Call him Mr.

Prince plays a rare rave-up

by Jon Garelick

The last time the great glyphed one sang "My Name Is Prince" in these parts (at the Worcester Aud in 1993), he was a tepid bore. At the Roxy last Wednesday (November 8) he sang, "You can call me Mr. Man, but don't ever call me Prince," and he was sizzling. The now-classic song catalogue took a back seat to a hardworking club band (think Peter Wolf, or James Brown when he gets serious) that cranked boiling funk jams.

This was, apparently, a quickly arranged short tour to benefit Prince's "Love 4 One Another" charity organization for underprivileged children. It packed the Roxy to a capacity 1200 (though the show's local promoter, former Prince national tour promotions manager Terryl Calloway, said that Prince had been looking for 2000-seat venues). The Roxy was not the best place to see a superstar. The raised dance floor created a packed glacier of fans that stood six inches taller than the rest of the crowd. Those of us in the back third of the room stared at a what looked like a wall of very tall people (Celtic star Rick Fox was there, but he could see just fine from the bar, thank you).

Prince (I'm sorry, I just can't do that AFKAP thing with him -- maybe he could go with something like "Irving" for the sake of the slobs of the working press) defeated the set-up by making his first appearance standing atop an organ, or a speaker cabinet, or something (hey, I couldn't see). It had the effect of bringing him to the center of the room, as though he were standing on top of the crowd and their upstretched arms, carried there by the tsunami of B-3 organ swells and churning funk of "Jam of the Year" (from the new Emancipation on NPG/EMI). It was one of the most dramatic entrances I've seen by a major star: decked in a white parka with black trim and wrap-around shades, Prince declaimed, "Everybody's here, this is the jam of the year!" No arguments.

Emancipation is a mix of pleasant froth and overwarmed cheese. The New Power Generation live band were a red-meat deal. In place of Emancipation's drum machines we got the backbeat crack and kick-drum stomp of Kirk Johnson's trap set. Instead of trickling synth lines, funk piano and barking B-3. Instead of flutes and saxes, the fiery high sustained notes and flashing runs of electric rock guitars (thanks to Mike Scott, Kat Dyson, and Prince himself). And always and everywhere, Rhonda Smith's bass lines, alternately digging a deep groove to the center of the earth or playing facile and speedy on top.

The high point was a 10-minute "Face Down" (also from Emancipation). To a repeated response of "Dead like Elvis," Prince rapped lines like, "That's how I want them to bury me -- face down, so they can all kiss my uh-uh." On and on it went, with Prince cutting the band for stop-time breaks and then bringing them in with a rush, like a vacuum of silence filled by a tornado suck of sound.

The show was nearly continuous for almost two hours. If people have complained that Prince's celebrated songcraft has been inconsistent of late, it hardly mattered. At times, the sound balance was off and guitar solos were lost or overwhelmed in bass rumble. But the churn stayed mostly on track. Ballads were mere breathers from the forward velocity of the beat. Prince reprised his famous near-skronking guitar solo from "Purple Rain," and he offered his own lyric twist on the Joan Osborne hit "One of Us" with the line "Just a slave like one of us" (his self-description under his old Warner Bros. contract). On "If I Was Your Girlfriend" he asked, "Would you let me wash your hair, would you let me touch you there?" And on "Do Me, Baby" he modulated his remarkable voice from pearly falsetto testifying to baritone bedroom drawl and a raspy "yeah-yeah."

But "Jam of the Year," "Get Yo Groove On," "Face Down," and "Sexy Motherfucker" (driven by wah-wah electronics and keyboards) set the pace. By the end of the set, Prince had the crowd shouting a tricky "NPG in the motherfuckin' house" and chanting it into the dark long after the band had left the stage.