Let's Go Crazy (30 page)

“Wendy and Lisa have worthy accomplishments on their own to be proud of—even if they'd never played for Prince, their résumés are respectable, and they're really good at what they do,” says Alan Leeds, who went on to work with such artists as Maxwell, Chris Rock, and D'Angelo after his time running Prince's Paisley Park record imprint. “The rest of the guys were the perfect fit for the band. I'm not hating the least little bit, but none of them have done anything of substance before or since. I'm not judging anybody, but they had the ride of their
life and got a big check. In Bobby and particularly Fink's case, the way they played their money, they were set for life. Prince was very generous, and they were smart about it, and now they work for fun.”

In June of 2000, Bobby Z, Matt Fink, and Mark Brown attended Prince's forty-second birthday party and jammed with him onstage. The national mega-promoter SFX made a major offer for a Revolution reunion tour. Wendy Melvoin took charge of the band and lined them all up to work, but Prince refused.

There was no communication for several years; in 2004, the Revolution members showed up at a club date Prince was playing at LA's House of Blues, and he proceeded to ignore them, inviting other musicians to join him onstage but not them. But after the show, Prince had his guitar tech call Melvoin and ask her to appear with him on Tavis Smiley's PBS talk show. Apparently the “Steve” side of Prince's personality came out to play that day. “He was the guy I knew when I first met him,” she said. “He was the guy who spent that night at my and Lisa's house on our pullout bed.”

In 2011, Bobby Z had a near-fatal heart attack in Minneapolis. Almost exactly a year later, on February 19, 2012, all the members of the Revolution gathered at First Avenue for a benefit show to celebrate his recovery. For ninety minutes, guitarists Melvoin and Dez Dickerson, keyboardists Lisa Coleman and Dr. Fink, bassist Mark Brown, saxophonist Eric Leeds, and drummer Bobby Z played a selection of Prince hits from the '80s to a sold-out room. “We're sentimental and we're nostalgic,” said Melvoin from the stage.

“To add to the one-of-a-kind spirit of the fund-raiser,” wrote the
Star Tribune
, “each of the Revolutionaries did a dramatic recitation from the movie
Purple Rain
. Good laughs all around.” A guitar was set up in case Prince decided to swing by at the last minute, but he didn't show.

In 2014, Apollonia served as the “VIP host” for the now-annual benefit, marking her first trip back to Minneapolis since the movie wrapped. After the First Avenue show, which included Bobby and Fink and various other local artists, she visited Paisley Park, where Prince took her on a tour of the complex, showing her the Purple Rain room and paintings that included her image. He then played a surprise late-night set with 3rdEyeGirl, which did not include a new song he had recently recorded called “This Could Be Us,” named for a popular Internet meme that featured an iconic
Purple Rain
photo of the Kid and Apollonia on his motorcycle.

At 4:42 that morning, Kotero put up a Facebook post, which read in part: “Heard new music that was dope! He had a cool chair for me on the stage at his side, and I sat there transfixed on every note, every move, every vocal. After every song I yelled and clapped my ass off. . . . And Prince . . . my heart still skip's [
sic
] a beat.” The post was deleted a few hours later.

While the band members have always been able to keep their hands in music over the decades, things have been a bit spottier for Kotero. She had a recurring role on
Falcon Crest
immediately following
Purple Rain
. In 1988, she released a widely ignored solo album, and went on to appear in a number of straight-to-video films and made her own workout video. A
highlight of her appearances on various reality shows was an episode of
MTV Cribs
featuring Apollonia and her next-door neighbor Carmen Electra, one of her successors as a bombshell Prince protégée. She now concentrates on her management company, Kotero Entertainment, and when approached about an interview for this book, replied very politely that she is working on a book of her own.

Jill Jones's self-titled 1987 album is considered one of the more interesting side projects in the Prince catalogue, but has long been out of print. Jones released a few more albums, and toured as a vocalist with Chic before moving back to Los Angeles and joining the corporate world.

