Morris Day and Prince in ‘Purple Rain.’ (photo: Warner Bros.)

Forty years ago, on July 27, 1984, Purple Rain hit theaters and turned Prince Rogers Nelson into a movie star. But another cast member, the Time’s Morris Day, practically upstaged him.

Considering the longstanding competitiveness between Prince and Day, it’s interesting that Prince allowed Day to steal the show as Purple Rain’s comic foil. But it turns out that it was a humorless acting coach hired by Prince who almost foiled Day’s chances.

During an interview with me promoting his autobiography, It’s About Time, Day recalled that during the cast’s group acting classes in preparation for Purple Rain, “I kept cutting up. Every time they gave me a skit to do, I would make everybody laugh or do something silly. And this acting teacher, he didn’t do a good job. He kicked me out of class. He said, ‘You need to spend your time at the beach or something, because you’re just disrupting this class!’ So, I got kicked out. But I guess I got the last laugh, because that same cutting up that I did in there, that I got kicked out for, is what worked for me.”

It was Purple Rain’s young director, Albert Magnoli, who noticed Day’s comedic skills and realized his silver-screen potential. “Albert, he sat down and we did the whole script. He’s like, ‘What would you say here?’ And so, then I rewrote all of my lines, and I got to do things the way I wanted to do them. He was smart for doing that.”

So, what was the best line that Day came up with? “‘How’s the family?’” he answered with a sly laugh. “So many people were mad at me about that line!” However, Day didn’t mind Prince casting him as a sassy villain. “I thought it was perfect. It was fun. I didn’t want to be the good guy. I always want to be a bad guy in movies. I wanted to carry a machine gun or something, shoot up some stuff. I didn’t get to go as deep as I wanted, but I got a nice taste.”

Another scene-stealer in Purple Rain was, of course, the Time’s Jerome Benton. The half-brother of original Time bassist Terry Lewis, Benton had initially worked with the band as a bodyguard and valet before becoming Day’s onstage sidekick, famous for their primping mirror routine. Day reveals that, much like his “How’s the family?” zinger, that now-iconic and often-imitated mirror act was also unplanned.

“We had recorded ‘Cool’ and had added it to the show; it was on the radio, roasting on the charts. And we were at rehearsal and I get to the part, ‘Somebody bring me a mirror,’” Day recalled. “And all of a sudden, Jerome appears. He snatched a mirror off the wall somewhere, and he appears in front of my face holding up a mirror. And it was just one of them moments, one of them ‘a-ha!’ moments.

“Everybody just stopped and we were just looking at each other and it was like ‘Oh, we going to keep this. You in the band now.’”

Morris Day & the Time performed two songs at Minneapolis’s First Avenue club in Purple Rain, “Jungle Love” and “The Bird,” and both became top 40 hits. The latter even popularized another Time shtick, the group’s arm-flapping dance craze. That dance was all Day’s idea, after watching cartoons on the Time’s tour bus.

“I don’t know if you used to watch The Flintstones, but they had an episode where everybody was doing ‘the pterodactyl,’” Day chuckled. “So, it was just on from there; we started doing that onstage.”

However, at first Prince tried to stop “The Bird” from taking flight. “We were on tour with Prince and that was the time where we started to kick his ass a little bit [outperform him] onstage, and he wasn’t liking that!” said Day. “So, we started doing the Bird [dance] and he said, ‘You can’t do that, Morris’ — he said it because he also did a [vocal] thing that was like this bird screech, whatever noise it was, and ours was too close to his. But of course, if he told us ‘don’t do it,’ we were going to do it more! So, we got in this big altercation about that. We kept doing it. It led to almost a fight — but not hand fight.”

Eventually, though, Prince came around. “Next thing we know, he brings over a groove to me and he wants me to listen to it. Guess what? It’s the song ‘The Bird,’” Day grinned. “And I’m like, ‘Oh, so you didn’t like it that much, huh?’”

That being said, neither “Jungle Love” nor “The Bird” were included on the all-Revolution Purple Rain soundtrack, oddly. (Both songs were ultimately credited to co-writers Day, the Time guitarist Jesse Johnson, and “Jamie Starr,” aka Prince.) Regarding this omission, Day said with a shrug, “That’s my question. That never got answered. But I have a feeling why. I think that would’ve really catapulted us sales-wise and visibility-wise even more. It was what it was.”

The above interview is taken from Morris Day’s appearance on the SiriusXM show “Volume West.” Audio of that conversation is available on demand via the SiriusXM app.

Tonight on #VolumeWest — @lyndseyparker sits down with funk legend and Minneapolis Sound pioneer @TheMorrisDay to discuss his fantastic new book #OnTime: #APrincelyLifeInFunk at 5:00pm PST / 8:00pm EST! pic.twitter.com/0C2izRR0ZV

— Trunk Nation on SXM Faction Talk Channel 103 (@TrunkNationSXM) October 18, 2019

“It was very difficult for us to climb up those stairs, I’ve got to tell you,” says Bobby Z., drummer for the late Prince’s most iconic band, the Revolution. He’s referring to that intensely emotional evening on Sept. 1 last year, when the Revolution reunited onstage at First Avenue — the Minneapolis club where Purple Rain’s concert scenes were filmed — and celebrated the life and legacy of their former boss.

