52 Weeks Of Prince: Paisley Park Special

Admission Is Easy, Just Drive Forever And Pay Some Money

When we moved to Bloomington, I didn’t know how I was going to replace my barber. I had someone I really liked in Evansville, and if I hadn’t moved, I would never have thought of finding someone else. But I did luck out. In fact, if you are in Evansville and need a barber, Nick Biggs is awesome.

Anyway, my barber here is great. Her name is Marny and she rules. One of the things we immediately talked about was my near-unnatural love of the music of Prince. Because I bring up all my nerdiness to people all at once. Part of it is the ADHD and part of it is I believe you should know what you’re getting into. Lucky me, she also liked Prince and Thursday before last, I had big news for her:

Conversations With My Barber:

Me: Guess who’s got two thumbs and is going to Paisley Park next week?

Marny: Whut.

Me: Lauren and me. We’re going to Paisley Park.

Marny: That’s a real place?

Even fans can get it twisted sometimes. It’s true, the song “Paisley Park” describes it as an abstract concept, but a year after the song’s release, Prince broke ground on what would become the IRL Paisley Park. It’s a building that was designed to allow Prince to literally roll out of bed and create anything he wanted: music, television, film, clothing, books, live performances, and anything else he could think of.

I’ve wanted to go to Paisley Park since the mid-90’s. The internet was still young, and so was I. Online there were reports of people going to impromptu shows at Paisley, and bootlegs circulated that had Prince and the NPG working out new material, some of which still hasn’t been released. My college roommate and I occasionally talked about driving up for a weekend, but it never happened. It was too far and we were too broke.

When Prince passed, it was inevitable Paisley Park would become a museum, and so it has. It’s now the Prince equivalent of Graceland. I’m not sure if I enjoy that comparison, but I’m not sure how to avoid it. Am I that kind of fan? (spoiler: yes) Do I really want to go all that way to see a dead guy’s house? Well, as it turns out, I do, but not without unease that comes from knowing I waited far too long to visit.

I met my partner after Prince’s passing, and the idea of a trip to Minneapolis, or more accurately Chanhassen, has come up a few times, but never seriously until her parents volunteered to watch the dogs for a long weekend so we could go on a trip. I’m not sure I’m the one who brought up Paisley as a destination, but the next thing I knew, we were booking tickets. What follows are my recollections of the trip, as well as my partner, Lauren’s. I thought it would be fun to have the impressions of someone whose interest in the place was more academic than mine.

Around The World In A Day

We decided to drive rather than fly, largely because on a four-day trip, the cost to fly would exceed the total cost of the rest of the trip. According to Google Maps, there was a nine-and-a-half-hour route with basically $20 in tolls, or a ten-and-a-half-hour trip with no tolls. We chose the shorter, more expensive route.

If the idea of that kind of car trip sounds daunting, you’re not wrong. We travel well together, but it was pretty brutal. There’s the traffic, especially around Chicago, and the construction in Wisconsin turned our nine-and-a-half-hour trip into an eleven-hour trip. It was stressful and not pleasant. Also, finding a vegetarian lunch in America’s Dairyland is not an easy task when you’re confined to roadside food. Culver’s serves a passable, if squishy, veggie burger thing.

Nevertheless, I was excited when we finally hit the Minneapolis metro area. There was so much stuff for me to geek out over. Prince loved his hometown, which seemed to baffle Oprah (more on that later).

His love of his home means now there are little bits of his history everywhere. For example, we were staying at a hotel on Flying Cloud Drive in Eden Prairie, less than a mile from the site of the Flying Cloud Drive Warehouse which is now mostly a place that replaces car windows, but still Around The World In A Day was recorded where that car window place is now. Do the people who work there now know about this? Do they care? Probably not. At least not as much as I do, which is not enough to visit there.

People Being Very, Very Nice To Each Other

Prince once described Minneapolis as being “so cold it keeps the bad people out.”

 Video: Harpo Productions / Paisley Park Enterprises

I can say the first part of this does not apply in late July. The only noticeable difference between the climate I’m used to and that of Eden Prairie, MN was a small, but distinct drop in humidity. Which is an odd thing to say about a place with so many bodies of water lying around.

