Let's Go Crazy (25 page)

As the tour rolled into Detroit, which had been one of the first markets to really support Prince, it was becoming clear that the band was about to experience something they had never really imagined. “Even after the movie was released and stuff was happening,” says Coleman, “I don't know what it felt like—we were just in it. But I remember that first gig in ­Detroit. It felt different. Even just the hotel, it was huge . . .”

“And we were on the hundredth floor and covered in fog, remember that?” Wendy Melvoin continues. “We were
freaked
. You could look out the window and see the arena that we were gonna be playing in, and they had the purple lights going, and it was like a massive party.”

“That's when we first got assigned bodyguards,” says Coleman. “Prince was being shuttled around, and he would travel
separately, which was kind of a bummer. They'd drive the limo right up to the plane, things like that.”

In a lengthy review in
Rolling Stone
of the opening night in Detroit, Chris Connelly offered a wildly mixed set of reactions. He described the crowd as “neither a predominantly black audience nor a typical white rock & roll one,” and then, in the next sentence, mentioned the “predominantly white crowd.” He observed that the evening's five costume changes “seemed to slow the show's momentum and stifle Prince's natural spontaneity,” and seemed a bit mystified by some of Prince's stage banter during a three-song mini-set played solo on the electric piano. “ ‘Do you know the difference between life and death? God,' said the singer. ‘Do you want to spend the night? Do you want to take a bath?' ” By the final encore of “Purple Rain,” Connelly said, “many in the audience filed out.”

In
Billboard
, Nelson George echoed this hesitation about the performance. “Prince has led us to expect him to reach for greatness and this show, for all his appeal, simply doesn't do it,” he wrote. (George suspects that this review was the reason Prince later wrote the violent revenge track “Bob George,” which is widely assumed to be directed at him, on 1994's
The Black Album
.) Bob Merlis, on the other hand, recalls that in Detroit “it was electrifying to have that thing come to life in a big arena. . . . Prince really delivered, significantly, onstage.”

The Detroit dates marked the beginning of Prince's charity efforts throughout the Purple Rain tour. A number of tickets were sold to benefit Chicago teacher Marva Collins's inner-city training program, as would be done at many of the
tour stops. At the end of the month, the band also performed for 2,500 deaf and handicapped students at Gallaudet College in Washington, D.C., one of four shows they would perform for special-needs children during the tour.

Ticket sales continued booming: in the same issue of
Rolling Stone
that ran the Detroit live review, the two top spots in the “Top Ten Concert Grosses” chart went to Prince's stops in Landover, Maryland, and Philadelphia. On November 28, “I Would Die 4 U” was released as a single, and would climb to number eight on the pop charts. The B-side, “Another Lonely Christmas,” was an almost absurdly over-the-top ballad, with Prince “drink[ing] banana daiquiris till I'm blind” while lamenting the death of a girlfriend on Christmas Day (cause of death: “Your father said it was pneumonia / Your mother said it was stress”).

The Purple Rain tour would go on to play ninety-eight shows in thirty-two cities. “The nature of the tour was ridiculously ambitious,” says Alan Leeds. “The focus that was put on it was something that really none of us—including Cavallo and Fargnoli, and me with James Brown, let alone any of the performers—had really experienced. This idea that we're in this capsule and we come to town and just take over for a week, streets are closed and there's security at the hotel elevator, I'd never rolled like that. This is shit that you read about—it's Beatles, it's Rolling Stones, and that's pretty much it.”

Thirty years later, the sense from everyone within the
Purple Rain
bubble is that it really was a blur. “There are certain things I remember, specific cities that were highlights to me,” says Matt Fink. “The Syracuse show that we shot for the
live performance video—I remember that one just because it was important. The venue was too big to do a show; playing the Superdome or the Orange Bowl was the same thing. Any of those large football dome stadiums are just not fun to play in, because the echo slap-back coming at you is insane. You're trying to hear yourself and it's confusing. And then the audience, like ninety thousand people, is roaring at you during all of that, it's very disorienting. So those really stick out for me, just for the sheer size and the experience and the scale.”

