Let's Go Crazy (28 page)

“It was so extraordinary for a major artist to have so little label oversight,” Susan Rogers wrote in an e-mail. “I don't know if anyone at WB even received copies of works in progress. A single cassette copy of each song made in the studio was handed straight to Prince. It was rare to make copies for anyone other than him or a band member.”

From all reports, the album was received enthusiastically (though it's hard to imagine a surprise visit by the label's biggest star eliciting a cool reception). But the project certainly raised a number of questions. It must have been clear on even a first listen that the album was a left turn from
Purple Rain
, with none of the flashy guitar and few of the pop hooks. “Raspberry Beret” and “Pop Life” gave the label some radio-friendly fare to work with, but tracks like “Tamborine” and “Temptation” were experimental, cerebral. Not that potential singles mattered for now, anyway, because Prince made it clear that he wanted no advance promotion for
Around the World
, hoping that fans would listen to it as a whole. (“This has got to be the easiest album I've ever worked on,” Warners creative marketing chief Jeff Ayeroff told the
Los Angeles Times
. “In a way, it's very refreshing—it's merchandising anarchy.”)

Most critically, of course, was the fact that shifting his focus to a new album meant that Prince was winding down
Purple Rain
, even as it remained the center of the live set and continued to sell by the truckload. “The promotion director was very concerned that we would be putting a stop on
Purple
Rain
,” says Bob Merlis. “It obviously could have been bigger if the next album held a little while—and that became the ongoing struggle between Prince and Warner Brothers.”

“I guess
Around the World
was a smart record, all things considered,” says Alan Leeds. “Anything too obvious might've been more successful at the time, but in the long run, it would not look good. Later, when I came off the road and was running his label, we would talk on almost a daily basis about how to get material to the market quicker. He told me once, ‘I look at these songs like newspapers. They're obsolete tomorrow. It's not stimulating for me to play, my head has moved on, so I need a machine that's more immediate.'

“So I think the answer is yeah, he was over
Purple Rain
. And he also realized that the most important thing was ‘How do you follow this?' and whether you like
Around the World
or not, smartly, there was no consideration of doing
Purple Rain 2
.”

Well . . . maybe not as an album, but Bob Cavallo was certainly looking at Prince's options in Hollywood. Though
Purple Rain
had turned out to be a blockbuster, Warner Bros. had been so unsure about the project that they had no rights to his next film. Cavallo claims that he negotiated a deal with the studio that would give Prince a deal comparable to what a star like Dustin Hoffman would have commanded at the time, with a significant percentage of the box-office gross.

“So I tell him, ‘Here's what we should do,' ” says Cavallo. “ ‘Warners wants a sequel. I know you won't do a sequel'—I understood that—‘but we could do
Purple Rain 2: The Further Adventures of The Time
.' That's my title, whether or not they
would call it that. I said, ‘The movie starts with the night of the show where he sings “Purple Rain,” and in the audience are some guys from Vegas. Prince wins; the Time get second prize, and that's a month in Vegas in some lounge.' Basically the story I tell him is ‘the Time go to Vegas, you come to play Vegas—so we'll have one scene with you—they come backstage and ask for your advice because they're in trouble with the cops, they're in trouble with the Mafia, and their only friends are the showgirls.' So you know the movie I'm envisioning: a big, monster movie, like a Martin and Lewis film, with a lot of great-looking broads and caricatured mob guys, whatever. He said that was, like, insulting to him.

“Morris Day came out of
Purple Rain
such a superstar,” he continues. “I wanted to make a movie with him. He said, ‘I'm not working with you anymore. You turned me into a clown.' I said, ‘Well, you're a comedian; is Richard Pryor a clown? What are you talking about? And secondly, do you really think that you'll be a superstar with your music career?' As soon as he started getting high, instead of thinking that Prince was helping him, he thought he was using him. The Time came out of that movie big; they could've had their own movie deal and made a series of films. That's what I believed.”

