About 20 miles southwest of Minneapolis, there is nothing outwardly remarkable. The landscape is as flat as you’ve heard. The air is a good kind of cold, so refreshing that though the temperature has dipped below 50 degrees, I roll down the car window. I catch a whiff of farm. I pass a smokestack with a Viking painted on the side. Trees are leafless and gnarled — February trees in November. I decide I like everything about Minnesota, the elderberry on my waffles, that the restaurant asks to round up my check by 60 cents to donate change to a food pantry. That celebrated generosity is everywhere and I should not be surprised, yet even the car rental folks are buoyant at 7 a.m. Three strangers ask how my “day’s going” and really want to know.
Nothing stands out on the horizon, including the sun. Everything is a shade of oatmeal. Even Party City, the party supply superstore, announces itself in pale white letters against a faded brick wall — and this Party City is down the street from Paisley Park, the fabled 24-hour-party-recording-studio-residence of Prince, Chanhassen’s most famous son. He died in April at 57. He wrote “Erotic City,” and “Partyman,” and “Uptown,” and “Party Up,” but, as far as Nikki Saukkola knows, the Party King never came to Party City. “You would think he would have,” the clerk says, then: “I guess he kept to himself.”
As a teenager I wanted to live in Minnesota. I worshipped the Replacements and Husker Du and Prince, and all of them hailed from that same unlikely Exotic City, Minneapolis. Little did I know that the reality was even more exotic, at least for Prince, in fittingly perverse, counterintuitive fashion. That Prince spent most of his creative years in Chanhassen is like hearing that Liberace retreated to Wheaton. Though Chanhassen has 24,000 residents, there seem to be fewer homes than Targets and family-style buffets and storage facilities. Paisley Park’s neighbors are a General Mills plant and a day care center and a chiropractic office and a marine products distributor, the secretary for which, when I enter, says with a knowing grin: “Well, I can’t wait to hear what you want to know about Paisley Park.” Her name is Nancy and she doesn’t know much, but she says, nodding to Paisley Park across the way: “That place is a shrine now. But I think it happened too quick. Can we let things be a minute before rushing in to make money?”
I came because Paisley Park just became, I think, a museum.
It’s hard saying what Paisley Park has actually become, but Graceland Holdings LLC, the company that manages the tours at Elvis Presley’s Graceland estate in Memphis, now runs tours of Paisley Park. Graceland opened in 1982, five years after Presley’s death, once his cultural significance had shown no sign of abating. Graceland has attracted 20 million visitors; in recent years, more than 600,000 annually. Paisley Park hopes for similar big things in Chanhassen, so the complex is ready for visitors seven months after Prince collapsed in an elevator there, the result of an accidental overdose of painkillers. His death is so fresh that fans still leave condolences at the edge of the compound. The day I visited there was a purple penguin, purple hat, purple flowers and a purple balloon.
His death is so fresh that the candlesticks inside Paisley Park — Prince was a big candle and potpourri fan — remain at whatever height they were when Prince last lighted them.
This transition has not been without ugliness: Paisley Park was sued by a local theater company for understandably backing out of a gala the company wanted to hold there only a month after Prince’s death. Almost 30 claims were made on Prince’s estate (a Minnesota judge threw every one out; the artist left no known will). And then, in early October, 48 hours before Paisley Park was set to give its first tours, the Chanhassen City Council voted against rezoning Paisley Park as a tourist attraction — some residents, and a handful of council members, thought it was too soon.
They succeeded in delaying the opening by only a month, but their caution wasn’t simple provincialism: I took a tour of Paisley Park a couple of weeks ago, and by the end I too was wondering if enough time had passed for a smart consideration, of legacy, innovation and failure. I wondered what we expect to get out of artists’ homes. A rubbernecking peek into their closets? An intimate window into the art they created? I wondered what it means to visit an artist’s home when the artist was expecting you.
Prince was the patriarch of Paisley Park, a famously narcissistic, pervy, controlling, enigmatic one. (“What’s behind those walls is mysterious to even the people who live and work around here,” said Susan Schmidt, director of the day care center across the street.) And yet Prince had talked with his family and employees about the possibility, someday, in the future, of opening Paisley Park as a museum and memorial to himself.
That day arrived sooner than anyone, likely including Prince, expected. So what he left seems abrupt, not quite a marbled pantheon, not just a work-at-home residence. It’s not quite a tourist trap, either. This is a holy place, where the one true faith is Prince. “Shrine” is not the wrong word. Entering Paisley Park, you are greeted by a painting of Prince’s eyes, commissioned by Prince. He lived to see it. He wanted to remind visitors, even when he was alive, that Minnesota’s Oz the Great and Terrible was always present. And from there, touring Paisley Park only gets stranger. You get a lot of insight into the cloistered ecosystem of Prince, but probably not the insight that was intended.
