THE BLURT BOOK EXCERPT: New Prince Biography
May 27, 2011
Taken from Prince: Chaos, Disorder and Revolution (published by Backbeat Books), this exclusive excerpt joins Prince on the eve of his Purple Rain ascent.
BY JASON DRAPER
Chapter 5: Baby I'm a Star
In 1983 Prince was still, as The Time's Jimmy Jam put it, "at the point where he wasn't yet a superstar, but was right at the point of doing it." What Jam and everybody else wondered was: "What's your next move gonna be?" As it turned out, Prince's next move was to do what David Bowie did with Ziggy Stardust: write himself into fame.
Prince was (and is) an avid film fanatic, so it's no surprise that he had long courted the idea of making a motion picture of his own. The man who stamped his dominance over the recording process with the words "Produced, Arranged, Composed, and Performed by Prince" would naturally have wanted to exert a similar authority over the other main avenue of popular entertainment. He would also have noticed how Sylvester Stallone had turned himself into a superstar with Rocky in 1976. Six years later, when Prince first began to consider making a movie, the Rocky franchise was into its third installment.
According to drummer Bobby Z, Prince was "fascinated with the camera," and had already started taping rehearsals and concerts and filming short skits. He had begun to come up with the basic concept for Purple Rain as far back as the Dirty Mind period. During his Controversy tour, Prince had started to film his shows for something called The Second Coming, which would intersperse concert footage with dramatic elements. In the end the project was scrapped, but he returned to much the same concept for the Sign "O" The Times concert movie a few years later.
By the time the second leg of the Triple Threat tour in support of 1999 began in February 1983, Prince had taken to carrying around a purple notebook in which he wrote down ideas for the semi-autobiographical movie that was beginning to form in his mind: Purple Rain. He wasn't yet a superstar, but did have some leverage. He had told his managers at Cavallo Ruffalo & Fargnoli that if they wanted to hold onto him beyond the imminent expiration of his contract they had better get him a movie deal with Warner Bros. "I want to star in the movie," he told Bob Cavallo. "I want my name above the title and I want it to be at a major studio."
Unfortunately for Cavallo, Warner Bros. Pictures wasn't particularly keen on the idea of pumping heaps of money into the pipe-dream project of a mid-level singer with only a handful of hits to his name. If he wasn't able to carry on making hit records, the company reasoned, he wouldn't be able to attract the sort of crowds a major motion picture needs to make its money back.
"There was no precedent for this," tour manager Alan Leeds recalled. "Rock'n'roll stars with a couple of hit albums did not make major movies. Let alone somebody from the black community having the gumption to do it in the mainstream." Before it was to agree to such a deal, Warners needed proof that Prince was the star that the movie was supposed to turn him into.
Thankfully, Prince still had the full backing of the head of Warner Bros.' music division, Mo Ostin. Although no distribution deal had been secured, Ostin put up $4 million of the label's money to get the ball rolling. Having been given at least something of a green light, Cavallo and his colleagues went out in search of a screenwriter. They soon found 46-year-old William Blinn, who had won an Emmy award for his work on the Roots television show and was an executive producer of Fame, which had just completed its second series.
By the time Blinn was introduced to Prince, the movie concept had formed into something that centered on the incestuous Minneapolis music scene and recalled Prince's early struggle for success in bands such as Champagne. Blinn found Prince less than willing to communicate at first, making his attempts at writing a treatment (for what was then known as Dreams) rather difficult. "Casual conversation is not what he's good at," Blinn later said. "He's an enigma. He wants to communicate but he doesn't want you to get too close." After gathering together "12 to 14 pages" of ideas Blinn flew out to Minneapolis to watch the March 15 Triple Threat show. Later that night he went to Prince's house, where it became clear to Blinn that the singer was on "an honest quest to figure himself out. He saved all the money on shrinks and put it in the movie."
He very nearly didn't get the chance. After the Triple Threat tour came to an end, in May, Blinn moved out to Minneapolis to start work on the project - only for Prince to start canceling meetings or walking out of them. Blinn came close to withdrawing from the project altogether when the singer left a meeting at a cinema after 20 minutes.
"You've got a rock'n'roll crazy on your hands," Blinn told Steve Fargnoli. "I know he's very gifted, but frankly, life's too short." With that Blinn got on a plane back to Los Angeles.
