Adam Duritz missed out on chance to party with Prince

Rocker Adam Duritz once passed up the opportunity to party with Prince because the superstar’s handlers refused to confirm whether the invitation had come from the icon himself.
The Counting Crows frontman remembers receiving a call from Prince’s people back in the early 1990s, when the band’s tour passed through Minneapolis, Minnesota, not far from the legendary singer’s Paisley Park studios, to promote its 1993 debut, August and Everything After.
Duritz had been a huge fan of the Purple Rain star since his teens, but the invitation to attend an event at Paisley Park came at a bad time for the vocalist as he was battling illness and didn’t want to risk losing his voice in the middle of a tour – especially as the representatives played coy when asked if Prince would actually be there.
“I got a phone call through my office that said there’s a poetry reading and party at Paisley Park tonight, starting about midnight, and will probably go all night and they would like you to come,” Duritz recalls to Billboard.com. “And I was like, ‘Is this, like, from Prince?’ And they said, ‘We can’t actually say who it’s from. Let’s just say there are some people here who would really like to meet you.’ And I was like, ‘Well, yeah, but is it Prince?'”
He continues, “Getting from gig to gig was really hard for me back then; I ended up having to take a lot of steroids and everything, and we cancelled some gigs. So to go out to a party in the middle of a night after a gig, with a gig the next day somewhere else, it was a pretty big thing to do for me at that point. I was really trying not to cancel any gigs any more, so if it was Prince, I was going to go for sure, but I could not get them to come out and tell me.”
Adam decided to skip the all-night bash, but he was pleasantly surprised to find a gift box full of Prince memorabilia waiting for him when he returned home to San Francisco, California weeks later.
“I don’t know if that was from Prince or not, either,” he laughs. “But it was just like, ‘Sorry you couldn’t make it to the party, but we wanted you to have this stuff anyway,’ and it was just a huge gift box for me from Paisley Park.”
And while the 51-year-old appreciated the souvenirs, he is still kicking himself for declining the mysterious invite.
“Oh, if I had gotten to go up there and have a cup of tea with him, that would be the greatest thing in the world,” he laments. “That would’ve been better.”
Prince died at Paisley Park in April (16), aged 57. The singer’s cause of death has since been ruled an accidental overdose of painkiller Fentanyl.