by Alan Light
“He still was really convinced that he should be the leader,” says Coleman, “but I remember we had a conversation where he said, ‘You need to know when to ask for help.’ I couldn’t believe he was saying that—I’m like, ‘Who are you? What have you done with Prince?’ But it was a really smart thing for him to discover.”
“He would deny saying that now,” adds Melvoin.
“I lost touch with him for a good year, while he was being a big rock star, a movie star, getting any girl he wanted, getting petulant and needy,” says Susannah Melvoin. “Everyone would have to go to his hotel room after each show to watch the show, every night, to critique the entire thing. It got to be more and more of ‘You need to do this,’ ‘Do this when I’m doing that,’ until no one in the room could breathe. It was not as fun as it was in the beginning.”
Alan Leeds could feel the pressure getting to everyone as the Purple Rain tour rolled on. The triumphant mood of the first few shows had begun to sour. “At first, everybody was sharing the quest,” he says. “Despite all these little dramas and subsidiary plot lines, I can honestly say that everybody from the crew to the band members to even the disgruntled Jesse Johnsons and Jeromes of the world, everybody shared this idea that ‘we’re all on this very unique ride together that is really beyond anything any of us ever imagined. Let’s don’t fuck it up, because this is a ticket you just can’t go buy. It’s hard to get to the Super Bowl, and you may not get here again, so even if you lose, enjoy it.’
“By the same token, as the tour went on, like any tour, you’re away at camp; you’re not in the real world. It becomes such an insulated environment, particularly when a tour is so security conscious. Everywhere we were going, there were hundreds of people trying to get at him and media trying to get at the rest of us because he doesn’t talk, which meant they were yelling at everybody else that they would ordinarily ignore. So everything became a challenge to the media to find an angle to somehow get a story. You’d go to—pick a town, Charlotte, North Carolina—and you pick up the morning paper and it’s front page. Not front of the Variety section, but on page A1, where somebody at the venue leaked the catering rider and there’s a long story about the M&M’s in the dressing room. You get off the plane and this is what you look at. And you’re like, ‘That’s my existence they’re talking about. They’re writing about what I deal with every day. Oh shit—that’s weird.’ And worse yet, he’s gonna read that, and he’s gonna call me and say, ‘That’s not a good look. Are you dealing with that?’ ”
Mark Brown, who was already resentful of the way Prince had moved Melvoin into the spotlight, was having the hardest time of it. He said that during the making of Purple Rain, Prince would tell him, “ ‘Mark, after this, you’re never going to have to work again.’ ” But now Brown was upset about the band’s salary, which he claimed was just $2,200 a week, and he began drinking heavily during the tour. “For me, the whole thing was a little too much at a young age,” he said.
Even though he was recording music for himself, Sheila E., the Family, and other side projects along the way, the routine of being on a lengthy tour was interrupting Prince’s usual constant flow of ideas. Doing the same thing night after night for six months, so soon after the time spent dedicated to the movie shoot, was aggravating to someone used to complete freedom to pursue his creativity. “I think the process of the filmmaking took so long, and his pace got a little off, so there was no way to quench his thirst again—he needed things fast,” says Jill Jones. “He would finish a record, and then he would be on another one. He couldn’t sleep, he was just driven, to the point of ‘Where is he getting all these ideas? Where’s the stimulus coming from?’ You can’t live like that—because then I think it just became an escape. I think he was having fun, but I think he had to make a lot of adjustments.”
In addition to starting to work in some of the material from Around the World in a Day, there were other changes happening in the nightly set. The conversations with God were taking up a more prominent spot in the show; some nights, Prince would fall to the ground as if struck down by the Almighty, and the concert would take on the tone of a desperate plea for redemption. “His emphasis was not on sexuality anymore, but on God,” said Howard Bloom.
Bloom believes that the onstage psychodrama was about more than just a spiritual struggle—it was something both familial and musical. “He had the voice of God coming down from the very center of the ceiling,” he says. “When I hear that voice, I know Prince is going through a wrestling match between himself and his dad—that’s a voice inside of Prince. There’s Prince the child, the adolescent rebelling against his dad, and then there’s the Prince who is his dad. Prince who is his dad is not an original musician, and Prince rebelling against his dad is.”
