Let's Go Crazy (10 page)

“The band was given the chord progression, and we ended up pretty much writing our own parts,” says Fink. “I do recall during the first time jamming on that song, I played that line on the piano that he sings at the end, when he goes up into his falsetto for that big peaking line—that came from me, just by sheer accident, and he latched onto it and sang it.

“And that coda piece on ‘Purple Rain,' where I play that little piano riff? I have to give Lisa a lot of credit for that, because she showed me this trick she had, where the left hand is doing one part and the right hand is doing this other thing against it, in counterpoint. It's kind of a weird rhythmic thing that she knew, and I said, ‘That's really cool—show me how you do that.' So she actually taught me how to do that part.”

With the music in place, Prince turned to a new friend for help with the lyrics. Recently, Stevie Nicks—the bewitching singer in his beloved Fleetwood Mac, who was currently working on a solo project—had called him, telling him that she had written a new song while humming along to “Little Red Corvette,” so she was going to give him a songwriting credit and also wanted to invite him to play on the session. He showed up at the Los Angeles studio an hour later, and the song, “Stand Back,” became a big hit. Nicks asked if they might write together someday, and he sent her a cassette of the ballad in progress, encouraging her to write some words.

“It was so overwhelming, that 10-minute track, that I listened to it and I just got scared,” Nicks later told the ­
Minneapolis Star Tribune
. “I called him back and said, ‘I can't do it. I wish I could. It's too much for me.' I'm so glad that I didn't, because he wrote it, and it became ‘Purple Rain.' ”

Once the structure was completed and the lyrics were in place sometime in the summer, those around the rehearsals recall the intense power the song seemed to have over people. Melvoin and Coleman remember a homeless woman wandering into the
warehouse and listening to them play “Purple Rain” for hours; when they took a break, they found her still outside, weeping.

“Big Chick came to rehearsal one afternoon,” says Alan Leeds, “and he said, ‘Buddy, you ain't gonna believe the song the boy did last night. He wrote a new song in the studio; it's gonna be the biggest hit of this album. Willie Nelson's gonna cover it, you wait and see!' It was ‘Purple Rain,' and when I heard that, I was like, ‘That's a hit.' ” (Funk maestro George Clinton later agreed with the bodyguard's assessment. He said, “ ‘Purple Rain' always reminded me of Jimi Hendrix singing country music—take all the effects off, and it's a country-and-western song.”)

The song's title touched on an image that Prince had long been bouncing around, and that would become a defining element of his image: thirty years later, Arsenio Hall still referred to Prince's fans as “the Purple Army.” One of his early demos mentioned a “purple lawn,” and he had already written songs titled “Purple Music” and “Purple Shades.” His father said that purple was always Prince's favorite color. The breakthrough hit of an earlier generation's African-American guitar hero, Jimi Hendrix, was titled “Purple Haze,” and on “1999,” Prince began his description of the impending apocalypse with the phrase “the sky was all purple”—and, of course, there was the series of signature purple trench coats that he had been wearing on album covers and in music videos.

As Touré points out in his book, in the King James translation of the Bible, immediately prior to the crucifixion, Jesus is prepared in the following ways: “And they clothed him with purple, and platted a crown of thorns and put it about his head
and began to salute him.” In 1984, Wendy Melvoin summarized the song title simply and plainly. “A new beginning—purple, the sky at dawn; rain, the cleansing factor.”

Writing, rehearsing, and recording never stopped. But Prince saw there was so much else to be done to prepare for making a movie. Though a real script hadn't yet been written, he had a limited amount of time to get a bunch of musicians who had never acted before ready to go in front of a camera. Drawing on lessons learned from those biographies of studio moguls, rather than wait for the producers or director to take charge, he began putting a battle plan in place.