“To walk on that stage and play those songs, knowing that he’s not there,” guitarist Wendy Melvoin says contemplatively, her voice trailing off. On that night, Melvoin — who handled most of the lead vocals in Prince’s tragic absence — appeared the most emotional onstage, sometimes struggling to make it through songs like “Sometimes It Snows in April.” But she says that by the third and final show of the band’s First Avenue residency, “the five of us felt a lift. There were more smiles onstage for us. There was more playfulness, and you could feel — dare I say without sounding too New-Agey? I am not really into this or anything — but you could actually sense that he looked at us and went, ‘It’s OK.’”

“Like kind of a séance,” Bobby adds.

Melvoin nods. “It was weird. And we walked offstage and cried.”

Now, more than six months after that historic evening — and as the announcement arrives that on June 23, Prince & The Revolution’s landmark Purple Rain soundtrack will get a deluxe, triple-disc reissue treatment, featuring rarities, B-sides, and the previously unreleased track “Electric Intercourse” — Melvoin, Bobby, bassist Brownmark, and keyboardists Doctor Fink and Lisa Coleman are sitting with Yahoo Music at the L.A. rehearsal space where they’re prepping for a nationwide reunion tour. And they’re in good spirits, eager to share their memories of Prince.

“He was as you could’ve possibly imagined greatness to be,” says Melvoin, who joined the Revolution in 1983 when she was just 19 years old. (Melvoin’s very first public gig with the band took place at First Avenue, and incredibly, three of the recorded performances from that night made it onto the Purple Rain album. “He was frantically telling us we’re making history: ‘We’re making history tonight, this is history tonight,’” recalls Bobby.) “When you were in a room with him, he was it. He was ephemeral. He was otherworldly. And he was as talented, or more talented, than what you’d expect. It was jaw-dropping to be around it.”

“He was the ‘funky Yoda’ to me,” says Brownmark. “My first encounter with him was at his house; Bobby took me out there. To me, the doors were 20 feet high … because I was scared to death. He opened the door, and I was like, ‘Oh, my God. This dude is a rock star!’ — because I never been that close to a real, hardcore rock star. I was blown away. From that moment, my life changed. My whole thought process of what stardom was — it changed at that point. I really started to get the difference between who I was and who this guy was.”

Bobby, who joined Prince’s musical entourage earlier, in 1979, remembers that even before Prince was an actual rock star, he was a rock star. “For me, when it started, Prince was very unfamous. We were very unfamous together,” he chuckles. “But he still had all these magical qualities. He used to practice being a rock star — like, he couldn’t go into restaurants, or he couldn’t go into a gas station, because he was going to be a rock star and he was going to be famous. He was always projecting himself to be this persona. … It’s just mind-boggling to think that he conjured up all this confidence and skill. We were all mere mortals. I knew that in the first look of the guy, you could tell he wasn’t a human. He was more of a reptile, or something different in his DNA.”

“One thing that a lot of people don’t realize about him is he lived and breathed what he did,” says Brownmark, who joined the band in 1982. “My first assignment, before I even picked up a guitar, was in Prince’s living room: Look at myself in the mirror eight hours a day. He would tell me how to stand. He said, ‘No, pivot your foot that way. OK, now turn your cheek to do this. Get your shoulder up. Bend your shoulder back.’ That’s how he trained me. Then it got to a point where I would be out at a club somewhere and I’d be standing, I’d have this pose, and people would come up to me and say, ‘Mark, what’s wrong with you? Why are you standing like that?’ I didn’t even know I was doing it.

“He would condition you like that,” continues Brownmark, revealing that the band members even took ballet lessons with Prince, at his insistence, to hone their stage skills for the Purple Rain film. “The more you rehearse, the more you don’t think about it, the less you think about it. Then the more fun you have, and that was the key to the Revolution. We didn’t think about it. He would throw up these cues, and we knew every marker, we knew every cue, and we would hit it — just BAM, BAM! We knew right where to hit.”

Melvoin elaborates on Prince’s vision when it came to assembling the Revolution: “He hired these individuals; we came to the picture with singular personalities and self-possessed in our own lives. That translated to each one of our personalities with an instrument. Bobby was always the gentleman and put-together, and that reflected in his absolute pocket, meat-and-potatoes, four-on-the-floor drumming, sturdy. Lisa, the ethereal person who walks on air, whispers when she talks — her music sounds that way. Matt [Fink], he is like a doctor; he can play his keyboard and get from the left side of the 88 keys all the way to the right side faster than any human being. And [Brownmark] is the sexy, gorgeous, all-encompassing, curious flirt, and that’s how his bass sounds.”

