***When The Artist Formerly Known As Prince Was Prince- The Thirtieth Anniversary Of Purple Rain
Yeah, purple rain, purple rain
Warner Brothers/AP
From the opening scenes of Purple Rain, as Prince and the Revolution rock the stage of the cavernous First Avenue nightclub, it's clear that the city of Minneapolis, with its thriving music scene, is going to be a character of its own.
Dan Corrigan
![The First Avenue nightclub during the Purple Rain era.]( "The First Avenue nightclub during the Purple Rain era.")
In 1984, when Prince made his film debut in the semi-autobiographical movie, he was already a homegrown star, a Minneapolis boy who cut his musical chops in the city's kaleidoscopic music scene.
By the time Purple Rain was filmed, Prince was already a regular on the First Avenue stage. But in the film, Prince plays The Kid, a talented and charismatic musician with a lot to prove, who channels his angst into his music. He's got plenty to go around. Beset by the demons of domestic abuse at home, his music doesn't go over with the manager of the hottest club in town.
Apollonia Kotero, who played the beautiful aspiring singer with whom The Kid begins to fall in love, says she was already familiar with the diverse music scene in Minneapolis by the time she arrived. She even knew about the club where Prince took her on the night of her audition for the film.
"I remember it was crowded and all these people were staring," she says. "And I thought, 'Oh, this is like, this is like his place!' And we danced!"
Allison Keyes/NPR
![The Ike Reilly Assassination performs at First Avenue earlier this year.]( "The Ike Reilly Assassination performs at First Avenue earlier this year.")
Roy Freedom, who has been a DJ at First Avenue for 30 years, says that Prince's music fit right into the club's cutting-edge vibe in the 1980s.
"It was just a really exciting, fun time. Well, Prince was the main thing, of course," Freedom says. "There was that whole wave of what was coming over from England — New Order — and then we had some New York stuff. I don't know if you remember; there was a song called 'The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight.' That was a big record here."
Jon Bream, a music critic who has been with the Minneapolis Star Tribune for 36 years, first saw Prince perform at the Capri Theater here in 1979.
"That's one of the great blessings of him growing up here," Bream says. This live music town, he says, had a mix of sounds when Prince was coming up that included punk, garage rock, funk and R&B. "So he didn't limit himself to R&B music. He listened to everything. He listened to a lot of classic rock and got a lot of influences in his music."
When Purple Rain came out in 1984, it drew attention to Minneapolis, but many figures in the local music scene don't think the movie really had a huge effect on the city's music. Especially since, at the time, it was already boasting other hot bands like The Replacements and Husker Du.
Allison Keyes/NPR
![A star commemorating the filming of Purple Rain painted on the wall inside First Avenue.]( "A star commemorating the filming of Purple Rain painted on the wall inside First Avenue.")
"The movie had absolutely no relevant bearing on anything," says Steve McClellan, who spent more than 30 years in booking and management at First Avenue. McClellan calls Prince a fantastic artist whose music broke down some racial barriers that used to effect Minneapolis clubs in the '80s. But, he says, the movie itself didn't improve local music.
"A lot of mediocre bands were created very quickly because the major labels signed anybody funk," McClellan says. "That happens in every market, right?"
Recording engineer Joe Mabbott runs the Hideaway Studio in Northeast Minneapolis, where he has recorded many of the city's notable hip-hop musicians including P.O.S., Brother Ali, Dessa and Atmosphere. He says the local music scene remains diverse to this day.
"I think it helps that Purple Rain was done here in the area, but obviously it's gone way past that," he says. "A huge array of styles of music, from hip-hop to traditional Irish folk music to everything in-between, basically."
But Bream says Prince — and Purple Rain — changed the stakes for musicians in Minneapolis. "People knew you could make it out of here and make it big. Bob Dylan is from here. He went to college here, but he had to move to New York to make it," he says. "Prince proved you could stay here to make it, and you could make it huge."
The movie's mystique clearly lives on: Bream says that almost any big-time rock band that comes through Minneapolis on tour makes some comment about Prince and Purple Rain, especially if it plays First Avenue.
********
Warner Bros./Getty Images
!["I never wanted to be your weekend lover": Prince and his Purple Rain costar Appolonia Kotero.]( "\"I never wanted to be your weekend lover\": Prince and his Purple Rain costar Appolonia Kotero.")
Prince's semi-autobiographical film, Purple Rain, hit theaters 30 years ago this weekend, presenting the world with a bold new model for the contemporary pop artist. NPR television critic Eric Deggans remembers the moment vividly. Hear his conversation with special correspondent Michele Norris above, and read his personal essay on the movie below.
