FEATURE:
Prince and The Revolution's Purple Rain at Forty
Inside Its Epic and Iconic Title Track
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ONE of the best albums of all time…
PHOTO CREDIT: Liu Heung Shing/AP
celebrates its fortieth anniversary on 25th June. Prince’s (that he recorded with The Revolution) sixth studio album, Purple Rain, was to huge critical and commercial acclaim. I am going to write another feature about it closer to the anniversary date. Here, I wanted to look inside its legendary and huge title track. One of the best title tracks ever. It is interesting where Purple Rain was placed on the album. Prince configured at least two unique track listings of Purple Rain prior to setting the final running order – 7th November, 1983 and 23rd March, 1984. In the 1983 line-up, Purple Rain was the first track on the second side. It is an odd track order. Purple Rain could be nowhere but the final track! Given it is nearly nine minutes and is so epic, it could only be the swansong. Nothing really could follow it. I am glad that it does end the album. I will bring in a Wikipedia feature before getting to some features about it:
“Purple Rain" reached number two on the US Billboard Hot 100 and stayed there for two weeks, being kept off the top spot by "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go" by Wham!. It reached the summit in Belgium and the Netherlands. It is certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and is considered to be one of Prince's signature songs. Following Prince's death in 2016, "Purple Rain" re-entered the Billboard Hot 100, where it reached number four. It also re-entered the UK Singles Chart at number six, placing two spaces higher than its original peak. In France, where it originally peaked at number 12, "Purple Rain" reached number one around a week after Prince's death.
"Purple Rain" was ranked number 18 on Rolling Stone's 2021 list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time and is included in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll. During Prince's performance at the Super Bowl XLI halftime show in 2007, "Purple Rain" was the last song of his set; the event became especially notable when actual rain fell during the performance while the stage and stadium were lit up with purple lights. The Super Bowl XLI halftime show featuring Prince has topped lists of the best Super Bowl halftime shows of all time. Prince performed the song as the opening of a medley of his hits with Beyoncé at the 2004 Grammy Awards. It was also the final song he performed at his last concert, which took place on April 14, 2016”.
The first feature I want to spotlight is from Neo Music. Last year, they explained and explored the story behind one of the finest tracks ever. Definitely one of Prince’s best. Many still feel like the 1984 album is underrated. The third single from the album, Purple Rain arrived on 26th September, 1984 – around three months after the album:
“THE ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF PURPLE RAIN
Prince intended to work with Fleetwood Mac singer Stevie Nicks on Purple Rain when he originally wrote it as a country song. According to Nicks, she received a 10-minute instrumental version of the song from Prince with a request to write the lyrics, but she felt overwhelmed by the task. She later said, “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 too much for me.'”
Prince then asked his backing band, The Revolution, to try the song during a rehearsal. He said, “I want to try something before we go home. It’s mellow.” According to Lisa Coleman, one of the band members, Prince changed the song dramatically after Wendy Melvoin, another band member, started playing guitar chords to it. She said, “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.”
Prince recorded the song live at a benefit concert for the Minnesota Dance Theatre at his home base venue, the First Avenue nightclub in Minneapolis, on August 3, 1983. That performance was Melvoin’s live debut with The Revolution. She was just 19 years old. Bobby Z, the drummer of the band, said, “It certainly was one of the best concerts we ever did.”
The concert was recorded by David Rivkin (aka David Z), Bobby Z’s brother, using a mobile recording unit. He said, “With Prince, you never knew. I thought we were recording a concert, but I wasn’t sure if it was going to be a record, too. I knew they were working on the movie as well. You just had to go in prepared to record whatever it was going to be as well as you could.”
Other tracks that were recorded during that concert were I Would Die 4 U and Baby I’m a Star, which also became part of the Purple Rain album and film soundtrack. Prince later performed overdubs while working at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles from August to September 1983. He edited out a solo and an extra verse that diluted the emotional content of the song. He also added strings and backing vocals by Clare Fischer and The Steeles.