Bobby adds that Prince had a “grand vision” for the aptly named Revolution inspired by coed bands like Fleetwood Mac, racially mixed acts like Sly & the Family Stone, and the ethnic diversity of Minneapolis’s Uptown neighborhood. “White, black, Puerto Rican, everybody just a-freakin’,” he quips, quoting a line from Prince’s Dirty Mind track “Uptown.”

Melvoin and Coleman especially appreciated the band’s sense of inclusivity. “I was very aware that [Prince] loved female musicians,” Melvoin says. “My being a woman onstage gave him license to be just even that much more androgynous and be more in touch with his own female energy, and I got the permission to be in touch with more of my male energy… I wanted to be more of a counterpart to him, and he wanted me to be more of a counterpart, so we both got what we wanted out of it.”

Still, Melvoin and Coleman can’t help but roll their eyes when asked about the famous “Is the water warm enough?” intro from the provocative Purple Rain track “Computer Blue.” What did that mean, exactly?

“’Are you gay?’ That’s what it meant,” groans Melvoin, who was actually in a serious romantic relationship with Coleman for 20 years. “Do you want to get in the bathtub with me, Lisa? Are we lovers? ‘Are they gay? Are they not?’ He was working that angle.”

“That was another fantasy episode going on in his brain that he got the public sucked into. Sexually suggestive lyrics were part of his early core to the end,” Bobby chuckles.

“You have to have a certain amount of f***ability, being a woman first and not a musician,” Melvoin continues, discussing the objectification most women face in the music industry, “and I didn’t have access to that part of myself — and didn’t want to have access to that part. But I was OK with the way Prince saw [female musicianship]. I didn’t have much of a relationship to what it really meant in the big picture, to him and his world, but I was honored to be in this band. For me, it was more like: ‘Oh, my God, I’m part of the Revolution!’ Sure, we’re the chicks in the band, but he’s a Jew, he’s a Jew, and that’s a black guy!”

For a while, the multicultural Revolution played in harmony, hitting their commercial and critical peak with 1984’s landmark Purple Rain film and soundtrack. But Prince was already moving on to his next projects, 1985’s more psychedelic (and less successful) Around the World in a Day, and the Under the Cherry Moon movie and its accompanying soundtrack, titled Parade, in 1986.

“You know, before we even hit the first show of the Purple Rain tour, he was already bored with Purple Rain,” laughs Bobby. “He really thought that people would be done with Purple Rain — but as we know now, they’re not done with Purple Rain. He was just moving so fast. It was like next, next, next. But Purple Rain is something that people want to examine for centuries now. I look back at everything, but he didn’t — he wasn’t very good at looking back.

“The thing about Prince is the hairstyle would change the whole thing,” Bobby adds with a laugh, “and he was already moving into the hairstyle for ‘Raspberry Beret.’”

“He hated his hair on Around the World in a Day!” says Melvoin. “He said to me at the video [for 'Raspberry Beret'], ‘I hate my hair; I look like Lou Ferrigno.’ I was like, ‘The Hulk? He said, ‘Yeah, I’ve got the Hulk’s hair.’”

More seriously, Melvoin says, “Obviously, Purple Rain was the pinnacle of his, like, ‘I’m a pop star and these are masterpiece pop songs.’ Afterward, the roots [no pun intended] started going in all these different areas, and he was trying to cherry-pick all these different elements of himself to explore.”

And that was the beginning of the end for the Revolution. As the band worked on the double album Sign ‘O’ the Times, which was eventually credited as a solo Prince album when it came out in 1987, Bobby recalls that Prince “was starting to become, finally, after being a superstar all those years, kind of like, ‘You know, I kind of want to do this myself again.’ I was kind of getting the sense that we had become such a huge part of his everyday life that he may have … well, we don’t know that he was growing a little tired of it, but we’re a handful. I mean, we weren’t just sidemen. We were the Revolution, and we opened our mouths often.”

“I knew something shifted our last night at [Japan’s] Yokohama Stadium,” says Melvoin, referring to the Revolution’s final concert on Sept. 9, 1986. “We were onstage, and he started calling a whole bunch of different people onstage with us while we were playing — and he hadn’t done that before. And we knew him, and I knew him so well. He wasn’t looking at us. I could feel it. And then we played ‘Purple Rain,’ and he destroyed the guitar. He destroyed it. And I looked at Bobby, and I went, ‘It’s over.’ I looked at Lisa. ‘It’s over!’ And it was over.”

Later, back in the States, Prince invited Melvoin and Coleman over to his L.A. rental house for dinner — what Coleman jokingly calls a meal of “paper-wrapped chicken,” because the women received their pink slips. “I knew it was coming; I just knew it. I was bereft,” says Melvoin. “I was like, ‘What? Now? Why?’ But you know, you can’t swim upstream when someone’s done. When someone’s done, they’re done. And you just have to go, ‘OK.’”

“He just had a vision of a different group in his head,” Bobby shrugs.