Mitch, my tour guide, wears a long purple tunic, designed by “Prince’s people.” It’s a phrase you hear a lot around Paisley Park, “Prince’s people.” Mitch explains that Prince’s people “want (the tour guides) to give a sense that Prince went to his closet and found us something to wear.” I joke that he looks like a cult member. Mitch chuckles uneasily.
Then he leads me to Prince.
In the atrium on the ground floor, at the center of the room, on a wide purple pedestal, is a miniature replica of Paisley Park. Two purple couches bookend the pedestal. Nearby are four open boxes of tissue. I begin to suspect what I’m looking at: “This is the room where Prince felt the most at peace,” Mitch says. I nod and wait for him to continue. Which is why, if I would like, Mitch says, “now is the time” for me to pay my respects.
Prince’s cremated remains are inside a tiny replica of Paisley Park, in the atrium of Paisley Park.
It’s an odd, matter-of-fact start to a tour of someone’s home, but also weirdly apt, unnerving and eccentric. Prince owned other homes in the area, from a modest 2,500-square-foot ranch home (with a purple rec room) to a lakefront cottage. Paisley Park, 65,000 square feet of recording studio and sound stage and game rooms and personal nightclubs and editing suites, was his Graceland, and as chilly and hard to get a handle on as Graceland remains a bawdy, faux-opulent reflection of Elvis’ personality. Paisley Park was started in 1986 and finished in 1987. It cost around $10 million. Architect Bret Thoeny was only 24 when he began work on it (and has since built recording studios for, among others, Apple’s Silicon Valley campus and film composer Hans Zimmer). What he built is a blocky three-building complex, covered with white aluminum panels.
There are few windows.
Earlier in the day, approaching the compound, I spot a woman on the street in front, taking a selfie. She’s from Atlanta, on a business trip to Minneapolis. She had to make a detour. She looks unmoved. “Reminds me of Circuit City,” she says. Indeed, even the commonplace, chain-link fence surrounding Paisley Park is as dull as the anonymous big box landscape surrounding the fence. Which is to say, visiting Paisley Park feels like visiting 1991. Behind the loading dock where Prince’s tour bus still waits is a grain silo of a building in matching white, a never-finished studio/club. It could be a dentist’s office.
The only recent addition to Paisley Park is a white tent, the kind you see at a wedding. This holds the Paisley Park museum store and the dining room of the Paisley Park Kitchen. The store sells Paisley Park-monogrammed pingpong balls ($12 for two) and old concert merchandise. The restaurant is a handful of plastic tables and a kitchen somewhere in the bowels of the building. It sells a nutty grab bag of Prince’s favorite meals, prepared by his personal chef, Ray Roberts: grilled cheese (with apples and honey), jerk popcorn, bibb lettuce cups, minestrone soup, pancakes.
Before my tour begins I sit in here waiting for Mitch and notice, on a wall, lyrics to Prince’s song “Paisley Park,” the chorus for which promises: “Admission is easy/ just say you believe.” Actually, admission to Paisley Park is pricey, $50 for a 70-minute tour, $111.75 for 100 minutes (the most expensive tour at Graceland is $80). Also, cameras and cellphones are confiscated at the entrance — though if you go on the $111.75 tour, a picture will be allowed in a designated area, provided you agree to buy a $10 thumb drive (for the picture). Paisley Park general manager Karen Ryan, a former Chicago account executive at the Ogilvy & Mather advertising agency, tells me Prince never allowed cellphones in Paisley Park, so they’re continuing the tradition; if caught sneaking a picture, you will be banned from the compound for life (and the picture you snapped will be erased). They placed my phone in a green purse that could be opened only by demagnetizing a latch.
But because I was allowed to bring an audio recorder, I am followed by security guards, who confiscate the device whenever unreleased Prince music plays.
Prince the Control-Freak God is in the details.
The staff, when they speak of him, lapse into present tense, giving a creeping sensation that the artist himself is standing in the shadows, pulling strings. A lot of the tour is what you might find in any conventional pop museum or exhibit: converted offices and storage spaces now showing off guitars and sequined costumes and motorcycles. “That notebook,” Mitch says, “those are handwritten lyrics of ‘Soft and Wet.'” He stares a moment at it and adds: “Turns out Prince had beautiful penmanship.” There isn’t much insight into designs, inspirations or simply what you are looking at. Scholarship will have to wait. But I do learn that Prince had cats and a small dog; Juell, Roberts’ wife, tells me Prince banned feta cheese from the premises; Mitch tells me that when Prince was feuding with Warner Bros. and changed his name to a symbol, Paisley Park employees were not allowed to call him Prince. “I think he was ‘Dude,’ or ‘Boss,’ or just ‘Hey, you.'”
