Let's Go Crazy (31 page)

Certainly, it has been imitated on-screen by other musicians, for better and for worse. Mariah Carey's disastrous
Glitter
and Eminem's triumphant
8 Mile
were both essentially the exact same movie as
Purple Rain
—though the movie's classic, formulaic plot (underdog star struggles to be recognized for his unique talent while competing for romantic love) is not exactly original enough to warrant too much credit. And the extent to which the fascination with the movie was dependent on Prince's mystique and inaccessibility is completely out of step with today's media universe, where any sense of mystery has been replaced by rap's ongoing obsession with authenticity and “realness,” plus the mandatory social media oversharing from every aspiring pop star.

Yet in the decade after the 1984 supernova, which saw the rise of Spike Lee (who claimed
Purple Rain
as an inspiration) and other young black filmmakers and the successful migration of hip-hop stars and themes—from
Boyz n the Hood
to
New Jack City
—to movie screens, it would seem that the movie's triumph did change the playing field. The music, of course, continues to echo infinitely, through the work of OutKast, Lenny Kravitz, Alicia Keys, Pharrell Williams, Daft Punk, ­Beyoncé, and Beck, from their drum sounds to their ballad singing, in more ways than can be imagined.

Alan Leeds notes that in all his work on the road during the last thirty years, there is always an inevitable moment when someone pops the
Purple Rain
DVD into the tour bus player. “If you're a writer or a producer or a roadie, there's some moment as a young person that captivated you,” he says. “When you said, ‘I don't want a real job—I want to be part of this.' And most of the people that I work with today, the Prince Era, meaning '80s Prince, that's their inspiration, their benchmark. That's what motivated them to want to do this.”

“
Purple Rain
showed me that you don't have to do what everybody expects,” says Darius Rucker, who has topped the rock and country charts. “That being a black kid didn't mean I had to just sing R&B. Prince was such an influence to not let anybody tell me what I can sing or what I can be. I looked up to him; I wanted to be Prince—this little short kid who was just killing them!”

“Prince has all these kids now,” says Chris Rock. “You get older and your influence goes in different ways; it doesn't have to just be in music. So there's Spike Lee, Ice Cube—he has big albums and big movies.
Friday
was a movie that's nothing but an Ice Cube album, the same way
Purple Rain
was. I don't exist without Prince. He might not like that now—he's a Jehovah's Witness, and I'm this cursing comedian!”

“Since then, who has done this?” asks Albert Magnoli. “Nobody. It's really hard to bring a musical individual into a film place. It's hard to transfer; a motion picture reveals too much.”

Susan Rogers emphasizes just how different Prince was, especially at his moment of breakthrough, from the other
stars at his altitude. “Michael Jackson, Madonna, Bruce Springsteen, the Rolling Stones, Elton John—they all had producers and session musicians. They had the best players. Prince was one guy who was writing and arranging and producing, and he was competing with all of them on that level. One guy.

“Patti Smith wrote that book called
Just Kids
, talking about the New York art scene—there were a lot of artists, it was truly a scene. This was a scene of
one guy
who created his own competition in order to
be
a scene. Who does that?”

One element of
Purple Rain
that has clearly had a life of its own over the years is the title song, which, in addition to solidifying over time as Prince's signature composition and fail-safe showstopper, has been covered by a wide variety of artists in a crazy array of settings. Adam Levine sang it at Howard Stern's sixtieth birthday party, while Phish (who have dropped the song into their sets off and on for years) played it during a July Fourth show at Long Island's Jones Beach ­Theater before going into “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

“ ‘Purple Rain' was basically a challenge,” says country singer LeAnn Rimes. “I wanted to explore something new and prove to myself and the whole world that I could do a lot more than what they had heard from me. Through the years, during my concerts, it's one of the main songs fans scream out for me to sing. I've rocked it out, I've performed it acoustic—it changes as I change. It will forever remain one of the most ­influential songs of my musical journey, and I will forever remain one of the biggest Prince fans.”

A young Tori Amos began playing “Purple Rain” in her cocktail lounge set immediately after first seeing the movie in 1984, and it has consistently turned up in her shows ever since. “It was like a hymn, like a religious experience, and maybe that's what spoke to me, growing up in church,” she says. “It wasn't filled with guilt but with compassion, taking yourself out of a situation and acknowledging that you might have hurt someone. It was like nothing I had really encountered in that way—a song that could be vulnerable and yet in control.

“Something was opened up in my heart by ‘Purple Rain,' especially near the end of the song when he goes really high. It seemed not funereal, but like a requiem to me. I remember bawling my eyes out when I first heard it. It woke something up in me—memories, sadness, deep longing; it touches so many emotions.”

“The whole movie blew me away, but when he played ‘Purple Rain,' that was really it,” says Darius Rucker, who has also made the song a regular feature of his concerts. “I got the album, and by the third time listening to it, I was like, ‘This guy has just written “Hey Jude”—he's written the perfect rock and roll ballad.' I wanted to sing it ever since. We talked about it in Hootie but just never did it. One day, the guys in my band came up and asked if I'd ever thought about doing ‘Purple Rain.' I said yes, forever, but I didn't think it would work in a country show. And they were like, ‘Oh, it'll work.'

“I love playing it, but I didn't think it would be something people would come to expect from me. Now I can't stop—I
mentioned on Twitter that I was going to stop doing it, and people went crazy. But every night I just love it; it makes me so happy when I hear those first chords.”

“Purple Rain” has also become a popular selection in the world of karaoke.
Rolling Stone
's Rob Sheffield, whose 2013 book
Turn Around Bright Eyes
is an examination of karaoke culture, says that it's clearly the Prince song of choice, though it poses its own challenges. “Sometimes you'll see somebody attempt it and then they look like a deer in the purple headlights, in those long pauses from line to line,” he says. “It's a song that requires you to stand your ground and handle those pauses. It forces you to call upon your reserves of charisma—when you sing ‘Purple Rain,' you're spending a lot of time standing there without a guitar to look busy with, so you have to go all the way into the song. You can't do that one casually or mockingly.”

