by Hahn, Alex
Shortly after recruiting Kotero, he took her to a Los Angeles nightclub where he had heard that Denise Matthews would be partying. As he had hoped, Matthews was aghast to see Prince with a woman who looked almost like a mirror image of herself. The message was clear: replacing her had not been difficult.
Few of Prince’s associates had been impressed with Matthews’ musical talents, although there was some hope that her charisma would translate to the silver screen. But Patricia Kotero was something else altogether. Although her sultry appearance was almost indistinguishable from that of her predecessor, her personal magnetism paled in comparison. Plucked from obscurity to star in a film and to front a singing group, she was immediately in over her head, displaying little talent in either area. She lacked Matthews’ edge; all that remained of the character Prince had created was physical beauty. “I don’t think she was creative or clever enough to hold Prince’s interest,” said one frequent visitor to the set. Nonetheless, she became the front person of Apollonia 6, with Susan Moonsie and Brenda Bennett reprising their Vanity 6 roles.
Although Prince believed that Apollonia could probably skate through her thin role in Purple Rain, he concluded her vocal talents were not worth expending any of his better songs on. A bounty of strong material was considered for her Apollonia 6 album, only to be reclaimed for other uses, leaving mainly filler. “He was not optimistic about Apollonia 6, so he wasn’t going to be really critical about those songs,” Rogers noted.
Nonetheless, some of Prince’s associates were troubled that even subpar material would be used for such a dubious project. With Matthews and now Kotero, a pattern was emerging: Prince would squander time, energy, and music on women simply because their beauty fascinated him. “The Vanities and the Apollonias bothered me,” said Matt Fink. “I thought he could be producing extremely talented people, not people who were there for their looks rather than their singing.”
While Apollonia denied in the press that she and Prince became romantically involved, rumors to the contrary flew on the set of Purple Rain. “She and Prince did have a brief fling,” confirmed one knowledgeable source. “But I don’t think he ever had a genuine flame for her. And there’s no doubt that part of his attraction to Apollonia was a desire to get Vanity’s goat.”
***
With all elements of the film finally in place, shooting began in November 1983 in Minneapolis. The pace was rapid, as Magnoli struggled to complete work before the arrival of winter made outdoor scenes impossible. But the young director also tried to keep the atmosphere loose and informal; scenes were shot in as few takes as possible, creating a playful energy between Prince and his associates. Shooting of the musical numbers took place at First Avenue, where hundreds of extras cheered and danced as Prince and the Revolution, as well as The Time, lip-synched to previously recorded material.
A major surprise was the on-screen magnetism of Morris Day, who channeled his frustrations into a bravura performance despite a growing drug problem. “During the making of the movie, more than once he had to be physically dragged out of his house and driven to the set, between the paranoia and exhaustion from all-night freebase binges,” said an insider who was sometimes sent to roust Day. Still, Day managed to play his character, a slick, sleazy, self-absorbed womanizer, with the perfect degree of camp. Some observers credited Day with stealing his scenes with Prince, whose onscreen presence during non-musical sequences proved to be relatively thin and weak.
With the Minneapolis scenes complete, the next step was to decamp to Los Angeles to complete outdoor shooting in warmer weather. But the initial funding from Mo Ostin had run out, placing an obstacle in front of the production. Cavallo and Fargnoli entered another intense round of negotiations with Warner Bros. Pictures as Prince and his team of actors and musicians anxiously waited. Word eventually came that the company had agreed to provide additional financing and also to distribute the film. Purple Rain was going to make it to cinemas, representing the realization of one of Prince’s lifelong dreams. “We were on a pretty exciting ride at that point, and we knew where it was going,” said Roy Bennett. “There was something big out there for us; we just never knew how big.”
