PatReilly wrote:

See, this page is an education. I always thought the Cocteau Twins were names after the two Jeans, Jean Cocteau and Jean Marais, for some reason: the Grangemouth concert explanation is much more obvious and plausible.
 
Regarding Lorelei, it’s probably the most structured of all songs on the album, for me a lovely song, chimes and echoes. But the entire album is atmospheric and pioneering music throughout, vastly different to the stuff the originally turned out. I enjoy the fact that Liz Fraser makes up words and sounds to suit the tunes: her voice is truly used as an instrument rather than the front piece of a band.
 
You see I remember them early on, almost wandering without a vision of their future musical direction. Liz Fraser was a bit of a Siouxsie (of the Banshees) fan and if anything, they were a Sevco type act (although the Banshees weren’t at that time finished/deid of course).
 
Don’t think Robin Guthrie was ever a great musician, but he was a very good technician, wise with echo and of course his drum machine. And he recognised the value of repetition. As a bit of extraneous information, Robin’s older brother Brian was a bit of a music promoter locally, and fancied himself as a bit of an entrepreneur, which he wasn’t. He used to position himself in the front at local gigs, staring at the bands in a deliberate unsettling manner. I recall this from personal experience, still have the photographs. Brian also ran a supporters’ bus for Falkirk away games, but I’ve not seen him going about for a few years now.
 
I’m mentioning Brian because, as a promoter, he used to get reasonably well known bands to play in Grangemouth, and put his wee brother Robin’s bands into support slots. Robin was in ‘All this and more’ who became ‘The Liberators’, and another band ‘The Heat’ (support to Simple Minds at the 1978 Grangemouth gig where supposedly the Cocteau Twins chose their name). Brian also had Robin as main DJ at the International, a hotel in Grangemouth which hosted gigs, and where Robin initially met up with Liz Frazer. From what I mind, Will Heggie, the original bassist in the Cocteau Twins, had a bit of a thing for Liz, and chucked the band when Robin Guthrie became involved with her. Heggie went on to play in Lowlife, while working in the process operations in the BP….. but it might have been the ICI, cannae really recall.
 
Liz Fraser was a quiet, almost timid wee punk who often turned up at local gigs, including some at which I was involved. Grangemouth seemed full of heavy metal fans at the time, and she stood out from that mob in appearance, without being abrasive as her looks may have suggested.
 
Anyway, I never paid much attention to what was happening to the Cocteau Twins after their formation, and was a bit taken aback to see their prodigious amount of releases very rapidly three or so years later. I was a good few years older than the band members, and had chucked in playing by the time they became ‘big’.
 
 

Enjoyed that Pat, always love reading a post when it's got that personal or local angle.
 

PatReilly wrote:

See, this page is an education. I always thought the Cocteau Twins were names after the two Jeans, Jean Cocteau and Jean Marais, for some reason: the Grangemouth concert explanation is much more obvious and plausible.
 
Regarding Lorelei, it’s probably the most structured of all songs on the album, for me a lovely song, chimes and echoes. But the entire album is atmospheric and pioneering music throughout, vastly different to the stuff the originally turned out. I enjoy the fact that Liz Fraser makes up words and sounds to suit the tunes: her voice is truly used as an instrument rather than the front piece of a band.
 
You see I remember them early on, almost wandering without a vision of their future musical direction. Liz Fraser was a bit of a Siouxsie (of the Banshees) fan and if anything, they were a Sevco type act (although the Banshees weren’t at that time finished/deid of course).
 
Don’t think Robin Guthrie was ever a great musician, but he was a very good technician, wise with echo and of course his drum machine. And he recognised the value of repetition. As a bit of extraneous information, Robin’s older brother Brian was a bit of a music promoter locally, and fancied himself as a bit of an entrepreneur, which he wasn’t. He used to position himself in the front at local gigs, staring at the bands in a deliberate unsettling manner. I recall this from personal experience, still have the photographs. Brian also ran a supporters’ bus for Falkirk away games, but I’ve not seen him going about for a few years now.
 
I’m mentioning Brian because, as a promoter, he used to get reasonably well known bands to play in Grangemouth, and put his wee brother Robin’s bands into support slots. Robin was in ‘All this and more’ who became ‘The Liberators’, and another band ‘The Heat’ (support to Simple Minds at the 1978 Grangemouth gig where supposedly the Cocteau Twins chose their name). Brian also had Robin as main DJ at the International, a hotel in Grangemouth which hosted gigs, and where Robin initially met up with Liz Frazer. From what I mind, Will Heggie, the original bassist in the Cocteau Twins, had a bit of a thing for Liz, and chucked the band when Robin Guthrie became involved with her. Heggie went on to play in Lowlife, while working in the process operations in the BP….. but it might have been the ICI, cannae really recall.
 
Liz Fraser was a quiet, almost timid wee punk who often turned up at local gigs, including some at which I was involved. Grangemouth seemed full of heavy metal fans at the time, and she stood out from that mob in appearance, without being abrasive as her looks may have suggested.
 
Anyway, I never paid much attention to what was happening to the Cocteau Twins after their formation, and was a bit taken aback to see their prodigious amount of releases very rapidly three or so years later. I was a good few years older than the band members, and had chucked in playing by the time they became ‘big’.
 
 

Good chat Pat!

arabchanter wrote:

Tek wrote:

Congrats Mr C on passing the 2 year mark on this here thread (just another 2 to go).

Still don't think we've agreed on album though.

Thanks for that Tek, that fact slipped by me, 2 years eh.

And as you say probably another 2 years to go (if that's alright with you and abidy else) so plenty of time for us to mutually like the same album


Cheers.
 

Actually, I tell a lie.

We both agreed the Violent Femmes debut album was superb.
 

Tek wrote:

Actually, I tell a lie.

We both agreed the Violent Femmes debut album was superb.
 

Album 537.
Van Halen......................................1984   (1984)











If I remember Rick Dagless liked this groups last album from the book? I hope you enjoy this one to, for me this was a lot better than the 1978 offering, I quite liked a couple of the tracks, "Jump," "Top Jimmy," and "Hot For The Teacher" but wouldn't be in any rush to hear them again to be honest. This one still had the wanky guitar solos crammed in wherever possible even on the shorter tracks to my horror, but hey "one mans potted hoch is another mans poison."


This album wont be going into my collection.




Bits & Bobs;



Have written about this mob before in post #412 (if interested)




Rolling Stone      March 1, 1984 5:00AM ET 1984
By  J.D. Considine.



This album confirms what a lot of Van Halen fans have suspected for some time: this is no mere arena-rock band. Beneath all the strutting and heavy-metal antics lies a band with more pop savvy than a dozen Journeys, as well as the chops to pull hooks from the most unlikely places. And 1984 is the album that brings all of Van Halen’s talent into focus.


 From the start, it’s clear that the band has a few tricks up its sleeve. The opening track, “1984,” is a wistful synthesizer instrumental that could have come from Pete Townshend or Thomas Dolby. It manages to sound simultaneously streetsmart and glowingly pastoral, and it’s the perfect prelude to “Jump,” the album’s initial single. Like “1984,” “Jump” is not exactly the kind of song you’d expect from Van Halen: the main synthesizer figure uses suspended chords and a pedalpoint bass in a manner more suited to Asia. But once Alex Van Halen’s drums kick in and singer David Lee Roth starts to unravel a typically convoluted story line, things start sounding a little more familiar; and by the time Eddie Van Halen reinforces the synthesizers with steely bursts of guitar, you know this has got to be Van Halen, even though it’s a mainstream pop tune.  Of course, 1984 isn’t completely dominated by synthesizers. Aside from “I’ll Wait,” a spurned-love song boasting a haunting melody and flashy guitar solo, the rest of the album features the band’s trademark guitar excess. And on 1984, Eddie Van Halen manages to expand his repertoire of hot licks, growls, screams and seemingly impossible runs to wilder frontiers than you could have imagined. On “Top Jimmy,” for example, he moves without the slightest bit of hesitation from the incredibly precise stutterstepped fills in the verse to the fretboard gymnastics on the solo. “Hot for Teacher,” on the other hand, finds Eddie plugging his two-handed arpeggios into brother Alex’ fiery tom-tom work before the two light off into a turbocharged boogie riff that sounds like ZZ Top at Warp Factor 8.


 But what really makes this record work is the fact that Van Halen uses all this flash as a means to an end — driving the melody home — rather than as an end in itself. Every song hits harder than expected, until by album’s end you’re convinced that, despite all the bluster, Van Halen is one of the smartest, toughest bands in rock & roll. Believe me, that’s no newspeak.


1984



1984 kicked off the new year with a bang on Jan. 9, 1984.


 The band's patchwork 1982 LP Diver Down didn’t really count, since the bulk of it consisted of covers, instrumentals and previously shelved tracks, leaving just two fresh compositions in “Little Guitars” and “The Full Bug.”

 That made the slickly produced, keyboard-heavy and primed-for-mainstream 1984 a surprise to many fans who last experienced Van Halen at full capacity on the dark, unconventional and somewhat sinister Fair Warning. 1984 showed that Van Halen were no longer just a backyard party band, having evolved with the times and as musicians, and continuing to be artistically innovative while still appealing to the heavy metal parking-lot crowd that blasted tunes out of souped-up, small-block Camaros.
  Frustrated after having been strong-armed into making several compromises on Diver Down, 1984 is also where Eddie Van Halen began to take control of the band. He had some major assistance from engineer Donn Landee, who quickly got on board with the guitarist’s vision for 1984. Landee served as an accomplice behind the controls, with longtime producer Ted Templeman having a contrasting idea of what direction the project would go.