As well rehearsed and (some said overly) planned as the show was, not every night went off without a hitch. In Birmingham, Alabama, the curtain mechanism stalled in the opening “reveal” of the band, the hydraulic lift failed to get Prince up to the stage, and his guitar didn't “climax” at the end of “Baby I'm a Star.” On top of all that, the touring party then had to sprint to beat an ice storm out of town. Leeds remembers Prince coming to him after the show and saying, “What can you tell me so that I know none of this is going to happen again?”

Mostly, though, the concerts were triumphant. “It was the greatest show on earth,” says Susannah Melvoin. “It was the greatest band, it was perfectly sequenced. The lighting director, LeRoy Bennett, was practically another band member. It was all just dialed in so perfectly. Every single night, I couldn't wait to see it.”

As the tour rolled from town to town, Prince never let up on all of his other recording projects. “On the Purple Rain tour, we went into studios a lot because we were making Sheila's record,” says Susan Rogers. “So I would scout rec­ording studios and book them in advance, and we'd go into
those studios after a set—after a four-hour sound check and a three-hour set, we'd go into the studio at midnight or one
a.m.
, record all night, and then get on the bus and drive to the next city to do a show the next day. We also did video editing; we did the video for “Take Me with U” somewhere in Texas, maybe it was Dallas. We had to spend a day off editing that video. We worked every day, that's for sure.”

“Almost every off-hour, we were finding a recording studio somewhere or renting a truck to follow us around,” says Leeds. “There was always something else going on besides the shows, for better or worse.”

The emotional high point of the tour came during a five-show hometown stand at the St. Paul Civic Center over the holidays. The governor of Minnesota, Rudy Perpich, designated the days of Christmas week as official “Prince Days” for the state. Prince's mother and father attended shows on different nights; when his mother arrived, she found a note he had left on her seat that read “This one's 4 U.” (On December 26, he couldn't resist playing “Another Lonely Christmas” for the one and only time onstage.) At the final show, a visibly moved Prince said, “This has been the best Christmas I ever had.” He expressed his thanks to the unlikely city that he had brought into the international spotlight, closing the night by saying, “We belong to you forever.”

There was another reason that Prince was so emotional during his holiday season in Minneapolis. Unbeknownst even to most
of those around him, while
Purple Rain
was still the biggest record in the country, that week he also finished his next album. Four of the songs, in fact, had been recorded before
Purple Rain
was even released.

But it was a demo that Wendy and Lisa brought him that had been recorded by their respective brothers, David Coleman and Jonathan Melvoin, that provided the linchpin for the next project. A shimmery, winding track with flutes and strings reminiscent of the Beatles circa
Magical Mystery Tour
, it had a sound and feel that Prince loved, and he began to build the album around the psychedelic overtones of the song that would ultimately give the album its title, “Around the World in a Day.”

Wendy and Lisa were closely involved in most of the album, and would remain the closest thing to true collaborators Prince would allow during this period. “We started making the album all that summer,” says Melvoin, “and that's when it started getting super-creative.”

Yet despite the vision of a communal utopia he offered in the song “Paisley Park”—which would soon become familiar as the name of the recording compound he built in rural Chanhassen, Minnesota, and of his new label imprint—the rest of the band was kept in the dark about the new album. “The thing about
Around the World in a Day
is I wasn't totally aware that he had been tracking that album,” says Matt Fink. “I was not involved in it, and maybe a little disappointed that he, again, went within himself only—although he did have Lisa and Wendy involved. But I just wish I had been a part of that
one more. I was okay with it, but at the same time, you always want to be in there if you can.”

