by Alan Light
“I felt bad about the way that Dez was feeling . . . he was super-angry,” says Coleman. “His kamikaze headband, white-guy rocker look was kind of cool. But I think he felt what was coming and didn’t like what it looked like. I think that he and Prince were mutually done with each other.”
Even Dickerson himself ultimately seemed to understand that times had changed. “Prince doesn’t need the same kind of band he had when he started out,” he said soon after his departure. “Back then, he needed a power band, people who could get him to another level. Now that he’s there, he can relax a little.” In the end, the blow was softened when Prince helped set up Dickerson and his band, the Modernaires, within his management team. (Later, he even gave them a brief appearance in Purple Rain.)
Conveniently, another guitarist was close at hand. Wendy Melvoin, the teenage daughter of an A-list Los Angeles session musician, had grown up with Lisa Coleman, and the two had become romantically involved. Prince had actually gotten close to the couple and to Melvoin’s twin sister, Susannah, staying in the apartment in Los Angeles shared by the three women when he came into town to record.
“Wendy and Lisa would pick him up at the airport, and then they’d all just come home and hang out,” says Susannah Melvoin. “He would sleep on the living room couch; we had some cats that bothered him in the middle of the night. I had the room in the middle of the apartment with no door on the bathroom. We had no privacy, but we were all having a great time.”
Wendy was traveling on the bus with the band for much of the 1999 tour. Prince had overheard her playing guitar—the first time, through a hotel-room door—so when Dickerson wasn’t at sound check before a New York City show, he asked if she could fill in and run through “Controversy.”
“He was walking around the venue listening,” says Coleman, “and he almost ran back up onto the stage and sat at the piano, which was at the middle of the stage at that time, and started jamming. He’s like, ‘Damn, girl, is your daddy black?’ That started this romance; it was like little stars and flowers came out of his eyes.”
“I had been a huge Prince fan, so by the time I was on that stage, I had done my own finishing school,” says Melvoin. “I was playing and practicing and knew myself that something would happen. I just kind of knew it.”
Coleman and Melvoin, forever joined in the minds of Prince fans as one unit (“Wendy-and-Lisa”), ended their romance years ago, and are both happily settled into long-term relationships—Coleman is married to the duo’s manager, Renata Kanclerz, and Melvoin’s partner is Lisa Cholodenko, who wrote and directed The Kids Are All Right, a 2011 Oscar nominee for Best Picture. But watching them together in the studio they share in Hollywood’s Jim Henson Company lot over the course of a rainy Los Angeles afternoon, one can’t help but notice that they interact like an old married couple. They finish each other’s sentences, trigger memories, laugh easily, bicker over details. Coleman is still and drily witty; Melvoin stays in motion, smoking an e-cigarette, picking up a guitar to illustrate a point. Clearly, one reason they continue to thrive in their work collaborating on scores and sound tracks for movies (Soul Food, Something New) and television shows (Crossing Jordan, Nurse Jackie, Heroes) after all these years is the strength of their personal bond.
Prince decided to ask Melvoin to join the band, but—in an uncharacteristically deferential move—wanted to clear it with Coleman first. “He was very respectful of me in these times,” she says, “so he called me, like, ‘How would you feel if I asked Wendy to be in the band? Would that bother you?’—number one, I would no longer be the only girl in the band, and number two, she was my girlfriend, and would I feel weird having my girlfriend in the band? He really seemed to care. I told him I thought it would be great, and it was like a dream come true to me, actually, because Wendy and I had really fallen in love, and it was hard being apart.”
To the rest of the Revolution, and the members of the Time, the choice of Melvoin as Dickerson’s replacement—rather than one of the “Uptown” mob—came as a shock. “It didn’t fly very well,” says Jill Jones. “There were new people coming in, and I think the Minneapolis crew felt a little threatened.”