 Landee was also an integral part in the building of Eddie Van Halen’s home studio, 5150, where 1984 and all subsequent Van Halen records would be recorded. Eddie would even say during an interview that the LP was “Phase One of Donn and Ed.”


 But even having the home-court advantage didn't prevent the struggle to get his perspective heard; he fought to incorporate keyboards into the forefront of the music, especially with singer David Lee Roth. Tensions had been mounting within the confines of the Van Halen camp during the recording of 1984, reaching an all-time high when they were on the road supporting the album. But their popularity and record sales rose concurrently.


 The North American arena tour consisted of 101 dates between January and July, many including two- and sometimes three- night stands in several cities. According to Eddie, the jaunt required eight trucks to transport the stage and equipment, including a staggering 2,000 lighting rigs, part of which would flash “1984” as the show drew to a close.


 When deals for top-tier sponsorship fell through, they co-opted Western Exterminator Company's “Little Man” mascot, a cartoon of a top-hatted, snappily dressed man brandishing a large mallet behind his back that was informally dubbed the “Hammer Guy” by fans who witnessed it as the backdrop each night. The record sat pretty at No. 2 on the Billboard albums chart for five weeks, stymied by Michael Jackson’s behemoth Thriller LP (which featured "Beat It" with Van Halen on lead guitar), and eventually went diamond for selling more than 10 million copies.


 Here's a track-by-track breakdown of the landmark 1984 album.


 “1984”


Instrumentals were nothing new for Van Halen. They had performed at least one on each of their albums up to this point – and three on Diver Down – but never opened an LP with one. More audacious is the minute-plus track's otherworldly synthesizer, which was culled from 45 minutes’ worth of noodling by Eddie that Landee had secretly recorded.


 Unlike the murky synthesized drone of “Sunday Afternoon in the Park” from Fair Warning that quickly turned into the ferocious shredfest “One Foot Out the Door,” “1984” served as a build-up to the next song on the LP. Though most people saw it as not much more than an eerie -- and guitar-free -- intro to “Jump,” the song signaled a major shift in the sound of the group and who was in command going forward.

 “Jump”



Had Van Halen not already been an established act on radio by 1984, “Jump” would have been their one-hit-wonder song. It’s the perfect blend of '80s synthesized confection and soaring rock 'n' roll, with keyboard and guitar solos that sound like nothing they had done before or since. But according to Eddie Van Halen, the rest of the group wasn't all that impressed with the song – at first. “Dave said that I was a guitar hero and I shouldn’t be playing keyboards,” Van Halen recalled in 2014. “My response was, If I want to play a tuba or Bavarian cheese whistle, I will do it.”


 The guitarist was proven right commercially: “Jump” was their first and only No. 1 single, topping the Billboard Hot 100 for five weeks, with a low-budget video in heavy rotation on MTV. Depending on what source you believe, it cost either $600 or in the neighborhood of $5,000. Reams of footage were shot of Roth performing circus-like high jinks – which would later be re-purposed for the “Panama” video – but the decision was to cut the material down to a simple performance piece, shot on hand-held 16mm cameras at the Complex, a small theater in Hollywood's Santa Monica Blvd. “We didn’t want any of the stuff, like, standing on the edge of a cliff with a picture in the background or fireballs thrown at you,” drummer Alex Van Halen told Rolling Stone. “We just wanted personality.”


 “Rather than doing something bigger than life, which is how Van Halen was perceived, we wanted something very personal,” director Pete Angelus said  “Let’s see if we can get Edward to smile. Of course, we also had to appease Dave, who wanted to throw his karate tricks into the equation. I think we spent less money making ‘Jump’ than we did on having pizzas delivered to the set of ‘Hot for Teacher."


 The small-scale maneuver paid off, with Van Halen snagging three nominations and a win for Best Stage Performance in a Video at the first-ever MTV Video Music Awards in 1984.


 Live on the 1984 tour, and for a brief tenure in Sammy Hagar’s inaugural outing with the band in 1986, Eddie Van Halen would perform “Jump” entirely on keyboards, mimicking the guitar solo on them. Hagar refused to sing the track in concert, though, resorting to having the audience do a mass sing-along or bringing a guest onstage to handle the vocals. So the song was shelved until the For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge trek in 1991, when the Red Rocker’s stance on Roth material softened slightly. By then, Eddie flipped the switch, playing guitar during the song with a pre-recorded keyboard track, something he does to this day.


 “Panama”




The second-catchiest number on 1984 was instant reassurance to anyone who thought Van Halen succumbed completely to the decade’s growing keyboard craze. The fast-paced guitar licks shake into overdrive, fitting for a song about a car ... well, about a car and sex. Roth claims he was questioned about the themes of his lyrics being solely about nonstop partying, sex and cars, when it dawned on him he hadn’t actually written about a car and set out to do so. “Panama” was the outcome, full of mischievous double entendres about pistons popping and shiny machines. The song's breakdown featured a cameo by Eddie’s 1972 Lamborghini Miura S, which he brought to the studio to lay down the rumble of the engine.


 “They thought we were nuts to pull up my Lamborghini to the studio and mic it,” he said. “We drove it around the city, and I revved the engine up to 80,000 rpm just to get the right sound.”


 Parts of the song's performance-clip video were filmed on the second of two nights at Philadelphia's Spectrum in March 1984. Discarded ancillary footage from the “Jump” shoot, with Roth cruising down the road on a motorcycle and goofing off with Alex Van Halen in his customized 1951 Mercury convertible were also included. Like “I’ll Wait” before it, “Panama” peaked at No. 13 on the singles chart, and the video went into heavy rotation on MTV.


 “Top Jimmy”



The shortest song, next to the instrumental title track, “Top Jimmy” was a curious number. Jimmy was a real person -- James Koneck, who worked at the Top Taco stand outside A&M Records in Hollywood by day and fronted Top Jimmy and the Rhythm Pigs at night. Roth had struck up a friendship with Koneck and joined him onstage a few times to jam.


 The singer's tale of the man who drove all the women crazy took over what was initially an instrumental piece called “Ripley,” which was named for guitarist Steve Ripley, who created a unique stereo guitar for Eddie that allowed for individual placement of each string across left and right channels.


 Eddie used his name again for the song “Ripley” from his score to the 1984 film The Wild Life. He also reused the music for the song “Blood and Fire,” which appeared on Van Halen’s A Different Kind of Truthin 2012.


 “Drop Dead Legs”



Drawing inspiration from AC/DC’s "Back in Black," Eddie Van Halen delivered an airy and sharp riff that carries through the song until it ends with a boisterous and bluesy guitar solo over an unanticipated and lengthy coda. The musical grind of “Drop Dead Legs” is a perfect fit to Roth’s lyrics on the age-old subject matter of losing one’s mind due to a woman’s sex appeal.


 Closing out the first side of 1984 following the massive hits “Jump” and “Panama,” the song ended up kind of lost in the shuffle but experienced a rebirth on the band’s 2015 shows, where it was played live for the first time and on every night of the tour.


 “Hot for Teacher”



The second side of 1984 erupted with what almost sounds like dozens of fireworks being shot into the sky. In reality, it was Alex’s assemblage of four bass drums used to create the sonic blitz. “Hot for Teacher” is one of the album's centerpieces, an amalgamation of Eddie’s non-stop fretwork shffle, Roth at his most comedic and a relentless thump of the bottom end.


 It made sense that the song's video was one of the group's most conceptual, with younger versions of the band members looking a lot like their adult selves, getting into trouble, driven mad by the opposite sex and living for the time of the day when partying would commence. The clip's iimages of scantily clad women -- in the teacher and disciplinarian roles -- drew criticism, as did the bullying of the video’s antagonist, Waldo, who does pretty well for himself by the time the video ends.


 Seeing that it was another round-the-clock MTV fixture, it’s surprising to note that “Hot for Teacher” stalled at No. 56 on the chart. But maybe it came down to timing, since it was the fourth and final single from 1984 and released after the tour ended.


 “I’ll Wait”



Another point of contention between Templeman and Eddie, “I’ll Wait” had the producer getting under the guitarist’s skin in the studio by humming Argent’s 1972 hit “Hold Your Head Up” whenever he referred to the song. Roth hit a wall in composing lyrics, so Templeman brought in former Doobie Brother Michael McDonald, who was in the midst of a successful solo run, to assist in fleshing out the track's words and portions of the melody.


 "Ted Templeman called me up and said, 'Hey, these guys have a track and they need some lyrics, so I mentioned you could do it and they said fine, so why don’t you come down?'" the five-time Grammy winner told UCR in 2014. "He sent me the track, and I got some ideas going so I’d have something when I got to the studio."


 Though he and Van Halen collaborated on “I’ll Wait,” McDonald’s involvement surprised fans over the years, because his name was erroneously left off the credits on multiple pressings of the album before it was finally corrected on the 2000 remaster.


