Prince was pelted by food and racism while supporting The Rolling Stones
While the thought of The Rolling Stones and Prince touring together sounds like a dream to many music fans, in the early 1980s, when the two converged, for Prince and his band, the experience was a horrific one. In 1981, Prince opened for the Stones, but the audience reacted in the worst possible way, and what ensued became one of the most infamous incidents in both acts’ careers.
The Rolling Stones tour in 1981 was a momentous affair following the release of their widely triumphant return to form Tattoo You. It saw the group break attendance records at some of America’s largest stadiums, with the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum packing in a crowd of 94,000. However, many in attendance made it clear that they had not paid money to watch Prince.
The first show in LA was on October 9th, and Prince and his group took to the stage before the other support acts, George Thorogood and the Destroyers and the J. Geils Band. Per Ultimate Classic Rock, Prince only had the hit ‘I Wanna Be Your Lover’ to his name at the time, and some in the crowd thought its style was egregiously different to the Stones’ music.
The crowd began hurling food – including fried chicken – bottles, cans, and other objects at Prince and his group as they attempted to play. Dodging the missiles, a barrage of disgusting racist and homophobic slurs soon followed.
“Next thing I noticed was food starting to fly through the air like a dark thundercloud. Imagine 94,000 people throwing food at each other; it was the craziest thing I had ever seen in my life,” Prince bassist Brown Mark, who had only just joined his band, remembered. “I got hit in the shoulder with a bag of fried chicken; then my guitar got knocked out of tune by a large grapefruit that hit the tuning keys”.
Things got so bad that after Prince tore through ‘Jack U Off’, promoter Bill Graham appeared on stage to avert the disaster, but it was in vain. Prince and the band stopped playing someway through their fourth song, ‘Uptown,’ amidst a jeering Coliseum. Prince was so frustrated that it was reported he was in tears backstage and maintained that he would not be playing the second show scheduled for two days later. He quickly flew home to Minnesota without his band. However, his manager, guitarist Dez Dickerson, and Stones frontman Mick Jagger encouraged him to return for the October 11th show.
“I talked to Prince on the phone once after he got two cans thrown at him in LA. He said he didn’t want to do any more shows,” Jagger explained in a somewhat dismissive account in 1983. “God, I got thousands of bottles and cans thrown at me! Every kind of debris. I told him, if you get to be a really big headliner, you have to be prepared for people to throw bottles at you in the night. [Laughs] Prepared to Die!”
Prince decided to give it another shot. However, things on the 11th were also terrible. As the reports suggest, a bootleg recording from the night reveals incessant booing and insults, along with an excessive amount of rubbish thrown on stage. This time, though, the band did finish their five-song set. In a supposed shot at the audience, they brought the curtain down with ‘Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?’ Allegedly, Prince later labelled the crowd as “tasteless in music and mentally r******d”.
In a genuinely despicable reflection of the abuse Prince and his band suffered, Greil Marcus reprints an anonymous letter that the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner’s Ken Tucker received after his review of the show was released. A trigger warning must be issued; it contains much vitriolic racism. Utilising the acronym ‘WASP’, which stands for White Anglo Saxon Protestant – a term inextricable from America’s far-right and white supremacists – not only does it reflect the horrendous abuse Prince and the band faced but the broader social divisions that the then-incumbent President Ronald Reagan was stoking. It also features some appropriately terrible grammar.
Unsurprisingly, that was the last time Prince opened for The Rolling Stones. Following the tour, guitarist Keith Richards was asked about the incidents. “Prince has to find out what it means to be a prince. That’s the trouble with conferring a title on yourself before you’ve proved it,” Richards asserted. “That was his attitude when he opened for us on the tour, and it was insulting to our audience. You don’t try to knock off the headline like that when you’re playing a Stones [concert]. You’d be much better off just being yourself and protecting that. He’s a prince who thinks he’s a king already. Good luck to him.”
Listen to a recording of Prince’s October 11th, 1981, support slot below.
