by Alan Light
When Prince wasn’t working, he was listening to music. “A lot of times he would put records on in his bedroom, and sometimes he would just leave the house and put the turntable on repeat,” says Rogers. “I don’t know if that was to annoy me or if I’m overthinking things, but I didn’t dare go in there and shut it off, so I had to be hearing that thing for hours. He played Culture Club a lot, stuff that was hip at that time.” (“He was listening to a lot of different music, a lot of English influence,” Jones confirms. “We’d go to sleep listening to Roxy Music or Gary Numan.”)
More songs were added to the stockpile for the album over the summer. Prince wrote an aching, piano-based ballad called “The Beautiful Ones,” inspired by his feelings for Susannah Melvoin. He had been courting her like a suitor in a Hollywood romance, and would send flowers to her door every day for a year. “I can’t say that the song was exactly our story, but he wrote it during that time,” says Susannah. “He wasn’t always specifically writing about what he was going through, because he also had to be consistent with the Purple Rain story line, but he was drawing from things that had happened in his life.
“Our relationship was definitely very intense. I remember he called me in the middle of the night, and he picked me up and we were in the car and had this strange two-hour period where he just stopped talking. I kept asking, ‘Are you okay?’ He wouldn’t say a word. We got to the hotel; he still wasn’t speaking. I was getting really upset. This was really early—I wasn’t aware that if you stood up for yourself and said anything he didn’t like, you would hear it from him. And I thought our relationship was different from that, anyway. So I said, ‘This is not right—call me when you know how to talk.’ I got into a cab and went home. He called me about an hour later, and I said, ‘That’s not cool, whatever you were doing.’ So we were very attached, and he spoke a lot through music. He would come and play me something, and I knew perfectly well it was about me.”
The other new addition—which was debuted at the First Avenue show, though that recording was not ultimately used for the album—was a hard-charging, tough but melodic rocker called “Let’s Go Crazy.” The song was a declaration of intent for the new band and the new era, spotlighting the precision and intensity of the musicians while adding a strong pop sensibility—and an unforgettable spoken introduction, with the invocation “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called life,” a perfect way to kick off a concert, or a movie. (He also closed the song with a full fifty-five seconds of high-speed guitar shredding, a squall which, in addition to cementing his badass reputation to rock fans, would be sampled to great effect on Public Enemy’s cataclysmic 1990 single “Welcome to the Terrordome.”)
“When [Prince] wrote ‘Let’s Go Crazy,’ he came and picked me up, and it must have been three in the morning,” says Jones. “You just knew that it was a really different kind of a record for him to make. He’d never composed anything with that much energy in the hooks. He found his voice, with the talk-singing, and he knew it.”
Though “Crazy” was written earlier in the summer, the recording came a few months later at the warehouse. “Prince wanted to be able to record his rehearsals,” says Rogers, “so I was told to make a control room right in the middle of a warehouse—which breaks every rule in the book, but I hadn’t been an engineer: I knew nothing about record making. Which in hindsight was why I was perfect for Prince, because he could have me make his records his way. So we brought in the console, threw a square of carpet down on the cement floor: ‘All right, that’s where the control room will be.’ There was no isolation or anything. We recorded ‘Let’s Go Crazy’ live at rehearsal, and then he sent the whole band home and it was just the two of us; we were going to do overdubs together. This was my first experience recording him one-on-one.
“I’m running the tape machine and he’s playing the guitar solo; he’s standing right in front of me and playing, and the idea is I’m going to record it and then stop and roll back and we’re done. But he made a mistake, so I rolled back to the top of the solo, and he’s playing along with the solo that he’s just laid down, and I’m thinking to myself, ‘He’s playing and I didn’t hit record. Have I made a mistake? Did I miss a signal?’ So I took my index finger and pressed the record button and he reached out and hit the stop button and said, ‘Who cued you?’ I said, ‘No one.’ He was patient and understanding, and he just said, ‘Roll back, watch me; I’ll cue you where to punch in.’ I said, ‘Got it,’ and I lived to record another day. That started a partnership where I would read his face, and that requires the engineer to literally play the solo along with him, watching for the slightest sign. As soon as his chin would make the barest move, I’d go, ‘Okay, here it comes, on the next downbeat,’ and we’d go. I got to where I knew him well enough that I could anticipate—‘Yeah, that’s the part that he’s going to want to record.’ You get a beautiful, symbiotic relationship between the engineer and the artist when you work that closely together that frequently, just every damn day.”
