Prince's 'Purple Rain' (Part 1 - The Album): Everything You Didn't Know

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Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio.

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Speaker 2: Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show that brings you the secret histories and little known fascinating facts and figures behind your favorite TV shows, movies, music, and more. We are your two autocratic polymaths of Midwestern Minutia, flexing our dominance of multiple mediums to bring you the first ever two part Too Much Information movie album tie in Purple Brain. Baby shouts to Andre, who is a bit been petitioning us on Twitter for months to do this, and I'm not sure if this would be more than he barret am I more than you bargained for yet? Baby, because we're about to do fifteen pages on just the record, and next week we're going to do the movie. So I've obviously now given away the order in which we are doing this. But my thought process was this which came first. Technically, the earliest Purple Rain song could be written was Baby on a Star, which Prince wrote in nineteen eighty one. The bulk of the album was more or less written and recorded, finalized and recorded between July of nineteen eighty three and March of nineteen eighty four, while the film started shooting on Halloween nineteen eighty three and wrapped forty two days later. So while these two pieces of art are inextricable for our purposes, this part will tackle Prince's life and career in music up to and including the album, and Part two will focus on the movie's production, reception, legacy, etc. Just gonna speak truth here. There's never and never will be again a person like Prince. We'll stop not gonna happen. I apologize to all of you, Jacob Collier, like all you bedroom musical polymaths who think you are coming close, but you're not. This guy had the entirety of the Black American musical tradition at his fingertips, but was also constantly, relentlessly pushing forward into the future with drum machines and synths. He was so so horny, but also so mystical in a way that made cosmology and dirty talk seem like natural bedfellows. And he was so relentlessly self driven and self possessed in his productivity and curation of artistic output that there is a very good likelihood we will never truly hear everything the man did. That's Prince. Who else you know? You can't have someone that combines James Brown's charisma and also self regard, Michael Jackson's fleet feet and sky high voice, Jimmy Hendrix's guitar, wizardry and moon eyed mysticism, slyestones color and genderblind vision of musical Utopia's Stevie Wonder's musical polymathy, and then all of that went into a blender with again so much horniness and also androgyny studio, wizardry, the fashion iconoclasm, dancing, and he did it all from Minneapolis. It's like somebody asked John Carpenter once what they thought about John Romero, and he was like, well, he makes movies in Pittsburgh. Somebody's got to do it. So it's like, yeah, man, you think about Prince, you think about guys on Prince's level, and it's like, I don't know, Miles Davis, like the center of the like in New York or for the decades, or Stevie Wonder, you know, in Detroit and LA and then you're like, oh yeah, and then there's Prince out in the hinterlands creating an entire universe unto himself.

00:03:39
Speaker 1: Higel, I have a really shameful confession to make about Prince, and I'm really embarrassed to do this both in front of you and also our dear listeners.

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Speaker 2: Let me put it this way.

00:03:51
Speaker 1: The time when we were coming into awareness musical awareness, I should say, in the late nineties and early two thousands was kind of the worst.

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Speaker 2: Time to be a Prince fan. I feel it was. And I, okay, no, dude, we're in alignment on this, because good, good, good good. My earliest musical memories are just like in the car and with my dad, the two classic rock stations that he vacillated between would never have played any Prince and what my mom had on in the car was just like the more bland kind of sixties seventies pop throwback, and that included Motown. That's the first place I heard Motown. But I did not hear Prince on that either. And you would see Purple Rain like named his stuff, and you kind of, oh, this song sound that song sounds familiar, but like the depth of his artistry was not at the four of the conversation in the mid nineties because he was churning out jazz fusion records with no name, you.

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Speaker 1: Know, Yeah, I mean this was the whole artist formerly known as Era, and he was kind of, I feel like, in the late nineties and early two thousands, an eccentric punchline, like sort of slightly less troubling Michael Jackson. And this this might just have been the Dave Chapelle connection, but I sort of viewed Prince as a kid as like on par with Rick James or something, which.

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Speaker 2: No, that's real, and I don't get okay, I can't get into the weeds of that in this episode because I didn't think it was germane to the conversation, but it is a real thing, I think, if I recall correctly, Rick James did like accuse Prince of like ripping off his oh his sort of vibes and music. Let me just fact check that real quick.

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Speaker 1: So yeah, I mean the eighties in general have always been kind of my big blind spot for the reasons you mentioned. I mean, I aligned myself with like the boomer music of the fifties, sixties, and seventies, and I live through the nineties and onwards, so the eighties were just kind of my own personal dead zone. So I admittedly didn't dive super deep into his catalog, probably until after his death. I have to say, and for that, I feel like I need to atone Oh interesting, when did you get into him college?

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Speaker 2: My big thing was I bought Sign of the Times on cassette tape, played it in my saturn constantly, so like that album is more in my head than any other one. But I also really love Dirty Mind. Obviously Purple Rain nineteen ninety nine is great too. I start to tune out around the under the Cherry Moon, around the world. Yeah, eras well. You know, there were people who were a whole hog for it, and so that's yeah, I mean, that's my standard boilerplate white hipster music guy answer. About Prince and the fact that he was famous for chasing his music offline. That was the big thing when we were both writing professionally about music online. The whole thing about Prince was that you couldn't find it. He was just like buy the CDs from my website. You know, there was no all of it was not on YouTube. And you would hear these rumors about, like, oh, Prince did this legendary cover of Creep at Bonnaroo or something. People talked about it like it was the Sermon on the Mount and no one could see it or hear it and then like he equipped about it. I mean he put it. He was like the creep covers back on YouTube, get it before my lawyers do or something like that.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, So that was everything, that was it. It was his doing though, right, I mean he was the one who I mean, he was one of.

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Speaker 2: The and again the incredible forward thinking of him. Like before Taylor Swift really brought in the Weeds music contract free to the to the full the mass, Yeah, to the masses exactly, Prince was out there saying everything like if you own slave on his face. Yeah, you know, I think his thing was if you don't own the masters, the if you don't own your masters, your label owns you, uh, something to that effect. And he was so you know, he dug his pointy little heels in man, and that's what gave him the hip pain that killed him all. I mean I admired these you know, him and Pearl Jam who like essentially blacklisted themselves from the live circuit for years in the nineties because they were trying to fight Ticketmaster. Like if you're at the top of the world and you use that platform to push back against some it will cost you. But it is that much more admirable well said well from Princes less than Royal upbringing to how the title track was inspired by Bob Seeger, possibly Journey and Stevie Nicks, to how Prince and the band wound up covered in shredded doves at one video shoot. Here's everything you didn't know about Prince's Purple Rain. Prince, much like the recent topic of this podcast, Jim Morrison, could be cagey about his upbringing and interviews throughout the early eighties, he'd variously described his dad as Italian Filipino, half black, half Italian, or describe his parents' marriage as an interracial one. The truth of the matter is that both of his parents were black. His father, John L. Nelson, took part in the Great Migration, as it's referred to, of many people black people from the South coming up in the post war era to find work in the cities. He left Louisiana for Minneapolis, and he would work at the Honeywell plant for over thirty years. He then fell in love with Mattie Shaw, a young jazz singer, and the two married. It was Nelson's second marriage and they had their firstborn child, Prince Rogers Nelson born on June seventh, nineteen fifty eight. He was named after his dad's stage name, which is funny, and they called him Skipper to differentiate him from his dad Prince, which is one of the most cognitively disconnected nicknames I could ever imagine.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, And didn't he like answer to that even later in life too.

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Speaker 2: I don't know, man, I mean, part of what we'll get into is that the like this, the ascendency of this album and film started his him with his dad. Oh no, I was going to say, isolated him further. So, although Prince's parents split when he was eight, they'd already given him a musical jumpstart. His dad played drums, Maddie sang. They were a working jazz trio, and Prince would recall later that watching his parent's band at the age of five jump started his love of music. But Prince's relationship with his dad did not improve after the divorce. Famously, he was kicked out of his dad's house as a teenager, with one explanation of red being that he was caught with a girl and his dad was super conservative and religious sexually and every other way, and disowned him or threw out of the house, and he basically just spent years bouncing around with friends and relatives in Minneapolis, and he would often tell the story of breaking down in a phone booth while begging his dad to take him back home as the last time I cried Jesus, Yeah, it's grim. Prince would later just describe his dad as a very strict disciplinarian, but he might have been doing some waffling there. Maybe. Susan Rogers, who is Prince's engineer from nineteen eighty three to nineteen eighty eight. Her name will come up a lot here, said that he once confided to her that he'd been abused as a kid. She said he had a weird name, he was small, which would have been enough to get bullied as a Innao, Minneapolis. Yeah, I wonder if any of the replacements ever bullied him. Now I don't think so. I think they just I think they just missed each other on the fame, Like Prince was like famous enough that Purple Rain was taking off while the replacements were still like not the replacements at all, Like Paul Westerberg has something about like I tried to dig it up, but I don't have the Replacements book anymore because it's so sad. Bob Muir's fantastic Trouble Boys the story of the Replacements, and I think in there there's an anecdote about Paul Westerberg seeing Prince at like a urinal in First Avenue and he knew who he was. First Avenue is the Minneapolis music venue, which you'll all say hear a lot during this episode, and he was like, hey, Prince, like, what's up? And Prince Like, while peeing was like life, and then walked out.

