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In 1985 Minneapolis Genius – The Historic 1977 Recordings appeared on the Hot Pink label. This is the kind of tribute LP normally only accorded dead artists like Miles Davis, whose studio sweepings are now boxed and sold at platinum card prices. The music on it was in similar sketchy form, mostly shapeless instrumentals that cried out for a strong-handed producer, though one of them, ‘If You Feel Like Dancing’, later became a club favourite. The material was attributed to a band called 94 East, but the styling of the cover – purplish, with a white dove holding a rose in its bill – coupled with the Minneapolis provenance, was intended to leave potential purchasers in no doubt that this was a Prince product. A couple of years later, the notorious Black Album (1987, released 1994) would become the decade’s most celebrated bootleg, but Minneapolis Genius has a prior place in the story.

There was no risk of ambiguity or confusion in the title. In 1985, there was only one genius in the Twin Cities and that was Prince. Back in 1977, when those tracks were cut, a television series that had strongly conditioned America’s view of Minneapolis was just coming off the air, though only to enter the strange purgatory of the network repeat cycle. The Mary Tyler Moore Show was actually shot in California with a feisty Brooklyn girl as its protagonist, but Mary’s lopsided grin and rueful stoicism in the face of eternal human stupidity spoke volumes about her Minneapolis home and workplace. Those Americans with a more political perspective might have remembered that Minnesota was the heartland of liberal Democrat hopeful Eugene McCarthy, who managed to survive 1968 unassassinated and sweetly irrelevant.

Almost everyone who lived there before the Prince revolution reflects a similar ambivalence. In the 1970s Minneapolis was a safe town and a dull town. An enviable record in civil rights and racial coexistence does not make a place funky. To that extent, Minneapolis was both the right and the wrong place for Prince to grow up: wrong in the sense that it lacked the deep roots in black music that could be taken for granted elsewhere, such as Detroit and Chicago; right in that it allowed him to develop at his own pace and on his own terms. In return, Prince created the brand new something that was called the Minneapolis sound. He also did what local boys made good often do and bequeathed the town a monument to his own success (or in Prince’s case his own hyperactive self-determination), a version of Camelot and a more grown-up version of Michael Jackson’s playpen Neverland. The Paisley Park studio complex sits about half an hour’s ride outside Minneapolis, alongside Highway 5, at 7801 Audubon Road in Chanhassen. It’s now a bigger draw than the city’s celebrated Museum of Questionable Medical Devices.

The extent to which Prince invented the Minneapolis scene has been endlessly debated. The mythological version likes to paint him as a younger, yet more potent version of a Fisher King, bringing energy and (purple) rain to a musically arid and sexless place. The more sober version points to a quiet infrastructure of studios, joints and rehearsal rooms, the world in which John Nelson worked away quietly. As so often in American stories, the mythological version wins out.

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Remarkably, given where it sits on the North American continent, Minnesota is washed by the Mississippi. The great river is integral to black America and black American music. In slave narratives and sociological treatises, in the testimony of educated freedmen and in musical histories, the journey north is portrayed as a mystical portage up from bondage and towards liberation, a salmon ladder in terms of cultural evolution. It was, you’ll still read it argued, the journey against the flow of the Mississippi that helped turn inchoate field hollers and marching tunes into Chicago blues and New York bebop, ultimately Detroit and Philly soul as well. If those cities far away from the headwaters felt its influence, why not Minneapolis?

In 1963, a year of acutely sharpened ethnic awareness in America and Prince’s first year at grade school, the collective population of Minneapolis and St Paul was still well shy of two million. That figure included only about 50,000 African-Americans, mostly clustered up on the North Side, which made Minneapolis just 3 per cent black. Mattie Shaw was an exception. As black southerners moved north in search of economic opportunity, Minnesota stood aside from the demographic mainstream, as it had been since it became a territory (not yet a state) in 1849; in that year, just forty free persons of colour lived there. Between 1860 and 1870, deeply troubled years in American history, the censused black population rose from 259 to 759, largely as a result of freed slaves travelling north with Minnesotan soldiers. In the early years of the twentieth century, the black population of the state experienced a significant drop.

