Vanity had quit. The piano ballad was for Morris and Apollonia.
On 20 September 1983, at Sunset Sound in Hollywood, Prince tracked The Beautiful Ones by himself. Engineers Peggy McCreary and David Leonard ran the date. It was the last day of a long run in that room. Five days earlier he had cut Irresistible Bitch. Across the previous weeks he had been finishing I Would Die 4 U, Baby I’m a Star, Purple Rain and Darling Nikki. The Beautiful Ones replaced Electric Intercourse on the album. Prince Vault lists him on all vocals and all instruments. With When Doves Cry and Darling Nikki, it is one of three songs on Purple Rain that he played alone.
The lyric was built for a shot that did not exist yet. In the film, the Kid is on stage at First Avenue. Apollonia is in the crowd, sitting with Morris Day. The song starts at the piano, quiet, and ends with Prince on the floor. Apollonia leaves in tears. Prince spelled the split out in a December 2015 interview with Ebony. The line about choosing him or the other man was for that scene. The line about the beautiful ones you always seem to lose was about Vanity, Denise Matthews, who had been cast as the lead and then quit. Apollonia Kotero took the part.
He had said the opposite to people closer to the sessions. Susan Rogers and Susannah Melvoin both heard a personal song in it. In the Ebony piece he pushed back. He said a ballad like that would not have worked if he had been looking at one person in the room. It had to be the character. The scream at the end is still his voice, one take’s worth of piano, guitar and that climb, edited later at the same studio.
Do you want him or do you want me, that was written for that scene in Purple Rain specifically, where Morris would be sitting with Apollonia and there’d be this back and forth. And also, the beautiful ones you always seem to lose: Vanity had just quit the movie.
(Prince, Ebony, December 2015)
On the early running orders the song sat second. It is track two on the configurations dated 7 November 1983 and 23 March 1984. After Take Me with U was added, the 14 April 1984 sequence moved it to track three, where it stayed. An edit pass on 22 March 1984 at Sunset Sound is the other session Prince Vault logs. The album cut is 5:13. It was not a single.
Purple Rain came out on 25 June 1984. Rogers later said Prince treated The Beautiful Ones, Purple Rain and Computer Blue as the core of the record, the songs he kept rehearsing when the rest could have been filler. The performance in the film is the one people replay: Albert Magnoli’s camera pushing in, Morris and Apollonia in the seats, the Kid spent on the stage floor. The recording under it is still the Sunset Sound tape from 20 September, the day the long Hollywood run stopped.