PRINCE’S PURPLE RAIN LYRICS
Prince’s Purple Rain lyrics are a powerful expression of his personal and artistic journey. It is a power ballad that combines rock, R&B, gospel, and orchestral music. It is the title track and final song on the album Purple Rain, released on June 25, 1984, by Warner Bros. Records. The album was also the soundtrack to the film of the same name, which starred Prince as The Kid, a talented but troubled musician who struggles with his family, band, rival, and love interest.
Prince wrote Purple Rain as a tribute to his father, who attempted suicide. The song also expresses Prince’s desire to reconcile with his former lover and bandmate Apollonia Kotero, who left him for his rival Morris Day in the film. It was recorded live at First Avenue in Minneapolis on August 3, 1983, with an audience of 1,500 people. Prince later overdubbed some vocals and guitar solos in the studio.
THE MEANING AND INTERPRETATION OF PURPLE RAIN
The lyrics of Prince Purple Rain are full of symbolism, emotion, and message. Purple Rain represents a new beginning, a cleansing factor, and a spiritual guide. Prince explained that the concept of purple rain relates to the end of the world, being with the one you love, and letting your faith or God guide you through. Bandmate Lisa Coleman shared that it means a new beginning. Purple is the sky at dawn; rain is the cleansing factor.
He also used the colour purple to symbolise doom and faith in his previous album, 1999, which included lyrics like “…could have sworn it was Judgement Day, the sky was all purple…”
The song expresses a sense of loss, sadness, remembrance, and reverence for a relationship that is over. Prince sings, “I never meant to cause you any sorrow / I never meant to cause you any pain / I only wanted one time to see you laughing / I only wanted to see you laughing in the purple rain.” He also sings, “It’s such a shame our friendship had to end.“
Purple Rain has elements of blues, soul, rock and roll, and gospel music. The song also showcases Prince’s vocal range, from his falsetto to his lower register. The song also features one of the most iconic guitar solos of all time, which showcases Prince’s virtuosity and emotion”.
In 2019, Louder Sound also took a look at a genius track. Purple Rain, in their view, reclaimed Rock for Black artists. It was a track that was played widely across radio. It is interesting how, on 3rd August, 1983, Prince and The Revolution broke from filming the Purple Rain film and recording its soundtrack album to play a forty-five-minute benefit gig for their choreographer, Loyce Holton. The band ended by playing Purple Rain:
“One of the great successes we experienced was not to just be thought of as a black R&B band,” Revolution keyboardist Lisa Coleman believes. “We had struggled for a couple of years, trying to write one song for a black music station, and one for a rock station. But Purple Rain the song was played on every kind of radio station, from country to Americana to rock ballad. And it’s just so perfect that it came from Prince, who nobody knew what to make of. Are you serious? Who is this guy?”
The question went to Prince’s heart, Coleman believes: “He never wanted to lose his black audience, that was really important to his identity. Because even within the black community, there was tension about how light his skin was, whether or not he was gay. Can we really call him one of us? That mentality was important to him, but he also was trying to grow beyond that. I think it was a struggle for him, all of his life.”
Having been reduced to tears by bigoted Stones fans when he supported them in androgynous garb in 1981, the Purple Rain album sleeve saw him astride a motorbike sporting a Little Richard pompadour, while on the record he was a Hendrix-like virtuoso, in defiant riposte to music which had buried its black roots.
The Revolution first heard Purple Rain at the Minnesota warehouse where they recorded most of the album. “It was on Highway 7, out in the boondocks,” says Coleman. “He was messing around on guitar, calling out the chords. And then Wendy [Melvoin, the band’s teenage rhythm guitarist and backing singer] started playing the chords in her Wendy way, and he loved it! The intro is Wendy, and her voicings on those chords are beautiful and Joni Mitchell-esque. I came up with the string parts. During the course of that day – maybe a day or two? – it just came out of us.”
A Record Plant mobile recording truck was outside First Avenue when they turned up that August. Inside, it was hot as hell. “It was pushing 90 degrees Fahrenheit and dense with cigarette smoke,” Bobby Z explains. “It was a toxic environment.” Coleman remembers the club being “packed with people”. The band were exhausted from the album and film, adding to the heightened atmosphere. They’d also be playing music the crowd hadn’t heard.
