by Alan Light
It’s impressive how much work the music does to propel the story and flesh out the characters (and interesting to think back and realize that since the album was out a month before the movie, we had already absorbed and memorized the songs before we understood their function in the film). “Each song works really well within that moment of the movie,” says Matt Fink, “and [Prince] was able to hone in on that and make it work. It’s a testament to his genius—it’s like building a musical, like Rodgers and Hammerstein.” And even Prince’s performances of the more experimental songs, while supposedly alienating to the club audience (“Your music makes sense to no one but yourself,” says Billy Sparks), are never less than riveting.
The acting and scripted dialogue, tenuous even at the time, don’t stand up quite so well. Though Prince mostly holds up his end during the most dramatic scenes, especially the father/son moments with Clarence Williams, he’s best at striking a pose and letting the camera appreciate his coolness—which is no small thing, since without his powerful presence at its center, the movie would collapse. Wendy Melvoin’s delivery has some spark, but it’s hard to find much in the Apollonia story line besides pure camp; it’s presumably the “romantic” component of Purple Rain that would later inspire Vanity Fair to call it “perhaps the best badly acted film ever.”
It’s also evident that this is a movie that was made just before the notion of “political correctness” would take root as a concern. From Apollonia’s attire to the infamous Dumpster moment to Fink’s line about Melvoin’s PMS, the presentation of women is generally pretty appalling (though, to be fair, the Wendy and Lisa characters do help balance out this mean-spirited chauvinism). Most complicated is Morris Day’s role; on the one hand, his natural comic timing and interplay with Jerome Benton still sparkle, but his pop-eyed, cackingly libidinous character does come dangerously close to offensive stereotype. (“I’m capable of better,” he once said. “Black people don’t necessarily act like this”—though one can’t help recall that he also claimed to have written most of his own lines.)
“It was a time before you had porno on your phone,” says Chris Rock, “so to see Apollonia playing with herself, naked by the lake, that was reason enough to go see the movie four times. It was almost like a black exploitation movie, kind of a precursor to gangsta rap—guys dumping a girl into a Dumpster headfirst, Prince smacks the shit out of Apollonia, his father tells him never to get married. It would be hard to make that movie today. It’s closer to Taxi Driver than to, like, a Justin Bieber movie or the kind of movies they make with musicians now.”
My recollection from 1984 is that we knew some of Purple Rain was silly; some of the most awkward lines were the ones we would quote back and forth to each other. But the concert sequences were proof positive that Prince was the most gifted musician working, and his style, his image, the way he carried himself offstage—the side of him that even his biggest fans had never experienced—did not disappoint us. The truth-versus-fiction aspect of the story line only got more interesting the deeper we dug: was making his mother white a way to show that this wasn’t to be taken as a documentary, a play for more crossover interest, or both? Wendy and Lisa took pains to make clear that they did not feel stifled creatively, as they were shown in the movie, but were they just stand-ins for Prince’s conflicts over control with the Time and Vanity and others in his orbit?
“Ambiguity, mystery, fiction or real, or what, that was exactly what it was, even for those of us on the inside,” says Susannah Melvoin.
Maybe the critics mattered, maybe they didn’t. Most crucially, word on the street was that the movie was good—that it was better than it had to be—and the reaction at the box office was immediate. Despite the studio’s skepticism, Purple Rain took in $7.8 million its opening weekend, essentially earning back its entire cost and replacing Ghostbusters as the top-grossing film in the country. Mo Ostin’s strategy of releasing single, album, and movie in May, June, and July, respectively, played out perfectly, and Purple Rain made Prince the first artist in history to have the same project simultaneously number one on the singles, albums, and movie charts in the United States.
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“The huge impact of Purple Rain was somewhat unexpected, except by Prince,” says Leeds. “He didn’t seem surprised by reports of audiences reacting to the movie like it was a concert.” The tour manager accompanied the singer when he snuck into a Los Angeles movie theater the day after the premiere. “I thought he had been spotted a few minutes into the film,” Leeds says, “until I realized the kids were shrieking at the screen.”
