In 1999, my old pal Gil Kaufman interviewed Prince for the pioneering Web magazine Addicted to Noise. Today at Billboard, Gil writes about his five minutes with Prince:
No one else was in the room, so I was clearly next. But I had to wait for this dude to … stop dancing around the coffee table with Prince. Man, they were both pretty into it. “It’s really not a great dance song,” I thought more than once as the boogeying just went on, and on. Once you started it, it seemed like it would have been hard to just stop.
It was all pretty goofy. The publicist whispered the guy’s name and affiliation into my ear as I stared down at my long list of questions and notes, reminding myself to be cool. Not sure why she did that. But… man, the dancing. I just couldn’t see myself doing that. It’s a calculated choice you make. Dance and maybe you get that extra, extra couple of minutes. Don’t dance and you potentially score one to two stock answers before getting yanked or your clock freezes at exactly five minutes and there’s no chance to go into bonus time. I didn’t dance. I sort of nodded my head a bit, respectfully, but not too much.
Like that scene in every ’80s movie where the needle scratches and the room goes dead silent, the volume dropped hard and Prince looked over at me.
“You don’t like this one?” he said, implying that my non-dancing was an offense of the highest order.
“The Time Prince Got Mad At Me Because I Wouldn’t Dance” (Billboard)