by Matt Thorne
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At the same time as working on songs for Purple Rain, Prince was also writing and recording for a planned second Vanity 6 album, which would mutate into an Apollonia 6 record after Vanity left both Purple Rain and the girl band (see Chapter 21). There was some slippage between the two projects, with Prince taking ‘Take Me with U’ from the Apollonia record, and also writing a song called ‘G-Spot’, which was considered for both records. ‘G-Spot’ would eventually be included on Jill Jones’s debut album (see Chapter 21), but works much better as a Prince demo, although it is closer to the loose sexual funk of the songs on 1999 than anything else on Purple Rain. The song that Prince wrote to replace ‘G-Spot’, ‘Darling Nikki’, is closer in sound to the rest of the album, but is still arrestingly different in content to the remainder of the record.
Why, for example, does Darling Nikki have a castle? Is Prince making deliberate reference to the gothic in this song of sadomasochism? (And maybe even De Sade?) Is it a goth song?6 Has he been inspired by Justine or Juliette; is he trading on some remembered imagery found in that library of erotic literature he once claimed inspired him? Or is he simply, in this crossover rock album, parodying heavy-metal imagery? As Mark Edmundson notes in his Nightmare on Main Street: Angels, Sadomasochism, and the Culture of the Gothic, ‘Gothic is one of the most common aesthetics for rock videos.’7 (Although for Edmundson, it’s Madonna8 and the late Michael Jackson9 rather than Prince who are the gothic figures.) Barney Hoskyns has pointed out that the song combines the themes of horror-inflected American sitcoms The Munsters and The Addams Family, which suggests that the gothic undercurrents are both deliberate and yet at the same time knowingly camp.10
We know that Prince listened to all his contemporaries on Warner Brothers; did that extend to Frank Zappa’s Zoot Allures, put out on the label the year before Prince signed with them? And if so, did he give more than a cursory listen to ‘The Torture Never Stops’, which though not similar to ‘Darling Nikki’ in sound or lyrics, takes place in a dungeon that sounds like a hard-core version of Nikki’s castle, and has a similar Sadean influence?
Or is the castle a less frightening place? Prince first started singing about castles via The Time, whose Prince-penned ‘Ice Cream Castles’ came from a Joni Mitchell lyric. Was this song born from the same inspiration? (Incidentally, Prince’s sister Tyka also sings of wanting a castle for two in her song ‘L.O.V.E.’, recorded four years after ‘Darling Nikki’, so perhaps it was a shared childhood aspiration.) In the live version of the song Nikki goes further, leaving her panties on the stairs instead of her phone number.
One of the many wonderful things about ‘Darling Nikki’ is that while it ended up at number one on the Parental Music Resource Center’s Filthy Fifteen (for more on this, see Chapter 21) due to its sexual content, Prince’s use of back-masking – a technique they persuaded a doctor to testify against at the United States Congress – was designed not to urge his listeners to devote their souls to Satan but instead to secrete a Christian message as a coda to his salacious song. The ‘mirror message’ in ‘Darling Nikki’ actually features Prince announcing his happiness at the thought of Christ’s future resurrection.11 Whenever there is darkness in Prince’s work, light is rarely far away.
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Reading PMRC head Tipper Gore’s Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society (1987) now is a genuinely baffling experience. This is partly because music has gone through so many transformations since the book was published, and also because with his forsaking of profanity and developing interest in soft jazz, Prince now seems a relatively innocuous figure. Mainly, though, it is because even at the time Prince made an odd bedfellow with Mötley Crüe and W.A.S.P. and the directors of slasher movies like Friday the 13th and I Spit on Your Grave. Indeed, Prince’s own later attitudes towards the violence of Hollywood are far more extreme than those espoused by Tipper Gore.