Little compares to that magic moment when you sit down in a movie theater and watch a film that seems as if it's telling your story. That happened to me three decades ago. The film was Prince's pop-funk masterpiece, Purple Rain.
The movie and its soundtrack were milestones for music and media: the christening of Prince as a pop star and the explosion of his uniquely multicultural, genre-bending, sex-drenched form of funky sonic genius.
But for me, nothing before had so fully captured what it was like to perform in a band.
I was a young drummer starting a band with classmates at Indiana University, which would eventually get a short stint as Motown recording artists, playing throughout the Midwest and even in Japan. Watching Purple Rain, before all that would happen, felt a bit like seeing an autobiography, set to the baddest music around.
A band is essentially a marriage with three or four or eight or ten people. It requires you to spend outlandish amounts of time together, sweating to make the kind of art that might move a few hearts and allow you to earn a living besides.
For all its flaws — from the stilted, amateurish acting to clumsy direction and clunky lines — Purple Rain nailed that feeling. As Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman begged Prince to let the band play one of their songs, I relived a thousand other band fights fueled by insecurity, fatigue and immaturity.
Seeing them eventually work it out and blow the roof off of the First Avenue club felt like a special message: You can do this, too.
Purple Rain was special to the world for many other reasons. At a time before YouTube, social media or the World Wide Web, few artists had the power to create multimedia experiences on multiple platforms to speak directly to fans.
Prince, who cultivated a mystique by giving few interviews and revealing little about his life or work, let fans into a fictionalized version of his history on the big screen. And the film, juiced by career-making turns from slick lothario Morris Day and his band The Time, gave Prince-heads a super-sized vision of their idol, tooling around Minneapolis with a tricked-out motorcycle and fiercely ruffled shirts.
Not many years before, the music world was seriously segregated. MTV had to be shamed into playing Michael Jackson videos and the "disco sucks" movement too often felt like a thinly veiled way of saying, "black and brown and gay people suck."
But Prince offered a musical world that put genres in a blender. "Let's Go Crazy" married a bouncy '50s-style rock rhythm to a percolating, '80s pop funk beat. "Purple Rain" was a soulful ballad fired up by incendiary guitar solos. "When Doves Cry" was a percussive marvel held together by a spastic drum machine groove and soaring, Prince-ian vocals.
Sitting in an Indiana theater packed with kids my age, I saw Purple Rain as a validation of the musical world I was already seeking out: a glorious, paisley-drenched descendant of Sly & the Family Stone by way of James Brown and Bill Haley's Comets.
Film purists will insist the movie itself is pure shlock. The female lead, Patricia "Appolonia" Kotero, emotes like she learned her lines that morning. Only the masterful Clarence Williams III — the Mod Squad veteran who gives an emotional performance as Prince's abusive father — seemed to have any real acting chops at all.
But when you're on the tip of a cultural revolution, little of that matters. And looking back over 30 years, it's obvious that Purple Rain became a generational manifesto, while providing the largest megaphone yet for one of the greatest geniuses in pop music.
Yeah, purple rain, purple rain
Minneapolis' Starring Role In 'Purple Rain'
hide captionPrince, onstage at the Minneapolis nightclub First Avenue, in a scene from the film Purple Rain.
hide captionThe First Avenue nightclub during the Purple Rain era.
The First Avenue nightclub during the Purple Rain era.
Dan CorriganBy the time Purple Rain was filmed, Prince was already a regular on the First Avenue stage. But in the film, Prince plays The Kid, a talented and charismatic musician with a lot to prove, who channels his angst into his music. He's got plenty to go around. Beset by the demons of domestic abuse at home, his music doesn't go over with the manager of the hottest club in town.
Apollonia Kotero, who played the beautiful aspiring singer with whom The Kid begins to fall in love, says she was already familiar with the diverse music scene in Minneapolis by the time she arrived. She even knew about the club where Prince took her on the night of her audition for the film.
"I remember it was crowded and all these people were staring," she says. "And I thought, 'Oh, this is like, this is like his place!' And we danced!"
hide captionThe Ike Reilly Assassination performs at First Avenue earlier this year.
The Ike Reilly Assassination performs at First Avenue earlier this year.
Allison Keyes/NPR"It was just a really exciting, fun time. Well, Prince was the main thing, of course," Freedom says. "There was that whole wave of what was coming over from England — New Order — and then we had some New York stuff. I don't know if you remember; there was a song called 'The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight.' That was a big record here."
Jon Bream, a music critic who has been with the Minneapolis Star Tribune for 36 years, first saw Prince perform at the Capri Theater here in 1979.
