July 7, 1984. That was the month, day, and year that my life changed. Of course, at the tender age of 13, I didn’t know that to be true, but the evidence I’ve uncovered over the last 42 years is undeniable. That was the day Purple Rain was released into theaters. I was there on opening night. I lied to the owner/operator of the Ready Theater in Niles, Michigan. I told him that my parents had given me permission to attend an R-rated movie. They had done no such thing. But I had dollars in hand, and the grizzled, bearded man shook his head and handed over my ticket.
I was hardly an artsy kid. I couldn’t tell you the qualitative difference between Bob Dylan and the theme from Ghostbusters at the time. That all changed when I walked into that musty, raggedy theater on Main Street in a town of 11,000 souls.
The Ready Theater was the greasy spoon of movie houses. Your feet stuck to the floor, there was a strange odor you couldn’t quite place, but spilled soda and stray buttered popcorn were definitely a part of the amalgamation of scents. The seats were as uncomfortable as steerage on a Spirit Airlines flight, and the option to take home with you a loose armrest was always in play. Beyond the lack of creature comforts, the sound was muddy, and the screen was always underlit. I found out later from the son of another Michigan theater owner that none of the other movie houses wanted a print after it had shown at the Ready. The downtown Niles theater wasn’t a caring environment for celluloid.
Somehow, none of that mattered when I entered the fully packed house to see Purple Rain. Even in a tiny town like Niles, you could feel something in the air. There is no way to manufacture a phenomenon; they pave a path of their own through some strange mixture of timing, quality, and novelty. The planets line up, the tumblers lock into place, and the world shakes.
That is exactly what happened with Purple Rain. Prince was not an unknown entity at the time. His previous albums had sold reasonably well, and his most recent album, 1999, peaked at number 9 on the Billboard Albums chart, and two of that long player’s singles reached the Top Ten (Little Red Corvette and Delirious. The title track breached the Top Twenty.
One could say the stage was set for liftoff, but that only happens if the artist delivers the goods. Purple Rain was the goods. Full of funk, rock, salaciousness, and eccentricity, the album captured the zeitgeist, selling more than 10 million copies and spending 24 consecutive weeks at number one on the Billboard Albums chart. That’s nearly half a year, if you’re scoring at home.
Two singles (Let’s Go Crazy and When Doves Cry) topped the Billboard Hot 100. The title track peaked at number two, despite being eight minutes and 41 seconds long. I Would Die 4 U also hit the Top Ten, and the album’s final single, Take Me With U, a duet with Appolonia, peaked at number 24.
An album that successful is a cause for mad partying at any record label, but Prince shot for the moon with an accompanying film, based loosely on his own life. Originally, Warner Brothers was hesitant to bankroll a film with no movie stars, a 24-year-old musician playing the lead, and an unknown director (Albert Magnoli) at the helm. In their finite wisdom, Warner wanted to use the songs but recast the lead with a white actor. That actor was John Travolta. The mind reels at the thought of Travolta, then 30 years old with his stardom on the wane, playing “The Kid” in a film built around the Minneapolis music scene.
Warner was willing to put up $30 million for Purple Rain, starring John Travolta. When Prince received the offer, which surely included a contract with more zeroes on it than he had ever seen before, he refused. Either he would play the lead, or there would be no movie. Warner relented, but not before cutting the budget down to $6 million. A sum that studios referred to as a “Black film budget.”
As a film, Purple Rain has numerous flaws. The storyline is thin (those who called the film a 111-minute music video weren’t entirely wrong), the gaps in logic are thick (how could a struggling artist afford that motorcycle?), and there’s a lot of painful ’80s misogyny in it. It’s hard to watch Morris Day, the leader of the Kid’s competing band, dispatch his valet/hype man Jerome to toss a jilted lover into a dumpster. Another scene depicts Prince backhanding his lover (played by Appolonia) after she tells him she’s joining a girls’ group that Morris has put together.
But there are parts of the film that really work. The camera loved its novice lead actor. Clarence Williams III as the Kid’s father is extraordinary as a man whose musical dreams exceeded his grasp and now violently takes his failures out on his wife and son. In that sense, the Kid’s backhand of Appolonia is lent context. As much as the son doesn’t want to be his father, the cycle of violence has been passed down along with the gift of music.
It should also be noted that the film is frequently quite funny. There’s a sequence between Morris and Jerome where the two men try to create a password for Jerome to alert Morris when Appolonia arrives in the club without giving anything away to whatever lady Morris may be squiring that night. The “What’s the password” scene is right up there with Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on first” as a comedic bit based on misunderstanding.
And then there are the musical sequences. When Prince or The Time take to the stage at the fabled First Avenue club in Minneapolis, you can feel the electricity running through your veins. For whatever the film lacked in script and direction, it more than made up for in performance. At the age of 55, and having seen countless films as a cinephile and a critic, I have never experienced anything like Purple Rain in a crowded theater. It was as if the patrons forgot they were at a movie. During the film’s close, which consists of back-to-back-to-back musical numbers by Prince and the Revolution, people rose from their chairs. They danced in the aisles, and when Prince commanded the audience in the film to “Raise your hands” during the performance of Purple Rain, the theater audience did the same. Back and forth, a sea of hands moving in conjunction with the diminutive (Prince was only 5′ 2″) god-like figure on screen. It was a happening that aligned with a becoming. The film was a hit, and the star of that film became a superstar.