After Melvoin’s opening acoustic chords, Bobby Z’s drums – mostly acoustic, and triggering Linn drums later added to in the mix – accompanied Prince’s singing for the first two minutes. “It’s just a back-beat and him from his guts,” Bobby says. “It’s just so raw for him. I remember those two minutes. Because the room is silent except for the pattern you’re playing. He was in the moment, and you’re in it with him, and it was a special place to be. It was a whole different planet.”
“That night it was on fire,” says Coleman, “and nobody’s singing along. It was just so different for Prince, almost a country song. But it got to them by the end, and his guitar solo was so beautiful. I get chills thinking of it. I always kept my eyes on Prince, in case he needed something, but I could see the faces and wide eyes in the front. It was like a kid seeing Santa Claus.”
There’s as much tension as release in this atypical rock epic (nearly nine minutes long on the album, after Prince cut a verse). Coleman’s string arrangement – played on her Obie FX keyboard on the night, with a string quartet added in the studio – has a classical, calming quality, as Prince’s voice and guitar clamber for the heights.
“It is that contrary motion that made it cool,” Coleman considers. “The verses are so intimate and personal, like he’s trying to talk to you. He liked the strings coming in slowly, and their warmth. And then, at the end vamp, where they’re going down and he’s going up, maybe it’s keeping it from flying away completely. It’s repetitive, and it keeps saying, ‘I’m here with you.’ And then his guitar solo is pleading, ‘Please be here.’” “You’ve got this dirge or ballad beat behind it,” Bobby Z reflects.
“You’ve got pleading in the vocals. You’ve got agility and spins and pirouettes in the guitar solo. And then the strings pull your heartstrings. Purple Rain is like a Stairway To Heaven. It’s non-religious, but people feel reverent about it. Even if you walk in on a casino and some crappy band are playing it, it still has something different”.
I am going to end up by going back to 2017 and a feature from The Guardian. They spoke with the track’s keyboard player, Lisa Coleman, and drummer Bobby Z. Rather than this being a track purely recorded in the studio, it was laid down in a packed and sweaty club in Minneapolis. It must have been quite a moment capturing a moment of music history in a relatively anonymous space:
Lisa Coleman, Keyboards
Being in Prince’s band was like getting in a sports car with a racing driver. Even though you felt a bit scared – why is he going so fast? – he could handle it, and it brought so much joy. I first met him in 1979. He was looking for a girl keyboard player and I happened to be one. One of my best friends got a job at Prince’s management agency. She called me about him, and I didn’t know who he was. I made a tape of myself playing a couple of songs and I flew to Minneapolis and he picked me up at the airport. We were both very shy, so it didn’t go well at first – but we ended up hitting it off.
The audition was pretty immediate. It was eight or nine at night when we got to his place. He told me there was a piano down the stairs, and I took that as a hint he wanted to hear me play. He came down a few minutes later and picked up a guitar. I was checking him out just as much as he was checking me out. He had a poster on his wall of Kris Kristofferson and Barbra Streisand in A Star Is Born. I thought that was kind of young. Me being from LA and my father being a musician meant I was around the music business, but it was a different feeling with Prince. He had the vibe of living music – his house smelled like a recording studio.
It took a handful of years for us to work up to being that completely fabulous Purple Rain band, so tight and good. I think we lived up to the flamboyant image because we worked so hard. When Wendy Melvoin joined to play guitar, it made a big difference. I was happy because she was my girlfriend, and Prince was so excited – she was like a new kitten to him, the way that he was precious about her. You could feel a new beginning. I think he chose each of us for very simple reasons, not because we were virtuosos – although we were very good. There was another quality he needed to have around him: a blend of loyalty, a spirit of young hunger and a musical quality he didn’t have. Every one of us had something he didn’t have, even though he had it all.