Whether or not Prince realized that he was to blame for Blinn's departure or simply didn't want to see his dreams crumble is unclear, but the singer quickly called his screenwriter to apologize for his behavior (which he blamed on stress). Blinn returned to Minneapolis to give the project another chance, at which point Prince played him some of the songs he had already written for the movie on his car stereo. "Behind the strange combination of shyness and creativity," Blinn realized, "he is very, very bright, quite gifted, and quite professional...not always what you find in the rock world." Dreams was finally becoming a reality.
While Blinn worked on the script, Prince carried on writing new songs and rehearsing them with a new line-up of his backing band, now known as The Revolution. Wendy Melvoin replaced Dez Dickerson, who had left to pursue his own music career after informing Prince that he was no longer happy with the theatrical direction in which the music seemed to be headed.
Another new addition was Alan Leeds. Having joined the Prince entourage as manager of the Triple Threat tour, Leeds was given the job of overseeing the various projects Prince was currently involved in, which now included much more than just writing and recording music. Prince & The Revolution, The Time, and Vanity 6 were all busy rehearsing in a warehouse in St Louis Park, Minneapolis. They also took acting classes three days per week for three months under the tuition of drama coach Don Amendolins.
Although each musician's screen role would essentially be an extension of his or her own personality, some seemed more cut out for acting than others. According to Amendolins, Morris Day had "natural abilities" that the others lacked; Denise Matthews (Vanity) was "lazy"; and Prince was "very, very good. He'd flip right out of his persona and be whatever character he had to be." Perhaps surprisingly, he also seemed to take direction better than the rest. An even tougher job fell to choreographer John Command, who had the job of condensing years of dancing training into a few short months.
***
Everything seemed to be on the up. Prince had first served notice of this most famous of backing bands on the cover of 1999, on which the words "anD thE rEVOLUtioN" are printed backward within the "i" of his own name. He debuted the now formally named Revolution - which would later become almost as famous as Prince himself - at Minneapolis's First Avenue, the club that would become the focal point of what was now called Purple Rain, on August 3, 1983, during a benefit concert for the Minneapolis Dance Theater Company, raising $23,000 in the process.
The show marked the live debut of guitarist Wendy Melvoin alongside longstanding Prince sidemen Bobby Z Rivkin (drums), Matt Fink and Lisa Coleman (keyboards), and relative newcomer Mark Brown (bass). Such was Prince's faith in this new group that he recorded the entire concert with a mobile truck, which yielded no-fuss backing tracks for "I Would Die 4 U," "Baby I'm a Star," and "Purple Rain."
While the music was going from strength to strength, and Prince was happy with his most talented band yet, problems beset the film. William Blinn's Fame television show was picked up for a third season, so he decided to quit work on Purple Rain, leaving Minneapolis for good after handing in his first script draft on May 23. It took Cavallo Ruffalo & Fargnoli until September - just two months before shooting was due to commence - before they found a new writer-director. The man in question was Albert Magnoli, who came on the recommendation of director James Foley, but whose previous experience as a director was limited to a 1979 short entitled Jazz.
Although Magnoli wasn't interested in rewriting Blinn's script, he had an auspicious first meeting with Prince's management team. "Cavallo asked me what kind of story it would be if I was to make a film with Prince," he recalled. "I just started telling him a story off the top of my head, and in that ten minutes I had outlined the concept of Purple Rain." Even more promising was Prince's initial reaction to Magnoli. "We sat down, I pitched him the concept, and the first words out of his mouth were: ‘You've only known me for ten minutes, yet you tell me basically my story. How is that possible?'"
Magnoli's arrival might have helped, but the project still refused to run smoothly. Prince's current side-projects, The Time and Vanity 6, were supposed to be playing his rivals in Purple Rain, but as both groups were essentially Prince puppets, they were becoming reluctant to co-operate. In April, Prince had fired the two main musical talents in The Time, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, while keyboardist Monte Moir had left of his own accord after the sacking, leaving only singer Morris Day. Replacements for Moir, Jam, and Lewis were all found in the shape of bassist Jerry Hubbard and keyboardists Mark Cardenez and Paul Peterson. But The Time didn't have much longer to run, as Morris Day made it clear that as soon as Purple Rain was finished, so was he. Not only had Prince undermined his power within the band, he had also begun making it more obvious to the public that the Jamie Starr/Starr Company credits were actually pseudonyms.
