That time I saw Prince at the roller disco

Life is bursting with regrets and, for me, one of those was passing on the opportunity to interview Prince — a man who would later turn out to be one of pop music’s great recluses.

It was L.A. in 1979 and I was the new kid on the block at Billboard, the music-trade magazine which back then was considered the bible of the record business. One of the editors asked if I would be interested in talking to this kinda weird guy with one name from Minnesota who played all his own instruments. His label, Warner Bros., was trying to drum up interest and, if the offer had fallen to the low man on the totem pole, it seemed they were not having much luck.

I turned it down — and Prince blew up.

His self-titled album, the one Warner Bros. was hawking at the time, went on to be a smash, spawning the hit singles I Wanna Be Your Lover and Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad.

A year or two later, the label didn’t have to try so hard. Everybody was talking about the guy whose wardrobe only seemed to consist of trenchcoats and skimpy underwear. He had been on the Rick James tour and Saturday Night Live, his Dirty Mind album exploded — and he stopped granting interviews.

But this time, I wasn’t missing out, at least on his live show. In March 1981, he came back to L.A. to play the legendary skating rink called Flippers Roller Boogie Palace on Santa Monica Boulevard.

His blend of funk, rock, R&B and blatant sexuality was transformed live by Prince and his tight band into booming, bass-driven bliss. At a time when music was more rigidly segregated by race and genres (AOR, punk, hip-hop, disco, R&B), Prince blasted through the barricades with abandon.

Only a handful of other acts of the time — David Bowie, Kraftwerk, George Clinton’s Parliament-Funkadelic come to mind — could draw such a wide array of races, subcultures, styles and strange fashion choices under one musical big tent.

It was like he was living in future tense.

As he roared through the likes of When You Were Mine and Uptown, those of us lucky enough to be there knew this would be one of those shows that we’d still be talking about many years later when dusting off rock ’n’ roll war stories. We all knew he’d be playing much larger venues in the future. (As an exclamation point to that, he performed an incredible 21-night run in LA in 2011.)

Flippers is no more. It’s now a CVS.

Thursday, Prince was found dead at 57 at Paisley Park.

But the memory of him, that night in 1981, and the regret from two years earlier will live on.

This story was originally published April 21, 2016 at 3:56 PM with the headline "That time I saw Prince at the roller disco."