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Threads Of Alligator Lizards In The Air: “Purple Rain” by Prince and The Revolution

By Marcello Carlin


The original idea was for a country-style collaboration with Stevie Nicks, to whom Prince sent a ten-minute instrumental backing track, asking her to come up with some lyrics. However, Nicks was overwhelmed by what she heard and feared that the task was too much for her to take on, so the song was reworked in rehearsal with The Revolution, utilising Wendy Melvoin’s guitar phrasing as a new guideline.

The song appears to have existed before the film; Purple Rain the movie is best described as lucid hokum, but its soundtrack changed the atoms which constituted “pop,” far more so than much ostensibly radical music of the period. For many of that decade’s generation, Purple Rain the soundtrack was “our” Ziggy Stardust – better conceived, performed and produced in every way – and the title song, which closes the album, was “our” “Rock ‘N’ Roll Suicide.”

It is such a patient epic, the song, and about a lot of things, and people – each of the verses addresses a different subject (his father, Apollonia and/or Vanity, his audience), and following the purple sky which heralded apocalypse in “1999,” it transpired that this was a song to end the world, in a year when most noticeable art appeared to focus on the final thermonuclear days of planet Earth. It was recorded as live – though another verse and at least one more instrumental solo were edited out – at the First Avenue nightclub in Minneapolis in August 1983, as part of a benefit concert for the Minnesota Dance Theatre, although the string quartet coda was essentially written by Lisa Coleman and overdubbed in a Los Angeles studio thereafter. I know that you wish to treasure the ideation of the strings being there, present, calmly climaxing the greatest stage performance you had ever seen – but perhaps you treasure even more the imagined spectacle, the avoidance of your actually having to have been there.

Prince does things here which make one wonder whether he was superhuman. Evoke Hendrix? He did so better than anyone. The bar was there to be pushed and he turned up and obligingly pushed it. This is a song of profound sorrow and deeper hope – remember how the album begins with his assuring us that in this life, we’re on our own – and in the end “we” are still on our own but (pace “Rock ‘N’ Roll Suicide”) we are not alone; we are being guided towards a brighter and better infinity.

After recording the song he contacted Journey’s Jonathan Cain, worried that it resembled the band’s then recent hit “Faithfully” too closely; Cain reassured him that having the same basic chords didn’t make it the same song. There may have been a buried influence of America’s “Ventura Highway” (“Sorry, boy, I’ve been hit by purple rain”) which Prince’s erstwhile Minneapolis colleagues Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis later used as part-basis for Janet Jackson’s “Someone To Call My Lover.” But that’s all there was; “Purple Rain” succeeds in its (maybe inadvertent) aim to exceed all of its influences. It is the greatest “power ballad” anyone ever conceived, mostly because it isn’t just about that. And when performed as the final song on stage in Atlanta on 14 April 2016, seven days before his death, it also became his last noticed word. Prince played guitar.

Date Record Made Number Two: 17 November 1984
Number Of Weeks At Number Two: 2
Record At Number One: “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” by Wham!
UK Chart Position: 8 (original run), 6 (2016 posthumous re-entry)

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