 Howdy, I had no plans on doing a video for a Saturday this month. I've been doing a video a day for the month of April, Monday through Friday. So this is an unscheduled video, but it's one that I had to do. Believe it or not, this is a purple shirt. It's kind of hard to tell because of the lighting, but this is a purple shirt and that means that I'm doing a little tribute video to Prince, who unexpectedly passed away on Thursday at age 57 and I'm going to be 57 in a few more months, so that's kind of freaky. I just got to tell you the truth. And you know, Prince is basically one of the three geniuses of my era. I'm going to say pretty much that kind of term because there's going to be people who are going to see other people from their time period as geniuses, but Prince is in my top three. The other two being Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder. I mean, these are just all brilliant people and Prince was one of those guys. Prince was one of those guys who all he needed was a sound and he can make a song out of it. And there's very few people who, you know, been able to do that type of thing. But I remember the first time I saw Prince, it was on the Midnight Special. As you know, folks today, you have no idea about this show, but Midnight Special used to come on late Friday nights and it would have musical acts and it would run by a guy named Don Kirschner. And so you would have, you know, new acts, you'd have acts that you're already kind of new. And so this one night, and I'm in college and this is back in 1981, I don't remember exactly which year, and they named this guy Prince, who's coming out. So here's this guy who shows up on TV basically wearing panties. He's a little skinny man, kind of this girly hair, he's got this little thin mustache. And he's wearing these little panties and he's got these boots that he's wearing. And he's just playing the heck out of his song and we didn't know what to make of this. I mean, it's a different time period than now. So we had no idea what do you make of this guy. It was just so freaky. And then his song, that song didn't actually do all that well on the charts, but then he had a couple of others that started to make it little red Corvette and some other things. And then he basically turned into Prince, the big Prince. I mean, it was all started with Michael Jackson when he had the thriller album that just was a mega monster. And then all these other acts, people who had real talent came out and they all had mega albums. And Prince had Purple Rain, which was a mega album. And then he had the movie that was a mega movie. It's not one of the best movies in the world. Trust me, it's not a best, it's not a great movie. If you're looking at trying to evaluate movies, but it was fascinating. I mean, all the musical stars that were in this thing, you had the time and just a host of other folks. This was basically Minnesota Funk at its best. And it was an interesting premise. It was kind of a semi-autobiography. It was kind of about him and kind of not. Sometimes just can't say the words. The strange thing is that over the years, Prince has modified himself. He had that time period where he was fighting with his publisher. So he basically removed his real name and he went by this symbol. I don't even know where he came up with that. But that was his thing. I mean, Prince was one of those kind of guys. And there's a lot of songs out there that people don't know that Prince wrote. And he wrote for anybody. I mean, he wrote for Funk. He wrote for Pop. He wrote for Country. He was just amazing. It was his music that was in the first Batman movie to start Michael Keaton. And in my opinion, it was his music that helped him make that movie what it was. I know some people today will look back at that movie and say, oh, this was corny or whatever. You know what? That was a fantastic movie to us back in the 80s. So Prince was just pretty iconic. And he's one of those guys where his royal badness, we used to call him because he was kind of this weird iconoclastic type of person. Where he would do all this stuff with the sensuality and sexuality. And he would just have this really nasty stuff. And then all of a sudden he would come out with a song that was like overtly Christian. And like, what is it with this guy? And you know, some of his best music were the album cuts. Songs that he never released as singles. And I've got a bunch of those that I loved. Now, here's one of those things that time does to you that really messes you up. I used to have the movie Purple Rain on VHS. Can't find it. I bought five or six Prince albums. Don't have any of them anymore. I had a VHS of Prince doing the live concert right here in Syracuse at the Carrier Dome back in the 80s. I had that. No idea where it is. I don't know if they'll put it out. Again, now that he's passed away, maybe they'll put it out on DVD. It was an amazing concert. I was out of town then, so I didn't get to go. Hey, you know what? I went to Vegas. What can I say? But, you know, he was just amazing. This was one of those guys. Well, think about it. I mean, he was still touring now, you know, over 35 years later. He was still this big touring star. He was still putting out music. You know, he was the first artist who basically decided, you know what? I'm just going to write my music and I'm going to sell it myself off my website. I'm not even going to give it to a publisher. He went from being this multi-million dollar seller to this 100,000 or too high, I think he sold 250,000, 300,000 copies of one of his albums and made more money because he cut out all the middlemen. He made a ton of money. He basically is kind of the precursor to all the people now who are selling their music digitally. Prince did it first. Now, of course, later on, he got into these battles with people talking about copyright and all that kind of stuff and whatever, using his music in videos, all that kind of stuff. Hey, you know, what are you going to do? He became a Jehovah's Witness, which means he passed up an operation he really needed for his hip replacement because this dude used to do some stuff. I mean, if you ever saw the movie, Propo Rain, you see him leaping off a piano into a split. Oh my God, dude. And he did that a lot. I mean, if there ever a dude needed a hip replacement, that was him. So here we are. This is a couple of days later. We're not going to know the autopsy results. There's some people who had speculated over drug, no, scrap that. If it comes out that it's drug related, I will be the most surprised person in the world. It's not going to happen. I'm not really sure what it is. He'd been complaining about being sick for a while. So obviously, there's something related there. Don't really know what it is. He was a private guy, but he was himself. Prince, that's the one thing you have to say. He was always totally himself. And he's, like I said, one of the top three musical geniuses of my lifetime. So this is my tribute to Prince. I'd like to know what you guys think. I mean, my goodness, it was a weird three days. I mean, I'm doing this tribute to Prince. On one of my blogs, I did a tribute to Dwayne Pearl Washington, who was basically, well, he was a Syracuse University basketball star. And he was a New York City basketball star. And in a weird way, he put Syracuse really on the map for good. And then China, Joni Lauer, who was a wrestler. People say these things about professional wrestling, whatever. But she was a big deal back in the 90s, during the time where the WWE was really starting to take over. And then she had issues in her life. She had issues before wrestling. Then she had issues later on. You feel bad, but that was a wild 24 hours of just bam, bam, bam. Like what? I mean, Pearl, we kind of knew because he was sick. Joni Lauer, she was probably leaning that way, but it's still a shock. And then Prince and the other two were younger than me. And Prince was my age. I'm really starting to feel old. Anyway, I'd like to know what your thoughts are on Prince. Y'all let me know. And RIP Prince Rogers Nelson, y'all take care.