Prince also started messing around with the band lineup, most notably bringing saxophonist Eric Leeds into the mix. In Greensboro, North Carolina, on the second stop of the tour, Leeds was tapped to add a solo in “Baby I’m a Star.” Then he was worked into another song, and by midway through the tour, he was practically a full member of the Revolution.
“I’ll never forget the day,” says Alan Leeds. “We had a benefit at the Santa Monica Civic Center one morning—it was actually a morning show. And Prince did an abbreviated set and he went offstage, waiting for an encore, and he said, ‘Tell Eric to go out there and play the introduction to “Purple Rain,” instead of Wendy’s solo.’ She would always start it off and, particularly on these casual shows, she would play sometimes three or four minutes before he’d come back out. But spontaneously he said, ‘Tell him—let Eric do that,’ without any regard for the fact that this was diplomatically difficult for me.
“The whole crew watched Wendy, and it’s all they talked about—‘Did you see her face?’ Some of the guys on the crew were like, ‘Yeah, go, Eric!’ and it was, like, a scandal. By then, the enormous success of Purple Rain gave Wendy cred with the other guys—because she was huge; you couldn’t deny that. It was easy to resent a nobody, but now she’s not a nobody anymore. That changed real quick.”
• • •
On February 21, on a day off between a series of shows at the Forum in Los Angeles (during one of which Madonna and Bruce Springsteen would both join the band onstage for the encore), Prince showed up at the Warner Bros. offices with a group including Melvoin and Coleman, Joni Mitchell, and his father, who was wearing a caftan. They sat on the floor of a conference room while the staff was gathered to listen, for the first time, to Around the World in a Day.
“It was so extraordinary for a major artist to have so little label oversight,” Susan Rogers wrote in an e-mail. “I don’t know if anyone at WB even received copies of works in progress. A single cassette copy of each song made in the studio was handed straight to Prince. It was rare to make copies for anyone other than him or a band member.”
From all reports, the album was received enthusiastically (though it’s hard to imagine a surprise visit by the label’s biggest star eliciting a cool reception). But the project certainly raised a number of questions. It must have been clear on even a first listen that the album was a left turn from Purple Rain, with none of the flashy guitar and few of the pop hooks. “Raspberry Beret” and “Pop Life” gave the label some radio-friendly fare to work with, but tracks like “Tamborine” and “Temptation” were experimental, cerebral. Not that potential singles mattered for now, anyway, because Prince made it clear that he wanted no advance promotion for Around the World, hoping that fans would listen to it as a whole. (“This has got to be the easiest album I’ve ever worked on,” Warners creative marketing chief Jeff Ayeroff told the Los Angeles Times. “In a way, it’s very refreshing—it’s merchandising anarchy.”)
Most critically, of course, was the fact that shifting his focus to a new album meant that Prince was winding down Purple Rain, even as it remained the center of the live set and continued to sell by the truckload. “The promotion
director was very concerned that we would be putting a stop on Purple Rain,” says Bob Merlis. “It obviously could have been bigger if the next album held a little while—and that became the ongoing struggle between Prince and Warner Brothers.”
“I guess Around the World was a smart record, all things considered,” says Alan Leeds. “Anything too obvious might’ve been more successful at the time, but in the long run, it would not look good. Later, when I came off the road and was running his label, we would talk on almost a daily basis about how to get material to the market quicker. He told me once, ‘I look at these songs like newspapers. They’re obsolete tomorrow. It’s not stimulating for me to play, my head has moved on, so I need a machine that’s more immediate.’
“So I think the answer is yeah, he was over Purple Rain. And he also realized that the most important thing was ‘How do you follow this?’ and whether you like Around the World or not, smartly, there was no consideration of doing Purple Rain 2.”