Purple Rain was one of the songs we were working on before we decided what the film was going to be. At first he wasn’t sure Purple Rain was actually a Prince song. It was kind of a country number and he gave it to Stevie Nicks, but she felt intimidated by it. So one day he decided to fool around with it at rehearsal. 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.
In 1983, we performed at a benefit show at the First Avenue club in Minneapolis. This is where the song was recorded live, though at the time we didn’t know that was the plan. Prince was really excited and kept pumping us up: “We’re making history tonight.” It all makes sense now: if you’re going to record something, make sure you’re as badass as you can be. Don’t fuck around.
It was Wendy’s first show. To have that be her anointing was a lot to live up to. But he was so supportive of her. He took her under his wing. He helped her relax and not be too nervous. We were unsure what was going to happen, but we hit the stage with such conviction that it didn’t really matter. The crowd were with us. It was hot, it was August, it was jampacked in the club. It was sweaty and smoky and vibey as hell.
Afterwards, I went into the studio in Los Angeles with Prince to work on it [the live recording had string overdubs added, and was edited from 13 minutes to 8 minutes 41 seconds]. I did the string arrangement – we didn’t hire session players, it was me calling my brother: “Can you get a couple of friends and come do some strings?” Prince made the decision to lose the third verse, making it more concise. He was completely right. The third verse didn’t really match the other two – it was a different spirit and it didn’t belong in the song.
IN THIS PHOTO: From left: Wendy Melvoin, Prince and Lisa Coleman accepting an Oscar for Purple Rain/PHOTO CREDIT: Bettmann Archive
Bobby Z, drums
In 1978, I was at Moon Sound Studios in Minneapolis, working with a different band. Prince was in Studio A making his first tape. It was dynamite, gunpowder. I heard it walking across the hallway one morning. I went in and I saw the afro.
I was working for his manager as a delivery driver, and my job became driving Prince. We spent seven months basically alone together. We were bonded as friends, which eventually made getting the job of drummer harder. I was very grateful that he hired me and very grateful that he took me for the whole ride.
There were people in the Revolution who weren’t committed to staying forever, and you can’t build a band like that, but by summer 1983 we had a special chemistry. He was always kind of a solo artist, but the fact that the Revolution were able to give him the colours on a palette made me proud.
Purple Rain was brought in at the end of a rehearsal. We had just gone through the set twice and he said: “I want to try something before we go home. It’s mellow.” For me it was natural: I could give it the big rock beat and be John Bonham. But when it starts, it’s really a country song.
The soundtrack recording began in 1983, when he used a mobile recording truck to capture Purple Rain, I Would Die 4 U, Baby I’m a Star and the workings of a couple of others. Documenting what we did was commonplace, and he used it as a tool to improve. We would watch videos as part of our rehearsals, and it caused a dramatic improvement. When you see yourself look stupid, you fix yourself a lot better. All he had to do was show it to you.
That day at First Avenue, it was 90 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 he got the performances out of people who were just for one minute to his level, and it was a beautiful thing.
We ended up losing the third verse. To edit it the way he did was genius. He was an incredible editor, and this was back in the days when we were splicing tape. Another feather in his hat. Because Prince was such a great musician, he was able to find pieces of music in his head, and then with Scotch tape put them together into something completely different – there were some real gutsy moves back then. He had a vision in his head for everything from fashion to the sound of the snare drum to the catering truck. He knew everything”.
On 25th June, 1984, Prince released one of his biggest albums. Many debate where it comes when ranking the studio albums. Some would place 1982’s 1999 or 1987’s Sign o' the Times higher than Purple Rain. It is amazing to think that, forty years later, Purple Rain is underrated and not as poured over as it should be! Not only is the title track standout. It also boasts songs like When Doves Cry, Let’s Go Crazy and I Would Die for U. I think Purple Rain is Prince’s greatest title track. The extraordinary finale to his sixth studio album, I wanted to spend some time with the biblical Purple Rain. From its modest and gentle beginnings to its epic rise and spine-tingling end, it is one of Prince’s…
ABSOLUTE masterpieces.