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Speaker 1: And everybody who's curious about what a young Prince was like at age ten or eleven, there's a great video clip that was making the rounds a few years ago of a young Prince I think he's eleven years old being interviewed on a picket line for a teachers strike by news crew and it's I mean, it's very clearly obviously Prince like he still has that attitude and that swag at age eleven.

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Speaker 2: It's amazing. So then they look that up. Yeah, it's really quite a horrible but also threatening. Yeah, there's that like laser focus. I know, I know Prince would also put stronger claims in his songs than he wouldn't interviews. He has a song called Papa that features the lyric don't abuse children or else they turn out like me. Weird thing to say. I mean, you know whatever that means abuse in that could cover a lot of words. Yeah, Prince didn't get along with his stepdad, his mom's new husband, and I believe he described clashing with him, but that left her to teach young Prince about the birds and the bees when it was time, and she did so by giving him some old playboys, which is hilarious when you consider his horniness. But you know, he was also a shy, really introverted kid who didn't conform to Minneapolis's usual vision of masculinity, and he was a target for that too. He would say, I went through a lot when I was a boy. They called me sissy, punk freak, the hard F word.

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Speaker 3: See.

00:13:45
Speaker 2: Girls loved you, but the boys hated you. They called me princess. And also in his song, he talked about having seizures until he was seven, So just throw that into the mix.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, he didn't really talk about that until the end of his life. Gave an interview to Tavis Smiley. He said, I used to have seizures when I was young. My mother and father didn't know what to do or how to handle it, but they did the best they could with what little they had. My mother told me one day I walked into her room and said, Mom, I'm not going to be sick anymore. And she said why, And I said, because an angel told me so. Yes, and so it was incredible. Prince answer. Yeah.

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Speaker 2: As he grew into adolescence, Prince found himself living with a high school friend who had a band, and he basically lived in this kid's basement for a while, getting familiar with various instruments and honing his craft. And he was also, as is well known by this point, no slouch at basketball during this time period either. And once again he must have had a time machine man or like, was not sleeping because the ten thousand hours he put in to achieve I mean, it might have been ten thousand hours at each of those things, you know, people, not the four octave vocal range, but the guitar, playing, the bass, playing the keyboard playing, I mean drumming. Yeah, that is just really to get that fluent, he must not have been sleeping. I for basketball, yes, sex, yeah, and also so tiny.

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Speaker 1: He was five foot two, that's like Lady Gaga height. That can't be.

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Speaker 2: How could he have been that good at basketball getting dominated by prints on the basketball court and then like seeing him later prancing around in like assless chaps and ripping a guitar solo. Must have crushed so many Minneapolis men in their middle age.

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Speaker 1: And the ping pong We forgot about his prowess at ping pong?

00:15:43
Speaker 2: Yes, your favorite story, which I'm sure you have. You shoehorned this in later. I didn't know, no, but tact full of you. Yeah.

00:15:50
Speaker 1: Prince and Michael Jackson faced off on the on the ping Pong table famous musical rivals. That was kind of their main their main showdown. Who on oh Prince, Prince, Prince scared off MJ and uh and as MJ slunk away, Prince said the very un PC did you see that he's playing like Helen Keller?

00:16:13
Speaker 2: And then what's the other Prince MJ thing where Prince aggressively played Prince slap base in Michael Jackson's face. I don't know, Michael Jackson.

00:16:22
Speaker 1: Michael Jackson the next day referred to him as a big meanie because will I am will I am was like, Hey, Prince has got a show tonight, Michael, do you want to go see him?

00:16:31
Speaker 2: He's playing in Vegas when it come with me? All right?

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Speaker 1: And so he like went and like sat in the front row and Prince came down and yeah, played aggressive slap base in his face, and it ruffled Michael.

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Speaker 2: He's a big meanie. Yeah.

00:16:46
Speaker 1: So Prince co founded his first band with his cousin at age thirteen, and they were called Grand Central, which I assume was a nod to Graham Central Station. I had to found it by slap base. But again get back on the slap base train, slap based Larry Graham. A young Prince's group played original songs that were inspired by Sly and the Family Stone and Earth Wind and Fire. But one of his weirder, or I guess i'll say unexpected influences was Joni Mitchell.

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Speaker 2: Did you know, Yes, he loved Joni Mitchell. Love Jonni Mitchell. One of the when piano and a microphone came out the which we'll get to later. Yeah, nineteen eighty three recordings of him just running through really songs and sketches for songs on the piano. People pointed out how some of the melodies and playing sounded like some of like Joni Mitchell's River in particular was compared to Purple Rain, which I think is really funny. But yeah, I love that for him. And also you can hear it like some of the just the upper effortless like upper registered leaps and navigating there. It's like not that hard to connect Joni's voice to Prince's voice.

00:17:52
Speaker 1: Joni's name features prominently on the cover art for Prince's nineteen eighty one album Controversy, and the song titled ice Cream Castles is a reference to her immortal feel bad anthem both sides now and Prince, I love this so much. He apparently sent her so many fan letters as a young boy that Joni's management thought it was quote from the Lunatic Fringe, and he went to see her play in Minneapolis at age fifteen. So what would that have been around like nineteen seventy three or so. And Joni said years later that she actually remembered him. She said he had distinctive eyes like an Egyptian wall painting, which is pretty cool in a She's not wrong.

00:18:36
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:18:38
Speaker 1: In a nineteen eighty five INU for Rolling Stone, Prince was asked whether or not he liked any.

00:18:43
Speaker 2: Current pop music.

00:18:44
Speaker 1: Prince replied, Nah, The last album I loved all the way through was The Hissing of Summer Lawns, Joni Mitchell's nineteen seventy five album Awesome.

00:18:53
Speaker 2: I feel like he would have been a hijira guy. Is that the The one was the fusion one with Jocko? Yeah. Yeah. Another of Prince's early bands, Champagne, recorded at a local Minneapolis studio with Chris Moon, who was a local concert promoter. He wrote jingles as well, and he took notice of Prince's talents and he offered Prince recording time at his studio, which was called Moon Sound, in exchange for his help with some songs. Prince got the keys to the studio, I believe immediately after or on the day he graduated high school, and he just went to work. He started putting demos together. At one point he went to New York to shop some around. Didn't get any traction there, but Moon had played some of Prince's demos to a local music impressario named Owen Husney, who agreed to finance Prince's next steps getting his music off the ground. Fun fact when he met Prince. Husney nicknamed Prince's Afro J seven because it was that much bigger than those of the Jackson fives. Husney got Prince into the door at Warner Brothers, whom he signed with in June of nineteen seventy seven, so a month out of high school.

00:20:05
Speaker 1: Wow.

00:20:05
Speaker 2: Yeah. Warners wanted to give him a producer and one of the big things that Prince did to convince them that he could operate with semi autonomy was to visit one of their studios and Lenny Waronker, who's one of the Warrenker I still don't know to say he's a big deal. Yeah, he's a famous A and R guy for Warners and other suits, came in to the studio just to watch eighteen year old Prince sit down at a drum set to record a drum track all the way through, then picked up a bass and recorded a bassline all the way through, then move over to guitar and keys and vocals, and that song was just as long as We're Together. So they obviously saw that this kid knew what he was doing and allowed Prince to produce his first record, but they installed a guy named Tommy Viccari, who Prince probably only allowed because Prince was a huge Santana fan, which is really interesting to me, and that guy's credit was brought on as executive producer, but Prince being Prince, that did not pan out.

00:21:08
Speaker 1: And yeah, Prince in your estimation kind of lost the plot while recording his first record. He eventually fired Vikari after basic tracking was complete and became obsessed with overdubbing, eventually finishing his debut album two months late at a cost of this is insane even now, one hundred and seventy thousand, five hundred dollars, which is just five hundred dollars short of Warner Brothers planned budget for Prince's first three albums.

00:21:35
Speaker 2: I love it blowing your three album deal on one record.

00:21:39
Speaker 1: That's over a million dollars in today money. That's insane.

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Speaker 2: I mean, you know this kind of could happen back. I mean, it still happens today. It's just happening with TikTok. But it's like this is what Kate happened with Kate Bush. You know, oh yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. They're just like we're like blown away, and they're like, let's throw money at it and just see what happens, because you can do that in the seventies. Oh what a great era.

00:22:03
Speaker 1: Britz's debut for You came out in April nineteen seventy eight, famously with him credited as playing twenty three different instruments on it.

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Speaker 2: I don't know if I could name twenty.

00:22:13
Speaker 1: Three instruments, let alone pick out twenty three instruments on there.

00:22:17
Speaker 2: Okay, maybe I could. I you know, I don't know, man, when you're splitting hairs between like since piano, you know, electric piano, organ like alright, because it's kind of like and I'm sure every individual percussion piece was also credited. But he's like that guy from the Brian Jones Sound Massacre, being like I play two hundred instruments, and it's like, yeah, you play like you know enough about guitar to play like weird ethnic stringed instruments and get a sound out of them, and you know how to make tambourines and like shakers and sound good. But you do not play those instruments. I'm sorry. In the spirit, you do in the spirit in the letter, if not the spirit, you know, yeah, because I'll tell you one thing. You listen to a really solid tambourine player, and your mind will be blown. But that's true that a serious tambourine player can do, not a Davy Jones. But yeah, and then I was gonna say, and we, having our popular consciousness, relegated that instrument to just like something the lead singer does to make themselves feel better about not contributing anything.

