had folding chairs in the aisles and packed them in there.
Point is that I've gone onto other artists with large bodies of work after being initially inspired, primed, prepped, and educated by my Prince fandom.
I learned that there were plenty of people on the PML with me who were as into Prince as I was and yet also that into Zeppelin, or Neil Young, or Rush, or half a hundred other bands. Not just the Dead.
So it was during the same time as I was doing the Golden Experience tape tree, dubbing off tapes for people on the PML...I was reaching out for other tape trading experiences.
Tori Amos had spawned an internet digest mailing list in the same time as I was on the PML getting my head around the internet and college. Soon enough, I believe February 1994, I had joined Really Deep Thoughts, the Tori Amos mailing list.
So I was able to obtain the Under The Covers compilations, both volume 1 and 2. I even made a few dubs for people later that year.
It was a few years later yet, but eventually I was on the Magical Armchair mailing list for Ben Folds Five.
The idea here is that I once assumed Prince was the first to - if you'll forgive a particularly Kevin Smith turn of metaphor - stretch me out with the big artistic dick he was swinging.
In reality it was being in the choir. Then Prince. Then Tori. Then Rev 105. Then Ben Folds. Soul Coughing. Ani DiFranco. The Honeydogs. Open mic nights at Kieran's Irish Pub.
By the time I'd flamed out of college a second time? Weezer. If not for Pinkerton, I might never have made it there for a while. That album made me feel like a mirror held up to every kind of raw I felt inside. It's still awesome to crank up loud and scream along with!
I mean Chaos & Disorder was in that same timeframe, but it wasn't the same kind of raw I was. Don't get me wrong, I still played the hell out of it. But it didn't fit me like Pinkerton did right then.
A few years later the whole "No Depression" scene. The Jayhawks, Son Volt, Uncle Tupelo.
And I've been borderline OCD collecting every track I can find for plenty of bands since then.
Now? Jason Isbell, Mr. Lif, Doomtree, Ted Leo, and Open Mike Eagle.
This isn't the passing-fancy sort of fandom, "I once had an Aerosmith tape..." or "I had a Debbie Gibson poster when I was an awkward child" kind of thing.
This is reading the internet, collecting b-sides, demos, imports, books, articles, posters, and all sorts of things. Regular, sustained interest that sticks with you like a google-alert in your mind. That's how it works.
(I remember the guy at MediaPlay in Coon Rapids calling me to take their Emancipation display. But I literally had nowhere to put it. Same when he called with the Irresistable Bliss Soul Coughing display. I wanted it badly and deeply. I had nowhere to put it.)
I didn't get quite as into Tori or Ben, I don't have snail mail they sent out. I never saw them play at their own venue in my home state, literally just an hour or so down the highway from home.
I've read people adapting the idea, the meme that states "hey, at least somehow you managed 2 b alive at the same time as Prince" and I like it. Somehow I could drive back home to my own bed after marathon shows at the Park...
Somehow I could wake up, work the day, and then drive down the highway to Chanhassen at night...when I knew pockets of people flew in from the Netherlands and further away - just to see him play.
How obscenely lucky that I grew up so near Paisley Park?!?...an echo of cosmic justice and humor at once. Couldn't grow up normal enough for classmates, couldn't fit in enough to keep from getting ridiculed till I hated going to school at all, but yet could somehow someday have these intensely rewarding, revelatory, even somewhat personal concert experiences?!?
I tweeted the other day that Love... Thy Will B Done is probably Prince's best song. Of the ones I've heard. I still wonder how magnificent Pangaea is.
I remember seeing him shred his symbol guitar playing Love... Thy Will B Done a few different times. Gold couldn't even touch that song. The anthemic guitar part in that song is something this world has yet to appreciate like those of us who already do...
...here's hoping the rest of the world gets to appreciate Prince like us fans do.
And that it doesn't take decades to unlock the vault's jewels for the world to love...
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