by Alan Light
At 4:42 that morning, Kotero put up a Facebook post, which read in part: “Heard new music that was dope! He had a cool chair for me on the stage at his side, and I sat there transfixed on every note, every move, every vocal. After every song I yelled and clapped my ass off. . . . And Prince . . . my heart still skip’s [sic] a beat.” The post was deleted a few hours later.
While the band members have always been able to keep their hands in music over the decades, things have been a bit spottier for Kotero. She had a recurring role on Falcon Crest immediately following Purple Rain. In 1988, she released a widely ignored solo album, and went on to appear in a number of straight-to-video films and made her own workout video. A highlight of her appearances on various reality shows was an episode of MTV Cribs featuring Apollonia and her next-door neighbor Carmen Electra, one of her successors as a bombshell Prince protégée. She now concentrates on her management company, Kotero Entertainment, and when approached about an interview for this book, replied very politely that she is working on a book of her own.
Jill Jones’s self-titled 1987 album is considered one of the more interesting side projects in the Prince catalogue, but has long been out of print. Jones released a few more albums, and toured as a vocalist with Chic before moving back to Los Angeles and joining the corporate world.
In addition to his work with Prince—Sign o’ the Times and the music videos from the 1989 Batman sound track—Albert Magnoli directed the Purple-Rain-on-a-balance-beam gymnastics drama American Anthem in 1986 and a few made-for-TV films, and co-directed Sylvester Stallone’s Tango & Cash.
The one person involved in Purple Rain who might credibly claim that it was not the high point of his career is Bob Cavallo. After parting ways with Prince, he went on to form a management company that handled such multiplatinum acts as Green Day, Seal, and Alanis Morissette, and also a film company that produced hits including 12 Monkeys and City of Angels. In 1998, Cavallo was named to the position of chairman of the Buena Vista Music Group—later the Disney Music Group—overseeing all of the Walt Disney Company’s recorded music and music publishing operations, where he served until retiring in 2012. He sure seems to be living the good life now; during our interview, he excused himself several times for phone calls to finalize details for an upcoming vacation trip across the Atlantic Ocean with his wife on the Queen Mary 2.
And then there’s Prince. Depending how you count, he has released twenty-five albums since Purple Rain, give or take. He made three more films. He has toured the world repeatedly, sometimes as a major, arena-scale operation, and sometimes as a low-flying hit-and-run mission. Most infamously, he changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol (an early version of which appeared on his Purple Rain motorcycle) and wrote the word “slave” on his face as part of an ongoing feud with Warner Bros. Records—after signing a deal with them that was reported to be worth $100 million. It made him something of a laughingstock, and in many ways his career has never fully recovered. But as digital rights and distribution became the single dominant issue of the twenty-first-century music business, it is also unarguably true that he helped bring awareness to the complex questions around creative copyright long before most of the world noticed.
“What we want,” Prince said to me in 2004, “is the easiest, most efficient way to get the business done, that can be as second-nature and organic as picking up a guitar. In Silicon Valley, they’re all coming to work with their jeans on, all cool; it’s all beautiful, all life. That’s how it should be.
“The cool thing about being independent,” he continued, “is you’re not handed a schedule and told, ‘This is what you’re going to do.’ Your psyche works completely differently. You’re not always reacting to things. You feel you’re in a creative mode, and that’s what keeps you alive, keeps you young.”
It’s a philosophy that is easy enough to comprehend, even to sympathize with; but as a fan, it’s also easy to get frustrated with Prince. His crusade has been driven by the desire to put out as much music as possible, which would be one thing if his albums were of the consistently excellent standard we know he is capable of. (It’s also a lot easier to say “Music should be free, anyway,” as he told me back in 1994, after you’ve signed a $100 million deal.) For so long, though, his releases have been such a mixed bag, so difficult to keep track of, much less to actually decode. It’s equally easy to over- or underestimate almost anything he does at this point. Though it slowed down his brain in a way he clearly couldn’t sustain, even a fraction of the meticulous editing and unwavering focus he gave to Purple Rain would go a long way toward raising his batting average.