Though he says he's seen attempts at “Let's Go Crazy” and a “surprising number” of “Darling Nikkis,” Sheffield thinks “Purple Rain” offers more latitude than other Prince songs. “There's really no way to karaoke ‘When Doves Cry' or ‘Raspberry Beret' without the constant pitfall of imitating the man, because his vocal mannerisms are so integral to the melody and rhythm. ‘Purple Rain' is more of a ‘standard' in the sense that you can sing it without seeming like you're just copying the original vocal. The song still has lots of his personality (practically everybody who attempts it does the ‘that means you, too!' part, often with a bit of air guitar), but it isn't dependent on whether or not you can do a good Prince. It's a song
that's kind to a mediocre or ordinary voice (like the voice that most of us karaoke obsessives have, definitely including me).”

In a classroom—with full recording studio capabilities—at New York University's Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, two dozen students gather on a Friday morning for a class titled “Topics in Recorded Music: Prince.” According to the syllabus, the course will “explore the joys and contradictions of Prince's music and business practices.” The instructors are Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson (who has to hustle each week from the classroom to his gig as bandleader on the
Tonight Show
) and Harry Weinger, a Grammy-winning reissue producer who serves as vice president of A&R for UMe, the catalogue division of Universal Music Group (Weinger has long overseen the reissue projects for such soul treasure troves as the vaults of James Brown and Motown Records). Today's subject is “ ‘Baby I'm a Star': Prince Goes Mainstream in the 1980s,” and the students are greeted with a pop quiz (sample questions: “Who was the female guitarist and female keyboard player in
Purple Rain
?” and “What's the name of the dance performed by the Time in
Purple Rain
?”)

The class watches video of the Time performing on
Soul Train
, and Questlove demonstrates the progression of drum machine technology during these few years. Footage of James Brown during his incomparable performance on
The TAMI Show
in 1964 is compared with unreleased clips of Prince leading the Revolution on the Purple Rain tour. Of course, it's
difficult to show even the official music videos, since Prince has them removed from YouTube as soon as they get put up; at the last minute, Weinger had to order a VHS copy of
The Hits
video collection just to screen the “1999” clip.

The students, all aspiring musicians or music professionals, giggle while watching sultry clips of Vanity 6 onstage and make comments both sophisticated (“How did Prince's business arrangements work with his protégé groups like the Time?”) and more innocent (no one in the class can identify a song by the Police). Still, they watch, rapt, when Questlove puts on that very first performance of “Purple Rain” from First Avenue—which, in fact, is pulled down the following week in the ongoing cat-and-mouse game Prince plays with the web.

Purple Rain
entered history long ago. Questlove and ­Weinger's class grants the project the respect that it's due. It is in no way demeaning to the rest of a glorious career to say that it will forever stand as the pinnacle of Prince's achievements. It represents the confluence of so many strands of his own creativity and ambition and of so many cultural trends that it could never have happened before or since. And given the splintering of the music audience that followed its colossal ­success, it seems likely that we will never again agree on anything the way we agreed on
Purple Rain
.

However often he says or acts otherwise, there is clearly a part of Prince that is aware of his contributions to history. Back in the Rocketown dressing room in 2004, in the early morning hours, he grew a bit more reflective. He was about to pack it in—to pass out some Jehovah's Witness literature
to the fans still gathered outside and then jump into his limo and speed off into the Nashville night. But he had one final thought to offer.

“When you're a young man, you think you're the center of the universe,” he told me. “Later you see you're just part of it. The world is only going to get harder. Me and my crew, we love having conversations about music, but when we get deep, we talk about the future, about what we're leaving for the kids.”

But this side will always be at war with the part of Prince that insists, in the words of the legendary baseball pitcher Satchel Paige, “Don't look back—something might be gaining on you.” Even as he shocked and delighted his fans with the news that he had mended fences with his longtime nemeses at Warner Bros. and would finally be revisiting his catalogue, he celebrated in the only way he knows: that night he put out a new song, a devastating ballad called “The Breakdown” that many listeners instantly called a return to form unlike anything he had released in years. The message was clear—the chance to regain control of his master tapes was something he had sought for decades, but the music always needed to keep moving forward. Always.

Or maybe it's all part of the show. As in
Purple Rain
, blurring the lines between fantasy and reality, creating a character that was larger than life but still mysterious, building a life in which nothing and no one could get in between the artist and his music, was all part of what it took for a kid from Minneapolis to conquer the world.

In 1994, at San Francisco's Club DV8, he ordered us both a glass of port and offered me a lollipop because, he said, he didn't think I smoked cigars. Leaning over and whispering conspiratorially, Prince lifted his glass and offered a toast.

“To Oz.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First and foremost, thanks to Prince. Though his adamant, longtime resistance to looking back and talking about his past meant that I had no reason to even approach him about participating in this project, his music has brought me more joy than I can say. My dealings with him over the years—some of them recounted in these pages—have seldom been easy, but have always been a pleasure. And the guy is just so damn funky.

Thank you to everyone who spoke to me for this book, all of whom were generous, patient, and giving. Extra credit to Lisa Kanclerz Coleman for assistance above and beyond the call of duty. The glories of social media made it much easier to track everybody down, but thanks also to Renata Kanclerz, Sharrin Summers, Ebie McFarland, Olga Makrias, Lori Nafshun, and Devon Wambold for introductions and guidance. David Prince, David Brendel, and
Roseann Warren passed along some invaluable links and files.