 That wasn’t the only mistake regarding the song: Alex’s drum fill before the first verse was a gaffe Eddie wanted to leave in. “It’s one of my favorite parts of the song," Eddie recalled. "Al hit the hi-hat instead of the cymbal. The only way we could record in that room was to have Al play just the drums and then later overdub the cymbals. He just forgot to hit the cymbal. It reminds me of Ginger Baker on “White Room,” where Ginger does a similar thing on the first verse.”


 “I’ll Wait” was released in the spring of 1984 as the second single from the record, and even without a video, it still managed to spend 14 weeks on the Hot 100, topping out at No. 13 in early June.


 “Girl Gone Bad”



The first hints of “Girl Gone Bad” came in 1982 and 1983, during live jams between the  Van Halen brothers as part of the “Somebody Get Me a Doctor” breakdown. The throwaway bit slid into a full-band take of Cream's “I’m So Glad," allowing Eddie to indulge in one of his favorite songs by his No. 1 guitar influence, Eric Clapton. (The two songs are phonetically similar and have the same number of syllables.)


 Eddie wrote the track while “humming and whistling” into a micro-cassette recorder in a hotel room closet as his then-wife Valerie Bertinelli was sleeping, piecing it all together in the studio later. The result features some of Van Halen’s most searing guitar work, including a frenetic solo that, like the rest of the piece, teeters dangerously on edge without ever going overboard.


 “House of Pain”



"House of Pain" was one of the oldest songs in Van Halen’s inventory at the time, dating back to 1975. Eddie even used to perform “Eruption” in the middle of the song live for a short period (as noted in the book Van Halen Rising). The track was part of the 1976 Demo's produced by Gene Simmons, and featured bursts of car horns throughout with one long salvo to end the song and fade out.


 That closing was then appropriated to open the band's 1978 debut album before stopping hard against Michael Anthony’s iconic bass line that opens “Runnin’ With the Devil.”  “The only thing that’s the same is the main riff,” Eddie said. “The intro and verses are different, I guess because nobody really liked it the way that it originally was.”


 When it came time to record “House of Pain” for 1984, it was changed up lyrically, becoming an ode to BDSM. It lost none of its ferocity, though, closing out the album on a hard and heavy note.




The cover of the 1984 album features a smoking cherub. It was censored when released in the UK. A sticker was placed to cover the cigarette in the cherub’s hand and the packs of cigarettes visible on the album cover.


In the original release of the album, all song credits were given to Edward Van Halen, Alex Van Halen, David Lee Roth, and Michael Anthony. In the UK single for “I’ll Wait” Michael McDonald was credited as a cowriter, but he was not given the same recognition in the US version.


The band promoted the album by doing a content on the channel MTV. The contest was called Lost Weekend with Van Halen. Their fans mailed over 1 million postcards to the TV station for a chance to win the contest. David Lee Roth said during the promo, “You won’t know where you are, you won’t know what’s going to happen, and when you come back, you’re not gonna have any memory of it.”


David Lee Roth can be heard yelling in the video for “Jump.” He did that so he could get his real voice onto the music video.


Back in 1983, Van Halen was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the highest paid band of all time.


 Eddie Van Halen was on the Rolling Stone cover in 1995. During that interview, he claimed David Lee Roth rejected the very famous synth riff for “Jump” for two years before finally agreeing to write lyrics to it.

 

Album 538.
Prince And The Revolution...................................Purple Rain   (1984)













Just fuckin' wow, I'd forgotten how good this particular album was, I probably haven't listened to this in it's entirety for a good  25 to 30 years, and to be honest with you I think I've made a bit of a cunt of it by not revisiting this, and on a regular basis to boot.


This, for this listener at least is as fine an album today as it was back in '84, and although he was a multi-instrumentalist.................boy could he play guitar, as you know I'm no' a great lover of guitary stuff, but I do make an exception in this case.


I found this platter without fault, every track, and I do mean every track was of the highest standard, even the slower numbers (normally no' my favourites) were absolute class, until this came up in the book I'd forgotten how much I liked it back in the day and would now quite easily make it into my top twenty albums (well at least for todays top twenty, an ever changing list.)


The Minneapolis Midget was a multi-faceted genius but a lot of the time overdid his musical offerings in my humbles (1999 sheesh), but this particular album I think he got bang on, even the eight and a half minute "Purple Rain," and the almost six minute "When Doves Cry" done nothing to blunt my enjoyment as both for me are absolute classic tracks.


This one will be going into my vinyl collection, please give it a listen as I think any music collection would be so much poorer with the omission of this album.





Bits & Bobs; 


Have already written about Prince in post  #497 (if interested)Prince’s Purple Rain: The epic story of how it was made
How reclusive genius Prince learned to play nice with others, how to rock and in the process made Purple Rain, his world-beating 6th album

It’s August 3, 1983 and history is about to be made, in the shape of Prince's career-defining sixth album, Purple Rain. Inside the First Avenue club in Minneapolis, a sweaty congregation of 1,500-plus believers is staring across the low stage at an 18-year old guitarist named Wendy Melvoin, who’s making her debut with hometown heroes Prince & The Revolution. 


 Dressed in a sleeveless V-neck top, her curly hair tumbling over one eye, she strums a circular progression of gospel-like chords on her purple Rickenbacker guitar. It’s the final number in a 10-song set of new and wildly eclectic material. The other musicians fall in lightly behind her. The hypnotic groove swells for nearly five minutes, while the leader of the band, lurking in the shadows, wrenches some sustained fuzzed-out cries from his Telecaster. 


 Finally, he flips the guitar behind his back, gunslinger-style, and steps to the microphone. Purple lamé jacket, ruffled collar, Little Richard hairdo, this magnetic five-foot-two soul preacher closes his eyes and sings, ‘I never meant to cause you any sorrow...’


 There are no cheers of recognition. This is the debut performance of Purple Rain, the title song of the album – and movie – that will propel Prince Rogers Nelson into the pop culture stratosphere.


 Within 18 months, the 25-year-old dynamo, who’s already charted with songs like Little Red Corvette and 1999, will be selling out arenas. He will also rival Bruce Springsteen, Madonna and, most significantly, Michael Jackson as the artist who defines the decade of the 1980s. And maybe more than any of these iconic contemporaries, Prince, with his inimitable songwriting, production-style and sexed-up ethos will imprint generations of artists to come, from George Michael to Justin Timberlake to Lady Gaga to Beyoncé.


 Purple Rain, an album that spent a staggering 24 weeks at No.1 and has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide, remains not only Prince’s zeitgeist moment, but the most thrilling and cohesive artistic statement he ever made.


 This is the story of how it happened.


 Prince was not a team player. Like auteurs Stevie Wonder, Todd Rundgren and Paul McCartney before him, the Minneapolis multi-track whiz kid wrote, arranged, produced and played almost every instrument on his first five albums, from 1978-1982. The minimalist, pogo-funk sound of those early records, typified by songs like When You Were Mine, I Wanna Be Your Lover and I Feel For You, was charmingly offbeat and original. But it was also insular. Prince must have sensed that if he was going to punch that higher floor on the elevator to global supremacy, he needed to rock. And to rock, he needed a band.


 “The reason I don’t use musicians a lot of the time had to do with the hours that I worked,” Prince told Rolling Stone in 1985. “I swear to God it’s not out of boldness when I say this, but there’s not a person around who can stay awake as long as I can. Music is what keeps me awake. There will be times when I’ve been working in the studio for twenty hours and I’ll be falling asleep in the chair, but I’ll still be able to tell the engineer what cut I want to make. I use engineers in shifts a lot of the time because when I start something, I like to go all the way through. There are very few musicians who will stay awake that long.”


 While he had toured with various players early on, it wasn’t until the breakthrough success of 1982’s album 1999 that Prince surrounded himself with the formalised line-up of musicians that he considered his equals. In 1983, he added an ampersand and called them The Revolution.


 To be a member of Prince’s band meant not only staying awake but living up to the boss’s sky-high standards. Hit-making R&B producer Jimmy Jam, who played in the first of Prince’s many side project bands, The Time, told me, “With Prince, it was about work ethic. And I mean work. We’d rehearse seven hours a day. He’d come to our rehearsals, then go to his own rehearsals, then he’d cut all night in the studio, and the next day, he’d show up at our rehearsal with some new song that he wrote. And it would be Little Red Corvette or something, and we’d be like, ‘Wow, that’s dope.’ The other thing he’d do, he never wanted you to have a free hand. When I would be playing the keyboards, if my left wasn’t doing something, he’d say, ‘Find a part. Fatten it up. Your hand shouldn’t be idle.’ Then he would want you to sing a harmony note. Then it would turn into, ‘They’re hitting choreography out there, you guys need to hit it too.’ He was like a drill sergeant, but it taught you that you could be so much better than you think you can be, if you just apply yourself.”