In fact, Prince had the number one film, single (When Doves Cry), and album simultaneously in 1984. A feat that, up until that point, only one other artist could claim: Frank Sinatra. At the age of 13, I was far too young to comprehend the significance of what I had experienced. Later, I understood the impact. I had discovered art in what seemed like all its forms: music, cinema, color, and shape. I would never listen to music the same way. I would never consider the visual in the same manner. I had exited the Ghostbusters era.
After seeing the film once, I went back multiple times each week until the Ready relinquished what was surely a tarnished print to some other unlucky theater proprietor. I took my meager allowance and compiled it with my lunch money (I would skip meals) to save up to purchase all of Prince’s previous recordings. It’s such a cliche to say that “My mind was blown,” but it was.
The sort of stardom Prince achieved is impossible to maintain. Especially for an artist so restless and esoteric. The world couldn’t keep up with what came next, even though the albums sold well and numerous hits would follow. It’s very difficult to capture the zeitgeist even once. It’s nearly impossible to do it twice.
Warner Brothers tried to rein in Prince by persuading him to release an album every other year, giving the label enough time to promote it and maximize sales. But Prince had so much music in him that he wasn’t about to work on anyone else’s timeline. Throughout my high school years, I could count on a new Prince album (all of which he would produce, write, and play most of the instruments on) every year. For a red-headed stepchild living out in the sticks, and who happened to be the youngest person in his class, I can’t begin to tell you how much a new Prince record every year meant to me. High school was a miserable time for me. I didn’t fit in with the jocks, the preppies, or even the weirdos. I was just “some guy.” Prince gave me something to look forward to. I don’t know how I would have survived high school without him.
I had the occasion to see Prince live twice in my life. Once on the Lovesexy Tour with Sheila E. on drums. It was an outstanding show, even from the nosebleed seats. The second time was truly something. I caught Prince’s act on the Diamonds and Pearls Tour at the Fox Theatre in Detroit. The Fox is a grand olde venue with great acoustics, and not a bad seat in the house. I was about 30 rows back and more than sufficiently pleased with my station.
After two delirious hours of music, Prince and the band left the stage. The house lights came on. The “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here” music began to play. Most of the crowd filed out, but about a third of us weren’t quite ready to let it end. We stayed and cheered, clapped our hands, and stomped our feet. As the roadies began unplugging the equipment, one of them looked out at the audience and lifted his hands three times, palms up, as if to say, “Don’t stop, keep it up.”
And so we didn’t. We became even more raucous. And then something happened that I’ve never seen in the countless times I’ve been to a concert: the roadies started plugging the equipment back in. There was only one thing to do among the thinning crowd: bum rush the stage. So, I did. Less than five feet from the center of the Fox’s raised floor is where I stood. Then the man returned.
The next hour of music was a gift to witness. I know I’d never seen anything like it before, nor have I since. Prince was going free form now. There was no set list, only cues to his crack band (The New Power Generation) to play whatever their leader fancied. Throughout those 60 minutes, Prince would walk over to his guitarist, his bass player, his piano woman, his man on synths, and his drummer, taking their instrument out of their hands and playing it better than they could. Let me tell you, that’s saying something. The NPG was a whip of a band, locked in the pocket while open to improvisation. And he was superior to all of them. Never in my life have I been in the presence of such a singular talent. If I live to 206, I don’t suspect that will change.
Eventually, as happens with any “pop star,” the world moves away from them, regardless of the quality of their output. Musicians, movie stars, and athletes all have limited lives on the top shelf. But Prince never became passe. Even when the records didn’t sell as well as they used to, and Top 40 radio shifted away from his sound, he could still pull a crowd on a moment’s notice. He survived two film flops: Under the Cherry Moon (which I have a soft spot for) and Graffiti Bridge (a mess of epic proportions). But he also directed one of the great concert films, Sign o’ the Times, which paired with an extraordinary album of the same name. While the albums became uneven in quality in his later years, there was the greatly underappreciated 3121, and every release had at least one jaw-dropping gem that could have been produced by no one else.
I remember exactly where I was the day Prince died on April 21, 2016. I was in my finished basement, working from home. I got a text from my oldest friend.
“Did you hear?”
I could somehow feel the hesitation in his tapping of the send button.
“Prince died.”
I stood there frozen. Looking at five words that were spelled correctly and were in the appropriate order to convey their meaning. And yet I could not understand them. I was stunned, outside of my body, my brain felt like it was floating on a cloud. Eventually, I gathered myself, turned on cable news, and received far more confirmation than I could stand.
I walked around in a daze from that point until the wee hours of the morning. I was a writer at the time. I was the guy who wrote obituaries when someone of significance died. But I had no words. How could the 26 characters of the alphabet, no matter how gracefully strung together, take the appropriate measure of this loss?
Somewhere around three o’clock in the morning, I began to write. As I did, I began to cry for someone I had never met. A first for me. But I kept writing, and the words, however raw, began to fall into place. At 5 AM, I stopped and hit publish. Sadly, that article is lost to the ages as the site I was working for went under, and I foolishly didn’t keep a backup.
Today marks the tenth year since the departure of the greatest artist I have ever seen or heard. However many words went into this piece, I am, once again, fully aware that they are not nearly sufficient. But they will have to do. They’re the best that I’ve got, and this time, I’m keeping a backup.
One last point about that show in Detroit: There is a balcony in the Fox Theatre. The hardy souls who stayed behind were jumping up and down in unison. The balcony was actually bouncing. I looked back and questioned whether that higher floor could withstand the force of such joy. Then I remember thinking, “If you’re gonna die, this ain’t a bad way to go.”
Prince Rogiers Nelson died on April 21, 2016. He was 57 years old.
Reel Reframe 