Tim Kazurinsky / YouTubePrince brought down the house at Saturday Night Live's 40th anniversary after-party last year.
The iconic pop and rock star died at age 57 Thursday at his Paisley Park studios in Minnesota. His death is under investigation.
Wearing a shiny gold outfit, oversized hooded black fur vest and sunglasses, Prince had performed at the SNL 40th anniversary after-party in February in front of a slew of current and past cast members. In a video former SNL cast member Tim Kazurinsky recently posted on YouTube, he is seen performing a super hard rock version of his 1984 hit "Let's Go Crazy" before a cheering crowd.
"Dearly inebriated," Prince told the audience, parodying a lyric from the song.
Past SNL cast members Jimmy Fallon, Chris Rock, Martin Short and Maya Rudolph joined Prince onstage and helped sing backup for him. During her time on the show, she had taken part in a famous talk show parody series titled The Prince Show, in which she played Beyoncé and Fred Armisen played Prince.
Prince drew particularly loud cheers at one point when he moved towards the audience while holding his electric guitar with one hand, from the bottom. Several members of the crowd took it gently and touched it for several seconds before handing it back to him.
On Saturday, SNL honored Prince with a special tribute episode that contains clips of his past performances on the NBC sketch series, spanning back to 1981.
"Other people may have been on the show more times or performed for frequently but there was always something different about a Prince performance," Fallon said. "It was special, it was an event. It was Prince."
"Times have changed, styles have come and gone but no matter what, Prince has never not been cool. I mean, he is, for my generation and our generation, he was, it was Prince and Madonna, Michael Jackson, they were the Elvis and Beatles, the Marilyn Monroe, the James Dean, they were icons, bigger, larger than life, fashion, music, every single thing .You couldn't take your eyes off of them. I mean, he had his own color. Who has their own color? He owns purple."
Also on Saturday, Prince's family and friends gathered at Paisley Park for a private gathering and had his body cremated. They also thanked the scores of fans who flocked to the site to pay their respects.
"Thank you for coming. Thank you for loving him," one of Prince's sisters, Tyka Nelson, told the crowd.
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