"When people came to realize how big a role he played in some of these projects," Alan Leeds recalled, "they started to lose a little respect." By the time a third Time album - Ice Cream Castle, named for a Joni Mitchell lyric - was released on Independence Day 1984, the group had ceased to exist, despite the fact that, ironically, they had been allowed to play their own instruments this time around. (Undeterred, Prince had already started to assemble a new group out of the wreckage: The Family.)
Vanity's role in the new project was also problematic. Hurt by the relationships Prince continued to have with other women, Matthews became addicted to drink and drugs ("I did [drugs] on the sly," she recalled, "but nobody tried to stop me") and embarked on affairs of her own. "She was a competitive pistol," according to Alan Leeds, and "wasn't about to let Prince's desire for control sentence her to the confines of her room." For his part, Prince - whose preference tends to be for more demure ladyfriends - quickly became weary of her attitude. Nonetheless, he had her written into the Purple Rain script and began to work on a successor to Vanity 6. Then in August 1983, during pre-production of the movie, she left the project, possibly over yet another pay dispute. Depending on who you believe, she either quit or was sacked.
Still looking to cling onto her fame, Matthews retained the name Vanity and recorded two solo albums, Wild Animal and Skin on Skin, while also starring in a handful of movies. All the while her drink-and-drugs lifestyle continued to spiral out of control. When she started dating the notorious rock lunatic Nikki Sixx a few years later, his equally wild Mötley Crüe bandmate Tommy Lee was moved to remark: "There's something really crazy about Vanity." Describing their first meeting in his autobiography, Sixx himself recalled: "She opened the door naked with her eyes going around in her head. Somehow I had a feeling we might just hit it off."
By the time she reached her thirties, having smoked crack cocaine for years, Vanity found herself temporarily deaf and blind. She suffered kidney failure (having already lost one kidney), internal bleeding, and a stroke, and spent three days on a life-support machine. After miraculously surviving this ordeal, she renounced her Vanity days and became a born-again Christian. She now runs a ministry in Freemont, California.
Meanwhile, back in Minneapolis, Prince and director Albert Magnoli needed to find a replacement for Vanity as quickly as possible. After auditioning close to 1,000 women in Los Angeles and New York, Prince settled on 22-year-old Patricia Kotero. Despite turning up to audition in her "baggiest sweats," as she later put it, she was practically the mirror image of Vanity, proving that in Prince's world, no one was indispensable. According to Magnoli, she was also "very sweet and tremendously accessible," which to Prince no doubt meant that she was malleable enough to fit the role. "Do you believe in God?" Prince reportedly asked her at the audition, and then: "Are you hungry?" Kotero answered "yes" to both. She was quickly rechristened Apollonia and given the job of leading Susan Moonsie and Brenda Bennett in the renamed Apollonia 6.
Kotero found Prince difficult to work with. "There was a side of him that was just a tyrant," she later claimed, noting that he made her keep the fact that she was married secret so that fans might believe they were romantically involved. It has also been rumored that Prince demanded she eat and drink only candy and herbal tea - just like him. "He wanted to make everyone clones of himself," she said.
As Prince soon discovered, however, Kotero might have had the look, but she wasn't the greatest of singers. With little option but to forge ahead, he soon began to take songs away from the Apollonia 6 album, either to record himself ("17 Days," "Take Me With U"), repurpose for another imminent side project by Sheila E. ("The Glamorous Life"), or hold onto until a suitable act came along ("Manic Monday," which he donated to The Bangles after meeting Susanna Hoffs in 1985). All that remained for Kotero to sing was a sequence of lightweight pop tunes, such as "Sex Shooter" and "Blue Limousine."
***
Purple Rain began shooting on November 1, 1983, giving the cast a few weeks to complete the outdoor scenes before the bitter cold of a Minneapolis winter crept in at the end of the month. Not all of them were finished in time, however, so some members of the cast and crew were flown out to Los Angeles as indoor shooting continued in Minneapolis. Mo Ostin's $4 million was beginning to run out, leaving the whole team in desperate need of major financial backing if the project was going to be seen through to the end.
Bob Cavallo and Steve Fargnoli went back to Warner Bros. Pictures, and this time were able to convince the company of Purple Rain's worth - just as cast and crew were celebrating at the movie's wrap party in Minneapolis at Bloomington's Holiday Inn on December 22. Although a few scenes had to be re-shot in Los Angeles on December 27, post-production on Purple Rain could now begin in preparation for its theatrical release.
