Prince delivers towering, funked-up Fox Theatre show

Thursday night at a sweaty, sold-out Fox Theatre, Prince took 5,000 fans to funk school and added another chapter to his storied Detroit legacy.

For two-and-a-half hours, his Purple Highness laid down jam after jam, hit after hit, and lesson after lesson in how to own a concert stage. His swagger levels were off the charts as he defiantly asked the crowd "what's my name?" and counted off the number of hits he was tearing through like a teacher taking attendance. He was backed by his electrifying band, an amalgam of his 3RDEYEGIRL and New Power Generation outfits that grew to as many as 12 strong.

After 11 years, it was a triumphant return to the town Prince once considered a second home. Prince has a long history with the city that dates back 35 years, and Thursday's show – his first visit to the Fox since playing two shows there in April 1993 – marked his 35th concert in Metro Detroit.

That's quite a legacy, and Prince acknowledged it at the very top of the show, a date on his impromptu Hit N Run outing which was announced only a scant six days prior. "Detroit!" he belted, raising one fist in the air. "It seems like only yesterday. They told me it's been 11 years! Well, if that's true, we're gonna play 17 hits in a row, until I see tears!"

He and his all-female backing band 3RDEYEGIRL then tore into a slowed down, funked-up "Let's Go Crazy" that kicked off a hit parade that passed the 17 marker and kept right on going. By the end of the night, which included three encores and callbacks to everyone from Sly and the Family Stone to the Jackson Five to Wild Cherry to Janet Jackson, the funk was hanging in the air like a dense fog, and Prince kept making it thicker.

Because it was a Prince show, whispers of an after-party were heard throughout the Fox lobby prior to the start of the concert, which fittingly fell on a day where a daylong rain – a purple rain, if you will – soaked the city. But Prince treated the entire concert like it was an after-party, with a loose, improvisational feel to the proceedings and a festive, whatever-happens-happens atmosphere on stage.

He invited a dozen or so members of the crowd up to dance with him during the show's first section, a seamless 45-minute barnburner that ripped through "Raspberry Beret," "You Got the Look," "Musicology," "When Doves Cry," "Sign o' the Times," "Nasty Girl," "I Would Die 4 U" and "Cool," with nods to his own "Cindy C." and Michael Jackson's "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough" mixed in. "I'm the DJ now! I play what I want!" Prince said, treating the Fox Theatre like his own personal house party. "Old school! We going back to the '80s!"

He spent a lot of time digging through his 1980s material, later cutting into "Controversy" and lifting the night's strict ban on cellphone usage during a celebratory "1999." That led right into the single's B-side, "How Come U Don't Call," and later into "Little Red Corvette," which was transformed into a sexy slow jam. A playful call-and-response at the end of the song led into a reclaimed "Nothing Compares 2 U."

"You've got a beautiful city and beautiful people, please take care of it for me so I can come back," he told the crowd, teasing a return to the Palace of Auburn Hills and shouting out the Palace's other Prince, Detroit Piston Tayshaun Prince. He then razzed the audience by telling them he'd "run out of hits" and faked like he was leaving before kicking off another set of bangers starting off with "Kiss" (which included a reference to "Preachers of Detroit" in place of the original song's hat tip to "Dynasty").

An epic "Purple Rain" that found Prince bathed in purple lighting, roaring through its monumental guitar solo, seemed to signal the end of the show, but after eight full minutes of applause Prince and his band mates returned for two more encores that stretched another 30 minutes. A jam that wound through his "Act of God," "Partyman," Janet Jackson's "What Have You Done for Me Lately?" and Jackson Five's "Dancing Machine" ended with Prince rhetorically asking "don't you love funky music?" He then went on another jag and tore through a huge swath of his catalog like he was shuffling through a greatest hits playlist, winking at "Diamonds and Pearls," "Darling Nikki," "Forever in My Life," "Alphabet St.," "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World," "Pop Life" and more. "How many hits I got?" he asked, metaphorically beating his chest. It was just one of those kinds of nights.

Things weren't so hot at the beginning of the night when the venue's paperless ticketing system – put in place in an effort to thwart scalpers – ran into a mess of technical problems. The Fox's doors opened at 7 p.m. sharp but credit card scanners were offline for 25 minutes, causing a bottleneck in the Fox lobby and a line that stretched outside the building for several city blocks. That backed off the start of the concert, and opener Judith Hill's spirited set, by 40 minutes, and forced fans to wait outside in the wind and rain.

But all's well that ends well. Prince closed the night with "The Love We Make," a track from "Emancipation," an unpredictable end to a wild evening that served to remind fans with a catalog as deep and as vast as Prince's, you never know where he's going to turn next.

The 56-year-old icon, dressed in gold lamé and with his hair puffed out, looked and sounded in prime shape. Even when barking orders to his tech team in the thick of a jam ("We gotta do soundcheck all over – sound man knows it!") he was in time and on message. "We the best!" he boasted at one point. And on this night – a towering evening of music, fun and communal joy – there was no arguing with him.