00:23:21
Speaker 1: The title track of for You features forty six layered vocal tracks from Prince Goddamn Yeah tape like magic Bohemian Rhapsody level like tape Transluci.

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Speaker 2: And also the thing is like to do these Susan would talk about how he would just do stuff in one take, like because the songs were just already in his head and he would just be like, well, there's the drum track all the way through, and then do his own punches too, like just you know, just totally self possessed, a self contained production unit.

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Speaker 1: Oh yeah, that was a crazy quote later on in here, when when it's engineer was like, yeah, he would sit down and play the drums just listening to nothing, just the sound in his head, no click track, I don't think, just like nope, I know exactly where everything's going to go, and I am locked into the music in my mind Yeah, insane but soft and wet, the single track released from Prince's debut, released on his twentieth birthday, which is even more depressing to me, only made it to number ninety two on the Billboard Hot one hundred. That was in August nineteen seventy nine, and then a little over a year later, in August nineteen seventy nine, Prince released the first single from a self titled second album, I Want to Be Your Lover, one of my favorite print songs. That song entered the Hot one hundred at the number eighty five slot.

00:24:41
Speaker 2: It deserves so much more. It really does, It really does.

00:24:45
Speaker 1: The song, which Prince later said was about his crush on pianist and singer Patrese Russian, eventually reached number eleven on the Hot one hundred and January nineteen eighty and held there for two weeks, capturing the top spot on Billboard's Hot Soul Singles chart for two weeks. I love how many songs were inspired by Princess, unrequesded crushes, love, the Man, loved Love, Yes, I appreciate that. Prince's next two albums, Dirty Mind, in nineteen eighty and controversy in nineteen eighty one made him the proverbial critical darling, but only Controversy made any chart impact, with its title track landing at a dismal number seventy on the Billboard Charts in nineteen eighty.

00:25:23
Speaker 2: Didn't he have the disastrous tour opening for the Rolling Stones around this time too?

00:25:29
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, that was up there with like Hendrix opening for the Monkeys in terms of just misplaced talent being combined.

00:25:36
Speaker 2: Nineteen eighty one at LA the Coliseum, Oh it was just the one. Yeah, Oh my god. As Prince and his band tried their best to get through the set, they faced a barrage of fried chicken, bottles, cans, and other objects. All too soon a wave of racist and homophobic slurs followed. Oh my, the brown Mark, whose name I believe is just brown Mark Brown. Prince, the Revolution bassist, was like, imagine ninety This was a quote he gave. Imagine ninety four thousand people throwing food at each other. I got hit in the shoulder with a bag of fried chicken. Then my guitar got knocked out of tune by large grapefruit that hit the tuning keys.

00:26:14
Speaker 1: Who brings a Grapefruit to a Rolling Stones concert. That was wrong with you people? Yeah?

00:26:19
Speaker 2: I know. They only got through four. They quit after four songs and Prince left the venue in tears. So talking to what's the last time you cracked? Caught you in a lie there, Prince. Apparently you dug this up. I didn't know.

00:26:36
Speaker 1: This is a version of when You Were Mine, which is one of your favorite Prince songs.

00:26:40
Speaker 2: So Good, which which was done.

00:26:42
Speaker 1: By Mitch Rider of Mitch Rider in the Detroit Wheels, a great yes sixties R and B band.

00:26:48
Speaker 2: Well, I would have thought it was the Cindy Lauper version because that's the one. Yeah, that's the one that's on She's so unusual and that cover bangs. But I would have thought that that would have been the highest. But bar trivia, it was Mitch Ryder. That's bizarre. Prince parted ways with Hussny in nineteen eighty. Remind us who Husney is? I forget? No? Sorry, Ohwen Husney, the guy who helped him get signed to Warners. He was, yes, the Minneapolis impresario that the original studio guy put Prince in touch with. At this point, it was nineteen ninety nine, which always confusingly was released in nineteen eighty two that changed Prince's fortunes from being a critical darling to more of a mainstream quantity. Little Red Corvette and Delirious were both top ten singles, and the double album sold over four million copies in the US and another close to two million more internationally. And then Prince broke his album a year streak in nineteen eighty three, and this was fortunate because that was the year of Thriller and not much else. It was also a good use of time because the next Prince project would position him as no other pop star, not even his chief rival Michael Jackson had ever purple rained the album, and purple rained the movie so much.

00:28:04
Speaker 1: A Prince's myth at the time was Senator around as isolationist genius. Dick Clark famously asked Prince how many instruments he played, to which Prince answered thousands.

00:28:15
Speaker 2: Which got a crowd laugh.

00:28:16
Speaker 1: But the image of Prince is that of an eccentric island surrounded by drum machines and guitars and synths. This wasn't exactly correct, though, des Dickerson played the guitar solo on Little Red Corvette and Morris Day wrote Party up on Dirty Mind in exchange for getting Prince to write more songs for a side project. But Day at the time, Prince's former bassist and childhood friend, Andre Simmon, has always been alleged to be the real writer of Doo Me Baby the note that's the whitest that's ever been said, though no official Prince release credits him as such. The song Kiss even originated as a song Prince gave another band, working with Prince's engineer, David z Z, essentially reinvented the song, and when Prince heard what he'd done, he took it back, creditings only with the arrangement on the final track.

00:29:03
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's really interesting the degree to which Prince meddled with his own songs. Oh yeah, and like just presenting them to people in their barest skeletons, hearing what they did, and then taking what they did and undoing some of it and keeping more of it, or simply replacing what they added with his own version of their contributions. Did he do that with Was it with Bad?

00:29:31
Speaker 1: It was with something that Michael wanted, Michael Jackson wanted him to work on, I think, and then he was like, no, I'm not doing this with you, but if I did, here's how it should go. And he sent him a version that he did on his own, just to be like, this is how I would have done it.

00:29:46
Speaker 2: But no, you can't have this, Michael. You're correct. Michael wanted Prince to do it with him on Bad, Yeah, and Prince was like, no, but if I did, here's how it should go. I saw Quincy I Quincy name come up in this as It as It does. Producer Quincy Jones set up a meeting between the two in the summer of nineteen eighty six. So Michael sent Prince a demo. Yes you are you were correct. I don't know why I'm bothered to correct you, but I have now verified this Prince sent Michael. Michael sent Prince an early version of Bad and then Prince re recorded virtually everything and sent it back. Do you know what? Do you know what Prince's nickname for Michael was No Camille Why because that was also the name of Prince's sped up tape manipulated female voice. That's what he nicknamed it. So he also called called Michael Jackson that it's like the rolling. The rest of the Rolling Stones calling Mick Jagger Brenda.

00:30:46
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, and didn't Freddie Mercury and Elton John and Rod Stewart and all those like early seventies British rock like future Sirs all have names for each other also that were like also like Brenda.

00:30:58
Speaker 2: I'm trying to remember what they were. They were all I don't know, like very upper middle class english woman names. Mimsy Purple Rain was not destined to be one of these cases, however. This whole situation, though, had its roots in nineteen ninety nine to sharp eyed fans, Prince Snuck and the Revolution as a credit line on the cover of nineteen ninety nine. Now, of course it was written backwards and in the middle of a weird football shaped doodle that was affixed to the eye in his name, but it was the first time a backing band had been credited on his release. The core of this band, Mark Brown, always referred to as Brown Mark on bass, Bobby Z on drums, who I believe God, there's so many Davids in the Prince story too, so he related to David Z. I think they're brothers. Yes, sorry, I did have this and then forgot to mention this David z Is. His real name is David Rifkin. He was a member of Lips inc Oh Wow, Funky Town, and he also produced Fine Young Cannibals, She Drives Me Crazy, Weird. And he is the eldest of three brothers. His youngest brother, Bobby Ze, was the the original drummer in The Revolution Cool Oh and then keyboardists Matt doctor Fink and Lisa Coleman. They had been with the band for years. Bobby z and David Fink were part of the very first live band that Prince put together to support his first record. Promo shots of the Revolution are so hilarious around this time because the rest of them are in the classic day glow, gay pirate, new romantic thing that we associate with Prince. And then there's a guy in surgical scrubs that so villaged people, and that was Matt doctor Fink. So guitarist As Dickerson left the band after nineteen ninety nine. I've heard it was either that he wanted to strike out on his own or he was like a religious man and increasingly uncomfortable with Prince's horniness. But crucially he was replaced by Lisa Coleman's then girlfriend Wendy Melvoyn, and Wendy and Lisa became an enormously crucial to Prince's sound for the next few years and the image too. You know, Prince was sort of keen to highlight the fact that there were women who were not entirely closeted, but still sort of closeted in his band. Also, Wendy Melvoyn was eighteen when she joined Prince's band, so they also weren't like particularly clause. As I mentioned earlier, they were kind of walking a weird line. Wendy Melvoyn would later tell Out Magazine. I just didn't want to be a lesbian musician. I felt really uncomfortable with that role. I was already fighting being a guitar player in a man's world, and then to have that on top of it, it just didn't seem like something I could handle. And then Lisa would joke with Prince in the Revolution. I think it was just taken for granted that we were supposed to be the gay representatives of the band, and being in the Revolution often meant more than sitting or playing through Prince's famously grueling rehearsals. Brown Mark said, my first assignment. Before I even picked up a guitar, was in Prince's living room. Look at myself in the mirror. Eight hours a day. He would tell me how to stand. You say, no, pivot your foot that way, okay, Now turn your cheek to do this. Get your shoulder up, bend your shoulder back. Prince also made all of the Revolution take ballet lessons to prep for being on screen in Purple Rain and to dance in the Windows Cry video Fossy I know, yeah, yeah, yeah. So Wendy and Lisa are the ones having the sexy dialogue at the beginning of Computer Blue. They're also super important to Raspberry Beret sometimes it snows in April, and also Prince, as we mentioned earlier, would sometimes just slap his name on things that they had brought to him as a song. This relationship was also compounded by the fact that Prince was dating Wendy Melvoy's sister Susannah for a little while.

