When I was ten years old, Saturday nights were television nights. My family would settle around the living room with popcorn or ice cream to watch television together. But early in the evening, before 8pm, I had the living room all to myself and watched the only weekly TV show that mattered: Solid Gold.
Solid Gold was a half-hour of syndicated television hosted by Marilyn McCoo, formerly of The Fifth Edition. Solid Gold featured pop stars performing hits between excerpts of the top ten songs of the week, all while the Solid Gold Dancers, men and women in sequins and leotards, danced across the stage.
To a kid in the Chattanooga suburbs, where local radio was limited to straight up rock and easy listening, Solid Gold was like watching the weekly world news. Because of Solid Gold, I got to hear what the “real world” was hearing.
But on January 29, 1983, I got more than I expected, more than I was prepared for. That was the night Prince made his first appearance on Solid Gold.
I’d never heard of Prince, never heard him on the radio, never even seen him on stolen moments of forbidden MTV. That night, he played a song called “1999,” backed up by a band called The Revolution. I’d tell you to go look for the performance on YouTube, but you won’t find it. So just imagine.
Prince, young and arrogant — dressed in purple some two years before Purple Rain — takes over the entire Solid Gold set, brings all 8 members of the Revolution on stage, instruments, costumes and all, and then proceeds to lip sync the song. Halfway through the performance, Prince loses the shiny purple jacket and oh my god he is dressed like a pirate. The song is about the future and The Bomb, and a party being over, but also listening to my body if I was gonna die — or if I had a dime, I couldn’t tell which. And why is there a guy dressed like a doctor in scrubs and sunglasses? This band is some kind of musical Justice League. Then he closes out by throwing his guitar over a bandmember’s head into the offstage darkness beyond. Maybe someone catches it, but who knows and it doesn’t matter.
Right at that moment, I knew I had a problem.
My parents were in their 40s in 1983. They grew up in the ‘50s and there was a lot of that mid-century influence still in our house, in the way they raised my older brother and me. They didn’t listen to pop music, not even 60s pop music, keeping mostly to FM radio country. To them, to my Mom especially, music stopped around the time President Kennedy was assassinated. Through that lens, someone like Michael Jackson appeared harmless. I liked Michael Jackson. I liked him enough to ask my parents to buy me the Thriller album and they did. Michael Jackson’s songs about love weren’t all that removed from the relatively chaste 1950s. Michael Jackson’s songs were something my parents could accept. His songs were like holding hands. But Prince sang about love in a way my parent’s wouldn’t want me to imagine.
Even at age ten, I knew Prince was different. The way he moved on stage, the way he seized the mic like a pentecostal preacher grabbing a serpent, the way he seemed to want more from the audience than just a little attention and admiration, the way his performance was so intense and human and sweaty. It didn’t matter if he was lip-syncing, he owned the stage, and he owned his time.
There was no way I was getting a Prince album, I didn’t even bother to ask. So I did the next best thing, at least for 1983. If you were ready by the radio, if you were quick on the button-mashing, you could hold a tape recorder up to the speaker and grab a favorite song on cassette. You might miss a few seconds of intro, but who cares?
I called up a local radio station. Prince’s music sounded sort of like rock, so I picked KZ-106, a FM station that played a repeating rotation of Steve Miller, Fleetwood Mac, Heart and ZZ Top. I called their request line, was put on hold, stuttered when the DJ answered and asked “Can … sir, can you play ‘1999’ by Prince?” Pause. “What?” I asked again. “’1999′ by a guy named Prince?” Another pause. “Do your parents know you’re on the phone?” No, they didn’t, so I hung up the phone.
The DJ confirmed my suspicions. If the DJ asked about my parents, asked if they knew, asked like I was doing something wrong, then that meant only one thing:
Prince wasn’t just different. Prince was dirty.
Dirty like the Playboys and Penthouses hidden in my Dad’s closet, dirty like movie posters with an R in the corner, dirty like the way I felt and didn’t understand when I was left alone and let my mind wander. I was only ten, almost eleven, but lines were drawn already. There’s good and then there’s dirty and dirty is bad. And dirty things had to remain hidden.
