Let's Go Crazy (22 page)

In September, the next shot in the promotional assault was fired with the release of “Purple Rain” as a single. It would climb to number two on the singles chart, kept out of the top spot by “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” by George Michael's candy-coated duo Wham! If “Let's Go Crazy”/“Erotic City” was Prince's most muscular A-side/B-side combination ever, this 45 was by far his most Divine-with-a-capital-D; the B-side, titled “God,” was a quiet meditation whose lyrics were evocative of a Bible passage. An instrumental version of the song was heard in the movie score during, of all things, the sex scene—and was ­released as a 12″ single in the UK titled “God (Love Theme from
Purple Rain
)”—but on August 20, Prince rerecorded the song in Minneapolis, this time with vocals. “God made you, God made me / He made us all equally,” he sang, before instructing us to “wake up, children / Dance the dance electric.”

The momentum carried through the fall. The movie was on its way toward taking in nearly $70 million (“The ticket prices were, what, $2.50, in those days?” notes Bob Cavallo. “So that would make it $300 million today.”) In October,
Rolling Stone
reported that the
Purple Rain
sound track was outselling its
competition by as much as four to one. Norman Hunter of the 160-store Record Bar chain said that “with Prince, we're getting an extra 10,000 sales a week.
Purple Rain
right now is our biggest selling record of all time outside of the Christmas season.”

“I don't think there's anyone who has had as massive a cultural impact—hip-hop as a genre has, but I don't think you can isolate a specific artist,” says Leeds. “Prince influenced how people dressed, who they hung out with, how guys were willing to express their masculinity, or not. I think that's what separates it from the pack, because you started seeing fashion in general for young males change, for young females change—arguably people who didn't even like the record, but the ruffles on their sleeves changed. The impact was amazingly dramatic. I don't think we had seen anything, other than maybe the ­Beatles on
Ed Sullivan
, so rapidly capture and change the culture.”

The album clamped down on that number one position, remaining there for almost a full six months before passing the torch back to
Born in the USA
in mid-January 1985. Spring­steen continued to offer formidable competition for the top of the rock 'n' roll mountain. But by the end of 1984, even
Rolling Stone
had proclaimed a winner, naming
Purple Rain
the Record of the Year in its year-end issue. The magazine called the album “essential listening” and dubbed its maker “a true original”—in a recap that ran just above the capsule on
Born in the USA
, ­reversing the order in which the original reviews had appeared.

As Greg Tate had written, “With
Purple Rain
(the movie and the album), he's established himself as the most cunning
black producer since Berry Gordy in plotting a course of conquest over American pop apartheid.”

EIGHT

Dig If U Will

One crucial aspect of the
Purple Rain
phenomenon that must be taken into account is its exact timing. The year 1984—and, even more precisely, the summer of that year—marked a fascinating, unprecedented moment in our culture. It's always impossible to reconstruct history with any real sense of accuracy, but as great as the music and performances in
Purple Rain
would have been at any time, it seems reasonable to conclude that the film would not have had the same impact had it been released even a year, maybe even a few months, earlier or later.

Especially for those of us in the class of '84, the year had always loomed large, and somewhat ominously, because of the dystopian warnings in George Orwell's visionary novel: the distant future invoked by his words in
Nineteen Eighty-Four
came speeding at us through our school years. Winston Smith's battles with Big Brother may not have come to pass in full, but as Ronald Reagan's first term came to a close and it became clear that his victory over Walter Mondale would be
a history-making rout, many young people certainly experienced a strong sense of alienation and despair.

With serious debate around the “Star Wars” strategic defense initiative and an official in the Department of Defense claiming with a straight face that with enough shovels we could dig our way to safety in the event of nuclear attack, the apocalyptic visions that Prince was expressing felt very close at hand. “It was the worst of times,” wrote novelist Rick Moody in an essay about the year 1984. “Atomic jitters were everywhere.” With such political folly as the invasion of Granada and the exposure of the Iran-Contra machinations dominating the news but having little actual public impact, the government seemed ridiculous, out of control—while the popularity of Reagan, with his Hollywood-honed paternal cowboy image, only kept soaring.

