Mattie Shaw doesn’t remember being introduced to John L. Nelson back in the 1950s. She just kind of knew him from dances at the Phyllis Wheatley settlement house. It was where blacks on the north side of Minneapolis often socialized. Nowadays, of course, they’d call the place a community center, which, in fact, they do.

Nelson, a lifelong musician, had a little jazz trio and he’d been around quite a bit. Shaw was a singer and the mother of one child. Nelson hired her for his Prince Roger Trio.

Even though there was a sixteen-year age difference between them, Nelson and Shaw eventually married, and she dropped out of the group. He worked as a plaster molder at Honeywell, an electronics firm, and played piano in his group or wherever he could get a gig. Two and a half years after they married, Mattie, then twenty-four, gave birth to a son, and they named him after the band: Prince Roger Nelson.

He was born at 6:17 P.M., June 7, 1958, at a Jewish hospital in south Minneapolis. Mom called him “Skipper,” because she called her forty-year-old husband “Prince” and “because he [her son] was small in size and he just was real cute—he was a darling baby.”

Of course, there was plenty of music around the house and young Skipper was naturally attracted to it. “He could hear music even from a very early age,” his mother said. “When he was three or four, we’d go to the department store and he’d jump on the radio, the organ, any type of instrument there was. Mostly the piano and organ. And I’d have to hunt for him, and that’s where he’d be—in the music department.”

When he was five, he composed his first song by banging two rocks together. A year later, he was telling his mother he was going to be a star. At age eight, he had a piano lesson with a woman across the street, but he refused to go back. His mom wanted to know why. “Because she wants me to play what she wants me to play, and I want to play what I want to play.” Even back then, the little Prince had his own ideas.

The first seven or eight years appear to have been a pleasant middle- class existence for Prince and his sister, Tyka, two years his junior. However, in the few in-depth interviews he has given, Prince has talked about a tormented childhood with parents who fought. His mother, who holds a master’s degree in social work and is now a social worker for the Minneapolis school system, says she and her husband had “normal disagreements.” Every kid invariably has something he or she wishes would be different in their childhood, she observes in commenting on her son’s remarks. Moreover, she notes that Prince was young when he granted his interviews and implies that he tended to make things up.

For instance, both Mattie and John Nelson, although light-skinned, consider themselves blacks. Yet Prince has said in interviews that his father was part Italian and his mother a mixture of things. ‘1 think all blacks are racially mixed,” says Mattie. “My grandfather, his grandfather—it was a racially mixed family, both my family and his dad’s family. I never did a family tree.”

John Nelson left when Prince was about ten, and soon thereafter a stepfather came into the picture. Prince didn’t get along with him. Hayward Baker apparently tried to win over his young stepson with gifts, but Prince wanted companionship. So he moved in with his dad on the south side of Minneapolis and then bounced to an elderly aunt’s home.

On the south side, Prince lived in another pocket of black families. There was no black ghetto per se in Minneapolis, the population of which is less than 3 percent black, just concentrations of black families. The households on the north side were sprinkled with pockets of Jewish families, whereas the southsiders mixed with Lutherans of Scandinavian descent. Northside folks, who tended to be lower-income, liked to tease their brothers and sisters on the south side about being bourgeois. Prince got to know both sides of town.

On the surface, Prince seemed to be a happy kid. But inside, something was churning. Something was missing. He didn’t have a home life like the other kids. He’d see his dad on weekends, but although his Aunt Olivia was good to him, she was just too old to give him the proper attention. He hung around a lot with the jocks from school, like his stepbrother Duane Nelson and Paul Mitchell. They watched football and pro wrestling on television (Prince would imitate the local announcer interviewing characters like Mad Dog Vachon and the Crusher), played an electric football game, or shot baskets at nearby Bryant Junior High School. When he wasn’t at his dad’s, communing with the organ or piano, Prince was likely to be at the Mitchells’ a couple blocks away. He’d arrive at 7 AM., go to school with his buddies, and then go to practice—and sometimes stay at the Mitchells till bedtime.

At one point, the guys went through a phase when they used to tickle and tease their moms. You know, it was a sign of warmth and love and fun. However, there was no mom in Prince’s life, so he used to tickle Mrs. Mitchell. “A lot of people felt sorry for him,” said Paul Mitchell. “He would get on people’s nerves sometimes; I think it was just his frustration lashing out at people. I think he was trying to be cute and get attention. He didn’t get it at home. We kind of helped him. I think at times he had to feel left out because he just didn’t have anyone. But he never talked about the family problems, even to Duane.”

Duane, who was in the same grade as Prince, is not a blood relative. His mom married Prince’s dad. Because Prince’s parents divorced and remarried people who themselves were divorced, his family tree has many twisted limbs: He has one sister, one half-brother and two step-siblings through his mother’s second marriage, and four half- and step-siblings through his dad’s second marriage.

Prince had a big family but no real home. He was the kind of kid who would just show up at someone’s house at dinner time and be a welcome if uninvited guest. In a way, he was spoiled.

Sometimes he’d start saying something about his family to a friend, then suddenly he would stop. He just couldn’t get it out.

“He’s got to have some kind of antipeople feelings,” observed the Reverend Art Erickson, who supervised youth activities with which Prince was involved at Park Avenue Methodist Church. “He told me a story once about how his stepfather locked him in his room for six weeks and wouldn’t let him out and the only thing in there was a bed and a piano, so he learned to play the piano. Personally, I think a lot of his background feeds into his life. In high school, he retreated into himself quite a bit—he would eat lunch alone and he became very reflective. The divorce, a lot of things hurt Prince. And out of that hurt probably comes a lot of his expressions today—a lot of anticu Iture, antifamily, antiestablishment, anti-institutional feelings.”

If Prince was religious, it was in his own personal way. He spent time at the neighborhood church and attended the obligatory Bible study sessions and choir practice. But he seemed more interested in the basketball team. In fact, when he was in the ninth grade, he and Mitchell coached a team of fifth and sixth graders at the church.

However, shortly thereafter, Prince bounced back to the north side to Bernadette Anderson’s big brick house. She was a divorcee raising six kids of her own while trying to get a degree at the University of Minnesota, yet she took in Prince. He wasn’t exactly a stranger to her—her exhusband had played in a band with Prince’s dad. And now Prince became almost a brother to Anderson’s son, Andre. She gave the two teenagers freedom to do whatever they wanted in the basement, as long as they made it to school the next morning. Both young men have told tales of sexual encounters of many kinds, which may be part fantasy and part reality. One thing for sure, though, Prince and Andre listened to a lot of music: Grand Funk Railroad, Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone, and Santana.