The second part, however, seems to be true. The people we met were all incredibly nice. From the person who checked us into the hotel, to people working in shops and restaurants, and even random strangers walking about, everyone was kind, interested and engaged with those around them. In fact, my brand of Midwestern politeness sometimes felt like East Coast impatience by comparison. A few times I was afraid of offending the locals.

The next day we had some hours to kill before our tour, so we decided to visit the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum. I’m normally indifferent to such things, so bear that in mind when I say it was amazing. If you’re ever in the neighborhood of Paisley Park, think seriously about heading down the road a few minutes to see the Arboretum.

I expected driving up to Paisley Park to be a little surreal, but not necessarily in the way I experienced. For one thing, for the home of such a notoriously reclusive pop star, Paisley is right on the road. My own house is more secluded than Paisley Park.

Lauren says:

Paisley Park is right off the Prince Rogers Nelson Memorial Highway (Highway 5) in Chanhassen, MN. Right off; you can see the buildings from the road. There is no long driveway or anything off in the woods. He wasn’t hiding anything.

One of the most surprising things about the whole experience was realizing how un-hidden everything was. I have looked online and I couldn’t find anything that showed how profoundly ordinary the place looked from the road. It was almost (apart from the Prince symbol statue) unremarkable from the highway. If I didn’t know what the building looked like, I never would have believed this anything other than a mid-sized office building.

Both the main building and the Egg are white. They look industrial, or medical, or maybe like a small arts high school specializing in minimalism. The skylights are shaped like pyramids so there’s a bit of mall food court flavor as well.

The Egg is not in the best shape these days.

The “Egg” is a structure off to the side of Paisley Park that was added at some point in the 90’s. It’s possible Prince used it as a personal residence, or possibly it was simply an outbuilding that never got finished. In any case, it’s the one part of the property that genuinely looks worse for wear.

No Pictures…Please

It’s true that the complex is highly visible, but that should not be taken as an indication of low security. Security is very much in force at Paisley Park.

There are two guard posts, one on the way in and one on the way out. The guards are cheerful but very much want you to drive the correct direction on the driveway when you’re parking and when you’re leaving.

If you’re familiar with the way Prince handled himself when he was alive, he had a polite but implacable security detail. This remains part of the experience. Every person who worked there exuded friendliness, willingness to help, focus on their own priorities and most of all a rigid sense of boundaries.

That focus was on display from the moment the gates (adorned with metallic symbols, of course) opened. The guard asked if we had a tour that day. We tried to show him our tickets that we had diligently printed before leaving home. This was not interesting to him. He wanted to know the time of our tour and nothing else, please. Once we had told him what the hell we thought we were doing there, he gave us brief and very clear guidelines of where we could go and what we could do while waiting for our tour.

The view from outside the gift shop

You have to do one of these or they don't let you in.

It wasn’t until I was in bed that night that I realized how he had phrased the instructions in such a way that it sounded like we could go anywhere we wanted, but if I had thought about it, the instruction “keep off the grass and don’t block a road that can be used” pretty much kept me to the front of the building and the parking lot. I don’t mind the constraints, I’m just a little embarrassed I didn’t see what they were doing.

The parking area is next to the exit gate, whose guard gave us a refresher on what the first guard had said 90 seconds ago, plus instructions on how to use the parking lot. After we parked, we asked the exit gate guard if we could take a picture of the “Welcome To Paisley Park” sign. He was very friendly as he told us we could, and had us use a counterintuitive route to get there.

None of this diminished my enjoyment at all. I was more than happy to stay on the rails. After all, if Prince were alive the rails would be there, so why should they be gone now?

Tours are scheduled. You can’t go into the main building more than 15 minutes before your tour time (except for the store).

At our appointed time, two dapper, yet decidedly tough looking young men in matching “Rock Star Entourage” black suits (one with black t-shirt in place of shirt and tie) invited us in after spending the last quarter hour or so keeping us out.

