What Prince's Final Performance Was Really Like

There was never a rock star quite like Prince. Just about the best singer, dancer, guitarist, and songwriter of the late 20th century, Prince was an unforgettable, purple-clad presence with a knack for making classic songs, including "Little Red Corvette," "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World," "1999," "Let's Go Crazy," and "Purple Rain." Whether he was singing about love, lust, or getting funky, Prince always made it count. 

The tragic real-life story of Prince ended with the musician's death at age 57 in April 2016. Up until the end, Prince remained musically active, writing and recording songs and playing a series of shows in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States in the last months of his life. Seven days before he died, Prince played what tragically became an inadvertent finale. On April 14, 2016, Prince performed in lengthy, back-to-back concerts at a modest hall in Atlanta. It was packed with fans, and by most accounts, he gave a categorically captivating and astounding performance, playing chestnuts and jams from throughout the many stages of his storied career. Here's what it was like to see Prince perform for the very last time.

What would turn out to be the last 12 months of Prince's life were primarily occupied with the "Piano and a Microphone Tour." The audacious shows wouldn't feature a band, only Prince, and his only tools were a piano and a microphone. "You have to try new things. With the piano it is more naked, more pure. You can see exactly what you get," he told French source Funk U. Alone on stage, Prince was free to play whatever he wanted, and he planned to improvise his set list at every concert.

After some shows in Australia and New Zealand, the "Piano and a Microphone Tour" hit the U.S. in February 2016, with Prince performing for multiple nights at each stop, including in Oakland, Montreal, Toronto, and finally, Atlanta. While Prince could and did fill stadiums and arenas earlier in his career, most dates on what would constitute his final tour were staged in smaller venues, allowing the performer and a limited audience to be closer. The last shows Prince did were at the Fox Theatre, a place that could seat just 4,600 spectators. Among the things we learned about Prince after he died was that more shows had been scheduled but not announced, with concerts planned for Nashville, St. Louis, and Washington, D.C.

Prince's final concerts took place at Atlanta's Fox Theatre on April 14, 2016, but both 80-minute concerts were originally supposed to have happened a week earlier. The Atlanta shows were originally scheduled for April 7, 2016, at 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. On the day of the shows, however, Prince abruptly canceled. According to a statement by the Fox Theatre, the musician reported having contracted the flu. Reporting various symptoms in the days leading up to the show, Prince played both of the Atlanta shows while still feeling sick. Collaborator Judith Hill traveled with Prince to Atlanta, and later told police investigating the musician's death that he'd been emotionally despondent after the first concert and that he claimed to have nearly dozed off during the second.

Prince's plane back home to the Minneapolis area had to make an unscheduled emergency landing in Chicago. The cause: Prince had experienced a close brush with death days before his tragic demise, after an overdose of prescription medication.

The two last shows that Prince played by himself were mostly separate affairs. Both concerts featured extensive and expansive set lists, with only a little bit of overlap. The mash-up of early hits "Little Red Corvette" and "Dirty Mind" opened the first show but came late in the first chunk of the second show. Each concert included Prince's renditions of "Nothing Compares 2 U" and "How Come U Don't Call Me Anymore," as well as stripped-down versions of "Purple Rain" soundtrack cuts "I Would Die 4 U" and "Baby I'm a Star."

Prince also reworked some numbers from the first show for the later concert. "Diamonds and Pearls" and "The Beautiful Ones" appeared in the lengthy second encore of the first concert, but were absorbed into a medley with "Purple Rain" in the third and final encore of the second show. And in a bit of a rogue, cheeky moment, Prince played a cover of "Linus and Lucy" twice that night, that song being an instrumental jazz piece originally composed and performed by pianist Vince Guaraldi, which served as the theme song for "Peanuts" animated projects.

Over the course of a recording career that lasted from the late 1970s until the mid-2010s, Prince cut hundreds of records. Many songs appeared on albums, were released as singles, or were earmarked for other singers, making for a gargantuan catalog. On his final set of concert dates, the "Piano and a Microphone Tour," Prince didn't stick to a finite set list, promising that no two shows would ever be exactly the same. He'd play whatever he felt like on any given night, from universally known singles to album cuts to stuff he rarely if ever even performed live.