"That's one of the great blessings of him growing up here," Bream says. This live music town, he says, had a mix of sounds when Prince was coming up that included punk, garage rock, funk and R&B. "So he didn't limit himself to R&B music. He listened to everything. He listened to a lot of classic rock and got a lot of influences in his music."
When Purple Rain came out in 1984, it drew attention to Minneapolis, but many figures in the local music scene don't think the movie really had a huge effect on the city's music. Especially since, at the time, it was already boasting other hot bands like The Replacements and Husker Du.
hide captionA star commemorating the filming of Purple Rain painted on the wall inside First Avenue.
A star commemorating the filming of Purple Rain painted on the wall inside First Avenue.
Allison Keyes/NPR"A lot of mediocre bands were created very quickly because the major labels signed anybody funk," McClellan says. "That happens in every market, right?"
Recording engineer Joe Mabbott runs the Hideaway Studio in Northeast Minneapolis, where he has recorded many of the city's notable hip-hop musicians including P.O.S., Brother Ali, Dessa and Atmosphere. He says the local music scene remains diverse to this day.
"I think it helps that Purple Rain was done here in the area, but obviously it's gone way past that," he says. "A huge array of styles of music, from hip-hop to traditional Irish folk music to everything in-between, basically."
But Bream says Prince — and Purple Rain — changed the stakes for musicians in Minneapolis. "People knew you could make it out of here and make it big. Bob Dylan is from here. He went to college here, but he had to move to New York to make it," he says. "Prince proved you could stay here to make it, and you could make it huge."
The movie's mystique clearly lives on: Bream says that almost any big-time rock band that comes through Minneapolis on tour makes some comment about Prince and Purple Rain, especially if it plays First Avenue.
********
'Purple Rain' Taught Me How To Be In A Band
hide caption"I never wanted to be your weekend lover": Prince and his Purple Rain costar Appolonia Kotero.
"I never wanted to be your weekend lover": Prince and his Purple Rain costar Appolonia Kotero.
Warner Bros./Getty ImagesThe movie and its soundtrack were milestones for music and media: the christening of Prince as a pop star and the explosion of his uniquely multicultural, genre-bending, sex-drenched form of funky sonic genius.
But for me, nothing before had so fully captured what it was like to perform in a band.
I was a young drummer starting a band with classmates at Indiana University, which would eventually get a short stint as Motown recording artists, playing throughout the Midwest and even in Japan. Watching Purple Rain, before all that would happen, felt a bit like seeing an autobiography, set to the baddest music around.
A band is essentially a marriage with three or four or eight or ten people. It requires you to spend outlandish amounts of time together, sweating to make the kind of art that might move a few hearts and allow you to earn a living besides.
For all its flaws — from the stilted, amateurish acting to clumsy direction and clunky lines — Purple Rain nailed that feeling. As Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman begged Prince to let the band play one of their songs, I relived a thousand other band fights fueled by insecurity, fatigue and immaturity.
Seeing them eventually work it out and blow the roof off of the First Avenue club felt like a special message: You can do this, too.
YouTube
Prince, who cultivated a mystique by giving few interviews and revealing little about his life or work, let fans into a fictionalized version of his history on the big screen. And the film, juiced by career-making turns from slick lothario Morris Day and his band The Time, gave Prince-heads a super-sized vision of their idol, tooling around Minneapolis with a tricked-out motorcycle and fiercely ruffled shirts.
Not many years before, the music world was seriously segregated. MTV had to be shamed into playing Michael Jackson videos and the "disco sucks" movement too often felt like a thinly veiled way of saying, "black and brown and gay people suck."
But Prince offered a musical world that put genres in a blender. "Let's Go Crazy" married a bouncy '50s-style rock rhythm to a percolating, '80s pop funk beat. "Purple Rain" was a soulful ballad fired up by incendiary guitar solos. "When Doves Cry" was a percussive marvel held together by a spastic drum machine groove and soaring, Prince-ian vocals.
Sitting in an Indiana theater packed with kids my age, I saw Purple Rain as a validation of the musical world I was already seeking out: a glorious, paisley-drenched descendant of Sly & the Family Stone by way of James Brown and Bill Haley's Comets.
Film purists will insist the movie itself is pure shlock. The female lead, Patricia "Appolonia" Kotero, emotes like she learned her lines that morning. Only the masterful Clarence Williams III — the Mod Squad veteran who gives an emotional performance as Prince's abusive father — seemed to have any real acting chops at all.
But when you're on the tip of a cultural revolution, little of that matters. And looking back over 30 years, it's obvious that Purple Rain became a generational manifesto, while providing the largest megaphone yet for one of the greatest geniuses in pop music.
