Darling Nisi

Prince Celebration 2022 Day 2 : Joshua, Mayte, Randee, and a Night at the Glam Slam

The following is an archive of a twitter thread detailing daily happenings at Prince Celebration 2022. Edited for clarity but maintaining the original format.

ICYMI, I got interviewed for this! Thanks @jonbream!

 

Someone saw a name check for us in this too! (Thanks Annie W)! @MDean @polishedsolid @laura_tiebert

 

Notes from the first panel! Listening session with Joshua Welton and Duane Tudahl!

Joshua was a member of Fatty Koo from BET show Blowin Up. He signed with Sony/Columbia and toured with Chris Brown and others. (That’s Joshua far left)

With Prince, he started out helping support the band. He eventually did cowbell, learned to be an engineer and later became in house producer.

Prince noticed how he worked with artists coming through Paisley “Women are impressed with you. You’re young, you’re married, you’re working…(for me)…and you haven’t tried anything”

Joushua’s audition to be in house producer was a competition between him and two others. They were given stems to Queen with Janelle Monae and Erykah Badu. First clip they play is his audition submission. P paid him 30k for it.

Hannah came out on stage to say hi with baby #4 in her belly.🤰🏼🥰

For production Josh would sometimes get just Prince’s voice and would be tasked to create a song around it. That’s how this FALLINLOVE2NITE came to be. song.link/t/27162564

We know, but worth me mentioning again. 1000 X’s and O’s inspired by Aaliyah’s Rock the Boat at the request of Prince. song.link/t/50767193

Unreleased song clip, Single Most Amazing by @RitaOra with a focus on the instrument section on the back half. Joshua described how P was excited in building the bass and synth part.

Unreleased song clip Better by Mary J Blige from the Think Like a Man Soundtrack. 🤯 Very funky! Again focus on P’s synth and bass playing.

Released version here : song.link/us/i/883414621

“You guys made marriage cool again” – P re Joshua & Hannah

The last time they spent time together. Tuesday/Wednesday prior to 4/21. Dinner at Dakota and a movie. They saw Barbarshop : The Next Cut.

P would touch his computer screen when they worked together (big pet peeve of mine too 😬).

Josh – Bruh you’re getting fingerprints on my screen
P – Finger what?
J – Prints (prince)
P – Exactly!

The Purple Movement is working on a new app to support community building amd activism. More to come!

*End of Josh Welton Panel*

Next we went to see the Randee St Nicholas exhibit and P’s shoes. Most of photos for Randee are in her latest book but they displayed it really nicely! You should check it out if you haven’t already!

The shoe exhibit is really well done! I was really interested in the 3d Printed panel and the picture especially!

We have a long break now for lunch so going to head back in the lounge because it’s cold and there might be good for us in there 👀. See you later with notes from Mayte and Randee’s panels!

They fed us pasta in VIP (by the way they didn’t really announce that we were getting lunch as part of our VIP experience when we bought our ticket so I missed yesterday’s tacos )

After lunch was Mayte’s panel! Robyn talked about interviewing Mayte (about her dance company) and how Mayte was hesitant about it. Robyn told her it wasn’t about P, but about Mayte as she is a whole human being doing important work herself and she agreed to do it.

She interviewed Mayte in the Soundstage and Prince watched from the catwalk.

After it was over, Paisley requested a copy to review it but Robyn dodged sending one, pretending she sent one by courier and acted confused that it hadn’t arrived when they asked again. It aired that night without P’s review.

She had beautiful words to say about Mayte’s grace and witnessing her story with Prince from afar. She then introduced Andrea and Mayte to the stage. Mayte came on in tears. 

(Honestly she was a bit emotionally overwhelmed for the first good bit but she got it together! The crowd supported her with cheers). 

When Mayte first visited Paisley there wasn’t a lot of color yet. That remodel happened around the time she got married to Prince.

During her first visit she stayed in a guest room at P’s Galpin house. All the furniture was from Under the Cherry Moon.

At that time P was working on Diamonds and Pearls. He took her for a ride in his Jeep and played her songs from it.

“Unreleased” Mayte song clip (in quotes this time because the bootleg is floating) Latino Paper Doll. Originally intended for Sheila E.

The original image from this album was shown (just her with white background).

Mayte noted the proposal to Prince happened fast and notes “not because I was pregnant!”

Unreleased song clip The Most Beautiful Boy in the world, demo version.

The curl on Mayte’s forehead here is hair breakage. P told her to gel it down.

Unreleased song clip If I Love You Tonight Demo. Official English and Spanish version included in this compilation I made a while back!

https://twitter.com/darlingnisi/status/1162565598112550912

The D&P Glam Slam show we saw was the first time Mayte performed on stage with him.