 At the time of the First Avenue gig, the drill sergeant’s platoon consisted of Matt ‘Doctor’ Fink on synth, Brown Mark on bass, Bobby ‘Z’ Rifkin on drums, Eric Leeds on sax, guitarist Wendy Melvoin and keyboardist Lisa Coleman. The band’s headquarters was a huge warehouse on Highway 7 in St. Louis Park, a suburb of Minneapolis. There Prince built the soundstage and recording studio that became the launching pad for all things Purple Rain (the room’s cavernous sound was put to especially effective use on Let’s Go Crazy). As he started to assemble the songs for the album, he opened himself up to a free-flowing trade of ideas from his band members. This change in Prince’s approach to record-making would be mirrored in the plotline of the movie, as his character, The Kid, slowly lets his guard down to allow his bandmates to co-write and contribute.
  “It was a very creative time,” Matt Fink told Pop Matters in 2009. “There was a lot of influence and input from band members towards what he was doing. He was always open to anybody trying to contribute creatively to the process of writing.”
 While Fink acknowledges Prince’s “oodles of talent,” he says that part of the Purple One’s genius was recognising what gifts The Revolution brought to the table. “Take Computer Blue, for example,” Fink said. “We’d always warm up before rehearsals doing free-form improv rock-jazz jams, and someone would start a chord progression. On that day, I started playing that main bass groove which later became Computer Blue. So the band started grooving on it, and Prince started coming up with some stuff, then we recorded a rough version and he took it into the studio and just incorporated it all and made it fly that way. Wendy and Lisa did some of the stuff on it. Prince borrowed the bridge/portal section from his father [a jazz pianist], who had given him some music over the years to play around with. So the song was a real mixture of different people and influences.
  “But Prince was the main lyricist and melody maker for all the songs,” Fink stressed. “And never took any lyrical content from people.”


 If Prince was the enlightened despot in this new democracy, his most trusted advisors were Wendy and Lisa, two West Coasters who hailed from music royalty parentage. Both of their dads were top LA session cats in the 60s and members of the famed Wrecking Crew who played with everyone from Sinatra to The Beach Boys. From them, the girls inherited their chameleon-like ability to provide the perfect parts for any song, regardless of groove or style.


 Prince said of them in 1985: “Wendy makes me seem all right in the eyes of people watching. She keeps a smile on her face. When I sneer, she smiles. It’s not premeditated, she just does it. It’s a good contrast. Lisa is like my sister. She’ll play what the average person won’t. She’ll press two notes with one finger so the chord is a lot larger, things like that. She’s more abstract. She’s into Joni Mitchell, too.”
 “We were absolute musical equals in the sense that Prince respected us, and allowed us to contribute to the music without any interference,” Wendy told Mojo in 1997. “I think the secret to our working relationship was that we were very non-possessive about our ideas, as opposed to some other people that have worked with him. We didn’t hoard stuff, and were more than willing to give him what he needed. Men are very competitive, so if somebody came up with a melody line, they would want credit for it.”
 
 The duo broadened Prince’s horizons by introducing him to modern classical composers like Stravinsky, Vaughan Williams, Scarlatti and Ravel (“Prince played Bolero all the time,” said Melvoin). And those nouveau sounds found their way into several songs. The jabbing string section that threads itself through Take Me With You’s driving riff was arranged by Lisa and her brother David, who plays the cello on the track. And When Doves Cry’s startling baroque keyboard climax was Coleman’s influence. “I think I influenced When Doves Cry to the extent that Prince was engaged in a healthy competition with us,” Lisa later said. “He was always thinking, ‘How can I kick their ass?’”


 Prince definitely preferred female company in the studio. In addition to Wendy and Lisa, engineers Susan Rogers and Peggy McCreary handled the recording chores for Purple Rain, in Minneapolis and Los Angeles, respectively.

 “Women have a very nurturing nature, and Prince thrives in that atmosphere,” Susan Rogers told Marc Weingarten. “He likes a studio atmosphere where people are flexible.”

 Rogers’s flexibility was tested when she was hired by Prince to create a studio in the warehouse on Route 7. Usually, a boomy, echo-laden space is a nightmare for audio engineers, but this time, the live vibe was just what was needed to match the nightclub footage for the movie. Still, Rogers did her best to convert the big cement room into a functioning studio.

 “I had been working for Crosby,Stills & Nash as a maintenance tech when I heard that Prince was looking for someone,” she said. “I jumped at the chance. He wanted me to remove his home console and put it in this warehouse, which seemed a little crazy, but we managed to make it work. I mean, nobody had really done that before. The first time I met Prince, after everything was set up, he asked me to set up a vocal mic so he could record. I had never professionally engineered in my life, but I really had no other choice. That’s how I began my engineering career.”
  Other important women in the mix for Purple Rain were Wendy Melvoin’s twin sister Susannah, who became a muse to the smitten Prince (they dated briefly), drummer Sheila E (who became a star on her own, with Prince’s guidance) and of course the film’s leading lady, Patty ‘Apollonia’ Kotero. Apollonia had stepped in when the previous co-star Denise ‘Vanity’ Matthews quit the film. She’s a prime example of Prince’s Pygmalion-like ability to shape even the most lacklustre talent into gold.

  If all of this musical creativity had been merely for another album release, it would’ve still been remarkable. But during the 1999 tour, Prince had carried around a big purple notebook with sketches, notes and ideas for a movie script. He made it clear to his label Warner Brothers that the new songs were to be for a soundtrack to a film in which he would star. He gave them an ultimatum: If they couldn’t land him a major movie deal, he’d find another label that could. It wasn’t an easy sell. Yes, 1999 had moved three million copies and was still on the charts after ninety weeks. Sure, videos for Little Red Corvette and 1999 played regularly on MTV. But to most people in 1983, Prince was what you’d call Lady Di’s husband. Hollywood didn’t take him seriously as a bankable leading man. In the end, Warner Brothers A&R man Mo Ostin agreed to pony up the money for the untitled film project.


 The first draft of the screenplay was written by William Blinn, best-known for his Emmy-winning TV movie Brian’s Song, and episodes of Starsky & Hutch. Blinn, who called Prince “a rock’n’roll crazy,” was frustrated with the lack of communication from the artist, but managed to hash out a semi-autobiographical script called Dreams, about a musician from a broken home who rises to stardom through the ranks of the Minneapolis club scene. “This picture was either going to be really big or fall right on its ass,” Blinn said.


 Soon the screenplay fell to Albert Magnoli, a 30-year-old director who had only one acclaimed student short film to his credit. Magnoli reportedly wowed Prince with an off-the-cuff reshaping of Blinn’s script. He described the love triangle between a brooding lead, The Kid (Prince), and a comic one (Morris Day), with a beautiful ingenue (Apollonia) at the centre. He outlined the tensions between the Kid and his band, and how he has to learn to be a team player. He then suggested having the Kid’s mum and dad, an interracial couple, fighting whenever the Kid came home. Prince told Magnoli, “I don’t get it. This is the first time I met you, and but you’ve told me more about what I’ve experienced than anybody in my life.”
 Meanwhile, back in the warehouse, Prince raced around, lording over every aspect of the proceedings. Fink recalled, “We were basically in boot camp – a disciplined regimen of dance class, acting class, and band rehearsing throughout that whole summer for about three months straight leading up to the start of the filming process. Prince had an acting coach brought in, a dance instructor brought in. It was just day after day filled with all those elements. Prince just worked nonstop. He never slept.”
  And in front of the camera, Prince was a natural. Always rehearsed and ready with his lines, he set a polished example for everyone on set. Whether he was riding his motorbike through the country, flirting with Apollonia or stuffing his rival Morris Day into a trash can, he had a presence that was both relaxed and full of mystique.


 The six-week shoot wrapped just after Christmas. Though there was more than enough material recorded for the soundtrack, Prince felt like it was still missing the one song that would crystallise the movie’s theme of parental difficulties and tangled love affairs. The song that would bring the world under his groove.


 On February 28, 1984 he attended the 26th Grammy Awards, only to watch his rival Michael Jackson walk away with most of the trophies. Prince was nominated for Best Pop Vocal and Best R&B Vocal, but lost both to Jacko.


 Two days later, Prince entered Sunset Sound studio with a song buzzing in his head. He programmed a funky, popping beat on his Linn drum machine. Quickly moving to vocals, then bass, keyboards and some fiery Hendrix-like guitar, Prince threw down the tracks to When Doves Cry in a few hours. As he and Peggy McCreary listened to the playback, he muted the bass track from the mix, and realised it was exactly what the song needed.
 It remains one of those landmark singles that sounds like nothing else before it. The stark arrangement. The Oedipal drama in the lyrics. The raw erotic charge in the vocal. When it was released on May 16, 1984, When Doves Cry turned radio on its ear, flying up the charts to become a number one on the pop, R&B and dance charts. Mission accomplished.


 The Purple Rain soundtrack was conceived as a double album, with tracks from The Time and Apollonia 6. But during post-production, Prince decided to bump them off and make a single album instead. His manager said that it was a purely economic decision, in that they’d reach more people if the price was lower. But Prince probably realised that this career-making record would carry more weight if he was the sole artist.


 A month before the movie opened, the soundtrack had already sold 2.5 million copies. Let’s Go Crazy was on its way to be the album’s second number one. After a premiere at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre that was attended by everyone from Stevie Nicks to Eddie Murphy, the film had a huge opening weekend, grossing $7.7 million and replacing Ghostbusters as the top film in the US. Costing only $7 million to make, it eventually pulled in $68 million.