At a casual glance, the city seems to fit the usual urban American sociological stereotype of rich-white-quarter abutting poor-black-quarter. According to her recollection, in 1967 Prince and his sister Tyka were part of a ‘bussing’ experiment to desegregate Minneapolis schools. There is also a reference to this on ‘The Sacrifice of Victor’ from the album (1992). This was the direct result of a 1954 decision in the case of Brown vs the Board of Education in Topeka, Kansas, in which Supreme Court Justice Warren ruled that segregation of schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution and that the principle of ‘separate but equal’ was unconstitutional. The idea was to prevent the insidious ghettoisation of the inner cities by moving black schoolchildren into basically white catchments, and vice versa. Twenty years later, Milliken vs Bradley’s revelation that there were deep flaws in that ruling were pounced on by the Reagan administration as it took a cost-cutting scythe to social services. The picture since has been one of steady resegregation, though slower, significantly enough, in the Twin Cities than elsewhere.

This is consistent with the area’s long history of political liberalism. A decade after Milliken vs Bradley, Minnesota stood alone in its opposition to Reagan’s presidential candidacy, pulling the switch for another forgotten man of American politics, Democrat Walter Mondale. In his study The Negro in Minnesota (1961) Earl Spangler points out that Minnesota was the first state to grant full suffrage to blacks under the terms of the Fifteenth Amendment. A similar picture emerges in June Drenning Holmquist’s 1981 They Chose Minnesota, a survey of the state’s ethnic groups, and in David Vassar Taylor’s Blacks in Minnesota (1976) and his more recent African-Americans in Minnesota (2002) (Minnesota Historical Society/Press). There were notorious lynchings near Duluth in 1920, sparked as such episodes often were by alleged ‘gross insult’ to a white woman, but the obsessiveness with which these incidents are reasoned away as pathological aberrations in Minnesotan histories suggests that such acts of crude violence were by no means the norm. Here was a state with a markedly good record in interracial relations, if not quite a colour-blind paradise.

Five years after Prince and Tyka graduated from John Hay Elementary and started taking the bus a few blocks downtown to Bryant Junior High School, riots flared in Minneapolis as they did almost everywhere in urban America. Several businesses were burned and the police department, reckoned to be the most holstered and restrained in North America, went out and cracked heads. If raw statistics and the chaos theory of dissent mean anything, the violence in Minneapolis in 1968 wasn’t a direct reaction to adverse social conditions. Clearly it was more than a television-fuelled carnival of destruction given a political and sociological rationale after the fact, but it was certainly not the ideologically driven ghettos-on-fire picture that had emerged that year across the continent. However few in number, blacks in Minneapolis enjoyed an easier coexistence with the white majority than they could have expected almost anywhere else. They lacked the critical mass to be defined as a major problem or to sustain a completely autonomous cultural development. And yet, in his song ‘The Sacrifice of Victor’, Prince refers explicitly to the riots as his moment of politicisation.

Compared to the average African-American teenager growing up in the larger cities of the north, Prince’s musical heritage was disproportionately white. If it seems self-evident that his main influences as a performer were Sly Stone, Rick James and Jimi Hendrix, it’s arguable that what he learned from each of them (and from Rick James at closer quarters when he opened for him on tour in 1979) was more about presentation than about music. The fact remains that much of the music Prince and his Minneapolis contemporaries listened to as teenagers was white pop and heavy rock. In February 1981, as Dirty Mind was taking off, Prince built on his nascent White Negro hipster-hoodlum persona by telling Rolling Stone that he’d grown up on an ethnic borderline. ‘I had a bunch of white friends and a bunch of black friends. I never grew up in one particular culture.’ It may have contributed to the mythology, but this part of it at least was true. It’s worth remembering that Jimi Hendrix, born in Seattle long before Seattle was a real music town, made his name with English musicians and a pale Geordie manager, the late Chas Chandler.

