Prince’s first and last concerts remembered by the critics who were there
Prince’s first and last concerts remembered by the critics who were there
Melissa Ruggieri, USA TODAYTue, April 21, 2026 at 3:59 PM UTC
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Jon Bream remembers it was below zero, not unusual for Minneapolis in January.
About 300 people turned up at the Capri Theater that night in 1979 to see an upstart musician who was being hyped as the next Stevie Wonder take the stage.
Bream, a staff writer at the Minneapolis Star, knew of this talented kid since 1976, when a local concert promoter touted the recent high school graduate who played numerous instruments.
By 1978, Prince had inked his first contract with Warner Bros. Records. But after spending triple his budget on his debut album, “For You,” the label suits wanted some indication of his ability to perform live. So Prince assembled a band, rehearsed for a few months and on that freezing night in his hometown, performed what Bream wrote was “an encouraging debut performance.”
That was the first professional review written about Prince, which also complimented the budding superstar for his Mick Jagger-like strutting and deduced, “He was cool, he was cocky and he was sexy.”
Tickets were $4 in advance, $4.75 at the door.
Prince, left, is shown in concert with guitarist Dez Dickerson in his first public concert at the Capri Theater on Jan. 5, 1979 in Minneapolis, Minn.
Fast forward almost 40 years to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where I worked for a decade as the newspaper’s pop music critic.
Prince was playing a pair of hastily announced concerts on his Piano & a Microphone Tour at the Fox Theatre April 7, 2016 – until he wasn’t. Hours before show time, the concerts were canceled because, we were told, Prince had a cold.
The shows were just as hastily rescheduled for the following week, April 14. Tickets were limited to two per person and could only be picked up at the theater box office the day of the show.
I attended the first of the two concerts – at 7 p.m. – to quick turn a review.
Prince’s voice, I noted, sounded nasally when he spoke, but otherwise my assessment was pure praise, calling the scaled-down concert a “rare opportunity to witness the raw musicality that pulses through his veins.”
I also wrote, “His ingeniousness was evident from the stripped version of the opening ‘Little Red Corvette,’ which dovetailed into Vince Guaraldi’s ‘Linus and Lucy’ – an interesting cross-pollination until you realized the similar melodic patterns of the songs.”
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Some of the best seats sold for more than $1,000.
That night, as Prince flew home to Minneapolis after his 10 p.m. Atlanta show, his private plane detoured to Illinois because he had fallen unconscious. The reason, we were told, was severe flu and dehydration. Really, it was an overdose requiring Narcan.
Exactly a week later, Prince was dead from an opioid overdose at his Paisley Park compound.
My story was the last review of a Prince show in a major publication.
That Bream and I bookend Prince’s lifetime as a live performer is weird in a universe-works-in-mysterious-ways sense. We’ve been peers and pals for more than 25 years, when he kindly shepherded an anxious cub reporter through her first Grammy Awards coverage. The odds of us being the newspaper music reporters whose words marked the start and finale of Prince’s extraordinary career are the kind even I would laugh at in Las Vegas.
Bream is still at the now-Minnesota Star and is the longest-tenured pop music critic at a U.S. daily newspaper. He is a de facto Prince expert – his knowledge collected from decades of coverage and dozens of conversations with the mysterious musical genius and off-the-record sources he dubbed Deep Purple.
He still remembers Prince’s already idiosyncratic style that first show – blue jeans, an unbuttoned blouse with a vest over it and, says Bream, “to give the Prince-ly touch,” leg warmers over his jeans.
My memory of Prince’s last performance is hazy, other than he was shrouded in purple lighting and wielded a cane. A strictly enforced no-phones policy meant no cruddy cell phone snaps existed to jar my recollections of his physical appearance.
But Bream – as he should – owns the definitive Prince remembrance.
Two nights before he died, Prince attended a Lizz Wright concert at one of his regular Minneapolis haunts, the Dakota. Bream was also in attendance and noticed that Prince remained for the show’s encore, which was unusual.
And then, “I saw him walk through the kitchen – which is not open to the public – with members of his entourage, all in a single file. He was walking with his cane, a fancy bejeweled cane, over his shoulder,” Bream said. “And that was the last I saw of him.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 10 years after Prince's death, we remember his first and last concerts
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