“Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this [Ultimate Experience Tour of Paisley Park].”

Okay.  Okay. Those aren’t the lyrics.  But I’d like to think that Prince would have just laughed if he heard me singing the altered version in his honor.  

Prince gave his fans a lifetime of fresh music, fashion, and entertainment. His passing on April 21, 2016 feels just like yesterday.  During our stay in central Minnesota in September 2022, I wanted to pay homage to Prince by visiting Paisley Park.

Here’s what I learned about Paisley Park (and what you should know before going there):

1. What Kind of Prince Fan am I? Casual or hard core?

2. About Paisley Park

3. What are the Paisley Park Photo Policies?

4. Paisley Park Layout

   • Paisley Park Atrium and Adjacent Rooms

   • Paisley Park Recording Studios

     • Studio A at Paisley Park

     • Studio B at Paisley Park

     • Studio C at Paisley Park

   • The Influence Wall

   • The Shoes! at Paisley Park

5. Photo Time:  Where you take photos at Paisley Park

   • Sound Stage

   • NPG Music Club

6. Concluding Thoughts on Paisley Park

Confession.  I’m just a casual Prince fan.  I was in junior high when 1999 (1982) and Purple Rain (1984) came out.  I purchased the cassette tapes, and liked them enough that I later bought the CDs as an adult.   I know the lyrics to mainstream hits like Raspberry Beret and Kiss, but only from the radio. I could tell you that Prince had bandmates named Wendy and Lisa because of Computer Blue (and that probably had a crush on them that I didn’t fully appreciate until later in life). BUT, beyond those ladies and Morris Day and the Time, I don’t think I could name many more of his bandmates or associates.  

Fun Fact: Prince's real name was Prince Rogers Nelson. I guess he was destined for fame.

I was hoping that by booking the $175/person (with taxes/fees) three-hour “Ultimate Experience Tour“ at Paisley Park, my casual fandom might immediately turn into something more. I suppose it did, but not in the way I expected. Sure, several purple-clad superfans in my 18-person group wept, hummed, and smiled A LOT.  A pair of middle-aged sisters even made the trek from Maryland just to see Paisley Park, one of them in a wheelchair with her purple headwrap declaring this to be on her “bucket list.” So yes, for more dedicated fans, the tour is clearly worth it. For me, I’m not so sure……

Constructed in mid-1980s after Purple Rain, Paisley Park is located in Chanhassen, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis, where Prince was born and raised.  The name Paisley Park shares its name with a song from Prince's 7th studio album Around the World In a Day (1985):  

Admission is easy, just say you
Believe and come to this
Place in your heart
Paisley Park is in your heart

Prince loved paisley because it has so many different sizes and colors (not just purple).  In building Paisley Park, Prince envisioned a sanctuary space of love and peace, without limits on his creativity.

The 65,000 ft^2 space served as both his home and recording studio.  Surprisingly, the building’s exterior looks like large office complex, and isn’t homey or inviting at all.  Stark white metal panels. Few windows. Little landscaping. Prince valued his privacy, and the design of Paisley Park seems to have been created with that in mind.

In some respects, the “Ultimate Experience” tour doesn’t feel very ultimate or inviting either. The tour does not involve any of Prince’s living quarters, which are on the second floor of Paisley Park.  Likewise, the tour does not involve the famous “Vault,” where Prince kept his archival recordings and other documents. Instead, with all of the tour options, visitors only see areas on the first floor that Prince considered to be public and that have a very commercial feel.  I didn’t know that going in, and perhaps that is one reason why I was a little disappointed in the tour. Indeed, the museum’s website emphasizes both the “home” and “studio” aspects.  My point is that it would have been nice to better understand the limited scope of the tour from the Paisley Park website.

The Paisley Park website DOES make it very clear about its restrictive photo policy.  Before we entered the building’s foyer, we were asked to place our phone and cameras in to a locked bag that we could carry with us and would be unlocked later in the tour Basically, we would be able to take photos in just two areas of Paisley Park: the concert venue and the night club. I knew about the photo policy going in, but that is the only tour I’ve ever been on that takes such precautions. 

