by Alan Light
“Corvette” was aided immeasurably by MTV’s increasing influence. The video, with a memorable, acrobatic James Brown–style dance break by Prince—clad in the familiar purple coat, with a frilly shirt and an increasingly complicated hairstyle piled atop his head—during Dickerson’s solo, became a staple on the network. (Rick James believed that this support for his archrival was an act of revenge taken by MTV in response to his criticism of its resistance to giving airtime to black artists.) But Prince’s approach to music video was, at least at this point, far different from the narrative clips Jackson and others were pioneering. His videos were really “multi-camera adaptations of his live show,” as Nelson George wrote in his 2010 book on the making of Thriller, “definitely a reflection of Prince’s otherworldly confidence that, in an era of increasingly conceptual videos, his visual expressions were all about capturing his band and himself.”
On the heels of the success of “Corvette,” the decision was made to rerelease the “1999” single, which this time climbed up to number 12 on the charts; “shut out of pop radio upon its initial release in 1982,” Billboard later noted, “[‘1999’] was relaunched in mid-1983, and off the back of its belated MTV exposure became a huge pop radio success the second time around.” (Rolling Stone pointed out at the time that “Prince’s guitar-heavy, synth-fried 1999 had already gone gold before rock stations opened their eyes.”) The one-two punch, followed by another Top Ten hit with the frantic electro-dance track “Delirious,” marked Prince’s entry into the big leagues of pop.
“We were playing in theaters,” says Alan Leeds, who had come onboard as the tour manager directly from a job overseeing Kiss on the road, “and during the course of the tour, they broke ‘Corvette.’ Then they rereleased ‘1999,’ and all of a sudden he was selling out arenas. We saw this happen over a period of three or four weeks, where the audience went from a predominantly black audience in theaters to a heavily mixed audience in arenas.”
Dez Dickerson has said that from the stage, you could track the progress of “Little Red Corvette”; that the “impact that the song was having reflected in the makeup of the audience—this tidal wave of white hitting the audience, getting whiter and whiter each night.”
Off the stage, Prince was still battling with his need for control. His autocratic side surfaced mid-tour when Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis of the Time, who had begun doing some production projects on the side, missed a concert because snow kept their plane from taking off following a session with the S.O.S. Band. On the duo’s return, he fired them, setting in motion an ongoing and ultimately disastrous tension over whose band the Time actually was—his or Morris Day’s. Jam and Lewis, of course, went on to become one of the most successful production teams of the ’80s, with their version of the “Minneapolis Sound” powering dozens of hits by the likes of George Michael, Luther Vandross, and, most notably, Janet Jackson.
“Prince had been urging Morris and Jesse [Johnson, guitarist] to find replacements, but they weren’t even looking,” says Leeds. “I don’t know if it was just denial or if it was actually strategic—that if they waited long enough, Prince would have to accept [Jam and Lewis] back. In their mind, Prince had inappropriately screwed up their band. They didn’t see it as his band; they saw it as their band. But if they wanted to really see the truth, they knew they weren’t coming back. First of all, those guys had their own ambitions, and I’m not sure they even wanted to come back. So Prince took it upon himself to find the replacements, and basically brought people in and said, ‘Hey, fellas, this is your new band,’ which of course just made the resentment worse.”
Yet at the same time, Prince was opening up his own music, or at least its presentation, to more input from his own band. The videos showcased him not purely as a solo act but as a bandleader; in addition to Dickerson’s “Corvette” solo, Lisa Coleman and Jill Jones were placed prominently in the “1999” video and sang on several other tracks; on one song, the soaring ballad “Free,” Coleman’s girlfriend, Wendy Melvoin (who had been tagging along for some of the tour), even added to the background parts.
For those who were paying close attention, he included a clue about his next direction in the squiggly lettering on the 1999 cover. Written over the i in his name were the words and the Revolution. Bobby Z has said that “he was setting the public up for something that was yet to come.” Prince himself later said, “I wanted community more than anything else.”
