This Thing Called Life: Prince's Odyssey, On + Off the Record

by Neal Karlen

Overview

A journalist “draws from his recollections, notes and tapes, to paint an illuminating and intimate portrait of a supremely talented and complex artist” (Newsweek).

Neal Karlen was the only journalist Prince granted in-depth press interviews to for over a dozen years, from before Purple Rain to when he became the artist formerly known as Prince. Karlen interviewed Prince for three Rolling Stone cover stories, wrote “3 Chains o’ Gold,” Prince’s “rock video opera,” as well as the star’s last testament, which may be buried with Prince’s will underneath Prince’s private compound, Paisley Park.

According to Prince’s former fiancée Susannah Melvoin, Karlen was “the only reporter who made Prince sound like what he really sounded like.” Karlen quit writing about Prince a quarter-century before the mega-star died, but the two remained friends for the last thirty-one years of the superstar’s life.

Before they met as writer and subject, Prince and Karlen knew each other as two of the gang of kids who biked around Minneapolis’s mostly-segregated Northside. Going back to Prince Rogers Nelson’s roots, especially his contradictory, and sometimes violent relationship with his father, This Thing Called Life profoundly changes what we know about Prince, and explains him as no biography has: a superstar who calls in the middle of the night to talk, who loved The Wire and could quote from every episode of The Office, who frequented libraries and jammed spontaneously for local crowds (and fed everyone pancakes afterward), who was lonely but craved being alone. Readers will drive around Minneapolis with Prince in a convertible, talk about movies and music and life.

“Peculiar, intriguing, lyrical. An earnest vamp on Prince’s life.” —Kirkus Reviews

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250135254
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/26/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	347
Sales rank:	435,410
File size:	23 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Neal Karlen is a former contributing editor for Rolling Stone, Newsweek staff writer, and regular contributor to TheNew York Times. He is the author of Babes in Toyland: The Making and Selling of a Rock and Roll Band, and other books ranging in content from minor league baseball to fundamentalist religion to linguistics. A graduate of Brown University, he lives in his hometown of Minneapolis.

Table of Contents

Prelude ix

1 Memoirs of an Amnesiac 1

2 Last Call 10

3 The Power of the Just-Dead 23

4 Kill 'Em and Leave 2.0 34

5 Daddy Dearest I: The Bad Son 54

6 Daddy Dearest II: The Good Son 77

7 "The Problem for Superheroes Is What to Do Between Phone Booths" 89

8 Bailer 101

9 High School 115

10 The Teenage Auteur 125

11 Purple Rain: "Dancin' in the Dark" 139

12 In This Life You're on Your Own 153

13 The Crack-Up, Act 1 159

14 The Crack-Up, Act 2 174

15 The Crack-Up, Act 3: A Has-Been is Born, 1998 184

16 The New Millennium: You Gotta Serve Somebody-Jehovah and Bob Dylan's Rabbi 201

17 "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" 211

18 Sonny Liston's Grave 218

19 Laughs, Lies, and Learning from Others 227

20 Minnesota Mean 241

21 Coda 260

Postscript-PrinceLit 289

Acknowledgments 299

Timeline 303

Endnotes 309

Bibliography 323

Index 326

Photo credits 336

Editorial Reviews

"Peculiar, intriguing, lyrical. An earnest vamp on Prince’s life."
—Kirkus Reviews

“Karlen draws from his recollections, notes and tapes, to paint an illuminating and intimate portrait of a supremely talented and complex artist.”
—Newsweek

From the Publisher

08/28/2020

Karlen's grandparents lived in the same Minneapolis neighborhood as a young Prince Rogers Nelson, leading to a chance meeting between the two boys outside a Dairy Queen. Years later, that encounter led Prince to pick Karlen to profile him for several Rolling Stone cover stories. For decades, Prince continued to confide in Karlen over late-night phone calls as the superstar retreated further into his Paisley Park fortress. The result of those confidences is a meandering biography and an account of what it was like to be Prince's almost friend. Karlen admits that Prince's mercurial personality and penchant for myth-making made him unknowable. Unfortunately, he does little to reveal much else about the provocative musician, filling this void with obscure references and cringe-worthy language, such as "Instead, let me tell you about where I felt aspects of his spirit." VERDICT Karlen's writing is too often barely coherent. Even devoted fans should skip.—Amanda Westfall, Emmet O'Neal P.L., Mountain Brook, AL

Library Journal

2020-08-04
A journalist acquaintance of Prince’s riffs on the musician’s Sphinx-like persona, heartbreaks, and basketball skills.

In this peculiar, intermittently intriguing blend of biography and memoir, Karlen makes clear that he didn’t know Prince (1958-2016) especially well. But, as he suggests, who did? They hung out in the same Minneapolis neighborhood as children, which helped Karlen gain Prince’s trust for three Rolling Stone features. Later, Karlen was recruited to script a movie, 3 Chains o’ Gold, that stitched together some of Prince’s early-1990s videos. More provocatively, the author notes that he wrote a document to accompany Prince’s as-yet-undiscovered will, which he claims is inexplicably buried somewhere at Paisley Park, Prince's compound outside Minneapolis. Over the years, they’d intermittently meet and connect via letters and late-night phone calls, but that’s not much to build a book around—especially since Karlen shares no details about the alleged will’s contents. Still, the author did a little reporting to supplement his files, connecting with Prince’s high school music teacher and Purple Rain–era band mates like André Cymone. Karlen also chronicles Prince’s deep-seated resentment of his high school basketball coach, who refused to play the infamously short budding musician despite his outstanding athletic talent. Prince could be peculiar and protective about his family history, concealing his father’s abuse and the death of his infant son from a genetic disorder while allowing slanderous rumors about his mother to perpetuate. That along with his numerous other idiosyncrasies, Karlen argues, were part of Prince’s “kayfabe,” a professional wrestling term for selling the sport’s fakeness as real. The author is a lyrical writer on these points, but ultimately, the narrative is an exercise in armchair psychology that has too many historical gaps to qualify as biography, and the author is too distant from his subject to deliver an intimate portrait.

An earnest vamp on Prince’s life that leaves its subject no less mysterious.

Kirkus Reviews