[Prince The BBC Tapes Aka Magnoli Files
Everardo Laboy
I was a Prince fan since 1999. I'd never gotten to see the tours in the beginning because I was young and from a low-income household. My dad would take me to Ames(before they were Zayre's) each spring when he got his tax refun money and got me the latest Prince albums. When "Lovesexy" came out I had a weekend job cutting grass and washing cars and was able to buy this on vinyl myself. The album was fantastic, "Glam Slam" being my favorite with the guitar sound within.
Prince started to tour and at the time I was hanging with my uncle alot. He'd rag on me about my love for the music, and it came up that he was touring and would be performing at the Capital Centre in Maryland in October. I didn't have the money to afford the tickets. When I got home that Saturday afternoon my grandmother had come over and told my mom and dad that uncle had gotten tickets to one of the October shows. When I heard about this I completely freaked out! I'd never been to anyone's tours before and my first was going to be Prince's!
October came around and he picked me up in his '87 Lincoln Town Car and a couple of his friends had gotten tickets too so the car was full. We got there, the second show I believe, and the parking lot was near empty. We had no trouble finding our seats because the turnout for this show was really low. I remember walking the hallway around the arena on our way to our seats and I could see the stage, and hear some kind of music being played over the speakers as the technicians got things set up.
We were seated, and not long after the lights went out, and the "thump... Thumpthump" of the drums started. The car rotated the stage and out pops Prince. Even though the crowd was small the energy was just as astounding. The music, alot of which I didn't know at the time because he was performing "Black Album" material as well, was amazing. I don't think I blinked the entire time. 13-year-old James was at a Prince concert! I remember some basketball playing on the side of the stage closest to me, the competition between my side of the arena and the other side over who could sing the loudest. I think that singer Pebbles was in attendance on the floor, but I'm not sure.
I saw the Lovesexy show on Friday,November 11,1988 at the Oakland Arena (still got the ticket stub!)...it was the best concert I've ever seen.This was something really magical about that era.Prince had an amazing band and an amazing stage show.I walked out of that arena in a daze....knowing that I had witnessed something truly incredible.
I remember being too late to get to any tickets as other prince-fans had already spend the night buying each and every one of them in just a few hours. It took me untill the broadcast of the Dortmund show to see what the fuss was about. It would be great to ever see a full movie of the German aftershow, or the London one, of which snippets appear on the Magnoli files.
I nearly killed my brother when he taped something else over the VHS tape of the broadcast. A few years later the released version waas available for no money at all. It was also issued on laserdisc but i didn't have the budget for that sort of fancy stuff.
I got into P when I was about 12 with the 1999 stuff, LRC and all that. I got really into it though, after my brother played the Purple Rain film over and over one weekend, all weekend. I thought P was obviously a bit of a twat but his music was the tits. After that I went off and bought Purple Rain and 1999 and I was hooked.
My first chance at seeing him live was in '86 for Parade. A few of us ordered tickets and were looking forward to it but for some reason we had to send our tickets back. I can't remember exactly what happened but we never got to go. I always thought he'd moved the dates back a bit but I can't remember properly now. One of my mates did end up going and he made us all sick telling us how fucking great it was. I'm still Gutted I never saw the Revolution live.
Next time it was SOTT in '87. As we'd missed out on Parade we made sure we had really good tickets for Wembley and again, looked forward to the gig. One shitty morning I got a call from my big brother saying we wouldn't be going as P had cancelled. We called the ticket office and they told us there were just a few problems and we'd still be going, just to a different venue. In the end he cancelled the whole UK leg and we were stumped for another year. Meanwhile, I was still getting everything I could get my hands on. Released stuff, Vinyl, Tapes, Out-takes, Videos, live gigs, posters, anything and I was gagging to catch him live.
When tickets for Lovesexy went on sale we jumped on em. At first there were only a few of us going and we got decent tickets but as the gigs got nearer our group got bigger. A coach firm in town were putting on trips to the shows so we chopped our original tickets in and booked up to all go on the coach for the opening night.
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