“There was some resentment in the band,” says Leeds. “That she got it too easy, and the fact that she’s a take-charge person just by nature. After a while, if there was a rehearsal and Prince was late, rather than sit around, Wendy would be the one who’d say, ‘Let’s do something.’ And Mark Brown and Fink would look at her like [silent expression of disbelief]—particularly Mark. Bobby Z is the eternal politician, so he always managed to keep the lid on.”
“It definitely changed the whole vibe,” says Fink. “Dez was, like, a seasoned rock veteran at that point, a rock star in his own right, and he was a very strong element. Wendy came in—she was nineteen at the time—young, albeit very talented. I was worried at first that maybe she wasn’t ready or was too green. I tried my best to be supportive of her, but there were moments when technically maybe her playing wasn’t quite there for lead playing yet. But then she worked hard and she made it happen, and I’ve got to give her a lot of credit for that, because it’s not easy to come in and be in that role that was suddenly thrust upon her.”
“It was more fun to be together with Wendy in the band,” Bobby Z has said. “Her personality brought so much to balance the band out and make it the band it became. It couldn’t have become the Revolution with Dez. It needed Wendy to bring out that extra oomph!”
“There was a split in the band for a minute there,” says Coleman. “Some of the guys really liked Wendy, and some of the guys were like, ‘She’s fucking it all up.’ In the band, Bobby, Wendy, and Lisa became kind of a clique. Wendy and Bobby really became close friends, that was pretty easy. I don’t know if people were a little bit freaked that we were lovers.”
The addition of Melvoin left only two members of the original Rebels lineup still standing—Bobby Z and Matt Fink. Wendy’s new role shook up the band in several ways. Musically, she represented Prince’s interest in expanding his sound away from the mix of rock guitars and dance-floor synthesizers that he had been exploring for years and ultimately perfected on 1999. “He knew that in Wendy he had not only this funky little black girl,” says Coleman, “but when she played those chords, it was like, ‘That sounds like Joni Mitchell tuning.’ So it took the music maybe a little more white in a way, and more experimental. Since I also had a jazz and classical influence, we became like college kids together—sound check started turning into, like, a chord class, of who can play the weirdest, coolest chord, instead of just thumping an E. We were trying all this crazy music, and it was getting harder to tell what fit into this new ‘Prince and the Revolution’ thing.”
Melvoin was a different kind of guitarist from Dickerson. “Wendy is a great rhythm player but maybe not that great as a lead player,” Dickerson says, “whereas lead was really my strength.” Whether entirely intentional or not, this cleared the lane for Prince to step out as the sole guitar hero in the group. In addition, the front line of the band no longer consisted of three black males but offered a mix of colors and genders, closer to the arrangements of the Family Stone and Fleetwood Mac, to which Prince aspired. Maybe Melvoin just happened to be in the right place at the right time, but Prince clearly sensed that if he wanted to keep growing his audience, she provided him an opportunity to change his image and his presentation in a way that might resonate with more listeners.
“He wanted her to be the other part of him,” says Coleman. “They were the same clothing size, and he’d say, ‘Wear this tonight, and I’m gonna wear this.’ ”
“Wendy brought a vulnerability that he hadn’t really been able to show,” says Jones. “He was like this dirty little boy onstage before, but she kind of balanced out the animus, the female version—he actually found another mirror that helped the audience to interpret this nice, kindred thing that they had between them. Someone who was ver
y strong, would always have his back, and yet possessed a depth of honesty. Wendy is very confident, and I think he liked that.”
“I was young and really excited, and I absolutely loved the role,” says Melvoin. “For my own personal growth and how I grew up, I finally felt important; I felt really honored. I was in a band with the love of my life, and because I was such a huge Prince fan, to be accepted and asked to join that situation was the biggest validation of my life.”
• • •
Bob Cavallo was pounding the pavement, trying to get a Prince feature film off the ground. The managers and Prince had each agreed to put up $500,000 to start the wheels turning, and the first move was to find someone to take a crack at a script. “I had some kind of a relationship to film,” says Cavallo, “because when I had the Lovin’ Spoonful, I did Woody Allen’s What’s Up, Tiger Lily?, we put all the music in that, and there was a Francis Coppola movie called You’re a Big Boy Now that John [Sebastian] wrote all the music for. So I knew directors and producers and stuff, but where the fuck was I gonna get a writer who wants to write a Prince movie?”
