Let's Go Crazy (11 page)

“Once his idea was put into place, even before the movie was cast, as soon as he pushed that one domino over, it was just a question of momentum,” says Wendy Melvoin. “And by the time it reached its pinnacle, it was a fucking speeding train, and there was no stopping it.”

FOUR

Sign Your Name on the Dotted Line

On August 1, Albert Magnoli arrived in Minneapolis and set up shop at a motel. He had a month before he had to return to Los Angeles and finish the postproduction on
Reckless
. Knowing that everyone wanted the movie, though fictional, to be firmly based in the realities of Prince's life—“We wanted it to be the Prince story without being the Prince story,” is how Cavallo put it—he began meeting with and interviewing all of the Revolution, the Time, Vanity 6, and others in the community. He found that everyone was ­accessible and open, and he started to formulate the shape of the script and the extensive revisions he would be making to Blinn's draft.

Consider the issues going on within the Prince camp in the summer of 1983. Following a period of tension with Dez Dickerson in which he was fighting to have more input in the band's music, there's now a new guitarist in the Revolution, whom
many of the other musicians resent, and who also happens to be dating the keyboard player. There's still anger just below the boiling point within the Time, who remain pissed that Prince fired two of their bandmates. Prince is making overtures to rebuild the relationship with his estranged, eccentric father, which presumably makes him more willing to talk about, or at least think about, his family conflicts. He is also dating, to one degree or another, Jill Jones, Susan Moonsie (one of the Vanity 6 singers), and several others, and is about to begin pursuing Susannah Melvoin, a woman who will further complicate his love life. It didn't require much digging for Magnoli to find his basic narrative themes: “The conflicts in the movie were real,” he said, “and became the core and genesis of the relationships [people saw on-screen].”

It took eight or ten days to meet everybody and to gather his ideas. For the rest of August, when he wasn't going to hear the bands rehearse, he was camped out in his room. “I was writing longhand,” he says. “I would write from seven to seven, with a ruler and pencil, on paper. Then a secretary would come in and take those pages and type everything up from that day in script form.”

With an actual director in their midst—even one who was just out of film school and had never made a feature before—the musicians could feel the scope of the project changing. “For the longest time,” says Coleman, “we would talk about it like, ‘We're gonna make the best cult movie, it's gonna be cool, we're just gonna put it out there and see who responds to it.' Then Al Magnoli came and actually kind of connected with
Prince, and Al was the one who was like, ‘If we're gonna make a movie, why don't we make a hit movie? It seems like we've got all the parts here. Let's not just make some artsy movie, just for fun. What do we have to lose?' ”

“As soon as he had the serious big guns paying attention—when Al Magnoli came on, you started seeing more of Bob Cavallo and Joe Ruffalo, not just Steve Fargnoli—when those guys started making their presence known, I was like, ‘They're gonna go deep with this,' ” says Wendy Melvoin.

Prince had already been talking to his friends, associates, and protégés about the roles he envisioned for them in the movie. His initial idea of making a true ensemble piece, though, was shifting as he and Magnoli refined the script, which, it was becoming clear, was ultimately going to be a vehicle for Prince first and foremost. Whatever had previously been promised or implied was now leading to some resentment from the crew.

“I think he genuinely wanted to include everybody,” says Jones, “but I also think that the business side, with the managers, started to come in and influence him and say, ‘Well, what more can you do with the Time?' I don't think they were persuading him, but he can't manage everybody, and
that's
what created the problems. They could've kept it a little bit more realistic for him, and not had Prince come off like he was being really selfish and stingy. I think he really wanted everybody in this film. He was really excited. And then the jealousy started. Jesse [Johnson] would be like, ‘Who does he think he is?' It's just normal.

“The script was still being developed, with characters and
new people coming in—how he created Wendy on celluloid had a lot to do with those new relationships with new people. He already knew how he wanted to create this thing between himself and Morris, which did exist, but maybe that rivalry existed more [in the film].”

