Prince Rogers Nelson has been dead for a whole week, but the tributes keep pouring in. Here’s a look at how the music industry has been celebrating The Purple One…
- “Saturday Night Live” dedicated last week’s show to Prince, airing past performance clips, as well as never-before-seen footage of him performing “Let’s Go Crazy” at the “SNL” 40th anniversary show afterparty. “Prince has been a special presence here at ‘Saturday Night Live’ for the last four decades,” Jimmy Fallon said in introducing the tribute. “Other people may have been on the show more times, or performed more frequently, but there was something different about a Prince performance. It was special. It was an event. It was Prince.”
- Elton John called him a “Purple Warrior” during his “Million Dollar Piano” show at Caesar’s in Las Vegas Saturday night. He then performed “I Guess That’s Why They Call it the Blues” as pictures of The Artist were projected on a screen in the background.
- D’Angelo was joined by Maya Rudolph’s cover band, Princess, to perform “Sometimes it Snows in April” on NBC’s “The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.”
- David Gilmour paid tribute during his gig at the Royal Albert Hall in London last weekend. He morphed the Pink Floyd tune “Comfortably Numb” into “Purple Rain.”
- Darius Rucker’s love of Prince isn’t a secret, and he often ends his concerts with a cover of “Purple Rain.”
- Pearl Jam paid tribute to the musical legend during their concert at the Colonial Life Arena in Columbia last week. After performing “Even Flow,” a song Prince had covered in the past, frontman Eddie Vedder told the crowd, “That guy loved music so damn much. He never stopped playing, never stopped writing, never stopped recording, never stopped creating. He was dripping with songs. He was certainly a guy I expected to still be playing when he was in his eighties.” The band also dedicated their song “Light Years,” which is about losing a loved one, to Prince and played snippets of “Purple Rain” before the Mother Love Bone track “Chloe Dancer,” and later again during “Yellow Ledbetter.”
- Coldplay’s Chris Martin performed a three-song set at the “Chords 2 Cure” benefit in Santa Monica, which raises money for pediatric cancer. When he was done he treated the audience to a cover of “Raspberry Beret” with a band of eighth graders who go by the name A-Side. Check it out here.
- Bruce Springsteen kicked off the first of two sold-out shows on his “The River” tour with a stirring cover of “Purple Rain,” complete with a blazing guitar solo by Nils Lofgren on a stage bathed in purple light. At the end of the song Bruce simply told the crowd, “Prince forever. God bless.”
- Little Big Town honored The Purple One in concert in Missoula, Montana by performing a cover of “When Doves Cry.” They posted video of the performance on Facebook, writing, “Prince. An American original. Thank you for the music and the memories. May you rest in peace.”
- During a concert in Horsens, Denmark, the Dixie Chicks paid tribute by performing “Nothing Compares 2 U,” a tune Prince wrote that was made famous by Sinead O’Connor.
- Chris Stapleton also did “Nothing Compares 2 U” at his show at the Greek Theater in Berkley, California. In case you missed it, he considered Prince an inspiration, and said, “He was a remarkable musician and an anomaly. There are very few like him and there won’t be another one.”
- Old Crow Medicine Show, with help from their opening act Margot Price, performed a fiddle-filled cover of “Purple Rain” during their concert Huntsville, Alabama.
- Mariah Carey dedicated “One Sweet Day” to Prince at her show in Paris. She said that the song was for people who “needed to make it through a moment.” She then ended her show with a moment of silence.
Couldn’t make it to Metallica‘s gig at San Francisco’s Rasputin Music on Record Store Day? Don’t worry. The band, who also served as Record Store Day Ambassadors, put their entire April 16th set online. Metallica’s show was a throw back to their 80s music and included performances of tunes from 1983’s “Kill ‘Em All,” and its follow-up, 1984’s “Ride the Lightning.” Check out the video and the setlist below:
- “Helpless”
- “Hit the Lights”
- “The Four Horseman”
- “Ride the Lightning”
- “Fade to Black”
- “Jump in the Fire”
- “For Whom the Bell Tolls”
- “Creeping Death”
- “Metal Militia”
Paul Simon just kicked off his 2016 tour at Jazz Fest in New Orleans. He gave fans a preview of what they could expect and shared the new track “Cool Papa Bell”, an ode to the legendary baseball player hailed as “the fastest man on Earth.” The song is on his latest album, “Stranger to Stranger,” which is in stores on June 3rd. As we told recently told you, Simon will play select tracks from “Stranger to Stranger” on his summer tour, but the bulk of the show will center around tunes from his extensive catalog. “They wanna hear ‘You Can Call Me Al,'” he said. “So I play it. It’s not like I would pick out ‘You Can Call Me Al’ and play it because I really want to, but people like it so much that I’m like, ‘Of course I’ll do it.’ I’ll play ‘Me and Julio [Down by the Schoolyard]’ too, though I actually like ‘Me and Julio.'”
Tributes for Prince have been pouring in since the moment news broke of his death. In case you missed it, Lenny Kravitz is the latest celeb to pay his respects to the Purple One, who was both an inspiration and a friend. “Here was an African-American cat, skin color like mine was, playing the guitar like I wanted to play,” Kravitz wrote in Rolling Stone. “Obviously I would have been into Jimi Hendrix as that prime example, but this person was alive. This person was doing his thing right in front of me. So he had a very deep impact on me. I was able to see where I could go.” The two became friends after Kravitz’ debut album, “Let Love Rule,” came out in 1989 and he says Prince was the same person one and off stage. “When you were with him he could be serious or he could be incredibly funny and goofy,” the rocker remembers, “which is the side I always liked because we used to laugh and talk.” You can read Kravitz’s entire tribute here.
And check out Prince & Lenny Kravitz doing American Woman HERE.
Here’s a piece Entertainment Tonight did on Prince
