Let's Go Crazy (27 page)

“I believe that moment is what made people ambivalent about his greatness. When you get negative press going, you need twenty years for people to stop reflecting on it. And if guys like Springsteen or whoever are talking about how great he is, like they used to, it would add to the legend. But instead, everybody kind of backed off, like, ‘What the fuck kind of idiot
is he that he would go to some dance club instead of just going there and singing two lines in the song?' ”

Saturday Night Live
opened the February 2 episode with a sketch about the situation. Cast member Rich Hall, playing MTV VJ Mark Goodman, introduced the bit, saying, “As you know, Prince did not appear in the big USA for Africa video because he was busy bailing out his bodyguards after they beat up some of his fans outside of a Hollywood restaurant.” But now, the “sultan of screen” had organized his own video effort for world hunger. Billy Crystal, as Prince, sang:

I am also the world,

I am also the children,

I am the one who had to bail them out,

Now ain't that givin'!

It's a choice I made!

The kids will have to wait,

There's got to be another way to get on MTV.

Cast members playing Bruce Springsteen, Paul Simon, and Willie Nelson all entered the studio, trying to sing, but each time “Prince” signaled to his bodyguards—played by Mr. T and Hulk Hogan—who manhandled the other artists and tossed them out of the room.

TEN

Why Must We Play This Game?

My new best friend Keith and I were counting down the days until the tickets were going on sale. I forget if it was actively snowing or there was just snow on the ground, but it was the middle of winter, and we knew it was going to mean sleeping on the sidewalk and waiting for the doors to open at Cutler's record store in New Haven if we were going to have a shot: their allotment for seats to the six Nassau Coliseum dates in Long Island would presumably be small. (We were still a long way from the days of online sales, for better or worse, and were entirely dependent on how many actual physical tickets could be accessed in this market.)

It was my freshman year at Yale, and my across-the-hall neighbor Keith and I were inseparable at the time, and comparably obsessed with
Purple Rain
, so we made the commitment to do it. He took the overnight shift, lying out on the freezing sidewalk with a couple of other diehards. I relieved him at five or six in the morning, counting down until the store opened. And then—at nine or ten or whenever it was—someone unlocked the door and informed us that Cutler's wouldn't actu
ally be selling the tickets. In an effort to foil scalpers, I guess, a little ticket booth spot a few blocks away, which mostly handled the local theaters, had the precious block of Prince ducats.

I grabbed Keith's sleeping bag and sprinted across campus. I think I moved up a spot or two as the line reassembled. I recall that I bought six tickets, as many as I could afford with the cash in my hand; I huddled with an upperclassman who was known for running a side business brokering tickets, and traded him four of the upper-deck seats I had for two in the middle of the arena. I guess we sold the other two at some kind of markup—that must have been the plan, though I can't recall if we had already set that up or found someone or how we handled that transaction. Anyway, we were set, with a pair of decent seats at only a slight premium.

Getting to the show was another matter. The date was March 23, 1985, which was during spring break, so we hung around campus until it was time, and then took the train into Manhattan to stay at our friend Dicky's family's apartment. The Long Island Rail Road trip to Uniondale was bonkers: almost everyone on the train was wearing purple (I borrowed someone's skinny purple tie for the occasion). The whole car was singing and dancing and was, to borrow Prince's own word, delirious with anticipation.

Almost thirty years later, it's hard to come up with too many details about the show. I remember the segment with Prince alone at the piano most clearly, for some reason. He played “Raspberry Beret,” which was still a few months from
being released, and it was obvious in seconds that it would be another huge hit. He played the heartbreaking B-side “How Come U Don't Call Me Anymore,” and Keith and I were ecstatic because it was a particular favorite of ours. Some doves flew around the arena during “When Doves Cry,” which closed the main set, and there were mirrors and the bathtub set up onstage to re-create the video.