Despite the advantages gained from the Revolution's prominence on
Purple Rain
, Prince reverted to a solo focus on
Around the World
: six of the album's nine tracks were essentially solo recordings by Prince, with some vocal contributions from Melvoin and Coleman. The three full-band performances—“Pop Life,” “America,” and “The Ladder”—were recorded in February, July, and December respectively, so it's easy to imagine that the Revolution weren't even aware that an album was actually taking shape. (“The Ladder” and the title track both had a co­writing credit for John L. Nelson—obviously not bothered by his fictional portrayal in
Purple Rain
, he was playing an even more active role in his son's life during this period.)

“
Around the World in a Day
was really fast,” says Susan Rogers. “We mixed a lot of it over Christmas in Minneapolis. We were on tour in a mobile truck, and on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day I was in that truck, parked in the driveway of his house, working on ‘Tamborine' and ‘The Ladder' for that record.” At 4
a.m.
on Christmas morning 1984, the follow-up to
Purple Rain
was completed.

Asked later by Detroit DJ the Electrifying Mojo about his mood while recording
Around the World
, Prince said that he had “an f-you attitude, meaning that I was making something for myself and my fans, and the people who supported me through the years—I wanted to give them something, and it was like my mental letter. And those people are the ones who wrote me back, telling me that they felt what I was feeling.”

But even if his focus had turned to the new music, he still had to go directly from Minneapolis to Dallas, the next stop on the Purple Rain tour. To those close to him, Prince was starting to display signs of his usual restlessness. “He was bored,” says Melvoin. “He gave it everything onstage, and he was always in that. But he was gone, he was uninterested, and he had moved on.”

“I think he kind of took things for granted for a minute there,” says Coleman “and he'd never done that before.”

“Creatively, he was over it,” says Alan Leeds. “I'm sure it was fun playing the music for a while, but this is a guy who never stopped rehearsing, so they were all tired of playing the songs long before the tour started—they'd been playing them every day in rehearsals for a year, and the crew had been hearing them every day for a year.

“Also, there was a decision made to basically replicate the movie as much as possible. For the sake of the audience, that's what you had to do; it's what you were selling. A no-brainer. But what it also meant was a very constricting set, because the show was so theatrical, it left no room for spontaneity—in wardrobe, in choreography, or in the music. All the theatrical aspects of it made for a great production, but essentially it was a Broadway play with no give or take, with the exception of the encores, where he could stretch out. We paid a lot of overtime in a lot of buildings, because the only time of the night when he had any fun was the encores, which could go on for hours.”

One stunning example of the high points was the second night in Atlanta; Questlove showed some bootleg footage from this performance to his NYU class. Prince is in a buoyant
mood, stopping and starting the Revolution like they were one of James Brown's finest bands. He turns somersaults, brings out Jerome Benton to dance the Bird with him, and repeatedly teases a final exit during the encore, driving the audience further and further into a frenzy. “Chalk one up for the Kid!” he crows. “Now who gonna mess with us?” He may have been getting tired of the routine, but he could still whip himself and his musicians into something near perfection.

In the
Los Angeles Times
, though, Robert Hilburn—the respected critic who had conducted the final interview with Prince before Prince's self-imposed media silence—skewered the show for its more staged aspects. “Prince became a near-parody of himself, pandering to the audience's fascination with his sexy persona,” he wrote, expressing his concern that “Prince's lame sexual posturing on the Purple Rain tour meant he was becoming the Bo Derek of rock.”

Nor was any of the touring party prepared for the security issues and general madness that would explode in each city they hit. “Your privacy level goes away,” says Fink, “and you can't get out of the hotel or you're in a restaurant surrounded by people—they find out you're there. We were in a mall in Atlanta, and Bruce Springsteen was hanging out that day in the mall, too, at the same time. He was incognito; he looked like a bum. We ran into him: ‘Hey, Bruce, how you doing, man?' And then we went into a restaurant and somebody knew it was us and spread the word, and the next thing you know, there was a crowd outside blocking the door to get out of the restaurant. So that freaked me out.”