The full, classic Revolution lineup never ended up playing with Prince again, but Melvoin says that after their breakup, there were “years of [Prince] sending smoke signals for us to get back there.” (Fink continued to work with Prince through 1990’s Graffiti Bridge; Brownmark says he was invited to join Prince’s post-Revolution band, the New Power Generation, but declined; and Melvoin and  Coleman did perform with Prince at the Brit Awards in 2006.) A proper Revolution reunion will obviously never happen now, but as the surviving members prepare to hit the road, they believe Prince would approve.

“He wants us to play,” Brownmark insists. “He liked to party, loved to enjoy his music with people. That’s what he wants us to do. Just because he’s gone, he doesn’t want us to go ‘boo-hoo’ and then go away. He wants us to share while we’re here and enjoy what was.”

“You’re going to feel a loss. You will feel a loss,” Melvoin says of what to expect from this year’s Revolution reunion tour. “We feel it. But we’re being respectful about how we’re doing this, in a way that none of us are [trying to be Prince] at all.”

Still, even without their leader, the Revolution members are aware that the chemistry and history they share is special. “[Prince] called us Mount Rushmore,” says Bobby. “He knew that this was something unique. And when you go through this together, the movie, the tours…”

“It’s like we’re astronauts. We, like, went to the moon,” Melvoin interjects.

“Yeah, we did,” says Bobby. “We left our footprints on the moon.”

This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.

It’s been almost eight years since Prince died, on April 21, 2016. His first wife, dancer/actress/author/philanthropist/animal activist Mayte Garcia, learned the shocking news that day via a phone call from — of all people — Prince’s second ex-wife, Manuela Testolini, who had become her friend in recent years. As Garcia revealed in her compulsively readable and at times truly heartbreaking memoir, The Most Beautiful: My Life with Prince, published by Hatchette Books in 2017, Prince began an affair with Testolini while she and Prince were still married; at the time, she and Prince were still grieving the tragic death of their 6-day-old son, Amiir, from a rare genetic disorder called Pfeiffer syndrome, followed by the miscarriage of their second pregnancy.

But the now 50-year-old Garcia — who reveals that she has been in a fulfilling relationship with Danish jazz pianist Niels Lan Doky for over a year (more on that later) — obviously made peace with the past long, long ago. “I believe in karma, and I think what you put out is what you’re going to get back,” she explains, adding with a giggle: “I mean, I have my moments! I’m not perfect. I have a temper — I’m Puerto Rican! But I just try to live with positivity.” Garcia continues to honor Prince’s legacy and their complicated but eternal love story via the charity they co-founded in honor of Amiir, LIVE4MUSIC, as well as via The Most Beautiful, which is now being made into a biopic that she hopes will come out in 2025.

“I just signed off to the rights to my movie for a production company, and now they’re in the process of writing it and all that,” divulges Garcia, who first met Prince when she was just 16 after he was impressed by an audition tape of her bellydancing, began a romance with him at age 18, and married him when she was 22. And she already has the perfect A-list actress in mind to play her. “It’s so funny, because a picture of just came out of Zendaya with her V-shaped bangs like mine; I can’t even tell you how many people sent that photo to me! I don’t know if she’d be interested, but I think she’d be a good one to possibly play me.”

As for which actor could possibly play Prince, one of the most iconic rock stars of all time, Garcia, perhaps the woman who knew him best, laughs: “Oh, they better hire a good casting director! But hey, they found Freddie Mercury with that guy [Bohemian Rhapsody Oscar-winner Rami Malek], and that’s what actors do: They transform and become. So, I have faith that somebody is going to be able to play him. I know I’m going to have to be the advisor and be like, ‘Yeah, no.’ I’m going to try my hardest to make sure they cast it right.”

Garcia is aware that revisiting her past via this movie project will be sometimes painful, just as it was when she wrote her book a year after Prince died. “I don’t know if you heard the Audible, but that is a real gut-wrencher. It’s gut-wrenching,” she admits. “I remember when I did it, I broke down. But [the audiobook engineer] was like, ‘No, no, we’re keeping that. That’s true. That’s raw.’ I felt so scared that it would come out weird. But it was amazing. So, I’m excited for [the film] to come out. I want it to show the love, I want to show the funny stuff, all of it — because it’s all true.”

Garcia says when she first decided to tell her story, in her own words, she “wanted it to come from a loving place,” especially since her ex-husband had been aware that she planned to pen an autobiography. “I did it so soon after he passed; I wanted it to be one of the first ones coming out, because of course there were going to be many [posthumous Prince books]. So, I wanted it to be beautiful. I always had a diary. I always kept stuff I didn’t want to forget. I didn’t forget the beautiful moments, and I also didn’t want to forget the painful ones — so I could go back and say, ‘Wow. I survived that.’”

