by Matt Thorne
But it worked for the teenage viewers, and ‘Little Red Corvette’ was Prince’s most successful song up to that point. Further propelling his journey towards mainstream ubiquity, it caught the attention of soft-rock goddess Stevie Nicks, who became determined to work with him. Throughout his career, Prince has enjoyed an affinity with eccentric female singers, from Joni Mitchell (whose ‘A Case of You’ he’s covered) to Kate Bush (with whom he recorded on the tracks ‘Why Should I Love You?’, for her album The Red Shoes, and ‘My Computer’, for his Emancipation), collaborating with them in the studio or inviting them onto his stage. Sometimes the overture has come from Prince, but usually it’s the other way round. In this case, Nicks was inspired by ‘Little Red Corvette’ to write ‘Stand Back’, which has something of the drama of ‘Little Red Corvette’ but is a far less lyrically interesting song, a curiously phrased lament from a lonely woman let down by her lover.10 Recently, Nicks has claimed that Prince also offered her ‘Purple Rain’, telling long-time Prince-watcher Jon Bream that he sent her a cassette of a long instrumental track and asked her to write lyrics for it. ‘It was so overwhelming, that 10-minute track, that I listened to it and I just got scared,’ Nicks explained. ‘I called him back and said, “I can’t do it. I wish I could. It’s too much for me.” I’m so glad that I didn’t, because he wrote it, and it became “Purple Rain”.’11
Alan Leeds, who joined the 1999 tour midway through, remembers that even though it featured Prince’s band, The Time and Vanity 6, Prince was already separating himself from not just the support acts, but also his own band. ‘When I joined, they had already gone through two road managers, and basically they were just looking for a road manager for Prince and his band. The biggest responsibility was for the band because Prince with his bodyguard Chick Huntsberry were actually fairly independent.’ Still, it’s touching proof of the possessiveness of Prince’s band that two weeks after the release of Stevie Nicks’s ‘Stand Back’, they were mocking it at rehearsal, playing comic versions of it alongside spoofs of Madness’s ‘Our House’ and Suburban Lawns’ ‘Janitor’.
These rehearsals, which took place at one of several warehouses Prince would hire as rehearsal spaces in the years before he built his own Paisley Park complex, were for what would turn out to be the most historically significant show of Prince’s early career. It’s hard to imagine many pop stars breaking in a new member by getting them to perform a show that would provide the basic tracks for three songs on the next record (using a mobile recording unit, as he’d done with The Time’s ‘The Bird’), but that Prince would choose to do this with Wendy Melvoin at a home-town benefit show reveals just how certain he was during this era. It also reveals Prince thinking less like a musician than a film director, confident that he could build on and change the performances in the studio. From the moment she entered the band, Melvoin would take up the role of foil to Prince previously played by Dickerson, as essential to him in onstage closeness as Keith to Mick or Ronson to Bowie. As she now describes it: ‘We played off each other. We wore the same suits, had the same hairdo.’ In his autobiography, Dickerson depicts this period as a time of personal disillusionment: although 1999 had gone platinum and their tour had been the highest grossing of the year, he had started drinking onstage and was resentful of those he considered bandwagon-jumpers.12 But his departure would prompt Prince to even greater heights13 (as well as informing the plot of Purple Rain), as he took a private home-town moment and turned it into a story that would captivate the world.
8
NIKKI’S CASTLE
Bob Cavallo remembers: ‘Eventually Prince became quite a handful. We had a young guy, Steve Fargnoli, who did booking for us. He worked for me, and we had to make him a partner because Prince needed twenty-four-hour coverage. And he wanted me to move to Minneapolis. He told me if I really appreciated how great he was, I’d move immediately to Minneapolis and stop beating that dead horse, and the dead horse was Earth, Wind and Fire. And I said, “I can’t do it, my kids are in high school.” But who would move to Minneapolis on purpose?’