“Al Magnoli was pushing for even more input from the band,” says Fink. “He wanted more dialogue for the group, which had been written into the original script, but later never came to fruition because Prince wanted to keep the focus more on him. You had the whole side story with Lisa and Wendy, but the rest of the group was sort of peripheral, just guys hanging out, playing, with a few lines.”

A few days after Magnoli arrived, he had a chance to see the Revolution in action when the new lineup was debuted at the First Avenue benefit. Though Prince had been working the band so hard that it was meant to feel like just another day's work, it was still clear that this was an important show. “There was a bit of excitement, more than usual, in the backstage area,” says Coleman.

“I remember the preparation for that show, the clothes and the style, to every T,” says Jones. “This was the big night, definitely. And it was special. They really worked very, very hard.”

She also maintains that it was immediately evident the kind of impact that Melvoin's presence would have on the group, that Prince displayed a new kind of energy that would be critical to the film. “You could see that it just worked,” she says. “His behavior onstage lightened up a lot more—the nuances, the eye contact, the interaction between those two
specifically. There was something a little more human and charming and cute, because Wendy used to dote on him all the time and tell him how cute he was, and maybe it was because there was finally a girl around who didn't want to, like, shag him. Somebody saying wonderful, feminine, nurturing things, but there's no payoff like, ‘What can I get from this sexually?' I think it was a nice little bit of a break for him. It was like sanctuary to be onstage, for a change.”

Susannah Melvoin came to Minneapolis to watch her twin sister's debut with the band. “They had rehearsed for such a long time that it was kind of second nature,” she says. “There was almost no fear; they just had it down. It was a whole group of people who had studied to be in this very powerful band for this very powerful guy playing very powerful music. And it felt like a piece of the puzzle he was looking for, like matter was collecting and turning into a star or a planet.

“It went off without a hitch—and then afterward, like always, everyone just went back and watched the video of the show to see what they needed to fix or modify for the film. The audience went nuts, but then it was right back to work.”

Wendy and Lisa recall that Susannah's visit for the First Avenue show marked the point at which Prince's romantic interest in her became evident. Their relationship would last on and off for years; by the time
Purple Rain
was finished, he had cast her as the lead vocalist in the band the Family, whose 1985 album is best remembered for including the original “Nothing Compares 2 U,” which Sinéad O'Connor would make a global smash in 1990.

“We were all in love with each other anyway,” says Coleman, “and then Prince met Wendy and he was like, ‘Well, I can't have her because you have her, and I can't compete with that.' Then Susannah showed up and—twins! He thought, ‘She's like her, only available.' ”

Meanwhile, Alan Leeds was grinding away, hiring technical staff to oversee all of the rehearsing, recording, and logistics that would be required throughout the summer and fall. One of his finds was a young studio engineer named Susan Rogers, who had been working at Westlake Audio in Hollywood, where Prince bought a new console and various other equipment. She initially came to Minneapolis to help set up the gear and “sort of audition” for a job, and was hired full-time in August.

Rogers replaced the console and did some repairs on the tape machine and some other pieces of Prince's home studio. “He hired me as a maintenance technician, so I wasn't doing any recording—in fact, I didn't expect to do any at all,” she says. “[That work] took me a week or so, and I could hear him upstairs playing ‘Purple Rain,' playing ‘Computer Blue' on the piano. Vanity 6 were there rehearsing, and occasionally some other members of the band would come over and they'd be talking and preparing upstairs. I finally got the studio up and running, and the first tape I put up was ‘Darling Nikki.' I never forgot it, I never forgot that experience. I'd never heard anything like it.”

When Prince wasn't working, he was listening to music. “A lot of times he would put records on in his bedroom, and some
times he would just leave the house and put the turntable on repeat,” says Rogers. “I don't know if that was to annoy me or if I'm overthinking things, but I didn't dare go in there and shut it off, so I had to be hearing that thing for hours. He played Culture Club a lot, stuff that was hip at that time.” (“He was listening to a lot of different music, a lot of English influence,” Jones confirms. “We'd go to sleep listening to Roxy Music or Gary Numan.”)