In addition to his work with Prince—
Sign o' the Times
and the music videos from the 1989
Batman
sound track—Albert Magnoli directed the
Purple-Rain
-on-a-balance-beam gymnastics drama
American Anthem
in 1986 and a few made-for-TV films, and co-directed Sylvester Stallone's
Tango & Cash
.

The one person involved in
Purple Rain
who might credibly claim that it was not the high point of his career is Bob Cavallo. After parting ways with Prince, he went on to form a management company that handled such multiplatinum acts as Green Day, Seal, and Alanis Morissette, and also a film company that produced hits including
12 Monkeys
and
City of Angels
. In 1998, Cavallo was named to the position of chairman of the Buena Vista Music Group—later the Disney Music Group—overseeing all of the Walt Disney Company's recorded music and music publishing operations, where he served until retiring in 2012. He sure seems to be living the good life now; during
our interview, he excused himself several times for phone calls to finalize details for an upcoming vacation trip across the Atlantic Ocean with his wife on the
Queen Mary 2
.

And then there's Prince. Depending how you count, he has released twenty-five albums since
Purple Rain
, give or take. He made three more films. He has toured the world repeatedly, sometimes as a major, arena-scale operation, and sometimes as a low-flying hit-and-run mission. Most infamously, he changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol (an early version of which appeared on his
Purple Rain
motorcycle) and wrote the word “slave” on his face as part of an ongoing feud with Warner Bros. Records—after signing a deal with them that was reported to be worth $100 million. It made him something of a laughingstock, and in many ways his career has never fully recovered. But as digital rights and distribution became the single dominant issue of the twenty-first-century music business, it is also unarguably true that he helped bring awareness to the complex questions around creative copyright long before most of the world noticed.

“What we want,” Prince said to me in 2004, “is the easiest, most efficient way to get the business done, that can be as second-nature and organic as picking up a guitar. In Silicon Valley, they're all coming to work with their jeans on, all cool; it's all beautiful, all life. That's how it should be.

“The cool thing about being independent,” he continued, “is you're not handed a schedule and told, ‘This is what you're going to do.' Your psyche works completely differently. You're
not always reacting to things. You feel you're in a creative mode, and that's what keeps you alive, keeps you young.”

It's a philosophy that is easy enough to comprehend, even to sympathize with; but as a fan, it's also easy to get frustrated with Prince. His crusade has been driven by the desire to put out as much music as possible, which would be one thing if his albums were of the consistently excellent standard we know he is capable of. (It's also a lot easier to say “Music should be free, anyway,” as he told me back in 1994, after you've signed a $100 million deal.) For so long, though, his releases have been such a mixed bag, so difficult to keep track of, much less to actually decode. It's equally easy to over- or underestimate almost anything he does at this point. Though it slowed down his brain in a way he clearly couldn't sustain, even a fraction of the meticulous editing and unwavering focus he gave to
Purple Rain
would go a long way toward raising his batting average.

But he's not really interested in that. “Shouldn't it be up to the artist how the music comes out?” he said to me in 1994, shortly after he had changed his name and his obsessions were escalating. “They're just songs, just our thoughts. Nobody has a mortgage on your thoughts. We've got it all wrong, discouraging our artists. In America, we're not as free as we think.”

It seems as if—much like Stevie Wonder, one of the few artists who can truly be held up as a comparable talent—there came a day when Prince just got tired of writing hit singles, became bored by how effortless his melodic gift was. Since the dawn of the 1990s, his albums have all felt like genre experiments or unfinished sketches, while his real attention was de
voted to business matters. Nor has he explored more personal issues, even in the stylized treatment they were given in
Purple Rain
, other than the religious narrative of 2001's
The Rainbow Children
and, most painfully, the songs anticipating his son's birth on 1996's
Emancipation
; the loss of his newborn child, who was born with an extremely rare skull malformation, and the subsequent end of his marriage to Mayte Garcia, may have closed certain doors that might never open again.

