Let's Go Crazy (3 page)

Prince's reluctance to look back at his career in more comprehensive ways is a mixed blessing at best. An artist can't be faulted for wanting to keep moving forward, for making all best efforts not to be weighed down by a legacy that, if he's lucky, eventually and inevitably turns him into a reliably bankable oldies act. The fact that Prince keeps making new music after all this time, that he refuses to coast on his back catalogue, is admirable, and whatever it takes for him to do that is understandably a priority.

At the same time, though, we are at serious risk of watching one of music's all-time greats erase his own legacy. For years, Prince has talked about his vault full of hundreds of unreleased songs—many of which have made the bootleg rounds among his superfans, while others circulate only as rumors or whispers. He constantly scrubs the Internet of unauthorized video footage and even his own official music videos, recently going so far as to file a lawsuit against twenty-two individuals,
for $1 million each, who “engage in massive infringement and bootlegging of Prince's material.” (The suit was dropped a few days later.)

Where Bob Dylan's authorized Bootleg Series or the Beatles' Anthology discs represented attempts by these artists to control and codify their unreleased material, improving the sound quality for fans and editing to help present their own versions of their histories, Prince has run in the opposite direction; in fact, the two primary documents capturing him live in his mid-'80s prime (the 1985 Syracuse concert that was released as a home video and the
Sign o' the Times
film) are both out of print and were never transferred for official DVD release in the U.S., leaving the immaculately choreographed and lip-synched performance sequences in
Purple Rain
as the only real evidence of what he was capable of onstage. And, as cultural critic Greg Tate wrote in
The Village Voice
when the movie came out, “Those of y'all going gaga behind
Purple Rain
and never seen the boy live ain't seen shit.”

Following the bewildering announcement that Prince would make a guest appearance on the Zooey Deschanel sitcom
New Girl
, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, drummer for the Roots (and such a superfan that he taught a course on Prince at New York University in the spring of 2014) posted on Facebook, begging that Prince just “make it count,” since it was a rare opportunity for people beyond the dedicated fan base to see him, and saying that he was tired of needing to explain Prince's greatness to a new generation without having any material to show them to prove it. It was a thoughtful plea from
a true believer, and concisely presented the very real challenge Prince has created for himself by moving only forward. (The amiable, slight
New Girl
guest shot, in which he offered romantic advice to Deschanel and then had her sing with his band at a party, didn't wind up helping matters much in the end.)

Yet a surprise announcement in April 2014 suggested a long-awaited change in Prince's thinking about his own musical legacy. Just a few weeks after he revealed that he now controlled the publishing rights to all of his music, a new deal with Warner Bros. Records, his initial champions and longtime adversaries, was unveiled, which would lead to the release of “previously unheard material . . . a veritable gold mine,” while also giving Prince his hard-fought, long-desired “ownership of the master recordings of his classic, global hits.” A statement from Prince said that “both Warner Bros. and Eye [
sic
] are quite pleased with the results of the negotiations and look forward to a fruitful working relationship.”

The deal is potentially a landmark in the recording community. An often overlooked change in copyright law allows musicians, writers, and other artists to exercise so-called termination rights. The provision, which took effect in 2013, enables the creators of music to win back their U.S. rights after thirty-five years, so long as they can show that they weren't employees of the record label, even if they signed a contract that transferred all the rights to their work. These rights, though, are not automatically awarded, and to obtain them usually requires extensive litigation.

That thirty-five-year window reaches back as far as 1978,
when Prince signed with Warner Bros. No further details of the deal or of future plans were announced—except that the first fruit of this agreement would be a newly remastered, deluxe thirtieth-anniversary version of
Purple Rain
. (His actual enthusiasm about this, however, still remains to be seen: the dates marking the anniversaries of first the sound track and then the movie release both came and went, and still no date had been announced for the reissue.)

Regardless of any anniversary, of all of Prince's groundbreaking work, it is
Purple Rain
that endures first and foremost. It will always be the defining moment of a magnificent and fascinating—if often erratic—career. It carries the weight of history. Its success, on-screen and as a recording, was a result of the supreme confidence, laser-focused ambition, and visionary nature of the most gifted artist of his generation.

Dancing on the line between fact and fiction, Prince utilized his mysterious persona to hypercharge the film's story with tension and revelation. He let us in—only partway, certainly not enough to rupture his myth, but more than he ever did before or since. Defying all odds, a group of inexperienced filmmakers and actors, working against the clock and the brutal Minneapolis weather, clicked for just long enough to make a movie that the public was starving for, even if they didn't quite know it at first.

“We just wanted to do something good and something true,” says director Albert Magnoli. “The producer was on the same page, and we had an artist who wanted the same things, a group of musicians who felt the same way. It was one of the
very few times when everybody actually wanted to make the same movie—which sounds obvious, but is actually very, very rare in the movie business.”

“I think part of the success of
Purple Rain
was that [Prince] did open up and examine himself, and that it was real,” says Lisa Coleman. “It was an authentic thing; you could feel it, and there was all this excitement around it. And I don't think he's ever done that again.”

Purple Rain
came along at precisely the right moment—not just for Prince, but for the culture. The summer of 1984 was an unprecedented season, a collision of blockbuster records and the ascension of the music video that created perhaps the biggest boom that pop will ever experience. It was also a time of great transformation for black culture, when a series of new stars, new projects, and new styles would forever alter the racial composition of music, movies, and television. While the magnificence of the
Purple Rain
songs remains clear thirty years later, the album and the film were also perfectly in tune with the time and place in which they were created, and their triumph was partly the result of impeccable timing and circumstances that could never be repeated or replicated.

The first time we heard the songs on the radio, the first time we put on the album, the first time the lights in the movie theater went down, we all did just what the man told us to do: we went crazy.