Alan Leeds would, and did. At the end of the 1999 tour, he moved to Minneapolis to become what he describes as ‘an off-road road manager’. ‘There was a bit of a void between Prince and his management team,’ Leeds explains. ‘It wasn’t intellectual, it was more geographical, because they were LA-based and Prince was steadfastly Minnesotan. There was a geographical separation. Prince required a full-time management presence, but the three partners in the LA firm [Cavallo, Ruffalo and Fargnoli] couldn’t afford to move to Minneapolis. So they needed a liaison of sorts. The responsibilities increased tenfold because all of a sudden I was the company, because there wasn’t a business structure. Prince didn’t have the revenue streams to support a full-time staff, so they needed someone to be responsible for anything Prince wanted to see happen.’
These responsibilities extended not just to Prince, but also to The Time and Vanity 6, and increased when they began working towards what would become Purple Rain. ‘There were dance rehearsals going on, acting lessons going on. And the actual band rehearsals and recording sessions, all of which were going on in various parts of Minneapolis simultaneously.’ Leeds didn’t even have an office: ‘Any business was conducted in the rehearsal space or my living room.’
To this day, Bob Cavallo remains impressed by the chutzpah Prince displayed when he told his management that he wanted to make a movie. ‘We thought we’d done an amazing job, and the first contract was coming due. Steve was with him in Atlanta, and I said, “Tell Prince we’re going to organise a contract with him for another five years.” And Steve calls me and says, “You’re not going to believe this. The kid says he’ll sign with us, but only if you get him a major motion picture. It has to not be from some jeweller or drug dealer but has to be from a major studio, and he wants his name above the title.” I can’t tell you what an impossible task that was.’
Finding a director proved equally tricky. ‘We got turned down by every director,’ says Cavallo. ‘I personally went out and talked to everybody. I was trying to sign Jamie Foley, the director of a movie called Reckless,1 and Foley passed. I was in the screening room alone with one person in the back and I assumed he was a PA. And when it was over he said, “What do you think of the movie?” And I said, “It was OK. I liked it, I thought the editing was good.” And he says, “Oh, I did that.” And so the kid was the editor, Albert Magnoli. And he had also produced and directed this movie called Jazz for the USC film school. I offered it to Albert, and of course Albert passed. I said, “How can you pass? You don’t have a pot to piss in. I’m going to give you the DGA minimum, which is seventy-five grand.” But he said, “The script is too square, it’s too TV.” And I said, “No, I agree, we’ll have to change it.”’
Cavallo gave Magnoli a week to think about it, and they met again at a restaurant and ‘he basically acted out the movie for me. He’s very athletic and energetic. We were in Art’s Deli, and he’s jumping out the booth showing me what he’s going to do. And I remember him saying to me, “Do you remember the closing scene in The Godfather, as Al Pacino is standing there with his son being baptised, they keep cutting to all of Pacino’s enemies being killed by his guys?” He said that’ll be our opening. “We’ll have Prince performing that opening song and I’ll introduce the characters – Apollonia, Morris, Jerome, the club owner, and Prince himself, making up and driving in his motorcycle.” And I thought it was very clever.’
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Much has been made of the importance of Minneapolis club First Avenue to Prince, and in a documentary to accompany the twentieth-anniversary DVD release of Purple Rain, various luminaries queue up to testify about Prince testing out tracks there – or sitting in on punk shows at the club’s next door wing, 7th Street Entry – but while he would become forever associated with the club after using it as one of the primary settings for Purple Rain, the benefit for the Minnesota Dance Theatre was only the third time he’d played there. As wel
l as giving him the tracks for ‘I Would Die 4 U’, ‘Baby I’m a Star’ and ‘Purple Rain’, it was first time he played ‘Let’s Go Crazy’ and ‘Computer Blue’, and the only occasion that he ever played the sublime ‘Electric Intercourse’ in front of an audience.2 But as far as Leeds is concerned, ‘I don’t think any of us had any sense, perhaps even he, that these recordings were going to become the basis of an album, much less a movie soundtrack.’
There are recordings of rehearsal versions of ‘Let’s Go Crazy’, played in preparation for this show, which reveal both how much fun this new song was to play and also how loose it was before it sharpened into the version we know today. It seems to have started out close to a punk song – although without even the pantomime danger of something like The Damned’s ‘Smash It Up’, a not that dissimilar song. Much of Purple Rain is in a slightly overwrought rock-metal register, and it’s clear Prince had to drill the band to get this sound, losing a lightness of tone along the way.
