1984: Baby I'm A Star

Prince: Baby I'm A Star

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1984 was the year Prince broke it open and assured himself icon status in American Pop culture. From the vantage point of 2008, it's hard to believe there was a time when Prince was considered verboten by mainstream audiences, so much so that in 1981, he was booed offstage while opening for the Rolling Stones. It was a much different Pop landscape in those days. Arena Rock was flourishing, fueled by a rotisserie of the same twenty songs shoved down a dulled-down public's ears by AOR Radio. That meant hearing a non-stop drone of Toto, Boston, REO Speedwagon, Kansas, Bon Jovi, Foreigner, Van Halen, etc. for ad infinitum. In 1981, Prince was touring to promote Controversy, an album that had songs like Jack U Off and the title cut, where Prince ponders whether he's "straight or gay". That didn't go over well with the suburban, testosterone-driven, lighter-waving, twenty-something crowd that made up the audience. On October 11th of that year, he opened for The Rolling Stones at the Los Angeles Coliseum. While onstage, wearing his underwear and a trench coat, he was pelted with garbage and booed off to an early ending.

"Don’t say that was because of me, that was the audience doing that. I’m sure wearing underwear and a trench coat didn't help matters - but if you throw trash at anybody, it’s because you weren't trained right at home." - Prince

"It was Mark Brown's second show with us. Here's this 18-year-old kid who looks like a deer in the headlights, in front of 110,000 people at the L.A. Coliseum. Prince was in his full 'Dirty Mind' regalia with the bikini and trench coat. Halfway through the set, those natives got restless. They started taking their Coke cups and throwing them onstage. I look around, and Prince is gone. So I signaled to the rest of the guys: Let's do likewise. Then more stuff got thrown. That audience brought stuff to throw. Someone threw a fifth of Jack Daniels that barely missed Prince's head during the first measure of the first song. A gallon jug of orange juice exploded on Mark's bass. I'd point at people and smile and wave. When all was said and done, we got through the set. Going through that added to Prince's bravado." - Dez Dickerson

"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. 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!"- Mick Jagger

He was booed right after Jack U Off, you can hear it for yourself. Here's the five-song October 11th show in a zip file.

Then came 1982, the year Michael Jackson released the landmark Thriller, which had the single Beat It. In an attempt to crossover into AOR playlists, Eddie Van Halen was brought in to play one of his patented edgy tapping guitar solos. Jackson's people were going public with charges of racism, so AOR stations added Beat It to their playlists and the song rose up Billboard's Rock Tracks chart. The other big event of that year - Prince came back with a vengeance and released the masterful 1999, his breakthrough album. But he wasn't done and in 1984, topped himself with Purple Rain, which was also tied-in with a film that nearly earned $100 million USD at the box office. He ran the stylistic floor, melding genres such as Funk, R&B, Pop, Rock and Heavy Metal.

1984 marked the time Prince went from barrier-busting artist to the Pop icon status he still claims to this day. Find a copy of Purple Rain, sit down for a good listen and be transported back to a much simpler time when Yakov Smirnoff was considered funny and cable only had 32 channels. It was also the year when Charlie Murphy was schooled by His Royal Badness in B-Ball.