00:34:45
Speaker 1: Anyway, we mentioned earlier that Purple Rain the album came first before the movie, but Prince had been kicking around the idea of a film for some time. Lisa Coleman told Spin in two thousand and nine the idea of doing a movie had been bubbling for years. Prince carried a notebook and he'd always come up with little scenarios on a plane, or on buses or back then in the occasional station wagon.

00:35:07
Speaker 2: I have a motorcycle.

00:35:12
Speaker 1: Of course, the way the film came into being was just a case of princess tremendous self confidence. The Purple One had been with one management group since the late seventies and would ultimately stay with them until nineteen eighty nine. But in early nineteen eighty three, their contract was about to expire, and one of their team members, Bob Cavallo, got a call from his associate, Steve Pargnoli, then out on tour with Prince Carvolo Total Cut magazine. Steve says, you're not gonna believe this. Princess will resign with us if we get of a motion picture, and this is Prince's quote. I want it from a major studio. I don't want it from some drug dealer or diamond jeweler that you find, and I want my name above the title.

00:35:54
Speaker 2: I was shocked. I thought, Holy Christ, how am I going to handle this? Now?

00:35:59
Speaker 1: We'll cover this in next week's episode. Which focuses on the film Purple Rain. But the point that I'm trying to make here is that Prince was confronting, largely by will power, two huge artistic projects, molding and working on songs with the Revolution for an album that would be a companion to a film that he'd only scribbled notebook notions of Purple Rain's eventual director, Albert Marknoli recalled Prince meeting him and saying that he had about one hundred songs in mind for the film, but as the pair refined the story, eventually the album's nine track sequence was whittled into place. Wednesday with singer Jill Jones and Electric Interchorus both made it, but then we're eventually cut. Prince had also wanted to release Purple Rain with songs from Morris Day and Apollonia six, but was convinced not to release another double app album as a follow up.

00:36:48
Speaker 2: To nineteen ninety nine, which was a double album. Prince stopped putting out so much music. Yeah, what was I going to say? Your drip is too qwa? That's the Yeah, your smoke too tough, You're drip too crazy. They'll kill you for it, Prince, and they almost did. Yeah, man, I Prince is kind of the embodiment of that tweet. That's like like rip to Icarus, but I'm built different, better, maybe maybe better than the rip to everyone killed by the gods for their hubris. But I'm different, better, better than maybe even the gods. And Prince was correct, like just the balls on that tiny man. Yo, God love him.

00:37:31
Speaker 4: As you meditate on that. We'll be right back with more too much information after these messages.

00:37:40
Speaker 2: Hello, folks, it's me the mean one, Alex from too much information. I'm here too. Jordan's here too, for a variety of reasons that they're not interesting. Jordan and I have, in our quest to make this thing as efficient as possible and justify the enormous amount of time we spend on it weekly, have been trying a variety of things, and we are now at the begging stage. We're not going to do a paywall, We're not going to do a Patreon, but what we are going to do is drop the I'm told it is pronounced co fee, which is sort of a digital tip jar into this episode's description. I know people complain about the ads, but trust us, we're not seeing ad revenue and this is a way to make it a little more sustainable and let us keep doing it. Essentially, if the average monthly listenership of this podcast just gave us fifty cents, it would be a truly affecting amount of money, And if everyone gave a dollar, it would be like life changing for a few months. So that's all there is. We're not doing a payroll, We're not doing a Patreon. We're going to drop a koffee link in there, and if you feel so compelled, you may donate to it and we will be ever so grateful and not let it go to our heads or affect our work in any way. That is all onto our regular scheduled programming. Since Purple raym was before the construction of Prince's custom mansion performance recording basketball court compound Paisley Park, The album was recorded in a few different Minneapolis locales. It was a former pet food warehouse that Prince and the Revolution shared with Morris Day in the time at six fifty one Highway seven in Saint Louis Park, and then Prince's home studio at the place that he lived from nineteen eighty to nineteen eighty five, and also as we'll get to later Minneapolis's famed First Avenue venue. The sessions were immediately more collaboratively minded with the Revolution. It was a very creative time, Matt Fink told Pop Matters in two thousand and nine. There was a lot of influence and input from band members towards what he was doing. He was always open to anybody trying to contribute creatively to the process of Also cruisell to this time period, as we mentioned earlier, is sound engineer Susan Rodgers, who's hired after Prince parted ways with his previous engineer. Rogers arrived in Minneapolis from la and was tasked first with moving Prince's studio from his house into the warehouse. So like, welcome to Minneapolis, welcome to your new job, move this recording console from my apartment into a warehouse, and then set it up all over again. But we're getting ahead of ourselves, or are we No. I think we're actually making good time. Let's go through these songs.

00:40:33
Speaker 1: One of the most important dates in the history of Purple Rain is August third, nineteen eighty three, when Prince and the Revolution played a benefit show for the Minnesota Dance Theater Company at the city's first Avenue venue that four monty grand Oh my god.

00:40:48
Speaker 2: Right, you see if we can do better than that on this show, Wow, that is wild.

00:40:53
Speaker 1: Four songs from that set, Let's Go Crazy, I Would Die for You Baby, I'm a Star, and Purple Rain, were captured by the Record Plants Studio mobile recording truck parked outside the venue. But crucially, though the version of Let's Go Crazy capture that night is the one heard in the film, it's not the one that wound up on the record. Prince reconvened the Revolution at the warehouse four days later for another go at it. Literally just setting up in the one hundred by fifty foot room with high ceilings and no isolation and wheeling the console over to where they were playing.

00:41:24
Speaker 2: Not ideal recording set up. Yeah, Susan was like a yeah, you know, concrete walls, big cavernous space. But I just did what he said and made it work.

00:41:36
Speaker 1: Let's Go Crazy was written by Prince to be a catchy single, and he talked in nineteen ninety seven about having to revise it from the initial draft. As I wrote it, Let's Go Crazy was about God and the de elevation of sin, But the problem was that religion is a subject is taboo and pop music people think that the records they release have got to be hip. But what I need to do is tell the truth. Obviously, he was not a fan of Brian Wilson's God Only Knows George Harrison's My Sweet Lord.

00:42:01
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I don't know. You do have to take Prince with a grain of salt. Yeah, he was everyone, you know, and people kind of talk about how he almost felt like Wendy. Lisa and and Susan all kind of talked about how he sort of was that line from Mother Night by Kurt Vonneguet is like we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful with what we pretend to be. Wow. And they talked about how Prince was just this sweet, shy guy, but as he became Prince, he felt more obligated to put on that persona and that character in public, and you know, maybe to his detriment, because he seemed inscrutable and bizarre and perhaps unintentionally hilarious half the time he was in public. But it's just so funny to me that everyone was like, yeah, he was just like the quietest nicest little guy as a sweet little boy, take me with you. The song was originally intended for Vanity, the model musician Prince meant in nineteen eighty two. Her real name was Denise Catherine Matthews, but Prince, after first trying to name her Vagina pronounced Regina Jesus, christened her Vanity, and as was his wont began building both a band and an album around her. A Nasty Girl was the first Vanity sixth release and became a minor hit in September of nineteen eighty two, though Vanity was uncomfortable with this sexually explicit music and image that Prince was forcing honor so consequently, a year later, as they're getting ready to shoot Purple Rain in September of nineteen eighty three, Vanity abruptly quits the band and pulls out of the movie. So Prince held on to the song and then reshaped it around the new woman that would be taking this role and place, Patricia Kotero aka Apollonia and Susan. Rogers said that this was very difficult for Prince because she just said that Apollonia could not sing, and said came in and coached her through it line to line. And the thing that I find most hilarious about this whole situation is that Apollonia was dating David Lee Roth at the time and I didn't know that. Yeah, she told the Sunset Sound Studio they do like a podcast like live show, and this was in twenty twenty one, and she said Prince was hell bent on maintaining this illusion that he had discovered her, and when David Lee Roth would send her flowers, it made Prince mad. She said, he didn't let me get the flowers. He didn't want me to be seen with anybody else. He wanted to be the one to discover me. Prince was the one that said, don't go out with someone famous in public until the movie settles. And hilariously, Apollonia, in that same bit contends that Prince started doing mid air splits from watching David Lee Roth do them in Van Halen First Wow, Yeah, Hi Yeah.

00:44:58
Speaker 1: Well, with his heart still presumably reeling over the vanity situation, Prince got back on the horse during Purple Rain's production. Following madly in love with new guitarist Wendy Melvoyn's twin sister, Susannah. She was in a relationship at the time, though, leaving Prince to Pine as only Prince could by having flowers delivered to her house every day for over a year on.

00:45:19
Speaker 2: The Iken sent flowers David Lee Roth You cannot Yes.