Prince told Rolling Stone that the only thing he wanted people to know about him was his music. Yet, like a trip to Emily Dickinson’s spare home on a hill in Massachusetts or Georgia O’Keeffe’s light-soaked rooms in the canyons outside Santa Fe, an artist’s studio-residence, regardless of how tidy that estate has been made for visitors, tends to reveal oodles. I suspect one of Paisley Park’s biggest challenges is reconciling Prince the Genius with Prince the Questionable, Prince the Overly Prolific and Prince the Paranoid. Kitsch is everywhere in Paisley Park, and not the wink-wink kind: In that atrium holding his remains, on the ceiling and walls above there is a painting of blue sky and clouds and birds entering through skylights, “representing the endless possibilities and freedoms,” Mitch explained. The painting, however, is so inept it looks as if someone emptied a box of anesthetized pigeons and they are falling to their deaths.
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On a balcony alongside the painting are white cages, holding live doves, Divinity and Majesty. Each gets its own cage. You don’t hear what it sounds like when doves cry (they’re fed), but they coo. Beneath them is the Little Kitchen, where Prince watched TV. His remote is on a coffee table where he left it. The rest resembles an office kitchen, Any Office, USA. Mitch says it was left as-is, “to respect the integrity of the space.”
Across the way, Prince’s office.
Prince was 5 feet 2 inches tall, though the clothes on display look smaller, and his office desk is smaller than a typical office cubicle. There is a glass meeting table, a stack of CDs, coffee table books about Egypt, a biography of Osama bin Laden. You would not be intimidated. Next door is an editing suite with a purple couch that no one sits on. This results in the awkwardness of your tour guide calling up rare clips and you sitting on the floor to watch, alongside a perfectly good couch. Mitch said an editor would sit at the editing desk and Prince would sit on that couch and watch.
You nod, you can imagine.
You can also see in this editing suite that Prince still used VHS tapes and pre-HD monitors. Nothing looks remotely state-of-the-art. Mitch tells me Prince did not digitize everything; everything (and apparently there is tons of unreleased everything: albums, live performances, video, etc.) sits in vaults below Paisley Park, which, Ryan says, will remain off-limits, for legal reasons. (Prince’s bedroom, like Elvis’ bedroom at Graceland, is also off-limits.)
The only part of Paisley Park that looks newer than, say, 1996 — a timeline in one of the hallways cuts off Prince’s history at 1996 — is his primary recording studio. Most of the music Prince recorded from the late 1980s until his death was made here; Celine Dion and R.E.M. recorded albums here. The walls are cherry wood and the room smells like Spencer’s. Mitch pointed through a control room window (we’re not allowed inside) to the microphone that Prince sat in front of “to create the content most of us have still never heard.” This was Mitch’s cue to play a clip of a jazz album Prince was making for Blue Note; it would have been his 40th (released) album. But the snippet served as a reminder that Prince, whose music in the 1980s took ambitious strides with every new record, had settled into a comforting baroqueness, which mirrored everything at home.
A fur shawl in one room (circa 1987) is a sparkling cape in the next (circa 1994).
The relative modesty of his “Purple Rain” period — white ruffles, a purple motorcycle from the film, with tags that expired in 1983 — opens into a room paying honor to later movie misfires “Under the Cherry Moon” and “Graffiti Bridge.” If you note the dates (wall labels are inconsistent or nonexistent), Prince’s work grows hermetically sealed, closed off from fresh ideas. Yet the tour doesn’t acknowledge financial failure, or even an artist’s aesthetic decline.
Before leaving you pass a mock-fence festooned with memorials left by fans after Prince died; you pass a video of Prince’s Super Bowl halftime show; you walk through a 12,500-square foot soundstage holding a custom piano he never got to play, a room that somewhat resembles an estate sale of instruments and clothes; you walk through the NPG Music Club, Prince’s private performance space/dance club, which has lots of pillows and looks like an “Austin Powers” joke. Ryan told me that when she moved to Minnesota, she came here whenever Prince released tickets (via Twitter) for small, surprise concerts at the club. Sometimes, she said, he would even show up and play.
If you can read between the lines and offer the rigorous eye that an often-groundbreaking artist demands, I recommend a visit to Paisley Park. What Prince created here was complicated, an elaborate system for reassuring himself he was still the king, even as he shifted from iconoclastic superstar to nostalgia act. He seemed to surround himself with a web of employees who met his whims and allowed room to create whatever he dreamed up but probably couldn’t offer much in the way of criticism.
Still, there’s a touching sadness at the margins, an ennui to the coldness of Paisley Park. The management of the tours is adding Sunday brunches and weekend dance parties; a three-day festival to mark the first anniversary of Prince’s death is set for April. But it’s tough to pretend this place was a monument to the artistic urge when it seems so much now like a mausoleum of lonesomeness. Whatever Prince was doing in Paisley Park had to be released to the world, and increasingly the response was indifference. Driving back to my hotel, the sky was a dark blue and the streets were silent and the air was settled. If you wanted to escape the unpredictability of your fans, there would be much worse places to create.
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