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Rolling Stone 500: Prince Achieves Global Takeover With ‘Purple Rain’ - Rolling Stone

Rolling Stone 500: Prince Achieves Global Takeover With ‘Purple Rain’ - Rolling Stone

Rolling Stone 500: Prince Achieves Global Takeover With ‘Purple Rain’ - Rolling Stone
Sep 29, 2020 3 mins, 55 secs

But Prince had plans to star in a movie loosely based on his life — he’d been jotting down ideas for it in a purple notebook while on his tour bus — and he wanted his next album to be the soundtrack.

Tapes of the First Avenue show also provided the basic tracks for “I Would Die 4 U” and “Baby I’m a Star.” Almost exactly a year later, with the album already a sensation, the movie would premiere, and Prince’s global takeover would be complete.

For countless listeners, Prince was Purple Rain.

The week that the Purple Rain movie opened, in July 1984, Prince became the first artist to have the Number One album, single, and film in the country simultaneously.

The success of “Little Red Corvette” the previous year had opened the door for the pop breakthrough Prince had longed for; guitarist Dez Dickerson described the audiences on the 1999 tour as a “tidal wave of white, getting whiter and whiter each night.” Prince began reconfiguring his sound, his style and his band in ways that would connect with the broadest-possible target.

It was a visual manifestation of the sonic goal Prince had presented to his musicians — a cross between Fleetwood Mac and Sly and the Family Stone.

“Maybe because we came together from different corners,” says Coleman, “and were able to share our souls so intensely toward one center, other people felt it.” From the start, the music on Purple Rain had been conceived in parallel with the movie idea.

As the story came into focus, though, Prince knew that he needed the music to relate directly to the narrative — almost an extra-long-form music video.

Out on the road, as he scribbled away in his purple notebook, Prince often found himself pulling into the nation’s hockey rinks on the heels of his fellow Midwesterner Bob Seger.

Perpetually competitive, he wanted to understand the key to Seger’s appeal; Fink offered that it was the big, lighter-raising power ballads — “We’ve Got Tonight,” “Turn the Page” — that Seger’s fans loved.

Prince set himself the goal of writing such an anthem, which he first sketched out to the band in December 1982.

His crossover dreams were so big, in fact, that he initially sent the track to Stevie Nicks — he played keyboards on her hit “Stand Back” — and asked if she would write the song’s lyrics; she replied, “I wish I could, [but] it’s too much for me.” (Later, Prince worried that he’d hit the arena-rock bull’s-eye too closely and that the song sounded similar to Journey’s hit “Faithfully,” so he called keyboardist Jonathan Cain and played the song over the phone to make sure the group wouldn’t challenge his copyright.).

On the heels of the First Avenue show, the first batch of songs he presented to the Revolution were, they felt, too pop, not funky enough — so Prince brought in the raging “Darling Nikki,” with its infamous line about the title character “masturbating with a magazine” that would later set in motion Tipper Gore’s creation of the Parents Music Resource Center.

Prince had given the sunny “Take Me With U” to Apollonia 6 (his female trio Vanity 6, which had just been reconfigured around his Purple Rain co-star), but then he grabbed it back to be a duet between him and Apollonia; engineer Susan Rogers recalled the actress warming up her inexperienced voice with “When I’m Sixty-Four.” Though Prince had performed “Let’s Go Crazy” at First Avenue, he re-recorded it with the band live in their rehearsal space, then overdubbed the cataclysmic closing guitar solo.

In May, more than two months after it was recorded, “When Doves Cry” was released as the first single from Purple Rain

Suddenly, the buzz around this movie (for which Prince would not do a single interview or promotional appearance) was at a fever pitch

And it pulled off something of a miracle — the movie managed to make him the biggest star in the music world, while only increasing the mystery around his personal life

The success of Purple Rain transformed Prince’s career forever; he once described it as “my albatross — it’ll be hanging around my neck as long as I’m making music.” Another time, he said it was “in some ways more detrimental than good

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