Purple Reign: Prince and The Revolution Uncovered [Episode 315]

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Coming up. On this episode of Booked on Rock, we
explore the most revolutionary period of prints with author James Campion.
We're totally rock and roll.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
I mean, I'll leave you you're reading. Little Hands says
it's time to rock and roll. Up.

Speaker 1 (00:16):
We are totally booked. Welcome back to Booked on Rock,
the podcast for those about to read and rock. I'm
Eric Senich, very excited to welcome back this episode's guest,
a fantastic author, really a friend of the podcast who's
been so supportive of the show, James Campion. His latest

(00:37):
book is titled Revolution Prince the Band the Era. James,
it is great to see you again.

Speaker 2 (00:43):
It's so great to see you, Eric, and I said
it before we went to record, but it's true. It's
not really a book for me until I get on Booked.

Speaker 1 (00:51):
On Rock, until you get on Booked on Rock. That's
so cool, man, thanks so much. Well, tell us about
this book. I know you were talking to me about
this a while ago. Yeah, and finally here we are.
The book is out. It focuses on Prince's most prolific,
groundbreaking era, right, and it's the era when he had

(01:12):
the Band of Revolution. But interesting that You're right. The
narrative has always been the Prince was a solitary entity,
but that is only half the story of his journey, right.

Speaker 2 (01:21):
It's true. I want to thank Andreas Swinson, who's pot
the original official podcasts with the with the Prince of
State for a few years. When she did the Sign
of the Times retrospective, I learned quite a bit. You know.
I grew up in the eighties. I was in rock
bands in the twenties, in my twenties, and I, you know,

(01:43):
Prince was a guy that we all could not wait
for the new Prince album to come out. Always came
out every year, and he was It reminds me of
the way people talk about the Beatles. It was always
something new, a new direction, a new sound, a new genre,
you know, mashing it all up. And I always, again
I felt, you know, that's what it was sold to us,
you know. And it's true to a certain extent that

(02:03):
he recorded all of this stuff, you know, produced arrange,
just you know, the credits recorded and performed by Prince.
But I it's their contributions. And by the by I
say they, I mean the Revolution and the bands prior
to that were so integral and how those songs were woodshedded,
how they were brought up in the first place, how

(02:26):
they were massaged, how they led Prince into different avenues
of musical styles that he never would have thought of,
and maybe he would have got to eventually, but he
got to it a lot quicker. So right off the
bat there, I thought, hmm, that's interesting, because I originally
had thought, I think I'd do another book about one
album like I did with Kiss with Destroyer and do

(02:46):
Around the World in a Day, which is one of
my favorite and a very controversial, no pun intended Prince
album and among fans and critics. But then when I realized,
that's smack in the middle of an incredible still of
really the burgeoning idea of Prince, even as a kid
growing up in North Minneapolis, how much he relied on bands,

(03:08):
And when I went to Minneapolis to visit, and again
thanks to Andrea who took me around, and I want
to also thank Dwayne Toudahl, who's become a friend, who
wrote brilliant books about Prince's output in the studio from
nineteen eighty three to about nineteen eighty six. I put
all those things together and I started to formulate this
incredible narrative that I thought would be best told in

(03:30):
a novel way, in almost like an unfolding story, so
people can follow really the arc of this incredible story
of not only Prince as a brilliant artist, one of
the greats of the twentieth centuries certainly the latter have,
but also the people around him, how he used things

(03:50):
you don't associate with him, compromise, collaboration, interaction, inspiration from
the fellow musicians. So once I dove into that, Eric just,
I mean, it was fascinating. Really, I learned so much
about an artist I thought I knew a lot about.

Speaker 1 (04:05):
And it all starts with Prince's quote fantasy musical ensemble
and interracial and intergender assemblage of special musicians that could
seamlessly mesh sonic styles. You could say that this vision
began when he was only like six or seven, right
when he was growing up in Minneapolis. I mean he
was listening to s Line, the Family Stone and James

(04:26):
Brown and the Stones, Aretha Franklin, so many artists right
when he was growing up.