“I got a call from Fargnoli sometime in July, offering me the gig to come to Minneapolis,” says Leeds. “And I said, ‘Well, what's the gig? Are you going back on the road?' ‘Not right away. We're going to make a movie first.' I go, ‘Okay, you need me to come there because you're making a movie? First of all, I don't believe you're making a movie. Second, why do you need me to make a movie? I don't make movies.' He said, ‘We got three bands: we got Prince and his guys that you tour managed, we got Morris and the Time, we got Vanity 6. They're all in the movie. Everybody's taking acting lessons, everybody's taking dance lessons, and everybody's rehearsing new music. We need an off-road road manager to coordinate all this stuff.' ‘Okay, ­Steven—you're really making a movie? Get the fuck outta here!' ”

For all of the musicians, acting classes with Don Amendolia­—who had appeared on
Ryan
's Hope
and
Cheers
, and
would later have recurring roles on
Twin Peaks
and the soap opera
Sunset Beach
—were required three times a week. “Prince came in one day,” says Melvoin, “and he was like, ‘We're all gonna have acting classes, we're all gonna have dance classes,' and that's when it started getting really like, ‘Okay, this is going somewhere else.' ”

“I don't know where he got it, but Prince has a great work ethic, like a classical musician: discipline is everything,” says Coleman. “It's not like we were even gonna be part of a big dance line or something, but we were taking classes and literally doing jazz hands.”

“It was ridiculous,” adds Melvoin. “But it was loosening and it was humbling and it was funny.”

“The acting coach was mandatory, whereas the dancing was not,” says Fink. “Prince hoped that everybody would stick around and do the dance stuff—at first he kind of required it, for about three weeks, and then people fell off. I personally stuck with it through the whole summer. I didn't go every time, but I was much more religious about it than the rest of the band. Sometimes it would just be me, the dance instructor, and a couple gals from Apollonia 6. They phased him out toward the end of the summer because people stopped going and they didn't want to spend the money. But I got in great shape; we were doing the Jane Fonda workout and then doing, like, Broadway dance moves and routines.”

Fink, who had studied acting in summer school and done voice-over and radio work, was probably the most experienced “actor” of the bunch, and welcomed the additional training. (He also points out that he grew up down the block from the
filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen, and suggests with a laugh that maybe his family inspired the title of their 1991 movie
Barton Fink
.) “We did a lot of exercises and played games—for the amount of acting that each member of the band was going to be doing, it was overkill, maybe, but still a good experience.”

Others among the cast were less enthusiastic about the classes. “One day, Prince was like, ‘We're making a movie,'” ­Morris Day told
Wax Poetics
magazine. “I was like, ‘Okay, fine.' So I started going to acting class and dancing class and all sorts of silly stuff. I got kicked out of acting class because I kept clowning around, and the guys said I was disrupting it for every­body. That's pretty much [how I] did the best in the movie, by cutting up.”

“In acting class, they weren't working on dialogue—they were working on, like, pimp walks,” says Susannah Melvoin. “The band was like, ‘Why are we doing this? Can we go rehearse?' ”

As for the star of the show, he participated in the classes as his frantic schedule would allow. “Prince was very, very good,” Amendolia once said. “He'd flip right out of his persona and be whatever character he had to be. He's very shy, as most actors are to a degree. He took direction well, probably the best. He asked a lot of questions.”

“He would come and go,” says Coleman. “He was working on his dance steps all the time, anyway. But Prince really was a good coach, like, ‘All right, let's show some hustle out there!'—and he also wanted to see how we were doing, and also get an idea of who's got what; where is the power coming from? They tried to make everything seem like, ‘How does Lisa usually say
“Good morning” when she comes in?' and then you'd just do that, trying to make it seem more natural for the nonactors.”

However excessive they may have seemed, the acting classes illustrated Prince's seriousness about the movie, and were worth it if only because they revealed the natural comic timing of Morris Day and, especially, his onstage sidekick/valet Jerome Benton, which would greatly impact the direction of the
Purple Rain
script. Also, Melvoin and Coleman's roles were reversed from their initial conception. Wendy was given the more outspoken, aggressive part, and Lisa made quieter and cooler. (“I was supposed to be the mean one!” Coleman asserts with a laugh.)

