“He says to Mick Jagger backstage ‘They hate me!’ Mick told him, ‘if you’re going to play to a crowd this big, you have to have a rock band. You have to have a big sound’”: Did Prince’s "humiliating" Rolling Stones experience inspire his later success?

It’s no secret that Prince’s 1981 support slot with The Rolling Stones didn’t go well. The LA Memorial Coliseum crowd, which included its fair share of Hell’s Angels, weren’t particularly taken by either his ‘punk-funk’ sound or his equally provocative look, which at the time incorporated a trench coat, a pair of bikini briefs and a pair of high-heeled boots.

Prince is known to have been understandably upset at the crowd’s hostile reaction, but in a new book about his rise to greatness that’s being published today - A Sign o’ the Times, by John McKie - it’s suggested that the events of that day may have at least partly inspired the stadium-sized success that was to come.

McKie says that he spoke to more than 200 people while he was writing the book, and one of them was producer Andrew Watt, the man who produced The Rolling Stones’ 2024 album, Hackney Diamonds.

He reveals that, while he was working with Mick Jagger, he happened to be wearing a Prince T-shirt, which prompted the Stones’ frontman to recall the fateful time that Prince opened for them.

“He got beer thrown at him. His heart broken,” Jagger told Watt. Continuing the story, Watt recalls: “‘He says to Mick Jagger backstage ‘They hate me!’ Mick told him, ‘if you’re going to play to a crowd this big, you have to have a rock band. You have got to have a big sound.’”

Watt goes on to suggest that the experience, and Jagger’s advice, may have had an impact on Prince’s next albums - 1999 and, of course, the all-conquering Purple Rain. “If you listen to the drum sound versus the earlier albums, the drums are huge. It’s a bigger sound,” he argues.

PRINCE⚜️ OpeningAct 4 The Rolling Stones, LA 1981 [audio] - YouTube

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The book also quotes Donnie Graves, tour accountant on the Purple Rain tour, who also believes that the Stones experience left a lasting impression. He recalls the time he raised the subject with Prince: “I wouldn’t say all the blood drained out [Prince’s] face but he became visibly shaken up,” says Graves. “I could see he went back to that. I could tell that it was soul-crushing and embarrassing to him. After they got through throwing their shoes at him, there were people urinating in cups and throwing it at him.”

Just like Watt, though, Graves goes on to say that, in the long-term, the sense of failure Prince felt after the incident may have been a blessing in disguise, arguing that it “drove him to a place to achieve heights he might not have.”

“That’s how self-aware the guy was, that’s how pissed off the guy was,” he adds. “I don’t think he would have reached the level he reached without that level of humiliation.”

And it seems that Prince agreed, for when Graves mentioned the Rolling Stones debacle during that triumphant Purple Rain tour, the star simply replied: “That’s why I’m here.”