by Alan Light
In that same interview, he was asked if he was worried about a backlash after the astonishing popularity that he had attained with Purple Rain. “I don’t live in a prison,” he said. “I am not afraid of anything. I haven’t built any walls around myself, and I am just like anyone else. I need love and water, and I’m not afraid of a backlash because, like I say, there are people who will support my habits as I have supported theirs.
“I don’t really consider myself a superstar,” said Prince. “I live in a small town, and I always will. I can walk around and be me. That’s all I want to be. That’s all I ever tried to be.”
ELEVEN
Thank U 4 a Funky Time
The success of Purple Rain, Prince once said “in some ways was more detrimental than good. . . . It pigeonholed me.”
There will always be one big, unanswerable question that lies behind Prince’s decision to end the Purple Rain cycle so abruptly, and in one form or another, it looms over the rest of his exhilarating, baffling, unparalleled career. Did he choose to rescale things and allow himself to operate with more freedom than a stadium-filling, twenty-million-album-selling artist can have, or did he believe that anything he touched would automatically be that big? Was his ambition to be the world’s biggest cult artist, or to be a global superstar—as Bob Cavallo put it, to be Miles Davis or Elvis Presley? Or had it become impossible for him to resolve this conflict?
In some ways, it’s the classic artist’s conundrum of creativity versus commerce. But there’s a hubris that must come along with having the bestselling album in the country for six months and with pulling off a movie project that even those around you—much less the Hollywood establishment—had absolutely zero faith in. But did that kind of adulation scare Prince, causing him to run from it so quickly, or did it warp him to the point that he really believed he could now do no wrong?
“You could look at it as, ‘Purple Rain got me to the stardom I want, and I’m done with Purple Rain—I’m that star now, and that’s gonna be maintained,’ ” says Wendy Melvoin. “To me, it feels more like that than ‘I’m too nervous to keep that going.’ That doesn’t sound like Prince to me.”
“And that’s sad to me,” continues Lisa Coleman, “because as a kid, growing up, you wonder about these stars or famous musicians—how many are noticed because they’re great, and how many are great because they’re noticed? How much do you put into promoting yourself, and how much do you put into being really great at what you do? And a lot of the time they don’t go together. I think Prince is such an amazing musician, and why can’t that be who he is? I think he’s never made that decision, and that is still what gets in his way now. That seems to be his Achilles’ heel. I think after Purple Rain he couldn’t reconcile intrinsic artistry with promotion and pop stardom.”
“At the end of Purple Rain,” says Matt Fink, “maybe he felt, ‘I need to take a break, because this is so oversaturated now; it’s so big that I’ve got to let people absorb it, and I have to let it go away for a while.’ People get tired of you and they move on to the next flavor, and that’s how it goes, and he knew that. So maybe he thought, ‘Okay, now I did it, this is what I wanted,’ but then, ‘Oops! Now what do I do?’ He couldn’t rest on his laurels, but he also couldn’t milk it beyond that initial part of the tour due to his own impatience and wanting to move on.
“He never expressed exactly how he felt to us. He never sat down and said, ‘I’m really concerned that I’ve overdone it, or maybe going here wasn’t so great for our careers because now we peaked and it’s all going to be downhill from here,’ or whatever. He just said one thing and then did another when he put out Around the World in a Day.”
With the momentum of Purple Rain behind it—or, more precisely, with the momentum still going full tilt—Around the World sold over two million copies, and no Prince record has been more commercially successful since. Despite his initial claims that he would not release any singles from the album, “Raspberry Beret” and “Pop Life” both reached the Top Ten. In the New York Times, Robert Palmer actually called the album “Prince’s finest hour—for now,” while a more tempered review by Jon Pareles in Rolling Stone said Prince was “still odd enough to be fascinating.”