Gore seemed to focus solely on the lyrics, missing the nature of Prince’s performance, something defined brilliantly by Miles Davis in his autobiography, in which he notes, somewhat resentfully: ‘[Prince] gets over with everyone because he fills everyone’s illusions. He’s got that raunchy thing, almost like a pimp and a bitch all wrapped up in one image, that transvestite thing. But when he’s singing that funky X-rated shit that he does about sex and women, he’s doing it in a high-pitched voice, in almost a girl’s voice. If I said “Fuck you” to somebody they would be ready to call the police. But if Prince says it in that girl-like voice he uses, then everyone says it’s cute.’12
Following his decision to stop swearing on stage, Prince would drop ‘Darling Nikki’ from the set in 2001 (although he still occasionally teases the audience with the intro), but in its last live incarnation it would become more nihilistic, with dancer Geneva inhabiting the role as a porno-schoolgirl. It seems unlikely we’ll ever hear Prince play this song again.
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A couple of weeks after playing the benefit concert at First Avenue, Prince returned to Sunset Sound to work on the album, during which time he decided to replace ‘Electric Intercourse’ with a new song, ‘The Beautiful Ones’. Much of his finest work appears to have been inspired by his relationship with Wendy Melvoin’s sister Susannah. ‘The Beautiful Ones’ fits thematically with these later songs, with its references to painting and confusion about levels of commitment. An all-solo effort, it is not – as might be expected, and as would undoubtedly be the case if it were a later Prince song – a narcissistic celebration of the band or Prince’s retinue but instead a faux-lament about how the important women in one’s life are the least pliable – a pleasing move forward from the sexual politics of Prince’s earlier work, albeit a strand that would not last beyond the late 1980s.
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Purple Rain, Prince’s most successful movie, is really a cinematic equivalent of the Triple Threat tour:13 it’s all about competition, and yet it’s a fake competition – the only person Prince is up against is himself. When Prince and Apollonia pass a music shop, there are several mannequins, including one holding a white cloud guitar. The subtext is obvious: everyone in the film is Prince’s puppet. He emphasises this again in an argument with Wendy Melvoin over a tape she wants to play him – containing the music to ‘Purple Rain’ – in which he communicates by holding up a monkey puppet and becoming a ventriloquist. The three competing bands in the film – The Time, The Revolution and Apollonia – are all Prince’s creations, and there’s a deliberate, sly tension in the film in the way he presents himself as the underdog at the mercy of Morris Day’s machinations, yet maintains his superiority throughout. In the opening scene at First Avenue, Prince is second on the bill to The Time, but this means he comes first in the film, playing a full version of ‘Let’s Go Crazy’ before the headliners do a truncated ‘Jungle Love’. Although Prince has a scene where he meets Apollonia in First Avenue, deliberately echoing his first meeting with Vanity (who refused to do the film after an argument about her fee), it’s Morris Day who recruits Apollonia and presides over their rehearsals. Still, although Prince has rigged the game, the subplot about Wendy’s tape acknowledges that this album, unlike the ones that had preceded it, is not just a solo record but, on five of the album’s nine songs at least, a group project.
Not ‘When Doves Cry’, though. The album’s second-most memorable song (and first single) was recorded alone. Alan Leeds was present at the rehearsal when Prince first brought in a cassette of it to play to the band: ‘Everyone was teasing him about the fact that there was no bass on the record, saying, “How are you going to have a hit record without a bass?” And he was boasting about how only he could do it. But all I remembered was that simple little piano hook, and I knew it was going to be a hit.’ Though it had the support of his management, it wasn’t the first choice for a single from some at his label. Howard Bloom remembers Bob Cavallo flying out to New York to play it to him. ‘He played me a song that Russ Thyret [from Warner Brothers] wanted to put out as the first single. It was a piece of
funk dreck. And then he played me “When Doves Cry”, and I could feel the entire film in three and a half minutes. Bob was pushing for support to have “When Doves Cry” come out as the single.’
As well as being among Prince’s most loved hits, this song has always attracted interest as being a particularly convincing portrayal of female desire, at odds with heavy rock’s usually phallic trappings. But while ‘When Doves Cry’ was celebrated for turning its back on a certain type of male sexuality, the film of Purple Rain disturbed many, particularly scenes such as Morris Day’s bodyguard Jerome tossing a woman into a dumpster, or Prince tricking Apollonia into jumping in a freezing lake. Asked to address this subject during an MTV interview, Prince responded: ‘Wait, I didn’t write Purple Rain, someone else did, and it was a story, a fictional story, and it should be perceived that way, and nothing else. Violence is something that happens in everyday life, and we were only telling a story. I’m not sure it was looked at that way. I don’t think anything we did was unnecessary. Sometimes for the sake of humour we may have went overboard, and if that was the case, I’m sorry, but that was not the intention.’