***
The emotional lift of the film being greenlighted sent Prince into a frenzy of recording. He continued to insist that even complicated songs be completed in a single session, meaning that engineers were required to work as long as 24 hours straight. From late January through March of 1984, Prince completed the remainder of the Purple Rain soundtrack; the backbone of what would be his follow-up to Purple Rain; the third Time album; the Apollonia 6 album; an album built around the percussionist and singer Sheila Escovedo, whom he dubbed Sheila E.; and various single B-sides and unreleased songs.
Various innovative recording approaches were used. “Erotic City,” which would emerge as a single B-side from Purple Rain, utilized the technique of changing the tape speed while recording vocals and guitars, creating unusual effects when the song was mixed down at normal speed. During the mixing process for “When Doves Cry,” conceived as a centerpiece of the film soundtrack, he dropped out the bass line, giving the song a minimalistic feel that was contrary to just about anything on the pop charts. As Marylou Badeaux recalled, the reaction from one official at Warners was, “What kind of fucking record is this, with a bunch of strange sounds?” But Prince was adamant that it be the first single from the album.
“When Doves Cry,” released in May 1984, vindicated his instincts and took Prince’s commercial success to a new level. It shot to No. 1 on the Pop Singles Chart and sold a million units, becoming the best-selling song of the year. This immediately created an atmosphere of excitement in Prince’s camp as the film was readied for a mid-summer release.
Meanwhile, Prince had developed strong feelings for Susannah Melvoin, who put her relationship on hold and moved to Minnesota to be with him. Her hopes of being his only love interest were quickly dashed, as he had also started a significant romance with Sheila Escovedo. For both Sheila and Susannah, two strangers now linked by their pursuit of the same man, what at first seemed like a storybook romance with a powerful pop star became tumultuous and painful. Howard Bloom, Prince’s press agent, became close with Escovedo and found her often distraught about her relationship with Prince. “Sheila E. wanted to live with him for the rest of her life, and it wasn’t going to happen; it was awful for her,” Bloom said.
Jill Jones also remained an on-again, off-again girlfriend, and Prince was generally ready to sleep with virtually any woman who grabbed his attention. Bloom recalls, for example, dispatching a publicist from his company to meet with Prince and getting a call that afternoon asking him to send the woman back for carnal purposes. “He was sexually omnivorous,” remembers Bloom, who refused to fulfill Prince’s request. “Life for him was a sexual hors d’oeuvres tray.”
***
On June 7, 1984 – Prince’s 26th birthday – a party for friends, family, and others took place at First Avenue, just weeks before the release of the Purple Rain album. In addition to his large entourage, Prince invited old friends from the neighborhood. His ties to the Northside had frayed considerably over the years, and the event offered an opportunity for Prince to reconnect with aspects of his formative years.
Among the old friends who attended was Terry Jackson, the former percussionist for Prince’s high school band Grand Central. Prince had long held a disproportionate grudge against Jackson over a high school spat over Prince stealing food from the Jackson family kitchen. The repercussions of that incident, which had devolved into Prince throwing a rake comb and then Jackson hoisting a golf club, had reverberated through the years. When Prince was forming his first professional band, in 1978, at first it had seemed that the scars might have healed and Jackson might have a space in the ensemble. But that possibility vanished when Prince had haughtily told the percussionist to pack up his equipment and leave the rehearsal space. Timbales, Prince told Jackson, would not be part of the future
of R&B music.
Tonight, Jackson felt proud of his friend and hopeful that the hatchet had finally been buried. Happily, he found himself dancing with the belle of the ball, Apollonia, as dozens of friends and other onlookers watched. But when Prince saw them, he stalked over and made his anger apparent. As Jackson backed off, Prince then pointed up at the ceiling as a new song began playing over the speakers. “Listen,” Prince said. “This is what I meant about timbales!”
The song was “The Glamorous Life,” which Prince had written and recorded for Sheila E. Among its key elements was Escovedo’s frenetic percussion, which included a very prominent use of timbales.
Jackson, stunned that Prince even remembered their interaction of nearly six years earlier, walked away in dismay. Even tonight, Jackson, for one, needed to be reminded that Prince’s victories in some measure had come at someone else’s expense.