 An exhausting tour would follow, with Prince & The Revolution recreating the funky magic of the film in more than 100 cities around the world. “I nearly had a nervous breakdown on the Purple Rain tour,” Prince said in 2012, “because it was the same every night. It’s work to play the same songs the same way for seventy shows. To me, it’s not work to learn lots of different songs so that the experience is fresh to us each night.”
 And it’s that hunger to always move forward that led to an eventual falling-out with Revolution band members (the title song forecasted, ‘It’s such a shame our friendship had to end’), feuds with record labels, lawsuits, name changes, successive marriages and comebacks over the years. Through it all, there’s been a prolific rush of creativity and musical experimentation, right up to his latest incarnation, with all-female backing band 3rdEyeGirl.
 In the end, perhaps the greatest gift of Purple Rain for Prince, beyond the stardom and the most enduring songs of his career, was simply that he found a way to belong to the music world at large. In the years after, he wrote and produced songs for The Bangles, Sheena Easton, Madonna, Chaka Khan and Stevie Nicks. Today that creative collaboration has continued with new artists such as Janelle Monae, Trombone Shorty and Zooey Deschanel. In 1985, still in the heat of Purple Rain’s glow, Prince reflected on balancing roles as a band leader and bandmate. “I strive for perfection, and I’m a little bull-headed in my ways,” he said. “Then sometimes everybody in the band comes over, and we have very long talks. They’re few and far between, and I do a lot of the talking. Whenever we’re done, one of them will come up to me and say, ‘Take care of yourself. You know I really love you.’ I think they love me so much, and I love them so much, that if they came over all the time I wouldn’t be able to be to them what I am, and they wouldn’t be able to do for me as what they do. I think we all need our individual spaces, and when we come together with what we’ve concocted in our heads, it’s cool.”


 A decade later, keyboardist Matt Fink said: “Fortunately for us, we were at first brought in as strictly sidemen, then allowed to be in on the creative process as well, which was really nice of him. He didn’t have to do that. He could’ve had his pick of just about any great sidemen that were around out in LA or New York. The reality is that this was his career, and we were just allowed to fortunately be along for the ride as his sidemen.”




  Prince and the Revolution, ‘Purple Rain’



“Prince knew this was going to be it,” says Susan Rogers, who engineered the 14 million seller Purple Rain. “He was ecstatic when he finished it.”


 Over five years later, the influence of Prince and Purple Rain is incontestable. He is one of just two artists (along with Bruce Springsteen) to have four albums among Rolling Stone‘s 100 Best Albums of the Eighties. And perhaps more than any other artist, Prince called the tune for pop music in the Eighties, imprinting his Minneapolis sound on an entire generation of musicians, both black and white.


 Released in tandem with the film of the same name, Purple Rain was more than simply a soundtrack, and it stands as Prince’s most cohesive and accessible album. “He envisioned the film as he made the album,” says Alan Leeds, vice-president of Paisley Park Records, Prince’s label. “He had a vision in his mind of the film a year before he got in front of the cameras, and he wrote the music to that vision.”


 Purple Rain contained five hit singles, including his first singles to reach Number One, “When Doves Cry” and “Let’s Go Crazy,” as well as “Purple Rain,” which reached Number Two.


 It was also the first Prince album to prominently feature his band the Revolution. “The band gelled when [guitarist] Wendy Melvoin joined,” says drummer Bobby Z. “We were recording and writing and doing it. We all worked hard and did this music together.”


 Some of the album’s success — and certainly its reception by radio — was possible because Prince downplayed the overt sexuality of previous records. There was only one controversial lyric on the album, the much quoted line “I met her in a hotel lobby/Masturbating with a magazine” — which appears in “Darling Nikki.” The song caught the ear of Tipper Gore, the wife of Senator Albert Gore, who cited it when she formed the Parents’ Music Resource Center (PMRC), a group that lobbied to have warning labels placed on album covers.


 The album’s quirky first single, “When Doves Cry,” originally had a more conventional sound. But Prince stripped the song down to its current form, completely removing the bass part. Despite initial qualms among some of the people at Warner Bros, about the unusual instrumentation, the record was released and quickly reached Number One on the pop charts.


 According to Rogers, “The Beautiful Ones” was Prince’s favorite. “That song meant a lot to him,” she says. “It was written for Susannah Melvoin [Wendy’s sister and, at the time, Prince’s girlfriend]. A lot of songs were written about her, but that was the first one.”


 Prince debuted many of Purple Rain’s songs during a performance in August 1983 at 1st Avenue, the Minneapolis club featured in the film. Although the show was recorded, Prince didn’t intend to use the live performances on his album — a decision that he reversed when he heard the tapes. Ironically, Prince and the Revolution lip-synced their parts for the film’s live-performance sequences.


 When Prince first played a version of “Purple Rain” for some of his staff, it caused quite a commotion. “Big Chick [Prince’s bodyguard at the time] came into the office raving,” says Leeds. “He said, ‘Wait until you hear the song he did last night. It’s gonna be bigger than Willie Nelson.'”


 For Prince, the international success of Purple Rain was simply the culmination of many years of hard work, coupled with a strong sense of self-confidence. In 1985 he told Rolling Stone, “I wish people would understand that I always thought I was bad.“


A Track-by-Track Rundown of 'Purple Rain'


"Let's Go Crazy"



 Having encouraged us two years earlier to accept that "Life is just a party and parties weren't meant 2 last," Prince started 1984 with a more defiantly optimistic sermon, suggesting that in life, "things are much harder than in the afterworld", and that our reward for enduring our current hardships would be to enter "a world of never-ending happiness." (Seriously: why were we so surprised when His Royal Badness "became" devout?)


 More importantly, "Let's Go Crazy" -- the lead-off track to Purple Rain -- suggests that the best way to endure one's hardships is to rebel against the expectations and norms of our safe, sanitized society; essentially, Prince's message is the message of all good rock n' roll, which is ... well ... "let's go crazy." And make no mistake: Purple Rain is rock n' roll first and foremost; its opening salvo's guitar solo puts Slayer to shame.


 "Let's Go Crazy" boasts that elusive sense of inevitability and completeness that only the greatest rock songs offer; who but Prince could yield such provocative, anarchic alchemy from so simple and unassuming a guitar riff? And who would dare to suggest that a single second of the song could be changed?


 At its best, rock n' roll serves as a call-to-arms, even when the revolution in question is nothing more subversive or relevant than a suggestion to party. "Let's Go Crazy" is not shy about extending an invitation to the audience; its opening monologue, which reads as intimately as a "Dear Constant Reader" introduction from a Stephen King collection, addresses the listener in a warm and direct and empowering manner that went unmatched until Danzig's "Godless" in 1993, which itself sounds like something Prince could have written ("I ask all who have gathered here to join me in this feast ... may we always be strong in body, spirit and mind")

 The pop cultural landscape of today is a barren and exhausting place, inordinately enamored with irony. Nonetheless, for all the earnest optimism of its opening sermon, "Let's Go Crazy" was the freshest, coolest, trendiest sound of 1984, and yet it does not sound dated in 2019.



 I knew in 1984 that Prince and his Purple Rain were special. I may have been only seven years old at the time, but I wanted to be Prince; no other performer inspired such adoration. Still, would I have predicted that Prince would boast such staying power and lasting relevance?


 No. In an early episode of Family Ties, Mallory asked her mother if she was familiar with Purple Rain's opening track (which she mistakenly called "Let's Get Crazy"), and Elise quipped, "It was our wedding song," and had you asked me then, I'd have assumed that the canned sitcom laughter would probably be pop culture's last response to "Let's Go Crazy."


 Instead, 35 years later, "Let's Go Crazy" still rocks, and Purple Rain is arguably the album of the '80s.


 "Take Me With U"


Simply put, "Take Me With U" is arguably Prince's single greatest pure pop song. Oh sure, he'd later do tracks that were more "mainstream" (see: "Cream") and showier (the still-fantastic "Raspberry Beret"), but the breezy, breathtakingly romantic "Take Me With U" -- with its acoustic hammer-ons and sampled string sections -- is the aural equivalent of falling in love for the first time, hopeless devotion mixing with eternal optimism, all making for one utterly irresistible Top 40 cocktail.


 The song's history, however, was less than rosy. First off, the track wasn't even supposed to be on Purple Rain in the first place. Initially written for Apollonia 6's debut album, Prince -- who knows when to take back a good song he's written for someone else (sorry there, Mazarati) -- decided to use it to soundtrack the scene where Apollonia rides around on the Purple One's decked-out motorcycle for the first time (prior to "purifying" herself in Lake Minnetonka). If you watch the scene on mute, it feels like watching the most boring stock footage you can imagine, as there are only so many times that you can film passing trees before you begin to wonder what Morris Day is up to. When backed by "Take Me With U", however, it suddenly feels like all these excessive shots are actually moving the plot forward, the montage showing the doe-eyed Apollonia realizing she might have feelings for The Kid after all ...


 Released as the fifth and final single from Purple Rain, "Take Me With U" has the sad distinction of being the only single from the album to not become a Top 10 staple (it stalled at #25). It's a damn shame too, considering that "Take Me With U" marks the first time that Prince dueted with anyone in any official capacity. As only the second track on the immaculately sequenced Purple Rain, the addition of Apollonia's voice not only deepens The Kid's character arc (he's sharing the song with her -- and he hates sharing songs!), but also sets up the audience for the inevitable falling out between our leads, their naïve love ballad a reminder of better times. Of course, with instrumentation this lush (the opening drum breaks swirling between the left and right channels, the echoed clanging of bells sweetly leading the song during the fadeout, etc.), it's hard not to fall in love right along with them.


