Ten years after Prince’s death, his former bandmates revealed that something strange was happening to him in the months leading up to his fentanyl overdose.
A moment of confusion. A forgotten conversation. Plans were made and then erased.
“I knew something was wrong,” Brownmark, who was Revolution’s bassist from 1981 to 1986, told Page Six. “There was something wrong with his memory and behavior.”
After years of not hearing from each other in what Brownmark described as “a potentially volatile sibling relationship,” Paisley Park manager Jim Lundstrom contacted them and they reconnected.
“He said, ‘Mark, I feel like Prince is going to contact you because he won’t stop talking about you,'” Brownmark recalls.
Prince, Lundstrom said he regrets his past and is ready to make things right.
Shortly thereafter, Brownmark’s phone rang.
“[Prince]says, ‘I want you to fly to Minneapolis. I want you to put some things together. I’d like to see if you want to be involved.'”
That’s all BrownMark needed. Although their relationship was always complicated, “we were both alphas,” he said. “We’ve always been like that.”
He left everything in his hometown of California and flew to Minneapolis. But Mr. Brownmark said that when Prince arrived, “I forgot he had brought me here.”
The bassist, who played on the legendary albums “1999” and “Purple Rain,” said he had been sitting alone in a hotel waiting for days.
Finally, he met drummer John Blackwell Jr. in the lobby.
“I don’t have a bat number. I don’t know how to contact (Prince). I’ve been sitting here. I don’t know what’s going on,” he recalled saying.
When Blackwell informed Prince that Brownmark was at the hotel, the bassist said the reaction was: And he says, “Oh, I forgot.” ”
And when Brownmark finally arrived at Prince’s studio, Paisley Park, he said, “That’s when I knew something was wrong. Something was wrong with his memory and his actions.”
Still, the two talked about forming a new group and chasing the Revolution sound again. BrownMark agreed to come back and work with us. A few months later, as planned, he packed up his life in California and moved to Minneapolis.
He said Prince froze when he entered Paisley Park.
“You could see the panic on his face, ‘Oh, wait a second, I moved him here,’ and you could tell he had just remembered what he had done,” Brownmark said. “His memory was really, really gone at that point.”
The bassist now believes that Prince’s short-term memory was wiped out by the opioids he reportedly used frequently during his life. Before his death on April 21, 2016, the seven-time Grammy winner reportedly intended to purchase Vicodin, not knowing that the counterfeit drug was laced with fentanyl.
He died in an elevator at Paisley Park the day before he was scheduled to meet with an addiction specialist.
“C’mon,[medications]just cloud the memory. And he was relying heavily on opioids to treat his pain and his hip, so I think that’s what was happening to him,” Brownmark said, noting that Prince would never have publicly acknowledged that he had a problem.
“He doesn’t want anyone to see him sweating,” he said. “He wasn’t going to tell anyone.”
In 2020, Brownmark told the Post how Prince kept the band on tight leash while he was in Revolution, giving the bassist a phone whose number only he knew.
“The Batphone might go off at four o’clock in the morning,” 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 was there dressed like a rock star ready for a photo shoot and ended up having hours of sessions with me about ideas.”
Prince also had road officials record band members’ musical mistakes on notepads and penalize them accordingly. “I once got fined $1,200 for one show, which is tough when you’re making $2,000 a week. I never thought Prince would lock me up, but he did,” he added.