Howard Bloom did everything he could to help the film reach a mass audience, his campaign beginning from the moment the film started shooting. ‘Bob hired an LA film PR firm and hired a standard set publicist. But the set publicist wasn’t doing anything, she wasn’t writing anything, finding anecdotes or planting them anywhere. One of the things I did for Prince was I felt that my rivals in publicity felt they’d done a superior job if they got six stories a month; I felt I’d failed if we got less than a hundred and twenty stories a month. People don’t recognise a name until they’ve seen it six times, they don’t recognise a song until they’ve heard it fifteen times. So you need hundreds of repetitions to establish an artist. I found all the gossip columns I possibly could and I found all the items I possibly could and I planted a Prince item every single week. And by the time of the film Prince was gaining recognition and name value.’
In spite of this, Bloom says Prince’s management was still nervous, which is unsurprising given that, as Cavallo says, he and Prince had financed the film for the entire shoot. Bloom remembers: ‘I got a call from Bob Cavallo, and Bob said, “You’ve got to be out here by eleven o’clock tomorrow morning. We’ve been in the editing room, we’ve done everything we could to turn it into a film, and it’s not a film. We’re screening it for Warner Brothers tomorrow, and you have to be there.”’ Bloom got on a plane immediately, and his experience in the screening room was very different. ‘This music pounded me in the fucking gut, and this film was one of the most amazing experiences I’ve ever had in my life. From the time I was a kid what I’ve been seeking from art is something that would do something to you utterly beyond your ability to articulate. And one of the reasons it hit at gut level was because the plot came through the music.’
In the conference room after the screening, Bloom says ‘it felt like we were at a funeral. The people in the room had faces that telegraphed exactly how they felt about this film – it was a failure – and they were wondering how to tell that to Bob Cavallo. It was not something they were going to bet their careers on. They were going to roll the film out at six theatres in Arizona. The minute you hear that expression you know you’ve been buried alive. Then came my turn to speak, and I got up and told them, if you do anything to kill this film, you will be killing a part of history. This is going to do for film what The Beatles did for popular music in 1964, and they would sin in every conceivable way if they failed to recognise that.’ Bloom concedes this wasn’t the only thing that saved Purple Rain and that Bob Cavallo also did an enormous amount to get the movie to a mass audience, but from this meeting onwards there was a change in perception.
‘Instead of rolling out in six theatres we rolled out with a hundred theatres; instead of doing a naked roll-out we did a roll-out in conjunction with MTV, which was as hot as anything. For MTV to do something with a black artist was crossing a boundary, but they did it and it worked.’
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While Purple Rain seems to have been largely one of those rare occasions when Prince did not dig particularly deep into his archive and mostly wrote songs that did end up, in whatever form, on the album or in the film, there are a handful of other songs that weren’t included on the record or in the movie, some of which received official release, such as ‘17 Days’14 and ‘Erotic City’.15 Of ‘17 Days’ Wendy remembers: ‘It came out of a “Purple Rain” rehearsal. Me and Lisa started playing a riff, and Prince started singing that melody.’ Lisa adds: ‘I think we were being really playful because we started doing like a reggae groove and we were twisting things around. It’s like musicians, we used to bust each other’s chops all the time doing polyrhythms, this feel against that feel, ended up being cool. He was like, “Hey, I kinda like this.” It was written quickly. We went to his house for the final bits.’16 But as good as ‘17 Days’ is, it was ‘Erotic City’ that pointed to the direction Prince would pursue instead. A duet between him and Sheila E, it would later become the opening song (and frequent highlight) of the Lovesexy tour; in the middle of this heavy-rock period, he produced this dance track, one of his very best songs, notable not particularly for the lyrics but for the speeded-up vocals, a creative avenue he would take a while to explore fully. Another less well-known but equally wonderful Purple Rain out-take is the aforementioned ‘Billy’, an undeniably throwaway rock-funk jam/rehearsal that nonetheless ranks in my personal Prince top ten. Unlike other rehearsals of this nature, the song is structured and sustained, perhaps closest to the much later ‘The Scandalous Sex Suite’ (although, at over fifty minutes, more than twice its length) in the way Prince builds a long song around repeated themes and sequences. The simple lyrics refer to the ugly sunglasses worn by Billy in Purple Rain, but both Prince’s vocal and his guitar-playing have rarely been finer.
