A benefit at First Avenue, then strings in Los Angeles
On 3 August 1983, First Avenue in Minneapolis was sold out: 1,558 people, tickets at 25 dollars, a benefit aimed at raising 23,000 dollars for the Minnesota Dance Theatre. Prince and the Revolution closed the set with Purple Rain. Wendy Melvoin was playing her first show with the band, in the chair Dez Dickerson had left. Lisa Coleman has said Prince kept telling them they were making history that night. They did not know the board tape would be the album master.
The intro is Wendy’s. At the warehouse on Highway 7 he had called the chords and she voiced them her way, closer to Joni Mitchell than to a stock rock ballad. He kept her part. On the night, Lisa played the string lines on her Oberheim. Bobby Z, Brown Mark and Dr. Fink held the rest. The performance ran long. Prince later cut a verse and brought the album track down to 8 minutes 41. The crowd is still in the recording. He edited the night. He did not replace it.
The strings on the record are not the keyboard. At Sunset Sound, violinist Novi Novog and cellists Suzie Katayama and David Coleman, Lisa’s brother, overdubbed a real section. David Coleman told Duane Tudahl that Lisa phoned from the studio and he drove over the same day. Novog remembered Prince on the phone from Minneapolis, listening and correcting, while Lisa and Wendy ran the date. Apollonia was in the booth. Tudahl counts about five sessions on this song, against eleven on Baby I’m a Star. The basic track was already the record.
Prince was really excited and kept pumping us up: We’re making history tonight.
(Lisa Coleman, The Guardian, 24 July 2017)
Warner Bros. released the album on 25 June 1984 and the single that September. The single stopped at number 2 on the Billboard Hot 100. Radio used a shorter cut. Albert Magnoli’s film puts the song at the end, after the father’s suicide attempt, with the band back on his side. In March 1985 the score won the Oscar for Best Original Song Score. On the Purple Rain tour the piece often ran past fifteen minutes. The Syracuse show on 30 March 1985, filmed for Prince and the Revolution: Live, runs close to twenty.
He played it for the rest of his life, including the last public show, in Atlanta in April 2016. The 1983 tape does not know that. It knows a benefit, a new guitarist on her first night, and a room Prince chose not to wipe. The strings came later, in Los Angeles, played by three people while he listened on the phone. Wendy’s chord voicings stayed in the intro. The plea was already on the First Avenue boards, before the film had a finished cut and before the single existed. The benefit raised the sum the theatre had asked for.
