“They didn’t like Prince’s bikini underwear”: Prince’s support sets for the The Rolling Stones in 1981 are remembered as disastrous, but guitarist Dez Dickerson says that the the crowd reaction wasn’t as bad as people think

For an up-and-coming artist - particularly one with such grand ambitions as a then 23-year-old Prince - a support slot on a Rolling Stones tour sounds like a dream come true. But when that opportunity landed on the young Minneapolis man’s lap way back in October 1981, the dream turned into what’s remembered as a bit of a nightmare.

Prince’s chance to open for The World’s Greatest Rock ‘n’ Roll Band came as he was in the midst of promoting Controversy, his fourth album in as many years. And, as he would throughout his career, he was experimenting with both his sound and his image.

While the music - a potent but not exactly traditional fusion of funk, rock, pop, new wave, R&B and outright lyrical filth - might have sat outside most Stones fans’ comfort zones, his look at the time was almost certainly one that some of them would have found ‘challenging’ to say the least.

Prince would typically take to the stage wearing a trench coat, a pair of bikini briefs… and not much else. Oh, apart from a pair of thigh-high boots.

Unfortunately, but also somewhat predictably, the reaction from the crowd at the LA’s Memorial Coliseum was both hostile and immediate. Boos rang out and objects were thrown, forcing Prince and his band to leave the stage after just 25 minutes.

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

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Unfortunately, the reaction was the same at the second show, when Prince - possibly against his better judgement - performed again. It’s often been said that it was Mick Jagger himself who convinced him to give it another go, but in a new interview with Guitar World, guitarist Dez Dickerson - who was part of Prince’s band at the time - says that it was actually him who did the persuading.

Recalling the moment they left the stage on the first night, Dickerson says: “We went to the dressing room and found out that Prince had gone straight to the airport. He went home and wasn’t coming back. Mick Jagger called Prince and asked him to come back, but he said, ‘No, I’m not doing it.’”

As Dickerson remembers it, he was then asked to intervene: “Finally, management came to me and said, ‘Look, Prince listens to you. Will you call him?’” he says. “I appealed to our manhood as a band and said, ‘We can’t let them run us off like this. We’ll never live it down.’ He came back and we did the second show.”

While the response was similar that night, Dickerson says that history is wrong to categorise the two performances as an unmitigated disaster, arguing that only a minority of the crowd were causing trouble.

“It was mostly Hell’s Angels,” Dickerson insists. “They didn’t like Prince’s bikini underwear. I found out later that the Stones’ audience threw things back at them - that was their way of showing their love. Prince got freaked and cut the set short. The rock stations reported that we got booed off the stage, but that wasn’t true.”

“They say 5% of any audience isn’t going to like what you do,” Dickerson points out, so perhaps it was just that, in this case, the 5% happened to be very vocal and active members of the crowd. Prince never again supported or shared the stage with the Stones, though, and is alleged to have called their audience “tasteless in music and mentally retarded”.

Perhaps irked by this, Stones guitarist Keith Richards is said to have later referred to Prince as an “an overrated midget,” arguing that he’d conferred his royal title on himself before he’d proved his worth (a claim that falls rather flat when you consider that Prince was actually the birth name given to the star by his parents).

Richards did have kinder words for Prince when he died, in 2016, when he took to Twitter (as it was then) to call him "a unique talent,” “a true original” and “a great guitar player”. However, the confirmation that he wasn’t a fan in the early days seemingly came later that year, when, in an interview with The Guardian, Stones drummer Charlie Watts was discussing Prince’s Dirty Mind album, from 1980, which was the catalyst for him being invited on tour.

“Mick and I both loved that album - Keith hated it - and we got him on our show,” said Watts. Of course, being Prince he duly went on in his knickers and our audience booed him off. Which didn’t deter me from liking him.”