How much this was a creative desire and how much it was a marketing strategy is unclear, and ultimately unimportant. Certainly, the more Prince seemed like the front man for a badass band, the more context a rock audience would have for his unclassifiable music. “The band was such an important media tool for him,” says Lisa Coleman. “1999 proved that—trading verses, actually having people step up, there was a white girl and a black guy and whatever. His dream was that we would be Fleetwood Mac mixed with Sly and the Family Stone.”
After five albums, Prince had reached the mountaintop. It had been a steady build, with lessons learned and refinements made along the way. After multiple hits and a successful tour, 1999 continued to reach new plateaus, and to introduce Prince to more and more new fans. Eddie Murphy, riding high as the biggest star on Saturday Night Live and with his film Trading Places, titled his 1983 stand-up special Delirious after the latest 1999 hit. “I think Prince is five years in front of everybody—he’s a fucking musical genius,” Murphy said. “He’s the only entertainer in the world I would switch places with right now. But he’s too short, so I guess I wouldn’t.”
Prince made the cover of Rolling Stone in April—the headline was “The Secret Life of America’s Sexiest One-Man Band”—without granting the magazine an interview; by the end of the year, Rolling Stone would claim that “the pint-sized founder of the ‘Minneapolis Sound’ was starting to look like the most influential music man of the eighties so far” (and this in a year when Michael Jackson thoroughly dominated all discussions of pop—or of anything, for that matter). Anticipation began building for his next album; if he could continue this momentum, it could really be his moment. “It was that point in a career where the table was set,” says Alan Leeds. “The right record, this kid goes through the roof.”
But Prince’s ambitions were already getting bigger than just his next album, as his managers would soon discover. Their contract was coming up for renewal after five years. Having broken him through to a multiplatinum audience and developed him into an arena headliner, they assumed that the decision would be a no-brainer. “I thought we did an incredible job, we had a creative relationship, I’m sure he’s gonna sign another contract,” recalls manager Bob Cavallo. “And he says that he won’t sign with us again unless we get him a movie.”
THREE
Bring 2 Life a Vision
To those in Prince’s inner circle, his fascination with film had long been apparent. “We used to watch so many old films,” says Jill Jones. “A lot of Italian films—he loved Swept Away—old Cary Grant. He got into David Lynch at one point, so he really started looking at, like, Eraserhead; I remember screaming at that little worm-baby or whatever it was. He was looking at European directors, trying to pull all of that in. He was really into the old studio system, too, Louis B. Mayer, he had books on those, looking at how that was structured. Also Elizabeth Taylor films, Marilyn Monroe—he’d look at a person long enough and try to figure out who they related to. Like the concept of giving me the blond hair: he said, ‘You’re very plain just with your normal hair,’ because I looked like I’d come out of some Ralph Lauren catalogue. He cut off all my hair with, like, fingernail scissors and started to Svengali.
“I know he had this idea pretty early on about a film. When I was touring with Teena Marie and we were opening for him, he said he was going to do a movie, but he didn’t really elaborate. He had a pretty clear vision on his road map.”
“We were always videotaping rehearsals and shows,�
�� Bobby Z said. “We were also doing skits. He was always talking about doing a movie.” Lisa Coleman confirms that Prince expressed his ambition to make movies when she first joined the band, during the Dirty Mind period. Prince had even attempted a film project titled The Second Coming during the 1982 Controversy tour. The March 7 homecoming show at Bloomington, Minnesota’s Met Center was shot in full, but Prince drove director Chuck Statler (who had helmed pre-MTV promotional videos for Devo, the Cars, and Elvis Costello, in addition to the Time’s clip for “Cool”) past the breaking point attempting to film interstitial narrative segments; Statler later described the experience as a “gruesome drill,” with Prince demanding take after take of every shot. The Second Coming was abandoned before it was ever edited, though stills have turned up on the Internet.
