Passionate. Principled. Those are two of the words that music mogul Irving Azoff and I just said to each other in describing Prince and this incredible loss. But also, to me, he was the single most talented musician—certainly to come out of the 1980s, if not all of rock and roll. He could play every instrument, he heard every note—he was our Mozart. In the 1980s, he and Michael Jackson were in a silent (but to those of us who knew both of them, obvious) competition. One or the other was always asking me about one or the other, and it wasn’t a secret that they always knew what the other one was doing and counting how many Madison Square Garden shows each of them could do.

Whenever I saw Prince, I told him that he was a hugely underrated guitar player. He would smile—that enigmatic, mysterious smile—and say, “Why don’t you write that?” And I would invariably say, let me do a proper interview with you and I will. A proper interview, of course, at least for me, involves the use of a tape recorder, and while he started out his career being accessible to the press, as we got into the 1990s and beyond, Prince wouldn’t allow anyone to tape him. I argued that he would be quoted more accurately this way—I couldn’t scribble down what he said fast enough. I even offered to let him tape me taping him; alas, we never got around to it. But over the years, at various parties, late-night shows, backstage encounters, and the like, we talked about music and especially the music business—with which he was, for many years, at war. In the early 1990s, when he decided to call himself a “slave” to his record label, Warner Bros., and started using a symbol instead of his name, people thought he was crazy. People always thought he was crazy—but it was clear that he knew exactly what he was doing; not only musically, but in terms of owning his own work and fighting for artists’ rights. In 2001, when I asked him to be on Vanity Fair’s Music Issue group cover, he said he’d do it if all the other musicians on the cover could be in chains—to show they were slaves to their record labels—except for him and the indie artist Ani DiFranco. I told him there was no way I could ask Stevie Wonder or David Bowie or Joni Mitchell (all of whom were on that cover) to be in chains.

He wanted to be free of contracts, and was obsessed about ownership, telling me, “I refuse sample requests all the time on rap records because those people don’t own their own masters.” He started his shows whenever he wanted to. If he was rumored to show up at a club at midnight, we all knew it could be three A.M. before he actually got onstage. A party at his Los Angeles house in 2000 started at midnight, and while I waited with Will.i.am, Wyclef Jean, Fran Lebowitz, and others for Prince to come downstairs, his guitarist and bandmate Wendy Melvoin told me, “Oh, he’ll make his Norma Desmond appearance around three A.M. . . .," referring to the Gloria Swanson character in the great Hollywood movie Sunset Boulevard. As I recall, he came downstairs at around two A.M., greeted his guests, talked to me again about slavery and chains, played some pool, and then jammed with his band in the living room until five A.M. He loved collaborating with others: his “house” band at his Minneapolis club First Avenue was Morris Day and the Time, who came out of the James Brown tradition, and whose musical and visual influence is so clearly seen in Bruno Mars’s act today. He resurrected the great soul singer Mavis Staples’s career long before Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy worked with her. He told me, “Mavis wasn’t signed and had no life when I met her . . . same with George Clinton, and we have to keep these people musically alive.” He also said, “One day Lenny [Kravitz] and I were playing together and we said we wondered what it would be like to record together. But...then the managers would step in....”

Prince’s performance at the 2007 Super Bowl—fittingly, in the rain—was the most outstanding performance ever—ever—at that event. Not a lot of dancers, or production, or hubub, no Zumba routines or blowup dolls. Just a man, his guitar, and his music, and it shredded everyone who ever did it before. Or since. He told me once that he sang better than he spoke, and indeed, his speaking voice was very quiet. He was, actually, for all of his lyrics and that sexual persona, quite shy. He wore boots with heels—they didn’t make him that much taller physically, but musically, he was taller than anyone in the room. Any room. He told me that he didn’t like prizes or platinum albums, but he happily showed up and performed when he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004. I was sitting at a front table with Ahmet Ertegun, and when Prince went into an extraordinary guitar solo, Ahmet and I were both so excited that we jumped up—a standing ovation of two—and Prince winked at us from the stage. One of the things Prince said to me once was, “I’ve worked very hard for what I’ve got, but at the end of the day, you just hope that you’ve done God’s will.”