by Alan Light
“Two things, I’d argue, produce good years for pop music: variety and shared pleasure,” wrote NPR’s Molanphy, celebrating the “monoculture” of music in 1984. “For us in the pop world, it means the idea of a shared cultural experience—the Beatles-and-Motown AM radio of the mid-’60s or Michael Jackson’s cross-cultural peak in 1983–84—and for years, many of us have been mourning its passing.”
That sense of music that everyone was aware of, that everyone had an opinion about and a relationship to, peaked during the summer with the battle for supremacy between Born in the USA and Purple Rain. In both cases, these albums represented an artist embracing his full potential as a pop stylist, striving to find a version of his music that would retain his essence yet connect with the greatest number of people possible. Bruce Springsteen utilized cleaner, more modern production on his new songs, put the musical hooks in the foreground (as in the ’60s pop records he loved), and worked out obsessively to resculpt his body. He dove full-on into the music videos he had scorned, frolicking with the young, unknown Courteney Cox at the end of the clip for “Dancing in the Dark” and allowing producer Arthur Baker to remix the song for a 12-inch dance single.
Yet Springsteen didn’t abandon the fundamental themes of his writing—the struggles, economic and emotional, of the American working class; the attempt to maintain faith in justice and moral principles in the face of constant betrayal; the need for friendship and camaraderie during trying times. Despite the scathing protest of the often-misunderstood title song (famously quoted by President Reagan in a clumsy attempt to connect with young voters) and the despairing mood of songs like “Downbound Train” and “My Hometown,” the album spun off seven hit singles on its way to selling more than 15 million copies.
“I was very conscious of being an American musician and addressing the issues of the day,” Springsteen told me in 2006, looking back at his decision to pose in front of an American flag on the Born in the USA cover. “There was a sense that the flag was up for grabs, that you had the right to stake out your claim to its meaning and to the kind of country you wanted your kids to grow up in. I wanted to write music that was charting the ever-changing distance between American ideals and American truths, to explore what was happening in the middle, to be a creative voice in that discussion.”
Prince and Springsteen expressed admiration for each other’s work. The Boss had come to check out a show on the 1999 tour in the spring of 1983, and the members of the Revolution recall that if Prince was quiet on the subject of Michael Jackson, he made clear that he respected Springsteen as a live performer.
The ascendance of Purple Rain and Born in the USA was a moment of pop music at its best. There was the usual tribal affiliation of fans claiming one artist or the other, but no one attains sales of more than 10 million without crossing a lot of boundaries. Whatever the eventual limitations of the grandiosity of the ’80s, the universal connection that these two projects offered, testaments to blowing up without selling out, was an inspiration.
It was “[a] summer, then, of two albums by two titans with two different views of American experience,” wrote Rick Moody, “each of them very moving, each of them struggling for a response to all the trouble back in Washington.”
The summer of 1984 ended with an event that represented and encapsulated pop’s new world order: on September 14, MTV’s first Video Music Awards were held at New York’s Radio City Music Hall. Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit” and “Every Breath You Take” by the Police were the most-nominated clips, while the Cars’ “You Might Think” won the prize for Video of the Year (the Prince and Springsteen albums came out too late for any of their videos to be eligible). David Bowie and Rod Stewart were among the performers, while a hodgepodge of artists from Diana Ross to Iggy Pop, the Go-Gos to Carly Simon, made appearances.
But really, there was only one thing most viewers remembered from that night, and it marked the true arrival of the final figure in the Mount Rushmore of ’80s pop. For this was the night that Madonna sang her new single, “Like a Virgin,” while writhing on the ground in a wedding dress and flashing her undergarments. Her first album had been a success, starting on the dance/R&B side (her clear target, as her first single was released without a photograph on the sleeve in an attempt to ease the way onto black radio) and eventually reaching the Top Ten on the pop chart. But it was with the Nile Rodgers–produced Like a Virgin that Madonna would join Michael Jackson, Prince, and Bruce Springsteen as another defining act of the era.
“I remember in 1983, while we were making the Purple Rain movie, Prince said, ‘When a woman comes along and does what I do, she will rule the world,’ ” says Susan Rogers. “And it wasn’t long before Madonna did exactly what he did, and ruled the world.”
Springsteen and I spoke about the fact that Rolling Stone had put him on the cover of an issue celebrating the music of the 1980s, and he invoked this same Fab Foursome. “It easily could have been Michael Jackson or Prince or Madonna,” he says. “They were all massively influential. But using me, well, I suppose that’s what I was aiming at. I was very aware that the people I was referencing were people who were not afraid to take on some history as part of their song and dance. I worked through [the eighties] to find my link in the chain of artists who were willing to do that—whether it was Woody Guthrie or Bob Dylan or Elvis or James Brown, Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye. That was the kind of impact I was interested in having.”
In 1984, the kind of impact those pivotal figures represented, that feeling of universal connection with music, reached a peak. Even in the 1960s, at the pinnacle of creativity for the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Rolling Stones, it wasn’t the same common currency; there was still widespread resistance to rock in the average adult community. But it can be argued that 1984 represented the moment when pop music’s audience got too big, and the center could not hold. When there were multiple albums selling 10, 15, 20 million copies at the same time, it was inevitable that things would start to fragment and that the various subgenres of pop would grow big enough to sustain economies of their own.