The restrictive photo policy is probably consistent with how Prince tried to protect some aspects of his life.   Prince had a long history of suing people about his name, image, and likeness and other intellectual property (but often dropping the lawsuits later).  For example, in 2007, Stephanie Lenz made a viral 29-second YouTube video of her toddler dancing to part of Prince’s Let’s Go Crazy.  Prince let his publisher, Universal Music, know that he was not happy about the video.  Universal asked YouTube to remove the video pursuant to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and then Lenz sued, saying that the publisher had not taken into account “fair use.”  In what copyright lawyers like me refer to as the “dancing baby case,” the appellate court agreed, essentially ruling against Prince.  As another example, in 2014, Prince sued nearly a dozen online users for unauthorized bootlegs of his recordings in Prince v. Chodera.  Some of these people just linked to the unauthorized recordings using Google’s Blogger Platform or Facebook.  Less than a month later, he withdrew the lawsuit because of a big public backlash.   Not surprisingly, visitors to Paisley Park won’t learn any of that in the “Ultimate Experience” tour. There really isn’t time for IP disputes, and besides, the tour largley avoids Prince’s controveries (more on that below).

As someone who practiced intellectual property law for 25+years, I don’t hold anything against Prince for aggressively enforcing his intellectual property. Having said that, the inability to take any pictures (even for private non-commercial use) throughout much of the tour does detract from experience.

It’s difficult to review the Paisley Park :”Ultimate Experience” tour without photos. While I would have like to use my own photos, the next best thing are probably those that Carver County released in connection with the investigation of his death. Thus, most of the photos in this blog are from Carver County. Although Carver County no longer hosts the photos on its website, many of them can be found online from other sources. One of the best repositories that I found was this website.

Now…on with a review the “Ultimate Experience” tour!

After congregating in the lobby, the “Ultimate Experience” tour begins with a short trip to the atrium. On the way, we first encounter a wall filled with numerous framed recording awards (I liked the gold-encassed cassette tapes the best!) and a mural of Prince’s eyes looking down from above.   The tour guide does not mention that the behind the solid wall, there used to be an opening with an elevator. This is the elevator where Prince died of a fentanyl overdose. While I understand that the museum wants the tour to focus on Prince’s wonderful life and not his death, the museum’s shouldn’t sugar-coat where or how he died. I think it deserves at least a mention.

Fun Fact: Prince’s doves, “Divinity" and "Majesty", are credited for "ambient singing" on the album One Nite Alone.

The atrium is comprised of pyramidal glass skylights, cloud-filled walls, and even a couple of caged doves on the second floor. Our tour guide tried to get the doves to sing for us, but they weren’t having it. We are told that on special occasions, Prince’s ashes are brought out for display in the atrium in a customized ceramic container that is a scale replica of Paisley Park. We collectively think to ourselves about how the doves likely let out a good cry then.  The atrium floor features Prince’s “Love Symbol #2” to which Prince famously changed his name in 1993 during a lengthy recording contract dispute with his label, Warner Brothers.  

Fun fact: Even though Prince was just 5’3”, he played on his high school basketball team.

There are several small rooms directly off the atrium.  There’s a small kitchen with a purple vending machine (not for public use), diner booths, and a TV where Prince reportedly watched a lot of basketball, including Timberwolves and Lynx games.  His favorite food was reportedly pancakes, and because Prince was a vegetarian, they still do not served meat in the museum.

Just off the atrium, closet-like rooms for Dirty Mind and Controversy and full rooms for Diamonds and Pearls and Lovesexy contain costumes, instruments, other artifacts, and of course, the music from the album. Our tour guide tells us that these rooms were were largely created while Prince was alive and emphasizes that Prince envisioned Paisley Park to one day be a museum.

Another room just off the atrium contains Prince’s business office. Much of the room is gold (the rest being purple, duh!), including the walls and vinyl floors.   There’s a pile of books with a Bible on top, a dimpled portrait of Jimi Hendrix, and a stack of records Prince purchased shortly before his death.   A photo shrine to a small girl catches my eye.  The child is Yara Shahidi, the daughter of Afshin Shahidi and now the star of Black-ish and Grown-ish.  The tour guide tells us that the roped off area is pretty much how it looked when Prince lived there. (That’s an exaggeration because the room has been tidied up quite a bit!)

