
As if five straight 16-hour days of nonstop live music wasn't enough for one festival, Prince took the South by Southwest Music Conference into overtime with his closing-night party Saturday.
The Minnesota rock boss performed six encores at his invite-only promotional performance for Samsung, whose mobile devices had their batteries tested like never before as the little energizer kept going and going till 3 a.m. Sunday at La Zona Rosa nightclub.
"We're gonna show you how we do it in Minneapolis," he warned at the start of the first encore.
Of course, the way Prince has often done shows in his hometown is by first making the audience wait for their musical pudding. He didn't go on until nearly 12:30 a.m., when doors opened at 9 p.m. and many attendees started lining up hours before that. At least they were treated to a rare performance by influential hip-hop quartet A Tribe Called Quest as an opening act. Samsung gave out wristbands for this wowza double-header concert to users of their $700 Galaxy mobile phones, who had to rack up points at 11 different vendor locations in Austin. The company certainly deserves points for staging what may be the most elaborate SXSW party after Kanye West's big bash in a vacant power plant in 2011.

Even though La Zona Rosa is a full-time, hi-fi music venue, Prince still made Samsung build him a new stage from scratch along the long wall of the club to accommodate the 18-piece New Power Generation band lineup he brought with him. Throw in a stretched-out video screen behind said stage -- plus confetti guns and a bevy of glitzy lighting -- and the giant South Korean electronics maker had clearly spent a small fortune even before it handed over Prince's paycheck (which was undoubtedly a not-so-small fortune; at least $1 million seems like a good guess).
Even with all that visual eye candy – including the several different blouses Prince changed in and out of – the show's handlers still threatened to eject attendees for taking pictures with their mobile devices during his set. So yes: Prince demanded that nobody use the product he was there to promote.
The concert followed a similar pattern as last fall's Welcome 2 Chicago shows and his second night of January's three-night stand at the Dakota in Minneapolis. He only sang a few of the hits, starting with "1999" for the second song and "Purple Rain" just before that first encore break, 50 minutes past go (for a few minutes, it looked like Samsung wasn't getting its money's worth).
For the rest of the show, Prince often acted more like a George Clinton-like cheerleader than the spine-tingling singer that he is, always urging various members of his band to take solos, especially drummer John Blackwell and saxophonist Marcus Anderson. Thanks to his own disinterest in playing a guitar – was he afraid the Austin humidity might warp the neck? – Donna Grantis of his new 3rd Eye Girl band got some extra spotlight time, too. Ironically, he addressed his surroundings mid-show from a six-string context: "Austin, Texas: Just like I pictured it," he said. "You've got a lotta guitar players up here, don't you?"