Maybe there have been bigger years than 1984 in terms of pure sales; as formats and pricing change over time, it’s almost impossible to make definitive comparisons. Certainly, the teen-pop boom at the turn of the twenty-first century saw Britney Spears and ’N Sync and the Backstreet Boys move millions of units, but those acts did not span a cross section of listeners, radio formats, and generations the way that the ’80s megastars did. The audience for music—and, I suppose, culture in general—began to grow narrower but deeper, and we’ve never since experienced the universal effect, the monoculture, of 1984. Prince achieved his goal of “White, black, Puerto Rican / Everybody just a-freakin’,” writ larger than he ever could have dreamed.
There was one other factor, too, that was altering the playing field even as Prince and his contemporaries were changing the world in 1984. Spurred by the surprising success of the Run-D.M.C. album, in June the Fresh Fest tour—the first national showcase for New York rappers and break-dancers—set off on a twenty-seven-city tour. Hip-hop had been steadily hammering away at the pop charts for five years, since the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” in 1979, and the new street dancing had already been co-opted into some lightweight but fun “breaksploitation” movies like Breakin’ and Beat Street (though after being featured as part of the opening ceremonies at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, it would soon be perceived as an overexposed novelty and pushed back into the clubs). But with evidence that rap, with its new sense of strong black masculinity, was popular enough to sell actual albums and concert tickets, the record industry—though still befuddled by the music itself—began making a move to develop the genre into a real business.
In another few years, those seeds would explode into the multiplatinum sales of Run-D.M.C.’s “Walk This Way” remake with Aerosmith and the Raising Hell album, followed by the Beastie Boys’ number one Li
censed to Ill album. By then, the solidarity of 1984 had crumbled—superficially, along hip-hop’s racial divide, though if you looked more closely, really between a young generation who accepted a new, boldly aggressive musical and cultural movement and an older audience who did not comprehend it. The rise of hip-hop would throw Prince off his game, too, as he first railed against the new movement and then tried to catch up with lame, unconvincing attempts to integrate rap into his own music.
Finally, and in some ways most important of all, technology was undergoing a transformation in 1984. Though it wasn’t immediately apparent, it was also over the course of this year that the next two revolutions in music distribution were initiated. The first commercial compact disc players had been put on the market in the U.S. in 1983, but it was the next year that the first portable players were sold, and that the first CD players were installed in cars. As the format became more convenient and offered better sound than cassettes and albums both, it soared in popularity, and by 1988, CDs would be outselling vinyl LPs. This was a bonanza for the music industry; as consumers rushed to replace all of their old albums with CDs, it was as though billions of dollars of found money was raining down on the labels.
Meanwhile, during the Super Bowl on January 22, 1984, Apple Computer ran perhaps the most famous advertisement in television history. Directed by Ridley Scott (Blade Runner, Alien), it aired nationally only this one time. In the sixty-second spot, a blond woman in athletic wear runs into a gray, dystopian setting—clearly invoking the milieu of Orwell’s novel—in which bald human drones are listening to their leader address them on a giant TV. The woman, chased by storm trooper types, triumphantly heaves a sledgehammer through the screen. A voice-over delivered the text that flashed on televisions around the world:
“On January 24, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984.”
Buying the spot during the most expensive broadcast of the year nearly destroyed Apple, but the company sold 72,000 computers in the next three months, over 50 percent more than their most optimistic projections. As has been well documented, it was a bumpy ride for Apple over the next two decades, but eventually, while the record companies had grown lazy assuming that the profits of the CD boom would continue forever, they came up with the iTunes model that would define the next generation of the industry. One key element of that model would be continually increased personalization; the construction of playlists would largely supplant the communality of radio.
In the social media universe that accompanied this digital revolution in music, it’s increasingly difficult to imagine anything that would be able to reach across boundaries of age, race, and gender the way that the recording giants of 1984 did. Of course there will always be songs that capture a wide imagination; in 2011, Adele’s 21 album proved that it was still possible for a piece of music to have a long-term and far-ranging impact, and something like Disney’s Frozen sound track showed that the marriage of music and film could extend the lives, and the reach, of both.
But from the way it took advantage of MTV’s rising power and novelty to its perfect anticipation and mirroring of a shift in the culture’s racial attitudes, more than any other project, Purple Rain as both an album and a film represented the culmination of an unprecedented moment in pop history. Crossing barriers of color, gender, musical style, and media, it perfectly embodies the remarkable cultural convergences of 1984.
“It brought all the races together, it really did,” says Jill Jones. “It wasn’t a black movie, it wasn’t a white movie, and I think that may be why it had its tipping point. He was speaking that language already—he just caught hold of a shooting star.
“It wasn’t even so much about color in the eighties, it was everybody trying to stretch their hair in that same freaking direction. It didn’t matter if someone was black, white, green—they had that hair.”
