Tag Archives: purplerain

Prince: Syracuse, New York, 30 March 1985

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In these crazy times, it’s always good to hear music that ‘washes away the dust of everyday life’, to paraphrase Art Blakey.

Rewatching Prince’s 30 March 1985 Syracuse gig this week did just that. The brilliant 1984-1989 period of albums is one thing but it’s somewhat of a shock to be reminded of how fantastic the live shows were during this time, and musically streets ahead of pretty much everything 2026 can offer.

Even though by all accounts he was already tired of the Purple Rain tour by early 1985 (during the tour he had put the finishing touches to The Family’s self-titled debut, Sheila E’s Romance 1600 and Around The World In A Day), he gave nothing less than his all.

The Syracuse gig was reportedly attended by 49,000 people but wasn’t sold out. A heavily edited 78-minute cut is currently on iPlayer for UK viewers, commemorating 10 years since Prince’s death, with a lot of the weirder sexual stuff edited out.

Joni Mitchell once said Prince was not a pioneer but instead a brilliant assimilator, and here we see James Brown, Little Richard, Sly Stone, Jimi Hendrix and Carlos Santana rolled into one. The show is built for pure entertainment. There are so many notable moments:

– Prince taking off his Telecaster and chucking it 25 yards into the arms of a roadie during ‘Computer Blue’

– Wendy and Prince’s twin rhythm guitars on ‘1999’ (Wendy acquits herself superbly throughout, often playing Prince’s recorded solos note for note with some aplomb. According to Prince’s engineer Susan Rogers, he acted as a guitar mentor to Wendy, his frequent advice to her being: ‘Learn to solo, learn to solo…’)

– Mark Brown’s excellent bass throughout, absurdly trebly and showing serious funk chops

– The use of silence. This band could turn on a dime. In fact, Prince insisted on it!

– The small stage, and how close the band members are to each other. Check out the remarkable shot where the camera zooms out to show the entirety of the stadium, with a tiny stage in the background

– Bobby Z’s control of the Linn Drum machine: some serious pressure there. There’s a particularly quick sleight of hand between ‘Let’s Go Crazy’ and ‘Delirious’. But he plays ‘live’ on ‘Take Me With U’ and ‘Purple Rain’ with the Linn trigger on his snare. You’d hope Lisa Coleman and Dr Fink were wearing ear plugs during this gig though – he NEVER lays off the cymbals

– The ‘Baby I’m A Star’ finale featuring Sheila E, Eric Leeds et al is pretty remarkable, complete with audience members doing the conga around the stage

The Purple Rain tour ended on 7 April 1985. He began work on Parade just ten days later! He sat down at the drums and recorded the first four songs at Sunset Sound on 17 April 1985. Then Around The World In A Day was released on 22 April. This guy was always thinking two albums ahead.

Rolling Stone from 40 years ago this week, the 26 April 1986 edition

But reportedly it was a big shock to Prince’s management and band that he refused to tour Purple Rain outside of the USA. They wanted to milk it for all it was worth, but Prince was moving on.

And his bandmates were less than thrilled to receive a tour bonus of just $10,000 each (meanwhile Prince’s accountants informed Sheila, who had acted as the opening act on the tour, that she owed Warner Bros. $1 million…).

Perhaps the most remarkable thing of all though is that Prince would go on to make better music during the 1980s, and arguably do better live shows too…

Prince: Batman 30 Years Old Today

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At the beginning of 1989, the tabloids were full of rumours that Prince was in dire financial straits.

While that seems unlikely, with hindsight it does seem a curious decision for him to take on a soundtrack gig for such a huge mainstream movie, stepping right into the belly of the Warner Bros. beast.

But then it’s also not much of a surprise that he smashed Batman out of the park. On many levels, it was the perfect project for the time – the movie’s themes appealed to his post-Lovesexy spiritual concerns and also tapped into his own feelings about fatherhood. He explored those themes poignantly on ‘The Future’ and ‘Vicki Waiting’.

Musically, in the main he retreated from Lovesexy‘s album’s dense, complex, band-inspired sounds and went back to a minimalist approach, pushing his guitar right to the fore and making liberal use of samplers and a Fairlight.

But even though ‘The Future’, ‘Electric Chair’, ‘Partyman’, ‘Batdance’ and ‘Lemon Crush’ are essentially one-chord jams, Prince knows exactly how to hold the attention with false endings, escalating riffs, hysterical guitar solos and quirky chord voicings. The net result is a somewhat forbidding but still undeniably funky album.