Of all the songs on Purple Rain, ‘Computer Blue’ underwent the most changes in its progress from the rehearsal room to the album. Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman both occasionally feel tormented about the way the song has followed them around, suggesting that it came into being in what seemed like a fairly improvisational way. What intrigues most listeners, of course, is the exchange between the two women at the start of the song. Wendy wishes ‘there was something more interesting [behind it], but Prince just gave us a piece of paper and said, “Say this.”’ The song, she says, came together at rehearsal and was based around Lisa’s lead line. ‘I had a cool sound on my Oberheim that day,’ Lisa tells me. ‘It took us about five minutes and that was the end of it, and here we are five hundred years later. Miss Haversham … what does it mean?’ ‘We didn’t even think it was this weird psychosexual lesbian thing. I had no idea,’ Wendy explains.
The version of ‘Computer Blue’ played at the First Avenue show was twice the length of the album track, but even longer, more complicated versions of the song were also experimented with. Instead of merely containing extended guitar parts or jamming, the ideas in these longer versions are the seeds of themes and imagery that Prince would pursue more thoroughly in his later work. There is a description of a house filled with hallways associated with different emotions, including lust, insecurity, fear and hate. Prince would play with something similar on The Gold Experience, a record that also emphasised his interest in computers. The song features a battle of wills between Prince and Wendy, in which she suggests that the ‘computer’ of the song should stop thinking of women as ‘butterflies’ and recognise them as computers too. There are also anguished lyrics about going to church and wanting to see ‘the Dawn’, something that would preoccupy Prince until 1997, and which he would also make reference to in another song from this era, ‘17 Days’. ‘Computer Blue’ interconnects with another song from this period, ‘Father’s Song’, which appeared in Purple Rain and which Prince frequently played during the subsequent tour. This song is co-credited to John L. Nelson, and could be an example of Prince using one of his father’s piano tunes as inspiration for his own work, something that seemed particularly appropriate to this project, given Prince’s fictionalisation of his family for dramatic purposes, though Matt Fink told me categorically that Prince’s father wrote the bridge melody and presented it to Prince.
The song from that night’s performance which didn’t make Purple Rain, ‘Electric Intercourse’, is not just one of Prince’s finest unreleased tracks, but is among the best songs he’s ever recorded. Although he ditched the song after coming up with ‘The Beautiful Ones’, it’s the equal of anything on the officially released album and if given a release might be as well remembered as any other track on the record aside from the title song. While the lyric feels slightly obvious – a less subtle bringing together of sexuality and machine than ‘Computer Blue’ – it has all the charm of ‘Purple Rain’ with none of the bombast.
‘I Would Die 4 U’ continues the ‘Computer Blue’ theme of women as butterflies. It’s the weakest track on the album, but Prince’s decision to construct the song from live performance pays off in its urgency. Oddly, Prince would later put out a ten-minute rehearsal version of the song, performed with The Revolution, Sheila E and members of her band (including Miko Weaver, who would eventually join Prince’s band) while on the Purple Rain tour. With its long percussion breaks, this version has a more Latin feel not entirely in keeping with the hard-rock song but providing a useful reminder that the all-conquering Purple Rain showcased only one side of Prince’s musical style. The prominence given to Eddie Minnifield’s sax solo is also notable, especially as it would be soon after this that Prince would begin working with Eric Leeds, who would move from being saxophonist in The Family into Prince’s main band.
Prince’s later engineer H. M. Buff told me that Prince’s guitar is out of tune on ‘Baby I’m a Star’, presumably as a result of basing the song on the tracks recorded from live performance. An original demo version of this song exists with Prince addressing the audience, but it’s not substantially different from the released version. It’s the last time Prince could get away – even in character – with singing about having no money.