 Yet part of the reason that "Take Me With U" works so brilliantly is because of its simplicity. "I can't disguise the pounding of my heart" it opens, "It beats so strong / It's in your eyes, what can I say? / They turn me on". Given the later lyrical depictions of animals striking curious poses and fetish-obsessed women performing extreme self-gratification acts in hotel lobbies, "Take Me With U"'s simple, unadorned sentiments serve as a breather, an easy emotional entry point for the rest of the album/film. No matter what we think of Apollonia's half-reconciliation at the end of the movie (that awkward half-kiss backstage prior to The Kid's dynamic performance of "I Would Die 4 U"), we will always have "Take Me With U" as a souvenir of what could have been, a soundtrack for young romance the world over that clocks in at less than four minutes; pop doesn't get more prefect than that.


 "The Beautiful Ones"



 "The Beautiful Ones" is the closest Purple Rain has to a proper love ballad, but there's little proper about it. It nearly annihilates the conventions of the form. Like the album itself, the song is fraught with romantic desire and anxiety, but it's the latter that takes control. It's a love letter in song, but our protagonist clearly has issues.


 "The Beautiful Ones" follows the traditional pattern of a man trying to win over a woman by singing directly to her. He's wooing her, trying to win her away from another man. In the film, it's Prince wooing Apollonia away from Morris Day. In life it's said to have been Prince's attempt to woo Susannah Melvoin, the sister of his Revolution band member, Wendy Melvoin. In the song, the person of his affectations seems more distant, less specific. That vagueness only grows as the song progresses, because with each second his chances seem to be dwindling, as his come-on – or really, ultimatum – grows more crazed. He begs, pleads, and ultimately freaks out so thoroughly that any impression of his confidence has shattered. In the film, Apollonia is brought to tears of shock but also apparent understanding. In the song it's hard to see him as succeeding. This isn't the man who will sweep you off your feet and fly you to the moon, or even the carefree but lovesick Prince of the previous song, "Take Me With U". This is the man howling into the wall or crying uncontrollably into his own chest. Earlier he sweetly begged, "don't make me lose my mind," and, now, he has.


 I've done no scientific study, but it seems that Prince wildly shrieks more often on this album than any other in his mighty discography. "The Beautiful Ones" wins the award for most convincing and even chilling Prince shrieks. "Shriek" seems the only fitting word for his breakdown at the end of the song. The song starts with him almost asking her politely, albeit with a lot of heaviness in his voice, "baby baby baby / what's it gonna be?" Before you know it he's proposing marriage to her, almost like he thinks that may be what does the trick: "if we got married / would that be cool?" By the end of the song he's on his knees screaming in pain, calling up devils in his soul to voice the ordeal that love, or desire, is putting him through. He has to know if she wants him, he tells her. All he knows is that he wants her, he proclaims in an ear-piercing shriek, one perched atop a peak built of moody keyboards, wailing guitar and a drum machine that, after the storm has calmed, sounds a note of life-goes-on.


 Concentrate too much on the initial come-on and the nervous breakdown at the end and you'll miss another interesting feature: Prince's psychological diagnosis of why she's rejecting him. In the middle of a song that otherwise is constructed like a personal screed, a love letter written in tears and pain, there's the protagonist's own rationalization that it's the beautiful ones who are the problem. Of course he gets more pseudo-poetic than that, whispering, "Paint a perfect picture / bring to live a vision in one's mind / the beautiful ones always smash the picture / always, every time." That moment is why Prince is Prince. He never hesitates to build an epic structure of drama and fantasy around each feeling or action, while also making you feel it viscerally. Purple Rain opens with a song where he slips into the tone of a preacher, and he does it again later in the album. That isn't quite the tone of this commentary section of "The Beautiful Ones", but it does sound like, mid-emotional rant, he's giving a lesson. That he can become Prince the poet/teacher/mystic in the middle of breaking down and crying, screaming, raging his heart out says something about the control Prince exerts throughout Purple Rain, the way he turns the conditions of the heart into fodder for that pulpit of rebellion, the arena stage.


 "Computer Blue"


Poor "Computer Blue". Imagine growing up in a sonic family that features eight other siblings that are far more famous than you (even the protracted Paris Hilton of the clan, "Darling Nikki"). The Purple Rain fanbase can recite your relatives' accomplishments verbatim, 25 years of rote repetitiveness on your favorite radio station guaranteeing their place in the public consciousness. But not poor "Computer Blue". Ask a Rain-head to rehearse or recreate anything else from the album -- "Let's Go Crazy", "I Would Die 4 U", even "The Beautiful Ones" or "Baby, I'm a Star" -- and you'll have little trouble with the treatment. But this bizarro track, built around a funky little hook, a syncopated drum pattern, and random guitar feedback sticks out like a surreal sore thumb. As Prince's echo heavy voice randomly invokes "where is my love life?", the direct disposability of the track hides something far more telling.


 Reviewing the writing credits, "Computer Blue" is the only Purple Rain production where Mr. Paisley Park is not 100% in control. The lyrics are credited to him, but the music is made up of random jams between himself, his father John L. Nelson, the dynamic Revolution duo of Wendy and Lisa, and keyboardist extraordinaire Dr. Fink. In many ways it represents the exact narrative of the movie, a microcosm of the kind of collaboration it takes a near-tragedy to get The Kid to embark on. Prince originally recorded the song as an extended 14 minute opus. It contained more electronics, a sing-along chorus, additional lyrics, and even something called "The Hallway Speech." When the album was being mixed, a near eight minute edit was offered, but that was also trimmed when "Take Me With U" became a last minute addition. So not only is "Computer Blue" orphaned among what is practically a greatest hits collection on one single album, it suffered at the hands of its creator before it even hit vinyl.


 The history explains the half-realized nature of the track, the lack of all the additional trimmings tantamount to turning an epic into a clip. And if you track down the lyrics for the longer version, the title even makes sense. Throughout, Prince is complaining about his broken down "machine", unable to find him the love he so desperately needs. Mandating that his emotionless pile of silicon chips receive a new "programming" to learn "women are not butterflies/ They're computers 2/ Just like U Computer Blue", he hopes for something more pure and spiritual. He rallies against anyone, or anything, that will "fall in love 2 fast and hate 2 soon/And take 4 granted the feeling's mutual." On Purple Rain, the track feels like a freaky fetish anthem, what with Wendy and Lisa going through the whole "is the water warm enough" spoken-word routine at the beginning. With the excised material reinserted, the song becomes a prophetic, almost painful search by one man for feelings that are meaningful, not mechanical.


 Kind of makes you feel bad for this awkward middle child of a song, doesn't it? Marginalized by its maker, forgotten by many who claim to know the property by heart, this is a clear case of commercial concerns taking the place of artistic needs. Finding a copy of the complete version is next to impossible, though Prince is known to favor live audiences with differing versions of the tune. Still, it doesn't make life any easier for this misbegotten musical memory from an otherwise earth-shattering sonic statement. Both the album and the film made Prince a superstar on par with Michael Jackson and Madonna, destined to partly redefine the '80s in his own oddball virtuoso image. Sadly, "Computer Blue" remains the obvious dysfunction in this otherwise solid family unit.


 "Darling Nikki"


That Nikki is one slinky 'ho.
 Any hussy bold enough to get her rocks off in a hotel lobby, presumably in full view of any passerby, deserves a wax likeness in the Hooch Hall of Fame. Of course, we've no idea whether Miss Thang is holed up at in a Times Square 'hotsheets', or the local Ritz-Carlton, but Sweetheart has no shame either way.


 Who's Nikki, you ask? (And no, I don't have her digits, so stop asking.) She happens to be the titular vamp in Prince's scandalous 1984 tune, "Darling Nikki", the most notorious track from his massive Purple Rain album, which followed in Thriller's footsteps as the pop crossover smash, while demolishing radio-influenced notions of "black" or "white" music, a social construct which sadly continues to flourish.


 "Darling Nikki" tells the steamy tale of a "sex fiend" named "Nikki" caught -- by His Royal Badness, of course -- "masturbating with a magazine". Our heroine predictably seduces the Purple One in a variety of situations, including an overnight romp at her "castle", making it clear he should ring her up "anytime U want to grind". Sonically, the song alternates between stripped-down percussion and swirling, melodramatic guitars; Prince, an unquestioned musical prodigy, handled all instrumentation himself. An insinuating keyboard whine -- betraying a hint of femme fatale menace -- starts us off, and we later hear slapping drum machine beats, possibly hinting at S & M play between Prince and Nikki. A standard-issue heterosexual male fantasy, as it were, not highbrow enough for Hefner, but more likely to appear in the pages of Penthouse.


 And therein lay the problem. Purple Rain was released during "morning in America", Reagan's mildly jingoistic slogan for reassuring the citizenry that prosperous times were just around the corner, with a caveat. The good times didn't necessarily include the freewheeling sexual bacchanalia of the 1970s, i.e., wife-swapping, nightclubs catering to group sex, or -- for the AIDS-ravaged gay community -- no-holds-barred bathhouses. The Gipper favored a more conservative, Rockwellian America, but also a wealthier one, apparently oblivious to the contradiction in dictating personal desires in an atmosphere of capitalistic freedom.