The Twin Cities bequeathed Prince an unusual perspective on American popular music. Minneapolis is what is known in the business as a vanilla market. British observers of the American scene are still perturbed by how sharply and how overtly the music industry is segregated. At one time ‘race records’ were cut exclusively for a black market but even in the 1970s and 1980s, there were separate charts for rock and r’n’b, which despite an enthusiastic take-up of black music by white teenagers was still tantamount to segregating audiences. Radio airplay was crucial and radio stations were more than ever in the grip of advertisers armed with demographic models and spreadsheets. As Dave Hill put it in Prince: A Pop Life, ‘Specific audiences were identified and catered to, in line with the dictates of commercials. And that “specialisation” effectively meant the resegregation of radio along racial lines that were no less rigid for justifying their informal apartheid with free-enterprise logic.’

In line with that relentless equation, Minneapolis had no infrastructure of black music stations. KMOJ had a virtual monopoly and thus a fairly safe, chart-driven playlist. For a time, KUXL offered smooth soul, classic Motown and some lite jazz to the small better-off black community on the South Side. All of which meant that even African-American youngsters of Prince’s age were drawn to a diet of white progressive rock on KQRS. His early band Grand Central, which some remember, probably wrongly, as Grand Central Station, was around too soon to have been named after Larry Graham’s mid-1970s funk unit Graham Central Station, though that might explain the confusion. (Graham later became a friend and something of a spiritual mentor, leading to the revelation in the late 1990s that Prince had followed his example and joined the Jehovah’s Witnesses.) The band’s later name-change to Champagne may well have been precipitated by optimistic recognition of a possible market clash, though it actually took place when Prince went to Central High, presumably so that it wouldn’t sound like a school band. The original name – or rather the second name since the group briefly went out as Phoenix – may also have been a nod to white bicep rockers Grand Funk Railroad, later known by the fans’ preferred short form Grand Funk. Theirs was the kind of heavy, anthemic rock that Prince and his friends dabbled in, and who knows, the later addiction for performing half-naked and glossed with oil might just be a screen memory of Grand Funk guitarist Mark Farmer stripped to the waist and sweating his way through a falsetto ‘Mean Mistreater’. Skinny kid looks at Charles Atlas advertisement and dreams.

For Prince’s contemporaries, Grand Funk, Iron Butterfly and the James Gang, British acts like Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and all the others that followed in the wake of the ‘invasion’ spearheaded by The Beatles and Herman’s Hermits were every bit as immediately compelling as r’n’b. These were the groups that played uptown and these were the groups that got the local airplay. In 1978 when Prince released his first album the best known Minneapolis band were punk thunderers Hüsker Dü; a couple of years later, you might mention The Replacements as well. Though punk as such didn’t make much impact on him, white rock and pop were to influence Prince’s music from the beginning.

It’s wrong to suggest that Minneapolis had no musical infrastructure, just that it was very different to those of Chicago or Philadelphia. The town’s most important contribution to popular music was the retail system established by Amos Hellicher’s distribution label Soma. By the late 1960s, though, it was living up to its name. People were being put to sleep by smooth, close-harmony romance and looking for a more resonant style of pop. There was also a thriving club scene in the Twin Cities, particularly in the knot of clubs and restaurants round Seven Corners, where John and Mattie Nelson played.

Records, gigs and radio are all influential, but what sparks many a career is a strong local role model, someone from the same background who makes good. Apart from his father, there was no one of a slightly older generation to emulate. Pianist Bobby Lyle is probably best known as MD to soul diva Anita Baker in the mid-1980s and from the smooth jazz of Pianomagic and 2004’s Straight and Smooth. Lyle grew up in Minneapolis, and was known to John Nelson. His early records seem to have been released only in Japan and by the mid-1970s he was drifting away from jazz, and from the Twin Cities. In 1976, though, Lyle was working with Sly & the Family Stone and Prince would certainly have been aware of that.