The lyrics to “Let’s Go Crazy” seemed a stark contrast to the party-up track, following the pattern of the end-of-the-world celebration in “1999.” This time, he sang, “All excited, but we don’t know why / Maybe it’s ’cause we’re all gonna die.” In 1998, he would tell Chris Rock in an interview for VH1 that “Crazy” was about God and the devil. “I had to change those words up, but ‘de-elevator’ was Satan,” he said. “I had to change those words up ’cause you couldn’t say ‘God’ on the radio. ‘Let’s go crazy’ was God to me—stay happy, stay focused, and you can beat the de-elevator.”
Along with the sentiments already being expressed in “Purple Rain” and “I Would Die 4 U,” the words to “Let’s Go Crazy” demonstrated that the new album was going to have an even stronger sense of impending apocalypse and the striving for final salvation than Prince’s earlier records. Some have traced this strain in his writing to the faith of his upbringing. Dez Dickerson thinks it was a personal crusade for Prince, a belief in his own mission on Earth. “We are messengers of some higher understanding in the guise of punk funk. . . . He had a sense of being called, if you will, of being a special messenger of some sort.”
It is also significant that the specter of nuclear destruction—through both nuclear power plants and Ronald Reagan’s arms race with the Soviet Union in the latter days of the Cold War (complete with the proposed “Star Wars” strategic defense initiative)—was an omnipresent theme in the early 1980s. The Emmy-winning 1983 made-for-TV movie The Day After, depicting the aftermath of a nuclear attack, was the highest-rated television film in history, and such popular, widely discussed books as Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth and Robert Scheer’s With Enough Shovels offered terrifying warnings of looming nuclear disaster. (One of my own senior-year projects in high school was a study of the futility of America’s civil defense plans in light of the military realities of the time.)
Not that Prince made his own thoughts explicit, even to those closest to him. “He didn’t really discuss lyrical content with the band,” Lisa Coleman wrote in an e-mail. “Only if he wanted/needed help with something, but those songs would not usually be the ‘message’ songs. In general conversation, I think we talked about that stuff just as most people did. It was a pop topic for sure, and all the cool bands had mystery and hidden messages written all over them!
“Prince would never mess around with the devil. That’s for sure. He can talk God all night and day, but don’t give that ol’ devil a single second of your attention! So, the safest, and the danger-est, would have to be God. The God angle! Everyone knows something about it, so the demographic is perfect!” Coleman then offered a list of popular explorations of apocalypse through the years, including Nostradamus, Orson Welles, disaster movie director Irwin Allen, and the film The China Syndrome. “So there you have a culture of disaster obsession. Hit films, books, psychic hotlines, and fortune-tellers. Gu
ilty pleasures. Ambulance chasers. It works for the politicians, so why not the Minneapolis boy puppy, the little pony boy with sad eyes?”
Wendy Melvoin notes that “at the time, he was still kneeling and praying to God, and he really believed in signs and certain things he was trying and then waking up going, ‘I know this and that!’ calling us in the middle of the night going, ‘I’ve seen it! I know it—it’s appeared!’ He was so much more fearless about figuring it out. Now he’s studied scripture, but when he was younger, he wasn’t spouting scriptures and parables. It was just an abstract thing.”
“He was writing songs that were not confused, but searching,” says Coleman. “He wasn’t limiting himself by his religion; he was allowing it to fuel his work.” When Prince finally broke his silence about the Purple Rain songs, he tried to put these complex matters in clear and simple terms. “I believe in God,” he told MTV in 1985. “There is only one God. And I believe in an afterworld. Hopefully we’ll all see it. I have been accused of a lot of things contrary to this, and I just want people to know that I’m very sincere in my beliefs. I pray every night, and I don’t ask for much. I just say ‘thank you’ all the time.”
