Let's Go Crazy (2 page)

The Purple Rain tour, which ran from late 1984 into the spring of 1985, saw Prince and the Revolution perform just shy of a hundred shows in five months, and sold 1.7 million tickets. They played multiple nights in many arenas, and even filled a few football stadiums, including the Superdome in New ­Orleans and Miami's Orange Bowl.

In retrospect, maybe the
Purple Rain
phenomenon seemed inevitable. Prince was the greatest pop genius of his time—on a very short list of music's most gifted and visionary figures—and it was just a matter of his finding the vehicle that would translate his incomparable abilities to a wide audience. Yet in truth, when you look closer, the fact that the
Purple Rain
movie got made at all is hard to imagine, difficult to explain, and the
result of many extraordinary leaps of faith on the part of virtually everyone involved in the production.

Prior to this release, Prince was nowhere near a household name: while he had established himself in the R&B community, he had just one album that could be considered a mainstream hit, and no singles that had peaked above number six on the pop charts. He was also shrouded in mystery, surrounded by rumors about his ethnic background and sexual preference, and had completely stopped talking to the press as of the release almost two years earlier of his previous album,
1999
.

The film had a rookie director, first-time producers, and a cast that, with only a few exceptions, had never acted before. The star and most of the featured players were black, and most of the footage was shot on location in Minneapolis, about as far away from the coastal entertainment industry as you can get. On top of all of these strikes against popular acceptance for the movie, the road was already littered with failed vanity projects by singers attempting to make it as movie stars—artists who were a lot better established, including folks like Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, and Mick Jagger.

But Prince's unwavering focus on the project was vindicated, to the shock of many in Hollywood. And he maintained his seemingly illogical faith because he knew—or sensed, or divined—that there were people like me out there. At a suburban Cincinnati high school, my friends and I were already nothing short of obsessed with Prince, whose music felt like the culmination of all the sounds and styles we loved—dance beats, rock guitars, provocative lyrics, passionate vocals, style,
glamour, intrigue. There was an extra locker in our senior class hallway, and we dedicated it to Prince, hanging the poster that came with the 1981
Controversy
album (of Prince in a shower, posed in front of a crucifix, wearing nothing but bikini briefs, which I'm sure delighted our teachers and administrators) inside the door. We sent him a letter welcoming him to the class of 1984 and got back a postcard with the handwritten words
love god
stamped across his photo.

Purple Rain
was released just a few weeks after our graduation. Earlier that spring, we had all stayed up until midnight, cassette recorders at the ready, for the radio premiere of “When Doves Cry.” On this mesmerizing, churning single, and then on eight more album tracks, we heard that he had modified his sound—focused and sharpened it, became a guitar god fronting a true rock 'n' roll band. Oddly, the aura of apocalypse and religious salvation that had already begun to turn up in his work was, if anything, pulled even further forward; yet during the heart of the Reagan era, with the nuclear arms race at the top of everyone's mind, this didn't make his lyrics any less ­accessible for new listeners.

The album seldom left our turntables in the weeks after it came out. We lined up to see the movie on opening weekend in late July. And we saw it over and over again for the rest of the summer, mesmerized by the stunning performance sequences, repeating the campy but irresistible dialogue to one another. If any of our other friends weren't previously on board with our Prince fixation, now the word-of-mouth street team was in full effect, and they simply couldn't avoid hearing about him
everywhere. And once their curiosity got the best of them and they took a chance on the movie, any lingering resistance was futile as soon as an offscreen voice intoned the first words—“Ladies and gentlemen, the Revolution,” and a backlit Prince recited the opening words to “Let's Go Crazy.”

When I got to college in the fall, I discovered that many of my new classmates were equally obsessed with
Purple Rain
—which meant that now we all had to go see it together, repeatedly, as part of the new bonds we were creating. (A few months later, my closest new friend and I took turns sleeping on the sidewalk in the snow to purchase tickets for the nearest stop on the Purple Rain tour.) Perhaps affluent, mostly white and mostly male kids weren't initially the target audience for a Prince film, but what the world soon realized was that a $7 ­million investment gets paid back pretty quickly when groups of teenagers go to see a movie six or seven or eight times.