One thing that was immediately clear to me was that the Estate intends to “do things Prince’s way” whenever possible. So, like any interlopers granted access to Paisley Park for decades, we had our communications devices confiscated. This didn’t really surprise me: Prince almost never let anyone take notes, pictures or video of Paisley’s interior. Why would we get unrestricted access? They had these little neoprene bags that had magnetic closures, and the policy was you first power down your phone, THEN put it in the bag.

You will have to turn off your phone and/or smartwatch and/or tablet when you first enter the building, and lock those into pouches that security provides. Yes, you will be able to use your phone later in the tour. Yes, security will help you figure out how to turn off your device if you forgot how. (Or have never done it before?)

When you buy your ticket (probably in advance, tour sizes are small and sell out), you are told you need to have your ticket on hand to get in. This is confusing, if you have the ticket on your phone! Your phone is locked in the pouch! What are you supposed to do?

Security is not concerned. No, they do not want to see your ticket. Just put your phone in the pouch, sir.

There is a reception desk. You give them your name. There is a trash can if you are the type of person who prints out tickets because you follow directions and maybe you like the security of a physical object.

All of this, while annoying, wasn’t surprising to me. It was nothing more than what Prince routinely asked his guests to do here. However, I expected most people who would not have spent many hours on Planet Prince (like I have) to balk at this. The fact that nobody tried to refuse is kind of amazing to me. These people, I thought, must be pretty big fans.

You will meet your tour guide after you check in. There will probably be 10-15 minutes of general “so where is everyone from” chatter. You can zone out and no one will ask you where you’re from.

Our tour group was 14 people and the tour guide (Maria; her favorite album is Musicology and she was born the year it was released [2004]. She is a guitarist.). I thought the group would be full of Nicks – extreme Prince enthusiasts for whom Paisley Park at least verged on a sacred space. There were maybe 1 or 2 other Nicks. The rest of the people maybe heard "Purple Rain" and "When Doves Cry" and "Little Red Corvette" once? These were not super fans, I’m saying. One dude was only there because his wife or girlfriend or whatever wanted to be there. He was sure he was scoring points, and made sure everyone else knew it.

The woman with the airbrushed Graffiti Bridge jeans was not there.

It’s true, neither the woman nor her jeans nor her spirit truly seemed to be in the group. Occasionally there were lapses as the N00bz did not know how amazed they should be. A few times, some truly inexcusable gaffes were made due to a lack of basic knowledge, but more on that later.

I was kind of hoping for the jeans lady to be there.

Maria seemed very nice and professionally interested in the people in the group. She had a strong vibe of a theatre student doing summer stock. She clearly was a person who enjoyed her job, but this was still a job. Plus, it seems like there could be a lot of behind-the-scenes pressure on the guides. There are a couple of times where they do let you just wander a bit, and every single person in the group will feel the urge to wander off. Or, at least, that’s how it feels like it should be, right? Occasionally, there HAS to be a gaggle of idiot superfans like me. Anyway, keeping an eye on 14 people walking around freely in a room where you just told them to touch NOTHING, not even the walls, has to a feeling of putting a lot on these poor folks.

Maria was very emphatic: Try to touch absolutely nothing. In a way, especially in the early parts of the tour, it makes perfect sense. Prince’s approach to everything was bespoke. Clothes, house, guitars, the whole shebang. And that does present interesting preservation challenges. For example, in his reception / sitting area, the walls are covered with murals of…well, the best possible description would be “a blue sky with happy little clouds.” Of course, people want to touch the walls (I wanted to), but it’s a bad idea.

Photos: Paisley Park Enterprises These are two views of the cloud murals. The top is looking out of the sitting room kitchen. The bottom is the reception area. Go past the steps into the well lit room in front and turn right to reach the kitchen.

Meanwhile, the “leave things as Prince left them” standing orders also have side effects. In the sitting area, some of the walls have his gold records, etc mounted on the walls. These, too, are left as Prince left them. Which means occasionally, you’ll find something out of place. Age and humidity caused a label to drop to the bottom of the frame, for example. I enjoy these little imperfections, the signs of a life lived here that had its mundane elements as well.

