by Alan Light
Prince is in the midst of one of his periodic resurgences in popularity, spurred by both music and strategy. After a series of experimental and even surly records, released in the midst of his ongoing battles with the music industry, his new album, Musicology, is accessible and funky; not a breakthrough or a true classic, it’s still a fully realized collection of satisfyingly Prince-style songs. He made some high-profile media appearances (opening the Grammy Awards broadcast performing a medley with Beyoncé, singing for Ellen DeGeneres), delivered a knockout mini-set at his induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in March, and concocted a plan in which everyone who bought a ticket for the tour received a copy of Musicology on his or her seat—each of which counts toward SoundScan’s bestseller lists. Since the ninety-six-date run would prove to be the top-grossing tour of the year, earning $87.4 million, this meant that the record would go gold and stay in the Top Ten for the whole summer, even if not one person bought a copy in stores.
So Prince is happy. He has also recently become a Jehovah’s Witness, and his conversation is now laced with frequent biblical references and allusions. The after-show performance at Rocketown offers the musical manifestation of this new Prince. Where these intimate, late-night gigs used to be cathartic, virtuoso displays, this time he leads his band through a set of loose funk jams. He bops through the crowd to listen from the soundboard and roams the stage cueing the players through a mash-up of Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” and Santana’s “Soul Sacrifice.” There’s no tension, all release.
I’m there to interview him for a cover story for Tracks, a magazine I founded and edited in the early 2000s, and after the show, I observe something even more unlikely: At 2:30 a.m., Prince can be found standing outside the stage door, hanging with his band members and talking to fans. The thirty or so clustered civilians are breathlessly excited to be in his presence, yet seem understanding when he tells them that he doesn’t believe in signing autographs. He is, as always, shy and quiet, listening more than talking, but he actually seems to be enjoying the chance to mingle.
One young woman tells him that Purple Rain was the first album she bought when she was in the first grade, but that her mother wouldn’t let her see the movie because it was too risqué. “Just think about what ‘too risqué’ means today!” Prince responds.
Material from Purple Rain had provided the focus for the arena concert earlier in the evening. He performed seven of the album’s nine tracks during the thirty-song, two-hour greatest-hits set, closing with the title song. In the grimy Rocketown dressing room, though, he claims that the twentieth anniversary of the project is of little consequence to him.
“I was there,” he tells me. “I did it, it was my baby. I knew about it before it happened. I knew what it was going to be. Then it was just like labor, like giving birth—in ’84, it was so much work.”
In fact, he says, just a few nights earlier in Atlanta, the Time—the Minneapolis friends/rivals/contemporaries who played his nemeses in the film, and sometimes in real life—came out and performed during his show. “We never got a chance to do the real Purple Rain tour, because the Time broke up,” he says. “But then, there they were, onstage last week, and people started tripping, and I was watching my favorite band. So there’s no anniversary, no dates; we just have to have faith in Jehovah and lay back and ride it.” (The fact that Prince became a Jehovah’s Witness may also explain some of his attitude toward the anniversary of the album, since members of the religion do not celebrate birthdays.)
Ten years later, his feelings about such milestones seem even more detached. In February 2014, Prince played a super-intimate performance in London for ten people, held in the living room of his friend, singer Lianne La Havas, as part of a press conference to announce a series of upcoming “hit-and-run” UK shows. Matt Everitt of BBC 6 Music News was one of those in attendance, and he noted that Prince seemed surprised when he was asked about Purple Rain’s impending thirtieth anniversary. “I hadn’t even realized,” he said. “Everything looks different to me, because I was there. I wrote those songs; I don’t need to know what happened.”
A few weeks after that, he appeared as the only guest for an hour of the Arsenio Hall Show—yet another in a series of odd media visits without a tour or new release to support. An audience member asked him when he last saw Purple Rain, and what he thought of it. “I was in the living room three days ago,” said Prince, “and it came on television, and I watched ‘Take Me with U.’ ” He did not address the second part of the question. (On July 27, 2014, the actual anniversary of the movie’s release, Prince did play a surprise show at his home base of Paisley Park: he opened the show with “Let’s Go Crazy,” and at one point slyly noted, “Thirty years ago today . . .” but he didn’t close the loop by playing “Purple Rain.”)