Fun Fact: The Pantone Color Institute created a special purple in Prince’s honor, aptly named Love Symbol #2

We proceed to an editing bay, where Prince would review his concert footage.  We sit in director’s chairs, the lights go out, and Nikki starts to grind.  No.  Wait.  We watch a VERY LOUD unreleased video from Prince’s concerts and other “insider” footage. I don’t consider myself to have any hearing issues but I cover my ears at times because it was SO LOUD. On the way out, I spot some ear plugs and later wish I would have grabbed some.  

Our “Ultimate Experience” tour also includes a stop by three of Prince’s recording studios.  On the way to the first studio, we encounter a purple meditation room and watch a small clip of Prince’s famous interview with Oprah.   This “Galaxy Room” has asymetrical curved walls painted with stars, planets, and what appear to be a backwards version Prince’s Love Symbol #2 illuminated by ultraviolet light. Our tour continues, and we are all amped to see where Prince’s music was made!

Studio B (the first studio stop on our tour) includes one live room, one vocal room and a central room with a huge 48-track recording device filled with all sorts of buttons, equalizer slides, and cords.  It looks like the mother of all mother boards to me.   Prince recorded and then edited many of the various tracks in his songs (drums, bass, guitar, vocals, etc) using the very heavy analogue tape reels.  Our tour guide shows us a large reel, which would house about 15 minutes worth of music.  To edit the tapes, Prince himself would physically cut and reattach the tape pieces together.  Today, most people (like me) lay tracks digitally using fancy software like Audacity.   Here, I really appreciate how Prince not only created music, but perfected the music to his liking.

Studio B sits on the other side of the men’s bathroom wall.  Prince reportedly would pump up the volume so much in the control room that the he cracked the tiles in the bathroom next door.  The wall was repaired, re-cracked, and re-repaired several times because no one wanted to tell Prince he couldn’t turn it up to 11!

The live room of Studio B includes a large photo mural of Prince with his bandmates, 3RDEYEGIRL.   A custom Yamaha purple baby grand piano that matches the color of favorite couch of Prince’s sits behind a rope. A white hat rests on the piano, and our tour guide tells us that the hat was there on the day he passed. 

Our tour guide takes 3-4 photos of each of us standing on a purple “X” by a purple guitar with Prince looming overhead. We are encouraged to play ping pong while we wait.   Yes, Prince loved ping-pong and was apparently pretty good at it.  Here’s where visitors imagine what it would be like to be in the recording studio with ping-pong breaks.   

Fun Fact: Prince played Micheal Jackson in a game of ping pong in December 1985.

Studio A (~1500 square feet) is larger than Studio B (~1000 square feet) is comprised of parquet wood floors and granite-walled and wood-walled isolation rooms that each provide different acoustical spaces for artists.  While granite walls are better for enhancing digital recording, the wooden rooms are better for the acoustics of resonating instruments.  One of the isolations room holds a drum set, another room contains various guitars and microphones, and we are told a third room was used for live horn recordings . Our guide tells us that Studio A has hosted the likes of Madonna, James Brown, R.E.M, and Aretha Franklin.  While in Studio A, we hear unreleased music recorded by Prince for a jazz album he was working on just before his passing. It is a moving moment.

The control room for Studio A sits behind a glass wall and we cannot go in there. We see a large drum machine and Yamaha DX7 synthesizer Prince used to make  “When Doves Cry” in 1983.  In one of the isolation rooms, a music stand holds a notebook with handwritten lyrics to the last song Prince was creating before he passed.  Five Grammy awards are on display, and one of them is missing the metal plaque at the bottom. 

Studio C is a dance/choreography studio with basketball flooring that Prince also used to play hoops.  The room houses rotating special exhibits, and during our visit, the room is filled with photographs of taken by Randee St. Nicholas over the course of 25 years of Prince’s life.   A chandelier made from a drum dangles from the center of the room, which is on loan from a former drummer.     

Just outside of Studio A is the Influence Wall commissioned by Prince in 2007.   Prince is flanked by artists that influenced him on one side (Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Wonder, Sly Stone, Chaka Khan, Joni Mitchel, Carlos Santana, and James Brown) and band members and artists he influenced (Lisa and Wendy from The Revolution, Cat Glover, Apollonia, Vanity 6, Morris Day and The Time, Sheila E. and others) on the other side.   This is where I feel really old because I don’t know many of the names that our tour guide mentions. The “superfans” in the group nod their heads at the names.

