“Tonight we are going to make history.” Prince knew everything was going to happen, always. And he knew it before anyone could even imagine it. That great little genius from Minneapolis was always a few thoughts ahead of everyone else, whoever was around him, saw him, or heard him. And Prince always took those forward thoughts into action. Or, what is the same, to his records. Because, as he said at one point on Grammy night 2015, “records are still important.”
But it was another night when he knew he would make history. And the place was different. It was the humid summer night of August 3, 1983 at First Avenue, a nightclub in his hometown that he often used as a laboratory for his music. There, in front of about fifteen hundred people, Prince and his band The Revolution played “Purple Rain” for the first time, the song that would make him the star he always knew he was. And he was until the last moment of his life. It couldn’t be a coincidence that the last song he played live, on April 14, 2016, was “Purple Rain.” On April 21 he was found dead in his Paisley Park home in Minneapolis, the city he never left. He was just 57 years old.
In 1983, Prince, 24 years old, was already a prominent figure in the music world, but he was not as big as he pretended. Or, at least, he was not for the music industry, then dominated by Michael Jackson. Prince knew he was bigger than everyone, but he needed something to prove it, to tell the world what he was capable of and what he only displayed in feverish study sessions. And that would be Purple Rain, the definitive work, which does not necessarily mean that it was the best.
In fact, Purple Rain falls between “1999” (1982) and “Sign ‘o the Times” (1986). Both albums are better than Purple Rain, but it turns out that Purple Rain is something else, more transcendent if you will.
By then, Prince had made 15 albums in seven years: seven of them under his own name and the rest with bands from his factory, The Time, Sheila E., Vanity 6, Apollonia 6 and The Family. It was evident that he had plenty of music.
However, he lacked being the absolute star he knew he was. To do this he needed to expand his audience, be massive and as expansive as his music was and for this he needed the right product. That product was Purple Rain. It was the consecration of his rhythm and blues and funk music of his first works with the appearance of synthesizers, guitars, keyboards and drum machines. It’s Prince rocking like he’s never done before.
And it was, definitively, the consecration of Prince as what he always was: an extraordinary guitarist. Purple Rain is an album of guitar solos like no other has been. Michael Jackson needed Eddie Van Halen for “Beat It”, Prince on the other hand did not need any Eddie Van Halen for Purple Rain: he himself was Van Halen’s own.
On the night of August 3, 1983, at First Avenue, Prince played Purple Rain with a $200 guitar, a Hohner MADCAT, a copy of the Fender Telecaster, and it was enough to do incredible things that night.
Prince already had everything in mind, he had decided to record that show because, although no one knew it, it was going to be made up of songs from his next album. Outside the premises, almost incognito, there was a van with recording equipment inside from the Record Plant studios.
Purple Rain came out perfect and went, with a few tweaks, straight to album. One of the keys to the success of that performance was guitarist Wendy Melvoin, who was making her debut that night in The Revolution, Prince’s band.
“When Wendy Melvoin came on board to play guitar, it made a big difference. I was happy because she was my girlfriend, and Prince was very excited: she was like a new kitten to him, the way he treated her. You could feel a new beginning,” Lisa Coleman, Prince’s keyboardist since 1979 and one of the key players in his music of the first half of the 80s, would remember many years later. “I think he chose each of us for very reasons. simple, not because we were virtuous, although we were very good. There was another quality he needed to have about him: a mix of loyalty, a spirit of youthful hunger and a musical quality that he didn’t have. “Each of us had something that he didn’t have, even though he had everything.”
The Revolution was the other key to Purple Rain’s success: for the first time Prince opened the game. In fact, the lyrics for Purple Rain came about at the last minute and were a collaborative work. Prince had the music for a long time, but he needed someone to write the lyrics for him and the one he first thought of for that was Stevie Nicks, from Fleetwood Mac, but he simply couldn’t. Stevie Nicks, who still has the demo acoustic recording of Purple Rain that Prince gave her to write lyrics for, said: “I wouldn’t know where to start. It was so overwhelming, that 10-minute song… I heard it and I got scared (…) I called him back and said, ‘I can’t do it. I wish I could. It’s too much for me”.
“I still have the demo on cassette, with the instrumental song and a little part of Prince singing ‘Can’t get over that feeling’ or something like that,’” he recalled years later in an interview for Mojo magazine. On that tape Prince was singing something to fill it in while the final lyrics appeared. In the end, the lyrics were written during a day of rehearsal between Prince and the entire band.
Released on June 25, 1984, Purple Rain was recorded in a particular way, during the second half of 1983 and early 1984. Prince wrote all the songs on the album and some of them were modified by members of The Revolution. Songs like “I Would Die 4 U”, “Baby I’m a Star” and “Purple Rain” were recorded during the concert at the First Avenue club and later modified and re-edited. Thus, for the first time, Prince included material recorded live on a studio album.
The first two singles from the album were “When Doves Cry”, without bass lines, and “Let’s Go Crazy”, a furious mix of metal guitars, stone riffs and a hard funk rhythm. The title track, which gives the album its name, is a majestic ballad full of brilliant guitar flourishes.
But this couldn’t be all. Although the records were the most important thing, Prince had something else in mind: a movie for which Purple Rain would be the soundtrack. Released on July 27, 1984, the film was an absolute box office success: it grossed 68 million and had cost just seven. But Prince cared about something else: making a product that contained his genius. And he achieved it.
