Dig if you will the picture: 26-year-old Prince, dressed in his signature purple coat, high-heeled boots and white lace gloves, sitting in the back of a limousine outside Hollywood’s famed Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on July 27, 1984 – the night of the Purple Rain movie première. The man of the hour – whose risqué songs had earned him the nickname “His Royal Badness” – was too nervous to get out of the car. According to his longtime manager Alan Leeds, it was the only time he ever saw Prince’s confidence waver.
This anecdote and many more are related in a new book, Prince and Purple Rain: 40 Years, by Minneapolis music journalist Andrea Swensson, celebrating the film and soundtrack’s four-decade anniversary. “Looking back on the footage of his famously quirky, quick stride from the limo to the theatre – which he made while avoiding eye contact with anyone,” writes Swensson, who hosts the Prince | Official Podcast, “it’s easy to see how a young pop star who appeared so coolly aloof might have actually been gripped by fear.”
Actually, I once saw Prince lose his cool. It was 20 years ago in his dressing room during the Toronto stop of his Musicology tour. Reporters had been warned not to record the interview – turns out Prince wasn’t a fan of his speaking voice – but in my nervousness, I pulled out a tape recorder. A look of panic crossed the musician’s face – as we stood eye to eye, both five foot three – and I immediately shoved it back in my bag. “I just about had a conniption,” were the first words Prince said to me. Then he walked me to the corner of the room and made me hide the offending item under a stack of pillows.
Over the next hour, the legendary artist revealed many sides of his personality, from paranoia and arrogance to sweetness and humour. He had been living in Toronto with his wife Manuela Testolini for a few years, but still cracked up when he heard my Canadian pronunciation of “about.” “I like saying ‘eh,’” he added with a laugh. “Where’s your concert, eh?”
Now, eight years after his death from an accidental painkiller overdose, and on the milestone anniversary of Purple Rain, there’s still so much to celebrate
– and unpack – when it comes to the complicated enigma that is Prince Rogers Nelson. Even before he became the first person to simultaneously hold the No. 1 spot on the album chart, the singles chart and at the box office with his 1984 behemoth, his approach to being a pop star was far ahead of its time and remains shockingly relevant and inspiring.
Consumed with creative freedom and copyright, Prince’s 1990s battles with his record company and the internet paved the way for today’s musicians to own their recordings and push back against streaming giants. He was mocked mercilessly for changing his name to an unpronounceable glyph and performing with the word “slave” written on his face, but in the end Prince won.
“If you don’t own your masters,” he said, “your master owns you.”
Meanwhile, current artists like Janelle Monáe and Frank Ocean are vocal about how The Purple One broke down barriers with his explicitly provocative look and lyrics. “He was a straight Black man who played his first televised set in bikini bottoms and knee high heeled boots, epic,” Ocean wrote when Prince died in 2016. “He made me feel more comfortable with how I identify sexually simply by his display of freedom from and irreverence for obviously archaic ideas like gender conformity.”
Prince did become more conservative after converting to Jehovah’s Witnesses in 2001, but during our 2004 interview he gave a rare nod to his freak flag days. When praising Toronto for being a city “where everyone has a parade,” he said with a grin: “There was a certain way we used to dress that shocked everybody. I don’t wear outfits like that anymore, but in Toronto it wouldn’t be a big deal.”
He was wearing those outfits in Purple Rain, the semi-autobiographical film about a Minneapolis musician who overcomes a volatile home life, and outshines a Zoot-suited rival (shout-out to The Time front man Morris Day) on the road to stardom. Viewing it now, the live concert scenes hold up – way up – while the dialogue and acting are cringey. Still, the cultural significance cannot be disputed. The film became the highest-grossing motion picture in which all the principal actors were people of colour, setting the stage for the Black independent film movement of the ’90s.
And the soundtrack held the No. 1 spot on the Billboard chart for 24 weeks, above Michael Jackson, Madonna and Bruce Springsteen. With his sixth record, Prince’s fusion of funk, soul, new wave, pop and rock reached majestic heights – thanks in no small part to the anthemic title track, influenced by Joni Mitchell’s unique guitar technique. (The Canadian folk star, Prince’s all-time favourite singer-songwriter, eventually became his friend, and they would go out dancing together in L.A.)
For Prince, the success of Purple Rain – not to mention subsequent chart-toppers like the socially conscious masterpiece Sign o’ the Times – meant it was impossible for radio stations and record companies to silo him in the Black music category. “Just look at When Doves Cry and Let’s Go Crazy,” he told Ebony magazine in 1986. “Most Black artists won’t try a groove like that. If more would, we’d have more colourful radio stations.” At the same time, he proudly reclaimed rock for Black musicians.
Cue the 2004 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame ceremony, where this pint-sized, sexy MF set out to prove he was the greatest of all time. For the show’s final number – a tribute to posthumous inductee George Harrison – the late Beatles’ son Dhani joined rock stalwarts Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne and Steve Winwood for a performance of While My Guitar Gently Weeps. Prince was on stage, too – off to the side. When it came time for the final guitar solo, which Eric Clapton originally recorded for the White Album, Prince stepped to the front and shredded for three minutes straight. He was a rock god incarnate and all those legends looked on in awe, even as he upstaged them – and Harrison, and the Beatles and Clapton, and really anyone who ever picked up a six-string. He closed the song by throwing his guitar in the air (having prearranged that his guitar tech would catch it and give it to Oprah Winfrey) – and strutted offstage without a backward glance. The ultimate mic drop.
If that night’s performance was a message to his peers, then the 2007 Super Bowl gig was a memo to the masses. His electrifying 12-minute show set the bar for all future halftime performers, with covers of Ike and Tina Turner, Jimi Hendrix and the Foo Fighters as well as a chill-inducing version of Purple Rain, leading 75,000 football fans in its plaintive cry “Woo hoo ooo ooo, Woo hoo ooo hoo” – all in a torrential downpour.
With nothing left to prove, Prince turned introspective later in life. He was working on a memoir about his formative years and, on his final tour, while performing with just a piano and microphone, he was surprisingly nostalgic. In fact, Swensson saw him cry while singing Purple Rain.
“He wiped the tears away,” she told Zoomer, “then dramatically shook them off his hands and left the stage. When he came back out a few minutes later, he said, ‘I kind of forgot, but music can be powerful like that.’”
A version of this article appeared in the June/July 2024 issue with the headline ‘His Purple Reign’, p. 22.
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