Hello there!
However your Monday morning has started, it’s about to get better. To mark both what would have been the great man’s birthday tomorrow and the re-release of a classic live set, we’ve got a Prince special to get your week rolling as two of his bandmates from his original and best group The Revolution look back on the triumphant Purple Rain tour. It’s such a good start to a week that this is probably what Prince wrote Manic Monday about. Yes, of course he could see into the future. He was Prince.
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Enjoy the edition,
Ted, Niall and Chris
Start The Week With… Prince And The Revolution
On Friday, the iconic live set Prince And The Revolution: Live was reissued as a remastered and digitally-enhanced edition. It’s the latest release plucked from the Paisley Park vaults and captures Prince and his first band The Revolution at the peak of their powers during a show at Syracuse’s Carrier Dome on March 30, 1985 as part of the all-conquering Purple Rain tour. A few weeks ago, Niall spoke with The Revolution co-founder and drummer Bobby Z. and bassist Mark Brown, aka BrownMark, about their memories of working with the purple supremo, that particular gig, Purple Rain blowing up big and standing in front of a mirror for hours on end at the request of their boss…
Hi Bobby, how are you?
I’m good. I’m in Minneapolis at the moment.
What’s the vibe in Minneapolis today?
It’s 11am, it’s a beautiful spring day. It’s been a very tumultuous city the last couple of years. It’s been through quite a bit and everybody deserves a good summer. They’re painting a gigantic Prince mural downtown that will be unveiled around his birthday, getting ready for the Prince celebration. They celebrate Mozart in Vienna 400 years later and I was just thinking the other day that they’ll probably be celebrating Prince in Minneapolis 400 years from now, so it’s pretty amazing to have been in the original lifetime and take the journey with him.
Not just in the original lifetime, in the original band!
Yes, yes. And the lead up to the band, in which we were very unfamous together. We were just a trio with Prince and André [Cymone, original bassist in the Revolution] and I in the beginning and it’s still amazing to me that we’re talking about this show in Syracuse because Purple Rain was six albums later. The beginning was so humble, as is the beginning of any artist with dreams and hopes but he navigated well and he did it through songwriting. He just had this uncanny ability to write himself out of any jam or trouble and move the ship with these compositions.
How much of Minneapolis did you hear in Prince’s music?
Quite a bit, from the standpoint of the musical diet we had here for a couple of brothers, André and Prince, growing up in north Minneapolis, they had a very small station that had a very weak signal that would play R&B so they had to turn to the pop stations, playing top 40 and bands like Grand Funk, who had a black bass player, rock bands that were crossing over. That’s what I hear - I hear Thin Lizzy, Grand Funk, I hear these crossover bands, mixed bands that really moved the meter for Prince and André. They were extremely fixated on Adam And The Ants and Siouxsie And The Banshees, too. Adam And The Ants had such a huge influence on Prince, the image, the message was very similar, a sexual suggested lyrical content, and, of course, the look, the military-style rebellion.
Before we hone in on the show in Syracuse, what are the first things that come to mind when you think back to the Purple Rain tour?
The hours of the day spent working. Prince would have the Presidential Suites but he wouldn’t sleep in them. He just wanted to make sure that as soon as the equipment was set up from the night before, moved with a massive crew to the next city, by two o’clock we were back onstage either soundchecking or recording, learning a new song or changing the show. And we would do that until doors - people would be pounding on the doors. Then we would have an hour for hair and make-up at dinner and back on stage. And then later in the tour, he did these infamous after parties. Rinse and repeat the next day. It was a blur but an incredible moment.
Did it feel like the band were reaching their peak at that point?
Yeah. By Syracuse, for sure. It was a Ferrari, tremendous horsepower and agility, able to take sharp turns. You could do audio commands, visual commands, we could go 16 bars somewhere, come back, four bars somewhere. Tempo, break, stops, cues, changes, all done on the fly, that were pretty flawless.