The 1980s were all about big-bigger-biggest blockbusters and sequels and expensive music videos, and Prince was going head-to-head with some of music's most towering icons at their peaks of popularity—Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, Madonna. But in that moment, no one understood the potential of the new scale for media and harnessed it for his own purposes as effectively as Prince did. He shook the culture, musically and racially, sexually and spiritually, transforming possibilities and ignoring rules. And if he never reached those heights again, and in many ways never recovered personally or creatively from the
Purple Rain
juggernaut, he still took us all to a place we had never been.

Rocketown is an unassuming, warehouse-sized club just a few blocks from the Bridgestone Arena in downtown Nashville. Geared to Christian teenagers, it's adjacent to a skate park; there are pool tables upstairs, and the marquee lists a bunch of bands you've never heard of. It is now May 2004, twenty years after the release of
Purple Rain
, and Prince has already finished a sold-out performance at the arena (which was still called the Gaylord Center at the time), followed by an additional ninety-minute set on Rocketown's stage, after which he has an almost three-week break in his touring schedule—“I gotta go home and water the plants,” he tells the crowd of five hundred or so with a laugh.

Prince is in the midst of one of his periodic resurgences in popularity, spurred by both music and strategy. After a series of experimental and even surly records, released in the midst of his ongoing battles with the music industry, his new album,
Musicology
, is accessible and funky; not a breakthrough or a true classic, it's still a fully realized collection of satisfyingly Prince-style songs. He made some high-profile media appearances (opening the Grammy Awards broadcast performing a medley with Beyoncé, singing for Ellen DeGeneres), delivered a knockout mini-set at his induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in March, and concocted a plan in which everyone who bought a ticket for the tour received a copy of
Musicology
on his or her seat—each of which counts toward SoundScan's bestseller lists. Since the ninety-six-date run would prove to be the top-grossing tour of the year, earning $87.4 million, this meant that
the record would go gold and stay in the Top Ten for the whole summer, even if not one person bought a copy in stores.

So Prince is happy. He has also recently become a Jehovah's Witness, and his conversation is now laced with frequent biblical references and allusions. The after-show performance at Rocketown offers the musical manifestation of this new Prince. Where these intimate, late-night gigs used to be cathartic, virtuoso displays, this time he leads his band through a set of loose funk jams. He bops through the crowd to listen from the soundboard and roams the stage cueing the players through a mash-up of Led Zeppelin's “Whole Lotta Love” and Santana's “Soul Sacrifice.” There's no tension, all release.

I'm there to interview him for a cover story for
Tracks
, a magazine I founded and edited in the early 2000s, and after the show, I observe something even more unlikely: At 2:30
a.m.,
Prince can be found standing outside the stage door, hanging with his band members and talking to fans. The thirty or so clustered civilians are breathlessly excited to be in his presence, yet seem understanding when he tells them that he doesn't believe in signing autographs. He is, as always, shy and quiet, listening more than talking, but he actually seems to be enjoying the chance to mingle.

One young woman tells him that
Purple Rain
was the first album she bought when she was in the first grade, but that her mother wouldn't let her see the movie because it was too risqué. “Just think about what ‘too risqué' means today!” Prince responds.

Material from
Purple Rain
had provided the focus for the
arena concert earlier in the evening. He performed seven of the album's nine tracks during the thirty-song, two-hour greatest-hits set, closing with the title song. In the grimy Rocketown dressing room, though, he claims that the twentieth anniversary of the project is of little consequence to him.

“I was there,” he tells me. “I did it, it was my baby. I knew about it before it happened. I knew what it was going to be. Then it was just like labor, like giving birth—in '84, it was so much work.”

In fact, he says, just a few nights earlier in Atlanta, the Time—the Minneapolis friends/rivals/contemporaries who played his nemeses in the film, and sometimes in real life—came out and performed during his show. “We never got a chance to do the real
Purple Rain
tour, because the Time broke up,” he says. “But then, there they were, onstage last week, and people started tripping, and I was watching my favorite band. So there's no anniversary, no dates; we just have to have faith in Jehovah and lay back and ride it.” (The fact that Prince became a Jehovah's Witness may also explain some of his attitude toward the anniversary of the album, since members of the religion do not celebrate birthdays.)

