Prince gives Steph Curry shout-out, strips down for Oakland shows

Prince performing in 1983. Prince performing in 1983. Photo: Steve Ringman, The Chronicle Photo: Steve Ringman, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 17 Caption Close Prince gives Steph Curry shout-out, strips down for Oakland shows 1 / 17 Back to Gallery

“What can you truly count on besides Steph Curry?” Prince rhetorically asked the sold-out audience at Oakland’s Paramount Theatre on Sunday night, Feb. 28. “And you can count on Steph Curry.”

That was the inevitable conclusion the Great Purple One came to after an extended meditation on the uncertainties of life during one of his two “Piano & a Microphone” shows at the historic venue.

Even before delivering the shout-out to the Golden State Warriors’ wunderkind the day after he made that historic buzzer-beater against Oklahoma, the 57-year-old singer was in the audience’s good graces.

The back-to-back concerts, played at 7 and 10 p.m. and announced just a few days earlier, sold out in minutes, with fans lining up outside the theater for hours before the doors opened.

As billed, the shows featured Prince — and only Prince — sitting behind a piano for nearly two hours, revisiting and reworking his classic hits, acting out dramatic monologues and expounding freely and openly about his complicated relationship with his father.

“Oakland, we need a new story,” he said numerous times.

The concerts at the Paramount, promoted by Live Nation, were the first of their kind to be performed in front of a major American audience, following a brief run in Australia and one-off showcases at Prince’s suburban Minneapolis headquarters, Paisley Park.

Wearing silk pajamas, silver boots with wedge heels that lit up (much like a toddler’s) and his Afro picked out, the eternally youthful Prince occasionally seemed to struggle with the concert’s restrained format.

Hunched over the piano and pounding out the melody for his 1981 single “Controversy,” first his legs and then the rest of his body appeared as if they were ready to tear away and launch into a jig while his fingers furiously kept working the keys.

Yet for most of the evening, he was in exquisite form.

Without a band and lighting cues to follow — the only visual was the nausea-inducing kaleidoscope that continuously unfolded and refolded on the giant screen behind him, while his silhouette was projected on an opposite wall — Prince was free to roam creatively.

In quick succession, he played snippets of singles from his imperial phase, such as 1984’s “I Would Die 4 U” and 1985’s “Pop Life,” drawing out each song’s nuanced jazz and gospel undertones while working in fleeting covers of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” the “Batman” theme song and Sly & the Family Stone’s “Stand.”

He paid tribute to his longtime protege, Denise “Vanity” Matthews, whose funeral was held the day before in Union City, with 1982’s “Little Red Corvette,” noting, “We lost a sister who was moving too fast.”

He also led the audience in several sing-alongs, digging in hard for 1991’s “Cream” and a stark, ominous take on 1990’s “Thieves in the Temple.”

Many of the songs he performed were the very same ones that he disowned in 2001, when he became a Jehovah’s Witness. And even though he returned to the stage for no less than four encores, he mercifully steered clear of more recent albums such as 2014’s “Plectrumelectrum” and 2004’s “The Chocolate Invasion.”

After delivering gorgeous renditions of “Nothing Compares 2 U” (the song he wrote and Sinead O’Connor made famous) and “Purple Rain” and being lured back out to sing “Kiss,” Prince sounded exasperated.

“We all got too many hits!” he said.

That didn’t stop him from skipping around the stage like a prizefighter going in for the big knockout as the evening’s first show drew to a close, ready to come back for more.

“This is the new story!” he said.

Aidin Vaziri is The San Francisco Chronicle’s pop music critic. Email: avaziri@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @MusicSF