“Is this real?” flashed the text message on my cell phone.

My brother was asking, I suspect, more out of puzzlement than shock. He didn’t know I’d already stopped at the side of the road in an urgent scramble for more information. I thumbed the phone’s touch-screen. Google never seemed more critical.

It couldn’t be Prince.

But a web hoax would be disrespectful. After a nearly 40-year musical career, Prince was off limits for that sort of thing. Everyone knew that. Then the phone rang.

“Are you watching the news?” asked a friend.

I wasn’t. But I’d spend the next three days fixated between CNN, MSNBC and TMZ, an odd alphabet verifying that my all-time favorite performer and biggest artistic influence had left this realm.

Or so it seems as, a full year later, fans like me still hope for the ultimate encore. He was known for that type of thing, you know.

“Detroit, are you crazy?” he asked in 2015 when we howled and beckoned him back to the Fox Theatre’s stage for a second or third time, late into the night.

Of course, we’re crazy was the unspoken reply. You told us to “go crazy” in 1984, remember?

Among his other last words to his Purple Legion in Detroit were some I can’t forget. He told us to take care of each other until he came back. Never had it crossed my mind that the man whose music I’ve loved for more than 30 years – whose voice I’ve heard, literally, twice as much as the voices of many close relatives – wouldn’t return.

So I was torn about the idea of going to hear The Revolution, Prince’s early and best-known band, when their tour hit Detroit May 20. It’s strange to mourn someone you never personally knew, but who moved you, literally and figuratively. I’d read in an interview with Wendy, his former guitarist, how she and the other band members concluded that getting back together to tour, after more than two decades, was the therapy they needed to get through their own hurt. I wasn’t sure it would help mine.

About 9 p.m., in a standing-room-only mix of Prince t-shirts, purple hair dye, and even a head-to-toe impersonator, I found out.

“We’re home,” Wendy’s voice announced as darkness lifted over the stage. Though she now wore the glasses of a secretary or librarian, she looked well-preserved after 32 years since the world watched her challenge and irritate “The Kid,” Prince’s character in the film, Purple Rain, which made him and The Revolution movie stars.

The band soon jammed into “Computer Blue,” the Purple Rain soundtrack’s moodiest song, followed by “America,” from “Around the World in a Day” and “Mountains,” from the Parade album. Brown Mark had no dialogue throughout the Purple Rain film’s 111 minutes, so it was a bit of a treat to hear him switching off with Wendy on lead vocals, but most impressive was the band itself. Note for note, The Revolution played in top form, reminding us what qualified them to tour and record with a musical genius. It was as if I’d pulled out my old Prince albums and been instantly transported back in time to my parents’ house, where I first blasted them in the basement.

But the stage somehow looked strange. I’d known every single band member to look for since I was younger than 12, too young to listen to Prince’s early adult lyrics, really. I scanned for Bobby, Lisa, Dr. Fink, Brown Mark, and Wendy. Who was missing? I caught myself as that painful reminder of why I’d hesitated to check out the concert in the first place hit me in the heart.

Off to the right, however, was a face I’d practically ignored. Detroit’s own guitarist Rob Bacon held his own with most of the original players responsible for hits like “Controversy,” “Delirious,” “Raspberry Berry,” and “Kiss,” all of which the band covered without disappointing. A highlight was Brown Mark thumping through one of Prince’s most noteworthy bass lines on “Let’s Work,” adding a solo you won’t hear on the original record.

Mint Condition lead singer Stokley Williams clearly came to party, owning the stage at times as he delivered lofty falsetto guest vocals on “Uptown,” then going alto for “DMSR,” which began a medley.

“We’re gonna send up a smoke signal, because this was his city,” Wendy announced before beginning “Paisley Park,” from Around the World in a Day. “He was born in Minneapolis,” she said, “but he’s a Detroit boy.”

And Detroit embraced him.

“Prince was not a musician,” wrote Highland Park historian Paul Lee, my long-time mentor. “He was a liberatory cultural force, who freed a lot of people – mentally, emotionally, sexually, even politically by affirming people’s sense of their own worth and possibilities. His loss is incalculable.”

The concert’s most bittersweet moment arrived as Wendy labored through acoustic guitar, beneath the eerie lyrics of “Sometimes it Snows in April,” Prince’s sad tale of a friend’s death, recorded long before we’d say goodbye to him on April 21, 2016. I thought of other concerts, of a 90’s show where I watched him climb a statue inset to the front of the Fox Theatre, before he pecked it on the lips. He leaped, unharmed, back down to the stage, landing on those high heels, later rumored to be the source of chronic hip pain. If addiction to opioids caused us to lose him, had he ultimately sacrificed his body, his life, for us?

I wonder if he knew there were hundreds of us there, at this informal family reunion with his band, who would have literally shouldered his burden. There were thousands more in Detroit, millions worldwide, who would have gladly divided his pain into particles to carry ourselves if this were possible to keep him singing. I’ll never know what he really knew. But The Revolution, who closed roughly 90 minutes with a trilogy from their famous film’s playbook, with “Purple Rain” and an encore of “I Would Die 4 U” and “Baby I’m a Star,” gave me musical comfort.

I’m glad they came “home.” Even minus one.

Lead photo by Ron Harris

  Highland Park historian Paul Lee, musical legend Prince, Prince, Purple Rain, Rob Bacon, Stokley Williams