Let's Go Crazy (20 page)

The public response was immediate.
Purple Rain
sold 1.5 million copies in its first week on sale (the last week of June), and another million in the following four weeks before the movie even opened. It matched the total sales of
1999
in a matter of weeks. On July 18, with “When Doves Cry” still the biggest song in the country, “Let's Go Crazy” was released as the second single, with “Erotic City” as the B-side. It was perhaps Prince's greatest ever one-two punch of rock and funk, with both songs taking over radio stations (despite the fearless sexuality of “Erotic City”—was he saying we could “fuck” or “funk” until the dawn? It was a chance many, but not all, broadcasters were willing to take) regardless of format. The “Crazy” music video was also a preview of the movie's opening scene, complete with the Revolution in full flight and Prince's finest guitar gunslinging—the best possible trailer, in round-the-clock rotation on MTV. Though
Born in the USA
had held the number one spot on the album charts for four weeks, in the first week of August, just days after the film's premiere,
Purple Rain
took its slot as the biggest seller in the nation.

Everything had been teed up. There was only one thing left to do: open the movie and see what would happen.

The world premiere of
Purple Rain
took place a month after the album's release, on July 26 at Hollywood's ultimate movie palace, Mann's Chinese Theatre. Throngs of screaming kids lined the sidewalks. The arrivals of the band members were covered by MTV. Prince pulled up in a purple Rolls-Royce, wearing his signature purple trench coat. He carried a single flower that he'd picked before he stepped into the car, and he spoke to no one as he strode the red carpet into the theater.

The array of celebrities in attendance seems like an impossibly perfect cross section of '80s stardom: Eddie Murphy, Pee-wee Herman, Talking Heads, “Weird Al” Yankovic, the members of Kiss. “I remember John Mellencamp and all these other artists came and paid homage to him,” says Bob Merlis. “That made me think, ‘This guy is really a thing—they have nothing to gain from being here.' ”

The after-party at the Palace was also covered live as an MTV special. VJ Mark Goodman interviewed a number of the attendees, with varying degrees of success. Wendy Melvoin explained that the movie centered on “the struggle to let [Prince] know that we do care about the music,” while Lisa Coleman said that
Purple Rain
“starts out pretty negative, goes through a lot of things, but the film takes you to a better, happier place.” Little Richard, brandishing a Bible that he hoped to give to Prince, asserted of the star, “He's me in this generation!”

“I'm a Prince groupie,” said Eddie Murphy. “The man is a genius.” A very serious Lionel Richie expressed his respect for Prince's accomplishment: “He didn't try to go after
Gone with the Wind,
he just did his thing. . . . He made a motion picture out of his album, and I think that's a very important step.” No surprise, Weird Al got off the best line of the night—“We all knew Prince was a great actor, but who knew he could sing?”

For the members of the Revolution, the night of the premiere was a sign of things to come. “We drove up to the theater, the quintessential Hollywood premiere, and there's massive crowds and screaming and yelling and it was a big thing,” says Fink. “Then going into the packed theater and seeing the reaction of the audience, hearing the people around you as it's playing—then I knew we were onto something for sure. I thought, ‘Okay, this is it. This is going to be a big tour coming up in the fall, and people are going to be singing the praises of the movie and all that.' ”

“Having been through the cycle of ‘write, record, tour; write, record, tour,' there was a lot of momentum, and it seemed to always work and connect and take us to the next level,” says Coleman. “So this was like, ‘Wow, where is
this
gonna go?' We were really playing it to the hilt, dressed to the nines, spending tons of money on makeup people and day rooms at the Beverly Hills Hotel. The day of the premiere it was very much like that, talking about how to get out of the limousine and everything. It was really like finishing school. We had to present ourselves like we were worthy of being big
stars. Back then, the fashion was weird and crazy, but it was fun to be weirder and crazier. ‘Oh, yeah, you have big hair? Look at my hair!' It's insane when I look at it now. We destroyed the ozone layer.”

