Prince – Darling Nikki

Kiowa Trail in May, then a sermon played in reverse

A cassette from Matt Fink’s collection puts Darling Nikki at Prince’s Kiowa Trail home studio in Chanhassen on 27 May 1983, with “new Prince” written beside the title. Prince played every part. Don Batts engineered the home date. With When Doves Cry and The Beautiful Ones, it is one of three songs on Purple Rain that he cut alone. No other musician plays on the home tape. A Linn drum machine runs under the live drums, the guitar line stops and starts, and the vocal keeps climbing until the last scream.

The lyric opens in a hotel lobby and moves to a castle full of devices. An earlier draft, later printed in his memoir, was a joke about a girl who could not cook. He crossed that verse out. What stayed was the sex, the dotted line, and the morning after, when Nikki is gone and a phone number is left on the stairs. In the film, the Kid sings it at First Avenue while Apollonia sits with Morris Day. Albert Magnoli used the number as the moment the Kid tries to humiliate her. Listeners kept the recorded performance. The film scene is built around that moment.

The coda was not on the May tape. On 18 and 19 September 1983, at Sunset Sound in Hollywood, Prince added wind, thunder and rain from the studio library, the same clips Duane Tudahl traces to the Vanity 6 song Wet Dream, plus a choir recorded backwards. Run the ending in reverse and he says hello, and that he is fine because the Lord is coming soon. Susan Rogers, who started with him just after this song, called the pairing deliberate. On vinyl and cassette it closes side one. A further edit and crossfade went down at Sunset Sound on 21 and 22 March 1984.