Sheila E. talks about loving, losing, and playing music with Prince
Before Sheila E. met Prince, he had already found his way into her bedroom. The year was 1978, when the Minneapolis wunderkind made a bold entrance with his debut album, For You - "Produced, arranged, composed and performed by Prince."
B efore Sheila E. met Prince, he had already found his way into her bedroom.
The year was 1978, when the Minneapolis wunderkind made a bold entrance with his debut album, For You - "Produced, arranged, composed and performed by Prince."
The drumming daughter of Santana percussionist Pete Escovedo went home from a record store with a poster of the album cover showing "a beautiful young man with brown skin, a perfect Afro, and stunning green eyes." She taped it to the ceiling above her water bed at the Oakland, Calif., home she lived in with her parents.
Later that year, the then-20-year-old Escovedo - already a seasoned musician who had toured with George Duke, recorded a Billy Cobham-produced album with her father, and had an affair with Carlos Santana - met Prince in the flesh.
As the singer and drummer - who will share a bill Thursday with fellow Prince associates Morris Day and the Time as well as WAR at the Dell Music Center in Strawberry Mansion - explains in her 2014 memoir, The Beat of My Own Drum, she first encountered her future collaborator and paramour at an Al Jarreau concert, and met him again backstage at one of his own shows.
He had seen her perform on television on Don Kirschner's Rock Concert and The Midnight Special, and he told her that he and his bass player had fought about which one of them was going to marry her.
Marriage never happened - though Escovedo was engaged to Prince in the 1980s. But that first meeting began a lifelong collaboration that started, chastely, back in her boudoir, where, she writes, "we'd hang out . . . and jam for hours." (When she introduced him to her family by name, her brother Pete asked, "Prince of what?")
All that personal and music history between Prince and Escovedo, who had her greatest solo success with The Glamorous Life, the debut album that came out in 1984 a few weeks before Purple Rain, contributed to the depth of grief Escovedo felt when faced with the shocking news of her friend and former lover's death in April.
"People didn't get to see, or they might have forgotten, that he and I did a lot of the same things," says Escovedo, 58. "We shared a lot of things. . . . He learned a lot from me, and I learned a lot from him."
Escovedo was speaking from her home in Los Angeles after returning from Rio de Janeiro, where she performed at the launch of the Arts Games, a cultural competition to be staged in Montreal next year that will bring together aspiring acts in dance, music, media arts, visual arts, and literature for Olympic-style competition. "It's going to be pretty amazing," she says. "Harry Belafonte is the ambassador." (Go to ArtsGames.com for more info.)
Escovedo has an impressive resumé. A professional since age 15, she has toured with Marvin Gaye, Lionel Richie, Diana Ross, and Ringo Starr's All-Starr Band. Uncredited, she added percussion to Michael Jackson's "Don't Stop Till You Get Enough" on his 1979 album Off the Wall.
She was bandleader on Magic Johnson's short-lived late-1990s late-night talk show and was crowned winner of the CMT network reality-show Gone Country, beating out George Clinton, in 2009. She maintains a busy touring schedule. Asked how she feels about the road after a lifetime on it, she says with a laugh, "I have to continue to say that I love it." In February, she'll be floating from Miami to the Bahamas on the Sheila E. Glamorous Life Latin Cruise, joined by George Lopez, Ozomatli, Judith Hill, and her father.
But the closest musical association for the multi-instrumentalist - she plays guitar and piano as well as drums, congas, and timbales - is with Prince. Due to his aversion to the internet, it can be difficult to find audiovisual evidence of the two working together in their prime, and when asked whether she has anything to do with the excavation of the archives of the Purple One's Paisley Park studios, she answers with a curt "No."
Online sleuthing can lead to astonishing rewards, though, such as from the criminally unavailable 1987 Sign O' the Times concert movie, in which she was drummer and bandleader of the New Power Generation.
To say that the clips of Escovedo fronting the band while Prince sits behind her drum kit are smokin' hot would be a massive understatement. But it can be tough to watch Prince execute the astounding dance moves we now realize were not so effortless. "We all just love what we do," she says. "When you're excited about the gift you've been given, and you know your purpose, you'll do whatever it takes to continue to do that, because it feels so good."
Escovedo and Prince had split up by the early '90s. Financial disputes as well as personal ones are touched on in The Beat of My Own Drum. But the duo continued to perform together in marquee moments, whether at the Brit awards in 2006 or at Coachella in 2008.
Since his death, her life has been upended.
"It's changed a lot," she says. She pauses. "Emotionally and spiritually. Musically. I was working on a dance record. It was going to be called Bailar!, or 'Dance with Me.' But now I'm working on new songs for a record called Girl Meets Boy," inspired by the duo's relationship. The album, her first since the 2013 Icon, is due this year on her Stiletto Heels label, and the title-track piano ballad is viewable at sheilae.com.
Escovedo won high praise for her Prince tribute at the BET Awards in June, in which she led a band through "Housequake" and "Erotic City." She played Prince's purple guitar and brought his ex-wife Mayte onstage to dance, along with Jerome Benton, Day's valet sidekick in the Time.
"My initial response was to say, 'It's too hard, it's too personal," she said of playing the tribute. When she originally heard the news of Prince's death, "I couldn't look at any pictures. I couldn't listen to any music. I was devastated by it, and I'm still devastated. It is not easy at all. So to go play a tribute a month later, it just didn't feel right.
"But I knew that if I could get to a place where I could do it, I would treat it like I treat everything else. ... It was from my heart and what I thought we would do if we were doing it together."
Prince's death hasn't given her a new mission. But it does serve as a reminder.
"You know, hopefully, I continue to grow as an artist," she says. "And that's just part of life and living. Anyone who tries to stay in the same place as they were 20 years ago is in trouble. I just try to continue to grow as an artist and an individual and a person. ...
"When you lose people that are close to you, it's a reminder that things are not promised. Tomorrow's not promised. Today's not promised. I get up in the morning and thank God for just waking me up on another beautiful day."
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