Prince and the Revolution, "Purple Rain"

Mitch makes an appointment with Dr. Everything'll-Be-All-Right

Mitch Blum

Ken Warshaw

, and

CJ Kaplan

Aug 16, 2023

Mitch’s Pitch:

On the day Notre-Dame burned I found myself in a spa in Las Vegas.

A weird spa in Vegas. It was super fancy, but there were TVs everywhere. I don't know about you, but when I'm wearing an ill-fitting loaner robe and getting ready for a massage, I want cucumber water and some barely audible new age music, not CNN. But Vegas is Vegas, and this spa had TVs everywhere.

When I walked into the men's waiting room things got exponentially worse. The room was full of be-robed dudes and there was yet another TV, this time blasting some terrible college football game. If you know me, you know that there's not enough cucumber water in the world to get me to watch some stupid college football game, so I had to take charge. I figured out who was the alpha in the room, quietly waited until they left, and then grabbed the remote.

As soon as I stumbled across Morris Day and the Time doing "Jungle Love", I knew I had hit the jackpot - the best stretch of the Purple Rain movie. I was excited, and I wish I could say that my new massage buddies were as well, but there was clearly trouble brewing. I could sense revolution in the air. Someone asked why we were watching this shit. Someone else asked where the remote was. Another person polished off the last of the cucumber water. We were spiraling.

"Just watch," I said, practically daring them to pry the remote from my warm, lavender scented hands.

As soon as Prince and the Revolution started playing "Purple Rain" the energy in the room shifted. The guy sitting next to me said "wow" under his breath. We were all transfixed. By the time Prince reached the crescendo seven minutes later - the guitar solo - we were transformed. Reinvigorated. Renewed. Reborn. The complaints had long since ceased, and I'm not sure if any of us even needed a massage after getting our souls cleansed (I still got one, obviously).

Even three years after his death, the power of Prince remained undiminished.

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Prince was popular long before Purple Rain, but Purple Rain took Prince to the next level. Before Purple Rain, Prince was known for great singles, salacious song titles, and the odd use of letters and numbers. He was also incredibly prolific, which meant that his albums were also full of tons of filler tunes, a tradition he kept alive for all 39 studio albums that he released in his lifetime.

Except for one album. Purple Rain.

Prince has a lot of great albums (Sign O' The Times, Emancipation), but they're all flawed masterpieces in one way or another - too long, too much awkward sexytime moaning, too experimental, or too screamy (Prince screams a lot).

Somehow, everything clicked with Purple Rain. Maybe it was Apollonia. Maybe it was the weird keyboard player that was inexplicably wearing scrubs. Maybe it was having to write songs for a movie about yourself, where you call yourself "The Kid" and are a huge jerk? Who knows? (I'm still putting my money on Apollonia.)

Purple Rain is the best Prince album because it's the most consistent Prince album, and it features 5 absolute bangers in "Let's Go Crazy", "Darling Nikki", "When Doves Cry", "I Would Die For You", and his magnus opus, "Purple Rain". The weakest tunes are "Computer Blue" and "Baby I'm a Star," but I still like both of those songs. Don't you? Yes, Lisa. Is the water warm enough? Yes, Lisa. What the hell are we even talking about? I have no idea, Lisa.

Somehow Prince managed to be the world's best R&B artist and the world's greatest rock star at the same time, and it all came together with Purple Rain. He was a freak, he was unique, he had his ups and his downs, but he was always true to himself and his art.

I remember seeing Prince (TAFKAP) at the Boston Garden in 1997, a tiny man dancing on a grand piano, whose music and personality was so beguiling that he could command an entire arena. He put on an amazing show, he won over every person in the audience, and he burned that place to the ground.

I guess that's just the power of Prince.