The most remarkable moment came at the end. The first encore was a lengthy jam on “I Would Die 4 U” / “Baby I'm a Star,” with and some horn players and opening act Sheila E. joining on percussion, that seemed to go on for hours. The second encore, of course, was “Purple Rain,” and it seemed like there was no way to follow that. The house lights came up and most of the audience filed out, but for whatever reason, we stayed to keep soaking in the excitement of the night.

After a long pause, with the lights still on, Prince and the band ambled back out and played a lengthy version of the not-yet-released “America,” a song Prince would describe as “straightforwardly patriotic,” with yet another warning of nuclear Armageddon. Keith and I scrambled over the empty rows of seats and were dancing on top of chairs maybe ten rows from the stage. There haven't been too many moments when I've ever felt happier.

Looking back on the set list from that show, we did draw—on paper, at least—a good night. The concerts had gotten longer since the thirteen songs performed in Detroit on opening night; most sets by this stage of the tour were more like eighteen or nineteen songs. With the extra time at the piano and
the additional encore, we got twenty-three songs, including all nine numbers from the
Purple Rain
album.

For eighteen-year-old me, it was a joyous night, but maybe I would have seen something different if I were looking closer. At this point, almost ninety shows into the tour, Prince was growing tired and irritable. In 1998, Prince would describe his state of mind to Touré: “I was doing the seventy-fifth Purple Rain show, doing the same thing over and over—for the same kids who go to Spice Girls shows. And I just lost it. I said: ‘I can't do it!' They were putting the guitar on me and it hit me in the eye and cut me, and blood started going down my shirt. And I said, ‘I have to go onstage,' but I knew I had to get away from all that. I couldn't play the game.”

“Things started cracking during the tour,” says Wendy Melvoin. “He'd have these terrible mood swings, which he was prone to having anyway, but during that time he would get really shitty to one of us or fire one of the techs for, like, breathing on his microphone—he started getting a little bit more paranoid about that kind of stuff, and his moods started getting a little bit freaky. I think it was just because he was exhausted, and when you're that exhausted and you're in denial about how exhausted you are, there's a pathology to it. You can't be clear.”

“He still was really convinced that he should be the leader,” says Coleman, “but I remember we had a conversation where he said, ‘You need to know when to ask for help.' I couldn't believe he was saying that—I'm like, ‘Who are you? What have
you done with Prince?' But it was a really smart thing for him to discover.”

“He would deny saying that now,” adds Melvoin.

“I lost touch with him for a good year, while he was being a big rock star, a movie star, getting any girl he wanted, getting petulant and needy,” says Susannah Melvoin. “Everyone would have to go to his hotel room after each show to watch the show, every night, to critique the entire thing. It got to be more and more of ‘You need to do this,' ‘Do this when I'm doing that,' until no one in the room could breathe. It was not as fun as it was in the beginning.”

Alan Leeds could feel the pressure getting to everyone as the Purple Rain tour rolled on. The triumphant mood of the first few shows had begun to sour. “At first, everybody was sharing the quest,” he says. “Despite all these little dramas and subsidiary plot lines, I can honestly say that everybody from the crew to the band members to even the disgruntled Jesse Johnsons and Jeromes of the world, everybody shared this idea that ‘we're all on this very unique ride together that is really beyond anything any of us ever imagined. Let's don't fuck it up, because this is a ticket you just can't go buy. It's hard to get to the Super Bowl, and you may not get here again, so even if you lose, enjoy it.'