***
Not long after the party, the various elements of the Purple Rain campaign were finally unspooled, and their success was of a magnitude that no one had thought to anticipate. Soon after being released in June 1984, the Purple Rain soundtrack displaced Bruce Springsteen’s Born In the USA from the No. 1 position on Billboard’s Album Chart. Prince’s album would go on to hold the top slot for 12 weeks, and it sold 16.3 million records worldwide.
This success did nothing to alienate hip rock journalists, who largely felt that Purple Rain had satisfied all of their great expectations for Prince. Here was an album that ranged from iconoclastic funk (“When Doves Cry”) to blistering guitar rock (“Let’s Go Crazy”) to stirring R&B ballads (“The Beautiful Ones”). It was difficult to find songs on the album that were not candidates for Prince classics.
The film itself grossed $70 million and was among the top moneymakers of 1984, making Prince one of the most visible entertainers in the entire world. Reaction from film critics was largely strong, and the entire project became a significant cultural phenomenon.
Not much more than a year earlier, Prince had remained an up-and-coming artist with a sizeable following and a modest entourage. Now, he was an international superstar, and also widely recognized as a consequential artist. Every hunch he followed, and every idiosyncratic decision he made had panned out. He had succeeded at creating a grand synthesis of rock, R&B, and funk that was already influencing other artists.
But for all of his foresight, the pressures that came with these victories would prove to be greater than even Prince himself could have imagined.
20. Typecast
Prince on the 1985 Purple Rain Tour
To satisfy all of the hype that had formed around Prince, the Purple Rain tour had to be an extravaganza. The stage set, designed by Roy Bennett, was the most elaborate of Prince’s career, costing $300,000 and featuring props such as a purple bathtub that rose from below the stage. Hours of preparation were required to integrate these complicated elements. It was the tub – perched on a platform and propelled by a hydraulic lift that would make it rise from the stage – that proved most problematic, particularly when it fell with Prince in it during a rehearsal. Although his injuries were not grave, Prince did suffer significant bruising.[221]
More consequentially, the set featured risers that were stacked on top of each other to achieve great height. Prince jumped from them multiple times during each show while wearing four-inch heels. This would occur night after night for the duration of the tour, which lasted an entire year, placing an immense muscular and orthopedic strain on Prince’s body. Over the course of this tour, Prince began using prescription painkillers to cope with the pain caused by these injuries.[222]
***
The compressed tour schedule included ninety concerts in thirty-two cities across the United States. To pull off the complicated logistics of the swing, Prince’s organization had to attain a new level of discipline and efficiency. With Steve Fargnoli continuing to spend most of his time in Los Angeles, the key player on the scene in Minneapolis remained tour manager Alan Leeds. He was joined by Karen Krattinger, an attractive, toughminded Georgian who had been road manager for the S.O.S. Band. Temperamentally, Leeds and Krattinger were near opposites and complemented each other perfectly; he was a strategic, sometimes lofty thinker with a passion for R&B music, while she was a meticulously organized administrator with almost no interest in artistic issues. Together, they became the linchpins of Prince’s team and also served as close personal aides to Prince. With the help of numerous others within Prince’s organization, they orchestrated one of the most elaborate pop tours of 1984-85.
The opening night, at Joe Louis Arena in the Prince stronghold of Detroit, demonstrated how thoroughly Purple Rain had captured the public’s attention. The 20,000 fans went into a frenzy the moment the spoken words that begin “Let’s Go Crazy” crackled over the speakers. The crowd-pleasing show focused on Purple Rain (eight of its nine tracks were played) and 1999. Although certain vaudevillian touches – the bathtub and other props, as well as Prince’s five costume changes – drew objections from some critics, who would have preferred more spontaneity, fans seemed enraptured.