More songs were added to the stockpile for the album over the summer. Prince wrote an aching, piano-based ballad called “The Beautiful Ones,” inspired by his feelings for Susannah Melvoin. He had been courting her like a suitor in a Hollywood romance, and would send flowers to her door every day for a year. “I can't say that the song was exactly our story, but he wrote it during that time,” says Susannah. “He wasn't always specifically writing about what he was going through, because he also had to be consistent with the
Purple Rain
story line, but he was drawing from things that had happened in his life.

“Our relationship was definitely very intense. I remember he called me in the middle of the night, and he picked me up and we were in the car and had this strange two-hour period where he just stopped talking. I kept asking, ‘Are you okay?' He wouldn't say a word. We got to the hotel; he still wasn't speaking. I was getting really upset. This was really early—I wasn't aware that if you stood up for yourself and said anything he didn't like, you would hear it from him. And I thought our relationship was different from that, anyway. So I said, ‘This is not right—call me when you know how to talk.' I got into a cab
and went home. He called me about an hour later, and I said, ‘That's not cool, whatever you were doing.' So we were very attached, and he spoke a lot through music. He would come and play me something, and I knew perfectly well it was about me.”

The other new addition—which was debuted at the First Avenue show, though that recording was not ultimately used for the album—was a hard-charging, tough but melodic rocker called “Let's Go Crazy.” The song was a declaration of intent for the new band and the new era, spotlighting the precision and intensity of the musicians while adding a strong pop ­sensibility—and an unforgettable spoken introduction, with the invocation “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called life,” a perfect way to kick off a concert, or a movie. (He also closed the song with a full fifty-five seconds of high-speed guitar shredding, a squall which, in addition to cementing his badass reputation to rock fans, would be sampled to great effect on Public Enemy's ­cataclysmic 1990 single “Welcome to the Terrordome.”)

“When [Prince] wrote ‘Let's Go Crazy,' he came and picked me up, and it must have been three in the morning,” says Jones. “You just knew that it was a really different kind of a record for him to make. He'd never composed anything with that much energy in the hooks. He found his voice, with the talk-singing, and he knew it.”

Though “Crazy” was written earlier in the summer, the recording came a few months later at the warehouse. “Prince wanted to be able to record his rehearsals,” says Rogers, “so I was told to make a control room right in the middle of a
­warehouse—which breaks every rule in the book, but I hadn't been an engineer: I knew nothing about record making. Which in hindsight was why I was perfect for Prince, because he could have me make his records his way. So we brought in the console, threw a square of carpet down on the cement floor: ‘All right, that's where the control room will be.' There was no isolation or anything. We recorded ‘Let's Go Crazy' live at rehearsal, and then he sent the whole band home and it was just the two of us; we were going to do overdubs together. This was my first experience recording him one-on-one.

“I'm running the tape machine and he's playing the guitar solo; he's standing right in front of me and playing, and the idea is I'm going to record it and then stop and roll back and we're done. But he made a mistake, so I rolled back to the top of the solo, and he's playing along with the solo that he's just laid down, and I'm thinking to myself, ‘He's playing and I didn't hit record. Have I made a mistake? Did I miss a signal?' So I took my index finger and pressed the record button and he reached out and hit the stop button and said, ‘Who cued you?' I said, ‘No one.' He was patient and understanding, and he just said, ‘Roll back, watch me; I'll cue you where to punch in.' I said, ‘Got it,' and I lived to record another day. That started a partnership where I would read his face, and that requires the engineer to literally play the solo along with him, watching for the slightest sign. As soon as his chin would make the barest move, I'd go, ‘Okay, here it comes, on the next downbeat,' and we'd go. I got to where I knew him well enough that I could anticipate—‘Yeah, that's the part that he's going to want to
record.' You get a beautiful, symbiotic relationship between the engineer and the artist when you work that closely together that frequently, just every damn day.”