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April 24, 2004
Me and My Friends vs. Prince & the NPG
The man in the picture above is performing in Raleigh on Sunday and Monday. The man he is caricaturing performed in Raleigh last night. Yeah, I plunked down $58.75 to see Prince at the RBC Center but now I kinda wish I could've had the chance to spend that same cash on a dinner/ticket package combo for one of the Chapelle shows at Charlie Goodnight's instead. But, alas, those were all completely sold out very soon after they went on sale.
Everyone I know who went to see Prince in 1997 talked about it like it was a religious experience...and the reviews of shows on this current Musicology tour have been pretty gushing for the most part. But from where I sat up in section 317 of the upper deck of the RBC Center, last night's show had a fatal flaw - the sound was absolutely terrible, really muddy and muffled and far-away sounding. Rawls tells me that the sound on the floor was pretty good and that some of these new basketball arenas are intentionally designed to trap the noise down in the bottom half. I would've figured they might've been acoustically designed so that "there's not a bad seat in the house" a la new movie theaters and the whole "stadium-seating" idea. Anyway, I probably shouldn't whine too much about this since I didn't exactly rush to buy tickets on the on-sale date.
As widely reported, Prince does trot out a lot of his old hits on this tour (which is supposedly the last time he'll play them). Unfortunately, many of them tended to be strung together in a megamix style....which I might not have minded so much if said megamix wasn't being played by the New Power Generation and its surplus of unnecessary horn players. Sure, it was kinda cool that one of the guys playing saxophone was legendary James Brown sideman (and NC native!) Maceo Parker....but to me, Prince's 80s hits just don't sound nearly as good when they're rendered as a continuous stream of horn-funk. The band would shift from song to song while the drummer kept on playing the same fixed backbeat....and to me it sounded like what a "Hooked On Prince" album might sound like if it was recorded by a very competent JBs-like funk band.
Overall, it definitely wasn't what I had hoped for, but I'm not completely sorry I went...some great moments included a seated acoustic interlude (featuring "Raspberry Beret" and "Little Red Corvette") and the encore with its sparser hornless ballads ("Nothing Compares 2 U", "Purple Rain"). And at least I finally saw the man, even if he was about a quarter mile away. Bonus points for the fact that immediately after Prince said farewell to a screaming audience, he seemed to be removed from the arena floor in a box a la Harry Houdini! Game, blouses...
Posted by Tim at April 24, 2004 06:59 PM
Comments
the walnut creek show wasn't that great either. I mean, it was Prince, so it can only be so bad, but the part that I really dug was the Plum Crazy afterparty. I mean, first of all, it's all Plum Crazy. Prince actually played, unlike this year's "afterparty" at the Office. Sure he played NPG-funk for an hour, but it was PRINCE, at PLUM CRAZY, and there were only a hundred or so people there, so it just felt right. Prince is best experienced in small doses and at close proximity, it would seem.
Posted by: bo at April 26, 2004 11:27 AM
Did anyone go to the Office after-show show this time? I wanted to go and as Bo suggested, witness him up close and personal. But it wasn't in the cards. For the record, I remember the 1997 show much like the show you saw this weekend, yo. So many medlies! But Dave Chappell---gawd, I can't belive I didn't even know he was in town.
Posted by: Sarah at April 26, 2004 11:43 AM
we were up top, too, in section 334, i think. the sound was awful.
we braved the after-party. it was terrible. i blogged about the whole thing if you're brave enough to read it all: http://home.earthlink.net/~christa.wessel/blog_archive/2004_04_01_past.html#108282345821385084
Posted by: christa at April 27, 2004 12:40 PM