No longer do tourists make mere visits to Minneapolis to commune with Prince. Ever since the city’s iconic son overdosed in April 2016 at the age of 57, such trips have become veritable pilgrimages. The tourism bureaus of Minneapolis and Minnesota now prominently host itineraries on their respective websites, featuring points of interest such as First Avenue, the nightclub where Purple Rain was filmed; Prince’s childhood home on the city’s north side; and the downtown studio where he recorded his first demo. Prince tourism is definitely “a thing,” according to Erica Wacker with Explore Minnesota, the state’s tourism office. “If you ask somebody what they know about Minnesota,” she says, “it’s lakes, loons, fishing, and now Prince.”
Yet despite all the reasons not to go, I still get a pang of Catholic guilt that I only made it out there twice while Prince was alive. Because all of that groveling at gate was worth it when on the other side, once safely ensconced in his sanctum sanctorum, you actually got to see Prince play guitar. He was divine, and all you had to do was put up with some paranoid bullshit out in the suburbs to see him.
The VIP tour takes about 70 minutes and includes a visit to studios A and B, the video editing suite, and Studio C, which has been converted into the Purple Rain room, where Prince’s 1985 Academy Award for best original song score is displayed alongside the purple 1981 Honda motorcycle from the movie. The attendees hailed from as nearby as Blaine (a suburb of Saint Paul) and as far as Germany, Sweden, and Australia. Mitch kicked things off with a short speech about Prince’s generosity during his lifetime—all the music that he gave us, his invitations to fans to listen to it inside his own home—followed by a moment of silence that allowed the group to contemplate Prince’s sacred remains encased in the miniature Paisley Park urn.
As a devout convert to the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ faith, Prince was deeply religious, but he was also full of contradictions. He was a reclusive artiste who loved God and celebrated sex. Even if he’d intended Paisley to ultimately become a half museum, half shrine, it was hard to believe these somber, reverential tours could ever fill the vacuum of freaky creation left in his wake.