Albert Magnoli ran into Prince that same day, while the singer was cruising around Westwood in a white limousine. “He saw me, and we just drove around and said ‘What the hell? This is wild.’ ”
Warner Bros. Records publicist Bob Merlis remembers looking at the Hollywood Reporter that Monday, seeing the opening weekend box office numbers, and thinking, “We aren’t hyping ourselves—it is real!” The publicist credits Cavallo, Bloom, and the rest of Prince’s brain trust with that big initial burst by “making it important to people who didn’t think he was important before,” and also points out that the good reviews and strong word of mouth indicated that the film might stick around for a while. “It wasn’t like today’s movies, where the first weekend is everything and then it disappears; it really was a more organic process.”
Merlis notes that in 1984, MTV had not fully saturated the culture, and watching music performances, with such strong visual presence, was still a novelty. Wendy Melvoin recalls that she had precisely that reaction when the movie opened. “I remember thinking to myself, ‘The album’s been out, so Purple Rain is actually the video for this record—how genius! It’s not MTV; it’s a movie, boom!’”
“What really puts [the album] over the top is how the music is performed in the film,” said Adam Levine. “It’s as exciting and eclectic as the music itself. People never would have fully understood what it was unless you could see it unfold in front of you visually.”
“It was the first truly long-form music video,” says Leeds, “at a time in his career where you had an interest level from an audience that either already knew something about him and wanted more, or had never seen him perform—had heard ‘1999’ and ‘Little Red Corvette’ on the radio, but had never seen him perform, and just witnessed this dynamo come to life on the silver screen. So it was the perfect storm of an amazing performer amazingly captured on film at, amazingly, the right time and the right place. There was certainly a lot of planning that went into it, but there was a lot of luck, too. There’s the old saying, ‘You’re only new once,’ and for a huge audience, discovering the depth of his performance ability was new to a great many people at that time. The timing couldn’t have been planned better.”
Tori Amos recalls the first time she saw Purple Rain, on a date in Rockville, Maryland. “I was with somebody who did not get it, and that was that—if you don’t get this, I have nothing to say to you. Next!
“It completely changed how I saw live performance,” she continues. “His energy, how he was able to put his hands on this force field, it was almost like a new language. I had never seen anything—except possibly Led Zeppelin, and maybe Mick Jagger—where the front person had such a power and they were completely present with it, almost staring you down. It was like he reached off the screen, grabbed you by the throat, and shook you awake.
“It was a complete awakening in my suburban existence. This wasn’t a storybook Prince—at least not a storybook that you were allowed to have in your library as a minister’s daughter! He was not like any prince in a Disney story.”
Darius Rucker, the lead singer of Hootie and the Blowfish who went on to became a country music star, also vividly remembers the first time he saw the movie—on a first date with a girl named Stacy Miller in his home town of Charleston, South Carolina. “For us living in the black community, here was t
his kid from Minneapolis, and they were letting him make a movie!” he says. “For us, it was like ‘Wow, this is really happening!’ And then the movie succeeded, which made it even better.”
Rucker, who guesses that he saw Purple Rain eight times that summer, claims that the movie had a very direct impact on his own future. “Up until I saw Purple Rain, I wanted to be a solo artist, but after I saw it, all I wanted to do was be in a band. It really changed what I wanted in my career—to be part of something rather than going all by myself.”
After the media saw that Purple Rain was a genuine phenomenon, the next wave of media coverage kicked in. Rolling Stone put Prince back on the cover of its August 30 issue—still without any access to the star himself. Kurt Loder, keeping on the Purple Rain beat, observed that the movie’s “director had never been in charge of a feature before. The cast . . . had, with only two exceptions, no acting experience. The tight budget ($7 million) and rushed shooting schedule (seven weeks) did not augur well for stellar production values.” Perhaps more notably, though, by the next issue the leading rock magazine was now dedicating significant space to the rest of the acts in Prince’s orbit. The following issue featured a news story about Sheila E. and a review of her Glamorous Life album, as well as a longer interview with Morris Day—who confirmed that his relationship with Prince had grown strained and that the Time had not survived the movie’s release.