Well . . . maybe not as an album, but Bob Cavallo was certainly looking at Prince’s options in Hollywood. Though Purple Rain had turned out to be a blockbuster, Warner Bros. had been so unsure about the project that they had no rights to his next film. Cavallo claims that he negotiated a deal with the studio that would give Prince a deal comparable to what a star like Dustin Hoffman would have commanded at the time, with a significant percentage of the box-office gross.
“So I tell him, ‘Here’s what we should do,’ ” says Cavallo. “ ‘Warners wants a sequel. I know you won’t do a sequel’—I understood that—‘but we could do Purple Rain 2: The Further Adventures of The Time.’ That’s my title, whether or not they would call it that. I said, ‘The movie starts with the night of the show where he sings “Purple Rain,” and in the audience are some guys from Vegas. Prince wins; the Time get second prize, and that’s a month in Vegas in some lounge.’ Basically the story I tell him is ‘the Time go to Vegas, you come to play Vegas—so we’ll have one scene with you—they come backstage and ask for your advice because they’re in trouble with the cops, they’re in trouble with the Mafia, and their only friends are the showgirls.’ So you know the movie I’m envisioning: a big, monster movie, like a Martin and Lewis film, with a lot of great-looking broads and caricatured mob guys, whatever. He said that was, like, insulting to him.
“Morris Day came out of Purple Rain such a superstar,” he continues. “I wanted to make a movie with him. He said, ‘I’m not working with you anymore. You turned me into a clown.’ I said, ‘Well, you’re a comedian; is Richard Pryor a clown? What are you talking about? And secondly, do you really think that you’ll be a superstar with your music career?’ As soon as he started getting high, instead of thinking that Prince was helping him, he thought he was using him. The Time came out of that movie big; they could’ve had their own movie deal and made a series of films. That’s what I believed.”
Day may have been the most visible disappointment, but he wasn’t the only one to come out of the Purple Rain project with a distorted sense of his own standing. It was as if the confidence and fearlessness that Prince had drilled into all the musicians around him had become a liability. “The one thing that changed in me was a certain sense of stardom, almost an ego-boost thing,” says Fink. “I wouldn’t say I became snooty or arrogant—‘Look at me, I’m the greatest keyboard player in the world’—but Prince used to like to tell us how great we were. ‘How does it feel to be in the greatest band in the world?’ It was almost like a Muhammad Ali–esque bravado, that kind of attitude. I never wanted to give in to that, I didn’t want to get that thing that happens. And then all of a sudden, I found myself doing it and really believing it.”
Alan Leeds has also said that the Revolution “had an enormously inflated sense of their importance to the project. . . . They pretty much felt they were the second coming of the Beatles as a band.” Elaborating on these remarks, he seems to lay blame equally at the feet of the musicians and at those of their leader for building to an unsustainable set of expectations.
“The whole subplot,” he says, “was Prince basically convincing everybody that they were a self-contained band—‘It’s not Prince and his backup band anymore, it’s the Commodores. Yeah, I’m Lionel Richie, but we’re still the Commodores.’ And, amazingly, they bought it. I would just sit there and say, ‘Be careful, okay? I know you’ve got people screaming your name because you’re in a movie, I get it, but Scorsese isn’t calling you. Your film career—it isn’t a new career. Don’t stop playing guitar.’ But they really bought it, so when that ended and he got bored and the security blanket was gone, they really felt dissed. . . . It was like a wife who had been cheated on. That’s how they behaved. It was just mind-blowing. And I was like, ‘What planet are you on?’ ”
Sometime in March—probably right around the time I saw them play at Nassau Coliseum—Prince took the band aside for a pre-show meeting and told them that the tour would be ending after the April 7 show in Miami’s Orange Bowl. They would not be continuing on to Europe or Asia or anywhere else around the world that was clamoring to hear them play.
“He had no interest in it,” says Fink. “I asked him why, and he said, ‘I’ve just had enough. I just don’t want to do it.’ And I went, ‘So what’s gonna happen now?’ and he goes, ‘Well, I’m gonna take two years off, and you guys can do whatever you want, as far as solo projects, or you can chill out, go be on retainer.’ And that’s it.