Every pop star presumably has some feelings of ambivalence about his or her biggest moment or defining hit. It immediately becomes both an obligation whenever you perform and the marker of a career pinnacle that, by definition, you can never match. Prince had a long run as one of the most successful musicians in the world, and can still sell out an arena pretty much whenever he wants to. He’s had an impressive half dozen records certified two- to four-times platinum, with 1999 (which predated Purple Rain) highest on that list, but he has never had an album with sales close to Purple Rain’s 13 million in the U.S. Indeed, he once described Purple Rain as “my albatross—it’ll be hanging around my neck as long as I’m making music.”
His work in film has suffered a more troubled fate. Each of his subsequent efforts—the features Under the Cherry Moon (in 1986) and Graffiti Bridge (in 1990), and the concert documentary Sign o’ the Times—has flopped. Sign, which chronicled performances from the magnificent 1987 album of the same title, earned some critical praise, but it was a production disaster and did minimal business. The other two movies were ravaged in the press, and the common belief is that Prince’s insistence on directing played a big part in his fall from the peak of the pop world.
Whatever his feelings about the legacy of Purple Rain, though, Prince has always kept its songs front and center in his shows—especially the title song. It has served as the climax of most of his concerts, including his 2007 Super Bowl halftime show in Miami, which was seen by 93 million people in the U.S. alone and is generally considered the gold standard of all performances at sporting events. (Over the years, “Purple Rain” has also been covered by a wide range of artists, from LeAnn Rimes to Foo Fighters, Etta James to Tori Amos, Phish to Elvis Costello, while other songs from the album have been recorded by everyone from Mariah Carey to Patti Smith.)
A December 2013 concert at Connecticut’s Mohegan Sun Arena saw Prince at his latter-day loosest; he introduced the night by saying, “We’re gonna just jam tonight—it’s just an old-school party,” and largely stayed away from the hits, digging deep into his catalogue (including quick runs through “Jungle Love” and “The Bird,” the two songs by the Time featured in Purple Rain) as he alternated between a twenty-one-piece, horn-heavy funk ensemble and his stripped-down, all-female rock trio, 3rdEyeGirl. Still, the inevitable closer, as a second encore, was a heartfelt rendition of “Purple Rain,” with a tender vocal and a winding guitar solo that saw him exploring the indelible melody as if it were a brand-new composition. As he had that night at First Avenue thirty years earlier, he stood in the spotlight, and an audience stood thrilled and riveted by what it heard—despite, or because of, the fact that this roomful of middle-aged, mostly white concertgoers was able to sing every note and anticipate every turn of the song, and had been able to do so for the majority of their years on earth.
Prince’s reluctance to look back at his career in more comprehensive ways is a mixed blessing at best. An artist can’t be faulted for wanting to keep moving forward, for making all best efforts not to be weighed down by a legacy that, if he’s lucky, eventually and inevitably turns him into a reliably bankable oldies act. The
fact that Prince keeps making new music after all this time, that he refuses to coast on his back catalogue, is admirable, and whatever it takes for him to do that is understandably a priority.
At the same time, though, we are at serious risk of watching one of music’s all-time greats erase his own legacy. For years, Prince has talked about his vault full of hundreds of unreleased songs—many of which have made the bootleg rounds among his superfans, while others circulate only as rumors or whispers. He constantly scrubs the Internet of unauthorized video footage and even his own official music videos, recently going so far as to file a lawsuit against twenty-two individuals, for $1 million each, who “engage in massive infringement and bootlegging of Prince’s material.” (The suit was dropped a few days later.)
