Let's Go Crazy (9 page)

Agreeing that they would move forward, Cavallo sent over Prince's music videos and some concert footage. Magnoli spent the night watching them and felt they were low-quality and didn't reveal much that would translate to a mass audience on a movie screen. He felt uninspired and considered calling the whole thing off—he had an offer from Henry Winkler's
production company to write a script, so there was a more secure choice in front of him. But on Friday, he got into the car that would take him to the airport.

“The driver is a black guy in his mid-twenties, and I think, ‘This guy is potentially part of my audience,' ” he says. “Just before we get to the airport, I ask him, ‘Do you know Prince?' And he says yes. I said, ‘Do you listen to him?' And he said ‘No, the guy's a fag.' I was pretty sure that was not true, but it was another thing that had not gotten over; that was the perception.”

In Minneapolis, he was met by Steve Fargnoli and Prince's hulking bodyguard, “Big Chick” Huntsberry. “I hadn't even been told there was another manager,” Magnoli says. “And Fargnoli said, ‘Understand this—we don't care what you pitched to Cavallo. It's garbage. We're doing the script as written. If you don't understand this, I will buy you a ticket and send you home right now.' ”

The plan was to meet Prince in a hotel at midnight and then go to dinner. As the clock struck twelve, Prince walked out of the elevator wearing black pants with buttons up the sides, heels, a trench coat, and a scarf. He walked past Magnoli over to Cavallo and Big Chick, which gave the director a momentary chance to observe him with his guard down. “What I saw was an extremely vulnerable guy who was essentially alone,” says Magnoli. “And in that time, I filled in the rest of the pitch—I saw the father, the fragmentation of the family.”

They drove to the restaurant and sat in a booth in the back in silence. Prince, once again, ordered spaghetti and orange
juice. “He looks at me and says, ‘Why do you like my screenplay?' ” Magnoli recalls. “This was news to me, suddenly, that it was his script. And I said, ‘It sucks. Now let me talk about what I want to talk about.'” Prince reacted—he looked at Fargnoli, looked at Chick. They'd told him Magnoli was coming out to talk about shooting the script as it was, not wanting to make large and dramatic changes. He had been lied to.

Magnoli continues: “I said, ‘I want to talk about the story I told to Cavallo; I want to tell you that story.' I gave him my entire rant. He said, ‘You guys go home; Magnoli, you come with me.' ” Like a true director, Magnoli describes a dramatic scene, in which Prince drives his black BMW to the freeway, then takes an exit that plunges them into complete darkness: “It was like we were in a spaceship. Prince stopped the car and said, ‘Okay, what do you know about me?' I said, ‘Really nothing.' He said, ‘Then how is it that in ten minutes, you told me my life story?' ”

The next morning, Fargnoli picked Magnoli up at the hotel and drove him over to Prince's purple house in the Chanhassen suburb. He didn't mention anything about the night before. Prince was going to spend the day playing some new music for Magnoli to consider for the film. The board in the home studio was on the fritz, so they went upstairs and sat on the floor. “We must have listened to about a hundred songs,” says Magnoli. “I said, ‘I need twelve songs,' and he said, ‘You pick them.' I told him that I would come back in August, I'd research and write a script, and then we would make the movie.”

Cavallo, meanwhile, had secured the funding needed to
get the production off the ground. He approached Warner Bros. Records chairman Mo Ostin, and they worked out an advance of $2 million against Prince's future royalties. “Bob came to me and said that Prince wanted to make a film and had threatened to terminate their relationship if he couldn't deliver,” says Ostin. “The fact is that it was valuable for the record company in terms of potential for Prince as an artist—and it actually seemed incredibly safe from my standpoint: he was already earning royalties.”

Ostin is one of the most respected record men from the industry's golden era, and his explanation sounds almost impossibly out of step with the tone of the business today. “When our artists were interested in going into other media, we felt we should support them in terms of facilitating their ability to be successful,” he says. “If we saw the possibility of it enhancing their image and making them bigger, and it was something they wanted to do, our responsibility was to create as powerful and strong a creative environment as possible. I thought Prince had a good shot with this, and given the following he had, seeing the audiences he was attracting on the road, the growth in his career, it was a reasonable bet to make.”

