Photo credit: Dave Zylstra/Shepherd Express
It didn’t take much persuading to convince Gabriel Sanchez to become Prince. A local theater company approached the musician with the idea of playing the famed Minneapolis funk/rock icon for a production it was planning. At first Sanchez declined, on the simple grounds that he wasn’t an actor, but he quickly warmed to the idea.
“I thought, ‘You know, I’ve always been a Prince fan, and I’ve always wanted to act, so why not?’” Sanchez recalls. “Then I told my friends and they were like, ‘You’re going to be Prince? Can you play the guitar like him and sing like him and dance like him?’ That was when I realized what I’d signed up for.’”
Sanchez spent weeks watching Purple Rain, studying the way Prince spoke and moved, and learned to play his guitar solos by ear. And the role stuck. The response to the production was so good that Sanchez was inspired to create the Prince Experience, an elaborate Prince tribute act complete with lighting, costumes, a full band and backing singers. “I got together some local people and explained that this was going to be a higher-quality show, and not just a regular bar band,” Sanchez says.
That was more than a decade ago and in the years since, the Prince Experience has become one of the region’s most coveted cover bands. That success afforded Sanchez the opportunity to do something he’d long wanted to do: play music full time. In addition to the Prince Experience, he also plays with The Toys and performs acoustically either alone or as a duo. “It’s hard,” Sanchez says of making a living off of music, “because you have to hit all the spots you want to play and you have to prove yourself. But now it’s easier because I can give them my name and a lot of times they’ll know my name because of me doing Prince. They go, ‘Oh, you’re the Prince guy.’”
The Prince Experience’s success has also given Sanchez the chance to follow through with a project he’d first conceived in the mid-’00s with his friend Rozzy Alexander, a costume designer who created the costumes for his Prince show. The two talked about building a costume-heavy, multimedia live show around Sanchez’s original songs, but those plans were put on the back burner after Alexander died from a stroke in 2006.
“The show was his idea, and after he passed I would start working on it, but it never felt right,” Sanchez says. “But now I have such a big group of people that I’m working with that it felt possible again. We’ve incorporated video, so instead of costumes we have had a video format, where the video is literally synced in with us as we play live, which is hard to pull off but looks very cool.”
The show is set to songs from Sanchez’s debut album, Immortal By Sound, which owes more than a little to the propulsive thrust of Prince’s more rock-minded output. The album’s title was inspired by Sanchez’s friend Paul Zandt, a former TMJ4 weatherman who played keyboard on the first track Sanchez recorded for the project, “Oh My My,” then died suddenly just months afterward. “Anybody can be immortal by sound,” Sanchez says. “A hundred years from now somebody might find this CD and think, ‘This is some cool keyboard playing,’ so in a way Paul will still be alive.”
Many of the songs on the album tell stories, some of which will be illustrated by videos at Sanchez’s concert Saturday, Jan. 16 at Turner Hall Ballroom. He hopes that night will be the first of many performances of the show. “It’s a huge undertaking, both time wise and financially,” Sanchez says of the show. “It’s costing a lot of money. But I believe in it, and if I do lose money on it, at least I can say that I finished that dream that started with Rozzy 10 years ago.”
Gabriel Sanchez’s record release show starts at 7 p.m. on Saturday, Jan. 16 at Turner Hall Ballroom with opener Ordinary Heathens.