 To wit, a watchdog group, the Parents Music Resource Center -- headed by future Vice-Presidential wife Tipper Gore -- formed, with the express desire to rate and label music releases, and our little Nikki was definitely on the radar. In fact, after Gore heard "Darling Nikki" blaring from her daughter's stereo, the song became a keystone exhibit in their crusade, also rousing the ire of hypocritical Jimmy Swaggart and the Trinity Broadcasting Network, veteran purveyors of cheesy Biblical Camp. Eventually, the PMRC was able to coerce the recording industry to adopt "Parental Advisory" stickers, for placement on any albums containing sexually suggestive lyrics or profanity.


 Although never issued as a single, "Darling Nikki" has firmly established itself in the audiosphere, inspiring numerous covers, including one from the Foo Fighters (!), which Prince ungraciously opposed, even refusing the band's request to release their version. Shame on you, Prince Rogers Nelson. Are you trying to scare off Miss Nikki's other admirers? We all heard you screaming in desperation after she left you alone in the sheets, "Come back, Nikki, come back!" Best crawl on back to Paisley Park ... Darling Nikki's grindin' without U.


 "When Doves Cry"


On an old cassette tape from my youth, wedged in between "St. Elmo's Fire (Man in Motion)", random interludes of my weird, nine-year-old ramblings, and three different versions of Huey Lewis' "The Power of Love", is arguably Prince's greatest song he ever wrote.


 "When Doves Cry" was a last-minute addition to his Purple Rain soundtrack album and was single-handedly written and recorded by the Artist Not Yet Formerly Known as Prince. According to Rolling Stone magazine, he supposedly told an engineer at the time, "Nobody would have the balls to do this. You just wait -- they'll be freaking." And, of course, everyone did (freak that is). Unfortunately, not everyone did the same when it came to his semi-autobiographical movie.


 In the long run, the album proved to be much more successful than the actual film. From July 7th to August 4th 1984, the song reined number one on the American music charts and Billboard named it the number one single of 1984. Since then, "When Doves Cry" has been hailed as one of the greatest songs of all time by various music magazines, as well as by MTV and VHI.


 The iconic intro to the song -- a dizzying electric guitar solo followed by a very computer-generated drum machine loop -- still makes me want to wear a skin-tight, crushed velvet body suit with a white ruffled silk shirt and play air guitar. Although musically a bit dated, the lyrics are full of universal truths; of how we are sometimes a reflection of our parents -- in our relationships, in our careers -- and how we need to break away from them, to become our own person.


 How can you just leave me standing
Alone in a world so cold?
Maybe I'm just too demanding
Maybe I'm just like my father, too bold
Maybe you're just like my mother
She's never satisfied
Why do we scream at each other?
This is what it sounds like when doves cry

 It's been said through the years that the song and the video evoke the theme of religion -- most likely due to the white doves flying around in a church in the video. A staple on MTV in 1984, the video is difficult to take seriously (like most anything from that era) now. I wonder if Face-Off director John Woo got his inspiration for his whole dove motif from this video. What, with a naked Prince crawling out of bathtub around on the floor, his renaissance fair-style jumpsuit, and scenes of him driving that huge motorcycle cruiser from the film, it's better to just listen to the song via MP3. At the time, it was considered controversial among studio execs who thought the video's sexual nature was too much for television audiences to take. Some 25 years later, it's nothing compared to what they show now.


 Many artists have covered what is now considered to be Prince's career-defining song, including Canadian folk/country band The Be Good Tanyas, southern rock/jam band Gov't Mule, R&B singer Ginuwine and Irish troubadour Damien Rice. Other alternative versions have appeared in films such as the 1996 Leonardo DiCaprio/Claire Danes version of Romeo + Juliet and in the 2003 Sofia Cappola comedy/drama Lost in Translation.


 Listening to that old blank tape now, I laugh at myself at how bad the sound quality is and the awkwardness of my recording method back then -- holding that large box of a tape recorder up to the TV to catch those songs as the videos started-- thank goodness for the Internet. It's been 25 years, and many of those songs from the 1980s just don't translate well now. "When Doves Cry", however, is an exception. As Milhouse so cleverly put it in the "Lemon of Troy" episode of The Simpsons when he confronts another boy with the exact same name: "I guess this is what it feels like when doves cry."


 "I Would Die 4 U"

"I'm not a woman, I'm not a man / I am something that you'll never understand"



 The stunning opening lines of "I Would Die 4 U" encapsulate as best as anything what it was that was so alluring, dangerous, mystifying and thrilling about Prince, circa 1984. Forget about the unmistakable spiritual implications of the song itself (we will get to that in a minute): this was an introduction to a figure as alien and sexually ambiguous as any pop culture iconoclast since Ziggy Stardust. Undoubtedly, for a time, it was the latter that troubled not only many a parent about Prince, but perhaps also unnerved an even higher number of insecure males unsure of whether it was okay to actually like this freak, motorcycle and harem of beautiful women or not. It was not that Prince was obviously or even possibly gay (he had already addressed that conundrum, however evasively, years earlier in the song "Controversy"), it was that his brand of carnality always had him unshakably poised in the role of the mysterious, Dracula-like aggressor. We, which is to say all of us who bought a ticket or spun the record, were vulnerable to his hypnotic spell.


 If anything, "I Would Die 4 U" proves just how impossible that spell was to resist. Gliding in on a shimmering wave of a simple but irresistible keyboard melody and itchy percussion throb, the song is simultaneously majestic and intimate, a series of comforting promises written in the sky: "You're just a sinner, I am told / Be your fire when you are cold / Make you happy when you're sad / Make you good when you are bad". That the song is cloaked in the guise of a pop love song, that elemental and broadly unspecific form that has served generations of pin-up heroes from the Beatles to the Jonas Brothers up to legions of squealing fans, highlights its singular brilliance as both a formal composition and a sly subversion of the same. Taken simply as a pop love song it is exemplary, but listen to what it says about the relationship between larger-than-life rock star and adoring fan: "No need to worry / No need to cry / I'm you're messiah, and you're the reason why." Any hint of vulnerability in Prince's words -- indeed, in the title itself -- is a ruse. He is our savior, seducer and pop idol all at once.


 Because few rock stars ever explored the dimensions of their faith with as much conviction as Prince, the song's conceit of placing him in the literal role of Christ ("I'm not a human, I'm a dove / I'm your conscious / I am love / All I really need is to know that you believe") successfully mutes any blanket accusations of sacrilege. Rather, the song is an expression of the defining tension at the heart of rock and roll, the struggle between the spiritual and the sexual. It is a duality that perhaps no other popular figure of the last thirty years, not even Madonna in all of her insistent provocation, has addressed with as much illuminating depth and fire as Prince. "I Would Die 4 U" is the ultimate act of self-mythologizing, placed in the midst of an album that successfully crafted and launched upon the world the legend of it's own enigmatic creator. Here, as in so much of Prince's classic work, the Christian savior and the glamorous rock star are one and the same.


 "Baby I'm a Star"


If "I Would Die 4 U" was Purple Rain's spiritually anguished yin, then "Baby I'm a Star" was its cocky, narcissistic yang. As the former seamlessly bleeds into the latter with a big organ swell, Prince kicked the religious allegories and latent born-again-isms to the curb in favor of just having a good time in this already fallen world. No one's going to get in his way or tell him that he's a nobody because, as far as he's concerned, he's already a star.


 The truth is that no one was disputing Prince's purple majesty in 1984. With Purple Rain, he had a hugely successful album and a blockbuster movie; at one point during the year he simultaneously held the spots for #1 single, #1 album and #1 film in the U.S. So when he hollered, "Baby I'm a Star," it wasn't a delusion of grandeur -- it was the gospel truth. But when Prince first penned his overweening ode to pop stardom, his celebrity status was not quite cemented.


 Originally composed and recorded in 1982 during his prolific 1999 sessions, "Baby I'm a Star" found the 24-year-old musician on the precipice of superstardom — and this song seemed to anticipate his success. Propelled by a danceable, hard-to-deny Linn drum machine pattern and punctuated by Prince's signature keyboards-as-horns, the song's self-assertive speed and cocksure chorus was the biggest slice of rock and roll hubris this side of Rod Stewart's "Do You Think I'm Sexy." Just check out the brazen chorus: "Oh baby, I'm a star! / Might not know it now / Baby, but I are, I'm a star! / I don't wanna stop, till I reach the top."


 His eyes on the prize, Prince was destined, if not downright overconfident, to achieve greatness. Lines like "Hey, check it all out / Baby, I know what it's all about" and "Everybody say nothin' come 2 easy / But when U got it, baby, nothin' come 2 hard" only supported that swagger. By the time "Baby I'm a Star" appeared on Purple Rain, Prince had assuredly reached the top and lyrics like "Hey, I ain't got no money / But honey, I'm rich on personality" just seemed laughably awesome.