A perfectly orchestrated promotional campaign meant that when Purple Rain opened on July 27, 1984 it brought in $7.3 million in just three days. It went on to make around $70 million in total - reportedly more than ten times the cost of production. According to Albert Magnoli, the movie's excellent opening weekend meant that its distribution needed to be stepped up several gears. Having initially planned to show the movie in 200 theaters, Warner Bros. now decided to present it on over 900 screens across the USA. Following the word-of-mouth success of the Controversy and Triple Threat tours and the May 1984 single "When Doves Cry," the release of the Purple Rain soundtrack album raised anticipation for the new movie to fever pitch. The summer of 1984 was set to be Prince's season. Anyone who hadn't yet seen him live clamored to get a look at Prince in action; those who already had were eager to relive the excitement.
In the two decades since its release, the Purple Rain movie has become dated on a number of levels. That it helped define the 80s is without question, but in so perfectly capturing the zeitgeist it also came to exemplify so many of the decade's worst cliches. There's the big hair, the new romantic clothes, the obligatory topless-woman scene, in which the hapless Apollonia is asked if she wants to "purify" herself in Lake Minnetonka; there's also an awkward moment where Jerome Benton throws a stereotypically loudmouthed ex-lover of Morris Day's into a dumpster. (When challenged by MTV about the movie's alleged sexism, Prince admitted: "Sometimes, for the sake of humor, we may have gone overboard.") Even the editing techniques that once helped tie the visual experience of Purple Rain to the fast pace of MTV aren't quite so dazzling as they once were.
As an insight into Prince's psyche, however, Purple Rain is indispensable. The Battle of the Bands trials surrounding rival acts The Revolution, The Time, and Apollonia 6 are based on Prince's early days as a struggling musician in Minneapolis, during which time he played in Champagne on the same club circuit as Flyte Time. The scenes work not just as dramatic construct but also as a tribute to Prince's hometown and the people who helped him in his early days.
Most of the characters and musical acts in the film - The Revolution, The Time, Apollonia 6, and even First Avenue club owner Billy Sparks - use their real names, and are essentially extensions of themselves. Prince plays The Kid, a semiautobiographical construction with an almost magical air. He seems to have the ability to appear and disappear at will, whether on side streets, on his purple motorcycle, or in scenes such as the one in which he seems to vanish when Apollonia turns to compliment him on a performance.
In 1996, Prince told Oprah Winfrey that the most autobiographical part of the film was "probably the scene with me looking at my mother, crying." Although Albert Magnoli later suggested that the part where The Kid's father warns him never to get married was based on something Prince once told him, the singer himself was adamant, in a 1985 interview with Rolling Stone, that "[the] stuff about my dad was part of Al Magnoli's story. We used parts of my past and present to make the story pop more, but it was a story."
Even so, the career of the father in Purple Rain - an abusive failed musician named Francis L. - seems to echo that of Prince's real father, John L. Nelson. Prince has never spoken about exactly what went on behind closed doors in his family. But given that his parents divorced when he was young, and that he then became estranged from his father for lengthy periods (and even made overt references to child abuse on record), it would seem that his was not a particularly happy childhood. That the specter of physical abuse lingers in The Kid's relationship with Apollonia - and that he even envisions his own suicide after his father attempts to take his own life - suggests that Prince was playing out something of an Oedipal nightmare on the big screen.
The New York Post review of Purple Rain noted that, in The Kid's world, "women are there to be worshipped, beaten, or humiliated." Most other reviews of the movie, however, were content simply to revel in the "affirmation of [Prince's] versatility and substance" (Miami Herald); his "taste for androgynous appeal" (Philadelphia Daily News); or the fact that the movie "reeks of unadorned sex" (Detroit Free Press). Perhaps the lack of armchair psychology in these reviews is a reflection of the two-dimensional nature of the movie, in which Wendy and Lisa are simply the girls of The Revolution; Morris Day - a "full-fledged young comedian" in the eyes of noted critic Pauline Kael - relaxes into a pimp persona; and Apollonia serves as the eye candy.
