Let's Go Crazy (19 page)

(Sometime around the year 2000, while I was working as the editor in chief of
Spin
magazine, I was booked for the premiere episode of a VH1 show called
The List
. The premise was that four panelists would give their top three picks for a certain category, debate them, and then the audience would vote for the winner. On this day, Melissa Etheridge, French Stewart from the sitcom
Third Rock from the Sun
, actress Kathy Najimy, and I were to determine “The Best Song of All Time.” My nominations were Chuck Berry's “Johnny B. Goode,” Bob Dylan's “Like a Rolling Stone,” and “When Doves Cry.” I don't recall many of the others, aside from Etheridge submitting
Peter Gabriel's “In Your Eyes” and several folks bringing up Beatles songs. When all was said and done, as far as that Los Angeles audience was concerned, “When Doves Cry” was the greatest song ever.)

The B-side of the single was a melodic non-album cut called “17 Days”; the full title, written out on the sleeve, was “17 Days (The Rain Will Come Down, Then U Will Have 2 Choose. If U Believe, Look 2 the Dawn and U Shall Never Lose),” which might imply a song with a religious theme, though the lyrics actually described another favorite scenario for Prince—being left lonely and forlorn by a woman. The track had initially been intended for the Vanity-turned-Apollonia 6 album, but it was rerecorded with Coleman and Melvoin's backing vocals. (That album had a hard go of it—among the other songs that were taken away from the group was “Manic Monday,” which made it to number two on the charts for the Bangles in 1986.) Most significantly, while “When Doves Cry” was credited just to Prince as per usual, “17 Days” was listed as a recording by Prince and the Revolution. Other than the tease on the
1999
cover, this was the first time that a Prince release was billed as a band, rather than a solo project (as the whole album would eventually be).

The “Doves” video played constantly on MTV, though it didn't really set up the movie; there were some unexplained shots from
Purple Rain
cut into the clip, but the focus was on scenes of Prince crawling out of a bathtub (not a hair from his complicated updo out of place) and of the Revolution, stylish in paisley and ruffles, posing in an empty white room. A still from the video shoot would be included as a poster in
the ­
Purple Rain
LP, the first thing to be hung on my dorm room wall a few months later. In small print on the back of the “Doves” 45 it said, “From the forthcoming Warner Bros. album and motion picture
Purple Rain
,” but there was still very little information circulating about the movie.

In late June 1984,
Rolling Stone
ran another Random Note (not yet even a full news story) with the headline “Prince Film Due Out in July.” The item noted that the movie was planned for release “right when the Olympics are in full swing,” and that “those who've seen the newly completed movie are primarily raving about its concert sequences.”

Albert Magnoli got another boost in confidence when he went to the movie theater one day and the first
Purple Rain
trailer popped up on the screen. “I hadn't seen it before,” he says, “and I saw that they duplicated the style of our editing in the trailer. This completely white crowd just went nuts, and I thought, ‘Whoa.' It was so electrifying. The trailer was doing its job, and there wasn't any hype besides that—the audience was able to say, ‘This is ours, not theirs.' There was no actor on TV telling you to go to the movie, no interviews, no baloney.”

Indeed, what had also become evident was that there was still at least one more way in which Prince was going to violate the rules of opening a movie, especially a major studio production: he really was not going to do any interviews. Meaning, not one. He did not speak to the press at all following the release of
1999
in 1983 right up until the release of the
Around the World in a Day
album in the spring of 1985, sitting out the entire cycle of the
Purple Rain
album, movie, and tour.

“We did not need to have Prince do interviews anymore,” says publicist Bloom. “We humans have very little memory, and it's not until you repeat something fifteen times that it rises to level of consciousness. So I worked on a Pavlovian philosophy almost, getting Prince's name repeated as frequently as possible. Doing publicity of this kind, you're like Sisyphus, rolling that big round stone up the mountain. Except when you're building a Prince, if you're moving that stone by repeating his name over and over again in every context possible, when you get to the peak, gravity takes over and the thing keeps moving with a momentum of its own. We had passed that peak. Prince had his own momentum by the time that movie came out.