“
Purple Rain
was the best part of all of his triggers,” says Wendy Melvoin. “He used it well, because he was excited. Now he's fifty-some years old; he's not as excited about it, and he doesn't want to have anything to do with his triggers, and he's shape-shifted into this completely different person who reads scripture and tells you fucking parables.”

And then every once in a while, whether inspired by creativity or commerce, he can flick a switch and connect with a huge audience again. Tying in to the relaunch of the
Batman
franchise in 1989 proved a good fit, with a hit sound track and a few big singles. In 1994, the gauzy ballad “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World” was matched with some promotion and touring and gave Prince the first number one of his career in the UK. In 2004, the
Musicology
album demonstrated that he at least understood the kind of sound that casual fans wanted from him and brought him back to the top of the charts and the touring world, and his Super Bowl halftime show proved he could continue to scale newer and bigger heights. But while it still feels like he could resurrect himself as a pop star whenever he chooses to, these resurgences are getting farther and
farther apart, and the Top 40 world is a rough place for anyone in their mid-fifties.

It's impossible to take
Purple Rain
out of Prince's history, but if we could, would we still think of him as a world-class superstar? Or would we instead consider him an experimental pop figure, “the world's top indie artist,” as
The New Yorker
recently called him, with a million people who will follow him down whichever path he chooses—which sure seems like an enviable position for an artist to establish.

“It's almost a uniquely huge cult he has,” says Leeds, “because ‘cult' usually implies ‘small'—and it ain't small if you can sell out Madison Square Garden three nights in a row. There are guys with a lot of hit records who can't sell out three Gardens in a row. So he has convinced people that he's worth seeing no matter what: no matter what your current record is, no matter who's in your band, because you change that all the time, and nobody really gives a shit anymore.

“I'm hard-pressed to think of anyone—maybe Paul McCartney—who could do three shows in a row, and have three different set lists, and be just as good each night. Here's a guy who you can go in and say, ‘I want to hear the hits,' and he
doesn't
do the hits, but you're not mad because what he does is so great that you don't even care.”

Thirty years later, Prince continues to make new music, to work with new musicians. Though
Purple Rain
will always stand as his crowning achievement, he has refused to allow it to define him, and has never fallen into the trap of becoming an oldies act. Maybe there's something else—so much
else—that his fans still want from him, but in fighting against the powerful siren song of nostalgia he has remained a creative force, and there are still plenty of us who wait eagerly for the next installment.

“I get why he doesn't want to celebrate the anniversaries or any of that stuff,” says Chris Rock. “You can't be a legend and a current artist at the same time. You can't be in the Hall of Fame and still play—everybody in the Hall of Fame is retired. I'd rather play, and I'm sure Prince would, too.”

So was there a real legacy left by
Purple Rain
? Was it just an odd eruption, a fluky confluence (however well planned and executed) of the right songs by the right artist at the right time, or did it make a lasting mark?

Over the years, the film continues to show up on screens as it has entered the world of Midnight Movies and cult classics. It played at Brooklyn's Prospect Park as a public sing-along screening for thousands of people, and in San Francisco at the Castro Theater for an audience of drag queens who dressed up as the characters. Punk cabaret singer-songwriter-provocateur Amanda Palmer and her band donned Revolution-inspired outfits and played the whole
Purple Rain
album as part of a 2013 New Year's Eve show at New York's Terminal 5 club. In 1984, Steven Ivory wrote a quickie biography of Prince that contained the prescient observation that “years from now, the movie will remain a cult favorite among rock music fans, not
unlike the success of the '70s rock musical
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
.”

“As big as it was, I think it's the most underrated thing,” says Bob Cavallo. “They talk about
The Song Remains the Same
or whatever; all I know is, I've never seen anything like this.”