00:45:26
Speaker 1: The track The Beautiful Ones was a last minute replacement for the much less subtly titled Electric Intercourse, one of the live recordings from the August nineteen eighty three First Avenue show. Even though both songs were meant to be a beautiful expression of Prince and Apollonia's character's love story in the film, once Prince came up with The Beautiful Ones, it became clear by his own admission that the song was a better fit. Vanity would later claim the song and been written about her, but Prince shot her down, saying the love triangle in the song is about his character Apollonia and Morris Day, Prince's chief musical rival in the film. No, you can't have this song. Yeah, this song is. Yes, it is about Morris Day. We'll get into Morris Day in the time the next next episode. I just did not shove it into this one. Computer Blue actually started life as a warehouse jam session. Matt Fink started playing a bass synth line, and the rest of the band just joined in and started jamming on it. Susan Rodgers was there to or David z was there to record, and uh then Prince came back like as again as was his Wont came back the following day and just re recorded the whole thing himself. But it's cool because it has one very personal touch that's kind of a Russian nesting doll. The guitar solo in Computer Blue is based on a song that Prince's dad wrote, Oh Yeah. He had reappeared in Prince's life around this time and was often seen hanging at the at the warehouse or the live shows and the movie shoots and Prince plays the this tune on piano in the film, but he just transferred the melody over to guitar for the recorded version of Computer Blue, and that's why his dad has a writing credit on the song, which I think is just so so cute.

00:47:11
Speaker 2: Computer Blue, as we mentioned earlier, is also known for its weird spoken word section between Wendy Melvoy and Lisa Coleman.

00:47:19
Speaker 1: Wendy, Yes, Lisa is the water warm enough?

00:47:25
Speaker 3: Yes, Lisa, shall we begin? Yes Lisa.

00:47:33
Speaker 2: For Spin's oral history of Purple Rain. In two thousand and nine, Lisa Coleman said, I don't know what it means. Prince handed us a piece of paper and said, will you guys go out there and say this? I didn't think twice. Wendy Melvoy added, we had no idea that it had some weird psycho sexual connotations. Now it's like some odd tagline for us. I roll my eyes because some people say it like I've never heard it before. If you meet Wendy Melvoy and do not ask her if the water is warm enough yet, just a horrible weird thing to ask a woman in public period a stranger, it is. Some versions of this song were twelve to fourteen minutes in length, but it was cutting down to seven and a half minutes a tight seven and a half minutes when two late era additions to the Purple Rain, take Me with You and When Doves Cry were added. The twelve minute plus version of the song, which features another spoken word track where Prince likens emotions to different rooms of a house, is out referred to it as Prince Hallway speech. As the Hallway speech, what room is is sadness. I believe it is the hallway. I don't know, I will now have to skip through this entire thing. Oh, I have it on genius.

00:48:47
Speaker 1: He didn't like living home alone. The house really lived at many hallways. It was a long walk to his bedroom because the him, each hallway represented an emotion, everyone vastly different from the next. One day, while she was with him, he decided to name each one of them. She was at his side, one hand on his thigh. No wait, she was sort of half a step behind him.

00:49:05
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:49:06
Speaker 1: The grip on his thigh intensified. As they walked slowly through the corridor, he named the hallway lust, and as they passed through the next one, he named it fear. The grip she now loosened, so he walked faster. Her hands now trembling, she let drop to her side. As he wrote the word insecurity. He looked in her eyes and smiled a demon smile, and quickly walked on to the next corridor. Walked on to the next corridor. After corridor, he named almost all. When he suddenly stopped. He picked up the word hate. She was gone. Oh, so he picked up the last one, pain, oh pain, Okay. Brackets solo.

00:49:45
Speaker 2: I in my personal headcanon have this now image of Prince walking, nay running through a s of a series of doors with a woman a La Scooby Doo to the set of yaks as scribbling various words like insecurity, hate, pain, is Chelsea boots and ruffles custom made guitar soloing wildly with another hand as he's writing because it's Prince custom a guitar that spells pain. We'll also cover the cloud guitar next episode four. Rubes thought I wasn't going to get to the guitars. Oh, how wrong you were. Bring it well.

00:50:32
Speaker 1: Now we're going to talk about Darling Nicki, my favorite track. I'd have to say on this christ I'm so basic. I just go for the title. The title cut man, that's you know this is gonna make you sad. That's actually one of my least favorite songs on the album.

00:50:46
Speaker 2: Do you not love emotions?

00:50:48
Speaker 1: I mean no, not these days, my friends, Now, I don't very much. No, give me, give me Darling Nicki any day, or let's go crazy fair for all the controversy it would cause later. Darling Nicky had humble beginnings as a basement track Prince finished at home when his new engineer Susan Rodgers showed up, presumably sore from moving his console around. He simply handed her the tape and told her to.

00:51:13
Speaker 2: Get a rough mix together.

00:51:15
Speaker 1: In the Purple Rain film, you'll remember that the song is directed towards Apollonio's character when she decides to work with Prince's character's rival played by Morris Day. But that's not how it would be remembered after eleven year old Karina Gore made the rookie move of listening to Purple Rain in her mother's earshot in nineteen eighty four.

00:51:33
Speaker 2: Karina Gore is kind of an unnecessarily metal name.

00:51:37
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, that name is far too cool to be coming from Alan Tipper Gore. Uh. Karina Gore's mom, Tipper Gore, wife of Democratic Tennessee Senator Al Gore, overheard the lyrics to Darling Nicky, which famously make reference to the titular character quote masturbating with a magazine.

00:51:56
Speaker 2: Now I've never understood, as I don't believe it's clear as to whether it was a tool or inspiration. Thank you, Yeah, that was my question. Okay, thank you, thank you. Okay.

00:52:08
Speaker 1: This launched one of the stupidest moral panics of the eighties, the Parents Music Resource Center, convened by Gore with her friend Susan Baker, wife of then Secretary of the Treasury. I don't know the man's name, doesn't matter.

00:52:21
Speaker 2: Just important to know that, you know, as de Snyder Frank in one of the VH one countdowns, like these wives got together and persuaded their husbands, and he'd like us. His eyes get wide and he uses scare quotes.

00:52:37
Speaker 1: So the group assembled a list of the quote Filthy fifteen, a playlist's worth of songs that they deemed indicative of the moral rot that America's musicians were trying to breed in the nation's youth via their lyrics. Prince actually held the number one and number two slots, with both Darling Nikki and a Song You've written for She and Easton Sugar Walls. I Love Sugar Walls. That song rip No but No but but Sadly. Vanity strap On Robbie Baby, a song from her solo album written about her vibrator, also made the list, but was not written by Prince, thus denying him the Filthy fifteen hat trick.

00:53:15
Speaker 2: Imagine had he had a full fifth of the Filthy fifteen the power. Yes.

00:53:22
Speaker 1: Yeah, and as you mentioned, as anyone who tuned into VH one at any point during the aughts will know. The Senate hearing is convened that the behest of the Parents Music Resource Center PMRC brought together strange bedfellows from across the music industry to fight the organization.

00:53:38
Speaker 2: You mentioned.

00:53:39
Speaker 1: D Snyder of Twist's Sister, Jello Biaffro of The Dead Kennedy's I Forgot About That, and Frank Zappa were all joined by John Denver, who opposed censorship in all its forms. Frank Zappa offered a typically caustic rejonder to the group's efforts, saying that it was quote the equivalent of treating dandruff by decapitation, further adding that the proceedings were quote an ill conceived piece of nonsense which fails to deliver any real benefit to children, but infringes the civil liberties of people who are not children.

00:54:10
Speaker 2: Frank he ran to this soaurus when he got mad. Yeah, you know, like so many of his quotes, of these elaborate dressing downs. It's like you sat and thought that one out. You didn't pull that out of your pocket. Oh yeah, The only material chains. That the PMRC resulted in was the parental advisory stickers to be placed on albums with lyrical material deemed unsafe for children, the design of which would become one of the hardest of all time. Of course, many musicians suggested the obvious, which was that these stickers suddenly began attracting young people to the records they were supposed to be prohibited from buying, simply because they were now confirmed to be dangerous, instead of the mere implication, whereas iced Tea would later wrap much more succinctly, Hey, PMRC, use stupid files. The sticker on the record is what makes them sell gold. Is that what's called a slant ry it is actually perhaps most hilariously, a guy named Joe Stoucy had presented a talk on back masking recovered back masking before. It is the practice of bands and musicians allegedly inserting subliminal messaging into songs that are only heard when the record is played backwards. So this guy, Joe Steucy, does a presentation on back masking during the PMRC hearings, but he failed to mention that Darling Nikki actually contains intentional and purposeful back Masking At three point forty two, there's backwards sounding dialogue by Prince that is just repetitions and variations on the line Hello, how are you? And fine fine because I know that the Lord is coming soon. And engineer Susan Rogers told tapeop that Prince had a complex relationship with sex. He had a father was a jazz musician, very religious, and his father had a very strong anti sex views. So when Prince would have a strong statement of lust like the song Darling Nicki, it's usually fall by some sort of exorcism like forgive me, get this out of me. Backmasking, she said, was his way of asking for forgiveness for having lust in his heart and doing it in a way that was artistic.