But he’s not really interested in that. “Shouldn’t it be up to the artist how the music comes out?” he said to me in 1994, shortly after he had changed his name and his obsessions were escalating. “They’re just songs, just our thoughts. Nobody has a mortgage on your thoughts. We’ve got it all wrong, discouraging our artists. In America, we’re not as free as we think.”
It seems as if—much like Stevie Wonder, one of the few artists who can truly be held up as a comparable talent—there came a day when Prince just got tired of writing hit singles, became bored by how effortless his melodic gift was. Since the dawn of the 1990s, his albums have all felt like genre experiments or unfinished sketches, while his real attention was devoted to business matters. Nor has he explored more personal issues, even in the stylized treatment they were given in Purple Rain, other than the religious narrative of 2001’s The Rainbow Children and, most painfully, the songs anticipating his son’s birth on 1996’s Emancipation; the loss of his newborn child, who was born with an extremely rare skull malformation, and the subsequent end of his marriage to Mayte Garcia, may have closed certain doors that might never open again.
“Purple Rain was the best part of all of his triggers,” says Wendy Melvoin. “He used it well, because he was excited. Now he’s fifty-some years old; he’s not as excited about it, and he doesn’t want to have anything to do with his triggers, and he’s shape-shifted into this completely different person who reads scripture and tells you fucking parables.”
And then every once in a while, whether inspired by creativity or commerce, he can flick a switch and connect with a huge audience again. Tying in to the relaunch of the Batman franchise in 1989 proved a good fit, with a hit sound track and a few big singles. In 1994, the gauzy ballad “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World” was matched with some promotion and touring and gave Prince the first number one of his career in the UK. In 2004, the Musicology album demonstrated that he at least understood the kind of sound that casual fans wanted from him and brought him back to the top of the charts and the touring world, and his Super Bowl halftime show proved he could continue to scale newer and bigger heights. But while it still feels like he could resurrect himself as a pop star whenever he chooses to, these resurgences are getting farther and farther apart, and the Top 40 world is a rough place for anyone in their mid-fifties.
It’s impossible to take Purple Rain out of Prince’s history, but if we could, would we still think of him as a world-class superstar? Or would we instead consider him an experimental pop figure, “the world’s top indie artist,” as The New Yorker recently called him, with a million people who will follow him down whichever path he chooses—which sure seems like an enviable position for an artist to establish.
“It’s almost a uniquely huge cult he has,” says Leeds, “because ‘cult’ usually implies ‘small’—and it ain’t small if you can sell out Madison Square Garden three nights in a row. There are guys with a lot of hit records who can’t sell out three Gardens in a row. So he has convinced people that he’s worth seeing no matter what: no matter what your current record is, no matter who’s in your band, because you change that all the time, and nobody really gives a shit anymore.
“I’m hard-pressed to think of anyone—maybe Paul McCartney—who could do three shows in a row, and have three different set lists
, and be just as good each night. Here’s a guy who you can go in and say, ‘I want to hear the hits,’ and he doesn’t do the hits, but you’re not mad because what he does is so great that you don’t even care.”
Thirty years later, Prince continues to make new music, to work with new musicians. Though Purple Rain will always stand as his crowning achievement, he has refused to allow it to define him, and has never fallen into the trap of becoming an oldies act. Maybe there’s something else—so much else—that his fans still want from him, but in fighting against the powerful siren song of nostalgia he has remained a creative force, and there are still plenty of us who wait eagerly for the next installment.
“I get why he doesn’t want to celebrate the anniversaries or any of that stuff,” says Chris Rock. “You can’t be a legend and a current artist at the same time. You can’t be in the Hall of Fame and still play—everybody in the Hall of Fame is retired. I’d rather play, and I’m sure Prince would, too.”