Albert Magnoli might have tried hard to invest some feeling and motivation into the characters, but the parts audiences tend to remember are the performances. Purple Rain might not have aged all too well, but the musical segments remain as incredible as they ever were, particularly those by Prince himself. He manages to wring every drop of emotion out of a character who, elsewhere in the movie, seems moody, inarticulate, and self-obsessed.
One interesting aspect of Purple Rain is that, although Prince's parents were both black, The Kid's mother is played by Greek actress Olga Kartalos (one of only two professional actors in the movie, the other being Clarence Williams III, who played Francis L.). This was in part another example of Prince's efforts to blur the truth of the story, but it might also say something about the light-skinned singer's attempts to appeal to a mixed mass audience. Having tasted mainstream success with "Little Red Corvette," Prince was keen to follow up with something simple and bombastic and cross right over - just like Bob Seger, whom Prince kept crossing paths with on his 1999 tour.
And so Prince wrote "Purple Rain," a guitar-led anthem that builds from a simple chordal opening to a huge crescendo with strings, almost five minutes of guitar soloing, and Prince's most impassioned vocal performance to date. The song became an instant lighters-in-the-air classic and helped the accompanying album sell 13 million copies in the US alone.
The Purple Rain soundtrack album still stands as Prince's biggest-selling record. After knocking Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA off the top of the Billboard 200, it remained at Number One for 24 weeks. It served as further evidence, as Bob Cavallo put it, of the fact that Prince was "vitally interested in music, but also in success." Perhaps the most obvious example of Prince's ability to meld creativity with commerciality was the leadoff single, the ethereal pop masterpiece "When Doves Cry." The opening guitar riff roots the song in rock, but the overlapping vocals, complex drum-machine patterns, and complete lack of bassline came from somewhere else entirely. (It was all too much for Warners. According to vice president Marylou Badeaux, the label's initial response was: "What kind of fucking record is this, with a bunch of strange sounds?")
The rest of Purple Rain served as the best evidence yet of the power of Prince and his arsenal of strange sounds. The opening "Let's Go Crazy" is perfectly pitched, beginning - as does the movie - with church organ and the words "Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today ..." before launching into an uninhibited dance track. Its promises of a mixture of sexual freedom and salvation carry the message that, if you follow Prince, you'll be free to do whatever you chose.
The album also contains one of Prince's most heartbreaking ballads, "The Beautiful Ones." Written for Susannah Melvoin, twin sister of guitarist Wendy -whom Prince had met in May 1983, while she was still in another relationship - it builds around gentle synths and slow drum patterns to the coy question: "If we get married, would that be cool?" Having concluded that you always lose the beautiful ones, Prince lets go for a moment of pure passion, screaming relentlessly to his unrequited love.
The pacing of the album is exemplary, with each of the ballads offset by uptempo dance tracks. "The Beautiful Ones" is followed by "Computer Blue," a track constructed out of driving drum loops and dolphin-like squalls of guitar. The emotional intensity builds on "Darling Nikki," with its stop-start synths and backward messages that God is coming, and "When Doves Cry," before peaking on the final three tracks - "I Would Die 4 U," "Baby I'm a Star," and "Purple Rain" - all of which segue into one another, as recorded at the First Avenue benefit show.
While most of Purple Rain seemed to replace the crude sexuality of old with a more subtle sensuality, one song in particular landed Prince in hot water. Prince had already written songs about oral sex and incest ("Head" and "Sister," both included on Dirty Mind), and even declared his intention to "fuck the taste out of your mouth" on 1999's "Let's Pretend We're Married." But when Tipper Gore (the wife of future Vice President Al Gore) heard "Darling Nikki" - in which the "sex fiend" title character "masturbat[es] with a magazine" - playing in her daughter's bedroom she was suitably encouraged to form the Parents' Music Resource Center. Gore's organization led a crusade to clean up popular music, one of the results of which was the introduction of Parental Advisory stickers. It also drew up a list of the "Filthy Fifteen" - the most offensive records of the time. "Darling Nikki" headed the list, with the Prince-penned "Sugar Walls" at Number Two, suggesting that the PMRC had been far too outraged to dig any deeper into Prince's back catalog.
***
From Prince: Chaos, Disorder and Revolution, (c) 2011 by Jason Draper. Published by Backbeat Books, an imprint of Hal Leonard. ISBN: 978-0-87930-961-9. $19.99. Reprinted with permission. www.backbeatbooks.com
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