Certainly, the most painful part of Garcia and Prince’s epic but doomed love story — the part that could make her break down in the Audible studio — was the chapter about her pregnancy and Amiir’s death, the full details of which had never been made public before her book was published. After Amiir died in 1996, she and Prince sat down for an exclusive interview with Oprah Winfrey at their fabled Minneapolis home, Paisley Park, bizarrely keeping up the façade that their son was still alive (even giving Winfrey a tour of the estate’s empty nursery) and dodging questions about his rumored health issues. Prince also convinced Garcia to return to the hospital where Amiir had been born to shoot a pregnancy-themed music video for “Betcha By Golly Wow.” Garcia stresses that openly discussing baby loss in the media — the way Chrissy Teigen and John Legend did after the 2020 death of their son Jack — was almost unheard-of, even taboo, in ’96.

“This whole thing of [celebrities] showing their personal side is something that’s kind of new. Our generation still was all about ‘just keep it together,’” Garcia explains. “We had to do Oprah [an interview already scheduled to promote Prince’s forthcoming album at the time, Emancipation], and I didn’t want to let him down. But really, we were thinking, ‘Let’s bring [Amiir] back. We’re going to bring him back.’ Well, that’s all I kept thinking in my head. That’s why I did it. I can’t speak for [Prince], of course. He was hurting — but he was also doing his job.”

Garcia feels being able to write and talk about Amiir now, as well as honor him through her nonprofit work, has not only brought her peace, but has consoled other grieving couples as well. “I was hoping [The Most Beautiful] would help people who have lost children, or who have miscarried, because I know if I would’ve seen something like that when I was going through it, it would’ve given me a little more strength, maybe one less tear, just helped me heal better and faster,” she muses. “And now I have gotten feedback that people love [Prince] even more because he went through that. I can’t even tell you the emails and letters I got after the book came out, from people just saying, ‘Thank you so much for sharing this.’ And then they would share their stories with me, which was so beautiful. I think people are more open to sharing and talking about it now, instead of just keeping it in and not dealing with it.”

As for the advice Garcia — who adopted her daughter Gia in 2013, after Gia’s struggling young bio-mom saw her on the reality show Hollywood Exes and reached out — would give to other couples mourning a pregnancy or baby loss, she says: “I would say really, really take a minute. You have to live in the pain. It doesn’t matter how many books you read or whatever — you’re going to have to live in it. And of course, try to keep people that you trust around, so that they can be there for you. I talk about depression a lot” — as Garcia revealed in her book, she contemplated suicide in the weeks after Amiir’s death — “and I say, get something that you have to take care of. It could be a plant, a cat, a hamster — just something where you have to get out of bed. Because if I hadn’t had my dogs, I wouldn’t have ever gotten out of bed. And also, really communicate with the other person, because that gets lost in your grief. And then you just internalize and forget that you’re even with someone.”

It could be assumed that the lack of communication between then-newlyweds Garcia and Prince in the aftermath of the Amiir tragedy is what ultimately tore them apart. As Garcia wrote in her book, Prince — seemingly not having the tools to process his pain — eventually ordered an assistant to destroy everything that reminded him of Garcia and their late son. At the time, she was even shockingly told that Amiir’s ashes had been burned. But as it turned out, that was thankfully untrue. Only two years ago, her longtime friend Kirk Johnson (the New Power Generation member who was the best man at Prince and Mayte’s wedding, and in fact was the one who passed her bellydancing videotape to Prince) finally found Amiir’s ashes, which Garcia then personally picked up in Minneapolis. She now keeps those ashes “very, very close” to her at her home in Las Vegas.

“They gave them back to me!” marvels Garcia. This actually quite cinematic development also brough her more closure regarding her relationship with her ex, with whom she was on “good terms” at the time of his passing. “That was yet another thing of me going, ‘You know what? The love is there. It’s always there,’” she stresses. “I see some divorced couples and I’m like, ‘Wow, you guys really hate each other! That’s crazy!’ But with us, it was never that. I mean, yes, I was heartbroken — so heartbroken when it was happening. I didn’t want to be that [divorced] person, and I made that very clear with [Prince] from the beginning. I was like, ‘I don’t want to be my parents,’ and he was like, ‘Neither do I.’ But, the unfortunate happened.”

Garcia admits it was “definitely hard,” as a woman who’d met her first love (a man 15 years her senior) at such a young age and says “Paisley Park was my life,” to establish to her own identity after the split. “I had to learn to be an adult; I’m thinking about writing another book and kind of digging into all that,” she says. “But I don’t think being with someone should identify you. … I think my work will speak for itself. And I don’t want to take anything away [from Prince], because if it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t be what I’m doing.”

After her marriage ended, Garcia focused on rebuilding her showbiz career and “dated here and there,” most notably a two-year relationship and brief engagement with Mötley Crüe’s Tommy Lee, who was also rebounding from his own high-profile divorce from a pop-culture superstar, Pamela Anderson. But Garcia “totally thought that ship had sailed” when it came to finding real love again — she even confessed as much in The Most Beautiful, seemingly still not over Prince at that time.

