Purple Haze

The night Prince flexed his jazz chops and I made the afterparty

This past September, I took some oxycodone after a complicated wisdom teeth extraction. That night, I dreamed I was staying outside Boston at my friend Brian Coleman’s place. Brian told me Prince was alive and well and living nearby on a golf course, where he played the game constantly. He wore plaid knickers, argyle socks, and a cap, all in various shades of purple. Naturally.

Brian introduced me to Prince, who said, “Michelle Mercer! You're the one who wrote the essay about my show in Montreal as a jazz performance. A long time ago.”

Me: “I can’t believe you know that piece, Prince!”

Prince: “You also wrote about the afterparty. Why didn’t you come behind the velvet ropes when I nodded the okay to my bodyguards?”

Me: “Because I was afraid you wanted me back there as a groupie.”

Prince: “Maybe. Now I want to play golf. Do you play?”

Me: “I don’t.”

Prince: “I can't leave the golf course. This is the afterlife.”

Me: “That’s okay, I’m just happy you remember my piece about your jazz sensibilities.”

Prince: “Keep writing those essays until you die. Keep punching a higher floor! See you later. I have a golf pro coming now.”

Brian: “You should have learned to play golf, Mercer."

The dream shifted. My sisters were suddenly there, and we all loaded into a car to drive to Cambridge for some lunch and book/vinyl shopping. As soon as we were belted into the car, I woke up.

Prince in a golf course afterlife was a strange twist, but otherwise this dream seemed like textbook wish fulfillment: As a reasonable, waking human, I don’t expect a pop star to be familiar with an obscure essay of mine. A couple of days later, I came across Sasha Weiss’s New York Times Magazine piece about the cursed Prince documentary (gift link). It was as if Weiss’s extraordinary article had such a huge impact on the cultural consciousness that it sent Prince into my dream.

This week, just over the paywall, my essay about Prince’s crafty 2001 Montreal Jazz Fest show and the afterparty. This piece appeared in the October 2001 Jazziz as the final page Refrain, a one-time refuge for the genre-bending essays that I’ve always favored.

Prince, by the way, played Montreal again in 2011: two legendary midnight shows, also at the jazz fest. He played a more intimate Montreal show in May 2015.

Note: If I were editing this essay now, I’d tone down the gonzo posturing (4 G&Ts?) and jazz chauvinism. What can I say? In 2001, I was a saucy twenty-something who assumed everyone lived forever.

Also, Brian Coleman was the publicist friend who tipped me to the afterparty.