(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Sat 14 February 2026 4:00, UK
Prince and Bob Dylan are usually held up as the central pillars of Minneapolis’s musical legacy, but the two artists had wildly different relationships with the city.
Dylan was born in Duluth, Minnesota, about two hours further north into the American Tundra, and when he finally moved down to Minneapolis to start college in 1959, he was fairly clueless about the place.
“Minneapolis and St Paul, the Twin Cities, they were rock and roll towns,” Dylan said in a 2017 interview published on his website, “I didn’t know that. I thought the only rock and roll towns were Memphis and Shreveport. In Minneapolis, they played Northwest rock and roll, Dick Dale and the Ventures. The Kingsmen played there a lot, The Easy Beats, The Castaways; all surf bands, high voltage groups.”
Dylan was intrigued, but he wasn’t ready to go electric yet himself, instead kicking the Minneapolis dirt off his boots well before graduating, and made his now mythical pilgrimage to New York City.
By stark contrast, Prince Rogers Nelson could never say farewell to the Twin Cities, despite his best intentions. Unlike Dylan, he was born and raised in Minneapolis and knew the important rooms and characters of the town as a second language. If Dylan had picked up a vibe while passing through, Prince had those vibes in his veins, and even when he tried to do the obvious thing and seek his fortune in New York or Los Angeles, it never stuck.
“I lose sight of what I’m doing when I’m there,” Prince said of LA in the early ’80s, “I dread [going there]… It’s like a dream factory”.
Usually, performers seem to be intoxicated by the “dream factory”, but Prince, despite outward appearances, wasn’t looking for shiny distractions. Music was the priority, and in his hometown, he trusted the local musicians he’d come up with to help him create the sound he wanted, and to do so without the complexities and politics of the East Coast or West Coast record businesses.
“It may be hard to believe,” Purple Rain director Albert Magnoli once said, “but he’s really just a very normal guy”. If “normal” is a stand-in word for ‘Midwestern’, then maybe that was true, but as Prince became increasingly famous, under scrutiny, and ‘less normal’, the comparative calm and familiarity of Minneapolis became all the more important.
In 1996, in an appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show, Prince was asked directly, in quite an insulting tone, why he hadn’t fled Minnesota by now. “Living in Minneapolis of all places,” Winfrey threw in a derisive tone to which Prince responded confidently, “Yeah, I will always live in Minneapolis”. And when Oprah followed up with a confused, “Why?”, he took a breath here, because he’d been asked this question repeatedly for over a decade and clearly didn’t have much need to try and explain it with nuanced details anymore, and so simply offered, “It’s so cold. It keeps the bad people out”.
That generated a chuckle and a brief round of applause. Oprah’s show was recorded in Chicago, so there was a Midwestern understanding there, but 30 years later, though, and ten years after his death, that little quote from Prince about Minneapolis carries a lot more weight.
For all his faults, he was a hero in the town, a star who appreciated the community and what made it unique, including the ways it had made him unique. It would be interesting to hear what Prince might have had to say during the events of the past few weeks, when Minneapolis was suddenly in the news far more than New York or LA, for all the worst reasons.