Let's Go Crazy: Prince and the Making of Purple Rain - Softcover

Light, Alan

 
9781476776750: Let's Go Crazy: Prince and the Making of Purple Rain
Softcover
ISBN 10: 147677675X ISBN 13: 9781476776750
Verlag: Atria, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

Alan Light, former writer for Rolling Stone, editor-in-chief of Vibe and Spin magazines, and author of The Holy or the Broken, “gets inside Prince’s mind palace in Let’s Go Crazy—a history of the making of his historic, semi-autobiographical musical masterwork, Purple Rain” (Vanity Fair).

Purple Rain is a song, an album, and a film—widely considered to be among the most important albums in music history and often named the best soundtrack of all time. It sold over a million copies in its first week of release in 1984 and blasted to #1 on the charts, where it would remain for a full six months and eventually sell over 20 million copies worldwide. It spun off three huge hit singles, won Grammys and an Oscar, and took Prince from pop star to legend—the first artist ever simultaneously to have the #1 album, single, and movie in the country.

In Let’s Go Crazy, acclaimed music journalist Alan Light takes a timely look at the making and incredible popularizing of this once seemingly impossible project. With impeccable research and in-depth interviews with people who witnessed and participated in Prince’s audacious vision becoming a reality, Light reveals how a rising but not yet established artist from the Midwest was able not only to get Purple Rain made, but deliver on his promise to conquer the world.

“A must-read for the Prince die-hards who have remained devoted through the musical meanderings of the last three decades” (Kirkus Reviews), Let’s Go Crazy examines how the masterpiece that blurred R&B, pop, dance, and rock sounds altered the recording landscape and became an enduring touchstone for successive generations of fans.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Emmy Award–winning music journalist Alan Light is the author of numerous books including The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, and the Unlikely Ascent of “Hallelujah” (which was adapted into an acclaimed documentary), as well as Let’s Go Crazy: Prince and the Making of Purple Rain and biographies of Johnny Cash, Nina Simone, and the Beastie Boys. He was the cowriter of bestselling memoirs by Gregg Allman and Peter Frampton. Alan was a senior writer at Rolling Stone and the editor-in-chief of Vibe and Spin. He contributes frequently to The New York Times, Esquire, and The Wall Street Journal, among many publications, and cohosts the podcast Sound Up! With Mark Goodman and Alan Light. 

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The story behind the making of the phenomenon PURPLE RAIN is the book every fan will want to read!

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Let's Go Crazy
ONE

We Are Gathered Here Today

The stage is dark. A chord rings out.

It’s an unusual chord—a B flat suspended 2 with a D in the bass. A year from this night, the sound of that chord will be enough to drive audiences into hysteria. But right now, in this club, the crowd of 1,500 or so people listen quietly, because it’s the first time they are hearing the song that the chord introduces.

A spotlight comes up, revealing a young woman playing a purple guitar. She is dressed simply, in a white V-neck tank top, patterned miniskirt, and white, metal-studded, purple-trimmed high-top sneakers. Her asymmetrical haircut is very much on trend for 1983, the year this show is taking place. Wendy Melvoin, the girl holding the guitar, is just nineteen years old, and this is not only the first time she is performing this song in public, it is also her first appearance as the new guitarist in Prince’s band, the Revolution. So far tonight, they have played nine songs; this one is kicking off the encore.

She plays through a chord progression once, and the rest of the five-piece band falls in behind her. They go through the cycle again, and then again. The fifth time around, you can hear a second guitar coming from somewhere offstage. On the ninth instrumental go-round, Prince strides out, wrapped tightly in a purple trench coat. He plays a few fills, moves his head to the microphone as if he’s about to start singing, then pulls back again. Finally, three and a half minutes into the song, he begins his vocal, reciting more than singing the first line—“I never meant to cause you any sorrow . . .” The performance would yield what would soon become his signature recording and one of popular music’s greatest landmarks.

When he reaches the chorus, repeating the phrase “purple rain” six times, the crowd does not sing along. They have no idea how familiar those two words will soon become, or what impact they will turn out to have for the twenty-five-year-old man onstage in front of them. But it’s almost surreal to listen to this performance now, because while this thirteen-minute version of “Purple Rain” will later be edited, with some subtle overdubs and effects added, this very recording—the maiden voyage of the song—is clearly recognizable as the actual “Purple Rain,” in the final form that will be burned into a generation’s brain, from the vocal asides to the blistering, high-speed guitar solo to the final, shimmering piano coda. As the performance winds down, Prince says quietly to the audience, “We love you very, very much.”