00:56:10
Speaker 1: When Prince became a Jehovah's witness in two thousand and one, he actually shelved this song for a long time, and he didn't play it live again until six years later in two thousand and seven. Now we're got to talk about When Doves Cried. Despite being one of Prince's signature songs, it wasn't recorded until the film was actually in its editing stage. Princess breakup with Apollonius six. Singer Susan Moonsey inspired the tune and he was so insistent on its inclusion that they had to add an extra montage scene the slotted in, although you've also read that it was the other way around, and the film's director Albert Magnoli said that he told Prince that he needed an extra song, and Prince delivered too, the other being God a track that ended up as Purple Rains b side.

00:56:51
Speaker 2: Your mileage may vary. I just think it's so good, Prince, any an extra attack, here's two. You're also so you're in the editing stage of this movie. I'm just gonna drop one of the hardest songs ever casually and find a way to work on end. Thanks. Yeah, appreciate it. I'll need to see dailies later. Yeah.

00:57:12
Speaker 1: Yeah, either way, Prince and Susan Rodgers, his engineer, had already spent something like thirty hours toying with the track when Doves Cry before he decided to strip it down those constituent parts.

00:57:24
Speaker 2: I believe the timeline of this is that he, like the director, asked him for this, and he wrote two of them in a day and then spent like the next day with Susan Rogers around with Win Doves Cry. So it was just like a two or three day process to deliver those songs fully formed and insist that they'd be slotted into a movie that was almost edited fully.

00:57:50
Speaker 1: Susan Rodgers, Prince's engineer, told The Guardian, we would work fast and quietly, without speaking. He would record the drums from top to bottom, listening to nothing, just the song in his head. Next thing, he'd play the bass part, and the keyboard part, the rhythm part, then his vocals alone in the control room. But she continued, he'd get really quiet, and that's when he started getting rid of things. He stripped down the whole top line and then changed the tempo with the tape machine to see if it was going to work better, slower or faster.

00:58:19
Speaker 2: Top line is the vocal melody of a song. When people talk about top lining demos, they're talking about putting a original. In some cases, many versions of an original melody over bed tracks. Yeah, Prince was crazy for the tape machine. There's the whole Camille thing, and apparently there is an entire album of Camille songs coming out. I just saw that it was a forthcoming posthumous album called Camille. You can hear some of that on some of the different albums. There's one he does on the Black album and then he does another one. I think she also sings on one part of signing the song on Sign of the Time somewhere. But yeah. So Prince was listening to playback of When Else Cry with his backing vocalist Jill Jones sitting next to him. Fun fact, Jill Jones and Lisa Coleman were supposed to sing on Baby I'm a Star, but Prince got annoyed with them at one point because they were giggling, so he kicked them out and finished the song with his own voice layered in, and you can actually hear it on the track. The point at which he stopped using their vocals and started using his own incredible. So. In a nineteen ninety nine interview with bass Player magazine, Prince said that he made the last minute change to the famous last minute decision to strip the bass track out because the sound was just too conventional like every other song with drums and bass and keyboards, and Prince said he told Jill Jones, if I could have my way, it would sound like this and played it without the bass track, and she answered him gnostically, why don't you have it your way, Prince, Why don't you cleanse yourselves from freshing waters of Lake Minutetonka. And the rest of it is proverbial history. Good enough. This song just it does have a bassline that you can now hear online. It's not that it was recorded. It was just muted for the final mix, so it exists on the multi track tape. The other bit of studio geekery in this song, in particular, is that Prince used the time Honor George Martin in My Life method of playing something that you physically cannot play at half speed and then using tape to speed it up. Of course, he did not extend this luxury to the Revolution's keyboardist, the aforementioned Matt doctor Fink, who then had to play the song's two solos, which are something like thirty second notes at whatever the tempo is. For this, I had to play them live, and he talked about like whatever. We played that song live and it came time for the solos, Prince would look over at me like, yeah, I did that to you.

01:00:47
Speaker 1: Session player in Novi Navogue an incredible name Yeah played electric viola on this track, and she recalled to uncut how Prince used her first take. She said, I was just learning the song. I said, oh, let me tee that part again. He said, no, no, I like that feel. He loved first takes.

01:01:03
Speaker 2: It's bontanaity baby. Best take is I've found is the third interesting? And then you're just dry humping. You never do more than five. One of Prince's biggest supporters of Warner was then promoter for Black Radio, Mary lou Badeaux, and she said that Prince threw Warner, who already didn't know what to do with him, an even larger than usual curveball when he delivered Win Doves Cry, a baseless, spartan icy song, and said this is the lead single. What the f do we do with this? She recalled some execs saying radio will never accept this. Obviously they were wrong, as we'll get into the numbers later. But when does Cry number one hit? You ever heard the Metallica cover? No, It's one of the worst things I've ever heard in my life. When did they do that? Right after he died? It was It's Kirk Hammett, Kirk Hammett and bassist Robert Trujillo do this thing at Metallica shows where they just like Lars Arek and James Headfield like leave the stage and the other two just like sit there and noodle and do like your own little versions.

01:02:13
Speaker 1: Oh this kind of sounds familiar now, and uh.

01:02:17
Speaker 2: Yeah, they did it. You gotta punch it in, man, because it's, first of all, it's hilarious for them forcing a Metallica crowd to listen to wind Dove's cry and then it is just the most bass tone and like chud knuckle dragging bullshit. And I think at one point, if I'm remembering this correctly, Robert Trio like tries to give the crowd like that you sing the wind Doves cry apart and there's just like baffled applause. Dude, this sounds like elementary school musicians like practicing before they have a drummer, Like the first guy you know with a bass you invite him over and you're like, yeah, man, like let's jam and.

01:02:57
Speaker 1: It's just Robin Kirk's doodle. It's actually on the Metallica YouTube channel.

01:03:03
Speaker 3: Yeah, all right, let's see if you picture.

01:03:32
Speaker 2: You and I your gage swear, have you bad?

01:03:37
Speaker 3: You talk with me? You dad Ji.

01:03:45
Speaker 2: Warrior fat, you look like Christopher walking a deer hunter. Having listened to that, I think when Stereo Gum posted this originally they titled it this is what it sounds like when lugs.

01:04:03
Speaker 4: As you meditate on that. We'll be right back with more too much information after these messages.

01:04:19
Speaker 2: So, as we mentioned earlier, three album tracks Purple Rain, I Would Die for You, and Baby I'm a Star We're all recorded live during one heroic set in Minneapolis's First Avenue. Before getting into the majesty of the title track of the album, let's hear a bit about how that night went. Engineer David Z had known Prince from the early days. As we mentioned earlier, he had an older brother named Cliff Rifkin, who is a regional promotion executive for Warners in Minneapolis helped grease the wheels Prince's assent to the label. David Z's older brother, Cliff Rifkin, was a regional promo exec for Warners in Minneapolis who had facilitated Princess signing to the label, and his younger brother, Bobby Z, was Prince's drummer in the Revolution so used to rolling with Prince's punches, David simply prepared himself when Prince told him to get ready to record the band's live set. Susan Rodgers had been hired by Prince but had not yet moved to Minneapolis, so Prince's manager, guy named Alan Leeds, secured the Record Plants mobile recording studio simply known as the Black Truck, and it came with not just state of the art equipment, but two engineers, Dave Hewitt and a guy named Koster McAllister. I'm getting all this from I think sound on Sound where they really get into the nitty gritty the recording stuff or no mix online. But at the bottom of the article, people are like, there are a lot of David's in Prince's orbit around now, and not all of these people could agree that they were there that night, so this is just a kind of melunge. They set up everything pretty bare bones, he says. The band was just listening to their mix through the monitors.

01:05:52
Speaker 4: You know.

01:05:52
Speaker 2: It was just kind of the live setting, your classic sure zone and guitar rams and all this stuff. The Prince was at this time apparently running two rum machines throughout the entire show, like one would just be the playback that Bobby was listening to keep everything on tempo, and then there was a separate one that he could trigger with a sample pad, which is insane for nineteen eighty three that he was putting people through this. We also talk a lot about recording trucks on this show. Is that correct?

01:06:20
Speaker 1: Oh?

01:06:20
Speaker 2: Yeah, we do. We talked about Neil Young's record truck. I think we then got to a discussion about the guy from Boston's truck that they parked outside of his apartment because he refused to record anywhere else. I have to you know, what I have to assume put them out of business was the invention of the solid state and or digital boards, because that meant that venues could afford their own and just start recording the house mixes. I think the first recording on a solid state console is ry Cooter Bop until You Drop in nineteen eighty Make of that what you will.

01:06:52
Speaker 1: Recording during a live show meant that all three engineers had to keep an eye on the levels and ride the faders as the set progressed. Even a band thus type rehearsed as The Revolution would have had consistent volume levels in mind while playing to a packed club, it must have been nerve racking and somewhat miserable, both in the club and the truck. Bobby Z told The Guardian that day at First Avenue it was ninety degrees a humid, wet August, cigarette smoke everywhere. It was a battle to get through and it was kind of forging metal in hot conditions. But things went off smoothly, and David Z remembered a particularly memorable scene from the end of the night. Prince drove up to the truck after the show and asked how it sounded. He's talking to mix online. I was about to answer when a girl wearing a raincoat and nothing else stepped off the curb and flashed Prince. Then he drove away. That was pretty much our post recording conversation. It was like a Fellini movie. One fun tidbit from the overdubed session at Las Sunset Sound some of the weird sounds heard just before the verse verse of the song could be snare symbol hits played in reverse, but the studio engineer said they could also just be Prince scatting. He often added onomopoetic effects as layers, and he was tracking vocals just so funny.

