When Prince's “Soft And Wet” from For You hit the airwaves I was somewhere around my first year of college and somewhat scandalized by the subject matter. But the booty knew better; the dancefloor payoff was too rich to ignore. By the time of the Dirty Mind album, I’d been fully indoctrinated into the provocative peacock funk, raw and clever wordplay of the Minneapolis wunderkind (and saw him perform at a club in Boston during the boots-underpants-overcoat phase). I played 1999 on an endless loop at the house one summer, driving my parents insane. Controversy further fueled the fires of fandom.
So I was a devoted Prince fan when Purple Rain came out. Devoted after a fashion – I was never one to go whole hog over-the-top with buying every piece of material he issued or aping his look. For one thing, I couldn’t afford it. For another, in 1984 I had some semblance of a professional life (yes, that’s how old I am). I was not yet working within the realm of the music industry; I was wearing preppy oxford-cloth shirts with jacquard bows and feathered hair as a book production manager for Scholastic in Greenwich Village. My boyfriend at the time was in law school but gigging in a covers band on weekends. (Btw: It’s interesting to note the varying impact the film had on those above and below the legal drinking age at the time.) The conversation within our music-fan circles was all about Prince and his cohorts.
Why? Because he was different. His music was different. He looked and dressed ... different. And if he was channeling James Brown and Jimi Hendrix with a spine of George Clinton and the ghost of Little Richard, who among the new power generation would really know or care? He presented the old in an exciting new package. In addition to his musical virility, he was an enigmatic beauty. Easy on the eyes, androgynous, power and posturing in a pint-sized package. An exhibitionist on stage yet oddly monosyllabic in the press glare. A man of color, but with a heritage murky enough to seem pan-ethnic. A man sho-nuff, but with enough eyeliner and hair gel to make one wonder. This dichotomous, international man of mystery had a broad-based appeal. He was a phenomenon, and one whose talent and surrounding mythology was already a buzz beginning to blanket the cultural landscape like some sort of nuclear fallout.
Purple Rain the movie was an anticipated event among fans. We were waiting with the proverbial bated breath, with our little puppy tongues hanging out. We were going to see the man himself on the big screen and lap up every ounce of artistry he was prepared to offer. It was going to be like a Prince show to the 8th power, because he would actually speak to us, show us who he was. Our appetites were whetted by the brilliance of “When Doves Cry,” which had landed on the radio and sounded like nothing else we'd ever heard. Anticipation was at a fever pitch.
Because Purple Rain was the locus of our attention, my boyfriend and I snatched up a copy of the soundtrack -- which arrived weeks ahead of the movie -- on release day. We rushed home and placed the vinyl album on the turntable, prepared to be transported into bliss. We were ... disappointed.
“What the hell is this shit?”
“I don’t get it.”
“Me either.”
“There’s a couple of good jams on there, ‘Baby I’m A Star,’ ‘Doves,’ 'Take Me With You,' but overall…?”
“I know, right?”
“So disappointing.”
What we heard was distinctly more pop and rock-edged, darker and more serious than what we were expecting, with lyrics that were either trite or confusingly opaque. And Prince’s tortured screeching at the end of the introspective “The Beautiful Ones” and the rude “Darling Nikki” left us scratching our heads. Just what was “purple rain” anyway? Purple Rain the album seemed impenetrable, inscrutable, in a word, weird. We began to jokingly refer to it as Prince’s epic project, “Screams In The Night.”
Needless to say: Context is all.
We saw Purple Rain the first weekend it opened, if not the first night. I know the theater was packed. Primed by our reaction to Prince’s opus "Screams In The Night," we were prepared to witness a royal mess. Instead we had our minds blown. The film was simultaneously amateurish, retro, misogynist, inspired, affirming, engrossing, compelling, funny, eye-opening and brilliant. It gave us a heaping helping of the Minneapolis music scene that had birthed Prince, and it was like stepping into another country with its own style of dress, language, and culture. This world was informed by the artistic, the outré, the retro (the ‘40s style dress and chitlin'-circuit comedy routines of Morris Day and Jerome Benton and The Time) and the overtly sexy. The Revolution was the coolest band a guy could have. It was a world we all wanted to be part of, where everybody wanted to go. After seeing the film we went home and put the soundtrack back on the turntable. Now it all made sense, it told the complete story of The Kid's struggles.
Was Prince a good actor? He didn't really need to be. The picture gave us enough of a sketch of what it was like to be him, even if the script was not supposed to be a dyed-in-the wool autobiography. And he gave us some of the best music of his career to that point. And if that wasn't enough, what about the visuals? Minneapolis in winter -- had we really ever seen it before? (Indeed, did we not need proof that people of color actually lived in the Land of 1,000 Lakes?) The purple motorcycle, the constructed fairyland of The Kid's basement apartment, Apollonia's cape (I looked everywhere for one just like it), the iconic white guitar, Morris' yellow Cadillac -- everybody has an image that sticks with them.
It was not a perfect film. But it was one of the closest things we'd seen to contemporary artistic reality in a spell (Wild Style had debuted the year before; Krush Groove would arrive in 1985). Its very rawness contributed to its popularity. Like many fans, I went back to the theater multiple times to plunk down my money and watch it from beginning to end. Most of the time I went alone. I might have seen it eight or ten times on the big screen during its run (not to mention numerous VHS, cable and broadcast TV viewings since) because I could not get enough of it. This collective need to experience it repeatedly turned Purple Rain into box office gold -- much to the surprise of its producers and the motion picture suits in charge.
Because more than anything else, Purple Rain is the story of triumph over adversity, which is something we all relate to and aspire to. And when Prince & the Revolution sing "Baby I'm A Star," we know that it's our own personal theme song. Years before the ubiquity of reality shows, we looked at Prince and projected ourselves onto that stage, in the spotlight, moving and grooving and being cooler than hell.
That idea was sexy enough to keep us all coming again and again.
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