The death of musical icon Prince last Thursday (April 21) has resulted in one of the greatest outpourings of tributes in recorded history. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Prince’s passing hasn’t been met with the copy-paste-repeat standard grieving a post-social media world typically turns to for catharsis. This is largely because of how protective Prince was of his intellectual property, keeping just about all of his music offline.

However, since his death we’ve seen several clips reemerge, many of which had eluded the Internet for years. While Prince’s Super Bowl performance, his “My Guitar Gently Weeps” solo and even his collaborations with The Muppets all show different facets of what made Prince such a one-of-a-kind talent, the clips of Prince-lore from David Letterman’s NBC and CBS shows really paint a picture of what Prince and the purple hysteria surrounding him truly was like.

YouTube user and future saint Don Giller generously dipped into his vast private collection of clips from NBC’s Late Night with David Letterman and CBS’ Late Show with David Letterman to upload four pristine-quality, heavily sought-after clips. Two from the height of Prince’s film Purple Rain, two from the frontline of his battle with Warner Bros., these clips show moments in time that, while not as (in)famous as his other milestones, speak to what the world of Prince was like.

Morris Day on ‘Late Night with David Letterman’ (August 30, 1984)

We begin fairly subdued with the usually flamboyant Morris Day showing some restraint during his conversation with Letterman. Purple Rain was in theaters and the hottest ticket in town. Letterman’s signature “razzing” makes it unclear whether Letterman truly had seen the film yet or not at first, but their dialogue veers away from the host poking holes in Day’s magic when the line between the singer’s in-character and real life persona is blurred in favor of a surprising candidness. Where things gets really interesting is near the end, when Letterman asks Day about if he and Prince had had a falling out. Day subtly plays into the mystique for a bit before assuring him the distance between the two was more a literal geographic obstacle than anything else.

Apollonia Kotero on ‘Late Night with David Letterman’ (December 3, 1984)

It’s the end of 1984—the year that saw Prince explode into full-fledged pop culture phenomenon, as well as showing how reclusive the singer could be. While we never got a full Prince interview on Letterman, his conversation with the Purple One’s co-star Apollonia revealed a lot of details about the man. From Prince’s interest in hoops to the difference between “The Kid” in Purple Rain and who he was in real life, to what he’s like on a date, revisiting the clip now really reveals what Prince’s life was like.

Prince Performs “Dolphin” on ‘Late Show with David Letterman’ (December 13, 1994)

It would be just over a decade until the worlds of Prince and Letterman would collide again. Both firmly established pop culture entities at this point, they also share in common publicly going to war with the corporations responsible for distributing their art. Letterman was only a year removed from moving to CBS after a widely seen dispute with NBC, and Prince was entering the most venomously antagonistic period of his war with Warner Bros.

The clip here captures a fun bit of Prince’s silliness in the cold open, as well as Dave’s introduction, noting that Prince was performing a song off of an album that was allegedly never to be released. While The Gold Experience did eventually hit store shelves nine months later, this performance is a particularly masterful example of Prince’s theatrics. With “Slave” on his cheek, the tale of reincarnation concluding with a mock-suicide takes on a new layer watching it in a world where Prince is no longer around.

Prince Performs “Dinner With Delores” on ‘Late Show with David Letterman’ (July 8, 1996) 

With “Slave” written once again on his cheek, Prince returned to Letterman, reluctantly promoting his Chaos and Disorder album with a rendition of the record’s sole single “Dinner With Delores.” A far different arrangement of the track from its single/album release, it’s something of a hidden gem amongst his televised performances. It was the first time Prince would ever publicly play the song, only ever playing it once more the following week on NBC’s Today show. 

Letterman’s genuinely funny introduction regarding Prince being one of the biggest “names” in music is the closest they would come to interacting in this clip, as Prince exits once again without having shaken the host’s hand. Some suggest this is because the clip was recorded a week prior to the episode date as a surprise for the audience after the conclusion of another episode and later edited into the July 8 broadcast, which explains the exceptionally rabid sounds of the audience just finding out they were about to bear witness to a Prince performance.