Let's Go Crazy (17 page)

Perhaps not the most carefully fact-checked paragraph the magazine could have run, but it began the drumbeat that would get louder as the year progressed. To be fair, there were at least two other stories that
Rolling Stone
was tracking much more intensely than the plans for Prince's movie: Bruce Springsteen's long-delayed new album, and the constantly
shifting plans for the Jacksons' tour, which would effectively be Michael Jackson's Thriller tour. All three events would reach fever pitch and compete for the hearts and minds of the pop audience by summer 1984.

Before everything had been fully assembled, it was time to screen a rough cut of
Purple Rain
for the Warner Bros. executives. “I was horrified,” says Cavallo. “I knew that the movie wouldn't play without drastic editing to some of the bad, over-the-top bullshit, and some of the scenes, like the ‘When Doves Cry' video and a bunch of the comedy stuff, weren't finished yet. It ran at, like, a hundred forty minutes. I'm just sliding down in my chair because of the embarrassing scenes that would never have been in the movie, scenes that they should never have seen.

“When it's over, Terry Semel stands up, and he's talking to Bob Daly and Mo Ostin, and he says, ‘So, Mo, you wanna bring me another one of your fucking music guys to do a movie on?' Because he's gotten burned on
One Trick Pony
, he lost a lot of money on it. I walked over to Mike Ovitz, I go, ‘Mike, I don't think they're gonna give us the money,' and he goes, loud enough that they can hear, ‘If they're not gonna give you the money, if they don't want to do this, we'll take this over to Paramount and this is gonna be a smash. I see it.' The next day I get a call: we got the money.”

Prince sat out all of these studio meetings; that's what his business team was there to handle. Besides, there was more music to make. Most urgently, there were still a few holes in the sound track that had to be filled. Deciding that they
needed a lighthearted song to reinforce the budding romance between the Kid and Apollonia, Prince took back a tune that was originally intended for the Apollonia 6 album and recorded “Take Me with U” on January 24 as a duet for him and Kotero, to match the footage in which they're riding his motorcycle through the fall foliage.

Susan Rogers recalls the challenge of recording Apollonia's vocals. She warmed up with the Beatles' singsongy “When I'm Sixty-Four,” and required the kind of patience and support that usually wasn't associated with Prince. “That took a bit of time, but she got it,” she said. “He coaxed her into being more assertive. He has an incredible talent for recognizing strengths and weaknesses. He has marvelous natural leadership, is very good at knowing just how to push you to get the best out of you—and he knew when to stop, in most cases.” In the end, the skeptical engineer was won over by Kotero's performance. “She had this campy quality to her voice that was perfect,” Rogers says. “She sounded like an actress pretending to sing.”

The breezy feel of “Take Me with U,” with its playful asides (“You're sheer perfection.” “Thank you!”), added a lighter mood that helped round out the
Purple Rain
album. Lisa Coleman did the string arrangement, and a new arrival, who had shared vocals on the “Erotic City” recording a few weeks earlier, handled the drums: Sheila E., the percussion-virtuoso daughter of Santana band member Pete Escovedo, who would become perhaps the most successful of all Prince's protégées.

“When I met Sheila for the first time, she came from the airport right to the warehouse where we were rehearsing,”
says Rogers. “She was wearing Converse All-Stars and jeans, and she had a football jersey on. That was the first and only time I ever saw her in tennis shoes and jeans.” Sheila was given the full Prince makeover, glammed up to almost cartoonish proportions, reconceived as a sex goddess. “She was transformed—the hair, the makeup, the clothes, everything,” Rogers says. “Just like with each band member—‘Here's your identity, and your identity, and your identity.' ”

The album's title song was finalized from the live First Avenue recording. The intro and guitar solo were shortened, the piano part was beefed up, the third verse (an awkward four lines in which he expresses his lack of interest in his lover's money) was cut. ­Additional vocal harmonies were added. A touch of echo tweaked Prince's voice in some spots, and understated yet dramatic strings gave “Purple Rain” an even more triumphant, anthemic feel.

But there was still one final piece missing, and though it came at the last minute, it would prove to be the most important addition of all.