Also he doesn’t scrimp on the dancefloor classics – put on ‘Partyman’, ‘Trust’ or ‘Batdance’ (a UK #2 and US #1) and to this day you’ll get any party started. Elsewhere, ‘Scandalous’ is a brilliantly-sung, sometimes funny seduction ballad in the tradition of ‘Do Me Baby’ and ‘International Lover’, while ‘The Arms Of Orion’ is a pretty – if somewhat trite – ballad.

The album was a smash hit, selling over a million copies in its first week of release and becoming his first US #1 album since Around The World In A Day. Prince was almost returning to his Purple Rain popularity, no doubt helped by the huge success of the movie.

But this kind of mainstream success was short-lived. Something was eating him up inside – in typical form, he regrouped immediately and took on a deeply personal project, the doomed Graffiti Bridge movie/album. Probably his least-remembered album of the ’80s – and arguably his last classic – Batman is ripe for rediscovery as we reach more end-of-the-decade, spiritual/political uncertainty.

Book Review: Prince And The Purple Rain Era Studio Sessions by Duane Tudahl

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There aren’t many titles in the ‘complete studio sessions’ pop library.

Mark Lewisohn and others have done sterling work in this area on the Beatles, and Elvis’s career has been similarly scrutinised.

But the relative lack of material begs the question – do we really want to know everything about our icons’ recording histories?

When it comes to Prince, the answer may be a resounding yes, since his mystique is so bound up with his status as a master multi-instrumentalist, famously with hundreds of unreleased songs in the studio vaults.

So such a book was probably only a matter of time, but fair play to Duane Tudahl for ‘The Purple Rain Studio Sessions’, a mainly fascinating day-to-day diary of Prince’s studio work (at LA’s Sunset Sound and various facilities and warehouses around Minneapolis) when he was recording the songs that made up Purple Rain, Around The World In A Day and key side projects with Sheila E, Jill Jones, Stevie Nicks, The Time and The Family.

The first half of the book is fascinating for three reasons – it outlines the vengeful decline of one band (The Time) and the adrenalized formation of two others (The Revolution and The Family), though you have to be a major fan of the former to enjoy these sections. It also captures Prince at a crucial juncture in his career, when he was going from mid-table journeyman to title contender.

What comes across loud and clear in the second half is the relentless forward motion of Prince’s creative drive – for example, just a week before the start of his Purple Rain tour, he was completing work on both the Around The World In A Day and The Family albums!

We also get a real sense of his famously-short attention span – he curtailed the Purple Rain tour at its absolute peak, bored of the material after only six months.

But the bane of the book is repetition. Too many calendar days are similar –  there’s only so much you can say about two weeks of ‘Baby I’m A Star’ overdubs. In Tudahl’s need to flesh out sometimes fairly uneventful studio days, he uses variations on very similar quotes.

But he also gets some great interview material from almost all of the major players, and there are plenty of revelations and interesting theories – he reveals that ‘When Doves Cry’ was written on Tuesday 1st March 1984, two days after Prince lost two Grammy awards to Michael Jackson. Did this double setback prompt some fairly uncharacteristic introspection, spawning his biggest hit?

Prince is also revealed as a major Springsteen fan, bringing the saxophone sound into his music mainly due to Clarence Clemons’ playing with The Boss. Then there’s his little-known charity work, including a touching photo of a gig at a Minneapolis deaf school, and we also get an insight into his fear before the first night of the Purple Rain tour.

There are also interesting comments about Prince’s business deals – Wendy Melvoin: ‘Collaboration with Prince was a reality, but it didn’t pay the bills.’ Her sister Susannah goes as far as to say that Prince would test people’s loyalty by paying terrible money. These are tantalising – if troubling – morsels, never fully explored by Tudahl.

But he gets closer than most to revealing the true Prince, warts and all. Spoiler alert: some of it isn’t pretty. ‘The Purple Rain Studio Sessions’ is a major achievement and a real labour of love. The years of research have certainly paid off.

It’s a vital buy for hardcore Prince fans, but arguably only the second best book on the Minneapolis master – just pipped at the post by Per Nilsen’s ‘Prince: The First Decade’.

‘Prince And The Purple Rain Era Studio Sessions’ by Duane Tudahl is published by Rowman & Littlefield