Conspicuously, Prince and Morris Day did not speak at the party, where there were performances by a breakdance trio and by Sheila E. Prince and the Revolution took the stage for three songs—“17 Days,” “Irresistible Bitch” (the B-side to the final single from
1999
, “Let's Pretend We're Married”), and “When Doves Cry,” with a bass part added for Mark Brown to play.

The guest who may have inspired the most curiosity at the after-party was Prince's mother, Mattie Baker (she married Hayward Baker after divorcing John Nelson). She expressed no surprise about his skyrocketing success.

“When he was three, he said he'd be a star,” she said. “Back then he would play pots and pans, anything he could make music with.” It was the beginning of a slight lifting of the veil around Prince's actual family. His sister, Tyka, was quoted as saying, “It was cute, I guess, in a funny kind of way, that people thought that what happened in
Purple Rain
happened to our family . . . but of course, people wanted to know about the gun, all the bad stuff.”

Asked at the party how much of the film was based on Prince's real life, Baker replied “You'll have to ask him that.”

It was out of their hands now. Nothing to do but wait for the reviews. “When the movie was about to come out,” says Rogers, “I remember him saying to us at rehearsal that he had had a dream the night before that Siskel and Ebert were
reviewing
Purple Rain
and he said, ‘The fat guy was just tearing me up.' [
laughs
] But in actual fact, when they did review it, Roger Ebert loved it, just loved it.”

On their PBS series
At the Movies
, both Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert were indeed wildly enthusiastic about
Purple Rain
. Ebert called the film “one of the best combinations I've seen of music and drama,” and proclaimed it “the best rock film since Pink Floyd's
The Wall
.” He paid special (almost alarming) attention to Kotero: “I'm only a human being,” he said. “Can I be human for a second? I thought she was electrifying. I thought their scenes together were the most erotic love scenes that I've seen in a movie in a long time.”

“I think this film ought to be studied for the way it uses music dramatically,” added Siskel. “This film is very sophisticated in the way it has music videos . . . move the story along, adding new information.” He compared the movie to
Saturday Night Fever
, calling it “very, very well directed” and also singling out Morris Day as “an excellent actor.” At the end of 1984, both critics put
Purple Rain
on their Top Ten list for the year—Ebert at number ten and Siskel at number five.

In the
New York Times
, Vincent Canby was less generous, calling
Purple Rain
“probably the flashiest album cover ever to be released as a movie.” He compared Prince to “a poster of Liza Minnelli on which someone has lightly smudged a mustache,” to “Kermit the Frog on a Harley-Davidson” with “all the pent-up rage of a caged mouse.” Canby described the range of Prince's musical influences and, revealing the confusion that Prince still seemed eager to perpetuate, claimed
that “Prince's background is also mixed.” Calling the female characters “suckers for the men who knock them around with brutal regularity,” Canby concluded that “the offstage stuff is utter nonsense” and that the musical sequences were “the only things that count.”

Pauline Kael of
The
New Yorker
, probably the most influential movie critic in the country, seemed bemused by Prince's image and performance. “He knows how he wants to appear—like Dionysus crossed with a convent girl on her first bender. And his instinct is right . . . his impudent pranks make the audience laugh and his musical numbers keep giving the picture a lift. It's pretty terrible (there are no real scenes—just flashy, fractured rock-video moments), but those willing to accept Prince as a sexual messiah aren't likely to mind.” Kael wrote that “it's not difficult to see the attraction that the picture has for adolescents: Prince's songs are a cry for the free expression of sexual energy, and his suffering is a supercharged version of what made James Dean the idol of young moviegoers.” She also singled out Morris Day as “a full-fledged young comedian . . . who suggests a Richard Pryor without the genius and the complications.”