While Prince’s ferocious self-determination clearly didn’t develop in a vacuum, there was no black Minneapolitan he could point to and say: I want to be him. The only internationally famous Minnesotan was Bob Dylan, who was born in Duluth and grew up in grimy Hibbing, where black skin probably meant you worked in the iron mill and washed off at the end of the day. There were bands around who proved it was possible to make a go of a musical career, even on a relatively unstructured scene like that of North Side Minneapolis and, given the scale of the place, it’s inevitable that their histories intersect with Prince’s. Flyte Tyme was perhaps the most successful of the basement groups, with a membership that included Terry Lewis, Jellybean Johnson and later Jimmy Jam. It also featured a small horn section, which would not have endeared it to Prince, who was initially wary of horns. There was also another North Side band The Family (not to be confused with English rockers Family), for whom Prince later wrote ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’, best known from Sinéad O’Connor’s cover version.

Jam and Lewis, who went on to be Janet Jackson’s saviours, eventually co-opted the Flyte Tyme name for their production company, but by then the band had metamorphosed into Prince protégés The Time, who became an integral part of his scene-breaking tour packages, along with the shrewdly confected girl band Apollonia 6. Soul star Alexander O’Neal was proposed as vocalist for the new group, but declined; perhaps believing that Minneapolis wasn’t big enough for Prince and himself; perhaps outraged at the money side of the deal; perhaps (as in one version) sacked for being ‘too black’, or possibly looking too much like Billy Eckstine for a funk-rock group. Five years older than the young Pretender, O’Neal’s breakthrough nevertheless didn’t come until 1985, by which time Prince was touring the multiple-platinum Purple Rain.

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School friends remember him as Skipper (or Skippy) Nelson. The pet name came from his mother and might have been Mattie Shaw hitting back at her husband. Even if, as Jimmy Jam remembers, most of it was platforms and the biggest ’fro anyone had ever seen, those who talk about Prince remember him as having stature, on and off the basketball court. Not everyone called him Skippy or Princess or Butcher Dog; he was also known as ‘the Human Jukebox’, the kid who knew every song going and who could reproduce them on a widening array of instruments. Some of his celebrated multi-instrumentalism and composer credits are on the material released on Minneapolis Genius, but there Prince is very much a group player. The 94 East material, originally intended for Polydor before that deal fell through, overlaps with the first work on what became For You.

His musical career seems to have begun at home, picking out tunes on John Nelson’s piano. The first tune he learned to play is supposed to have been the television Batman theme, coincidentally given his later involvement with the Tim Burton movie. It’s said that he wrote his first song at the age of seven, and it may well be that that first manuscript (possibly known as ‘Funkmachine’) is lying in the vaults at Paisley Park even now. Interestingly, no one who knew him in his early teens remembers him as a prodigy. Prince’s ‘genius’ is more likely to have resulted from sheer hard work rather than some kind of Mozartian gift. There’s a possible parallel here with Andy Warhol, the ‘Picasso out of Pittsburgh’, whose apparently enervated and will-less approach to work disguised a ruggedly industrial and intensely hard-working background; no coincidence that this son of a manufacturing town should call his studio ‘the Factory’. It’s significant, too, that one of the most important aspects of Prince’s musical education was a business class. It was run at Central High by an easygoing former session player called Jim Davidson who taught students how to make and present demo tapes, as well as copyright, contract and other legal issues. Andre Anderson and Terry Lewis both took the class, but it was Prince who took the lessons most to heart. One wonders how often in later years he tried to apply Davidson’s uncomplicated principles to his dealings with Warners, sacked band members and copyright claimants.