But the album didn’t capture the public imagination to anywhere near the degree that Purple Rain had. If anything, its lilting textures and cerebral lyrics confused a large portion of the fans attracted by the girls-and-guitars spirit of Purple Rain. Then again, that seemed to be his intention. “Record sales and things like that,” said Prince, “it really doesn’t matter, ya know. It keeps a roof over your head, and keeps money in all these folks’ pockets that I got hangin’ around here! It basically stems from the music, and I’m just hoping that people understand that money is one thing, but soul is another.”
In some ways, this was remarkably savvy. As Bob Merlis points out, attempting to top or compete with a success of Purple Rain’s magnitude is a loser’s game. Michael Jackson not only set himself the goal of beating Thriller with his next album but of reaching sales of one hundred million. As a result, when Bad came out in 1987, the six million it sold was considered a huge letdown. In the aftermath of Born in the USA mania, Bruce Springsteen’s marriage fell apart, and his next album was the more personal, musically modest Tunnel of Love; after one more tour, he dissolved the E Street Band for more than ten years.
“A hit like Purple Rain is a phenomenon of its time,” says Merlis. “The stars aligned. Even if you do put out another record that’s just as good, success is so circumstantial, and you really have to build in the possibility of great disappointment.”
At the same time, though, Prince’s decisions in the aftermath of Purple Rain also reveal a sense of invulnerability and grandeur—that since he had been right about the movie all along, when everyone else doubted, it meant that he could now do no wrong. Certainly the next project he took on, directing himself in the film Under the Cherry Moon, was a series of disasters. Shot in the south of France in glamorous black and white, the movie included virtually no footage of Prince performing, had lead characters (Prince and Kristin Scott Thomas) who were decidedly unlikable, and ended with the death of Prince’s character. The sound track, Parade, didn’t even have the same title as the film. With a budget of $12 million, Cherry Moon was critically lambasted and took in only $10 million at the box office.
“All I know is that it was never good after he got eaten by the fame, which was the success of Purple Rain and that tour,” says Cavallo.
Lisa Coleman and Wendy Melvoin continued to work even more closely with Prince on the Parade album (which, by the way, is a fantastic record that I have overlooked for years, probably because of its association with the terrible movie). Melvoin was even featured prominently in the video for the album’s smash single, “Kiss,” sitting on a stool playing the guitar part (which Prince had actually recorded) while he danced and preened and basically did everything that he hadn’t done in Under the Cherry Moon. But this collaboration was not to last.
“We had been thinking that we were gonna kind of become another entity, with us and Prince,” says Coleman. “There was something different and special about the way the three of us wrote together and did things together. It was really great. We started looking for a house in Minneapolis, and then Prince suddenly started questioning it. Again, he started just shifting, and then he fired us, saying that he wanted to go in another direction.”
Not that he slowed down creatively: in fact, he set to work on multiple albums—Dream Factory, Camille, Crystal Ball—proposing a triple album to Warner Bros. before eventually releasing Sign o’ the Times as a two-disc set in 1987. And to many fans it stands as his single greatest record—not as airtight as Purple Rain but sprawling in all the best ways, revealing the full breadth and scope of Prince’s talents. Melvoin and Coleman still turn up on a few songs, and the penultimate track, “It’s Gonna Be a Beautiful Night” (named by Ques
tlove as his all-time favorite Prince song) is a live recording with the Revolution, plus Eric Leeds and Atlanta Bliss on horns, Sheila E. on percussion, and Susannah Melvoin and Jill Jones adding background vocals—effectively a final farewell to the entire Purple Rain crew. But Sign o’ the Times peaked at number six on the charts and stalled at a million sold.
Within the next few years, Albert Magnoli—who codirected the Sign o’ the Times concert film with Prince, most of which was shot on a soundstage after the footage from a European tour proved unsatisfactory—had replaced Steve Fargnoli as Prince’s closest advisor. “Prince and my group had a falling-out, and we sued each other and he bought me out, and I’m sure I got fucked,” says Cavallo. “But I wanted out, and it was enough money to equalize the partnership so I could walk, because I wanted to do it my way. I was an eighties guy, a lot of cocaine—you know, I fucked up.”