• • •
So was there a real legacy left by Purple Rain? Was it just an odd eruption, a fluky confluence (however well planned and executed) of the right songs by the right artist at the right time, or did it make a lasting mark?
Over the years, the film continues to show up on screens as it has entered the world of Midnight Movies and cult classics. It played at Brooklyn’s Prospect Park as a public sing-along screening for thousands of people, and in San Francisco at the Castro Theater for an audience of drag queens who dressed up as the characters. Punk cabaret singer-songwriter-provocateur Amanda Palmer and her band donned Revolution-inspired outfits and played the whole Purple Rain album as part of a 2013 New Year’s Eve show at New York’s Terminal 5 club. In 1984, Steven Ivory wrote a quickie biography of Prince that contained the prescient observation that “years from now, the movie will remain a cult favorite among rock music fans, not unlike the success of the ’70s rock musical The Rocky Horror Picture Show.”
“As big as it was, I think it’s the most underrated thing,” says Bob Cavallo. “They talk about The Song Remains the Same or whatever; all I know is, I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Certainly, it has been imitated on-screen by other musicians, for better and for worse. Mariah Carey’s disastrous Glitter and Eminem’s triumphant 8 Mile were both essentially the exact same movie as Purple Rain—though the movie’s classic, formulaic plot (underdog star struggles to be recognized for his unique talent while competing for romantic love) is not exactly original enough to warrant too much credit. And the extent to which the fascination with the movie was dependent on Prince’s mystique and inaccessibility is completely out of step with today’s media universe, where any sense of mystery has been replaced by rap’s ongoing obsession with authenticity and “realness,” plus the mandatory social media oversharing from every aspiring pop star.
Yet in the decade after the 1984 supernova, which saw the rise of Spike Lee (who claimed Purple Rain as an inspiration) and other young black filmmakers and the successful migration of hip-hop stars and themes—from Boyz n the Hood to New Jack City—to movie screens, it would seem that the movie’s triumph did change the playing field. The music, of course, continues to echo infinitely, through the work of OutKast, Lenny Kravitz, Alicia Keys, Pharrell Williams, Daft Punk, Beyoncé, and Beck, from their drum sounds to their ballad singing, in more ways than can be imagined.
Alan Leeds notes that in all his work on the road during the last thirty years, there is always an inevitable moment when someone pops the Purple Rain DVD into the tour bus player. “If you’re a writer or a producer or a roadie, there’s some moment as a young person that captivated you,” he says. “When you said, ‘I don’t want a real job—I want to be part of this.’ And most of the people that I work with today, the Prince Era, meaning ’80s Prince, that’s their inspiration, their benchmark. That’s what motivated them to want to do this.”
“Purple Rain showed me that you don’t have to do what everybody expects,” says Darius Rucker, who has topped the rock and country charts. “That being a black kid didn’t mean I had to just sing R&B. Prince was such an influence to not let anybody tell me what I can sing or what I can be. I looked up to him; I wanted to be Prince—this little short kid who was just killing them!”
“Prince has all these kids now,” says Chris Rock. “You get older and your influence goes in different ways; it doesn’t have to just be in music. So there’s Spike Lee, Ice Cube—he has big albums and big movies. Friday was a movie that’s nothing but an Ice Cube album, the same way Purple Rain was. I don’t exist without Prince. He might not like that now—he’s a Jehovah’s Witness, and I’m this cursing comedian!”
“Since then, who has done this?” asks Albert Magnoli. “Nobody. It’s really hard to bring a musical individual into a film place. It’s hard to transfer; a motion picture reveals too much.”
Susan Rogers emphasizes just how different Prince was, especially at his moment of breakthrough, from the other stars at his altitude. “Michael Jackson, Madonna, Bruce Springsteen, the Rolling Stones, Elton John—they all had producers and session musicians. They had the best players. Prince was one guy who was writing and arranging and producing, and he was competing with all of them on that level. One guy.