Ken’s Response:

Performing music for the outside world is truth and vulnerability; performing it for yourself provides brutal honesty that no amount of cover can protect you from. When an artist releases a song, an album, or a performance, every note of it gets scrutinized, and there is usually no tougher critic than the artist(s) themselves. Some grow into the confident, almost egocentric personas they portray: a fake-it-til-you-make-it formula that has worked well for literally thousands of chart-topping musicians. Others exude genuine bravado and self-awareness from the moment we first become aware of them, against all odds and conventional logic.

Prince wasn’t your typical musician; he wasn’t a typical anything! Standing just 5’2” and weighing in at a whopping 112 lbs., he stood larger than life because his personality, his style, his swagger, and his musical genius elevated him to heights far beyond his diminutive stature.

We knew of Prince in the early ‘80s, but aside from some minor charting tracks, it wasn’t until 1999 was released in 1982 that he forced his way into every household in America (and most of the world) and made us take notice. And if you were a teenager in 1984, you were blown away by the phenomenon known as Purple Rain.

Not so much a stand-alone album as it was a musical “movement,” Purple Rain was a film, an album, a collection of incredibly written and performed songs, and a moment almost frozen in time that helped define mid-’80s pop/rock.

Opening with one of the greatest opening lines of all time, reminiscent of Stevie Wonder’s “Love’s in Need of Love Today”, “Let’s Go Crazy” begins: “Dearly Beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called life”. Featuring smash hits like “When Doves Cry” and ending with Prince’s greatest composition, “Purple Rain”, we’re riding in his sidecar on an incredible journey through jazz, blues, rock, and pop that’s as poignant as Dylan, as experimental as Zappa, and as cleverly composed as Sondheim.

I’m not in love with every track on the album, “Darling Nikki” doesn’t hold up as well as I thought it might, and “Computer Blue” is skippable, but keeping Purple Rain off the shelves of Newbury St. would be like keeping Joe DiMaggio out of the baseball hall of fame!

Pitch Successful (tonight I’m gonna party like it’s a Wednesday in 2023)

CJ’s Response:

Prince and David Bowie died within a few months of each other in 2016. Sad as that was for music and the world to lose two beloved icons in such a short period of time, it was oddly fitting.

Prince was the American Bowie, wasn’t he?

Prince and Bowie. Two enigmatic, shape-shifting spacemen sent from Planet Sexy to blow our minds. Both blended music, art and fashion seamlessly and gloriously. And both were able to evolve their personas from one album to the next, never standing still, never treading water no matter how successful they were.

Case in point: Purple Rain.

Purple Rain, the movie, is kind of silly but watchable. Purple Rain, the album, is spectacular. Prince’s lyrics are bold and evocative and his guitar work is incendiary. The comparisons to Hendrix are well-founded. The Revolution are as talented as they are outlandish. My favorite band members are the two women who play the keyboard with one hand each while dry humping one another. I found this particularly impressive since I couldn’t play the keyboard with two hands while seated and not being felt up. So, kudos to those ladies.

There are so many incredible songs on this album, but I want to call out one in particular. “Darling Nikki” was written to give the PMRC fourteen heart attacks, which it did. There are two things that I truly love about this song. First, when Prince meets Nikki in the lobby, she is masturbating to a magazine. How quaint. You see kids, when I was your age we didn’t have PornHub. We had airbrushed “photographs” on glossy paper that you could access without Wi-Fi. Which was important because there’s no way we would’ve gotten reception out in the woods…uh, perhaps I’ve said too much.

The other amazing aspect of this song is that it appears Prince has to sign a waiver before Nikki commences with the grinding, as if he were about to try bungee jumping or brave a particularly perilous waterslide. I commend Nikki on the wisdom of having the appropriate documents drawn up and on hand. When it comes right down to it, there are always legal ramifications with an activity like that.

Even for a sexy spaceman.

Pitch Successful (Why are the doves so sad?)

Mitch’s pitch was successful and Prince and the Revolution’s Purple Rain has ascended to the hallowed halls of the Newbury St. Collection. What’s your take on Prince, the Revolution, and Purple Rain? Which Top 20 album from 1985 would you have pitched? Please let us know in the comments section.

Exile on Newbury St.

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