“Liz Smith [a syndicated gossip columnist] had always been kind of an adversary of mine, but I managed to put together item after item that was perfect for her, and she became my greatest ally. With a gossip column, you can get somebody's name out every single week. So by the time you went to see the movie, his name had been trickling around you for a long time.”

On the record company side, Bob Merlis claims that there was no great pressure to force Prince in front of the media. Radio promotion was more important to his marketing than press, and his previous interviews had been odd and unpredictable enough that maybe it was better to retain his mystery than risk messing it up.

Still, today it's almost impossible to imagine a movie studio, reluctant to put out a film in the first place, agreeing to terms in which their star would do zero promotion. “Those
were simpler times,” says Alan Leeds. “It was easier to manage a cohesive campaign without him than it would be today with social media and everything. But he was good at something that you could only get away with once. If anybody else tried what he did, it would be like, ‘You're trying to be like Prince.' But he really did sell not just the industry but the world on the concept of his mystique, and the value of it and the legitimacy of it was based around this reclusiveness. He worked it brilliantly, for an awfully long time, to his advantage.”

“I don't know if it was preplanning or if it was just coincidence,” says Susan Rogers, “but this is where being an enigma paid off, because he became more and more of an enigma from
Dirty Mind
onward, and if you're an enigma who's selling a lot of records and making millions, and you say, ‘I want to make a movie about my life,' someone is going to say, ‘Now this I've got to see!'

“There was Prince and there was Michael Jackson and Madonna and Bruce Springsteen, and Prince was the only one who was so extremely enigmatic. Michael Jackson we
thought
we knew, Madonna we could sort of figure out, Bruce Springsteen had no artifice, so I can see how being an enigma would play to your advantage. But you only get one shot at that; there's only so much you can reveal, and then after it's revealed, there's your story.”

The
Purple Rain
album, credited on the cover to Prince and the Revolution, was released on June 25, 1984, just as “When
Doves Cry” reached number one. Until the last minute, the members of the Revolution didn't even know how or if they would be acknowledged; Bobby Z said that it was only when he saw the test pressing of the album cover that he realized how prominently the band was going to be billed. “That's when I ­really had the chills about it,” he said.

On the eve of the next step of his multimedia attack, Prince later admitted that he was anxious about reactions to the album in the press. “Apollonia and I slept under a hotel table waiting for the reviews [of the album],” he claimed. “We were so excited we couldn't sleep. When we saw them, they were all good.”

For much of the rock press, though, the album's release was overshadowed by the fact that Bruce Springsteen's long-delayed
Born in the USA
album had come out a few weeks earlier. In its summer double issue,
Rolling Stone
gave Spring­steen the featured lead spot in the reviews section, with
Purple Rain
coming second. And where
USA
received the magazine's coveted five-star rating, Prince was given a more modest four stars.

Kurt Loder's review leaned too heavily on comparisons to Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone, seeming to bend over backward to create a familiar context for a rock audience that might be encountering Prince for the first time. Loder (still several years away from leaving
Rolling Stone
to become the voice of mature journalism at MTV) wrote that Prince's “extremism is endearing in an era of play-it-safe record production and formulaic hit mongering.” He speculated that
Purple Rain
“may not yield
another smash like last year's ‘Little Red Corvette,' ” but concluded that “anyone partial to great creators should own this record.”

In the
New York Times
, the brilliant music writer Robert Palmer gave the album a well-informed, even prescient, rave. (In a sign of the times—so different from the instant response expected, even required, today—his review ran almost a full month after the album was released, just ahead of the movie's opening.)
Purple Rain
, he wrote, is “musically and emotionally tougher and considerably more personal than his last album,
1999
, released two years ago, or any of his earlier discs. Prince's personality shines through more brightly than ever, but it's something of a new Prince we're seeing.” He noted that, especially in combination with the film, this music represented a new openness from the mysterious artist: “[It] begins to clear the air, to bring Prince and his world into sharper focus. The film and certain lyrics on the album suggest that Prince never talked much about himself or his background before because he found the subject too painful. . . . Prince has chosen to reveal himself to us in a more meaningful manner than the sexually explicit verbal striptease of his best-known earlier songs.”