“In the past, there’s been a secrecy. In the future, I’m going to talk,” he told writer Michael Goldberg in that Rolling Stone interview. “There’s a lot of negative things I could say. But I don’t want to see these things in print. I still consider the guy my friend.” Day indicated that the attention his performance had received, and his own relocation to Los Angeles to pursue his acting ambitions, had created tensions with Prince. (Presumably—hopefully?—attempting to stay in character, he also spoke to the issue of misogyny in Purple Rain by saying that “you just kind of have to keep [women] in place. If that means tossing them in the Dumpster, then that’s what you’ve got to do.”)
The more mainstream press seemed unsure what to make of Prince, which served, as such a reaction always does, as the strongest endorsement for the real fans. Time magazine called him “a suitably odd [star] for these askew times.” The official Soviet newspaper Pravda, of all places, offered a perceptive commentary, noting “with thorough disapproval that a large, demoralized section of American youth was beguiled by an icon who seemed to imply that a holocaust—nuclear or otherwise—was inevitable and desirable.”
Prince’s overt, daring sexuality, which was a novelty or curiosity earlier in his career, also inevitably became a primary focus as he entered the mainstream spotlight. People magazine spoke to Dan Peters, a minister at the interdenominational Zion Christian Center in North St. Paul, Minnesota, who called Prince “the filthiest rock ’n’ roller ever to prance across the stage.” Peters had been leading an anti-rock crusade for several years, urging people to destroy “offending” albums.
Not only was Peters unconvinced by the backward message at the end of “Darling Nikki,” but he singled it out as objectionable. “Kids come up to us and say, ‘See, that shows he is a Christian,’ ” he protested. “And I say, ‘As far as we can tell from listening to the lyrics, his Lord is a penis.’ ” This reaction to Purple Rain would, of course, find its most significant manifestation the following year, when Tipper Gore overheard her daughter listening to “Darling Nikki,” noticed the line “I met her in a hotel lobby / Masturbating with a magazine,” and set in motion the project that would reach the floor of the United States Senate as the Parents Music Resource Center and lead to warning stickers being placed on albums deemed to contain explicit lyrics.
Whether you considered it a source of outrage or not, Prince’s sexuality was unlike anything pop music had ever witnessed. As shocking as Elvis Presley, Mick Jagger, and other rock gods had been when they first appeared, he had raised the stakes to a new level. “His songs were propelled by how incredibly palpable his sexuality was,” marvels Wendy Melvoin. “He was wearing, for all intents and purposes, women’s clothing and makeup—not dissimilar to Bowie or Little Richard—not being a homosexual, still having a certain amount of badass factor in him, singing in falsetto and wearing black underwear and high heels. It’s remarkable to me that twenty million people gravitated to that and were like, ‘Not only do I love that music, but he’s fuckable to me.’ ”
“Prince gets over with everyone because he fulfills everyone’s illusions,” wrote Miles Davis in his autobiography. “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 that he uses, then everyone says it’s cute.”
As extreme as the carnality was in Purple Rain, though—aside from the sex play with Apollonia, which was entirely straight, the movie had him humping the speakers during “Nikki” or sweaty and shirtless with a bandanna over his eyes, S&M style, playing “Computer Blue,” which also saw Wendy Melvoin kneeling in front of him and simulating a blow job during the guitar solo—even this was at once more toned down and more stylized than his earlier image. The elaborate ruffles and cascade of curls may have hinted at some kind of androgyny, but they were a long way from taking the stage in a trench coat and bikini briefs. “Nikki” made reference to masturbation, but it was far more acceptable than songs titled “Jack U Off” or “Head.”