With these new songs in place, the album was taking a more concrete shape, even as the film it would support (or was it the other way around?) was still coming into focus. “He always regarded albums as having a kernel or a core,” says Rogers. “For lesser artists, you might consider two or three songs as the heart of your record, and then everything else is really just filler. But for him, five or six songs could be the seeds, the core of the record and, from how much I heard him rehearse these things, he knew that ‘Beautiful Ones,’ ‘Purple Rain,’ ‘Computer Blue,’ those songs were representative of the record to him.”
• • •
Al Magnoli continued to work on the Purple Rain script when he was back in Los Angeles finalizing Reckless during the first two weeks of September. He returned to Minneapolis to start hiring a crew on September 15, and spent the next six weeks in preproduction. He says that he was working under the impression that the project was going to be entirely self-financed, and therefore totally independent, which to him was worth the limitations of the budget.
He was told by Cavallo, however, that now studios were expressing interest in the movie and wondering why they weren’t involved. “There was still zero awareness of Prince,” Magnoli says, “but studios don’t like ideas that they don’t have their paws on.” Cavallo summoned the director to LA for a series of meetings alongside him, Fargnoli, and Ruffalo, with the goal of raising $7 million, which would enable them to roll the movie out in a significant way.
“The first guy I went to was [David] Geffen,” says Cavallo. “He decides not to do it; he wants more security. He says, ‘I’ll make it for six instead of seven, and we can’t start now; we have to start after you do another tour.’ I knew what he was saying, but knowing Prince, it would be ‘Fuck him.’ ”
“Geffen’s attitude,” says Magnoli, “was ‘Prince will never be a major star; I’m in business with Michael Jackson, I’m not interested.’ ”
The next stop was Richard Pryor’s company, Indigo Productions, where they met with Pryor’s partner, football Hall of Famer and activist Jim Brown. “I pretty much had a deal,” says Cavallo, “and he’s saying, ‘Look, I’ll be executive producer and you run everything by me.’ I said, ‘Well, I’ve hired a cameraman—one of my best friends is a five-time Academy Award nominee, and he tells me the guy I’m getting is quiet, will not have an ego, and will help direct the picture.’ I tell Jim Brown that, and he says, ‘How many times have I told you that you have to run it by me?’ So I go over to say to him, ‘Listen, Jim . . .’ I put my hand on his back, and I knew that was a mistake—someone had to jump in between us and block him from killing me. So that was that—fuck him; I was gone.”
Magnoli remembers the dynamic differently. “Jim Brown took one look at us and said, ‘What is this, the Italian mafia in front of me? I wouldn’t make this movie with you clowns. I’m not making a movie with a black artist and no black people.’ ”
In Spike Lee’s 2002 documentary Jim Brown: All American, Brown recalled that the issue was not with him but rather with his partner. “The movie Purple Rain was really the first venture that I wanted,” he asserted, “and I said, ‘Richard, this is it, man!’ I said, ‘Prince is just about to break out,’ but Richard didn’t know who Prince was, [and] somehow we passed [on] it.” Shortly after, Brown left the company, and Indigo Productions fizzled out.
“Now I have nothing,” says Cavallo. “[Hollywood super-agent] Mike Ovitz, somehow, eventually gets Warner Brothers to agree that they’re going to do it. I gave Mike Earth, Wind and Fire and Prince when he started his [personal appearance] department; Freddy [DeMann, Madonna’s manager] gave him Madonna; and that’s how he opened his doors, with those three artists. So I told him in return for that, he has to help me get this movie.”
Mo Ostin also helped open doors at Warner Bros., which was obviously under the same umbrella as the label. “I went to the movie people and told them how strongly we felt about Prince, how important he was to the company overall, and that we expected significant success in a sound track they would participate in,” he says. “I did my best to convince them that this was a movie they should make. I don’t know that they understood the music that much. They weren’t sure what it was they had, but that happens a lot in the film business.”
