Four days after First Avenue, the Warehouse on Highway 7
On 7 August 1983 Prince and the Revolution recut Let’s Go Crazy at the Warehouse in St. Louis Park, Minnesota. The room was a former pet-food store at 6651 Highway 7, rented for rehearsals. Susan Rogers, just hired, was told to put a control room in the middle of it. She and the crew rolled in an API console, dropped a square of carpet on the cement, and recorded with no isolation. David Leonard engineered with her. Prince wanted a new version because the live take from four nights earlier was too frantic.
That live take is 3 August 1983 at First Avenue in Minneapolis, a benefit where the band also recorded I Would Die 4 U, Baby I’m a Star and Purple Rain. Those three stayed, with overdubs, as the album masters. Let’s Go Crazy did not. The idea was older than the club. On 18 May 1983 Prince had cut a home demo at the Kiowa Trail house in Chanhassen, organ under the spoken opening, the line about the elevator already in place. The Warehouse version is the one on the album: Prince on vocals and guitar, Bobby Z. on drums, Brown Mark on bass, Wendy Melvoin on guitar, Lisa Coleman and Dr. Fink on keyboards.
The album Purple Rain, the first billed to Prince and the Revolution, came out on 25 June 1984. Let’s Go Crazy opens the record and the film. The album cut runs 4:39. Edits at Sunset Sound on 22 March 1984, and a crossfade for the 7-inch on 5 June, produced the shorter single.
I was told to make a control room right in the middle of a warehouse, which breaks every rule in the book, but I hadn’t been an engineer: I knew nothing about record making. So we brought in the console, threw a square of carpet on the cement floor. There was no isolation or anything.
(Susan Rogers, to Alan Light)
Warner Bros. released the US 7-inch on 18 July 1984, catalogue 7-29216. The edit is 3:46. The B-side is Erotic City, recorded with Sheila E. The 12-inch followed on 29 August, with a Special Dance Mix at 7:35 and the long Erotic City at 7:24. The single went to number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for two weeks, Prince’s second chart-topper after When Doves Cry. It also hit number 1 on the Black singles chart and, listed with Erotic City, number 1 on the dance chart.
Britain got it later, and not alone. On 15 February 1985 Warner Bros. W2000 came out as a double A-side with Take Me with U. It entered the UK chart on 23 February and peaked at number 7. In the movie the song is the first thing you hear, the sermon and then the guitar. The record that went to number 1 is not the First Avenue tape. It is the one made four days later, on a concrete floor, because Prince thought the live version rushed.