It's a great start, with Let’s Go Crazy opening the show. What was going on backstage just before the band walked on?
This particular night was one of those nights where Prince was pacing back and forth, we’re making history and he got his adrenaline and excitement up, which drags you with it. You didn’t want to make an error, you wanted everything to be perfect. The tension of all that was equal to the elation of a good show after, but he definitely took this as a life and death situation. Even when I met André and Prince in the beginning, they were kind of famous before they were famous. There was a life and death approach to it that most musicians don’t have. Musicians can be lackadaisical and the gig is the gig and the pre-gig is nothing and the gig is going through the motions and doing your songs and after a gig, it’s just another party, but with Prince, it was like a mountain, you’re climbing Mount Everest every night. It was a work ethic that other people didn’t have.
We’ve got Mark on the line too, now. Hey Mark! We were just talking about the opening of the show.
Mark Brown: I was one of the guys in the front row so we had a different kind of energy we had to generate before - we had to get our psyche together before we walked out on a stage because the power that was coming from audience, the roar, the excitement, that’ll put you in a state of shock if you don’t prepare yourself for it. By this point in the tour, we were so amped up that you walked out there like a gladiator, like a ‘yeah, I’m gonna conquer’ kind of mentality. Prince taught that very well. I don’t know where he got it from. I always say, he’s from outer space somewhere.
Bobby Z.: I was just saying the same thing. He had a seriousness to it that other musicians didn’t have, it was like life and death up there.
Mark Brown: Absolutely. So when you come out, he taught me how to have that same attitude, “you walk out there, you own this, this is yours, you take charge”. By that part of the tour, man, I was already amped up, call it confidence or call it arrogance, it really doesn’t matter. It’s what made the show. At that point in the tour, there was no more fear, it was more, ‘I want to go down as one of the great bass players of our generation, I want to be remembered for what I do on the stage’. Prince and I both used to have this energy with each other where we would compete. He liked that, because he would drive that, he did the same thing with Wendy [Melvoin, guitarist in The Revolution]. And that’s what made us all look so cohesive and so powerful and in tune because he connected with each one of us, and gave us all a little bit of his power. We were able to stand on that stage and just really create some visual effects that were amazing, even when I look back at it now.
Bobby Z.: Niall, I don’t know if you know this, but Mark basically did all in choreography. Prince would say, “what should we do here?” and he came up with the stuff in the When Doves Cry video and then Prince would go “what are they going to do in the back?” so Mark had the drummer and the keyboard players that are doing stuff that that was just unheard of. No band ever did that. You got the front row doing steps, you got the background doing steps, it started with the Purple Rain movie and then the tour went even further. Prince would be like, “what are you doing with your baby finger of your left hand?” There was no part of the body that didn’t have movement!.
From the outside, it always felt that Prince’s bands were a collaborative thing more than just back-up for a solo artist. Did it feel like that from the inside?
Mark Brown: For me, I can’t say Prince with all his bands. I’ve watched several shows, I’ve gone to concerts after Prince and The Revolution, and they were very different. Those shows to me where he was Prince with The Revolution, there was a really different energy there. I’ll probably get a lot of criticism, but I really do feel that with The Revolution, Prince felt like he was in a band with The Revolution where the rest of the stuff that he was doing with New Power Generation was more like, ‘here’s my back-up band”.
Bobby Z.: I can say that, as the co-founding member of this whole thing, that Mark is right. I don’t want to get in trouble with any of the other bands either, but the band originated and then there were replacements when people want to leave, you know André and Dez wanted to leave, Mark and Wendy came along, Lisa [Coleman, keyboardist] came along, these people are still here, we’re still in the band. And so The Revolution was the last band Prince was in, just to backup what Mark is saying. I’m not disrespecting those other bands, and you’re right, he made all those other bands do a bunch of stuff, but I think what Mark is saying is this was a really collaborative effort whereas what Prince did later was tell them what to do.