Ten years later, his feelings about such milestones seem even more detached. In February 2014, Prince played a super-intimate performance in London for ten people, held in the living room of his friend, singer Lianne La Havas, as part of a press conference to announce a series of upcoming “hit-and-run” UK shows. Matt Everitt of BBC 6
Music News
was one of those in attendance, and he noted that Prince seemed surprised
when he was asked about
Purple Rain
's impending thirtieth anniversary. “I hadn't even realized,” he said. “Everything looks different to me, because I was there. I wrote those songs; I don't need to know what happened.”

A few weeks after that, he appeared as the only guest for an hour of the
Arsenio Hall Show
—yet another in a series of odd media visits without a tour or new release to support. An audience member asked him when he last saw
Purple Rain
, and what he thought of it. “I was in the living room three days ago,” said Prince, “and it came on television, and I watched ‘Take Me with U.' ” He did not address the second part of the question. (On July 27, 2014, the actual anniversary of the movie's release, Prince did play a surprise show at his home base of Paisley Park: he opened the show with “Let's Go Crazy,” and at one point slyly noted, “Thirty years ago today . . .” but he didn't close the loop by playing “Purple Rain.”)

Every pop star presumably has some feelings of ambivalence about his or her biggest moment or defining hit. It immediately becomes both an obligation whenever you perform and the marker of a career pinnacle that, by definition, you can never match. Prince had a long run as one of the most successful musicians in the world, and can still sell out an arena pretty much whenever he wants to. He's had an impressive half dozen records certified two- to four-times platinum, with
1999
(which predated
Purple Rain
) highest on that list, but he has never had an album with sales close to
Purple Rain
's 13 million in the U.S. Indeed, he once described
Purple Rain
as “my albatross—it'll be hanging around my neck as long as I'm making music.”

His work in film has suffered a more troubled fate. Each of his subsequent efforts—the features
Under the Cherry Moon
(in 1986) and
Graffiti Bridge
(in 1990), and the concert documentary
Sign o' the Times
—has flopped.
Sign
, which chronicled performances from the magnificent 1987 album of the same title, earned some critical praise, but it was a production disaster and did minimal business. The other two movies were ravaged in the press, and the common belief is that Prince's insistence on directing played a big part in his fall from the peak of the pop world.

Whatever his feelings about the legacy of
Purple Rain
, though, Prince has always kept its songs front and center in his shows—especially the title song. It has served as the climax of most of his concerts, including his 2007 Super Bowl halftime show in Miami, which was seen by 93 million people in the U.S. alone and is generally considered the gold standard of all performances at sporting events. (Over the years, “Purple Rain” has also been covered by a wide range of artists, from LeAnn Rimes to Foo Fighters, Etta James to Tori Amos, Phish to Elvis Costello, while other songs from the album have been recorded by everyone from Mariah Carey to Patti Smith.)

A December 2013 concert at Connecticut's Mohegan Sun Arena saw Prince at his latter-day loosest; he introduced the night by saying, “We're gonna just jam tonight—it's just an old-school party,” and largely stayed away from the hits, digging deep into his catalogue (including quick runs through “Jungle Love” and “The Bird,” the two songs by the Time featured in
Purple Rain
) as he alternated between a twenty-
one-piece, horn-heavy funk ensemble and his stripped-down, all-female rock trio, 3rdEyeGirl. Still, the inevitable closer, as a second encore, was a heartfelt rendition of “Purple Rain,” with a tender vocal and a winding guitar solo that saw him exploring the indelible melody as if it were a brand-new composition. As he had that night at First Avenue thirty years earlier, he stood in the spotlight, and an audience stood thrilled and riveted by what it heard—despite, or because of, the fact that this roomful of middle-aged, mostly white concertgoers was able to sing every note and anticipate every turn of the song, and had been able to do so for the majority of their years on earth.