Prince played a small venue in Chicago last Saturday night (Really Sunday morning, as he made people wait in the rain and then didn’t go on till 2AM.)

There was a blog post on chicagoist.com:

Titled: When Prince Says No Photos Allowed, Prince Means NO PHOTOS ALLOWED

Picture of the front door accompanies the post with a sign on it saying Photography and Video Taping strictly prohibited.

So….the writer described trying to take a picture with his phone. At that point a “Huge security guard” suddenly in front of him waving his finger no.

So he moved to the back of the room and tried again!! Another huge guy “enveloped his cell phone in his huge hand” and sent him outside, after deleting the photo.

From the writer:

“This is the point where you might expect this writer to whine and complain and bemoan getting tossed out of a Prince show but let’s be honest, despite changing societal expectations, an artist is certainly within his or her rights to ban all photos, so while I was surprised to see it actually enforced I don’t really have any room to complain. And the staff was polite: I’ve seen security guards act far more poorly with much less reason in the past. I learned later that Prince had several guards throughout the crowd whose sole role was to catch people taking photos and, had I known that going in, I certainly wouldn’t have ever taken out my phone (though I see at least one person got away with snapping a shot without being ejected).

So Prince has a bunch of large guys following him on tour and stopping people from taking pictures. That must cost him about ten thousand dollars a week in saleries, hotels and travel to make sure that no one has any shitty cell phone pictures to take home with them! My guess is that pretty soon cell phones will be banned from concerts. Some security guys tell me that that could never happen, as people have to call their kids at home to make sure that they are all right. We shall see!!