Even before I’d heard of Prince, I’d learned to associate unfamiliar and new sexual feelings with sin, with something that was wrong, something shameful and ungodly. My parents raised my older brother well enough, but something about my curiosity left them flailing.
Dirty was thrown into my life so early that I can’t remember the first time I heard it, that I heard it applied to me. I just knew it was wrong and because things that felt dirty would bring me joy, then I must also be wrong. And if was going to indulge in dirty things, I’d have to deal with the shame that followed.
***
When it takes residence early, a severe dichotomy of love and sex, of love versus sex, can have a relentless and long-lasting effect. Years. Decades. You keep love in one hand and sex in the other. You put your heart into one box and place your body in another. You hold one in the light and keep the other in the dark. It splits your heart in two.
I never owned 1999 as a teenager. I would pick it up in the local K-Mart, I’d read the track names of the back, imagining what they must sound like, then I’d put it right back.
On a late afternoon in seventh grade, Sheriff Phil Winters of Catoosa County delivered the first of several anti-drug lectures I’d hear over my educational career. His opener was a science experiment. He placed a flask of liquid over a bunsen burner then told us to breathe in through our noses, assuring us we were all perfectly safe. “Smell it? That … is what weed smells like! But don’t any of y’all worry, this is just a bunch of chemicals that produces a marijuana-like scent, so nobody is getting high up here today.”
Sheriff Phil escalated his warnings through a list of harder drugs at various junior high threat levels, until finally switching to a wider range of societal ills that could claim our young hearts and minds. To illustrate his point, he fanned out a handful of record albums across a fold out table. Right in the middle was 1999. “Now, let’s talk about this fellow who calls himself Prince.”
He lifted the album, and asked us if we could see the secret message. We all leaned in to look. “Right here, right on the front.” He pointed to the 1 in 1999.
“See that? That … is a penis.”
Even the police didn’t want me to listen to Prince.
***
In 1999, Prince not only alluded to sex, not only addressed it directly, but used the language and cadence of the church to elevate sex to something holy. 1999-era Prince offered a glimpse into an understanding of sexuality that went far beyond hand-holding. Prince was a voice in the pop music wilderness to tell us that we are allowed to want what we want, we can broker a peace between the heart and the body. You can have both, you can have it all.
We are shaped by forces both well-meaning and harmful, carved from rough material like canyons under insistent streams that become rivers as the earth offers little resistance. Events catch like resilient rocks and shift the shape of the lives. Events and words. Words like dirty.
1999 was only a glimpse into a life I wouldn’t know for years. When I listen to 1999 now, I hear a frankness about love and sex that feels fearless and uncompromising, but there is a loneliness as well. Prince puts the blame on all those women who treat him so bad, women drinking something in their water that just doesn’t compute,but the loneliness is his. It’s a loneliness I carried through college, through my adulthood.
Prince was never going to save me. It took therapy at 41 to teach me the lesson of 1999: You have a right to be selfish for your own happiness. It’s okay to want. It’s okay to listen to what your body is telling you.
It took meeting someone who welcomed all of me, who saw me as an entire person. Someone who listened to my stories, who told me I was good. Someone who told me I didn’t need to be anyone but me. Someone who showed me a life and a love where I can be tender and I can be loving and I can be dirty and shame isn’t even invited.
I wish I could thank Prince for opening a door and offering a glimpse of the future couched in the lyrics of a doomsday pop song. But I’m not sure that Prince exists anymore. For every generation, there is a new Prince. He remakes himself to fit the times, regenerating and keeping only so many memories of his storied history. Art Official Age Prince would just nod sagely, then glide away, trailing his kaftan behind him.
So I’ll thank 1999-era Prince instead. Drop a line back to 1983 and say something like:
“Thank you for showing up on my television set, for showing me how something as forbidden as 1999 could contain a promise of a better future, a future that is good. Shamelessly good.”