In January 1989 Magnoli took over as Prince’s manager. But as Prince got deeper into his next ill-fated movie project, 1990’s Graffiti Bridge, Magnoli also walked away.
Maybe Prince was simply too restless, too impossible to tame, to ever again scale the heights he reached with Purple Rain. But it’s clear that part of the reason he got there was the team around him, from the band to the management, and that as he systematically took all of those people out of his life, he never replaced them with figures of comparable stature who could contribute to his efforts and might possibly say no to him.
“Prince didn’t just have any old team—he had a team of fucking geniuses,” says Howard Bloom. “What other artist has ever had a team of brains around like that? It’s almost like that book on Lincoln, Team of Rivals. It wasn’t just Prince building Prince in the 1980s, it was a team of people at their creative best who put everything that they had creatively into it, because he deserved it, he earned it.
“At every stage of the game, you need goals that are higher than where you are now. And you need a couple of people around who will tell you truths that you don’t necessarily want to hear.”
“That team of people were very powerful guys at the time,” says Melvoin. “They had all the resources to make him what he wanted to be, and I think that’s the thing that blew it up, because he does not have a team and he hasn’t had a team since then. As a younger guy, he was much more able to say to himself, ‘I’m gonna manipulate those crazy, strong dudes. They’re gonna make it happen for me.’ I think that was his laser beam at the time.”
Going back to 1986, the expanded Revolution, including Sheila E. and the horn players, continued the Parade tour of Europe and Japan through the summer. The shows were more funk-driven than the Purple Rain shows, with Prince dancing more and playing much less guitar. And then he sent them all home.
On October 16, 1986, the Minneapolis Star Tribune announced, “The Revolution is over.”
• • •
Morris Day steps out of the car. He cinches his coat closed at the throat and casts a glance around the sidewalk, surrounded by his band—including a “valet” next to him carrying a suit bag. His hair is cropped closer than it was in the elaborate 1980s bouffant, but he seems to be in good shape. The scene is shockingly reminiscent of the singer swooping down his front steps and into his car in Purple Rain’s opening montage, with Jerome Benton protecting him from a nonexistent crowd of fans.
This time, though, Day is crossing the sidewalk on Forty-second Street, in the heart of Times Square, arriving at B. B. King’s nightclub for the first of two sets by a band now billed as “Morris Day and the Time,” and including just two other members—drummer Jellybean Johnson and keyboard player Monte Moir—from the original group. It’s a cold January night during the “polar vortex” winter of 2014, and the 550-capacity venue is a little shy of sold-out, at least for the early show. The Time hit the stage at two minutes after eight o’clock and play for sixty minutes on the dot, mostly cruising through medleys with abridged versions of their hits. Day can still muster his trademark cackle, and obviously knows that the audience would be disappointed if he didn’t have a handheld mirror brought out so he can check his hair every few songs.
Though he makes only one reference to the movie (asking the crowd to “jump back to 1984—jump in that yellow taxi from Purple Rain, you remember the one”), the two Time songs featured on-screen are still, inevitably, the climax of the show. The set closes with an extended rendition of “The Bird,” and after a few minutes offstage, the group files back out to perform an encore of “Jungle Love.” Thirty years later, those numbers are still the meal ticket.
In the latter half of the 1980s, Day scored a couple of solo hits with “Fishnet” and “The Oak Tree.” In 1990, a reunited Time actually had their biggest single with “Jerk Out,” which reached number one on the R&B charts. Day’s much-vaunted screen career, though, never really materialized: he had small roles in Richard Pryor’s film Moving and Andrew Dice Clay’s The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, and had a part in a short-lived ABC sitcom called New Attitude. He also appeared in a series of commercials for a Toyota dealership in Atlanta.
In 2001, the title characters in Kevin Smith’s cult comedy Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back proclaimed that the Time was their favorite band, and at the end of the film, Jason Mewes’s Jay introduced “the greatest band in the world, Morris Day and the Time!” and the group materialized, performing “Jungle Love.” The Time have reconstituted in various configurations since then, playing on their own and backing Rihanna at the 2008 Grammy Awards and releasing a new album, Condensate, under the name “The Original 7ven” in 2011.