01:08:02
Speaker 2: And he did these. He did his vocal takes in the control room. They just put an annoyment, a U forty seven, an annoyment Telefunken. They put a U forty seven on a boom stand over the recording console, and he would just stand in the room with the engineer and do take after take of comps and other layers. So you just imagine being in this room with Prince and you're hearing this like insane vocal parts, and then he just rewinds it back and just goes, what does ever take after take after take, like he's a genius, all right. Onto the titular song. Purple Rain got its titular. My favorite, No No No was just not my favorite. Oh okay, Onto the eponymous song.

01:08:45
Speaker 1: The song itself is not one of my favorites.

01:08:47
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, idiot. Purple Wayne got a start during the tour for nineteen ninety nine, which coincidentally saw Prince in the Revolution hit a lot of cities. I think right after Bob Seger had just blown through town, like they were on the same route, but Bob Seger was like two or three days ahead. Of them something like that, and Matt doctor Fink remembers talking to Prince on the bus at one point and Prince was just like, did not understand Bob Seeger's appeal, And Matt Fink was like, well, you know, secers got those big power ballots like turn the page or We've got Tonight. It really stirs people. And that seeded the idea in Prince's mind of writing something similar. But when you listen to the version of Purple Rain that's released on this piano and a microphone album that I mentioned earlier, it just sounds like the barest thumbnail sketch. At that point. He has the verse melody, he has the chorus, and then he just kind of dicks around on piano like very very unfinished Italy. And so as he went through these successive iterations, he began to fear that he had inadvertently copied the chord progression to Journeys Faithfully, which had been a monster smash in April of nineteen eighty three. So he called Columbia and asked them to connect him with Jonathan Kane, Journey's keyboardist, who had written the song. Prince played him the song Purple Rain on the piano over the phone and said these core changes are close to faithfully and I don't want you to sue me. This apparently hadn't even crossed Kane's mind. He had later recalled telling Prince that he was flattered he'd even gotten a call. He said it was a classy move, and then he said, good luck with the song. I know it's going to be a hit. Very classy.

01:10:28
Speaker 1: There is, however, yet another eighties icon who was involved with Purple Rain, Stevie Nicks. She and Prince had just worked together on stand Back from her album The Wild Heart, and she claimed to have written that song by improvising a melody while listening to Little Red Corvette on the radio. So when it came time to record it, she asked Prince to come in and play on the song. You say he either played up synth or he came in and programmed the drum machine and added a bunch of other stuff, depending on who's telling the story.

01:10:54
Speaker 2: Yeah, so Stevie Niggs and her keyboard is and I think H. David Iovini was the engineer on this. I think they said like Prince came in and just like doodled on keys for a while and that was his contribution, and the keyboarders was like he only added one part. Prince, in his telling, said that Stevie and Jimmy Ivini couldn't figure out how to program the drum machines, and so Prince came in programmed a drum machine for the whole song and then just hung out and kept tracking over it. So you know, whichever version you prefer, take that one to heart, which one lives in your heart, Definitely the version where he just came in and took over everything, because it's funny when you listen. I mean, one of the other quotes that Stevie has given about this was like, you know, I was in a pretty bad drug phase at the time, so it's just like, yeah, she might have just been snowblind, like off in the court of just watching Prince work as he just kind of came in and silently bullied her in Jimmy Iovini into letting him play all over their song.

01:11:55
Speaker 1: So as Prince toyed with Purple Rain, he sent the ten minute instrumental version of Stevie to ask her to write lyric and she basically caved. She told The Guardian it was so overwhelming that ten minute track. I listened to it and I just got scared. I called him back and said, I can't do it. I wish I could. It's just too much for me. And I'm so glad I didn't because he wrote it and it became Purple Rain. Later, Stevie would walk out of the premiere at Grahlman's Chinese theater of the Purple Rain movie over the scene where Prince slaps Apollonia. When she told Prince, he chastised her, saying that it would have made sense.

01:12:27
Speaker 2: If she had finished the movie such a power move. Yeah, I didn't like that scene where you hit someone, where you hit a woman, and Prince going, you should have stayed. It would have made sense. Even after all this, the song wasn't done evolving. Keyboardist Lisa Coleman told The Guardian that Prince was still thinking of it as quote a country song. Wendy Melvoyn joined the band once again at eighteen years old on guitar. One day, he decided to fool around with it at rehearsal. Coleman said Wendy started hitting these big chords and that rejigged his idea of the song. He was excited to hear it voiced differently. It took it out of that country feeling. Then we all started playing it a bit harder and taking it more seriously. We played it for six hours straight and by the end of that day we had it mostly written and arranged. Drummer Bobby ze who says he was basically just doing an impression of Led Zeppelin. Drummer John Bonham once the song kicks in, remembers it similarly says Purple Rain was brought in at the end of rehearsal. We had just gone through the set twice and Prince said, I want to try something before we go home. It's mellow once again. First Avenue, Oh I didn't. I actually didn't mention this earlier. The first Avenue show, the one that was recorded and multiple tracks of which formed the bedrock of the Purple Rain album, was Wendy Melvoin's first live set with the band. So that immortal Purple Rain intro that she does with all these crazy spread voicing fingersplaying jazz chords was her live debut with the band. She recorded it with a Rickenbacker guitar with the f holes taped over to prevent feedback into the legendary boss ce one chorus pedal, which is one of the most recorded guitar pedals of the nineteen eighties. Prince was famously a boss guy. Did you know this? Oh yeah, when someone showed his pedal board at a show. It wasn't one of these crazy shoegaze rack things that you would imagine, I'm like that I have, or you would imagine like my bloody Valentine or having. It was just like the size of a small briefcase and it was all Boss pedals. A boss for non guitar pedal nerds are like some of the sturdiest pedals you can buy. You can change a tire with them. But entry to mid level. That guitar and a copy that Melvoyne had were both stolen from her studio one point, which brings us to this episode. It belongs in a museum. Wendy was still talking about this as the top of this year. I think it was a January twenty four interview where she was like, I still go on Craigslist, eBay, used gear sites looking for those stolen guitars. She gives a great in depth playthrough and interview to I think it's premier guitar where she just like is sitting down playing the Purple Rain part, and she was talking about how Prince showed them this on the piano using mostly just triads and then her finger stretching jazzy intro is all in the upper chord extensions and which she calls the blue notes, and Prince loved it. There are live videos not just from the first Avenue show, but from other shows around this time where he just like walks around the stage seemingly overcome with emotion as Wendy and the band just circle around that chord progression for minutes at a clip before he gets to the first line. Prince overdubbed extra tracks onto Purple Rain at Sunset Sound as well. I found this via this guy named Nate Johnson. He has a site called chops Angelus, which is medium good and he just goes around a bunch of la icons and so he did a tourist studio sound and he doesn't name the guy. He says it's the studio manager, and that's a guy named Paul, the owner, guy named Paul Camarado, but he doesn't name him. The article and he says this guy confirmed a long standing Prince rumor about recording Purple Rain. At Sunset's down, Prince asked him to go get purple sheets, purple pillowcases, and a purple bedspread to go on the bed that Prince had brought into the studio so that he could lay down and rework lyrics when the mood struck him. So let's get the numbers out of the way. Purple Rain was released on June twenty fifth, nineteen eighty four, a month before the film came out. It became Prince's first album to reach number one on the Billboard two hundred, spent twenty four consecutive weeks just under half a year up there at the Billboard two hundred, and was present on the chart for one hundred and sixty seven weeks total, when Doves Cry and Let's Go Crazy reached number one on the Billboard Hot one hundred, while Purple Rain peaked at number two and I Would Die For You peaked at number eight. When Dove's Cry of Course Famously to Me kept Bruce Springsteen's Dancing in the Dark from ascending to the number one position, which would have been Bruce's only number one hit. In May of nineteen ninety six, Purple Rain was certified thirteen times platinum by the RIBLE A Recording Industry Association of America. It has sold twenty five million copies internationally, and bear in mind this figure is from two thousand and five, so that's almost certainly more now. I don't I think they just stopped counting. It's gotta be like thirty in the thirty million range at this point. Prince of the Revolution won Grammy Awards for Best Rock Performance by Duo or Group with Vocal, Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media. Prince also won an OSCAR for Best Original Song Score for the film, and Purple Rain is both in the Grammy Hall of Fame and my Beloved National Recording Archive at the Library of Congress, having been deemed historically significant mothers. The first single from the album, When Doves Cry, came out on May sixteenth, nineteen eighty four. It was Prince's first signal since Let's Pretend Were Married from nineteen ninety nine in November of nineteen eighty three, and its weird alien sound immediately captured the public. The video, which hit MTV the following month, was a similar sensation shot at the A and m Record soundstage in Los Angeles. It was set to be handled by photographer Larry Williams and directed by Apollonia. Before anything was shot, however, Prince told producer Simon Feels that Williams would not be needed, so Williams read magazines outside while Prince directed, choreographed, and starred in the video. Prince was cuckoo, paranoid about letting anyone take control of something once he had in his mind. Sharon Ork, who produced the Wind Doves Cry.