He may have handed over a huge batch of songs, but Prince didn't stop making more music. The 1999 tour had ended on April 10, 1983; by early June, Prince had set the band up for rehearsal in a warehouse off of Highway 7 in the St. Louis Park neighborhood of Minneapolis. The building has since been
torn down, leaving just an empty space next to the electrical towers of a substation in the spot where the
Purple Rain
album came together.

“The whole experience at that warehouse was a really different thing,” says Lisa Coleman. “It kind of stands out—it was set apart, away from other buildings. Usually we would rehearse in these industrial parks and they were busy; we would have hours where we couldn't play because there were businesses being run there.”

Rehearsal was as relentless as ever—maybe even more ­intense, because they didn't need to stop. “Prince was such a structured boss, there was no real fun in it,” says Susannah Melvoin, who became part of the Minneapolis family in addition to watching her sister work. “If you were five minutes late, he'd dock your pay. You might work on the same groove for five hours nonstop, some three-bar thing over and over. It was like the army.”

While Magnoli was refining his choices for the movie, certain songs seem to have risen to the top for Prince. “Baby I'm a Star” was a carefree, straight-up boast. He had started working on the song as far back as 1981, recording a solo piano version while working on remixes for the
Controversy
track “Let's Work.”

Its eventual companion piece, “I Would Die 4 U,” had a comparably breezy groove, though the lyric was something quite different. The title phrase, which would fill a dramatic moment in the
Purple Rain
script, was something Prince remembered his own father saying, but he transformed it from
the notion of surrendering everything to love into an invocation of spiritual salvation; “I'm your messiah,” he sings, and “if you're evil, I'll forgive you by and by.” Dez Dickerson told Touré, for his 2013 study of Prince, which was titled after this song, that he takes the lyric at face value: “I think Prince had experienced something. I think he had a moving experience with respect to the idea of who Jesus is or was, and he wanted to express it in a song. It's not a very cloaked lyric. It says what it says. He's saying he is Jesus.”

Questlove reads the song more metaphorically. “I think in his mind he was lending voice to what he perceived as being the gospel message. I don't think he's literally saying he's the Messiah, but in his own way he's speaking for the Messiah.” Years later, after Prince became a Jehovah's Witness, he would continue to perform the song, but would make things much clearer by changing the line “I'm your messiah” to “He's your messiah.”

The song contributed to the theme of redemption that would run through much of
Purple Rain
, but it isn't one of the set's most musically challenging tracks. “ ‘I Would Die 4 U' and ‘Baby I'm a Star,' they were fun dance tracks, and he did those things easily,” says Susan Rogers, who moved to Minneapolis in the summer of 1983 to help Prince set up recording equipment in the warehouse and at his home. “Just because he does them easily doesn't mean that they're not great, but I would venture to guess that he didn't put nearly as much effort into those.”

The most complex piece in this batch was one he had been
working on since the 1999 tour, and would continue to refine until the last minute, well after filming had stopped. “We were jamming one day,” says Fink, “and I'm playing something, and he goes, ‘Oh, that's nice.' And then that turns into ‘Computer Blue,' which became a full-blown collaboration between Prince, me, Lisa, and Wendy, and Prince's father, who wrote the main melody to the bridge section of that song.”

“We did the basic track at the warehouse,” says Rogers, “but there was quite a bit of editing with that; we brought it to Sunset Sound [in Los Angeles] and made substantial changes to it. The basic piano part was the same, but a lot of overdubbed parts were different.” In fact, “Computer Blue” expanded (past the fourteen-minute mark) and contracted significantly over eight months—one instrumental section that was cut turns up in the
Purple Rain
movie, in a scene where Prince is late to rehearsal and Fink, Bobby Z, and Mark are playing a jagged instrumental. A lengthy spoken-word section, known among Prince superfans as the “hallway speech,” sees Prince walking down a hallway with a girlfriend and assigning emotions (love, lust, hate) to each room. Vaguely reminiscent of Jim Morrison's recited section in the Doors' epic “The End,” this segment would also eventually be dropped.

