If there is a Twin Cities version of Rob Fleming, the music-obsessed protagonist of  Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, it’s Bill Hubbell. In past years Bill would burn and send out as many as 20 “Best Of 2004” (“of 2005″…”of 2006”, etc.) compact discs to friends and family. Each year, 15 to 20 discs from that year’s new music, each one with at least 15 or so songs. Billy never asked for a penny. He just wanted to share the music (I may have occasionally sent him a crappy T-shirt as compensation).

Anyway, Bill, Katie McCollow’s brother (see post below), also wrote a few words on the death of Prince that I want to share with you. Thanks, Bill.

Baby, I’m a Star

By Bill Hubbell

The coolest guy in the world died on Thursday. It’s hard to know what to say when the coolest guy in the world dies. Millions have tried and I’ve read as many of them as I possibly could, and damn if I haven’t enjoyed every last one of them.

Imagine living a life that has this sort of outpouring when it ends. You can’t, obviously, none of us can, because none of us ever got to be the coolest guy on Earth.

I mean, I’m sitting here by myself as I write this, and I’m barely the coolest person in this room, and if my wife happens to walk in, I clearly won’t be.

I’m kidding, of course, (not about my wife being cooler than me, that’s pretty clear), nobody my age cares about being cool anymore, but back in the day, when you’re still young and silly enough to think you might be cool, I was plenty guilty of it on many occasions.

It was on one of those said occasions when I saw Prince up close for the first time in my life. I’d turned 19 and of age about a week before, and me and my friends were at Graffitti’s nightclub in downtown Minneapolis. Here I am, wearing some ridiculous combination of clothes I’d spent $30 on at Banks, looking probably something like an Irish immigrant did coming off a boat in the late 1800’s. (At least I was cool enough not to wear the popped collars that the suburban boys we were suddenly thrown into the same environment with had on. We Minneapolis boys laughed and made fun of their popped collars while they laughed and made fun of our $22 jeans.) We were all idiots in our quest for what we thought passed for cool.

Anyhow, I’m standing there trying my hardest not to look like a dork, (and, with just that thought in my head, clearly failing), when “Delirious” starts blasting over the speakers and about 10 seconds in, Prince comes peacocking out of the shadows, strutting through the place like a rock god, which, of course, he was. He walked right by me and my friends wearing an impossibly shiny, glittering, canary-yellow outfit that was pretty similar to the purple one he’d have on in the movie a couple of weeks later.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIs4JdfJ8NA

So, you know, it’s a dance club full of idiots like me trying to be cool, so there isn’t a complete freak out, OMG THERE’S PRINCE meltdown by the entire club, but it certainly teetered on that. We saw him three or four times at Graffitti’s over the next month, and it was always like that—he’d prance through the club as if by magic, you’d never know where he came from or where he went, and it never lasted for more than 45 seconds or so.

We were certainly lucky, all of us Minnesotans, having this global superstar and icon in our midst. We always got the extra shows and the random sightings. I think all of us have collectively bristled at the notion that he was some sort of weirdo. Weirdos don’t go to the Edina movie theatre (a lot), high school hockey games (maybe just one, but he was definitely at a SW vs Washburn game) Vikings and Timberwolves games. Sure, he was a Superstar Rock God, but he was also “one of us” and we all unapologetically loved him for being so.

First Avenue, last Thursday night

My wife, of the same era as me (and who went to high school with the popped collar boys), has a great story where she’s at the bottom of the stairs at Marsh’s nightclub and Prince comes dancing down the staircase, full on shoulder shimmying and a huge grin on his face and he WINKS at her as he passes! I’ll spend my whole life trying, but I’ll never make her feel like she did in that moment and I’m ok with that. He was the coolest cat on the planet.

You don’t ask a Minnesotan, at least one of my era, if they like Prince or not. That’s literally as silly as asking them if they like sex. We all LOVED Prince. Rock ‘n Roll, Funk, Jazz, Soul, Dance… what kind of music did he play? He played Prince music.

He entered our lives with the following:

I wanna be your lover
I wanna be the only one that makes you come running
I wanna be your lover
I wanna turn you on, turn you out, all night long make you shout

Mission accomplished. I could go on forever about the music, but suffice to say he sat on “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man” for five freaking years, because he had so many incredible songs pouring out of him. Seriously, that would be the greatest song 99.9999 percent of anyone who’s ever played a note could come up with and Prince had it in his holster for five M-FNG years!

I’ve always been proud to be from Minneapolis, but maybe never more so than the past couple of days. I love how quickly we’ve turned sorrow to celebration. I love how we’ve all unabashedly cried with one another, but turned our tears to joy, which is what the coolest guy on Earth would have wanted us to do.

One of my best friends was over last night to watch the Wild game, and as it went to overtime, we were watching “Purple Rain” on VH1 instead.

Cry some more. Talk about how much you loved him some more with your friends. I’m going to go listen to the one…… you know the one…..Dr. tells us that everything is going to be alright….. Thank you Prince for punching the higher floor for all of us.

Prince is in heaven now, but it seems to me that he was already three-quarters of the way there while he was here on Earth. Peace and love–that was his main message. Let us all let a little more of that into our lives.