Where Bob Dylan’s authorized Bootleg Series or the Beatles’ Anthology discs represented attempts by these artists to control and codify their unreleased material, improving the sound quality for fans and editing to help present their own versions of their histories, Prince has run in the opposite direction; in fact, the two primary documents capturing him live in his mid-’80s prime (the 1985 Syracuse concert that was released as a home video and the Sign o’ the Times film) are both out of print and were never transferred for official DVD release in the U.S., leaving the immaculately choreographed and lip-synched performance sequences in Purple Rain as the only real evidence of what he was capable of onstage. And, as cultural critic Greg Tate wrote in The Village Voice when the movie came out, “Those of y’all going gaga behind Purple Rain and never seen the boy live ain’t seen shit.”
Following the bewildering announcement that Prince would make a guest appearance on the Zooey Deschanel sitcom New Girl, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, drummer for the Roots (and such a superfan that he taught a course on Prince at New York University in the spring of 2014) posted on Facebook, begging that Prince just “make it count,” since it was a rare opportunity for people beyond the dedicated fan base to see him, and saying that he was tired of needing to explain Prince’s greatness to a new generation without having any material to show them to prove it. It was a thoughtful plea from a true believer, and concisely presented the very real challenge Prince has created for himself by moving only forward. (The amiable, slight New Girl guest shot, in which he offered romantic advice to Deschanel and then had her sing with his band at a party, didn’t wind up helping matters much in the end.)
Yet a surprise announcement in April 2014 suggested a long-awaited change in Prince’s thinking about his own musical legacy. Just a few weeks after he revealed that he now controlled the publishing rights to all of his music, a new deal with Warner Bros. Records, his initial champions and longtime adversaries, was unveiled, which would lead to the release of “previously unheard material . . . a veritable gold mine,” while also giving Prince his hard-fought, long-desired “ownership of the master recordings of his classic, global hits.” A statement from Prince said that “both Warner Bros. and Eye [sic] are quite pleased with the results of the negotiations and look forward to a fruitful working relationship.”
The deal is potentially a landmark in the recording community. An often overlooked change in copyright law allows musicians, writers, and other artists to exercise so-called termination rights. The provision, which took effect in 2013, enables the creators of music to win back their U.S. rights after thirty-five years, so long as they can show that they weren’t employees of the record label, even if they signed a contract that transferred all the rights to their work. These rights, though, are not automatically awarded, and to obtain them usually requires extensive litigation.
That thirty-five-year window reaches back as far as 1978, when Prince signed with Warner Bros. No further details of the deal or of future plans were announced—except that the first fruit of this agreement would be a newly remastered, deluxe thirtieth-anniversary version of Purple Rain. (His actual enthusiasm about this, however, still remains to be seen: the dates marking the anniversaries of first the sound track and then the movie release both came and went, and still no date had been announced for the reissue.)
Regardless of any anniversary, of all of Prince’s groundbreaking work, it is Purple Rain that endures first and foremost. It will always be the defining moment of a magnificent and fascinating—if often erratic—career. It carries the weight of history. Its success, on-screen and as a recording, was a result of the supreme confidence, laser-focused ambition, and visionary nature of the most gifted artist of his generation.
Dancing on the line between fact and fiction, Prince utilized his mysterious persona to hypercharge the film’s story with tension and revelation. He let us in—only partway, certainly not enough to rupture his myth, but more than he ever did before or since. Defying all odds, a group of inexperienced filmmakers and actors, working against the clock and the brutal Minneapolis weather, clicked for just long enough to make a movie that the public was starving for, even if they didn’t quite know it at first.
“We just wanted to do something good and something true,” says director Albert Magnoli. “The producer was on the same page, and we had an artist who wanted the same things, a group of musicians who felt the same way. It was one of the very few times when everybody actually wanted to make the same movie—which sounds obvious, but is actually very, very rare in the movie business.”
“I think part of the success of Purple Rain was that [Prince] did open up and examine himself, and that it was real,” says Lisa Coleman. “It was an authentic thing; you could feel it, and there was all this excitement around it. And I don’t think he’s ever done that again.”