In a way, that’s what I’m really here for. The products of Prince’s work are easy to get a hold of, compared to any kind of understanding of Prince’s process. I don’t think you can understand how Prince created without also understanding he arranged his life so that he was less than twenty feet from recording equipment at all times. His mundane life was so intertwined with his work that we cannot really know much about his creative process without knowing how he set up his existence to facilitate that process. So that’s the level of nerdiness I’m working with: fascinated by dislodged labels in a platinum record display.

There were two people talking about recovery and sponsors. I’m sure it was substance recovery, but I decided they were in Prince recovery, hitting the methadone of Paisley Park.

An aside: I somehow missed Prince in my adolescence, with the exception of "7" and "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World." The latter was not for me. "7," however, I taped off the radio and listened to constantly for a period of about 6 months. Those finger cymbals! Whoever those 7 were, I was against them! (I read a lot of fantasy and science fiction, it fit right in.) And then I just … didn’t ever follow up with any of Prince’s other music.

(And then much later I met Nick and I have willingly osmosed a lot of Prince trivia and appreciation. I do not have a favorite album, but my favorite song is "Courtin’ Time" [from 1996’s Emancipation.])

Anyway, that’s why the whole Prince recovery thing; I knew I wasn’t going to be bored or anything on this tour, but it wasn’t meaningful to me the same way I figured it was going to be for Nick and the 12 other Nicks on the tour, so I needed other things to think about other than how outclassed I was in Prince stuff.

It didn’t take long for it to become obvious that, at least among this group, I was solid B tier. Nick and the other twoish Nicklikes were S tier, obviously, but some of the others seemed to be at Paisley Park because they were in the area? And that’s fine, let’s not gatekeep. I’m just talking about my expectations and the reality.

I also expected more from our tour group. It didn’t take the edge off of the experience by any stretch, but some of the gaps in knowledge felt weirdly basic.

There is a room where they have several “Cloud” guitars mounted on the walls. This was one of two custom designs of guitar Prince used throughout his career. What people rarely talk about is that the guts of his guitars – his custom, built to his specifications guitars – all had the same guts. Or at least that was the rumor. In all, I saw almost two dozen different “Cloud” guitars, and they were all authentic – except the two or three white ones on the tour.

The very first white Cloud guitar on the tour, in the room that featured guitars, did have a note in tiny print that said this particular guitar was one of the small run of Clouds that Schecter made a while back to sell only at Paisley Park. The differences between the Schecters and the authentic guitars run the gamut from meaningless (different kind of paint, the dots on the fretboard are in the shape of spades rather than dots) to the baffling (the guts are completely different and have custom Seymour Duncan pickups instead of the off-the-shelf EMG pickups Prince favored.) In the case of the pickups, it’s infuriating. This is supposed to be a REPLICA. And it’s not like the EMG’s are even something special. They’re certainly cheaper than a custom Seymour Duncan setup.

Anyway. All the other guitars were legit, and they all had identical pickups.

Now, I don’t expect the average music fan to either understand or care about that stuff. But if you’re on a tour of Paisley Park, one would expect somebody else to notice, if not care.

The studio tours were very cool. We got to see more of them than I thought we’d be allowed. Since I have an ad hoc studio space in my own home, it was both cool and embarrassing to see what “home studio” meant to Prince. Studio A had Prince’s actual Linn LM-1 drum machine, complete with the Boss guitar pedals he plugged into them. The space itself is both soundproofed and incredibly well-treated (which is what you’d expect, but still).

Aside for those who don’t live in the audio recording / production space:

Any good recording space will be both “soundproofed” and “treated.” Broadly speaking “soundproofing” refers to things done to the room to keep outside sound out. “Treating” refers to efforts to keep the sound you make inside the studio clean, clearly recorded and under control.

For example: The walls and doors of the stuidios (especially studio A) were very thick, the doors heavy. This is soundproofing. Inside the studio was covered with cherry wood and the walls of the studio were deliberately built to not be parallel. This reduces reverb or “bounce” inside the studio, and is an example of a treatment.