Greg Tate was one of few black writers given a major platform to weigh in on
Purple Rain
. “The movie rises above, rather than drowns in, its own pretensions,” he wrote in
The Village Voice
. “Take the scene in which Prince finds his father at the piano, which evokes something tragic about the frightful gaps in communication that can go for years between black father and son. . . . [The movie] is certainly truer to the human
ity and milieu of its black principals, looney-tunish as they may seem, than I've come to expect outside of independent black cinema.” (Black film historian Donald Bogle characterized Prince's performance a bit differently, writing that it evoked the stereotype of the “tragic mulatto” while also stumbling into self-parodying vanity: “Never has any black star been so adored and so worshipped in a film. . . . He pouts, broods, flirts, and struts like a 1950s screen siren; he's a coquette turned daredevil.”)

The rock press—presumably a more receptive audience, but also probably more important to potential ticket buyers—was over the moon. In
Rolling Stone
, Kurt Loder (back on the case) said
Purple Rain
“may be the smartest, most spiritually ambitious rock & roll movie ever made. Not since the Beatles burst off the screen in
A Hard Day's Night
twenty years ago has the sense of a new generation's arrival on the pop scene been so vividly and excitingly conveyed.” Calling the movie “a creative coup for its charismatic star,” Loder wrote that the concert sequences rivaled those in
Woodstock
and
The Last Waltz
, high praise indeed from the magazine initially created as a voice for the '60s rock explosion.

Interestingly, Loder argued that the most distinctive element of
Purple Rain
was a strong sense of morality in the offstage story. “The characters . . . spend most of their time working—rarely has the work ethic been made to seem so cool,” he wrote. He mentioned the “nonsalacious sexiness” and added that “the simple equality with which the characters interact is quietly inspiring,” ultimately concluding that “in
its simple positivism alone,
Purple Rain
marks a radical break with the rock-movie past.” In the
Los Angeles Herald Examiner
, Mikal Gilmore—one of Bloom's media plants at the San Diego advance screening—compared
Purple Rain
to
Citizen Kane
and simply called it “the best rock film ever made.”

From a distance of thirty years, all of these reviews, good and bad, speak some part of the truth. The performance sequences in
Purple Rain
have lost none of their impact. Magnoli's finest decision, without question, was the opening sequence; the blistering “Let's Go Crazy” is almost immediately followed by the Time funking its way through “Jungle Love.” We don't leave the stage of First Avenue for more than eleven minutes, other than via the quick cuts that introduce the other characters. It's breathless, exciting, the music is magnificent—at this point, it almost doesn't matter what happens in the rest of the movie.

Considering, too, that
Purple Rain
ends with four consecutive songs, totaling more than twenty minutes of screen time, we're left with not much more than an hour of actual narrative in between, and even that is consistently broken up by musical interludes; in some very savvy editing, only once in the film does more than ten minutes pass before cutting to a song (and that stretch has the sex scene in the middle). Once you've made it to the one-hour mark in
Purple Rain
, the reward is seven ­musical performances in the final forty-five minutes.

It's impressive how much work the music does to propel the story and flesh out the characters (and interesting to think back and realize that since the album was out a month before the
movie, we had already absorbed and memorized the songs before we understood their function in the film). “Each song works really well within that moment of the movie,” says Matt Fink, “and [Prince] was able to hone in on that and make it work. It's a testament to his genius—it's like building a musical, like ­Rodgers and Hammerstein.” And even Prince's performances of the more experimental songs, while supposedly alienating to the club audience (“Your music makes sense to no one but yourself,” says Billy Sparks), are never less than riveting.

The acting and scripted dialogue, tenuous even at the time, don't stand up quite so well. Though Prince mostly holds up his end during the most dramatic scenes, especially the father/son moments with Clarence Williams, he's best at striking a pose and letting the camera appreciate his coolness—which is no small thing, since without his powerful presence at its center, the movie would collapse. Wendy Melvoin's delivery has some spark, but it's hard to find much in the Apollonia story line besides pure camp; it's presumably the “romantic” component of
Purple Rain
that would later inspire
Vanity Fair
to call it “perhaps the best badly acted film ever.”