Dez Dickerson, guitarist with Prince and the Revolution from 1979 to 1983, has reflected on Prince’s disastrous stint opening for the Rolling Stones in 1981.
Those shows are some of the most notorious in rock history, with Prince facing such an onslaught of abuse (and bottles) that he abandoned the stage after 25 minutes.
Dickerson, however, tells Guitar World, “those shows have gotten twisted out of context.”
On the opening night at LA’s Memorial Coliseum, Prince was greeted by a barrage of fried chicken, cans, and bottles, not to mention racist and homophobic abuse.
Revolution bassist Brown Mark recalled, “Next thing I noticed was food starting to fly through the air like a dark thundercloud. Imagine 94,000 people throwing food at each other; it was the craziest thing I had ever seen in my life. I got hit in the shoulder with a bag of fried chicken; then my bass guitar got knocked out of tune by a large grapefruit that hit the tuning keys.”
“It was mostly Hell’s Angels,” Dickerson remarks now. “They didn’t like Prince’s bikini underwear.”
He insists, though, that the majority of the crowd was on Prince’s side.
“I found out later that the Stones’ audience threw things back at them – that was their way of showing their love. Prince got freaked and cut the set short. The rock stations reported that we got booed off the stage, but that wasn’t true.
“Statistically,” Dickerson argues, “they say 5 percent of any audience isn’t going to like what you do.”
Prince, however, was unimpressed and insisted he would not play another show. “We went to the dressing room and found out that Prince had gone straight to the airport,” Dickerson remembers. “He went home and wasn’t coming back. Mick Jagger called Prince and asked him to come back, but he said, ‘No, I’m not doing it.’”
Jagger’s failure might have been related to his dismissive attitude. In a 1983 interview, he said dismissively, “I talked to Prince on the phone once after he got two cans thrown at him in LA. He said he didn’t want to do any more shows.”
After Prince’s management also tried unsuccessfully to coax Prince back, Dickerson tried himself.
“Finally, management came to me and said, ‘Look, Prince listens to you. Will you call him?’” says Dickerson. “I appealed to our manhood as a band and said, ‘We can’t let them run us off like this. We’ll never live it down.’ He came back and we did the second show.”
That second show was met with a similar response, and Prince never again shared a stage with the Stones.
For the full interview with Dickerson, check out the latest issue of Guitar World, available now from Magazines Direct.