The tour packed arenas everywhere it went, with shows selling out mere hours after being announced. The crowds were not only much larger than any Prince had experienced as a headlining performer, but had a very different flavor; suburban parents brought children who had begged for concert tickets, whites greatly outnumbered blacks. It was, in short, the generic mass audience that gravitates toward any artist of the moment. The days of Prince as an underground phenomenon were gone forever.
Along with casual fans checking out the next big thing, the crowds contained large numbers of zealots who identified, in many cases excessively, with the Prince and the Revolution of Purple Rain. Largely as a result of the film, each band member became highly recognizable. “They all had their own very vocal pockets of fans at shows,” Leeds recalled. “Wendy and Lisa in particular were instant role models for every aspiring young female musician in the country.” The wild desire of fans and groupies to meet and touch their new heroes kept the atmosphere charged with emotion and expectation. “It became a circus,” noted drummer Bobby Z. Rivkin. “There were people dressed up in costumes, people dressed up as you. It was extremely exciting, but you had to be careful – it was very powerful.”
To satisfy the expectations of new admirers, Prince had created a show in which the visual elements were just as important as the music. But in the process, something was lost: the subversive energy of earlier tours was stifled by the props and choreographed routines that Prince felt were integral to a major-market production. Dez Dickerson, watching from the sidelines, felt vaguely nauseated by the spectacle. “It was a big part of why I had left – he wanted the shows to become more and more structured and would often say, ‘I want it to be like a Broadway play,’” Dickerson recalled. “For me, it was going in an entirely different direction from what I felt was the heart of what we do as a craft. I didn’t want to become Wayne Newton in high heels.”
Among the show’s stranger elements was an interlude during which Prince had an anguished “conversation with God” against swirls of synthesizers. While largely incomprehensible, this dialogue seemed to reflect Prince’s struggle to reconcile his lustful side with more traditional morality. With the largest crowds of his career looking on, Prince seemed intent on showing that he recognized a higher authority and was, at heart, a God-fearing man.
As he watched the show, publicist Bloom saw that an important, and in many respects unfortunate, transition was occurring in Prince’s career and his psyche. From Dirty Mind through 1999, he had been a rebel who rejected prevailing social norms. Now, having achieved the heights of fame, Prince felt an obligation to curtail the more outlandish elements of his character. With so many young people around the world fixated on him, perhaps he even felt the need to become something of a role model. “Prince had been rebelling against God and morality, and now God and morality were taking him over,” Bloom observed. “His emph
asis was not on sexuality any more, but on God.”
Still, the sexual elements of Prince’s music and persona, now that he was a household name, gave pause to social conservatives and moralists. In late 1984, for example, thirty-six-year-old Tipper Gore, wife of the handsome young senator Albert Gore, discovered her daughter listening to Purple Rain and was shocked in particular by the lyrics of “Darling Nikki,” which refer to a woman masturbating with magazines. Four months later, Gore and several other well-connected women in Washington started the “Parents’ Music Resource Center” to advocate for commercial restrictions on prurient lyrics. This eventually resulted in the placement of warning labels on certain “explicit” albums, with Prince’s music having been a driving impetus for the campaign.
While Prince was hardly unaware of the publicity value of Gore’s attacks on him, the charge that his music corrupted the minds of children stung. In many respects, his bedrock value system was conservative and hierarchical, and it was becoming even more so. While working on the Family project in 1984, Prince pulled a song called “Feline” from the project because group member Paul Peterson felt it offended his religious sensibilities and, even more importantly, his mother. “Prince is gonna be the first one to listen when someone says ‘My religion doesn’t allow me to do this,’” recalled engineer Susan Rogers. “Those words carry a lot of weight for him. He also respects mothers and respects family life even though he didn’t have such a good one of his own.” While Prince had previously been more reluctant to accommodate band members’ concerns – witness his refusal to drop “Head” from the live set at Dez Dickerson’s request during the Controversy tour – by the mid-1980s, with his fame broadening, he now felt some pressure to dial back such elements.