Speaker 2 (04:30):
Yeah, he was initially introduced. You know, you mentioned the
age of seven. That's when his parents split up Mattie
and John Ell. Mattie is mom a part of his personality.
I write in the book sort of a junior psychologist,
about how Maddie represented that side of him that was
loose and sensual and fun loving, and you know, gregarious

(04:52):
and adventurous and then john Ell religious, solemn focused, you know, perfectionist,
you know, and his father wouldn't let him go near
the piano unless he could really play it, so he'd
have to wait till his father left the room, and
then he would. He taught himself out of play, and
then his father got involved and taught him to play better.
And you know, his father got him a guitar, and

(05:13):
by seven eight nine he started to play. But it
wasn't until he met Andre Anderson later Andre Simone, who
was a middle school friend of his when his father
kicked him out of the house, and a famous story
that was depicted in Rolling Stone magazine in the mid eighties.
John Nell was fed up with Princes more like his mom,
gregarious in adventurous way, especially with girls in his room

(05:35):
and under his father's roof, and Prince ends up in
the Anderson home where he lives in the basement with
Andre and the two of them. That's where Andre sort
of turns Prince on. Prince got the notion about this
kind of stuff that you would learn in the black
community of Minneapolis in the sixties into the early seventies,

(05:56):
which is pared down to, you know, ninety two of
Minneapolis it's Caucasian and still to this day it might
be around ninety ninety one percent, but there were black
pockets around Minneapolis. And Andrea talks about it in her
fabulous book about that era of redlining, where you know,
certain neighborhoods could not move into white areas. So for Prince,

(06:21):
he grew up with Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles James Brown.
These were forming inside, giving him sort of a vocabulary.
But it was Andre and Andrea's brothers who at that
time were dealing with a wider swath of music because
the radio stations were more white and more meaning more rock,
you know, and he turned Prints onto Grand Funk Railroad

(06:44):
and sly in the Family Stone and sort of that
that crossover stuff that Prince is so well known for
and why he absolutely wanted, as you just read from
my book, intergender, interracial voices and sound and styles in
anything he did.

Speaker 1 (07:02):
You're right. Quote. Prince was twenty six when the official
revolution was detonated, and it was quite the excursion to
get there. So let's get to this. There was a
pre revolution lineup that Prince formed as his backing band
after the release of that first album, which was nineteen
seventy eight for you. So let's get to that pre
revolution lineup and how they came together. It starts as

(07:22):
a trio, that's right.

Speaker 2 (07:24):
It starts in the Lauring you know that great apocryphal
mystical thing called the Louring Park sessions, in which Prince
had met Bobby Z. Bobby Rifkin, who became his drummer
for the first nine years of his career, who was
the brother of David Rifkin, who famously helped to engineer

(07:45):
the first real big song to come out of the
Funky aspect of Minneapolis called Funkytown by Lips Incorporated. And
so Prince had gotten a lot of because he was
a young penon, he got a lot of like studio
session stuff, and he met through his manager at the time,
Owen Hunse, he met Bobby Z, who was only about

(08:06):
nineteen twenty at the time. Prince would have been eighteen nineteen.
He's already friends with Andre from growing up with him
in middle school, and they formed this trio and they
rehearse in Hunsi's office in the Loring Park area of Minnesota.
And I actually went to visit this building. You could
go downstairs and right in front of the room where
they practiced as a plaque there now. And Andre had

(08:28):
helped them put the plau up after Prince's death, and
he explained to a lot of the people there where
they used to bring in the equipment, and I took
a photograph of it. And they would play every night.
They'd move the all this office stuff out, play until
dawn and move all these stuff back and then go
back to try to sleep. I guess at that point,
I don't know when they slept, but that was the

(08:48):
beginning of the trio. And that trio really started to
formulate later on when Des Dickerson became a fourth and
started to play with him, the guitar player who ended
up later on, of course, being in his touring bands.
And then later on it expanded out to Matt Think
of course, the doctor. All these different personalities and Gail Chapman,