Prince stuck to that goal during his final concerts in Atlanta's Fox Theatre in April 2016. Because of the sheer volume of material available to perform on a whim, Prince couldn't be expected to remember every lyric and every cue of every song that ever came out of his head. To assist his very analog piano-and-voice presentation, he employed modern technology. Before the show, a stagehand placed an iPad atop Prince's piano. During the concert, Prince swiped through what were apparently the lyric sheets or notations to a substantial portion of his catalog. The screen wasn't visible to the audience, but Prince made frequent use of his iPad.

Throughout his life, and particularly in performances, Prince dressed well or at least uniquely and memorably. His last concert tour, in which he simply sang and played piano, meant that all of the attention and focus would rest squarely on him (with the exception of a projection screen), and Prince came up with a stage wardrobe to fit the occasion. For his last shows, Prince wore a long, loose-fitting, dark-colored tunic that left his arms unencumbered while playing the piano.

The musician accessorized his clothes with an eye toward both form and function. While wearing his hair in the traditional Afro style, he carried and held aloft for emphasis a cane, which he needed to assist in his walking after years of sustained hip damage. And while not everyone in the audience could see Prince's feet, he wore some very flashy footwear: white shoes with clear heels, which were wired with tiny lights that flashed when Prince moved his feet around.

Lacking the grandeur and spectacle of a stadium concert experience, Prince had to rely on himself and himself alone to entertain the crowd on his "Piano and a Microphone Tour." While he mostly just played a lot of songs during his final shows in April 2016, Prince frequently engaged with the audience in a one-sided conversation. He casually delivered many anecdotes about his personal life and musical history, such as speaking about his childhood in Minneapolis, and how he first learned to play the piano via lessons from his father. 

Prince also made some self-deprecating remarks, at one point comparing his singing face to that of classic tough-guy actor Edward G. Robinson. In the lead-up to "If I Was Your Girlfriend," Prince discussed some complicated romances from his past, while the stage was adorned with a photo of Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford from the 1973 romantic drama "The Way We Were." Then he spoiled the film's tragic ending. At another moment in the show, Prince had to head backstage for a break because he'd become so overwhelmed by his own songs. "Sometimes you forget how emotional the music is," he said (according to Billboard).

Neither Prince nor anyone inside Atlanta's Fox Theatre knew that it would be the iconic musician's last performance, but he played the show like it was a farewell. Over the course of the night, Prince performed two separate, full-length concerts presented as two sets. Altogether, Prince sang and accompanied himself on piano on more than 40 songs.

He certainly gave the fans what they wanted, playing many of his biggest hits from the '70s, '80s, and '90s, but he also played some deep cuts, non-singles, and obscurities that only hardcore fans would be familiar with. Prince did "Muse 2 the Pharaoh" from 2001's "The Rainbow Children," "Black Muse" from 2015's "HITnRUN Phase Two," and two soundtrack songs from his 1990 flop movie "Graffiti Bridge": "Elephants and Flowers" and "Joy in Repetition." There also happen to be a lot of songs you might not realize were written by Prince, and he performed a few during those last shows, including Chaka Khan's "I Feel For You," Jill Jones' "All Day, All Night," and Sinead O'Connor's "Nothing Compares 2 U." Peppered throughout both shows were covers Prince that enjoyed, including "Heroes" by David Bowie," "Waiting in Vain" by Bob Marley and the Wailers," and "A Case of You" by Joni Mitchell.

The first portion of each of Prince's final two solo concerts comprised 11 songs and 12 songs, respectively. But then Prince just kept playing. Following the first show, the musician busted out an additional 13 songs across two encores. He'd saved some of his best-known songs and biggest hits for these portions; the first encore included Prince's "Controversy," "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World," and "I Would Die 4 U," for example, while the next encore held space for "Diamonds and Pearls," "I Wanna Be Your Lover," and "Kiss," which ended the first concert proper.

After the second full set of the night, Prince came back and topped his earlier performance by sticking around for three encores. The hits just kept on coming, with "Cream" in the first encore and "If I Was Your Girlfriend" in the second. The third encore packed an emotional wallop. Prince sang the mournful breakup ballad "Sometimes It Snows in April" and then a medley consisting of "Diamonds and Pearls," "The Beautiful Ones," and his signature song, "Purple Rain." Then it was all over, and Prince never publicly performed again.