The members of the Revolution weren't entirely thrilled with the first bunch of songs for the album, or sound track, or whatever it was going to be. “The songs weren't as funky to me,” says Wendy Melvoin. “They were pop songs; they were definitely watered down. It was really white, and it felt that way.”

“I think that Prince felt that way, too,” adds Coleman, “be
cause then he went and did ‘Darling Nikki'—which was not necessarily funky, but it was full-out angry energy, something that was missing. He would imitate an old granny, like, ‘You could make Granny dance with this one,' but then I think he was just like, ‘We're leaning it too far to the granny; we still need danger.' ”

Dickerson notes that a new approach was evident from the time Prince was first presenting embryonic new material during the Triple Threat tour. “It was clear that he wanted to write classic pop-rock hits,” he says. “The songs on
1999
had been a significant shift in being more polished and accessible, and this was the next step in that evolution. It was definitely calculated—that word gets used in a negative way, but this was through the lens of being smart and trying to write the kind of songs that galvanized moments in a film, and vice versa.”

In addition to working on the raw, snarling “Darling Nikki,” with its lyric that would later incur the wrath of Tipper Gore and lead to the formation of the Parents Music Resource Center, Prince was working on a song with an even more provocative title—“Electric Intercourse.” The song itself, though, is actually not the nasty rocker the name might imply but a more slinky and subtle R&B number, just electric piano and drums; it was part of the early track list for the album, built on the recording from the First Avenue benefit, but ultimately wasn't deemed essential enough to make the cut. (In a May 2014 show in Birmingham, England, Prince broke out the song for the very first time since that 1983 performance; he played it solo on the piano, though in
accordance with his more conservative approach as a Jehovah's Witness, he didn't sing the word
intercourse
.)

The initial motivation for “Purple Rain” came from Prince's observation of another rock star on the road. While much has been made over the years of a rivalry between Prince and Michael Jackson, those around him say that his competitive streak reached much further than just one artist (“Michael wasn't the biggest ­priority to kill—it was everybody,” says Melvoin, as Coleman adds with a laugh, “It was Prince against the
world
.”) He was obsessively reading music and fashion magazines, tracking anyone or anything that had some heat, sensing which lessons he might absorb.

On many dates in the 1999 tour, Prince had followed Bob Seger into the arenas of middle America. One night, he asked Matt Fink why the proudly working-class Detroit rocker had such a huge appeal; Fink replied that it was Seger's big, gut-punching ballads—“We've Got Tonight,” “Turn the Page”—that his fans loved, and that Prince should try writing that kind of anthem if he really wanted to conquer the pop world. (In 2004, when Prince and Seger were both inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Prince noted that they were “both Midwesterners” and said that Seger “had a lot of influence on me at the start of my career; he certainly influenced my writing.”)

In December 1982, Prince showed the chords of a new ballad to the band during sound check at Cincinnati's Riverfront Coliseum. “I remember him coming in, and he had this idea,” says Melvoin. “He made it clear: ‘I need to find this thing; it needs to be
this
and it has to be
this
tempo,' and then he picked a key and we started jamming and came up with that open
ing chord sequence, and it just started to happen.” What was happening, of course, was the genesis of “Purple Rain,” even though lyrics and a title, much less any notion that it would provide the name to a movie, were still months away.

Melvoin took the chords that Prince showed the band and spread them out and added suspensions; whether the listener could follow the structure or not, the sound was something other than the obvious. “At that time, there weren't a lot of super-pop bands, other than maybe Andy Summers [of the Police], who were doing those kinds of things, doing harmonies that advanced,” she says.

“He loved how Wendy was able to take it away from a country feel,” says Coleman, “and then everyone in the band seemed to make it a little bit different. But when I put the high harmony on the chorus, then he was like, ‘Lisa's bringing it back around again to good old American country music.' ” In fact, the song retained such a classic power-ballad feel that Prince recognized its similarity to Journey's 1983 hit “Faithfully”; reportedly, he called Journey's keyboardist Jonathan Cain, who wrote the song, and played him an early version of “Purple Rain” over the phone, to make sure that the band wouldn't make a stink over the resemblance.