Palmer also commented on the impact of Prince working with a band rather than as a solo musician, which made the music “sound more alive and more sensual.” Concluding his review with the inevitable comparisons to the other—and at that point, bigger—music stories of the season, Palmer wrote that “long after this summer's hits are forgotten and
the ­Jacksons and Springsteen albums are packed away,
Purple Rain
will still be remembered, and played, as an enduring rock classic.”

In its final form,
Purple Rain
had truly become a masterpiece. There isn't an ounce of fat on it. (“There's not a bad [song] on
Purple Rain
,” says Chris Rock. “
Thriller
, that's allegedly the best album of all time, and that has at least two bad songs on it. There's no ‘Baby Be Mine' on
Purple Rain
.”) Every one of the nine songs could have worked as a single on its own, yet the cumulative effect was even more impressive. Prince's sound was entirely unique and irresistibly accessible. He struck a perfect balance between rock and R&B, with nothing forced or pandering. He was as daring as the throat-shredding screams on “Darling Nikki” or the new wave chill of “Computer Blue,” as purely pop as the bouncy “Take Me with U.”

From the rockabilly kick of “Let's Go Crazy” to the gospel lift of “Purple Rain,” the album felt like it encompassed all of American pop music history to that point. Even before one saw the movie, the songs felt cohesive, a complete emotional experience. And whether the rock 'n' roll kids who were dazzled by Prince's guitar pyrotechnics realized it or not, as Touré put it, “the album takes us through the structure of a religious event by opening with the preaching of the word and ending with the audience being forgiven and baptized.” Every possibility that Prince's career had previously presented was fully realized in the forty-five minutes of
Purple Rain
.

“The album
Purple Rain
is as enigmatic as Prince himself,” Adam Levine of Maroon 5 (and TV's
The Voice
) told NPR.
“It's Hendrix, it's James Brown, it's outer space, it's church, it's sex, it's heavy metal. But at the end of the day, it's just Prince at his absolute best. . . . What makes it so special is that no one had ever really heard anything quite like it. It's such a fearless record. The music is just completely limitless and unself-­conscious about what it is.”

Tour manager Alan Leeds recalls that he felt like the lone voice expressing any disappointment in the album. “I was lamenting the fact that the music wasn't black enough,” he says. “I knew ‘Doves Cry' was a hit, knew ‘Purple Rain' was a hit, but I was very unsure about the rest of the record. I was a little concerned that he was turning his back on his base audience and would catch some flak. Maybe because I was brought into the business by James Brown, I had this dogma in me that you never turn your back on your base; it's okay to express yourself limitlessly and be the complete artist you should be—I'm not suggesting restriction or limits—but don't turn your back on your own folks.

“But I also realized that I was the only one in the camp who was the least bit concerned about that. Nobody else was. Perhaps that's because the management team was all white. Their experience with black music was people like Earth, Wind and Fire, who had equal crossover aspirations and potential. Fargnoli had worked for Sly. So they didn't think like that—thankfully, because if there had been too much thought like that, it wouldn't have been good. And as it turned out, Prince was right, because he took his black fans with him to a place they hadn't been before.”

When
Purple Rain
came out, the leading black music critics expressed no such concerns. As Greg Tate put it in
The Village Voice
, “No album since Funkadelic's
Let's Take
It to the Stage
has so amorously bedded down black and white pop. . . . It's the record Prince has been wanting to make all along, since the music sounds like the kind of mulatto variation he probably was piecing together and performing in Minnesota before he got his deal.”