Maybe it’s not the career Day dreamed of when the Time were going toe-to-toe with Prince at sold-out arenas during the Triple Threat tour or while he was being singled out as the comic highlight of the number one movie in the country. But it’s also not as bad as things might have been had his drug use persisted after he and Prince began feuding during the latter days of Purple Rain.
The experiences of the other musicians are mostly comparable—Purple Rain didn’t make anyone but Prince a superstar, but they are all still making a living with their music, even if much of their reputation is based on their time in the Revolution.
Bobby Z hosts a radio show every Sunday night in Minneapolis, devoted to playing “the best in Minnesota music.” Matt Fink produces local musicians and does other work for hire in his home studio while playing in several groups, including his Prince cover band. Mark Brown continues to play in the Bay Area; a recent Facebook post announced auditions for a new version of Mazarati, the band he started under the Paisley Park umbrella after he left the Revolution. Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman have carved out the most interesting career path, working in the world of film and television music on their own—even winning an Emmy in 2010 for Outstanding Original Main Title Theme Music for the Showtime series Nurse Jackie—not dependent on touring for money, returning in a way to something like the Los Angeles session world of their fathers.
“Wendy and Lisa have worthy accomplishments on their own to be proud of—even if they’d never played for Prince, their résumés are respectable, and they’re really good at what they do,” says Alan Leeds, who went on to work with such artists as Maxwell, Chris Rock, and D’Angelo after his time running Prince’s Paisley Park record imprint. “The rest of the guys were the perfect fit for the band. I’m not hating the least little bit, but none of them have done anything of substance before or since. I’m not judging anybody, but they had the ride of their life and got a big check. In Bobby and particularly Fink’s case, the way they played their money, they were set for life. Prince was very generous, and they were smart about it, and now they work for fun.”
In June of 2000, Bobby Z, Matt Fink, and Mark Brown attended Prince’s forty-second birthday party and jammed with him onstage. The national mega-promoter SFX made a major offer for a Revolution reunion tour. Wendy Melvoin took charge of the band and lined them all up to work, but Prince refused.
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nbsp; There was no communication for several years; in 2004, the Revolution members showed up at a club date Prince was playing at LA’s House of Blues, and he proceeded to ignore them, inviting other musicians to join him onstage but not them. But after the show, Prince had his guitar tech call Melvoin and ask her to appear with him on Tavis Smiley’s PBS talk show. Apparently the “Steve” side of Prince’s personality came out to play that day. “He was the guy I knew when I first met him,” she said. “He was the guy who spent that night at my and Lisa’s house on our pullout bed.”
In 2011, Bobby Z had a near-fatal heart attack in Minneapolis. Almost exactly a year later, on February 19, 2012, all the members of the Revolution gathered at First Avenue for a benefit show to celebrate his recovery. For ninety minutes, guitarists Melvoin and Dez Dickerson, keyboardists Lisa Coleman and Dr. Fink, bassist Mark Brown, saxophonist Eric Leeds, and drummer Bobby Z played a selection of Prince hits from the ’80s to a sold-out room. “We’re sentimental and we’re nostalgic,” said Melvoin from the stage.
“To add to the one-of-a-kind spirit of the fund-raiser,” wrote the Star Tribune, “each of the Revolutionaries did a dramatic recitation from the movie Purple Rain. Good laughs all around.” A guitar was set up in case Prince decided to swing by at the last minute, but he didn’t show.
In 2014, Apollonia served as the “VIP host” for the now-annual benefit, marking her first trip back to Minneapolis since the movie wrapped. After the First Avenue show, which included Bobby and Fink and various other local artists, she visited Paisley Park, where Prince took her on a tour of the complex, showing her the Purple Rain room and paintings that included her image. He then played a surprise late-night set with 3rdEyeGirl, which did not include a new song he had recently recorded called “This Could Be Us,” named for a popular Internet meme that featured an iconic Purple Rain photo of the Kid and Apollonia on his motorcycle.