Rhino Factoids: Prince Plays Live For You

36 years ago today, at a benefit performance for the Capri Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a gentleman with a decidedly royal moniker made his concert debut as a solo artist.

That’s right: if you’d had a whopping $4.00 in your wallet – or $4.75 if you’d bought your ticket at the door – you could’ve been one of the lucky MFs who got to see the first proper live performance by Prince.

Last year around this time, The Current – a music blog tied to Minnesota Public Radio – wrote about the 35th anniversary of the performance, which was followed by a second show the following evening. Prince’s band for the gigs featured bassist Andre Cymone, who’d been friends with Prince since they were kids and had played with him in the band Grand Central, later to be known as Champagne; others onstage for those performances included drummer Bobby Z, guitarist Dez Dickerson, and keyboardists Matt Fink and Gayle Chapman.

In Prince: Inside the Music and the Masks, author Ronin Ro detailed Prince’s attire for that first gig: “For this show, he wore jeans, leg warmers, a slack blouse, a vest, and a raincoat that he hoped – along with his deeper voice during this performance – would position him closer to Mick Jagger, Sly Stone, and Jimi Hendrix than the blow-dried flashy, polyester-clad Bee Gees set.”

The plan apparently worked, given that Jon Bream, the music critic for the Minneapolis Star-Tribute specifically cited the Rolling Stones frontman as a point of reference, describing Prince as having “strutted across the stage with grand Mick Jagger-like moves and gestures,” using the adjectives “cool,” “cocky,” and “sexy” before declaring outright that, “as a whole, Prince’s performance clearly indicated that he has extraordinary talent.”

And what did Prince perform on that fateful evening? Well, maybe it’s because no one knew it was going to be quite as historic as it ended up being, but it’s hard to find a complete set list for the show, but based on various reports, we do know that he played “For You,” “So Blue,” and “Soft and Wet,” and he definitely closed with “Just as Long as We’re Together,” which was his new single at the time, described by Bream as being contagious enough for soul, pop, and disco audiences alike.

Unfortunately, radio didn’t agree – it never got any farther than #91 on the R&B charts – but Prince survived to thrive later in the year: his next single, “I Wanna Be Your Brother,” began the process of breaking him into the mainstream, providing him with his first #1 R&B hit and a #11 hit on the Billboard Hot 100, which meant that Bream definitely got one thing right in his write-up: Prince was on his way to “a royal future.”