When Prince went on tour with The Rolling Stones and polarised the band
Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones share a bond that pretty much defines brotherly love. Sometimes they love each other, sometimes they really seem to bloody hate each other. Prince helped to bring that paradigm to the fore, and there are no prizes for guessing who heaps praise and who gets the knives out.
Jagger once said that Richards was “not a happy person. If you can’t understand that, you can’t understand anything. He’s not happy.” Richards fired back in typical fashion by slighting his manhood, “Marianne Faithfull had no fun with his tiny todger. I know he’s got an enormous pair of balls- but it doesn’t quite fill the gap.” It’s quite a battle as grisly as Freddy vs Jason, but it’s a cat-dog living that Prince illuminated when he headed out on tour with them.
It was 1981. Prince would go on to bestride the decade like a little colossus, but he was still trying to nudge his way into the mainstream at this stage. In fact, when he opened for the legendary rockers Los Angeles Coliseum before 94,000 people, he was unceremoniously booed off. He would later rejig his set, and along with a bit of encouragement, complete the rest of the tour.
However, Richards didn’t give him much sympathy. “An overrated midget,” Richards called him. “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.”
Continuing: “His attitude when he opened for us… was insulting to our audience. You don’t try to knock off the headline like that when you’re playing a Stones crowd. He’s a prince who thinks he’s a king already. Good luck to him.” Yeah, break a little leg, mate.
Nevertheless, Jagger was far more encouraging. In fact, his opinion was pretty much the opposite on the man he crowned king. “I think Prince is a great artist, very traditional in some ways,” he told Rolling Stone. “Prince has been overlooked. But he’s so incredibly in the mould of the James Brown sort of performer. He broke a lot of musical modes and invented a lot of styles, and couldn’t keep up with himself. Very prolific, which is rare.”
He continued: “Mostly people write three songs and repeat themselves. So Prince has a lot of talent as a writer, and I’ve seen great performances by Prince. He’s outperformed almost everyone. I’d rate him at the top. I don’t think there’s a lot of competition from new artists.”
Without retracting from Prince’s brilliance, you could argue that Jagger was vital in helping him reach such lofty heights. After Prince was booed off, it was Jagger who called him and gave him words of wisdom that inspired him to continue. “I talked to Prince on the phone once after he got two cans thrown at him in L.A. He said he didn’t want to do any more shows,” Jagger recalled.
Adding: “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. Prepared to Die!” Prince was then ready to face the slings and arrows of critics and soon they became fans.