My favorte part of the tour is The Beautiful Collection: Prince's Custom Shoes.  The exhibit includes more than 300 pairs of custom-made shiny, dazzly, high-heeled shoes.  Many of the shoes are labeled to indicate when Prince wore them, and there is a video playing in the background showing Prince in action.  Several shoes have “friction burns” from all of Prince’s skipping, sliding, and dancing.  We learn that at some point, the designers included a metal brace between the sole and the heel.   Here, I am reminded of Prince’s wide-ranging fashion sense, but also just how hard this man worked.  

Fun Fact: Prince wore a women’s size 5 1/2 or 6.    

Many of the shoes are displayed on a 3D-printed baby grand piano that was created for the exhibit.  The piano is comprised of 45 individual parts fused together.  The legs on the piano are replica Cloud Guitars, one of Prince’s most iconic guitar shapes. I marvel at this masterpiece.  

Fun Fact: The “Love Symbol #2” is an amalgam of both the Venus and Mars gender symbols.

After going through some more award-studded hallways, we arrive at another lobby area where we watch a brief video on Prince’s name change to the Love Symbol #2.  To the best of my recollection, this is really the only time that our tour directly addresses one of Prince’s controveries. Our phones are unlocked from their cases and we proceed to the four-story-high, 12,500-square-foot soundstage that is connected to the NPG Music Club.

The Sound Stage is where Prince practiced for his live performances.  We are encouraged to listen and dance as we watch old video footage, including his legendary 2007 Super Bowl half-time show.  The room is filled with two cars (a light blue Bentley and a purple Plymouth Prowler), the motorcycles from Purple Rain, a bicycle, a few pianos, and several over-the-top outfits that Prince wore.  Because people can take photos and videos of this area, this is what you will find when you search the internet for details.   The “Ultimate Experience” includes non-alcoholic beverages served on a purple couch in the corner of the room, and access to some additional artifacts in a trunk that our guide tells us not to photograph. 

Fun Fact: The Paisley Park Soundstage was used to shoot scenes from Grumpy Old Men and commercials for companies like Burger King, McDonald’s, and various car companies.

The tour ends in the NPG Music Club (named for the New Power Generation), where Prince performed and threw parties for the surrounding community. Today, Paisley Park occasionally offers an “After Dark” experience that allows guests to enjoy a live dance party in the NPG Music Club.  There’s a mural there above one of the seats were many in out tour group (including us) decide is good photo op.

Hold on. Like most commercial tour, our tour of Paisley actually ends with the gift shop. There isn’t anything special about the gift shop insofar as all of the shirts, hats, vinyl records, and other trinkets can probably be purchased online. Kasie finds some ping pong balls that look cute. However, because we live in our RV on a full-time basis, we don’t have the room for more stuff so we didn’t spend that much time in the gift area and don’t purchase anything.

Outside of the building, there’s also a memorial fence where fans can leave notes and other items to honor Prince. The curators at Paisley Park reportedly collect the items every now and then and preserve them.

So…what did I think of the Paisely Park “Utimate” tour? I certainly came away with a MUCH greater appreciation for the volume of works that Prince created — in music, fashion, film, and so on. The Paisley Park tour is a well-orchestrated teaser that left me wanting to know more about the “real” Prince. AFTER the tour, I’ve now spent countless hours listening to his music and reading about his life. Yet, in many respects, in contrast to the Paisley Park tour, to get a better sense of how Prince lived, I learned more about the “real” Prince by reading his wiki page and then viewing some of the Carver County crime scene photos.

Because the second floor and Vault were off-limits, the tour seems superficial and white-washed at times. Fans care about his music, but they also care deeply about the life that Prince lead — even though that was quite messy and confusing at times. Paisley Park feels like it’s run by Prince’s PR firm; it largely ignores the complexities and controversies of his life and death.

The Utimate Experience at Paisley Park is pricey at $175/person (with taxes and fees). I don’t regret spending that much money, but in hindsight, I’m not sure I got my money’s worth. For casual Prince fans like me, consider doing a cheaper tour option ($48/person + taxes/fees) that will likely cover the highlights in just 1.5 hours and then do some more reading and listening afterwards.

I also hope that Paisley Park revises its restrictive photo and video policy. To truly remember and appreciate Paisely Park, it really helps to have photos and videos to look back on. Fans are still going to come, even if the internet is flooded with images. People love Prince, and that will never change.

Thanks for reading. Now, I’m going to go party like it’s 1999.