I'm not ready to write about Prince yet. I'm not ready to distill his immense body of work down to one eulogy. I can't yet find the words to sum up in a tidy little column even a slice of what Prince meant to me (and others) musically. Besides, other people have already said it better than I can. Prince's musical talent deserves all the superlatives, a word that sounds a lot like “purple,” his signature color. Prose easily turns purple when lesser talents try to describe his one-of-a-kind musical magic.

So let me put it this way instead: Prince's mojo was so substantial that he once broke up a band simply by gifting them their first hit song.

I blame Matt Pinfield at KFOG for planting the “Manic Monday” seed in my head this week. On the second day at his new job, he was asked to pull together a memorial set as the news broke of Prince's death. Sometime that morning, scrambling between fan and guest call-ins, Pinfield threw on “Manic Monday” as an example of how much spare talent Prince had to burn. Four days later, Monday deadline looming, this is the song that came to me. 
In 1986, The Bangles were an up-and-coming band from Los Angeles consisting of two sisters, Vicki and Debbie Peterson, plus their friend Susanna Hoffs and former Runaway Micki Steele (now known by her birth name Michael). They were working on their second album when Prince, possibly nursing a crush on Hoffs, handed the band a song about how hard it is to go to work again after a great weekend off. The song was originally intended for the Prince-formed side project Apollonia 6, but that group had disbanded. The Bangles took it to No. 2 on the Billboard charts, right behind Prince's own “Kiss.”

When The Bangles formed, the plan was for Debbi to handle drums while Vicki and Hoffs  played guitar. Steele joined later, replacing the band's original bassist. All the members would contribute songs and trade off vocal duties – often in the same song, as demonstrated on the band's second hit, “Walk Like an Egyptian,” where Steele sings the first verse, Vicki sings the second and Hoffs sings the final verse.

Hoffs explained last year to 89.3 KPCC that “The Bangles were kind of intended to function in the same kind of way that The Beatles were. There [were] multiple singers [and] multiple songwriters.” But just like with The Beatles, conflicts over songwriting credits and equal air time plagued them. The band's record label began positioning Hoffs as the frontwoman. And, since “Manic Monday” was their first big hit, with Hoffs as the sole vocalist, it was easy for fans to miss the fact that there were three other members of the band now fighting it out for equal time. Eventually, the intra-band tension proved too much and the Bangles broke up in 1989 after the release of their third album.

There is a coda to this story: The Bangles reformed in 1998 to record a song for one of the Austin Powers movies. Steele subsequently left the band again, but the core trio of Vicki, Debbie and Susannah still occasionally record and tour together (they played the Fillmore in 2013).