Throughout the Triple Threat tour, though, Prince could often be seen scribbling in a purple notebook that he carried everywhere. Eventually he started letting the band know what his plans were for their next step. “I think it was at a rehearsal where he said, ‘Here’s what I’m thinking, here’s what we’re gonna do,’ ” says Coleman. “Actually, he wouldn’t ever say ‘Here’s what I’m thinking’; that would be way too intimate. He’d just be like, ‘We’re gonna make a movie.’ I remember on a plane ride during the tour, he called me to come sit next to him and told me a lot of the ideas. He would ask me things like, ‘Would you kiss Matt if I wrote this scene?’ He would describe how he saw the character, who I was. I think he was always aiming at big, ‘I’m gonna be a big star,’ but to him, a band was much more interesting than just a singer. So he wanted to really feature that, and he wanted to have his philosophy and his politics and his message all be incorporated—on Dirty Mind, ‘Uptown’ was a big thing in his mind. The song wasn’t that big, but there was always this utopian thing.
“I remember him saying, ‘We’re gonna have a director come and meet us, and we’re just gonna see what he’s about and if he’s up to it.’ We were little smart-asses, too, so it was like, ‘Ha, ha, the director will come, and we’ll give him a hard time and scare him away.’ ”
“I think we were in Cincinnati, maybe a week before the end of the 1999 tour,” says Matt Fink, “and he called me and said he wanted to have breakfast with me, just the two of us. He took me to the hotel restaurant and told me about his plans to do the movie, asked what I thought about that and if I was excited about it. I said yes to all of it—I thought it was a great idea to go for; why not? So I said ‘Perfect, I’m on board.’
“After the conversation, I did think, ‘Now, wait a minute. Do we really have the following to create a movie that’s going to generate enough people to come out and see it, create the revenue needed to support something like that?’ ”
Objectively, the idea of Prince starring in a feature film made very little sense. As of 1983, he had just one album that could truly be considered a major hit. He was still largely unfamiliar to a general pop audience, and, especially since he had stopped doing press of any kind, he certainly did not register as a mainstream celebrity. And other than the Beatles with A Hard Day’s Night and Help!, very few musicians had been able to make a convincing or successful jump to the big screen; most recently, Prince’s fellow Warner Bros. artist Paul Simon had just flopped with his 1980 film One Trick Pony.
“When I got there, he already had a notebook, and people were saying, ‘He’s writing a movie,’ ” recalls Alan Leeds. “The people closest to him were probably in the know about what he was doing; I just knew that he’s got this notebook, and he sits on the bus and he writes and he wants to make a movie—you know, like, ‘Yeah, so do I.’ I didn’t take it seriously. I thought he was nuts. I’ve got to figure that most people around him thought it was nuts, too—even the people who knew how ambitious he was and knew these traits that we now celebrate as being a necessity for success for somebody like him. He was a kid with a very vivid imagination, who was stubborn and angry enough with the world to refuse anybody’s no. And you could argue that without all that, he wouldn’t have gotten where he got; if he’d have been civil, he wouldn’t have ever gotten the movie made.
“Somewhere there’s a book to be written about the DNA of guys like Prince or James Brown or Miles Davis, all of whom had mother issues, all of whom had abandonment issues in various ways, and all of whom could be extremely judgmental and difficult to get along with. There’s a pattern there; it’s not a coincidence. The normal person, if somebody tells you no, you get tired of it or you’re needy enough that you want friends or whatever, so eventually you just say, ‘Well, yeah, okay, I’ll do something else.’ Not these guys.”
At Prince’s label, Bob Merlis remembers that the initial reaction to the idea of a movie was a certain bewilderment. “My own response was, ‘Really?!?’ I thought it was very bold—it certainly wasn’t conventional in terms of the usual sequence for these things. But the success of 1999 was substantial, so he did have momentum, instead of doing it on the downside of a career, which is often when these things are attempted.”
To others in the camp, the concept of a movie was less of a shock and more of a tribute to Prince’s artistic vision and trajectory. “It made absolute sense to me, because before anybody had heard who Prince was, I read the black charts and other people didn’t,” says Howard Bloom. “That phenomenon of going platinum when you were buried on the black charts, that says something.