TWO

Alone in a World So Cold

“Can you keep a secret?”

These—I kid you not—are Prince's first words to me when I meet him in April of 1993. (And since the answer is yes, all I can tell you is that you really wouldn't be all that interested.) I had received a call in New York on Friday saying that Prince had read something I wrote about his tour's recent opening shows. He wanted to see me in San Francisco on Saturday, the first step in feeling me out for what would eventually become an interview that ran in
Vibe
magazine, his first lengthy on-the-record conversation with a journalist in over four years.

The driver who picked me up from the airport showed me the erotic valentine his girlfriend had made for him, then told me about the work he and his wife were doing for the Dalai Lama. It was time to wonder:
Is this whole thing a put-on?
But no—I arrive at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium and there is Prince, sitting alone in the empty house, watching his band,
the New Power Generation, start its sound check. He's fighting a cold, so we speak quietly back and forth in our seats for a while, and then he leads me onstage to continue the conversation while he straps on his guitar and rehearses the band.

Mostly, Prince talks about music—about Sly Stone and Earth, Wind & Fire, and other classic soul favorites we share. The NPG plays “I'll Take You There,” and we discuss the Staple Singers and Mavis Staples, whose new album he has just finished producing. He is talkative as he jumps from guitar to piano to the front of the stage to listen to his group, with that surprisingly low voice that loses its slightly robotic edge when he's out of the spotlight.

As all reports indicate, he is indeed tiny—what's most striking isn't his height but his delicate bones and fragile frame. He is also pretty cocky, whether as a defensive move to cover his shyness with a new person or with the swagger needed to keep a performer going during a tour. Underneath the onstage roar of the NPG, he leans over to me, his fingers not leaving his guitar, and says, “You see how hard it is when you can play anything you want, anything you hear?”

Which is, in many ways, the question underlying Prince's lifelong creative journey, from his days as a prodigiously gifted high school student leading a band on the weekends to his years spent fighting the conventions and restrictions of the music industry. First came the years of striving for maximal communication through music, then came the efforts to keep up with the constant flow of creativity that resulted.

Prince Rogers Nelson was born in Minneapolis on June 7, 1958, to pianist and songwriter John L. Nelson, whose stage
name was Prince Rogers, and singer Mattie Shaw. In a 1991 television interview with
A Current Affair
, his father said, “I named my son Prince because I wanted him to do everything I wanted to do.”

Let's get this out of the way right now, since it would later come to dominate so many conversations about
Purple Rain
: both of Prince's parents are black.

Not that he was always forthright about that fact. Early in his career, eager to avoid any possibility of being pigeonholed as a “black” artist with a limitation on his potential audience, he was quoted as saying that his mother was white, and also that she “is a mixture of a bunch of things.” Even after
Purple Rain
was released,
People
magazine referred to him as a “mulatto.” He told
Rolling Stone
that he was the “son of a half-black father and an Italian mother.” (Former girlfriend/protégée Jill Jones claims that he borrowed this mix from her: “When we met, he was like, ‘You're half what?' and I was like, ‘Oh, I'm half Italian and black,' and it was like, ‘Oh, okay, I can see that—I can make this work.' He went on tour, and when he came back, he was Italian and black.”)

Regardless, what is clear is that the racial composition of the Twin Cities, and the pop and rock music he heard on the radio (there wasn't even a round-the-clock black station in the city with a strong signal—just the low-wattage KMOJ), made for a complex blend of influences on the young Prince. “I was brought up in a black-and-white world,” he said to MTV. “Black and white, night and day, rich and poor. I listened to all kinds of music when I was young, and when I was younger, I always
said that one day I would play all kinds of music and not be judged for the color of my skin, but the quality of my work.”

Prince's family obviously made a powerful impact on his budding relationship with music. “Who said I was supposed to be a musician?” he said to me in a rare moment of openness in 2004. “I just watched my father, and saw that when he played it pleased my mother.”

Howard Bloom was Prince's publicist from 1981 through 1988. He also worked with such other superstars as Michael Jackson, John Mellencamp, and Bob Marley before developing chronic fatigue syndrome and not leaving his Brooklyn apartment for years. When he recovered, he quit the music business and returned to a career focusing on his early training in the world of science. I meet Bloom on a blustery winter night at the local café that he uses as his office, and from there we head back to his cluttered walk-up to talk about his time working with Prince.

Bloom says that during his publicist days, he always searched for an artist's “imprinting points . . . the moments when your brain opens up and you look for something with certain characteristics, and when you find it, you seize on it, and your brain is wrapped around it for the rest of your life.” He maintains that Prince's first such imprint came when he was five years old and his mother took him to watch his dad rehearse: “He steps into a theater and there are all these chairs aimed at the center of the stage, and there's his dad in the center of the light with five beautiful women behind him. And that was it.”

But the eccentricities and struggles of his parents, which
would later be used so effectively in fictionalized form for the songs and story of
Purple Rain
, didn't make for a stable household. (In 1996, he told Oprah Winfrey that the most autobiographical scene in the movie was “probably the scene with me looking at my mother crying.”) John and Mattie separated when Prince was ten years old, and in the years that followed, he was constantly shuttling between different homes. Sometimes he lived with his father—who worked for Honeywell Computers during the day and played gigs at night, so was seldom around—and sometimes with his mother and a stepfather he didn't much like (but who did take him to a James Brown concert where, according to legend, Prince got onstage and danced). He tried living with an aunt for a while. Eventually he moved into the home of a neighboring family, the Andersons, who had six kids, one of whom was André, a friend of Prince's from church who became known as André Cymone when he was a member of Prince's band. At one point, in fact, André's bass-playing father was in a band with Prince's father.