Jill Jones notes that one of Prince's other girlfriends was teaching one of the dance classes, but points out that competition and rivalry for his attention was a regular aspect of the scene, and he used that to creative advantage. “Everybody knew everybody was going out with Prince at the same time,” she says, “but the men also had these relationships where everyone thought they were the one who had his ear. So the roles are always constantly on a wheel, shifting, and Prince would just take his pick from the wheel. But he was so excited, like, ‘Look what we're doing. We're doing something great.' I think everybody wanted everything to be permanent, but he was definitely prepared for it all to change, in a good way. He had a very Zen thing, like, ‘It's
gonna
change
and
it's gonna be great.' ”

“Prince could rally the team,” says Leeds. “He could pull them together and convince them that they were going to win
no matter who they're playing; he's that guy. So what I walked into was a situation where he had not only convinced Fargnoli and Cavallo that they're going to make a movie or else, but he had convinced even the skeptics in the groups. Nobody was ballsy enough to actually take him on and say, ‘Fuck you. You're not going to do this.' ”

In 1984, Matt Fink told
People
magazine that one day, Prince spoke to the band about his family life. “He mentioned something about having a tough time. Then he suddenly realized what he was doing and clammed up. That was two and a half years ago. We never heard about his personal life again.” But as things moved closer to the start of filming, there was one other relationship that Prince felt the need to confront.

“He started visiting his father a lot more, driving over to his house, because his father was a relative recluse,” says Jones. “He would go and visit, and I'd sit in the car—it wasn't really a long visit, but I think they started mending some fences.

“He would always have very nice things to say about his eccentric father. He'd prepare you, like, ‘My dad loves you,' or ‘He thinks you're great,' but John was—as a musician, I'm not saying he was superior to Prince, he just heard things that other people didn't hear. Prince was able to find a balance between the real world and the not-so-real world of how to make money in this business, whereas his father was so extreme and so complicated, and I think he had to get clear on that.”

“He had a lot of reverence for his father,” says Wendy Melvoin, while Coleman recalls the times that John L. Nelson would show up at the warehouse. “If his dad came to a
rehearsal, we'd have to not cuss, and some of the songs we weren't even allowed to sing. We would accidentally be like, [
sings
] ‘Oh, ­motherfucker—' and then, ‘Oops!' ‘Remember? We're not singing in this run-through because Dad's here.' ”

“He's full of ideas,” Prince later said about his father. “It'd be wonderful to put out an album on him, but he's a little bit crazier than I am.”

There was still no script for the film, no budget, no shooting schedule. But there were songs, the cast was learning their craft (one way or another), and the mental and emotional preparations had begun. As far as Prince was concerned, he was making a movie—and there were expenses that were raising the stakes every day.

“Somebody was posting the money for all this,” says Leeds, “because you had three bands and crews on salary, you had a professional drama coach, a professional choreographer, facilities to rent, occasional extra musicians for recordings. You had technical people to support all these activities. And, like myself, there were other people who didn't live here, and all of them were getting apartments paid for and rental cars, getting per diems on top of salaries. There was a lot of money being spent from somewhere, and we knew Prince wasn't rich—I mean, he had two hits. But there must have been enough optimism to justify finding the money somewhere.”

It was all being driven from the mind of one young musician. Yet one aspect of Prince's genius was the ability to make those around him not just trust his vision but feel invested in and dedicated to the plans. “He didn't speak much, but he
would sometimes rant on about ‘what we're all doing is this or that'—and it was always ‘what
we're
doing,' not ‘what
I'm
doing,' ” says Susannah Melvoin. “I know that's how guys running cults like Jim Jones sound, and it was kinda like that on a musical level. It might sound creepy and eerie, but there was a little of that. And other times, he would just say nothing. He would just come in and put on his guitar, and you knew to stand at attention and get to work, or get out of the way.”