Nearing the end of the editing phase, Magnoli decided to cut in a montage, a moment that would convey the Kid struggling with all the forces swirling around in his head. “I needed a song,” says the director. “I told Prince that it was about his father, his mother, loss, redemption, salvation—all the themes we were dealing with in the film. The next morning, he called and said, ‘Okay, I got two songs.' ”

On March 1, after attending the Grammy awards ceremony in Los Angeles, Prince went into Sunset Sound studio and recorded one of these new compositions, a song that may
have been inspired by his relationship with Vanity/Apollonia 6 member Susan Moonsie: “When Doves Cry.” The lyrics sometimes seemed to touch on material from the movie (“Maybe I'm just like my father, too bold”), but more striking was the grinding, almost industrial sound, full of lust and frustration and unlike anything he, or anyone else, had ever done before. Rendering the track unique and challenging, Prince stripped the bass part out of the song, which made it subtly disorienting, unsettling.

“We cut [‘Doves'], and when he was playing with it before he did the vocals, he took the bass out,” recalled Peggy McCreary (nicknamed and credited as “Peggy Mac”), who engineered the sessions. “He said, ‘There's nobody that's going to have the guts to do this.' And he was smiling from ear to ear. He felt this was the best, and he knew he had a hit song . . . so he decided to do something really daring.”

“Prince was renting a big old white Cadillac that he was driving around LA,” says Matt Fink. “He invited Bobby and me out to the studio and said, ‘Hey, let's go for a drive; I want to play you this new song for the movie.' We get in the car and we're driving around and he pops the cassette in, and it's the song ‘When Doves Cry'—we're hearing it for the first time. The song ends, and I say, ‘There's no bass on that thing. It's just all kick drum—is it done?' And he goes, ‘Yeah, it's done.' I go, ‘But there's no bass on it, how come there's no bass on that thing?' And he goes, ‘Because that's just how it is—that's how it's gonna be.' And I go, ‘Really? You really like the fact that there's no bass on that?' I was questioning him on it, because I
wasn't ready for this; it was, like, not in my worldview. He said, ‘No, this one is gonna be just like you're hearing it.'

“I was skeptical, and I thought, ‘Oh God, are people gonna get this? Does it sound too empty? What is the deal with this?' I couldn't get to it yet—I couldn't wrap my brain around it—but when I look back on it now, it's pure genius, because it was so different. It would have been one thing if the melody or the lyric wasn't working or it wasn't touching people the right way, but the reality is, it was the greatest hit off the album. I didn't believe in it at first, I didn't like it. I had difficulty being critical of him, and very rarely was I. In all the time I was in the band, that was the first time I questioned something he did creatively—the greatest song on the record, and I'm having an issue with it because there's no bass on it.”

Though the mix may have been extreme, especially for a song destined to be a single, it was also an extension of an approach Prince had been toying with. In his 1989 autobiography, Miles Davis recalled an exchange between the two musicians, who worked together toward the end of the great trumpeter's life. “One day I asked Prince, ‘Where's the bass line in that composition?' He said, ‘Miles, I don't write one, and if you ever hear one, I'm gonna fire the bass player, because a bass line gets in the way.' ”

“I heard the version of ‘Doves Cry' with a bass line,” Questlove has said. “It wouldn't have grabbed me. Without bass it had a desperate, cold feeling to it. It made you concentrate on his voice. The narration of the song is dealing with ‘Why am I the way I am?' and it's important that you let the words paint
the scenario, and with the bass line you could get lost. It was distracting. With the bass line, the song was cool. Without it, it was astounding.”

Susannah Melvoin remembers the day that Prince delivered “When Doves Cry” to the full team. “Everybody had been sitting around the production warehouse for hours waiting for him,” she says. “He came in wide-eyed, like he'd been up for four days straight. He pulled his limo into the warehouse and played it as loud as possible. He was in a state, he loved it so much—he was in a hurricane of excitement. And in that moment, everybody knew this was going to be history. He had wrapped up what the movie was about, and it set everything in motion. He found his grail, the apex that was going to release this thing. And that same day we all heard this song was the day they shot the video.”