Keeping in mind Cavallo’s warning about Magnoli’s tendencies to embellish, here is the director’s account of their initial meeting at Warner Bros.: “All of us on a couch, facing [Warners executive vice president] Mark Canton, and off to the side are the head of production and three D-girls, development girls, all dressed in black like some kind of judge’s gallery. Canton said, ‘We have a couple of problems,’ and he turned it over to the D-girls. The girl in the middle says, ‘I hate this material; it’s disgusting, it’s anti-woman.’ The managers were as close to a heart attack as you can imagine.
“I said, ‘This film is going to be junk unless it’s authentic, unless kids know that Hollywood has nothing to do with it. I wrote the script based on the culture I’m in, what I’m seeing.’ Then Canton said, ‘There’s another thing I wonder if you would consider. We’re thinking Prince isn’t enough of a star to hold this movie, and wonder if you would consider John Travolta to play this role?’ ”
According to Magnoli, the managers were apoplectic, while he felt vindicated, since this kind of interference was precisely why he didn’t want to take studio money for this movie in the first place. He was headed back to the airport to return to Minneapolis when Cavallo called in to his office (this was, of course, in the days before cell phones) and got a message from Canton. When they spoke, Canton apologized and asked if the team would come back and pitch to Bob Daly and Terry Semel, who ran Warner Bros. Pictures at the time.
A week later, they reconvened at the Warner offices. Cavallo warned Magnoli that there was one scene, in which Prince’s father kills himself, that the studio hoped he would change—they were finishing a film called Star 80, about the life and death of Playboy model Dorothy Stratten, and said that the audience reaction to the murder-suicide in that movie was very bad. Magnoli insisted that he wouldn’t reconsider the scene.
“I launch into the pitch,” he says. “I do my whole rant and see they’re with me. I come right up to the suicide and I say, ‘The bullet hits him—but it doesn’t kill him. Prince has learned his lessons and resurrected himself.’ Semel says, ‘That was the best pitch we ever heard, and we’re going to green-light this movie right now.’ ” The deal that Warners proposed, though, allowed them to keep the studio’s name off of Purple Rain until they saw the finished product and determined whether they wanted to be publicly involved.
The final decision as to whether the father would die had been debated since the first draft of the script, and would continue
until days before shooting started. “I think once they resurrected the characters of the mother and father, they lost a little bit of the darkness that could have been portrayed,” William Blinn, the original screenwriter, has said. (Cavallo has also said that “if it was up to Prince, a lot of people would have died.”)
Now that the financing seemed to be in place and the script was nearing completion, the pieces were coming together. Against tremendous odds, production was ready to go full speed ahead. But then another crisis arose: the leading lady had quit.
Vanity, born Denise Matthews, began her career as a model, competing for the Miss Canada title and going on to do commercial work. Before meeting Prince, she had acted in several B movies, including Terror Train and Tanya’s Island. Following the success of Vanity 6’s “Nasty Girl,” a number one hit on the dance charts, her aggressive sexuality was apparently leading to new offers, and to tension with the Prince team.
Magnoli first met Vanity upstairs at First Avenue during his early days interviewing the Minneapolis principals. “It was obvious there was a strain, that her agent was putting doubt in her,” he says. “She’s looking at the next door, but she’s not sure she wants to go through.” She told him that she had been offered the role of Mary Magdalene in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. Magnoli told her that of course she should take it—who would turn down the chance to work with Scorsese rather than with a first-time director?—but added, “This isn’t really about that, is it?”
Though it does seem that Vanity’s discussions with Scorsese were real, they were also exploratory: the 1983 attempt to make Last Temptation proved too controversial for the studio, and it was put in turnaround in December. (When the movie finally picked up production several years later, with a different studio behind it, Barbara Hershey played the part of Mary Magdalene.) Most immediately, though, there was the reality of money; Vanity, with more film experience than the rest of the cast, wanted a better deal, which the producers would not agree to. “They wouldn’t pay me enough money to go through with the crap I would have had to go through,” she said, and she left not only the movie but also her spot at the front of Vanity 6.