Interesting read in todays New York Times. 9/9/2024
After reading it I really felt for the pain this man experienced and reflected in some of his music. Kicked out of his home in his early teens by his 7th day Adventist father. I can't help but wonder if he learned the truth about the truth before his death, resulting in more pain...... "...Prince’s parents, John Nelson and Mattie Shaw, had a volatile, violent relationship. They split up when Prince was 6 or 7, and his mother remarried a man named Hayward Baker. Two people in the film — a youth counselor and a childhood friend — said Prince told them that Baker locked Prince in his bedroom for a period of time (the youth counselor said it was for six weeks), passing food through the door. When Prince emerged, according to the counselor, his ebullience was gone: “He went inside.”
According to people in the film, Prince’s mother kicked him out of her house when he was around 12; she sent him to live with his father, whom he idolized as a musician. But after catching Prince with a girl in his room for the third time, his father, a strict Seventh-day Adventist, kicked him out, too. Prince was 14, and as his sister Tyka tells Edelman, “It broke his heart.” He stayed with various friends, for many years sleeping on a mattress in the basement of his best friend, André Cymone." ......"As his fame grew, he had a troubled relationship with his family members. His mother was in and out of his life, at times asking him for money. He and his only full sibling, Tyka, who sometimes abused drugs, were estranged for periods. He would draw close to his father, buying him a house and cars, bringing him as his date to an awards show, the two men dressed in matching purple suits. He continued to hunger for his father’s praise (a touching inscription on a copy of his cosmically great album “1999” flashes across the screen: “Hi Poppa, please play side with a star on it. It’s longer and better. Love you, Prince”), but John Nelson’s love was inconsistent and self-aggrandizing. In the film, we see him take credit in interviews for all Prince was, even demanding a co-writing credit on some of his songs, angering Prince and leading to more years of estrangement."...."...Edelman presents the depth of Prince’s denial about the death of his baby — for years, he would never acknowledge it publicly — as more evidence of his inability to show how truly vulnerable he was: a motherless, fatherless child who longed to be protected by a family of his own. As the family-making enterprise was failing, it seems he sought a different form of protection. Over the next 15 years, he adhered to a strict religious observance, falling under the sway of an ersatz father figure, the musician Larry Graham, who insinuated himself into Prince’s life and instilled in him the Jehovah’s Witness theology. Another seemingly inexplicable chapter in Prince’s metamorphosis starts to make some kind of sense. That weird period when Prince kind of went off the deep end? The film shows how he was caught in a grief that he couldn’t admit to or comprehend, trying on many new guises in an attempt to shed it." ..."After he died, his estate, which was divided among his sister, Tyka, and five half-siblings, was plunged into chaos. When Netflix negotiated the deal for the documentary, a court had placed the estate, which owed millions in back taxes, under the administration of Comerica Bank & Trust. But in 2022, after years of legal battles, a Minnesota court divided Prince’s assets between Primary Wave, a music company to whom three of Prince’s heirs had sold their shares, and Prince Legacy LLC, composed of the other three heirs and L. Londell McMillan, a lawyer who worked with Prince in the 1990s and 2000s, and Charles Spicer, a music producer." " Prince died on April 21, 2016, at age 57, of a fentanyl overdose, alone, in an elevator at Paisley Park."
The Prince We Never Knew
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/08/magazine/prince-netflix-ezra-edelman-documentary.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Jk4.IITs.nnglFMCB0IX6&smid=url-share
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Graham