How many hours a day do you guys think you were playing at the time of the Purple Rain tour?
Mark Brown: That’s a hard one to answer! A better question would be how many hours weren’t we playing?
Bobby Z.: Probably two or three!
Mark Brown: Exactly, enough time to sleep, that was it!
Bobby Z.: I was telling you earlier, he just wanted to set-up, soundcheck, rehearsal, recording session, whatever you want to call it until doors, do the show, after party, rinse and repeat, you know, you’re just doing that every day.
Mark Brown: Every day. I would go to bed. A lot of the guys would stay up, your adrenaline’s going, but I’ve always slept since I was a kid. I’m a sleeper and when I got on the bus, I’d be out. I’d wake up at the crack of dawn with the bus driver and we’d be pulling into a new city, so I would take advantage from eight or nine o’clock, check into the hotel, get some breakfast and walk around the city a little bit because I knew the rest of the day was gone. At 2.30pm, we’re on our way to the venue and that’s it until one o’clock or a party in his room until 3am.
Tell me about some of the post-gig parties…
Bobby Z.: Parties in his room which just turned into watching the tape and critiquing - more rehearsal, more study. The parties were called parties but the five of us and Prince would sit around the TV watch the video of show. We never stop working.
That sounds so intense.
Mark Brown: Well, he lived what he was, that’s what made him different from a lot of musicians. Prince lived and breathed the image, it’s not fake, he’s not putting on a show. He and Michael Jackson, in my opinion, are some of the most prolific artists of our time because they woke up in the morning and that’s just who they are. They lived and breathed every second of it. They studied every move that they made. When I first joined the band, Prince made me stand eight hours in front of a mirror for the first week at his house.
What?!
Mark Brown: I’d have to stand in front of a mirror and look at myself. I’m like, ‘what is this, this is nuts!’ and he would leave the room and then I would sit down on the couch. I’d hear him coming back up the steps or down the stairs and I jump up and get back in front of the mirror to make him think I was doing something!
Bobby Z.: We’d rehearse in front of big ballet mirrors and you’d really find out what your left hand is doing, what your eyes are doing, but he was working the same sweat, he was pushing himself so hard that you rose to it on a kind of a supernatural level. We watched ourselves on tape, we listened to ourselves on tape, we’d practice in front of a mirror, this was our daily routine.
What was it from the inside as Purple Rain became a huge, mega-selling hit record?
Bobby Z.: Surreal. It started from humble beginnings - at Mark’s first gig, we were booed off the stage supporting the Stones. Lisa has a good comment that Prince had to win over that Stones audience that booed him off in order to become this crossover icon and he did. It had steps. The movie definitely paused his process, so it was a lot of lead up to the movie and then shooting a movie and then the rehearsal for the tour and then the tour. Purple Rain is a diamond because it had that three-year window that made him pause. Otherwise, as you know, the guy was on fire, he wanted to release an album a month and Purple Rain was when things finally got a moment to breathe in Prince world and look what happened, it was Purple Rain.
Did you sense it was going to take off when you were making the record?
Mark Brown: I didn’t think the movie was going to take off. But I knew there was nowhere to go but up with us as a band. I’ll never forget after 1999, the power I felt when we did the Minnesota Music Awards. I never forget the feeling when I walked out on that stage, I felt invincible. When you get to a point in your career that that’s how you feel, then there’s no way but up. You don’t go backwards, you keep going up. And here comes Purple Rain - boy, we were powerful as a band, we were a freight train, nothing could stop us, there’s nothing we couldn’t do. Prince was on fire. He wanted to prove, ‘I am the Prince, I am the king’.
Bobby Z.: This was leaps and bounds more crossover powerful than 1999 but it certainly it felt like by the time we’re jumping to Syracuse, he was like the Muhammad Ali of rock’n’roll - he was going after everyone.
ND
Prince and The Revolution: Live is available on CD, vinyl, and Blu-ray for the very first time. Click here for more details.
