too easy. “Let’s Pretend We’re Married,” “D.M.S.R.,” and “Automatic” form a twenty-five-minute suite that pushes the erotic bounds of electronic dance music—Kraftwerk as sex-obsessed cyborgs rather than robots. Both “Something in the Water (Does Not Compute)” and “All the Critics Love U in New York” flip the equation, with the soul and experimental balance now tipping toward the latter. The album is rounded out by the two ballads, the uplifting anthem “Free” and the up-in-a-jet-screwing slow jam “International Lover,” and the nasty down-in-a-cab-screwing “Lady Cab Driver.”
1999 Super Deluxe offers twenty-four tracks from the Vault. “Moonbeam Levels” appeared on 4Ever, and ten tracks are alternate versions of previously released songs. Nine of the remaining songs were attached to contemporaneous projects, such as the Hookers, Vanity 6, and the Time, while “Money Don’t Grow on Trees,” “Rearrange,” “You’re All I Want,” and “Don’t Let Him Fool Ya” appear to be free agents. More on 1999 Super Deluxe in chapter 35.
The 1999 Triple Threat tour covered eighty-seven US dates from November 1982 to April 1983. Jill Jones joined the Controversy tour band, while The Time hit the stage before Prince and served as the offstage backing band for opener Vanity 6. All the 1999 material got a live airing on the tour except “All the Critics Love U in New York,” which debuted on Controversy and then hit its stride on the One Nite Alone tour.
The B-side “How Come You Don’t Call Me Anymore” was played throughout the tour, and session outtake and 4Ever/1999 Super Deluxe track “Moonbeam Levels” appeared on March 28 in Universal City, California.
Purple Rain (1984)
With 1999, Prince became a music superstar. With Purple Rain, he became a household name.
Much ink and many bytes have been consumed on Purple Rain, as is common when trying to come to terms with a masterpiece. So what makes it tick? Succinctly, on Purple Rain, Prince channeled the diverse influences and tendencies of his first five albums and synthesized them into individual and unique songs. Well, duh, isn’t that what everyone is trying to do? But he did all that not only with a memorable hook for each song but also with a memorable gimmick. There’s the bored Wendy and Lisa song and the Hendrix solo song and the dirty masturbation song and the one where he screams at the end. It’s all catchy and clever and all memorable. And when the LP was released, the fact that you could not only hear all these songs on the radio or on your Walkman but also watch some of them on TV and all of them at the movie theater made the deal that much sweeter.
Purple Rain is accused of rocking rather than funking, and it’s guilty as charged. How can you tell? When you’re standing up and listening to the song, do you just move your body above or below the shoulders? The former is rock, the latter is funk. And there’s a lot more head banging here than ever before. Whether this change was a cynical appeal to gather white rock fans doesn’t matter because it’s so great.
For all that, the LP has only one all-out rocker: the opener “Let’s Go Crazy.” “Computer Blue” and “Darling Nikki” have some hard guitar, but both have backbeats that get your butt moving albeit in very different ways. “Take Me with U,” “I Would Die 4 U,” and “Baby I’m a Star” are pop songs. “The Beautiful Ones” might be his best straightforward ballad, and “Purple Rain” is, well, “Purple Rain”—eternally anthemic without being cheesy. That leaves the top highlight, “When Doves Cry,” a bass-free organic-mechanical cry of pain, its own genre.
Purple Rain started on the 1999 tour, as Prince was often seen scribbling ideas for a movie into notebooks on the bus. The tour ended in April 1983, and during the late spring and early summer, Prince developed songs for this movie. In June, he began rehearsals for the new songs with his band, which now included Wendy Melvoin on guitar, at a warehouse in St. Louis Park, Minnesota. On August 3, 1983, this band, now The Revolution, debuted at First Avenue.
1984 was the year of the blockbuster LP, with only five albums holding down the pop number one spot: Purple Rain, Michael Jackson’s Thriller, the Footloose sound track, Bruce Spring-steen’s Born in the USA, and Huey Lewis and the News’s Sports, the latter for one week. Most record stores typically used handmade dividers to separate all of one artist’s vinyl catalog from another artist’s, but with the popularity of Purple Rain and the marketability of Prince’s iconic look, Warner Bros. distributed album-specific promotional dividers. (Author’s collection)
They played a dozen songs, six of which were new and three of which would end up on Purple Rain. The rest of the album and B-sides and outtakes were recorded between then and April 1984 at the Warehouse, Prince’s Kiowa Trail Home Studio, and Sunset Sound.
Purple Rain was released on June 25, 1984, a month before the film. It’s the first of three albums credited to Prince and the Revolution. It hit number one on the US pop charts for twenty-four weeks, preceded and followed by Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA. It reached number one on the black charts, chasing out Tina Turner’s Tiny Dancer and replaced by another sound track: Stevie Wonder’s The Woman in Red. It reentered the top 200 at number two on May 7, 2016, and stayed in the top ten for four weeks It is the twenty-sixth-best-selling album of all time with sales of more than 13 million. It chalked up three Grammys.
Purple Rain featured five singles. Both “When Doves Cry” and “Let’s Go Crazy” hit number one and are featured in chapter 12.
Released on September 26, 1984, in the United States, “Purple Rain” was the third single, reaching number two in the United States. The seven-inch edit was first collected in 2017 on the four-disc Deluxe Purple Rain. The twelve-inch featured the album version, but three versions are still uncollected on CD: the German twelve-inch “Long Version,” the UK seven-inch promo “Radio Edit,” and “Long Radio Edit.” We can hold our breath for Purple Rain Deluxe Deluxe.
The fourth single, “I Would Die 4 U,” was released on November 28. The single version hit number eight in the United States and has appeared on multiple collections. “I Would Die 4 U (Extended Version)” was available on a German “Erotic City” CD in 1989 and finally hit the United States in 2017 on Deluxe.
“Take Me with U” was the final single, released on January 25, 1985, reaching number twenty-five. The edit and the B-side edit for “Baby I’m a Star” appear on Deluxe.
B-sides “Erotic City,” “Erotic City (‘Make Love Not War Erotic City Come Alive’),” “God,” “God (Love Theme from Purple Rain),” “Another Lonely Christmas,” and “Another Lonely Christmas (Extended Version)” all appear on Deluxe. “17 Days” appears as “B-Side Edit,” but the full version has not been released and wasn’t circulating until December 2017.
The Purple Rain tour started on November 4, 1984, with seven nights at Detroit’s Joe Louis Arena. It encompassed ninety-eight shows, ending on April 7, 1985, at Miami’s Orange Bowl. All nine album tracks were performed at most shows, and seven were performed regularly until 2016, “Computer Blue” and “Darling Nikki” less favored. Non-LP songs “God,” “How Come You Don’t Call Me Anymore,” “Irresistible