I was living away from home for only the second time, at college in a small town in Minnesota. This was the slow part of the year, when winter verrry gradually gave way to spring. Just after the Crystal Ball set came out from Prince, calling himself The Artist at the time, so we’re talking the timeframe after Emancipation and before NewPowerSoul.
I walked over to the mall and bought a copy in the clear-plastic round box direct from the Sam Goody. They had about a dozen copies. There had been a full-page ad in most of the Minnesota newspapers that week. As a kid I collected the Star Tribune and Pioneer Press front pages when the Twins won the World Series, I assure you I still have that ad folded up in a drawer somewhere.
I couldn’t get over how stank-dawg nasty-funky Hide The Bone was - any more than I could get the song out of my head. I couldn’t just play it loud for only myself in my dorm room for the fiftieth time. One evening, itching to see people enjoy it as much as me, I took the disc and went to the Student Center.
The snow had stopped a few days before, and it was just another Saturday night in Marshall. Our campus recently renovated a building that had been dormant for years. The Student Center didn’t really have a performance space, it was just a large concrete bunker that doubled as a cafeteria where sometimes you could catch the random folksinger with their acoustic guitar standing in a corner without so much as a microphone.
I still remember being amazed by what they put into the old Food Service East building. An actual lounge with a proper sound system, a real dance floor, a small stage, party lighting complete with a spotlight, a mirror-ball and a well equipped DJ booth. It had a decent kitchen and made acceptable fried American bar-room food. No pool tables and arcade machines to be seen, this was about as slick as it got in the middle of nowhere.
For such an impressively outfitted room, it could have been a friendlier atmosphere, but it was more like halfway-to-Church the way they ran it. They certainly didn’t go for any Snoop, Pac or Biggie in the Student Center lounge - they had a low tolerance for gangster rap, G-funk, whatever that thin, whiny synth-backed rap was called. (Which is why it played incessantly from the footballers’ and wrestlers’ dorm windows until quiet-hours forced them to STFU. They couldn’t play explicit rap in the gym, either. Thus the gym was the domain of those mindnumbingly-bad Jock-Jams comps 24-7.)
I strolled across that shiny floor and stepped up to the DJ, presently playing some anonymous inoffensive hip-hop of the late 90s - Montell Jordan maybe? I politely asked if he’d drop Hide The Bone into the mix. He agreed to drop it in without even looking at it or asking what it was. I sat down nearby and sipped at a coke and waited to reclaim my CD once he’d played it, watching a handful of people lazily dancing, trying to make the most of the teen-club vibes of a place with a dance floor but no alcohol.
One of the attendees that night was differently-abled and using a self-propelled wheelchair, but there was a small group of no more than 20 people mostly standing around. Then as Montell faded out and Hide The Bone began, bouncy upward notes of thumping bass filling the room with anticipation vibes, the lights swept across from the sliver of a stage and lit the dance floor up in a flicker of colors.
The guy I’d assumed was the DJ because he was behind the board when I walked in, he faded the room lights down and everybody seemed to take the focus being on the music and the lit-up dance floor. It went from a hallway-discussion to full-on party in a flash.
As hesitantly as any of the Dionysian pleasures are to be engaged in by the average Minnesotan on a given day, these people were clearly waiting for a chance to unwind. Before thirty seconds had passed the atmosphere entirely changed, the babbling stopped, the music took over and commanded respect and vaguely slutty expressions of dancing and glee.
Even the girl in the wheelchair rolled back and forth just a little bit, the fingers of one hand outstretched, the other clutching the movement-control stick on her armrest to allow her motion, a halfway guilty smile relaxing to spread out across her lips. These few handful of randomly gathered, normally staid, quiet, mostly Lutheran, pale-skinned people however briefly managed to uncage their inner beasts.
They wriggled around like they just didn’t care. It was a sight to behold and I wish you’d been there to see us. I’d been casually observing, almost uninvolved for the first thirty seconds myself. I’d come as a skeptic with the mind to pull a stunt and then watch like a scientist from my chair.
This night the almighty Funk would have none of my wallflowerishness, and I almost immediately rose back up. I didn’t let my inner critic stop me, I didn’t have time for that. I just walked a couple steps to the dance floor and got myself on down, bouncing and wobbling around amongst my fellow students as I should have properly been when the song I requested began.
I closed my eyes and swayed around, holding in my memory a dance party and performance I’d attended in the NPGMC lounge at Paisley Park within the previous year. An Emancipation-era warm-up party where there wasn’t a single wallflower, I remember doing ‘The Bird’ to ‘Jam of the Year’ spun by DJ Brother Jules up on the catwalk before the band did their set.
I held that same inner shine when I was wishing Hide The Bone went on for half an hour that night in the Student Center at college. When all the rump-shaking and bouncing around and joyfulness that went along with my sudden surprise request of Hide The Bone - that should have just kept right on going...well, it went kaput when the next song somehow ended up being ‘I Believe I Can Fly’ and just took those rising vibes and settled them gently back down to the safe, boring solid ground where they’d begun.
I felt a little bizarre. Revved up like a sugar high because I’d just transformed the energy in the room with a singular song choice. Sad to see it immediately sag back to where it had started from. I also felt like I’d just had a handful of bottle rockets shoot out of my hand. Didn’t anybody else think that was awesome how we all just gave in to the groove for a few minutes there?!?
I walked in and cold dropped a song nobody knew, in a place notorious for the Midwestern stoic-wallflower act, and had them spontaneously bust into party mode like the drop-of-a-hat. I felt like a god with a lightning bolt in my pocket. Prince could do ANYthing!
That night when everybody just stopped in their tracks and started getting nasty to Hide The Bone. Music can take control, even when we least expect it to, even when we’re not really familiar with the song. Prince music still held mighty magic, even if people didn't hear any of the latest music on the radio very much - it could still MOVE bodies!
With shoutouts to soniclovenoize, jiggy22, purplehassan, listen2prince.blogspot.com and darlingnisi and a thanks for cover art from M Celestine
(Alternate post title: "Get down, all ye Strays of the World!")
(Alternate post title: "Get down, all ye Strays of the World!")
