Prince's Welcome 2 Canada Tour

For more than half of my life I was a die-hard Prince fan.  It started when I first saw Purple Rain and was solidified when I saw Prince live in early December of 1985 on the Purple Rain tour.  Prince has released at least one album every year since 1978 and as far as I was concerned every single one of them was genius material.

Then one day in mid 2010, I was listing to Prince’s Twenty10 album I realized that the music was not good.   Then it dawned on me that the album before that was not good either, nor the one before that, I had to think back to late ‘80s to find an album that was great. 

Over the years I’ve been lucky to see Prince perform live many, many times.  He’s so good live that I’ve often travelled for his shows.  Aside from my hometown of Toronto, I’ve seen him in Montreal, Buffalo, New York and Minneapolis where on July 7^th, 2007 I was lucky enough to see two of his shows in one day, first at the Target Center and then at 1^st Avenue, on the very stage where Purple Rain was filmed.  That was the last time I’d seen him until a month ago.

Pince symbol shaped stage
Photo courtesy www.skinnydip.ca

On November 25^th, 2011 Prince kicked off his Welcome 2 Canada tour in Toronto and I already had a commitment out of town, so I had to miss it.  I ended up catching him in Ottawa a week later at Scotiabank Place on December 3^rd, 2011. 

I was super-hyped to see this show, it utilized the same amazing stage that was used for Prince’s performance at the Super Bowl four years prior.  It was shaped like the hieroglyph which Prince had used as a name for a few years. 

He opened the show with the song D.M.S.R. (Dance Music Sex Romance), from the “1999” album which was released in 1982.   The music was thumping and Prince looked more like a 20-something than a 53 year old.  I was rather surprised to see how lithe he was, considering that it was well documented that he had a bad hip from his years of high-heel wearing, however he could not take the hip replacement surgery due to his religion which forbids him from having a blood transfusion. 

Prince brought the funk throughout the night and he focused mainly on his music from the early to mid-80s.  The one exception was the song “Guitar” from 2007’s “Planet Earth” album and when he played that song it was so unfamiliar to the audience that the energy in room just deflated, even though it was a very energetic song.  It was clear that he’d lost his audience with this one and he quickly returned to the ‘80s bangers. 

This was the first time that I wasn’t familiar with the whole band line-up.  Of course I recognized a couple of the musicians that had been with Prince for a while.  The prestigious Maceo Parker was featured on saxophone.  John Blackwell, who was with Prince on 2004’s Musicology tour returned as his drummer, but not very well featured.  A newcomer to the band, Andy Allo, is a female rapper and backup singer, was stunningly gorgeous wearing a print top that featured her own face. 

Prince with Andy Allo performing at the Montreal Jazz Festival.
Photo courtesy of  www.lipstickalley.com

Andy Allo is featured on a rap during Prince’s song “Extralovable” which had been released the week before to coincide with the launch of the tour. Interestingly, the song was originally recorded in the early ‘80s, during the sessions for the 1999 album.  It was never released and finally Prince went back on re-recorded it.  In fact he mentioned that he plans to release three different versions of the song.  The original was a brutally misogynistic piece, but the new version was considerably softened.

So here’s Prince with a new song from the early ‘80s and almost every song he performed in the show was from the ‘80s. It was if he had come to same conclusion as I had about how much his more recent works lacked relevance.  Although he never did perform “Extralovable”, he did perform three songs from The Time, a group that was a prodigy of his, and it is generally accepted that he wrote most of the their songs and produced their albums.

 Prince rarely performs songs exactly like the record, his thinking is that it’s got to be better than the record, his songs are his babies and they continue to grow through years, but I was thrilled that the guitar solo ending of “Let’s Go Crazy” was a duplicate of the record, as was the guitar solo in “Purple Rain”. 

A really cool part of the show had Prince playing with a synthesizer that triggered samples of various songs.  He teased the crowd with one song or the next.  Prince’s mission with this show was to turn the arena into a dance club.  I think he succeeded.  I think Prince is one of the greatest concert performers of all time and I truly believe every other musician or serious music fan is missing out if they do not see him live.  Yet, maybe it was just me, but I couldn’t help to think that Prince failed to connect with the audience at this show.  This is one of Prince’s fortes, building a repertoire with the crowd and I didn’t sense that this time. I felt that he wasn’t totally engaged on this outing.  He had after all just played Montreal, one of the greatest cities on the planet the night before, so maybe he was tired on this bone chillingly cold night in Canada’s capital city.  

Michael Jackson: The Immortal World Tour by Cirque du Soleil

After Michael Jackson passed away I was so touched by the number of people who told me that they thought of me when it happened.  Even people that I grew up with but had lost contact with over 20 years ago remembered how fanatical I was about Michael Jackson.  The truth is that I had forgotten how much I loved MJ.  It's sad. The music is so timeless that I see young children today who share in the same fervent love for his music as I did over 25 years ago.  

Tonight I attended the Cirque du Soleil show, "The Immortal".  I went in blind - I had no idea what to expect.  I've been disappointed by Cirque shows in the past, where I felt that they were too bourgeoisie for my taste.   More recently though, I saw the Cirque show “Believe” in Las Vegas which was thoroughly entertaining. 

The one thing that I did hear about this tribute to MJ prior to seeing the performance was a tweet stating that if you are in any way a fan of MJ, this show is a must-see.  I absolutely concur.

I was very touched by this show.  It went beyond being an absolute fitting tribute to the beauty of MJ’s soul.  I imagined that this would have been a show that MJ himself would have been happy to have been a part of.   I felt that wherever his spirit was that, he was seeing this show and he was proud of it.  They captured his very essence, his message and his music.