There was scarcely a moment in his teens when Prince was not making music, either alone or with the friends who formed his first band. Grand Central went through a number of personnel, including Prince’s cousin Charles Smith, who seems to have been a respectable drummer. (He also introduced Prince to keyboard player Gayle Chapman.) He was probably better than his replacement Morris Day, who along with Andre Anderson and Prince formed the nucleus of the active band. There may have been an extra-musical reason for Day’s recruitment, since his attic offered an alternative rehearsal venue to Prince’s basement at the Anderson house. When they were working from home Andre’s sister Linda sometimes played keyboards.

Until Prince was sidetracked – or monorailed – into making solo demos with Chris Moon, Grand Central and Champagne were the focus of his musical life. Recollections vary as to what they sounded like. One has to be wary of self-interest in the suggestion of band members that the roots of Prince’s black music revolution lay in those chaperoned gigs in downtown bars, where the age limit was a rock-solid twenty-one. Most reliable witnesses remember a mix of lightly funked-up rock and jazz. Champagne was a faintly ironic banner for the abstemious and in those days not even studiedly frivolous Prince. No underage drinking for him, in fact nothing that got in the way of making music.

If his father was the key early influence, it was a cousin by marriage who helped steer him and Grand Central along a more professional route. Linster Willie – always known as Pepe – left New York for Minneapolis after marrying Shauntel Manderville, who was the daughter of Mattie Nelson’s twin sister. Pepe had worked in and around the music business for some years, as a gofer for his uncle’s band Little Anthony and the Imperials and as a freelance songwriter. He knew Prince and talked to him about music, but it seems that it was Morris Day’s mother who suggested that he take Grand Central in hand. The first priority, as far as Willie was concerned, was to put the publishing situation on a proper footing, suggesting to Prince that he write to Broadcast Music Incorporated – the powerful BMI – and make sure that all songs were securely copyrighted. This was one area where Jim Davidson’s Business of Music lessons seem not to have taken, and later it was to be the source of much disagreement.

Like just about every association in Prince’s early life, this one ended acrimoniously, but for a time the cousins worked together effectively enough. Pepe helped streamline Prince’s songs, which demonstrated more creative ambition than structure or market awareness; in 1977, the year before his debut record, Prince was playing on Pepe’s own demos. They attracted some interest from Polydor, who were later set to release 94 East before that deal collapsed. Some of their overlapping work appears on Minneapolis Genius and Pepe Willie is the composer of the briefly successful ‘If You Feel Like Dancing’. Given how his own career stalled apart from that one minor hit, it’s not surprising that Pepe would lay claim to much of that material. Its real authors, though, were Andre and Pepe’s talented cousin.

Prince had begun to spread his wings, both creatively and geographically. He found being a band member constraining, particularly when he didn’t share their enthusiasm for white rum and beer. Andre – who later changed his second name to Cymone – dined out for a time on stories of adolescent exploits with Prince, but these read like a curious backward projection of the priapic star of Purple Rain and Parade onto the shy, almost puritanical kid. Prince’s later affiliation to the Jehovah’s Witnesses wasn’t so much an aberration as a return to his church roots. Alcohol and drugs have never played a significant role in the Prince entourage.

Pepe Willie had contacts in New York. He had contacts all over the place. One of the local ones was keyboard player Gayle Chapman. Another resident of the white St Louis Park suburb that raised the Rivkins, she was to play an important but largely unrecognised role in the early Prince story, bringing not just musical skills but a strong Christian sensibility that seems to have reinforced Prince’s notion that live performance had a sacred dimension. Pepe Willie knew her because they’d collaborated on songs. His more immediate value to Prince, though, was his knowledge of the New York studio scene. However important the Cookhouse and Studio 80 had been (and would continue to be, as witness the joint David Rivkin/Studio 80 thanks on For You), Prince’s ambition needed more sophisticated facilities. Some of the instrumental material on Minneapolis Genius was taped in New York, from where Prince kept close and sometimes anxious contact with the man he’d asked to be his manager. It is to Chris Moon’s eternal credit that he realised early that it would take someone with considerably heavier clout to manage ‘the new Stevie Wonder’.