“Funk Night” is when members of the band would compete for money by doing the funkiest thing. She recounted some times she won, when she stage dived and no one caught her, and when she dived and her shirt was pulled off in Paris.

Unreleased song clip Scorpio “Scorpios always get their man” is a lyric.

Prince as an animal lover : Paisley the cat had a tumor in their jaw. They put them down. They had Isis, a grey shelter cat. This picture is from when Prince and Mia first met.

*End of Mayte panel*

But we will see her again shortly during Randee’s!

Overall there was a lot of love for Mayte in the room. There will always be the 🙃 folks as well but nothing untoward happened thankfully.

I bet the 🙃 folks were annoyed about this afternoon of panels though because Randee is 100000% team Mayte for sure and was not shy about saying so!

Let’s begin.

Before this book came out, P wanted to do a retrospective. She convinced him to scope it to 21 nights instead because it was such a historical run of shows.

Many of the photos from this panel are from her last book which if you haven’t gotten…you should.

For this photo Prince asked to do a photo shoot on the train. When she got all of her gear and stuff together he changed his mind. Randee suggested he take a nap instead…and then…

(He’s really sleeping ..of course he looks gorgeous while doing so 🙄)

For this, Randee was on her way to a meeting and noticed this smoking building. She called Prince and they talked about doing a shoot there. She got a crew and invited a model to entertain him. He really played the piano, When Doves Cry & Jazz lines.

By the way Randee St Nicholas also films all of her photo shoots and said…”maybe there’s a film in this”

(I’m not going to show all the pics she went through because many of these are in her book and I want y’all to get it. The stories behind many of them are also in her book too…as are the ones above just doing favs).

“I shot 3rdEyeGirl…I shot…a couple other girls… 😐” P would call and say he wanted to do a shoot with her but send his girlfriends to be photographed instead. 🥴

Randee St Nicholas shouts out Prince fans in Japan for being amazing. Dressing like P, playing his music while waiting in line, and being extremely polite at concerts. 

Notes that P would often be bratty, but she always forgave him when seeing him perform.

When supporting D&P, she would sneak off to handle other clients while Prince was sleeping and then fly back to Chanhassen. 😭

Shot at a club in la she was going for a vintage burlesque cabaret look. Called P to come over… and models. He was questioning the building because it looked shady on the outside but a big smile crossed his face when he saw the ladies lined up for him.

First time hearing of Mayte: P called Randee over saying he wanted to show her something. She was with her dad so she brought him too. Left her dad downstairs and went to P’s room to see. He played her a tape of Mayte belly dancing.

P asked her what she thought and Randee said “I think she’s a girl you’re going to marry”.

P said “no, no she’s jailbait why would you say that?!”

“you asked me…is that all my dad’s downstairs”

Prince was surprised that she brought her dad and went down to meet him. Shook his hand and said “I’ve called a lot of people over in the middle of the night and none have ever brought their father.”

They brought Mayte back out and went through some of her pictures with Prince. Mayte’s book cover was shot during filming of The Morning Papers.

During this, Prince was talking a lot making it hard for Randee to get a good shot. (He was cracking jokes). Randee got exasperated so he got more serious.

She showed this picture too but there was another one… I don’t have my book with me to make it exact and I don’t have it in my scans, but it was a very intense stare.

I will be adding it to my scans because seeing it huge make me say bad things out loud. 🥵 Sorry God.

P and Mayte were engaged here. P wore his ring on his wedding finger already just because.

Randee was SUPER team Mayte in this. She said in her 25 years of photographing Prince nobody ever shared the chemistry that he Mayte did… And she never saw him look at any woman the way he looked at Mayte. She truly believes they are soulmates.

*End Randee Panel*

After that panel headed back to the hotel to change for the concert.

Concert thoughts here :

I stayed a bit for the party as well, did my little two-step , belted out every line of We Can Fuh….like one should do….and absorbed vibes…by the beautiful @DJRASHIDA who I finally got to meet! 🥰 

Got my 7 inch record…

And so ended the last day at Paisley Park! 💜

One more thing, back to the in studio sessions. On Friday the first group of VIP folks got Son of Sexy MF with NPG.

Saturday, the second group got What If with 3rdEyeGirl and Liv Warfield. (Minus Ida of course as she’s on tour. Here, Ida’s part and P’s voice were in the mix).

Love that I got NPG, but I love 3EG’s What If too! I’m curious what he would say while directing them through a cover song and how he sounded for his vocal. If you were in this did Liv sing it all with just his voice directing? 👀

3EG’s version here :

 

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