(09:09):
who I interviewed for the book who was there a
short amount of time, but she was the first white
keyboard player who is very, very classically trained and really
brought that kind of aspect to Prince's sound. But once again,
going all the way back even to his high school
days when he was in a band called Grand Central Eric,
this was a guy who really enjoyed the camaraderie and

(09:29):
the inspiration of jamming and trying different styles and those
bands all the way through high school into the trio period.
They they did a lot of stuff like Santana and
Steely Dan and you know, Parliament Funkadelic. As I mentioned
Stevie wonder It Sli in the family Stone. They did
the full Grand Fight. They did the full gamut of
type of music Chicago, just so they can get gigs

(09:53):
in the predominantly white areas of Minneapolis.

Speaker 1 (09:55):
But Warners didn't feel that the band was ready to
put them in the studio. They were wanted Prince to
do it on his own, essentially with the help of
some of the people that they handpicked. Like the first
album you write about how they left to his own vices.
You know he's gonna be there forever. He would take
him forever to finish y.

Speaker 2 (10:12):
I think he did forty six overdubs or something on
one song. Yeah, so your Prince was it was signed incredibly.
They they pitched him as the new Stevie Wonder and
this guy Hensey did a fabulous job in convincing Moe
Austin from Warner Bros. To sign him. Now Austin had
signed Neil Young and Fleetwood Mac and Randy Newman. The

(10:33):
list is long, and it's a great it's a great story,
great backstories. He got all these guys Lenny Warnaker and
Katz who produced this, Steely Dan and Templeton who produced
Van Handon. He got all these guys in there to
kind of watch Prince and say, because this kid really
do this. And they all came back to Austin and
said he's killing it, he's doing it, so leave them alone.

(10:54):
And they did and end up costing a very much
more more money than they wanted to spend. And Prince
really want a band. So between for You, which is
very much a solitary entity production, and so is the
second album which was Uponmany's titled Prince. That record you
could tell the difference, And I don't know if you
listened to a lot of this music while you were

(11:15):
reading the book, Eric, and a lot of people have
reported back to me they've done that, they've rediscovered these
early records. And it seemed to me when I started
listening to that again with Fresh Air Ears, that Prince
was trying to put together a band type record to
go on the road and kick ass. And that's when
he started bringing all these other musicians in. And these
songs have more of a chanting quality, you know, and

(11:35):
more of a hybrid of disco and funk and rock
and pop. So there was that great overlap that he
was able to produce. But miraculously, as I said before,
Warners gave him full creative control at you know, nineteen
twenty years old, which is amazing, totally amazing.

Speaker 1 (11:53):
At one point he was in New York. Then they
moved him out to California, but then he wanted to
go back to Minneapolis.

Speaker 2 (11:58):
That was his home, always back to Minneapolis. They wanted
him to get studio musicians. He didn't. He played all
the instruments. They wanted him to get studio cats or
a road cats to play, but he kept returning to
that trio. He kept returning to Minneapolis, and that's where
he built the band I mentioned before, with Gail and
Dez and Matt Fink and Bobby and his old pal

(12:21):
from middle school. So it's really a fantastic story about
a guy who did want it to be a big star.
He wanted to control his own music, but he also
wanted to be He wanted to find that gang, that
tribe that he could connect to. And I say this
a lot in the book. As you know, the band,
his family family is the band. He felt very strongly
about that. A band was more than just musicians. They

(12:44):
had to have full loyalty at all the time. They
had to have his back. I write quite a bit
in the book about all in. That's a phrase that's
thrown around a lot in the music business, in sports,
but this was true of Prince. Everybody had to have
the same style and the same attitude and the same
almost the same gate when they walked. It's incredible, you know,

(13:06):
he just built this family from the ashes of his
own family life, which didn't work out for him as
a kid.

Speaker 1 (13:13):
Booked on rock Podcasts We'll be back after this when.