“I remember I thought, ‘Well, I’ve already lost my biggest love. So, I’ll just be happy with myself,’” Garcia shrugs. “And I was cool with that. I worked on myself. I learned how to make candles, and you know what? I make really good candles! I just took on things that I love, like, ‘I’m going to learn how to garden.’ And I learned how to garden. I took classes. Just work on yourself, is what I tell women. As cheesy as it sounds, that’s the best way.”

But while Garcia concedes that the romance she had with Prince “will always be one of my top — is my top,” she adds, “I can’t stop living. That history is who I am, and you’ve got to find somebody that loves you for what you are.” And she has now found “unexpected” love again with the above-mentioned Lan Doky. She first met the jazz musician when she and her friends took a fateful girls’ trip to his native Denmark, to attend a big annual rose festival where the country’s then-princess/now-queen was blessing a new rose called (wait for it) “The Most Beautiful” — introduced at the ceremony by Garcia, the woman who’d inspired the flower. And soon, love blossomed.

“I wasn’t looking!” chuckles Garcia. “Yeah, I rolled my eyes when people said, ‘Oh, you’ll find love when you least expect it, when you’re not looking, blah, blah, blah.’ But yeah, it’s true! The thing with me was, if I didn’t find it, I would be fine, because I know what I’d had [with Prince]. I know it was beautiful, and I tried to create beautiful things with my friends and my family. I mean, I got lucky [with Lan Doky]. But I was like, ‘You know what? I’m fine if he comes along, and if he doesn’t, he doesn’t.’”

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Garcia says dating Lan Doky is “completely different” from her wild allnighter adventures with her famous ex-husband. (“No afterparties, just do the show and go to dinner, and I love that!”) And she appreciates that her current man isn’t intimidated by her romantic history with one of the most famous men of all time — as many potential suitors no doubt would be. “There’s lot of insecurity, and it sucks, but you know what? That’s their journey. It’s not like I paraded it around, but it is what it is: I am who I am because of my past. It’s nice finding someone who’s secure in that, who’s very supportive, who’s a fan of what I do. He’s an amazing musician, very respectful, age 60. … It all has to do with maturity.”

Now, along with her upcoming biopic, happy relationship, and devoted motherhood to Gia, Garcia is focusing on LIVE4MUSIC’s music education program, which is designed to empower talented youth who don’t have access to advanced music classes. Rising stars have until May 31 to apply for the transformative program, which will include one-on-one private lessons and various ensemble workshops, masterclasses, clinics, lectures, and demonstrations with veteran entertainers and educators, some of whom are musicians that once worked with Prince himself.

“This program that we’re doing, if I could have had a chance when I was kid to have Debbie Allen teach me via Zoom, I would’ve fainted!” says Garcia, who began dancing as a toddler and was performing professionally by the time she was a tween. “Just to have even 30 minutes to get some insight would’ve been amazing. So, that’s what we want to do with LIVE4MUSIC. We have some amazing teachers, amazing musicians, professionals, Grammy-winning people that are willing to teach these children, to help them and make them believe in themselves, to give them some kind of hope. And I’m so excited about that.”

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Sitting backstage with Yahoo Music at Coachella’s Heineken House this past Saturday, Parliament-Funkadelic icon George Clinton is in a reflective, mellow mood — not just because he’s winding down from playing a two-hour set for a capacity crowd, but because thoughts of his old friend and collaborator, Prince, are unavoidable at this time of year. Not only is Prince’s cover of Radiohead’s “Creep” at Coachella 2008 still widely considered to be one of the festival’s all-time greatest moments, but the one-year anniversary of Prince’s shocking death is right around the corner, on April 21.

“I just don’t even think about that, from when [Prince’s death] happened, ’cause I can’t process it, still,” Clinton says, shaking his head, before insistently adding: “He didn’t do no drugs. No. He was always cool. He didn’t do that s***.”

Clinton refrains from speculating about the circumstances surrounding Prince’s death (just two days after this interview, more distressing details about Prince’s secret opioid addiction will emerge). Instead, he’s focused on his upcoming performance at this week’s multiday “Celebration” tribute at Minneapolis’s Paisley Park compound — at which he’ll likely reprise his cover of “Erotic City” from the 1994 comedy flick PCU — and his happy memories of working with the late legend.

“My fondest memories of Prince was him calling me in the middle of the night when I’m somewhere getting high,” laughs Clinton, who quit drugs himself several years ago after decades of abuse, and whose next release (with Parliament) will ironically be a pharmaceutical-themed concept album of sorts titled Medicaid Fraud Dog. “He’d say, ‘Come on, I need someone to talk to,’ and I’m like, “Oh s***, why are you calling me now?’ He’d stay up all night, just running my mouth because I like to talk a lot.”