“By the same token, as the tour went on, like any tour, you're away at camp; you're not in the real world. It becomes such an insulated environment, particularly when a tour is so security conscious. Everywhere we were going, there were hundreds of people trying to get at him and media trying to get
at the rest of us because he doesn't talk, which meant they were yelling at everybody else that they would ordinarily ignore. So everything became a challenge to the media to find an angle to somehow get a story. You'd go to—pick a town, Charlotte, North Carolina—and you pick up the morning paper and it's front page. Not front of the Variety section, but on page A1, where somebody at the venue leaked the catering rider and there's a long story about the M&M's in the dressing room. You get off the plane and this is what you look at. And you're like, ‘That's my existence they're talking about. They're writing about what I deal with every day. Oh shit—that's weird.' And worse yet,
he
's gonna read that, and he's gonna call me and say, ‘That's not a good look. Are you dealing with that?' ”

Mark Brown, who was already resentful of the way Prince had moved Melvoin into the spotlight, was having the hardest time of it. He said that during the making of
Purple Rain
, Prince would tell him, “ ‘Mark, after this, you're never going to have to work again.' ” But now Brown was upset about the band's salary, which he claimed was just $2,200 a week, and he began drinking heavily during the tour. “For me, the whole thing was a little too much at a young age,” he said.

Even though he was recording music for himself, Sheila E., the Family, and other side projects along the way, the routine of being on a lengthy tour was interrupting Prince's usual constant flow of ideas. Doing the same thing night after night for six months, so soon after the time spent dedicated to the movie shoot, was aggravating to someone used to complete freedom to pursue his creativity. “I think the process of the filmmak
ing took so long, and his pace got a little off, so there was no way to quench his thirst again—he needed things fast,” says Jill Jones. “He would finish a record, and then he would be on another one. He couldn't sleep, he was just driven, to the point of ‘Where is he getting all these ideas? Where's the stimulus coming from?' You can't live like that—because then I think it just became an escape. I think he was having fun, but I think he had to make a lot of adjustments.”

In addition to starting to work in some of the material from
Around the World in a Day
, there were other changes happening in the nightly set. The conversations with God were taking up a more prominent spot in the show; some nights, Prince would fall to the ground as if struck down by the Almighty, and the concert would take on the tone of a desperate plea for redemption. “His emphasis was not on sexuality anymore, but on God,” said Howard Bloom.

Bloom believes that the onstage psychodrama was about more than just a spiritual struggle—it was something both familial and musical. “He had the voice of God coming down from the very center of the ceiling,” he says. “When I hear that voice, I know Prince is going through a wrestling match between himself and his dad—that's a voice inside of Prince. There's Prince the child, the adolescent rebelling against his dad, and then there's the Prince who
is
his dad. Prince who is his dad is not an original musician, and Prince rebelling against his dad is.”

Prince also started messing around with the band lineup, most notably bringing saxophonist Eric Leeds into the mix. In Greensboro, North Carolina, on the second stop of the tour,
Leeds was tapped to add a solo in “Baby I'm a Star.” Then he was worked into another song, and by midway through the tour, he was practically a full member of the Revolution.

“I'll never forget the day,” says Alan Leeds. “We had a benefit at the Santa Monica Civic Center one morning—it was actually a morning show. And Prince did an abbreviated set and he went offstage, waiting for an encore, and he said, ‘Tell Eric to go out there and play the introduction to “Purple Rain,” instead of Wendy's solo.' She would always start it off and, particularly on these casual shows, she would play sometimes three or four minutes before he'd come back out. But spontaneously he said, ‘Tell him—let Eric do that,' without any regard for the fact that this was diplomatically difficult for me.

“The whole crew watched Wendy, and it's all they talked about—‘Did you see her face?' Some of the guys on the crew were like, ‘Yeah, go, Eric!' and it was, like, a scandal. By then, the enormous success of
Purple Rain
gave Wendy cred with the other guys—because she was huge; you couldn't deny that. It was easy to resent a nobody, but now she's not a nobody anymore. That changed real quick.”

On February 21, on a day off between a series of shows at the Forum in Los Angeles (during one of which Madonna and Bruce Springsteen would both join the band onstage for the encore), Prince showed up at the Warner Bros. offices with a group including Melvoin and Coleman, Joni Mitchell, and his father, who was wearing a caftan. They sat on the floor of a
conference room while the staff was gathered to listen, for the first time, to
Around the World in a Day
.