The Most Beautiful: My Life with Prince

by Mayte Garcia

In Prince’s mind, there was never a hard line between the visual and the musical; it was all one. We all came together—dancer, drummer, keyboard, lights—to transport the audience into an experience that was already a reality inside Prince’s head. I think that’s part of the chemistry that made him a megastar; he brought all this game along with his musical genius at the perfect moment in music history—the moment when “video killed the radio star.” All of which is to say, Prince saw his dancers as part of the band. He always talked about the impression James Brown’s backup dancers made on him that time his stepfather lifted him up onto the stage. “On my way out,” he said, “I saw some of the finest dancing girls I’ve ever seen in my life. I respected that. He influenced me by his control over his group. His dancing girls. His apples and his oranges.”