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A decade after Prince’s untimely death, his former bandmate sheds light on the unsettling changes that occurred in the iconic musician’s life during the months leading up to his tragic fentanyl overdose.
Instances of confusion emerged, marked by forgotten conversations and plans that seemed to vanish as quickly as they were made.
“I knew something was wrong,” recounted BrownMark, the bassist for the Revolution from 1981 to 1986, in an interview with Page Six. “His memory and behavior were just not right.”
For years, BrownMark and Prince had lost touch, their relationship having oscillated between deep camaraderie and volatility. However, an unexpected call from Jim Lundstrom, a janitor at Paisley Park, reignited their connection.
“Jim said to me, ‘Mark, I have a feeling Prince is going to reach out to you because he keeps talking about you,'” BrownMark recalled.
Prince, Lundstrom told him, regretful about the past and ready to make things right.
Not long after, BrownMark’s phone rang.
“[Prince] says, ‘I want you to fly to Minneapolis. Putting some things together. I want to see if you want to be involved.’”
For BrownMark, that was all it took. Their relationship had always been complicated, “We were both alphas,” he said. “We were always like that.”
He dropped everything in California, his home, and flew to Minneapolis. But when he arrived, BrownMark said, Prince “forgot that he brought me there.”
The bassist, who played on the legendary albums “1999” and “Purple Rain,” said he sat in his hotel, alone, for days, waiting.
Finally, he ran into drummer John Blackwell Jr. in the lobby.
“I don’t have a bat number. I don’t know how to get a hold of [Prince]. I’ve been sitting here. I don’t know what’s going on,” he recalled saying.
When Blackwell let Prince know that BrownMark was at the hotel, the response, according to the bassist, was: “‘What? What’s he doing there? Oh, you brought him here?’ And he goes, ‘Oh, I forgot.’”
And when BrownMark finally got to Paisley Park, Prince’s studio, he said, “That’s when I knew something was wrong. Something was not right with his memory and his behavior.”
Still, the two spoke about forming a new group and chasing the Revolution sound again. BrownMark agreed to come back and work together. A few months later, as planned, he packed up his life in California and relocated to Minneapolis.
When he walked into Paisley Park, he said, Prince froze.
“You could see the panic in his face because you can see he just remembered what he had done: ‘Oh man, wait a minute. I moved him here,’” BrownMark said. “His memory was like really, really shot at that point.”
The bassist now believes that Prince’s short-term memory was wiped by the opioids he was said to frequently be using before his death. It’s been reported that the seven-time Grammy winner thought he was buying Vicodin before his April 21, 2016, death, not knowing the counterfeit pills were laced with fentanyl.
He died in an elevator at Paisley Park a day before he was set to meet with an addiction specialist.
“Man, [pills] just clouds your memory. And I think that’s what was happening with him because he was heavily relying upon opioids for his pain, for his hip,” BrownMark said — noting that Prince would never have publicly admitted he was having problems.
“He ain’t gonna let nobody see him sweat,” he saie. “He [wasn’t] going to tell anybody.”
In 2020, BrownMark told The Post how, during his time in the Revolution, Prince kept the band on a tight leash — issuing the bass player a phone to which only he had the number.
“It could be 4 o’clock in the morning and my Bat Phone would ring,” he recalled. “If I didn’t answer, one of Prince’s security guards knocked on my door and told me to come to the studio. Prince would be there, looking like a rock star ready for a photo shoot, and he’d have me jam with him on an idea for hours.”
Prince also had a road manager tally band members’ musical mistakes on a notepad, then he would penalize them accordingly. “I once got fined $1,200 in one gig; that hurts when you make $2,000 per week. I didn’t think Prince would hold me to it but he did,” he added.