Clinton and Prince’s friendship began in the late ’70s, when Clinton championed the young Prince’s music, and a little more than a decade later, Prince — now a multiplatinum superstar — returned the favor by signing Clinton to his Paisley Park record label and casting him in the movie Graffiti Bridge. “Once I left Capitol after ‘Atomic Dog’ and all that, I needed a label. I just called him and said, ‘I got a track I peed on and I’m gonna send to you; you pee on it and send it back!’ And that’s the way it went,” Clinton chuckles. “I signed up to the label, and the first album was [the 1989 comeback effort] The Cinderella Theory. He didn’t work too much on that one, but for the second one, I told him, ‘Don’t be so nice.’ He was always trying to be respectful [and not change the music too much]. I said, ‘No, put some of that s*** on there.’ So he played a lot on my [1993] Hey, Man, Smell My Finger album.

“Graffiti Bridge was the best,” Clinton continues. “He had fun doing that s***. Him and Morris Day was funny with each other in real life — just the way they act in the movie, that’s pretty much like how they were anyway. [The Time’s guitarist] Jesse [Johnson] was even funnier. They was crackin’ with each other about who’s the shortest; they’re tiny, and they cracked on each other all the time about that. It was a fun family, all of them.”

Another, more serious way in which Prince and Clinton bonded was by sharing hardship tales of their respective music-business battles. In the ’90s, Prince famously changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol, scrawled the word “SLAVE” on his face to protest his contract with Warner Bros., and waged a battle for artistic control that dominated the rest of his career. Meanwhile, Clinton was dealing with his own legal issues (he has filed multiple lawsuits against Bridgeport Music Inc., which owns the rights to about 170 of his compositions; the company says he signed over his rights to the music in 1982/’83, but he says his signature was forged). Clinton says he was eager to advise Prince about avoiding such career mistakes.

“I think I got him into that ‘SLAVE’ thing,” Clinton muses. “I know I did. I was always talking about the record companies, how bad they was. He got it. He did his act real good with that. He had all this copyrights back. I had preached to him. I didn’t do it at first, and it took me a long time to get it together, but he got it really quick. He did it so much better than me!”

As for his own legal fight, Clinton says, “I’m still fighting it; all the legal stuff I went through, it’s unbelievable. From the copyright office, to the publisher, to [the labels], all of them conspired together… They’ll do anything not to let that story get out, so I’ve been fighting. Now I’m gonna do a documentary on it — but I’ve got to keep [the film’s details] secret for a minute.”

George Clinton performs Sat., April 15 at the Heineken House at Coachella. (Photo courtesy of Heineken)

Clinton is nothing if not a fighter. For instance, just last year, he was very vocal in his support of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton (no relation), and he still holds nothing back when speaking about his disdain for Donald Trump. “I was active [in Hillary’s campaign], even more so than with Obama. I mean, I voted for [Obama], but with her, I was running my mouth. But I was kind of late. I should have started earlier,” he says of Hillary’s loss. “I try not to preach, but this needs people to pay attention — and vote the next time. People got to vote. I know they was mad at the system and all that s***, but you can’t be that mad! Fool, get in there. You ain’t got that kind of luxury. You can’t get that kind of mad. You’ve got to vote.”

As for Trump’s presidency, Clinton says, “That’s some scary s***. He’s on some scary s***, f***ing with North Korea. He’s a clown, too. You got two clowns in there, and ain’t no telling what could happen. And whether there’s North Korea or not, [Trump is] gonna get us in trouble. Everybody needs to speak out on that s***. But he’s gonna get impeached, and all these rest of them are going to jail. They got so much s*** on them, it’s just dribbling out little by little, but it’s gonna blow up in a minute.”

Interestingly, in his later years Prince was notorious for shunning technology — fighting to keep his live music (even his above-mentioned “Creep” Coachella cover) off YouTube and Vine, banning cellphone recording at his shows, and refusing to put his music on streaming services. But 75-year-old Clinton, who credits his popularity with audiences of all ages (including Coachella’s millennial-skewing Heineken House crowd) to his decade-spanning collaborations with everyone from Prince and the Red Hot Chili Peppers to Snoop Dogg and Kendrick Lamar, says he embraces new technology — whether it’s making music with Pro Tools, being available on Spotify, or joining Twitter and Instagram.

“I’m for whatever it takes to make the music. You have to get used to it, but that whole digital world is how they make records now,” he shrugs. “You get old quick if you don’t! The easiest way to get old is to not [accept] something new… You know how when the car came along, the horse and buggy had to go? It’s like that. I’ve seen this s*** before, so it wasn’t hard to get in line. You may not like it, but you gotta figure out how to do it. I’m texting and social media-ing my ass off.”

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This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.

(photo: Reuters/Chris Pizzello)

One of the most thrilling guest performances in American Idol history was when the late, great Prince showed up out of nowhere – almost as if in a genie cloud of purple smoke – on the Season 5 finale in 2006. It wasn’t a typical Idol finale cameo. Prince didn’t perform alongside any of the contestants; his appearance was a complete shock (even to the finalists and employees of the show); and he vanished almost as quickly as he had appeared, immediately after tearing through the 3121 tracks “Lolita” and “Satisfied.”