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Alan Leeds believes that part of Prince’s motivation for making Purple Rain was to patch things up with his parents. ‘I just saw it as a father and son trying to re-bond. The father was replicated in this film, albeit fictitiously, and Prince had a lot of respect for his father as a musician. As he got older he understood the pressures that had turned his father into who he was – very reclusive, and he wasn’t a particularly happy guy. Clearly, a guy whose life hasn’t turned out exactly the way he’d like it to be. But here comes his son, who is an entrée to such an extent that he gets his father dressed up in a special wardrobe to come to movie premieres and MTV specials with a Playboy model on each arm. It gave them a form in which to bond.’
Though Purple Rain featured Prince turning his past into drama, not everyone from Minneapolis appreciated it. Pepe Willie remembers: ‘That’s when I got pissed off at him, because Prince called me and said, “Pepe, I gotta part for you in Purple Rain.” He said, “You’re gonna be the owner of this club.” I was supposed to be the club owner, but Prince never called me back. So what I did, because I do acting too, I went and auditioned on my own and got in.’
Willie also told me that the movie led to a falling out between Prince and Morris Day. ‘They had an argument. I don’t know what it was about. Prince was yelling at Morris “You owe me”, and I’m sitting down, going, “Oh no, here we go.” And then Morris starts yelling, “I owe you. If anybody owes anybody anything, you owe Pepe.” And I’m going, “Oh no, why did he bring my name into it?” So Morris left the group at that time. He went to Los Angeles, and a week later he calls me up and says, “Pepe, you got to help me.” So I said, “Don’t sign anything, I’ll be on the next plane.” So I flew out to LA and started getting his affairs in order. His mother was living out there and I had to build his team, and I had to say, “OK, Morris, we got to get you management, an accountant, and I gotta talk to the record label.” And that’s what I did. I went up to Warner Brothers and I talked with Mo Ostin on Morris’s behalf and I helped get him management.’
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Surprisingly, Prin
ce’s most rock album was the first to be appropriated by rappers, with MC Hammer constructing the song ‘Pray’ around samples from ‘When Doves Cry’ and 2Pac borrowing from ‘Darling Nikki’ for ‘Heartz of Men’. But at the time, Prince seemed to be aiming directly for the heartland, with a bombastic live show that took in ninety-eight dates across the US and Canada and was officially documented with Double Live, a video release of a show in Syracuse broadcast live to a worldwide audience of 12 million. The recording, like the rest of the tour, concentrated almost exclusively on tracks from 1999 and Purple Rain. A few songs into the show, there was a weird interlude where the band played ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’ and Prince teased the audience about taking them to his house and making them stay there for ever. The show also featured a rather strange song entitled ‘God’ that Prince released in two versions on the US and British editions of the ‘Purple Rain’ single. The vocal version, entitled simply ‘God’, can also be found on the B-sides disc of 1993’s The Hits box set; an instrumental version entitled ‘God (Love Theme from Purple Rain)’ is harder to track down. The song, which features Prince debating with God, also sees him making reference to ‘The Dance Electric’, a song he wrote for André Cymone. I asked Wendy Melvoin how serious she thought Prince was in his theological questioning. ‘I felt it was showbiz for me,’ she told me. ‘I did not relate personally. But part of the beauty of it back then is that there were Jews, Mexicans, blacks, whites, gays and straights in his band. Everyone had their own opinions and they were tolerated and embraced.’
