Alicia Keys and her band are, by nature, a chatty, rambunctious group. But as we approach the gate to Prince’s Paisley Park compound outside Minneapolis, they suddenly fall silent, transformed into the Group Formerly Known as Chatty and Rambunctious.

After all, Keys may be the flagship diva for J Records, the new label from legendary music mogul Clive Davis, who has previously given the world a string of superstars from Janis Joplin to Whitney Houston. But there’s a big difference between being mentioned in the same breath as musical icons and popping around to one of their estates.

Moreover, the classically trained piano prodigy?cum?R&B wunderkind isn’t here merely on a social call. Keys covered Prince’s song “How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore?” on her number 1 debut album, Songs in A Minor. In return, he has requested the singer’s presence at the Celebration, a sort of black-music Renaissance Weekend held to commemorate the release of Prince’s new album and the forty-third anniversary of His Purpleness’s birth. And yes, Keys will be performing “How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore?” in front of the man who wrote it.

In short, it’s enough to make any 20-year-old go quiet even before our driver announces that the man assigned to guide us is not exactly your average bored wage slave.

“You are going to get a tour from Billy, which is rare. Billy,” he intones reverently, “played the club owner in Purple Rain.”

After going through a metal detector (cameras, tape recorders, cell phones and meat are forbidden inside the Park), we’re greeted by Billy Sparks, a burly man in a baseball cap and shorts, who shows us around. Keys nods her head a lot at the scenery, sweetly giggling at the Gracelandness of it all, her beaded cornrows clack-clacking gently like rosaries.

“When do I get to meet Prince?” she inquires after a while.

“He’ll be here tonight,” Billy says, then returns to a monologue about how everyone thought Prince was crazy when he bought all this land—Prince? Crazy? No…—and now it’s worth so much. We keep walking—down hallways painted sky blue (with little white clouds), past diplomas and plaques and walls of gold records, our group still silent but for Billy’s baritone.

Then a strange cooing sound fills the hallway. Keys cocks her head and starts to sing: “This is what it sounds like…” Before us, to no one and everyone’s surprise, sits a cage full of honest-to-God white doves. Jaws drop as in a Warner Bros. cartoon. Billy just smiles and nods, and nonchalantly motions for us to step further into the castle.

This is what it feels like to be Alicia Keys. At 20, things are getting increasingly bizarro for the Manhattan-born singer, and it’s not just the fluttering doves.

The day before she pulled into Prince’s driveway, Keys was blessed by Oprah Winfrey, the media mogul and purveyor of spiritual uplift whose book, movie and music recommendations exert a singularly persuasive force on the buying habits of American females. At the taping of an Oprah episode dedicated to the “hottest rising women in music,” Keys, belying any jitters, belted out her current single, “Fallin’,” while Oprah, seated in the audience, sang along with gusto. By the time Keys left the soundstage, she was famous.

Born Alicia Augello-Cook, Keys grew up in Hell’s Kitchen, between “hell and decency,” as she puts it. “Decency started around 10th or 11th Avenue,” she explains over chicken nuggets after the Paisley Park tour. “And hell was 8th Avenue. Dark doorways, boarded-up buildings, ho’s, pimps, hookers, drug fiends. Every kind of neglected individual flocked there—and I had to walk through it every day.”

She and her younger brother were raised by her mother—“Italian, Scottish, Irish, some other stuff”—and Keys has never been very close to her father, who is black. “My mother was my mother and my father,” she declares.

Musical inspiration first struck Keys at age 4, when she spent hours pretending to play the piano at a friend’s home. By the time she was 11, she was a preteen workaholic: “I was dancing, taking piano lessons, going to school. I virtually had a breakdown!” she gasps. “I said to my mom, ‘I have to stop something!’ She said, ‘You have to stick with the piano.’”

When she was 16, two Columbias entered Keys’ life: the record company, which offered her a deal, and the Ivy League university, which accepted her for admission. After four weeks of trying to juggle the two, she quit school to pursue music full-time.

But having signed with Columbia Records in 1997—“the whole boo-da-ba-bang-bang!” she scats—Keys clashed with the label’s vision for her, and a year later, she left and signed with Clive Davis’s Arista Records. When Davis was ousted from his post last year, he took Keys with him to J Records.

“You don’t see many female R&B artists who play these days,” says Peter Edge, vice president of A&R for J. “They’re either singers or, y’know, honeys. Alicia has it all. She has songs, she plays well and she has that voice—it takes me back to the purity of early Roberta Flack and the fire of Aretha.”

Davis’s faith in his young charge was more than justified with the release in June of the largely self-penned and self-produced Songs in A Minor, which sold more than 230,000 copies its first week and went straight to the top of the charts. Not that Keys believes in sitting on her laurels.

“When I met Clive Davis,” she says, popping her last chicken nugget into her mouth, “he asked me how I see myself as an artist. I said I see myself being around for a long time.”

Later that evening, several thousand people come to Paisley Park to catch Keys. It’s the biggest crowd she has ever played for, but from the show’s opening flourish—Beethoven’s “Für Elise” segueing into the lumpy bass groove of Notorious B.I.G.’s “Hypnotize”—Keys is in complete control. She tears into A Minor’s “Rock Wit U,” and knocks “How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore?” out of the Park, throwing in a hip-hop?schooled ad-lib—“Now you’re gone/And I ain’t tryin’ to hear that shit!”—for good measure.

Backstage, the mood is euphoric. “This is the bomb!” Keys shouts to her bandmates. She slaps her thigh and laughs. “By golly, I’m having a great damn time!”

Then he appears. The Purple One is standing in the doorway of the dressing room, his goatee sculpted so precisely it appears to have been drawn with a fine-point marker. The room goes dead silent.

“Great show. Good sound,” says Prince in his seductive bedroom drawl. “Where’s the drummer? He was great.”

The drummer, it soon becomes clear, is somewhere else entirely. An unspoken note of sadness passes through the gathering that he was not here to receive the compliment.

Keys gets up and strides toward Prince. “I wanna talk to you,” she says, and they disappear down a stairway into unseen purple-upholstered catacombs.

There is a moment’s awed silence. Then Wayne Mitchell, also known as Freaky Little (a tiny, shoulder-popping dynamo who keeps the crowd hyped during Keys’ shows), explodes. “Oh, dawg! That was the man standing there. Oooh, dawg!”

After Keys returns from her tete-à-tete, we watch Erykah Badu perform with Prince sitting in on keyboards. Then everyone heads back to the hotel; Keys has a 7 a.m. wake-up call.

But first, Blender asks what the Great One said to her in private.

“He talked about how wonderful he thought the show was, and how he thought I had great timing, and any opportunity I got to solo on the piano, I should take it.”

Anything else?

“He said he’d have to get the curse jar so I could put a dollar in it, because I cursed onstage,” she says. “I admit it. I like to curse.”

By Thomas Beller, August/September 2001