In the audience, up in the club’s balcony, Albert Magnoli listens to Prince and the Revolution play the song. Magnoli, a recent graduate of the University of Southern California’s film school, has just arrived in Minneapolis to begin work on Prince’s next project, a feature film based on the musician’s life, which will start shooting in a few months. He thinks that this grand, epic ballad might provide the climactic, anthemic moment for the movie, an element that he hadn’t yet found in the batch of new recordings and work tapes Prince had given him. After the set, Magnoli joins the singer backstage and asks about the song.

“You mean ‘Purple Rain’?” Prince says. “It’s really not done yet.” Magnoli tells him that he thinks this might be the key song they are missing for the film. Prince, the director recalls, considers that for a minute, and then says, “If that’s the song, can Purple Rain also be the title of the movie?”

This launch and christening of Purple Rain occurred on August 3, 1983, at the First Avenue club in downtown Minneapolis. The show—with tickets priced at $25—was a benefit for the Minnesota Dance Theatre, where Prince has already started his band taking lessons in movement and rehearsing in preparation for the film. The sold-out concert, which raised $23,000 for the company, was his first appearance in his hometown since the tour that followed his breakthrough album, 1999, ended in April, during the course of which he reached the Top Ten on the album and singles charts for the first time, and made the hard-won leap to becoming an A-list pop star.

The event was significant enough that Rolling Stone covered the show in its Random Notes section. Noting that “the mini-skirted Wendy” had replaced guitarist Dez Dickerson, the item said that Prince and the band “swung into a ten-song [actually eleven] act, including new tracks entitled ‘Computer Blue,’ ‘Let’s Get Crazy,’ [sic] ‘I Will Die For U,’ [sic] ‘Electric ­Intercourse,’ and a cover of Joni Mitchell’s ‘A Case of You.’ Then he encored with an anthemic—and long—new one called ‘Purple Rain.’ . . . Prince looked toned up from workouts with Minneapolis choreographer John Command, who’s plotting the dance numbers for the film Prince has dreamed up. The new songs, which may appear on Prince’s next LP, are to be part of the movie’s sound track. . . . Filming is slated to start November 1st.”

The location for this concert was no accident. First ­Avenue, a former bus station that reopened as a discotheque in 1970, was familiar, comfortable territory for Prince. “It was his venue of choice to try material out,” Revolution drummer Bobby Z (Bobby Rivkin; his stage moniker was derived from “Butzie,” a family nickname) has said. Grammy-winning megaproducer James “Jimmy Jam” Harris, whose career began as a member of Prince’s protégé band, the Time, noted how the venue was an exception to the de facto segregation of live music: “A lot of clubs wouldn’t let us play because we were a black band, and they were one of the first to really give us a shot.” Indeed, First Avenue would practically function as a full-fledged character in the Purple Rain movie, and on this night, its hospitable confines served as the perfect place to introduce not only new material but a new configuration of the band.

Looking back, Wendy Melvoin claims that she didn’t feel nervous about her first show with the Revolution. “From eating and drinking to singing and playing and choreography, everything had a desperate importance, and nothing took priority over the other,” she says. “Every moment that you were in Prince and the Revolution had to be like your last day on earth. So when we were doing that show, it seemed just as important as making it to rehearsal on time the day before.”

The crucial decision to record the benefit was made in a bit of a scramble. Alan Leeds, who had worked as a longtime employee in the James Brown organization, had recently been brought on board as a tour manager for Prince. After the 1999 dates ended, Prince’s managers asked Leeds to stay on as plans for the film developed. “By default, I ended up as the production manager,” he recalls. “Honestly, I was in over my head . . . so I was nervous from a technical standpoint. . . . I had to find a [remote recording] truck, and I finally got a guy named David Hewitt, who had access to trucks, and he found the right truck and we had David Z [engineer David Rivkin, Bobby’s brother] in it. So there was a lot of last-minute running around to pull that show off. It was also ridiculously hot and...

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Verlag
Atria
Erscheinungsdatum
2015
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
147677675X
ISBN 13 
9781476776750
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
304
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV, GPSR Europäische Union
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
3584 AA
Niederlande

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