 The version that ended up on the album -- and as a B-side on the "Take Me With U" single -- was recorded live with the Revolution at the Minneapolis club First Avenue in 1983. The performance marked the debut of guitarist Wendy Melvoin. Prince reworked the song in the studio, keeping the audience clamor and applause and adding assorted effects and overdubs — most notably the faux string enhancements and the nebulous backmasking in the beginning that rips his critics: "Like what the fuck do they know? / All their taste is in their mouth / Really, what the fuck do they know? / Come on, baby. Let's go crazy!" More than any other song on Purple Rain, "Baby I'm a Star" documents the unbridled energy and graceful sleaziness that was Prince live. If you listen close enough, you can hear purple chiffon and pelvic thrusts under all the come-ons.


 "Purple Rain"


"Remember when we was young, everybody used to have those arguments about who's better, Michael Jackson or Prince? Prince won!"


 With this quote, the great Chris Rock comes down firmly on the side of Prince Rogers Nelson in the battle of pop icons. But in 1983, the answer wasn't so obvious. Michael Jackson was in the midst of Thriller-induced megastardom. Then, the summer of 1984 came along and with it, the pop culture ubiquity of Prince. He even captured two titles Michael Jackson never could: Movie Star and Rock Star. And no other song cemented his mythical status like that of the title track to a movie, an album and an era -- "Purple Rain".


 Recorded live at First Avenue, the Minneapolis club that hosted the Revolution vs. Time throwdowns in the movie, "Purple Rain" starts off simply enough. Technically an exploration of harmony in ballad format, it's really just a man and his guitar, sounding lonely on purpose. The song has places to go -- and go, it does. From resignation to urgency over an epic eight minutes and forty-five seconds -- like gospel on rock & roll steroids. Prince builds emotion with his classic vocal take and busts the song in half with a ringing guitar solo, from which "Rain" intensifies with organs, cymbals and pleading. Finally, the song settles as piano and strings linger like sparks trailing the fireworks.


 Lyrically, the question that endures 25 years later can be summed up thusly: what the hell is he talking about? Is it an allusion to the "Purple Haze" of his idol Jimi Hendrix? A lyrical rip from America's "Ventura Highway"? Is he just really into purple? Regardless, Prince deduced the great secret of mass acceptance by keeping the lyrics decidedly elliptical. He never explains this fantastical "purple rain" or why it's got him so morose at the start. On one listening level, ignorance is bliss so just sing along. But if you delve deeper, more questions arrive than answers.


 In Thailand, the color purple represents mourning and Prince is certainly lamenting the end of a relationship through the first half of the song ("It's such a shame our friendship had 2 end"). He seems the Prince of the Purple Heart, wounded in battle. As the song structure opens skyward, the lyrics reflect the change by discussing a larger relationship, that of a "leader" that will "guide" his prospects. Purple seems to take on the connotation of ultimate royalty -- the King of Kings. Does Prince have a God complex? In one sense, he could be setting himself up as the Creator of this relationship. He "only wants to see you underneath the purple rain." Kind of a poetic way of saying, "my way or the highway". Or perhaps he's contemplating his relationship with his Maker. Rain falls from the heavens after all. This reading seems a better fit for the spiritual transcendence reflected in the music.


 The definitive answer never comes though, and the song is all the better for it. In the end, that sense of mystery keeps the track universal. There's something bigger at work within "Purple Rain", the holiest of rock anthems.


 Prince initially asked Stevie Nicks to write lyrics for ‘Purple Rain’. “It was so overwhelming, that 10-minute track… I listened to it and I just got scared,” she said. “I called him back and said, ‘I can’t do it. I wish I could. It’s too much for me.” And so Prince went his own way and ‘Purple Rain’ was born.
Purple Rain’ was originally a whopping 11 minutes long. A verse and chorus were cut, apparently because the theme of money was deemed inappropriate. The original lyrics are as follows: 


Honey I don’t want your money, no, no.
I don’t even think I want your love.
If I wanted either one I would take your money and,
I want the heavy stuff.



The song was recorded during a benefit concert for the Minnesota Dance Theatre at the First Avenue nightclub in Minneapolis on August 3, 1983. It was the first time Wendy (who actually wrote the first chords of the song) of Wendy + Lisa played live as part of The Revolution before. I’d say that’s not a bad debut.



Prince was so worried that the song sounded too similar to Journey’s ‘Faithfully’ that he called Jonathan Cain and asked him what he thought. Cain OK’d it because the power ballads only shared a few chords. Bet he’s kicking himself now.



Each verse of ‘Purple Rain’ is about a group of people in The Kid’s life: his parents, Apollonia and his band mates.



 The lead female role was supposed to be Prince’s girlfriend Vanity but she left Prince just before filming. After Jennifer Beals (Flashdance) turned down the role, Apollonia 6 was drafted in, and pretty good she was too.



Prince won an Oscar for the now defunct category Best Original Song Score for ‘Purple Rain’ in 1984.



Darling Nikki’, one of the songs on the soundtrack, caused a diplomatic incidence when Tipper Gore decided it was way too fruity for children’s ears. “A sex fiend… masturbating with a magazine” led to Parental Advisory stickers.



Fans have been trying to work out the meaning of “purple rain” for decades now. Some believe it’s about the end of the world, a theme Prince was interested in mid-80s. This quote from His Royal Badness suggests the apocalypse wasn’t far from his mind:



When there’s blood in the sky – red and blue = purple.. purple rain pertains to the end of the world and being with the one you love and letting your faith/god”guide you through the purple rain

 Right…



Rumour has it Morris Day, arguably the star of the film, wasn’t invited to its premiere. He had to rely on Pepe Willie, the founder of funk group 94 East married to Prince’s cousin, to get him a ticket. Ouch.




Bruno Mars, dressed in full Prince regalia, performed "Let's Go Crazy" in tribute to Prince, who died the previous year, at the Grammy Awards in 2017. (I bet poor Prince was spinning in his shoebox)



 It wasn’t reported at the time but Wendy and Lisa were a couple during “Purple Rain’ and for 20 years afterwards.



The strange, distorted vocals at the end of ‘Darling Nikki’ during the sound of rain storm are an extra verse played backwards (“backmasked”) through a vinyl player:


Hello, how are you?
I’m fine ’cause I know that the Lord is coming soon
Coming, coming soon.”



And finally an act of outrageously wanky guitary stuff that I have to doff my cap to;





 

PatReilly wrote:

And where did his guitar go at the end of that clip, A/C?

"Magic" always the showman
 

shedboy wrote:

Some real good albums now.  I love the stories about Cocteau Twins.  Do you know them Pat?  I have met them many times.  Liz certainly was a Siouxsie influenced artist.  I love the Cocteau Twins even early pre Treasure stuff as it was a bit dark and complicated.  I went off them after heaven and las vegas though.   

I don't know the Cocteau Twins, shedboy.We were at the same places at the same times often years ago, but I knew Brian Guthrie better. Thankfully, not too well though 

shedboy wrote:

We are also about 7 albums away for one of the best bands ever and a sadly departed hero of mine.  14 albums away from the album that changed my music taste for ever and 20 ish away from the best album ever written - lol in my view anyway 

And you've made me look forward, thinking to The Fall and The Mekons.

 

arabchanter wrote:

PatReilly wrote:

And you've made me look forward, thinking to The Fall and The Mekons.

 

Wish you twa hidnay a done that, I like to get a wee surprise wi' the albums, em like a wee laddie covering my work at school so cunt can copy, an arm covering the next page so I can't see what's coming next, childish I know but works fir me, bloody blabbermooths
 

Sorry A/C- Shedboy is like the Devil. He tempted me, I succumbed.
 

PatReilly wrote:

arabchanter wrote:

PatReilly wrote:

And you've made me look forward, thinking to The Fall and The Mekons.

 

Wish you twa hidnay a done that, I like to get a wee surprise wi' the albums, em like a wee laddie covering my work at school so cunt can copy, an arm covering the next page so I can't see what's coming next, childish I know but works fir me, bloody blabbermooths
 

Sorry A/C- Shedboy is like the Devil. He tempted me, I succumbed.
 

arabchanter wrote:

Album 537.
Van Halen......................................1984   (1984)











If I remember Rick Dagless liked this groups last album from the book? I hope you enjoy this one to, for me this was a lot better than the 1978 offering, I quite liked a couple of the tracks, "Jump," "Top Jimmy," and "Hot For The Teacher" but wouldn't be in any rush to hear them again to be honest. This one still had the wanky guitar solos crammed in wherever possible even on the shorter tracks to my horror, but hey "one mans potted hoch is another mans poison."


 

 
Hi chanter you are correct I did like the first album. This one is decent as well, Jump is an 80s classic, Panama and Hot For Teacher are decent tracks. Those tracks aside though I'm not usually in a rush to hear the rest of it.

Also that Prince - Purple Rain album is incredible.

Rick Dagless wrote:

Also that Prince - Purple Rain album is incredible.

Honestly forgot how insanely good an album that was
 

Album 542.
Echo & The Bunnymen.........................Ocean Rain   (1984)













While their peers U2 and Simple Minds were playing stadiums, Echo & The Bunnymen were touring islands off the west coast of Scotland. Ocean Rain proves which ultimately was more rewarding (artistically.)


Epic and romantic, but less cryptic than previous albums, it employed an orchestra to add soaring strings and flourishes, also Ian McCulloch who crooned and occasionally stuttered out lyrics that shunned self-indulgence in favour of warmth and poetry never sounded better.


The confidence of Ocean Rain means it stands the test of time better than any other Bunnymen album. "Our definitive statement," said McCulloch