The Way Opportunities and Music School recruited organist Bobby Lyle and other musicians to teach kids about music--how to play it, how to read it, how to take it to the marketplace. "The one thing that we requested of all the students was that you give back to the next class," says Spike Moss. "So they'd come back and teach the next group coming through. As a matter of fact, the guy that taught Prince was Sonny Thompson. He was the baddest of all of them that came through the class."
Thompson describes Prince as a "sponge" rather than a student, soaking up knowledge from anyone he played with, and most musicians took pride in doing their thing without adult assistance. Jimmy Jam, who had started DJing at the Roller Gardens, remembers booking his band Mind and Matter at a downtown Minneapolis hotel himself. "That event drew something like 2,000 people, and pulled from the white clubs," he says. "With black and white, there's prejudice until there's green involved." The first big downtown club to open its doors to Jimmy and his friends was Uncle Sam's, which later changed its name to First Avenue.
Charles Chamblis courtesy of the Minnesota Historical Society
Tear the roof off the Elks' Club: Flyte Tyme bassist Terry Lewis circa 1976
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Most black groups drawing black audiences were restricted to playing black-owned clubs. Thriving on the new bands, Jimmie Fuller's smoke-filled Cozy Bar and Lounge on Plymouth let them all play. (When the city bought the place out for highway expansion, the money went into launching the late Riverview Supper Club). There was also the Nacirema ("American" spelled backwards) over south, a "bring your own bottle" bar that kept booze in a cabinet to sidestep liquor laws.
"It was supposed to be a private club, all adult," says Sonny Thompson. "But once again, all the kids were playing. The police would raid it, too. We'd be playing, and next thing you know all these cops were on the stage with us."
For most of the kids, bars were a new world. Few of the musicians drank, smoked, or did drugs. "We were kind of even naive in that sense, I would say," says Linda Anderson. "Because, growing up, we weren't around people who got drunk or people who got high. So when we'd see that, we'd say, 'Look at that!'"
By 1976, Prince couldn't wait to escape this scene. One of his first original songs was called "Go to New York" (it contained the lyric "Sitting here on the purple lawn"). But he never really left Minnesota, and over the past three decades, he seems to have tried to recreate the feel of his formative years on Minneapolis's north side.
Prince has hired and rehired old friends, including Sonny Thompson, who recently played at Paisley Park with the Legendary Combo. He named an unrelated '80s new wave band the Family, and titled the Time (who were recent surprise openers for Prince on the second night at the Xcel) in obvious homage to Flyte Tyme. From Myst, a leggy black female trio he caught one night at the Nacirema, he took inspiration for Vanity 6, who debuted at the same bar. The three sisters in Myst eventually formed Best Kept Secret, who were also invited out to Paisley in June.
Prince might miss the sense of community that comes from nobody being a star and everyone wanting to be one. If that's the case, of course, there's no going back. He's still on the stoop somewhere playing his guitar. But all of the cars are in valet parking.
