"Brooklyn, baby!"

Pepé Willie may be "the Godfather of the Minneapolis Sound," but he hasn't forgotten his roots. Before he moved to the Midwest, Willie formed relationships with some of the most iconic names in mid-century music — thanks to a family connection to Little Anthony and the Imperials.

"I found out that my uncle had the number one record in the country when I was ten years old," he told Sean McPherson in a recent interview for Purple Current. "'Tears On My Pillow.' And he was like 17."

Half a decade later, the teenage Willie started working for his uncle's group as a valet — a role that expanded to running errands for the likes of Chubby Checker. He recounts those experiences and others in his new memoir, If You See Me.

"Little Anthony and the Imperials always went to Harlequin Studios," Willie told McPherson. "They had a piano there, they had mirrors there. The piano player would play some songs and they would sing and rehearse and they would do their steps and dancing and everything." While the young Willie "thought it was very boring," he admits, he grew to appreciate the group's discipline, a value he would ultimately impart to a young Prince and his Minneapolis bandmates.

"When I got to Minneapolis and was working with Grand Central — with Morris Day, Prince, and André Cymone," Willie said, "I really taught these guys how to write songs for radio. Because at that time, radio was only playing songs for three minutes, three minutes and thirty seconds."

While Willie was able to help the young musicians, he was careful not to oversell his experience or influence. "They thought I was some big-time producer from New York," he said. "All I did was copy what I learned in Brooklyn: watching the Imperials rehearse, and how they spoke, and the steps that they had taken."

The connection that brought Willie to Minneapolis was his first wife: Prince's cousin Shauntel. Willie brought his guitar, though, and soon became the center of a band called 94 East. "This could be the next Motown," Willie remembers thinking about the profusion of musical talent in Minneapolis in the 1970s.

94 East ended up giving Prince his first opportunity to lay tracks in a professional recording studio: the legendary Cookhouse, formerly known as Kay Bank, would be the home to Minnesota-made hits from the '60s through the '80s. For a period, 94 East also included Bobby Z — a drummer Willie hired over Sonny Thompson, Willie told McPherson, in part because he wanted a racially integrated band like Sly and the Family Stone.

"I owe it to Minnesota," Willie said about the resilience he's demonstrated, as documented in the memoir. "Minnesota has changed my way of life. Growing up in Brooklyn was very hard: you come out your door, and you've got to be looking around making sure nobody's coming after you." Whereas in Minnesota, "people here were so nice. It took a minute for me to get used to it."

So Minnesota had nice — but what it didn't have was experience in the national music industry. Willie told McPherson he remembers his uncle and other Black musicians talking about touring through the Jim Crow South: "We couldn't get off the bus, we couldn't drink the water, we couldn't get in the hotels. And I'm going, oh my God! They couldn't own their own music."

Standing "on their shoulders," Willie was able to pass some of their hard-won experience along to Minneapolis musicians. "If you're going to be in this business," he now says, "learn about this business and the artists who came before you to help you get to where you're going."

Click on the player above to listen to Willie's complete conversation with Sean McPherson.