In an excerpt from his new Prince book 'This Thing Called Life,' journalist Neal Karlen reflects on his decades-long friendship with the artist, and recalls the final time they spoke
And the out-of-time oddness of that last call nagged at me periodically for days. But lots of things bother me off and on for days, always had. For whatever reasons he liked me, it wasn’t for my preternatural calmness. As potatoes went with Prince, this was pretty small, I reassured myself.
But even when news broke of the weirdness in Moline, no one from his old days could get to him. André, his old best friend and among those old pals he’d gotten back in touch with in the last year, tried texting Prince a dozen times, falsely telling him he was homeless, needed a place to stay, asking if he could hang out at Paisley Park for a few days until he got on his feet.
He’d shown me where, in 1985, when Paisley Park was just another unnamed, featureless field in the middle of nowhere, adjacent to the Twin Cities. It was the Drivepastland of Flyoverland, and for reasons my know-nothing twenty-six-year-old self never understood, my Spidey sense spooked me the second he showed me the field and told me of his dream of what he would soon build there.
If “the Big Sleep” was the slang moniker Raymond Chandler used for death, then Prince’s yearning to be by himself was “the Big Alone.” For the musician the need to be by himself proved a road map straight to Chandler’s destination.
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