Dave Chappelle talks friendship with Prince, stealing guitar picks
One of Dave Chappelle’s classic skits on Comedy Central’s “Chapelle’s Show” was when he portrayed Prince playing basketball for a “Charlie Murphy’s True Hollywood Stories” segment in 2004. In a rare interview ahead of his Netflix comedy special’s release Tuesday, Chappelle shared with “CBS This Morning” co-host Gayle King what Prince’s friendship in real life meant to him.
“He was real kind to me,” Chappelle said. “With a guy like him, man, you gotta understand, he was iconic in my mind.”
Chappelle recounted when he was about 11 years old, his sister, the first family member to bring a Prince record into their home, went to see the artist in concert.
“We were all excited for her. Like, man, you know, it’s like ‘Purple Rain’ was out. We were like, ‘Man, you went to go see that guy?!’” Chappelle said.
“So I wake up in the mornin’. First thing I do is knock on the door to ask her how the show was, like, ‘What did he do?’ And she was asleep. She was asleep with her fist balled up like this. And then she woke up, she saw me, and she opens her hand. And his guitar pick was in her hand. On the guitar pick, it said, ‘Love God.’ And, you know, she had been in the front row. She was screamin’, ‘Oh, I love you. I love you.’ And he very pointedly looks at her, like, ‘I love you too.’ Puts the pick in her hand,” Chappelle said.
“My sister was a bigger girl. She was chubby,” he added. “Like, this meant the world to her that he paid that kind of attention. And I think about that when I engage people, how these moments are just moments, but they mean so much.”
Then he fast forwarded to when he was backstage at a Prince concert with CNN’s Anderson Cooper.
“I stole a handful of guitar picks. And Anderson was lookin’. I was like, ‘You want one?’ And then he mentioned it on one of these morning shows,” Chappelle recalled. “But what he doesn’t know is the guitar picks meant a lot to me, because that was the first physical trace of [Prince].”