Available:*
Material Type | Library | Call Number | Suggested Age | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Book | Searching... Cabell County Public Library | 921 PRINCE KAR | Adult | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
A warm and surprisingly real-life biography, featuring never-before-seen photos, of one of rock's greatest talents: Prince.
Neal Karlen was the only journalist Prince granted in-depth press interviews to for over a dozen years, from before Purple Rain to when the artist changed his name to an unpronounceable glyph. Karlen interviewed Prince for three Rolling Stone cover stories, wrote "3 Chains o' Gold," Prince's "rock video opera," as well as the star's last testament, which may be buried with Prince's will underneath Prince's vast and private compound, Paisley Park.
According to Prince's former fiancée Susannah Melvoin, Karlen was "the only reporter who made Prince sound like what he really sounded like." Karlen quit writing about Prince a quarter-century before the mega-star died, but he never quit Prince, and the two remained friends for the last thirty-one years of the superstar's life.
Well before they met as writer and subject, Prince and Karlen knew each other as two of the gang of kids who biked around Minneapolis's mostly-segregated Northside. (They played basketball at the Dairy Queen next door to Karlen's grandparents, two blocks from the budding musician.) He asserts that Prince can't be understood without first understanding '70s Minneapolis, and that even Prince's best friends knew only 15 percent of him: that was all he was willing and able to give, no matter how much he cared for them.
Going back to Prince Rogers Nelson's roots, especially his contradictory, often tortured, and sometimes violent relationship with his father, This Thing Called Life profoundly changes what we know about Prince, and explains him as no biography has: a superstar who calls in the middle of the night to talk, who loved The Wire and could quote from every episode of The Office , who frequented libraries and jammed spontaneously for local crowds (and fed everyone pancakes afterward), who was lonely but craved being alone. Readers will drive around Minneapolis with Prince in a convertible, talk about movies and music and life, and watch as he tries not to curse, instead dishing a healthy dose of "mamma jammas."
Author Notes
Neal Karlen is a former contributing editor for Rolling Stone , Newsweek staff writer, and regular contributor to The New York Times . He is the author of Babes in Toyland: The Making and Selling of a Rock and Roll Band, and other books ranging in content from minor league baseball to fundamentalist religion to linguistics. A graduate of Brown University, he lives in his hometown of Minneapolis.
Reviews (1)
Kirkus Review
A journalist acquaintance of Prince's riffs on the musician's Sphinx-like persona, heartbreaks, and basketball skills. In this peculiar, intermittently intriguing blend of biography and memoir, Karlen makes clear that he didn't know Prince (1958-2016) especially well. But, as he suggests, who did? They hung out in the same Minneapolis neighborhood as children, which helped Karlen gain Prince's trust for three Rolling Stone features. Later, Karlen was recruited to script a movie, 3 Chains o' Gold, that stitched together some of Prince's early-1990s videos. More provocatively, the author notes that he wrote a document to accompany Prince's as-yet-undiscovered will, which he claims is inexplicably buried somewhere at Paisley Park, Prince's compound outside Minneapolis. Over the years, they'd intermittently meet and connect via letters and late-night phone calls, but that's not much to build a book around--especially since Karlen shares no details about the alleged will's contents. Still, the author did a little reporting to supplement his files, connecting with Prince's high school music teacher and Purple Rain--era band mates like André Cymone. Karlen also chronicles Prince's deep-seated resentment of his high school basketball coach, who refused to play the infamously short budding musician despite his outstanding athletic talent. Prince could be peculiar and protective about his family history, concealing his father's abuse and the death of his infant son from a genetic disorder while allowing slanderous rumors about his mother to perpetuate. That along with his numerous other idiosyncrasies, Karlen argues, were part of Prince's "kayfabe," a professional wrestling term for selling the sport's fakeness as real. The author is a lyrical writer on these points, but ultimately, the narrative is an exercise in armchair psychology that has too many historical gaps to qualify as biography, and the author is too distant from his subject to deliver an intimate portrait. An earnest vamp on Prince's life that leaves its subject no less mysterious. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Table of Contents
| Prelude | p. ix |
| 1 Memoirs of an Amnesiac | p. 1 |
| 2 Last Call | p. 10 |
| 3 The Power of the Just-Dead | p. 23 |
| 4 Kill 'Em and Leave 2.0 | p. 34 |
| 5 Daddy Dearest I: The Bad Son | p. 54 |
| 6 Daddy Dearest II: The Good Son | p. 77 |
| 7 "The Problem for Superheroes Is What to Do Between Phone Booths" | p. 89 |
| 8 Bailer | p. 101 |
| 9 High School | p. 115 |
| 10 The Teenage Auteur | p. 125 |
| 11 Purple Rain: "Dancin' in the Dark" | p. 139 |
| 12 In This Life You're on Your Own | p. 153 |
| 13 The Crack-Up, Act 1 | p. 159 |
| 14 The Crack-Up, Act 2 | p. 174 |
| 15 The Crack-Up, Act 3: A Has-Been is Born, 1998 | p. 184 |
| 16 The New Millennium: You Gotta Serve Somebody-Jehovah and Bob Dylan's Rabbi | p. 201 |
| 17 "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" | p. 211 |
| 18 Sonny Liston's Grave | p. 218 |
| 19 Laughs, Lies, and Learning from Others | p. 227 |
| 20 Minnesota Mean | p. 241 |
| 21 Coda | p. 260 |
| Postscript-PrinceLit | p. 289 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 299 |
| Timeline | p. 303 |
| Endnotes | p. 309 |
| Bibliography | p. 323 |
| Index | p. 326 |
| Photo credits | p. 336 |
