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‘Prince Was Our True Artist’: Readers Share Their Memories

Compiled by LINDSEY UNDERWOOD

Times readers react to the death of Prince.

Prince’s death was major news across Europe, where newspapers rushed to create front pages that paid tribute, often in hues of purple, to the musician.

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The sheriff’s office in Carver County, Minn., where Prince was found dead in his home on Thursday, has released a transcript of the 911 call made by an unidentified man and woman from the musician’s home, known as Paisley Park.

A copy of the transcript was posted online by Minnesota Public Radio.

The call was made at 9:43 a.m., and the transcript reveals that the caller was in considerable distress.

Man: We have someone who is unconscious.

Emily Colestock, sheriff’s office dispatcher: O.K., what’s the address?

Man: Um, we’re at Prince’s house.

Ms. Colestock: O.K., does anybody know the address? Is there any mail around that you could look at?

Man: Yeah, yeah, O.K., hold on.

Ms. Colestock: O.K., your cellphone’s not going to tell me where you’re at, so I need you to find me an address.

Man: Yeah, we have, um, yeah, we have, um, so yeah, um, the person is dead here.

Ms. Colestock: O.K., get me the address please.

Man: O.K., O.K., I’m working on it.

Ms. Colestock: Concentrate on that.

Man: And the people are just distraught.

Ms. Colestock: I understand they are distraught, but…

Man: I’m working on it, I’m working on it.

Eventually, the man and the woman supplied the address for Paisley Park: 7801 Audubon Road, in Chanhassen, Minn.

When emergency workers arrived, it was too late.

“You can cancel anybody going to Audubon,” an ambulance dispatcher told the sheriff’s office, in a separate call. “Confirmed D.O.A.”

NASA posted a photograph of a purple nebula in memory of Prince, to pay its respects to the genre-defying singer, songwriter and producer.

The cast of “The Color Purple” led the audience in a sing-along of “Purple Rain” on Thursday night.

Members of the audience clapped and waved their arms in time to the refrains.

And at “Hamilton,” the cast led the audience in a cheering, dancing rendition of Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy.”

“Wait a few days before you waste any prayers.”

That was Prince’s reassurance to fans gathered for a dance party on Saturday night at his Paisley Park complex in Chanhassen, Minn., after reports that he had suffered a health scare during a flight on Friday.

This famously private performer warned the hometown crowd to not always trust the media, soothing them at least for the moment. A representative insisted he had only had the flu.

Days later, Prince was dead at 57, discovered not breathing after an emergency call at 9:43 a.m. on Thursday in an elevator at Paisley Park, a complex that houses his estate and studio. His death shocked not only the legions of fans who had somewhat selfishly thought him to be otherworldly and invincible but also those who had seen him out and about in recent days: Prince was seen riding his bike, hosting a party and visiting a local record store and jazz club. Read More

Prince’s Death Is a Surprise to Those Who Saw Him Recently

By JOE COSCARELLI

Fans in Minneapolis reported seeing the musician around the city just days before his death.

Prince got his first taste of stardom in 1979, after his single “I Wanna Be Your Lover” became a hit. But he had already spent much of his life immersed in music.

Prince’s father, John Nelson, played piano in a jazz trio that also featured his mother, Mattie Shaw. In a 1984 interview with the Minneapolis newspaper, The Star Tribune, Ms. Shaw said that from the time her son was a toddler, he was obsessed.

“He could hear music even from a very early age,” she said. “When he was 3 or 4, we’d go to the department store and he’d jump on the radio, the organ, any type of instrument there was.”

According to a 1983 profile in Rolling Stone,  Mr. Nelson gave his son an instrument of his own — a piano — when he was 7.  He otherwise relied on improvised equipment, such as a box filled with newspapers, which served as a makeshift drum set.

When he was 13, his father bought him an electric guitar. He learned to play keyboards and the saxophone. He never developed the ability to read music, and did not seem to need to.

He drew inspiration from an array of musicians from various genres. His sound reflected the influence of black artists, such as James Brown and Sly and the Family Stone, as well as bands like Fleetwood Mac and Carlos Santana’s band, Santana.

“Half the musicians I knew only listened to one type of music,” he told Rolling Stone. “That wasn’t good enough for me.”

Prince formed several different groups in his adolescence, including a band called Champagne. He first started to work in a studio with that band, learning how to record and produce his own music. He learned so much that, after being signed to Warner Brothers at the age of 18, the label trusted him to self-produce his 1978 debut album, “For You.”

At that point, he was still about a year away from stardom, but the label had already shown its faith in him. According to Rolling Stone, before Prince had even recorded a note for the label, it signed him to a three-album deal.

Prince sold more than 100 million records, won seven Grammys and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004. Here’s a look at the lengthy career of the ambitious musician, who died at 57.

On Twitter, fans of Prince were posting photos of the sign for the Prince Street subway station in Manhattan, with some alterations.

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After spending winter mourning the deaths of high-profile musicians, including David Bowie and Glenn Frey, legions of fans declared that they’d had enough with 2016.