Speaking to Yahoo Music’s Reality Rocks at BritWeek’s Annual Business Innovation Awards honoring Idol creator Simon Fuller, Idol producer Nigel Lythgoe recalls the surreal scene.

“When I first met Prince, I told him exactly what was going to happen [on the show], how Ryan Seacrest would introduce him,” Lythgoe remembers. “And he said, ‘No, Nigel. I don’t want any introduction.’ And I said, ‘To be honest with you, sir, we’re going to need to do that.’ He said, ‘No, Nigel. I’m going to come on that stage as a complete surprise.’ So he went out there with the two girls, was sensational, and left the stage before Ryan could even say, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Prince!’ He was gone. The funny thing about that was, Prince had [a driver] in the theater area, on a telephone in his car, going around the block. So the driver knew exactly when Prince was going onstage, and when he was done. The car drove up, Prince jumped out of the car, ran onto the stage, ran off the stage back into the car, and drove off. Gone.”

Photos: Prince’s Most Memorable Onscreen Moments

While Prince was unwilling to take direction from Lythgoe (“He was very ‘this is the way it’s going to be’”), Lythgoe stresses that Prince was “very gentle with that, not rude in any way. He was very congratulatory about the program and how well he thought it had been done, and I believe he was very, very happy to be appearing on American Idol. But it was literally those conversations: ‘No, Nigel. We’re not going to do it that way.’ Which I’m unaccustomed to!”

As for how Prince’s finale appearance remained such a secret, Lythgoe laughs, “I just kept my mouth shut! Yeah, I know — it’s not like me! But when I need to keep quiet, I can, you know.”

Related: The Voice Coaches Pay Tribute to Prince

Lythgoe produced American Idol during its first seven seasons as well as Seasons 10-12, and he returned this month to oversee the nostalgic series finale. He reveals: “I thought about asking Prince to play again for the Season 15 finale. But then once I went down the route of thinking there shouldn’t be anyone on the finale apart from the judges and contestants, I dropped that idea. But it’s quite interesting that the two people that came into my head [when planning the finale months ago] were David Bowie and Prince. I suppose thank God I didn’t think about anybody else, right?”

Lythgoe ended up including a Bowie medley on the Season 15 finale, starring past winners David Cook, Kris Allen, Lee DeWyze, Phillip Phillips, and Nick Fradiani. When asked which contestants he would have picked for a Prince tribute, he ponders for a moment and says, “That’s a good question. It’s really difficult to recreate Prince. I suppose Adam Lambert would have been great for that. I’d have to think about it, because there was nobody for me ever that was like Prince – apart from [Fox’s former President of Alternative Entertainment] Mike Darnell,” he jokes. “I always used to make fun of Mike’s height [Darnell is 5’2”], so he actually walked up behind Prince [to compare height]. And he was smaller than Prince! But then again, Prince was in stilettos.”

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This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.

On Thursday, The Voice hosted a karaoke happy hour at Hyde Sunset Kitchen + Cocktail in West Hollywood, at which journalists sang with a live band for charity while the actual coaches – yes, Blake Shelton, Adam Levine, Christina Aguilera, and Pharrell Williams – looked on in amusement (or bemusement). It was supposed to be a celebratory event… but unfortunately, just hours earlier, the tragic news broke of Prince’s shocking death, casting a dark purple cloud over the party.

Shelton’s likened Prince’s passing to “some sort of horrible terrorist attack” when speaking to Us Weekly on the event’s red carpet. “I’m still really shocked, so I’m kind of processing everything, but I’m going to miss the guy so much,” added Levine. “There are many kings, queens, and princesses, but there will never be another Prince,” Williams told ET, while he elaborated to Billboard: “His death represents a big hole in the ether right now, especially the musical ether. But his music, his message, his movement — it was just super-powerful. His physical presence will definitely be missed. The essence of him survives along with the body of his work, the memories we all have of him, and the incredible impact and impression that he’s made with his songs.”

I wasn’t going to attend the party at all, to be perfectly honest, because I was feeling as dejected as the coaches themselves. But at the last minute, I donned a Prince Coachella 2008 T-shirt and a pair of glitter purple shoes, headed to Hyde… and belted an off-key, no-chair-turn-worthy, but emotionally connected rendition of Prince’s “Kiss” in front of Blake, Adam, Pharrell, and Xtina.

OK, so perhaps this wasn’t quite at the level of recent amazing onstage tributes by Stevie Wonder, Jennifer Hudson, or the cast of Hamilton. And yes, I am pretty sure if this had been an actual Blind Auditions episode of The Voice, no one would have hit their red buttons. The coaches would not have wanted my extra time or my kiss. Pharrell would not have called me “anointed.” But Blake may have called me “badass.”

As for what Prince might have thought, well, his lyrics did say, “You don’t have to be cool to rule my world,” and this performance was definitely uncool. And Prince was charity-minded, and he did teach the world to live fearlessly — so he may have appreciated my tone-deaf tribute, even if the coaches probably didn’t.

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This article originally appeared on Yahoo Music