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No matter what else he is remembered for, it seems Prince will forever be most associated with ‘Purple Rain’. He has self-consciously tried to replicate it at least twice, once for the title song of his fourth movie, Graffiti Bridge, and later under an alias as ‘Gold’. It’s the first song a concert virgin wants to hear and about the last (along with ‘Cream’, ‘Kiss’ and ‘Let’s Go Crazy’) a concert veteran wants him to play.3 He’s used it to start sets, to finish them, made it a centre point and smuggled it away a few songs in where he can’t make a meal of it without derailing the show. He’s said onstage that it’s what people shout instead of his name at airports, and although he has played it nearly every time he’s got up onstage, somehow it still retains some emotional power. It is not a song that exists as a demo, and the first time Prince played it at First Avenue it had an extra verse. He played an alternative version at a rehearsal for his twenty-sixth birthday concert known as ‘Gotta Shake This Feeling’, in which he sings different lyrics (some from ‘Another Lonely Xmas’, others which have never been used again) over the chords from the song. When he first played the song on the Purple Rain tour, it would often seem endless, stretched out longer and longer as he continued his vast tour of the US, a lengthy run that Prince has subsequently dismissed, telling an interviewer: ‘Purple Rain was 100 shows, and around the 75th, I went crazy … It was bloody back then. I won’t say why but there was blood on me. They were the longest shows because you knew what was going to happen.’4
Albert Magnoli has commented that it was this benefit show at First Avenue that truly gave shape to the film, and that the movie’s central drama grew out of his performance of this song that night. ‘Months before pre-production began, I was in the First Ave, 7th St. Club in Minneapolis and heard Prince perform a rough version of “Purple Rain” on stage with The Revolution. After Prince finished his performance, I met him backstage and asked him what the song was titled. He said: “Purple Rain.” I suggested that this was the song that should be used for the pivotal moment in the story, after he discovers his father shot in the basement. Prince agreed, and asked if the title of the song could also be the title of the picture. I said, “Yes,” and the film from that moment on was called “Purple Rain.”’5
Knowing that the film grew out of the song rather than vice versa ensures that we don’t have to fit the meaning of the lyrics to the action of the movie, though it seems likely Prince cut the extra verse missing from the finished version of the song – in which he tells the object of his affections that he doesn’t want her money or her love – in order to ensure that it could be both dedicated to his father in the movie and fit the narrative of the film. For a song that has come to define Prince, it’s ironic that the song (however anthemic) is actuall
y all about uncertainty, with Prince initially contemplating roles offered to him (a lover, a leader), before finally accepting them.
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There is some confusion about how the screenplay for Purple Rain came to be written. One thing that does seem certain is that the initial idea for the plot of the film came from Prince – whom Barney Hoskyns observed scribbling scenarios for a film in a purple notebook while on the Triple Threat tour, when Prince took Vanity 6 and The Time with him – and that he called in screenwriter William Blinn to observe life on the road and turn it into a screenplay. But Dez Dickerson told me that an earlier screenwriter ‘wrote the first version, a screenplay that was slashed and rewritten. The screenwriter was very, very observant. He was quiet and low-key, sort of innocuous. He didn’t say much.’
Wendy Melvoin remembers it differently, suggesting that it was the director who shaped the story. ‘It was a weird situation. Purple Rain was written while we were all there. The draft was written around Prince. Al Magnoli had met with everyone independently and said, “If this situation were to happen, what would you say?” And that was the script, that was how we experienced it. But it was three months. During this period we were writing and rehearsing for the Purple Rain tour. It happened all at once. By the time the movie was done we went out on the road for a year. There was six months of writing, rehearsing and playing and filming, but we didn’t see anything. I remember having a reaction to Matt Fink because I would hear Matt saying, “God must’ve got Wendy’s periods mixed up,” and it was a dumb thing to say. I thought, “That’s what you would say if you were given that scenario, Matt, that?”’
Dickerson was not part of this experience. ‘No, I remember a handful of personal conversations. The movie was loosely based on semi-autobiographical details. Even with the dynamic in the band, the Wendy and Lisa subplot in the movie was related to the relationship between Prince and I. It was a real-life thing. I never met with William Blinn. Really it all came from Prince.’