Day may have been the most visible disappointment, but he wasn't the only one to come out of the
Purple Rain
project with a distorted sense of his own standing. It was as if the confidence and fearlessness that Prince had drilled into all the musicians around him had become a liability. “The one thing that changed in me was a certain sense of stardom, almost an
ego-boost thing,” says Fink. “I wouldn't say I became snooty or arrogant—‘Look at me, I'm the greatest keyboard player in the world'—but Prince used to like to tell us how great we were. ‘How does it feel to be in the greatest band in the world?' It was almost like a Muhammad Ali–esque bravado, that kind of attitude. I never wanted to give in to that, I didn't want to get that thing that happens. And then all of a sudden, I found myself doing it and really believing it.”

Alan Leeds has also said that the Revolution “had an enormously inflated sense of their importance to the project. . . . They pretty much felt they were the second coming of the Beatles as a band.” Elaborating on these remarks, he seems to lay blame equally at the feet of the musicians and at those of their leader for building to an unsustainable set of expectations.

“The whole subplot,” he says, “was Prince basically convincing everybody that they were a self-contained band—‘It's not Prince and his backup band anymore, it's the Commodores. Yeah, I'm Lionel Richie, but we're still the Commodores.' And, amazingly, they bought it. I would just sit there and say, ‘Be careful, okay? I know you've got people screaming your name because you're in a movie, I get it, but Scorsese isn't calling you. Your film career—it isn't a new career. Don't stop playing guitar.' But they really bought it, so when that ended and he got bored and the security blanket was gone, they ­really felt dissed. . . . It was like a wife who had been cheated on. That's how they behaved. It was just mind-blowing. And I was like, ‘What planet are you on?' ”

Sometime in March—probably right around the time I saw
them play at Nassau Coliseum—Prince took the band aside for a pre-show meeting and told them that the tour would be ending after the April 7 show in Miami's Orange Bowl. They would not be continuing on to Europe or Asia or anywhere else around the world that was clamoring to hear them play.

“He had no interest in it,” says Fink. “I asked him why, and he said, ‘I've just had enough. I just don't want to do it.' And I went, ‘So what's gonna happen now?' and he goes, ‘Well, I'm gonna take two years off, and you guys can do whatever you want, as far as solo projects, or you can chill out, go be on retainer.' And that's it.

“And then within three months of the tour ending, he had
Around the World in a Day
ready to go. He gave us a little bit of a break, and then he was ready to jump back into another project, even though he had said it was going to be a much longer hiatus. Personally, I was hoping that we were going to do Europe with the Purple Rain tour—at least do a European leg of the tour, but he didn't. So in that sense I was a little disappointed.”

While his band may have been let down, his managers were frustrated that he didn't take advantage of the opportunity to extend the once-in-a-lifetime success of
Purple Rain
. “I said to him, ‘If you want to be Miles Davis and do whatever work you want, fine,' ” says Cavallo. “ ‘But if you want to be a pop strategist, you can't put out this fucking record now. It doesn't make any sense.' I never won the argument, but it impressed him. I said, ‘You can't be both Miles Davis and Elvis Presley.' ”

“His management was like, ‘You're missing it here; there's
something missing,' ” says Coleman. “ ‘Why are you doing this hippie thing now?' They were really pissed that he stopped the tour. And I was a little confused by that, too.”

“Why are we shifting so quickly?” Melvoin remembers thinking. “This doesn't feel right. You're gonna alienate a lot of people. I mean, I love the stuff, but wait a minute. Slow down.”

Mark Brown claimed that at end of tour, each band member got a $15,000 bonus. “It was a slap in the face,” he said.

Before the final show, Steve Fargnoli issued an announcement stating that the Miami date would “be [Prince's] last live appearance for an indeterminate number of years.” Fargnoli would say that when he asked Prince why he was taking time off, he explained that it was because he was going to “look for the ladder.” When he asked for further clarification, Prince replied, “Sometimes it snows in April.” These deliberately—some said annoyingly—cryptic responses both turned out to tease song titles from his next two albums.