He was pointed toward a writer named William Blinn, who had won an Emmy for his work on the Roots miniseries and was currently writing for Fame, the series based on the movie about a New York City high school for the performing arts. Cavallo arranged a meeting in Los Angeles between Prince and the writer, a dinner at which Prince flummoxed Blinn by ordering spaghetti with tomato sauce and a glass of orange juice. Prince gradually, haltingly began revealing the ideas he had been accumulating in his purple notebook.
Blinn was certainly confused by Prince; he said that the musician’s attempts to define the movie’s theme were “inarticulate. . . . He is not verbally comfortable. Certainly not with strangers.” But he teased out enough of the concepts that he could start to write. “He’s a man apart in many ways,” Blinn said. “But his whole sexual attitude is positive: this is good, this represents growth, life.”
“He was semi-communicative about his dad,” Blinn said. “You could tell that his father is very key in what he’s about. It was as if he was sorting out his own mystery—[on] an honest quest to figure himself out.” Elsewhere, the writer said that Prince’s “initial concept, unlike in the finished motion picture, was that his parents were dead. They were the victims of a murder-suicide: his father had killed his mother, and then himself. . . . It was a constant back-and-forth as to whether he was going to embrace life—in the form of the character of the girl, and the substance and form of his music—or, in essence, he was going to be swallowed up by the death that surrounded him.” The writer concluded that “this picture was either going to be really big or fall on its ass.”
As Blinn was working, he tried to set up a follow-up meeting in Minneapolis, but Prince canceled on him several times. Finally they connected and went to the movies together, but Prince got up and left after twenty minutes. At this point, Blinn announced that he wanted off the project. (“I know he’s very gifted, but frankly, life’s too short.”) He went back to Los Angeles, but Prince called him and asked him to return to Minnesota.
In May, Blinn submitted a first draft of the script, at the time titled Dreams. “It’s a little TV, it’s a little square,” Cavallo thought, “but it’s a good idea, and I figured the director will rewrite it anyway. But I can’t get a director. There was nobody interested.”
Sending out the script was getting him nowhere. Awareness of Prince in Hollywood was close to zero. Someone recommended that Cavallo see an early cut of a new movie called Reckless, a Rebel Without a Cause–style love story starring Aidan Quinn and Daryl Hannah, made by a young director named James Foley. “I go to screen this movie and I’m the only one in the theater,” says Cavallo. “I see it, I walk out, and a young man comes up to me and says, ‘What did you think?’ I said, ‘Well, I thought it was pretty good, and that’s really all I thought. I thought the editing was good.’ He’s like, ‘Really? Good. I did that.’ ”
The editor was a recent University of Southern California film school graduate named Albert Magnoli. His final film school project, a twenty-three minute study of musicians titled Jazz, won multiple awards, including a student Academy Award. Magnoli remembers that Cavallo approached him after the screening and asked if he thought Foley might be interested in getting involved in Prince’s first motion picture. “I was excited to continue editing alongside Jamie, so I told Cavallo that Jamie was a massive fan,” says Magnoli, who may not have made a movie in a while but remains a master storyteller, even over the phone during a series of marathon calls. “I ran across the parking lot and called Jamie in New York and said it was great, I had found us our next film. And he said to me, ‘Who is Prince?’ ”
Magnoli got the script from Cavallo and sent it to Foley, who called him the next day and said, “Have you read this? It’s terrible, and I will not do it.” When he passed that news on to Cavallo, Magnoli recalls, the aspiring producer “went into a fit of sorts—he said, ‘I don’t understand, I’ve sent this script out and they’re all passing on it. I thought I was doing everything correctly. Why isn’t this working?’ He asked if I had read the script, and said ‘I really need to understand what I did wrong, and what I’m going to do, and fast.’ ”
Magnoli read the Dreams script and, he says, “Jamie was actually being very nice—it had no relevance to the audience the film was intended for; it was not musical, too cerebral.” He called Cavallo and suggested that they meet, telling him, “At this moment, I know way more about the film business than you, and I don’t know anything.”