01:18:40
Speaker 1: Video, said in The Oral History of MTV by Craig Marx and Rob Tannebaum, she asked the director Larry Williams what she could get and was told a stage, a crew, a bunch of cameras, a bunch of smoke, and some doves.

01:18:53
Speaker 2: The day before we're going to shoot, I was.

01:18:54
Speaker 1: Told paint a room purple and get a bathtub and some candles, and the bathtub wrangler had to get three baths so Prince could choose. Prince was six hours late for the first day of shooting and would communicate only through Simon Fields. At one point he had a pair of long woolen underwear delivered, which he had wardrobe die purple and fashioned in a small smeedoesque undergarment which he could wear in the bath. According to Lisa Coleman also and I Want My MTV, the video was the first time the band had the perform choreographed dance steps.

01:19:25
Speaker 2: Prince tortured us in rehearsal.

01:19:27
Speaker 1: She said, he said, everybody, come to the front of the stage, let me see you walk, and of course he started making fun of us again like Bob Fosse.

01:19:35
Speaker 2: Yeah. Producer Sharon Rik also related this story in I Want My MTV and I'm going to present it unedited. God, we should put like Brian's music for airports under this. There was a story told at Limelight Productions about an early Prince video. Supposedly, there was a shot where Prince wanted doves released into the air, but the production manager decided not to work with an animal trainer because it was too expensive, so he bought some doves from a local pet store. When it came time to throw the doves into the air, he literally threw them from the stages and they were immediately sucked into a giant fan, chopped up, and then sprayed around the room and all over the band. That was one of the first rock video Legends When Doves Die. God, what a horrifying image, A fine slurry of doves coating a fabulously attired Prince in the Revolution. What do you think dove meat taste like?

01:20:33
Speaker 1: Oh?

01:20:33
Speaker 2: God. Helping build momentum for the film was the fact that Prince was resolute about not doing any press. Alan Light, who wrote a book about this specific period of Prince's life called Let's Go Crazy, told NPR in twenty fourteen, we really didn't know much about Prince. He did not do any press. It's amazing to look back and think Prince did not do one interview during the entire Purple Rain cycle. That's nuts. From the time that nineteen ninety nine came out until after a round the World in a Day the next album came out, he did not do one any kind of interview, any kind of press anywhere.

01:21:08
Speaker 1: So the singles are out, the album's out, the movie comes out, and Prince gets about four months to enjoy it before embarking on the Purple Rain Tour, which began in November nineteen eighty four. Des Dickerson, who left the band just before all this madness, saw Prince on the DC tour and hung out with him after the show. When he was leaving, he told Spin that he invited Prince to go shopping the following day at Georgetown, an old ritual from when the band came through DC. Dickinson remembered. At first he got the smile on his face and was about to say something, but then he stopped. I'll never forget the look in his face changed and his voice dropped, and he said, you know, I can't really go out anymore to.

01:21:44
Speaker 2: Lighten the mood. It was on the Purple Rain tour that Prince instituted a new tradition for the live band. He would say, hit me insert number of times, which the band would then have to incorporate into the very next bar of music. I think he got this from James Brown. Yeah, bass player Brown Mark. Once again, the man's name is Mark Brown. I want to be very clear about that throughout this episode. Hit me two times is an easy instruction to follow, he said. But when he yells hit me twenty five times, we have to do a percussive hit twenty five times, and if we miss one, we are fined one hundred dollars. He got from James Brown. James Bowner.

01:22:22
Speaker 1: Yeah, besides the suffocating effective movie stardom for the creatively restless Prince, being trapped in one set of songs was his own kind of hell. I nearly had a nervous breakdown on the Purple Rain tour because he was the same every night, Prince told the Chicago Tribune in twenty twelve, adding in a separate interview with Icon, I was doing the seventy fifth show, doing the same thing over and over, and I just lost it. I said, I can't do it. I knew I had to get away from all that. Tour manager Alan Leeds said in Allen Knight's book Creatively, he was over it. I'm sure it was fun playing the music for a while, but this is a guy who never stopped rehearsing. Say they were all tired of playing the songs long before the tour start. They'd been playing them every day in rehearsals for a year, and the crew had been hearing them every day for a year.

01:23:05
Speaker 2: I cannot imagine. I probably would have put a bullet in my head. Yeah, six hours of rehearsals what daily? Semi daily? Yeah, like three four times a week. I have to assume playing these songs, then going out on tour playing all of these songs. Holy crap. Of course, the show itself was also insane. Two hour and change set an average of six nights a week for six months, with a lone ten day break in the middle, more than one hundred concerts, along with multiple after party charity performances, award shows, and recording sessions. And so it came to pass that on April second, nineteen eighty five, just five days before the tour's final day at the Orange Bowl in Miami, held on Easter Sunday, Prince announced by a statement from his manager, Stephen Fargnoley, that he was withdrawing from the live performance scene for an indefinite period of time, with that Miami concert being his last performance for an indeterminate amount of years. In the statement, Fernoli added, I asked Prince what he planned to do. He told me, I'm going to look for the latter. I asked him what that meant. All he said was sometimes it snows in April, and both of those are Prince lyrics and or Prince titles. And this is where it gets a little sad to me, you know. Although Prince had been with as we mentioned, some members of the Revolution like drummer Bobby Z for nearly a decade, same with Matt doctor Fink. The idea of having a band that was independent of Prince was pretty much a concept with an expiration date from the start. Alan Light told NPR and the aforementioned interview Purple Rain was not an album by Prince. It was an album by Prince and the Revolution, and he made a very clear distinction that he was going to bring the band forward put himself at the center of that. But the fact is, this is a guy who writes and sings and produces and is capable of doing everything himself. So how much actual input he's willing to take from them, how much of that was just about how he could use the band for positioning. How much were they actually a creative force was something that became a source of real tension as the project went on, and as they went out touring and playing stadiums. Where these guys just hired hands or were they actually a real band. That's something that they still struggle with. So byen nineteen eighty six is Hit and Run Tour, which Prince used to promote both under the Cherry Moon and Parade. The band had expanded to include a horn section various others, but the core of the Purple Rain Band had become more and more isolated through tours and releases of each new project. And this is where a Sign of the Times comes in. This was originally supposed to be another Revolution project, and I don't know what percentage through the process that Prince pulled the plug, but it.

01:25:42
Speaker 1: Was a solo Princes album when it came out in nineteen eighty seven. Drummer Bobby Z told Yahoo in twenty seventeen that Prince was quote starting to become finally after being a superstar all these years, kind of like, you know, I kind of want to do this myself again. I was kind of getting the sense that we had become such a huge part of his everyday life that he may have, well, we don't know that he was growing a little tired of it. But we're a handful. I mean, we weren't just side men. We were the Revolution, and we opened our mouths often. It's a great as that we became more of a satellite. Lisa Coleman told Spin it hurt our feelings. He used to travel with us on the same bus, but then he got his own. He would always be escorted ahead of us in his own car, and we were left behind. He had his big house, and when he got the guard at the gate, it was wow, dude, it's me.

01:26:28
Speaker 2: I did your laundry. I lived at them for a while.

01:26:31
Speaker 1: In his house. I'd fix him a sandwich, or we do laundry together. It was really brother and sister stuff. When it changed, I'd have to go through other people to talk to him. I was not into that. I'm still not into that.

01:26:42
Speaker 2: Such a bummer. Yeah, I knew something shifted our last night at Japan's Yokohama Stadium, Wendy Melvoyne told Yahoo, referring to the Revolution's final concert on September ninth, nineteen eighty six. We were on stage and he started calling a whole bunch of different people on stage with us while we were playing. He hadn't done that before, and we knew him. I knew him so well. He wasn't looking at us. I could feel it. And then we played Purple Rain and he destroyed the guitar. He destroyed it. I looked Bobby and I went it's over. I looked at Lisa it's over, and it was over. Prince fired Wendy and Lisa first. At the end of the nineteen eighty six tour, he brought Wendy and me over to his house for dinner. Lisa Coleman told Spin we always called it the paper wrapped chicken dinner because it was wrapped in pink slips. Who Yeah. In the same interview from twenty sixteen, she also suggested that Prince's Jehovah's witness faith had come between them. He has hinted to Wendy and myself recently that he can't condone who we are or be friendly in a certain ways. We both have kids now with other partners, so that hurts, especially because he liked that element in his band Back then. Bobby Z would be replaced by Sheila E or he left out of solidarity with Lisa and Brown Mark, but Prince Magna adamously supposedly kept Bobby Z on the payroll for a couple of years out of loyalty classy move. Doctor Fink stayed on until nineteen ninety one. But the Revolution had made an impact on Prince. Bobby Ze said. Prince called us Mount Rushmore. He knew that this was something unique. So, with the sound of Dove's crying ringing in your ears, join us next week as we leave the sonic world of Purple Rain and enter into the visual world of Purple Rain as a kicker. Whatever I liked it, I loved it. I'm spent. My name is Alex Eigel. This has been too much information. Thank you folks for listening, and.

01:28:39
Speaker 1: I'm Jordan Runtagg. We'll catch you next time.

01:28:47
Speaker 2: Too Much Information was a production of iHeartRadio. The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtogg.

01:28:53
Speaker 1: The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June.

01:28:56
Speaker 2: The show was researched, written.

01:28:57
Speaker 4: And hosted by Jordan run Tag and Alex.

01:29:00
Speaker 1: With original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra.

01:29:04
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01:29:06
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