In the end, the Purple Rain tour played to nearly 1.75 million people in thirty-two cities and grossed an estimated $30 million on ticket sales alone. While Prince pulled the plug after less than six months on the road, Bruce Springsteen kept on rolling; the Born in the USA tour went for fifteen months and more than 150 shows, following a run of U.S. arenas with dates in Australia and Asia, then Europe, and then returning to the States for a lap of stadiums before finally wrapping up on ­October 2.

Prince also courted controversy up to the very last date, when religious leaders in Miami expressed their disapproval
that his Orange Bowl show, for an audience of 55,000, was taking place on Easter Sunday. Whichever promoter gets the credit for that booking, the fact that Prince ended the tour supporting his greatest triumph on the day symbolizing the resurrection of Christ seemed particularly resonant (think back to that first attempt at a movie project,
The Second Coming
). Almost two years to the day after the end of the 1999 tour, when Prince turned his full attention to the unlikely, seemingly impossible creation of
Purple Rain
, it was all over.

“This has been the happiest season of my life,” Prince said from the stage. He ended the show saying, “I have to go now. I don't know when I'll be back. I want you to know that God loves you. He loves us all.”

After the show, he and Sheila E. turned up at an after-party at a Miami club. They both had very short haircuts, and Prince would only speak to
Miami Vice
star Don Johnson. There would be one final sour note to the tour, as well, when it was discovered that $1.6 million was missing from the accounts, and one of the promoters was charged with defrauding and misappropriating ticket revenues.

Just two weeks after the Miami show, with minimal warning or fanfare,
Around the World in a Day
arrived in record stores and quickly shot to number one;
Purple Rain
was still selling steadily, and while it started to fade after the release of the new album, it hung around the Top 200 until late 1985. Still, Prince did no interviews and no appearances, but later in the year, when he resurfaced for some unexpected press, he told MTV, “I don't plan on touring for a while. There are so
many other things to do.” But it wouldn't be too much longer before he was back on a stage, playing a series of one-off shows throughout the U.S. in the spring and summer of 1986 before kicking off a full-blown tour in London on August 12, 1986, to promote not only his next album,
Parade
, but also his new movie, the self-directed debacle
Under the Cherry Moon
.

In that same interview, he was asked if he was worried about a backlash after the astonishing popularity that he had attained with
Purple Rain
. “I don't live in a prison,” he said. “I am not afraid of anything. I haven't built any walls around myself, and I am just like anyone else. I need love and water, and I'm not afraid of a backlash because, like I say, there are people who will support my habits as I have supported theirs.

“I don't really consider myself a superstar,” said Prince. “I live in a small town, and I always will. I can walk around and be me. That's all I want to be. That's all I ever tried to be.”

ELEVEN

Thank U 4 a Funky Time

The success of
Purple Rain
, Prince once said “in some ways was more detrimental than good. . . . It pigeonholed me.”

There will always be one big, unanswerable question that lies behind Prince's decision to end the
Purple Rain
cycle so abruptly, and in one form or another, it looms over the rest of his exhilarating, baffling, unparalleled career. Did he choose to rescale things and allow himself to operate with more freedom than a stadium-filling, twenty-million-album-selling artist can have, or did he believe that anything he touched would automatically be that big? Was his ambition to be the world's biggest cult artist, or to be a global superstar—as Bob Cavallo put it, to be Miles Davis or Elvis Presley? Or had it become impossible for him to resolve this conflict?

In some ways, it's the classic artist's conundrum of creativity versus commerce. But there's a hubris that must come along with having the bestselling album in the country for six months and with pulling off a movie project that even those around you—much less the Hollywood establishment—had absolutely zero faith in. But did that kind of adulation scare Prince,
causing him to run from it so quickly, or did it warp him to the point that he really believed he could now do no wrong?