Speaker 2 (13:17):
When opichis with the impatients, Remember absence makes the heart
grow fonder.

Speaker 1 (13:25):
You had to pick that night when they first play live,
So clearly it's it's in the debt of Minneapolis sub
zero January night in nineteen seventy nine, one year before
the dawn of a decade. Prince would emerge triumphant that
the band debuted for Warner Brothers. But here again, Warners
just didn't feel that the band was ready to enter
the studio.

Speaker 2 (13:46):
And they all admitted that. They all admitted that they
weren't ready for primetime. It was a total disaster. They
played the caprio. It was only for a couple of
hundred people, but all the Warners staff was there. They bombed.
You know, I call it the flop in the book.
But it reinvigorated him and it challenged him, and he
knew he couldn't be stopped. And I thought he did
a very smart thing. He took the band to Colorado,

(14:08):
not Minneapolis, not New York, not Los Angeles.

Speaker 1 (14:10):
Yeah, he about it fascinating Colorado, of all places.

Speaker 2 (14:13):
All places. Goes out there studio, all private, and he
asks everybody in the band to write songs. Everybody writes songs.
Bring him in. I'll write some too. Let's do a
band album. Let's not think about Prince, Let's not think
about Warner Brothers, does not think about going on the road.
Let's just convene and collaborate. And they did and it
was called The Rebels and you could find it on
YouTube and there's other bootlegs of it. It almost became

(14:35):
an album. They actually had a photograph of all the
members a la Hot Rocks, you know, the Rolling Stones,
where they were all like, you know, their profiles, and
it never came out. But it was so fascinating listening
to these songs, Eric, because one sounds like Sticks, one
sounds like Steely Dan, one sounds like Parliament, one sounds

(14:56):
like the Ohio Players. It's incredible. They all came with
their own styles, all sing vocals. He just he said,
let's got, let's got, let's become a band. Such a
great idea.

Speaker 1 (15:05):
And that was intentional, just let's play whatever music we
want to play or write, et cetera. And it was
like camp. You discs really was camp And.

Speaker 2 (15:14):
I don't want to pass over this idea is when
he hired everybody to play. Des Dickerson loved the Cars,
loved Boston, Love love Ultravox, loved uh the Generation X
was Billy Idol's original band. Matt Fink loved Elton John
and David Bowie and Stevie wonder Uh and you know

(15:34):
hooked on Bach. You know later on Lisa Coleman loved
jazz and classical music. They all brought something to the
table which continued to challenge is Prince's prism and his palette,
so we could continue to mind those things. He was
like a sponge and he was so much a genius
at taking all these disparate, seemingly disparate styles. In the

(15:57):
late seventies when there was a total isolation of music,
black stations, white stations, disco rock, never the twain shall
meet different TV shows, different radio stations, different award shows.
And that wasn't the case in the fifties and sixties,
where there was a great meshing of African American sounds
with white sounds. But that split in half of the

(16:21):
music business was very, very, very extremely stringent in putting
the labels on artists, and Prince said from the very beginning,
don't make me black. And he wasn't rejecting his heritage.
What he was saying is I don't want to I'm
not I'm gonna do whatever the hell I want. And
all these musicians, as I write about, really helped him.
They gave him, they butchased him, you know, they supported him.

(16:43):
He saw all these voices saying, hell, yeah, why should
we just do this? Why should we just do that?
Why can't we do anything? And the Rebels sessions really
did bring that out for them.

Speaker 1 (16:52):
The early TV appearance is NBC's Midnight Special and American
Bandstand with the band. Now, he could have come out
by himself, but it was important for him to have
the band behind him.