As he wrote more and more music, Prince bumped all the songs by other artists that had been in play for the sound track—songs by the Time, Dickerson, and Apollonia 6 all moved over to their own albums. Jones's “Wednesday” had made it as far as the album's first pressing, but was dropped when her scenes were cut. “The Beautiful Ones” had replaced “Electric Intercourse,” and another Prince song titled “G-Spot” was also cut, later to appear on Jones's album.

Back in the days when vinyl LPs (and cassettes) were the means of music distribution, there was also the issue of how long an album could actually run, how much music a side could
hold. Though Prince had extended “Let's Go Crazy” to allow Magnoli to work with it for the movie's opening scene, the full version (with a wild, dissonant piano solo) was saved for the 12″ single and a shorter edit was used on the album. “Father's Song,” an instrumental with a writing credit for John L. Nelson, had been its own track at one point, but on March 23, Prince assembled a new configuration of the album with a short version of it woven into “Computer Blue,” which would also be cut down for time, with the “hallway speech” finally gone for good.

The final version of the
Purple Rain
album was airtight—nine songs, just shy of forty-four minutes, all performed by Prince, with and without the Revolution. It had evolved from a true companion sound track to a perfectly balanced album that could stand alone, separate from the movie. There wasn't a wasted second in these grooves—the music offered variety and range, from the rocked-up blast of “Let's Go Crazy” to the yearning intensity of “The Beautiful Ones” (which, electronic musician Moby once pointed out, “goes from being all synthesized to a [live] band—it's almost four songs in one”), from the party jam “Baby I'm a Star” to the angry screams of “Darling Nikki.” Prince was deliberately and consciously presenting himself as a badass guitar player who was the front man of a band, a construct that fit the worldview of rock fans. The sonics of something like “When Doves Cry” were entirely unprecedented, impossible to mistake for the work of any other artist, but the more extended, more experimental tracks that had been an element of most previous Prince records were left aside this time around.

A few more crucial decisions: Prince slightly altered the sequence of songs from the order in which they ran in the film, moving “Purple Rain” into the final slot on the album, the last thing that listeners would hear. If the song offered a dramatic climax in the film, setting up the final triumphant performances after he has won over the First Avenue audience, on the album it was left to echo as a final emotional peak. After “Darling Nikki” concluded the LP's first side, he added a brief, backward recitation; when the record was spun under the needle in the wrong direction, he could easily be heard saying “Hello, how are you? I'm fine, 'cause I know that the Lord is coming soon. Coming, coming soon.” (Not since the days of the Beatles had fans spent so much time manually rotating a record in reverse; the message came as a particular surprise following the album's most sexually explicit track.)

“Sequencing for the record was a big deal,” says Susan Rogers, “doing those segues and backward pieces and cutting all those in. That was a very important part of the process back when the album was the work of art that the consumer was purchasing, not singles. On those earlier records, you hear that unrestrained, unfiltered rawness on some of the tracks, whereas
Purple Rain
was very carefully arranged. It's a masterpiece.”

While Prince was completing the album, Magnoli and his team were trying to finalize the edit of the film. Cavallo claims that he went into full, cliché producer mode and made his instructions very clear. “I said, ‘Picture me as a big, heavy Jewish guy with a cigar,' ” he says. “ ‘Here's how the movie should go: song, tits and ass, joke, story. Song, tits and ass, joke, story. If
you have to skip a joke, you don't have enough, it's okay.' Or maybe I said, ‘Song, story, tits and ass, joke'—whatever, you know. I wanted to be as vile as I could, because this wasn't a great work of art; it was all about Prince. And in some ways it was brilliant.” Cavallo understood the film's best chance of success was to keep the focus fully on Prince and make him indisputably a star, rather than try to create a cult-style art piece that wouldn't have mass appeal.

Magnoli realized quickly that the key to the movie would be to make the performance scenes and the dramatic scenes work together, to make them all feel like part of the same project. “We were essentially making a backstage musical,” he says. “It was important to find a way to truly integrate the performances so that the music would flow from the words, not just be a commercial break from the dialogue. We were able to mirror music and reality through cutting to audience reactions. That's when I started to really see the wallop in it.