The codification of modern conservative values meant big things for business. Corporations were expanding; money was defining the culture. This extended to the popular arts, where blockbusters became crucial commodities. It was a time of ­extravagance—big hair, bright colors, grand ambition.

“Have you heard that in the United States, when a conservative government is in power, the standard of beauty for women is large breasts, and that when a liberal government is in power, it's small breasts?” says Susan Rogers, who is currently a professor at Boston's Berklee College of Music. “In class, I talk to my students about how, as an artist, you need to be able to read your culture and know what's coming. In the height of the Reagan excesses and that movie
Wall Street
and
‘greed is good' and all that, you would pay money to see an artist onstage whose hair was done, whose makeup was done, and who wore clothes and shoes that were worth more than your whole life. Then by the nineties, it was Bill Clinton and it was grunge and the rawer rap, the gangster stuff. It was inevitable that the glam thing was going to collapse, along with Wall Street and everything else with it.”

Nothing exemplified the era more than MTV, which had transformed the rules and the scale of pop success. The network, which had launched in 1981, had effectively become the equivalent of a national radio station—a video in heavy rotation meant a hit single. In the channel's earliest days this was exciting, because the simple fact that MTV had to fill up all of its hours of programming before there was a surplus of videos to play meant that some weird stuff got exposure, and a band like Talking Heads could reach an audience that radio formats never would have granted them. But as the power of music video became evident, the clips became mandatory for even the biggest acts, and the higher production values started to push out the smaller bands.

Not all rock stars were quick to embrace music videos. Some found the idea crass or felt that it compromised their music, taking away the listeners' ability to create their own images and associations for a song. Bruce Springsteen initially said that he wouldn't make videos; he grudgingly allowed an abstract black-and-white clip—in which he did not appear—for “Atlantic City,” from his stark, somber
Nebraska
album. By the
time of
Born in the USA
, of course, this attitude had changed, which marked a crucial shift in Springsteen's entire career.

Prince, however, had no such qualms about music video. “Instead of thinking, ‘Ugh, MTV ruined music,' he was like, ‘MTV!' ” says Coleman. “He was always very visually oriented.”

“Prince was stoked about MTV,” adds Wendy Melvoin. “He loved the idea of videos and doing performance stuff for them.”

“I'll never forget the time I went in and he was playing a new song,” says Alan Leeds. “The volume was jacked so loud, he's trying to say something and you don't even hear a word, you're just nodding, pretending you hear him. Finally I realize he's describing a video treatment for the song. And I'm like, ‘You just wrote the song this morning! You've already got the video?' And he says, ‘Alan, you don't understand. Today, people don't hear music; they see it. It all comes together to me.' It was an aha moment for me, being old-school and thinking video was just an add-on, and recognizing that he literally created those things simultaneously was very profound to me.”

The impact of MTV extended well beyond the music business. It shook up all forms of visual media, including advertising, graphic design, and film. “The movies took their cue from the music,” wrote Aaron Aradillas in an essay about
Purple Rain
for
Indiewire
, “as Hollywood entered into a symbiotic relationship with MTV, both as a new form of storytelling but, more importantly, as a powerful marketing tool to reach the
coveted youth audience.” He mentions the role of music and the MTV-influenced high-speed editing in such 1984 movies as
Footloose
(the sound track from which was the biggest-selling album of the first half of the year),
Against All Odds
,
and
Repo Man.
The sound track and scores of projects like
Streets of Fire
and
Body Double
moved pop music further to the center of the movie experience; Ray Parker Jr.'s
Ghostbusters
theme would be the song that knocked “When Doves Cry” out of its number one position. Talking Heads' concert film
Stop Making Sense
was an art-house blockbuster, and both Paul ­McCartney (
Give My Regards to Broad Street
) and Rick Springfield (
Hard to Hold
) even released their own (failed) star vehicles that year.