“Patti Smith wrote that book called Just Kids, talking about the New York art scene—there were a lot of artists, it was truly a scene. This was a scene of one guy who created his own competition in order to be a scene. Who does that?”
One element of Purple Rain that has clearly had a life of its own over the years is the title song, which, in addition to solidifying over time as Prince’s signature composition and fail-safe showstopper, has been covered by a wide variety of artists in a crazy array of settings. Adam Levine sang it at Howard Stern’s sixtieth birthday party, while Phish (who have dropped the song into their sets off and on for years) played it during a July Fourth show at Long Island’s Jones Beach Theater before going into “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
“ ‘Purple Rain’ was basically a challenge,” says country singer LeAnn Rimes. “I wanted to explore something new and prove to myself and the whole world that I could do a lot more than what they had heard from me. Through the years, during my concerts, it’s one of the main songs fans scream out for me to sing. I’ve rocked it out, I’ve performed it acoustic—it changes as I change. It will forever remain one of the most influential songs of my musical journey, and I will forever remain one of the biggest Prince fans.”
A young Tori Amos began playing “Purple Rain” in her cocktail lounge set immediately after first seeing the movie in 1984, and it has consistently turned up in her shows ever since. “It was like a hymn, like a religious experience, and maybe that’s what spoke to me, growing up in church,” she says. “It wasn’t filled with guilt but with compassion, taking yourself out of a situation and acknowledging that you might have hurt someone. It was like nothing I had really encountered in that way—a song that could be vulnerable and yet in control.
“Something was opened up in my heart by ‘Purple Rain,’ especially near the end of the song when he goes really high. It seemed not funereal, but like a requiem to me. I remember bawling my eyes out when I first heard it. It woke something up in me—memories, sadness, deep longing; it touches so many emotions.”
“The whole movie blew me away, but when he played ‘Purple Rain,’ that was really it,” says Darius Rucker, who has also made the song a regular feature of his concerts. “I got the album, and by the third time listening to it, I was like, ‘This guy has just written “Hey Jude”—he’s written the perfect rock and roll ballad.’ I wanted to sing it ever since. We talked about it in Hootie but just never did it. One day, the guys in my band came up and asked if I’d ever thought about doing ‘Purple Rain.’ I said yes, forever, but I didn’t think it would work in a country show. And they were like, ‘Oh, it’ll work.’
“I love playing it, bu
t I didn’t think it would be something people would come to expect from me. Now I can’t stop—I mentioned on Twitter that I was going to stop doing it, and people went crazy. But every night I just love it; it makes me so happy when I hear those first chords.”
“Purple Rain” has also become a popular selection in the world of karaoke. Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield, whose 2013 book Turn Around Bright Eyes is an examination of karaoke culture, says that it’s clearly the Prince song of choice, though it poses its own challenges. “Sometimes you’ll see somebody attempt it and then they look like a deer in the purple headlights, in those long pauses from line to line,” he says. “It’s a song that requires you to stand your ground and handle those pauses. It forces you to call upon your reserves of charisma—when you sing ‘Purple Rain,’ you’re spending a lot of time standing there without a guitar to look busy with, so you have to go all the way into the song. You can’t do that one casually or mockingly.”
Though he says he’s seen attempts at “Let’s Go Crazy” and a “surprising number” of “Darling Nikkis,” Sheffield thinks “Purple Rain” offers more latitude than other Prince songs. “There’s really no way to karaoke ‘When Doves Cry’ or ‘Raspberry Beret’ without the constant pitfall of imitating the man, because his vocal mannerisms are so integral to the melody and rhythm. ‘Purple Rain’ is more of a ‘standard’ in the sense that you can sing it without seeming like you’re just copying the original vocal. The song still has lots of his personality (practically everybody who attempts it does the ‘that means you, too!’ part, often with a bit of air guitar), but it isn’t dependent on whether or not you can do a good Prince. It’s a song that’s kind to a mediocre or ordinary voice (like the voice that most of us karaoke obsessives have, definitely including me).”