Prince’s recasting of his sound and image into the role of the guitar-slinging rock god also allowed him much more latitude to mix and match gender signifiers. It’s hard to think of another rock star, or almost any prominent straight male, who would dare to offer himself up as a character with the vulnerability and femininity of the Kid. In the first few scenes, we see him putting on makeup, checking his hair in the mirror, returning to the home where he lives with his parents, and getting knocked down by his father—not exactly Rambo. Yet simultaneously, we watch him playing the shit out of his guitar and parting the crowd in front of the club with his custom motorcycle, always conveying a sense of aggressive masculinity.
“When he played the guitar and when he soloed, there wasn’t a chick in there—that was straight-up dude,” says Melvoin. “He perpetuated that even if he sat in on people’s sets; he would try and kick Bruce Springsteen’s ass or Sting’s ass or whoever. So when he held a guitar, he knew, ‘I could be wearing pink lipstick right now; I’m still one hundred percent guy.’ ”
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In September, the next shot in the promotional assault was fired with the release of “Purple Rain” as a single. It would climb to number two on the singles chart, kept out of the top spot by “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” by George Michael’s candy-coated duo Wham! If “Let’s Go Crazy”/“Erotic City” was Prince’s most muscular A-side/B-side combination ever, this 45 was by far his most Divine-with-a-capital-D; the B-side, titled “God,” was a quiet meditation whose lyrics were evocative of a Bible passage. An instrumental version of the song was heard in the movie score during, of all things, the sex scene—and was released as a 12″ single in the UK titled “God (Love Theme from Purple Rain)”—but on August 20, Prince rerecorded the song in Minneapolis, this time with vocals. “God made you, God made me / He made us all equally,” he sang, before instructing us to “wake up, children / Dance the dance electric.”
The momentum carried through the fall. The movie was on its way toward taking in nearly $70 million (“The ticket prices were, what, $2.50, in those days?” notes Bob Cavallo. “So that would make it $300 million today.”) In October, Rolling Stone reported that the Purple Rain sound track was outselling its competition by as much as four to one. Norman Hunter of the 160-store Record Bar chain
said that “with Prince, we’re getting an extra 10,000 sales a week. Purple Rain right now is our biggest selling record of all time outside of the Christmas season.”
“I don’t think there’s anyone who has had as massive a cultural impact—hip-hop as a genre has, but I don’t think you can isolate a specific artist,” says Leeds. “Prince influenced how people dressed, who they hung out with, how guys were willing to express their masculinity, or not. I think that’s what separates it from the pack, because you started seeing fashion in general for young males change, for young females change—arguably people who didn’t even like the record, but the ruffles on their sleeves changed. The impact was amazingly dramatic. I don’t think we had seen anything, other than maybe the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, so rapidly capture and change the culture.”
The album clamped down on that number one position, remaining there for almost a full six months before passing the torch back to Born in the USA in mid-January 1985. Springsteen continued to offer formidable competition for the top of the rock ’n’ roll mountain. But by the end of 1984, even Rolling Stone had proclaimed a winner, naming Purple Rain the Record of the Year in its year-end issue. The magazine called the album “essential listening” and dubbed its maker “a true original”—in a recap that ran just above the capsule on Born in the USA, reversing the order in which the original reviews had appeared.
As Greg Tate had written, “With Purple Rain (the movie and the album), he’s established himself as the most cunning black producer since Berry Gordy in plotting a course of conquest over American pop apartheid.”
EIGHT
Dig If U Will
One crucial aspect of the Purple Rain phenomenon that must be taken into account is its exact timing. The year 1984—and, even more precisely, the summer of that year—marked a fascinating, unprecedented moment in our culture. It’s always impossible to reconstruct history with any real sense of accuracy, but as great as the music and performances in Purple Rain would have been at any time, it seems reasonable to conclude that the film would not have had the same impact had it been released even a year, maybe even a few months, earlier or later.