The real power of MTV, though, and the escalation to a true sky's-the-limit potential for music hinged primarily on the accomplishments of one man, who cast a shadow over everything that happened in pop in 1984: Michael Jackson.

The cyclone known as
Thriller
came out in late 1982 and sold impressively from the beginning, but it really went into overdrive a full year later. Jackson's unforgettable appearance on the
Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever
television special, when he introduced the moonwalk—a dance move that would have the biggest impact on the world since Elvis shook his hips—aired in the spring of 1983. It was followed in December by his most ambitious creation to date, the fourteen-minute
“short film” for
Thriller
's title track, which is still generally recognized as the most important music video of all time.

“Thriller” solidified what the clips for “Billie Jean” and “Beat It” had already put into motion: Jackson was the most creative, most popular force that MTV had to deal with, and the network's initial resistance to playing black artists (because they felt that the channel had to maintain a “rock 'n' roll” format) simply was not viable. As
Thriller
continued its march to more than 25 million albums sold, and the racial and stylistic walls for programming on MTV fell, the playlists of pop radio nationwide began to transform.

“Pop fans, now accustomed to seeing black artists and white artists on the same video channel, came to expect the same mix of music on pop radio,” wrote Steve Greenberg in “Michael Jackson's ‘Thriller' at 30: How One Album Changed the World,” a 2012 report for
Billboard
magazine. “It was impossible to keep the various fragments of the audience isolated from one another any longer. Mass-appeal Top 40 radio itself made a big comeback due to this seismic shift. ­Beginning in early 1983 in Philadelphia and rapidly spreading through the country, one or more FM stations in every city switched to Top 40, and many rose to the top of the ratings playing the mix of music made popular by MTV—young rock and urban hits.”

The representation of black music on the pop charts quickly skyrocketed. “If 1982 was the genre's low point in terms of pop success,” said Greenberg, “by 1985 more than one-third of all the hits on the
Billboard
Hot 100 were of
urban radio origin.”
Thriller
had, virtually single-handedly, changed the racial composition of pop radio and reopened doors that had been closed to black artists in the post-disco days.

The relationship between Prince and Michael Jackson has been the source of much speculation, with frequent references to a competition between the two. Those within Prince's inner circle offer conflicting ideas about how much attention he was paying to Jackson. Alan Leeds recalls that well before
Purple Rain
, Prince saw Jackson as a professional target. “Even on the Controversy tour, I was already picking up on the fact that there was a feeling of rivalry in the Prince camp, that Prince was out to get [Jackson],” he says. The month that the
Purple Rain
album was released, while Prince was still conceptualizing his own tour, he chartered a jet and took Leeds and lighting director LeRoy Bennett to see the Jacksons' mega-hyped Victory tour at a stop in Dallas. “It was about ‘I want to see their show before we finish mounting ours.' We very much wanted to see it, just to know what we were following ­professionally—but with the attitude that ‘this is our competition,' like, ‘he's the Yankees, but we're the Red Sox.' ”

Howard Bloom, who worked with both Prince and Jackson, remembers it differently, maintaining that he had no sense that Prince was scoping out Jackson. “I actually experienced it the other way around,” he says. “There was somebody in Michael's camp who was telling him that I was a spy for Prince, and that I was there to make sure that Michael didn't outshine Prince. Fortunately, he didn't buy it. But Prince's job was to be
Prince—he was sui generis; there was no competition, and it wasn't that we were looking for competition and there wasn't any. It was that, in his world, everything dropped out of sight except for Prince and the audience.” (According to bodyguard Bill Whitfield, Jackson still felt a rivalry until his final days, possibly scheduling the fifty dates at London's O2 Arena that he would not live to see so that he could break Prince's record twenty-one shows in the venue: “Mr. Jackson was always competitive about being compared to Prince,” he said.)