We also got to see his “editing bay” which was basically a video production workstation. And they did show a piece of footage from his Gold Experience Tour, which made me very happy. Hopefully they’ll release more footage from this show? Please?

Studio B was kind of a smaller, more analogue version of Studio A. Studio C was basically a rehearsal space that had a recording booth installed at some point. Now it’s an exhibit that has mostly to do with Purple Rain stuff.

Oh Lord…I think Ima Need A Drink

Then we were led to a small room just outside the soundstage which has been converted into an Emancipation room. They really did want to make a thing of Prince’s beef with Warner Bros., but it’s hard to really communicate all the important information about that in the confines of a museum tour. So that was a little disappointing, but understandable. Like the bits from the book that “Jurassic Park” cut from the movie.

There was a display for a symbol-shaped guitar, but it was out for whatever reason.

So anyway. There we were, almost ready to go into the soundstage, and Maria is wrapping up her spiel about how Prince changed his name from his bespoke wingding to his birth name again on Jan 1, 2000, the day his publishing administration contract expired with Warner. Some mention of the Rave Un2 the Year 2000 Pay-Per-View special was mentioned, since it ran on New Year’s Eve 1999.

And then someone asked if Prince wrote the song 1999 to celebrate his full freedom from Warner Bros.

...whut. Photo: Warner Bros

Which, if you have been reading this blog (or live mostly on this planet), you know that “1999” came out in the early 80’s.

Thank God the woman in the Graffiti Bridge jeans wasn’t there. She’d have died of shame.

…So Maria had a job explaining that situation without making this poor woman feel any worse about her crass mistake.

The soundstage was cool, but that was mostly just because they had instruments and stuff all set up they way they would have been if it were all in use. I’m not sure if the squares on the tour had much fun here because it’s really just a “if you’ve seen the concert videos” kind of place.

And then you’re taken from the soundstage into the NPG Music Club room.

This is a unique place, because it’s the only place I saw at Paisley Park that had obviously been repurposed. I’m not sure what it was originally. Possibly a scenic construction place? They certainly could do load-ins there.

Since 2000 or so, it has been a kind of small venue / night club that Prince could use for smaller, more intimate gatherings. There’s a little café that sells his favorite cheesecake and Paisley Park branded bottled water.

The cheesecake is predictably amazing.

So is the Raspberry Beret lemonade.

And then the tour was over. The NPG Music Club room opens right on to the gift shop. Sounds like we’re ready for final thoughts.

REM’s Out of Time was recorded at Paisley Park (or at least enough of it for a/the Platinum records to be hung on the wall there). Neat! (Also albums by many other artists.)

You get to see Prince’s doctored Linn LM-1 drum machine!

There is not a huge amount of wardrobe on display, but it’s worth spending some time with what’s there. (Except you, you weird-ass pair of white men’s size 10+ oxfords that totally did not belong with the suit they were paired with, why didn’t I take a picture of this, no way Prince ever stuck his dainty piggies into those things.)

All tour guide commentary is very sanitized. There is no mention of Prince being a Jehovah’s Witness. No mention of fentanyl or the elevator in which he died. No mention of the need for a hip replacement. No mention of Larry Graham. No mention of Mayte (except in a question from someone in the group based on her appearance in a video we saw) or any of his girlfriends.

It’s true they skip A LOT of stuff, even stuff that would normally be positive and upbeat. I expected the place to be a lot more sanitized, actually. The things that he actually touched have been preserved…basically.

The other thing that everything about the tour does a good job of misdirecting you from is the things you did not see. For example: Where’s the vault? What about Prince’s private spaces on the second floor? I know the vault was underground, what else is there? The vault has nothing in it anymore, why not show us the door?

Anyway, I had a great time, and saw plenty. It wasn’t until the soundstage and NPG room that I started to get a little misty. During the Celebrations, Prince would often play these rooms until the wee hours, informally milling through the audience as he did so. And yes, it still feels like he’s there somewhere. Waiting to start the party.