“And then within three months of the tour ending, he had Around the World in a Day ready to go. He gave us a little bit of a break, and then he was ready to jump back into another project, even though he had said it was going to be a much longer hiatus. Personally, I was hoping that we were going to do Europe with the Purple Rain tour—at least do a European leg of the tour, but he didn’t. So in that sense I was a little disappointed.”
While his band may have been let down, his managers were frustrated that he didn’t take advantage of the opportunity to extend the once-in-a-lifetime success of Purple Rain. “I said to him, ‘If you want to be Miles Davis and do whatever work you want, fine,’ ” says Cavallo. “ ‘But if you want to be a pop strategist, you can’t put out this fucking record now. It doesn’t make any sense.’ I never won the argument, but it impressed him. I said, ‘You can’t be both Miles Davis and Elvis Presley.’ ”
“His management was like, ‘You’re missing it here; there’s something missing,’ ” says Coleman. “ ‘Why are you doing this hippie thing now?’ They were really pissed that he stopped the tour. And I was a little confused by that, too.”
“Why are we shifting so quickly?” Melvoin remembers thinking. “This doesn’t feel right. You’re gonna alienate a lot of people. I mean, I love the stuff, but wait a minute. Slow down.”
Mark Brown claimed that at end of tour, each band member got a $15,000 bonus. “It was a slap in the face,” he said.
Before the final show, Steve Fargnoli issued an announcement stating that the Miami date would “be [Prince’s] last live appearance for an indeterminate number of years.” Fargnoli would say that when he asked Prince why he was taking time off, he explained that it was because he was going to “look for the ladder.” When he asked for further clarification, Prince replied, “Sometimes it snows in April.” These deliberately—some said annoyingly—cryptic responses both turned out to tease song titles from his next two albums.
In the end, the Purple Rain tour played to nearly 1.75 million people in thirty-two cities and grossed an estimated $30 million on ticket sales alone. While Prince pulled the plug after less than six months on the road, Bruce Springsteen kept on rolling; the Born in the USA tour went for fifteen months and more than 150 shows, following a run of U.S. arenas with dates in Australia and Asia, then Europe, and then returning to the States for a lap of stadiums before finally wrapping up on October 2.
Prince also courted controversy up to the very last date, when religious leaders
in Miami expressed their disapproval that his Orange Bowl show, for an audience of 55,000, was taking place on Easter Sunday. Whichever promoter gets the credit for that booking, the fact that Prince ended the tour supporting his greatest triumph on the day symbolizing the resurrection of Christ seemed particularly resonant (think back to that first attempt at a movie project, The Second Coming). Almost two years to the day after the end of the 1999 tour, when Prince turned his full attention to the unlikely, seemingly impossible creation of Purple Rain, it was all over.
“This has been the happiest season of my life,” Prince said from the stage. He ended the show saying, “I have to go now. I don’t know when I’ll be back. I want you to know that God loves you. He loves us all.”
After the show, he and Sheila E. turned up at an after-party at a Miami club. They both had very short haircuts, and Prince would only speak to Miami Vice star Don Johnson. There would be one final sour note to the tour, as well, when it was discovered that $1.6 million was missing from the accounts, and one of the promoters was charged with defrauding and misappropriating ticket revenues.
Just two weeks after the Miami show, with minimal warning or fanfare, Around the World in a Day arrived in record stores and quickly shot to number one; Purple Rain was still selling steadily, and while it started to fade after the release of the new album, it hung around the Top 200 until late 1985. Still, Prince did no interviews and no appearances, but later in the year, when he resurfaced for some unexpected press, he told MTV, “I don’t plan on touring for a while. There are so many other things to do.” But it wouldn’t be too much longer before he was back on a stage, playing a series of one-off shows throughout the U.S. in the spring and summer of 1986 before kicking off a full-blown tour in London on August 12, 1986, to promote not only his next album, Parade, but also his new movie, the self-directed debacle Under the Cherry Moon.