NINE
Let Me Guide U
Now that Prince had the biggest album and movie in the country, promotional requests kept pouring into his camp. He stuck to his guns about maintaining absolute silence, though, and decided that Lisa Coleman and Wendy Melvoin would become the spokespeople for him and the band.
“The way he put it to me,” says Melvoin, “which I think was just him working me, was ‘I can’t speak well, I don’t speak well. And you speak well, you’re eloquent. And I need someone smart to represent something that I can’t do well.’ And I was like, ‘Okay, all right. What can I say, and what can’t I say?’ He would always say, ‘Just tell the truth’—ooh, that’s fucking snake oil right there, man. That was not true. That was not true at all.”
Management arranged practice interviews for the two musicians, without informing them that the sessions were rehearsals. “I remember in one hotel, they had called a few journalists who wanted interviews,” says Coleman. “I don’t know what they bargained with these people, but they came in and asked us questions. And I remember Steve Fargnoli interrupting and saying, ‘Well, this is something that they’re not gonna talk about right now,’ or he’d kind of [whisper], ‘Tell them this.’ There were a couple of moments where he intervened and made sure that we were gonna follow the company line.”
Most of the reporting was pretty innocuous, anyway, because the next big news was the announcement of the Purple Rain tour. Unfortunately, it would not be possible to re-create the full excitement of the movie’s music on the road, because while Apollonia 6 appeared as guests during Prince’s set, the Time—whose onstage power had pushed Prince so hard on the two previous tours and who had garnered such a strong response in Purple Rain—had broken up. Rumors had been rampant even before the movie opened; in his review of the Ice Cream Castle album, which included “Jungle Love” and “The Bird,” Rolling Stone’s Christopher Connelly asked whether the band was “Prince’s AAA farm team, his comic relief, or his competition,” and noted that “word from the Twin Cities has Morris going solo any day now.”
After playing at the movie premiere party, the band was no more; on the tour, they would be replaced by the woman Rolling Stone was calling Prince’s “main squeeze,” Sheila E. When Prince finally broke his media silence in 1985, he expressed only regret about the disintegration of the Time. “They were, to be perfectly honest, the only band that I was afraid of,” he said. “And they were turning into, like . . . Godzilla, and certain things happened and different waves flowed, different winds blew, and everybody fell apart. But I still love all those guys . . . and I hope they get back together, ’cuz I want some competition, ya know?”
Elsewhere, he expressed even deeper admiration for the group that still stands as the finest of his numerous alter egos. “Jesse and Morris and Jerome and Jimmy and Terry had the makings of one of the greatest R&B bands in history,” he told MTV. “I could be a little pretentious in saying that, but it’s truly the way I feel. There’s no one who could wreck a house like they could. I was a bit troubled by their demise, but . . . it’s important that one’s happy first and foremost.” Soon it would be reported that Morris Day had signed a “hefty seven-figure, three-picture” deal with Twentieth Century Fox.
While guitarist Jesse Johnson also struck out on his own, signing a solo deal with A&M Records and bringing two Time alumni (keyboard player Mark Cardenas and bassist Jerry Hubbard) with him, Prince immediately got to work creating (yet another) new band out of the ashes. He invited Jellybean Johnson, Jerome Benton, and “St. Paul” Peterson to form the basis of a new band, which he named the Family. The other members of the new group were already familiar within the camp—Susannah Melvoin as the lead vocalist alongside Peterson, and Alan Leeds’s brother Eric adding saxophone and flute.
The Purple Rain tour was announced in September, with an opening set for November 4 at Detroit’s Joe Louis Arena; when the first four shows sold out in four hours (at ticket prices ranging from $12.50 to $17.50, well below the $30 seats on the Jacksons’ 1984 Victory tour th
at had inspired such outrage), another three dates were added.
The first matter of business was for Prince and the Revolution to try out the new show on a small stage, without all of the elaborate arena staging that would follow. They attempted to set up a surprise show in Detroit, but had to cancel when word leaked that Prince would be playing. Eventually, on September 23, the band performed at Bogart’s in Cincinnati, a club with a capacity about the same as First Avenue’s. The show was promoted with radio spots announcing a “Purple Rain Ball,” featuring a new band called Red, Hot, and Blue. At about eleven o’clock, the Revolution took the stage and played a ninety-minute set, ending the night with an encore that re-created the “I Would Die 4 U,” “Baby I’m a Star,” and “Purple Rain” sequence that closed the album.
(At this point, you might recall that Cincinnati is my own hometown, and that in September of 1984, just a few weeks before this show, I had departed the city to start college. I leave it to you to imagine how I reacted to the news that Prince had played a rehearsal date for the most highly anticipated tour in the world—quite possibly while I was watching Purple Rain yet another time with my new friends—at a club I had often gone to during the previous few years.)
Meantime, work was proceeding on the plans for the real, large-scale shows. The stage set cost around $300,000, and the touring party would ultimately grow to 125 people, with thirteen trucks carrying all of the gear, including thirty wardrobe cases. There were problems with the initial stage design. “It was so big, Prince didn’t like it,” says Fink. “He said, ‘This isn’t intimate enough. It’s too large for the band.’ Everybody was spread out from each other too much, so he had them rein it in.”