On social media, they railed against the year’s bad news as they grieved for Prince, the latest music legend to die this year. Their messages ranged from wheedling to angry and were tagged “Dear 2016,” a phrase that trended on Twitter by Thursday afternoon.

Many commenters simply castigated the year, and one made the point that Denise Matthews, the singer, model and actress known as Vanity who toured with Prince in the 1980s, also died recently.

Others begged 2016 to spare celebrities who were still alive, like Betty White, Bruce Springsteen, Robert Plant and Stevie Nicks.

Many noted other recently deceased musicians like Maurice White, Ian Fraser Kilmister, known as Lemmy, and Phife Dawg, often conveying their emotions with strong language, emojis or a GIF of an obscene gesture aimed at 2016. The sentiment was echoed by the website Vice in a widely circulated post.

One commenter took the opportunity to express frustration with the seemingly interminable presidential contest.

And another asked why so many musicians had died, providing a possible answer in the process.

Prince was a fitting stage name for would-be musical royalty, and Prince Rogers Nelson started and finished out his career performing under his Christian name. But though it’s clumsy, it’s not incorrect to refer to him as the artist formerly known as “the artist formerly known as Prince.”

Prince adapted a glyph that he called “the love symbol” (Ƭ̵̬̊) in September 1993, almost a year after he had released an album under the same title. The symbol, which mashes together the traditional male and female symbols, was often mocked at the time, as many saw it as an empty or incomprehensible gesture.

But the name change was a way for Prince to signal his displeasure with his label, Warner Brothers, which had grown frustrated with his prolificacy, and was unwilling to release much of the music he created. In the biography, “Prince: Inside the Music and the Masks,” Ronin Ro explained that the name change allowed Prince to gain some measure of artistic and commercial independence.

“As Ƭ̵̬̊, he could release new stuff on a smaller label. It’d be a dream come true, to finally release as much music as he created,” Mr. Ro writes, in an excerpt provided by Vanity Fair.

He did manage to release much of his music independently through the rest of the decade, after breaking his two-decade contract with Warner Brothers in 1996. But the name “Prince” was still tied up with the label until the millennium ended. In 2000, months after the link to Warner Brothers expired, Prince announced that he was once again Prince.

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The singer Frank Ocean responded to Prince’s death on his Tumblr, calling Prince “a vanguard and genius by every metric I know of.”

Mr. Ocean wrote, “He learned early on how little value to assign to someone else’s opinion of you. An infectious sentiment that seemed soaked into his clothes, his hair, his walk, his guitar and his primal scream.”

Mr. Ocean has covered “When You Were Mine,” from 1980’s “Dirty Mind,” at live shows, and called that song his favorite of all time. He also talked about Prince’s impact on his identity:

“He made me feel more comfortable with how I identify sexually simply by his display of freedom from and irreverence for obviously archaic ideas like gender conformity, etc. He moved me to be more daring and intuitive with my own work by his demonstration — his denial of the prevailing model.”

(For those unfamiliar with Snapchat, the filter superimposes purple rain droplets over photos taken with the app.)

The New York Times has been covering Prince for 35 years.

In 1981, Stephen Holden wrote one of the first reviews of Prince for the paper. He saw the rising star at a sold-out concert at the Ritz, noting that “four months ago, when Prince played the same club, it was half-empty.” He added: “With his sassy grace and precocious musicality, he is heir to the defiant rock-and-roll tradition of Elvis Presley, Mick Jagger and Jimi Hendrix.”

Later that year, Robert Palmer wrote the newspaper’s first large-scale feature on Prince, focusing on how he challenged sexual and racial stereotypes. “One suspects that as time goes on, more and more American pop will reflect a similarly biracial orientation,” he wrote. “If that’s so, Prince’s black-white synthesis isn’t just a picture of what could be, it’s a prophecy.”

Prince was a fully-fledged superstar by 1984, the year he released the album and film “Purple Rain.” Michiko Kakutani compared Prince to Michael Jackson, the other King of Pop. And Mr. Palmer raved about the new album. “The hard-hitting lyrics give his ‘Purple Rain’ album a highly charged text to work from,” he wrote, “and the music feels equally intense and equally liberated, the best of Prince’s career.”

In 1996, our music critic Jon Pareles scored an interview with the reclusive star, in which Prince talked about his family, his rapid songwriting process and his spirituality. “Sometimes I stand in awe of what I do myself,” Prince said. “I feel like a regular person, but I listen to this and wonder, where did it come from? I believe definitely in the higher power that gave me this talent.”

The pair touched upon spirituality again in a 2004 interview in Minneapolis, shortly after Prince was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. “I always knew I had a relationship with God,” Prince said. “But I wasn’t sure God had a relationship with me.”

In 2007, Kelefa Sanneh reviewed Prince’s Super Bowl halftime show, writing: “His performance last night at Super Bowl XLI will surely go down as one of the most thrilling halftime shows ever; certainly the most unpredictable, and perhaps the best.”

Last September, Prince released the first part of his final album, “HitNRun.” Jon Pareles’s review praised Prince’s never-ending experimentation and innovation, calling it “a proud display of quirks and an effort to come to terms with the possibilities of electronic dance music and all its gizmos.”