Purple Rain came along at precisely the right moment—not just for Prince, but for the culture. The summer of 1984 was an unprecedented season, a collision of blockbuster records and the ascension of the music video that created perhaps the biggest boom that pop will ever experience. It was also a time of great transformation for black culture, when a series of new stars, new projects, and new styles would forever alter the racial composition of music, movies, and television. While the magnificence of the Purple Rain songs remains clear thirty years later, the album and the film were also perfectly in tune with the time and place in which they were created, and their triumph was partly the result of impeccable timing and circumstances that could never be repeated or replicated.
The first time we heard the songs on the radio, the first time we put on the album, the first time the lights in the movie theater went down, we all did just what the man told us to do: we went crazy.
TWO
Alone in a World So Cold
“Can you keep a secret?”
These—I kid you not—are Prince’s first words to me when I meet him in April of 1993. (And since the answer is yes, all I can tell you is that you really wouldn’t be all that interested.) I had received a call in New York on Friday saying that Prince had read something I wrote about his tour’s recent opening shows. He wanted to see me in San Francisco on Saturday, the first step in feeling me out for what would eventually become an interview that ran in Vibe magazine, his first lengthy on-the-record conversation with a journalist in over four years.
The driver who picked me up from the airport showed me the erotic valentine his girlfriend had made for him, then told me about the work he and his wife were doing for the Dalai Lama. It was time to wonder: Is this whole thing a put-on? But no—I arrive at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium and there is Prince, sitting alone in the empty house, watching his band, the New Power Generation, start its sound check. He’s fighting a cold, so we speak quietly back and forth in our seats for a while, and then he leads me onstage to continue the conversation while he straps on his guitar and rehearses the band.
Mostly, Prince talks about music—about Sly Stone and Earth, Wind & Fire, and other classic soul favorites we share. The NPG plays “I’ll Take You There,” and we discuss the Staple Singers and Mavis Staples, whose new album he has just finished producing.
He is talkative as he jumps from guitar to piano to the front of the stage to listen to his group, with that surprisingly low voice that loses its slightly robotic edge when he’s out of the spotlight.
As all reports indicate, he is indeed tiny—what’s most striking isn’t his height but his delicate bones and fragile frame. He is also pretty cocky, whether as a defensive move to cover his shyness with a new person or with the swagger needed to keep a performer going during a tour. Underneath the onstage roar of the NPG, he leans over to me, his fingers not leaving his guitar, and says, “You see how hard it is when you can play anything you want, anything you hear?”
Which is, in many ways, the question underlying Prince’s lifelong creative journey, from his days as a prodigiously gifted high school student leading a band on the weekends to his years spent fighting the conventions and restrictions of the music industry. First came the years of striving for maximal communication through music, then came the efforts to keep up with the constant flow of creativity that resulted.
Prince Rogers Nelson was born in Minneapolis on June 7, 1958, to pianist and songwriter John L. Nelson, whose stage name was Prince Rogers, and singer Mattie Shaw. In a 1991 television interview with A Current Affair, his father said, “I named my son Prince because I wanted him to do everything I wanted to do.”
Let’s get this out of the way right now, since it would later come to dominate so many conversations about Purple Rain: both of Prince’s parents are black.
Not that he was always forthright about that fact. Early in his career, eager to avoid any possibility of being pigeonholed as a “black” artist with a limitation on his potential audience, he was quoted as saying that his mother was white, and also that she “is a mixture of a bunch of things.” Even after Purple Rain was released, People magazine referred to him as a “mulatto.” He told Rolling Stone that he was the “son of a half-black father and an Italian mother.” (Former girlfriend/protégée Jill Jones claims that he borrowed this mix from her: “When we met, he was like, ‘You’re half what?’ and I was like, ‘Oh, I’m half Italian and black,’ and it was like, ‘Oh, okay, I can see that—I can make this work.’ He went on tour, and when he came back, he was Italian and black.”)