The two men met for breakfast at Du-par’s restaurant in the San Fernando Valley. Thirty years later, the chronology of this conversation differs a bit, depending on which of them you talk to (“Magnoli completely makes up shit,” says Cavallo. “Sometimes he’s very flattering to himself, and sometimes he’s just wrong”). According to Cavallo, they sat down and he offered Magnoli the chance to direct the movie for $75,000. “Now, he doesn’t have a glass to piss in,” says Cavallo. “He says, ‘I pass.’ I fucking went crazy. I lost my cool. I say, ‘How the fuck do you pass? Why?’ He said, ‘Oh, it’s so square.’ I said, ‘I know it’s square—can you do something about it? Do you have any ideas?’ He says, ‘Give me a week.’
“We meet again a week later, and basically, he does the movie standing up, jumping up and down—he’s a very athletic kid. [And] we make a deal.”
Magnoli’s account of his own performance is quite similar, but he claims there was just one meeting, and that his conjuring of the movie’s narrative was much more spontaneous. When he asserted that what the movie needed was a writer/director who would spend time with the musicians and write something more authentic, Cavallo asked him what the story would be.
“It was one of those moments when all the bells go off,” Magnoli says. “I looked at him and I just started talking, and in five to seven minutes, I pitched him Purple Rain. In elementary and high school, I was a drummer, so that was enough to give me some insight into the troubles and tribulations of a performer. The Blinn script gave me the characters. I had enough information that I could just pitch. And I’m an excitable guy; I was jumping up in the air, getting down on the ground.
“[Cavallo] looked at me and said, ‘That’s a hell of a story. So now what are you going to do?’ I said that the next day I would go to Minneapolis. It was a Friday. I would go and meet Prince and pitch that story. Then Sunday I would come home, and I’ll come back with a motion picture or I won’t.”
They both agree that it was Magnoli’s vision of the movie’s first scene that helped close the deal. “He got me excited by describing the opening,” says Cavallo. “He said, ‘Take the ending of The Godfather and make it the opening of our picture.’ Prince is doing a song, the elevator comes up, the girl is coming from the airport, hustling her way in—all the characters are introduced, and you keep cutting back to the stage. Prince is putting makeup o
n, getting on his bike, he rides up to the place, the bar scene with the Time, Apollonia pulls a scam and gets in, you see everybody. So he described that scene, and I went nuts.”
“I instinctively conceived an opening musical number in which we could introduce other characters and minimize the need for dialogue,” says Magnoli. “I mentioned the ending of The Godfather, all those cuts to the other characters—moving from Michael Corleone at the church, with those words going all over the other scenes and characters, and that gave him a visual.”
(It isn’t actually the final scene in The Godfather that Magnoli was referencing—that’s the famous moment when Michael Corleone denies his involvement in the mob to his wife—but the penultimate scene, often called the “baptism sequence.” For five minutes, Francis Ford Coppola cuts back and forth between Michael’s godson’s baptism and a series of murders of the Corleone family’s enemies. It’s interesting to note that the director was unhappy with the montage, which used sixty-seven shots, until one of the film’s editors suggested he lay an organ track over the entire sequence: in an inversion of the Purple Rain concept, in The Godfather it took adding the music to unify the scene, rather than the weaving of narrative moments to intensify a song.)
Agreeing that they would move forward, Cavallo sent over Prince’s music videos and some concert footage. Magnoli spent the night watching them and felt they were low-quality and didn’t reveal much that would translate to a mass audience on a movie screen. He felt uninspired and considered calling the whole thing off—he had an offer from Henry Winkler’s production company to write a script, so there was a more secure choice in front of him. But on Friday, he got into the car that would take him to the airport.