Prince reclaimed his name, opened the doors of Paisley Park in Chanhassen to the public for six days of tours, punctuated the whole experience Tuesday night with 3 1/2 hours of pure, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-purple-pants funk at the raucous, sold-out Northrop Auditorium and called the whole mess “Prince: A Celebration.”

At best, the show was spontaneously intimate and honest. At worst, it was chaotic, monotonous and unpolished. But by the finale, Prince’s no plan, no rules approach degenerated into a cacophony of sight and sound.

It didn’t help that Prince invited so many people from the first few rows on to the stage that audience members crowded out the musicians _ and there were plenty of musicians.

More than 30 bodies pulsed and twisted on the theater stage: A marshmallowy woman in a pink jumpsuit, a gaggle of small children, a singer, a skinny kid with spidery moves, some sparkling girls that Prince had beckoned with a nod, another singer, bassist Larry Graham, more singers, dancers, rappers, horn-blowers … feeling dizzy?

Among the musical melee, pulling the strings, was the diminutive puppetmaster himself: Dragging reluctant musician friends from backstage, beckoning more girls up to dance, jangling on his hollow-body guitar, conducting the horn section, barking orders at the lighting director and expending more energy than all the rest of them combined.

But it wasn’t at this uproarious end that the performance ceased to be a polished concert. In fact, it never really was a concert at all.

What fans from around the world were served was one of Prince’s famous, invite-only, all-night Paisley Park jam sessions _ but on a much larger scale and at $50 a pop.

There were moments when Prince donned one of his signature guitars and unleashed the kind of blistering power-rock leads that put the power in New Power Generation.

Early in the night, Prince’s deep purple, six-stringed glyph steered the band through the hairpin turns of a nitro-burning “Delirious” that digressed from high-voltage pop into jazz _ then a jarring heavy metal interlude _ and closed on one of those caterwauling, ear-splitting Prince solos that sends the rest of the players into sit-still-and-watch mode.

And at midpoint, Prince led the band through a cursory medley of popular hits, beginning with a truncated “Nothing Compares 2 U,” followed by an even more severely shortened “Take me with U” and “Raspberry Beret.”

But the majority of the time was filled with extemporaneous, guitarless, loping funk grooves, R&B clunkers and evangelism; Prince opened and closed the show with the message “Love is God. God is Love.”