Blood and blue over First Avenue
The organ holds a chord that already sounds like weather, and the band waits as if the room had been told a secret. Then Prince sings, not yet the guitar, not yet the storm, just a man asking to be with someone when the sky changes colour. Purple Rain is eight minutes that behave like a film even before the film existed. The climax is not a chorus. It is a solo that seems to apologise and accuse in the same breath, then refuses to end on anyone else’s schedule.
The bones of it were recorded live at First Avenue in Minneapolis on 3 August 1983, with the Revolution: Wendy Melvoin, Lisa Coleman, Matt Fink, Brown Mark, Bobby Z. Prince produced. He took the tape to Sunset Sound in Los Angeles and built on the night rather than replacing it, editing a long performance into the version that would close the album and the movie in 1984. The crowd is still in the track if you lean toward the speakers. That is why the emotion feels shared rather than staged. A studio could have made it cleaner. It would have made it smaller. The guitar, when it finally speaks, uses the room the way a singer uses a vowel.
He explained the colour late, and plainly. Blood in the sky, red and blue, makes purple. The rain is the end of the world, and the wish is to be with the one you love while faith walks you through it. The film turned that cosmology into a story about a son, a band and a stage. The song did not need the plot. It already had the scale. Radio cut it and still could not domesticate it. On the tour it grew again, past ten minutes, past sixteen, the solo a country he was willing to get lost in. Audiences did not check the time. They checked whether they were still standing.
When there’s blood in the sky, red and blue equals purple. Purple rain pertains to the end of the world and being with the one you love and letting your faith guide you through the purple rain.
(Prince, reported from an NME interview, 2012)
After him, the track became a ceremony other people were allowed to hold. Guitars at tribute shows, a choir, a stadium that only knows the hymn and not the First Avenue boards. The last time he played it in public, in Atlanta in April 2016, it closed the night. That fact is easy to overload. The recording from 1983 does not know it is a farewell. It knows it is a plea, and a band that can carry a plea without dropping it.
What remains is the solo’s patience. It does not shred to impress. It sings because the voice has said what words can say. Purple Rain still sounds like weather you would go outside to meet, dangerous and violet, with someone beside you if you are lucky, and the Revolution still in the walls of the take.