“There are two keys to superstardom—one is an intense work ethic, and it doesn’t just come from a work ethic, it comes from the fact that you want to make music more than you want to breathe, eat, sleep, or do anything else in life. When you find a person like that, it’s someone worth hanging on to. Prince had that; his entire life was music. And then he had this astonishing executive capacity, this prefrontal-cortex discipline. If you’re a soul searcher, which is what I was, you have really found it when you found him. So the idea that he should make a movie was no more outrageous than the idea that the Beatles would write their own songs in 1961—ninety percent of the time when an artist of this caliber makes a decision out of pure passion, he is right, and you have to defend him for all you’re worth.”
“When he said it was going to be bigger than Saturday Night Fever—he had that burning desire—I was like, ‘Sure, why not?’ ” says Jill Jones. “It didn’t seem crazy because I had the background, growing up with the Gordys, where anything can happen. But I also really admired the fact that he didn’t have any real help, that his mind put all these people together.”
“Prince had to make it happen, he had no choice,” says Susannah Melvoin. “He was compelled, and he knew how to make everyone else feel that compulsion, too—and that was the weird part. How did he make us all fall under his spell? You got sucked in, and sometimes that was great and sometimes it was really crappy. On the periphery, it didn’t make sense, but inside this world of his, there were a lot of people who wanted to make it happen.”
Whether Cavallo and the rest of the management team really believed in the idea, the ultimatum Prince laid down left them with no choice but to deliver. “It was right out of the blue, but it didn’t surprise me,” says Cavallo. “It was worth so much money to me, because if he didn’t re-sign with us, it would’ve been a tragedy. We had such a big fucking hit with this guy, and I knew how big he would be. I knew that in person he was unstoppable; he was so good, he works so hard, his shows are so precise. It was something to see.”
The marching orders were spelled out very clearly by Prince to Cavallo. “He said, ‘It’s gotta be a major movie; it can’t be with one of [your] gangster friends’ or something. I don’t have any of those—I went to Georgetown University, I’m not a mob guy! But anyway, whatever his fantasy was, he says, ‘It has to be with a major studio, my name above the title’—basically, ‘Warner Brothers presents Prince in his first motion picture.’ Think how carefully he thought about this.”
Dez Dickerson remembers Prince saying, “If
it’s just me and Chick [bodyguard “Big Chick” Huntsberry] in the snow with a camcorder, I’m going to make this movie.”
Meanwhile, at the conclusion of the 1999 tour, Prince decided to make one more personnel change in the band, which would prove to have a major impact on the direction of the movie. His relationship with lead guitarist/primary onstage foil Dickerson was fraying, for a number of reasons: Dickerson didn’t want to take as much direction from Prince; he wanted to work more on his own music; he was a Christian and was increasingly uncomfortable with Prince’s lyrics. (He was also probably still annoyed that Prince used his home phone number as the title and hook of the Time hit “777-9311.”) Prince sat him down and told him about the plans for the movie, and that it would require a multiyear commitment to ride out the project—a commitment he didn’t feel he could make. “That was the bottom line,” Dickerson says. “I just couldn’t see myself doing that for three more years.”
“By the time I came on that tour, Dez was on the outs,” says Leeds. “The band that I was introduced to when I came aboard was, ‘There’s the band, and then there’s Dez—Dez is a pain in the ass. He’s got his wife with him, she stirs him up; she doesn’t like Prince, Prince doesn’t like her. He demands his own dressing room; sometimes there’s venues where there’s not enough rooms to accommodate him and that becomes an issue. He doesn’t have to come to sound check, you’ve got to kiss his ass to get him to do that; it’s just bad.’ So everybody was fed up with Dez.”
“Dez just walked himself out of the job,” says Jones. “Dez was the only one who was married at the time—now, after we’ve all been married, I think we kind of know that those things happen, but it’s really no joke how a wife can come in and just wreck your shit. ‘You can’t be here, you need your own dressing room’—those kinds of things started to really wear on Prince. But I don’t think Prince wanted to continue the new wave-y stuff like what he’d done prior, anyway, like ‘Head’ and those kind of songs; I think he was trying to make it commercial and make a lot of money, because with money, he could do anything, and he knew that.”