Speaker 2 (17:05):
Yeah, it was. It's they absorbed him and protected him.
That's what they did. He could be shy, which he
was extremely He could be monosyllabric, which he was with
Dick Clark on that in this interview, or he doesn't
even look at him and he just wiggles his fingers,
mumbles occasional things. But I'm fascinating, and I point out

(17:25):
in the book, I'm fascinated by the fact that they
recorded American Bandstand first, but it came out afterwards. So
if you look up, the first TV appearance ever by
Prince was the Midnight Special. But the interesting thing is
you could see the difference immediately there was still a
ragtag bunch, kind of punky. The guitar falls off Prince's shoulder.
He just lets it fall to the ground. Mike Stone

(17:46):
stands up being toppled. They're just winging it, man. It's
like a full punk show, you know. They do I
Want to Be Your Lover, which was a disco kind
of pop it yeah, and Why You Want to Treat
Me So Bad, which was his first real rock and
roll yeah, with great U know, guitar lead in there,
as opposed to the Midnight Special, which was still prints
in outrageous costumes, sort of ambisexual, you know, high heels, panties, garters,

(18:11):
hair all teased up, and you know, the band in
very much pre eighties pastels and different styles. You could
see him inventing in a way the eighties. But those
those were two huge appearances. But as you said, Eric
very smartly, and I think I put it out in
the book, it was very important for his management and
for him and the band to be represented as a

(18:32):
band and be represented in these crossover places where people
were not used to it.

Speaker 1 (18:37):
Now.

Speaker 2 (18:38):
Of course, there were black bands that crossed over the
Commodore's earth Wind and fire Parliament. But Stevie Wonder certainly
opened up of the Rolling Stones and had an incredible
crossover appeal, and then later on Michael Jackson line of Richie.
But with Prince, he was going deeper. He was going
in the rock clubs. He's playing in the Ritz in
the bottom line and you know, he's playing out in

(18:58):
the rocks y at La. None of these acts I'm
talking about ever did that. Prince took those bands. So
he did the band thing, the kind of thing you
have to do, no matter what kind of band you are.

Speaker 1 (19:07):
I always wondered why here in Connecticut he was never
on any of the rock stations. He would be on
Top forty only not until the Rock and Roll Hall
of Fame appearance where he plays while my guitar gently weeps.
Did rock and roll fans suddenly wake up? So? Whoa,
oh this guy? Wow? He could play? Yeah, he could
always play.

Speaker 2 (19:27):
He always could. And I think from the very beginning,
and I talk about it in one chapter about lineage,
and I think very much so, and I don't believe
I'm the first to think this, but I put it
very very I underscored it quite a bit. Prince was
trying to return rock and roll music back to the originators,

(19:49):
the Little Richards, the chuck Berrys, the Fast Dominoes. They
were sort of left out, you know, when rock became.
When rock and roll became rock in the late sixties
and seventies, became more of a white somebody like Jimmy
Hendricks had a hard time crossing over himself one of
the greatest, if not the greatest guitar player of all time.
And we mentioned Sli in the Family Stone that was
a hybrid band of inter gender and interracial. But Prince

(20:11):
was trying to do that from the very beginning. I'm
fully convinced of that, and by bringing guitar leads in
and other things. And I think that Rock and Roll
Hall of Fame is very important for that reason you
mentioned Eric, but also I love the fact that he
dresses almost like a Chitlin circuit nineteen fifty eight. He's
wearing the red pinstripe suit with the bowler hat. He

(20:32):
goes out there with all these famous rock and rollers,
white guys, and he plays one of the greatest solos ever,
which has every sort of trope that you would have
seen anybody play in the Chitlin circuit. It's almost like
his final which is incredible. I think he was inducted
that night and he's saying, I'm at the Rock and
Roll Hall of Fame. Don't forget who invented this stuff,

(20:54):
and in a very very cool and total Prince way,
because he spoke through his music and he was very
influenced by a lot of the New Romantics music, the
second British Wave that came out of Britain in the
early eighties when he traveled there in eighty nineteen eighty
I think or eighty one eighty, and he always incorporated

(21:16):
whether it was Gary Newman or or craft Work or
you know, Todd Rudgren, Joni Mitchelli loved so he was
constantly infusing a lot of that music into his music.
And yeah, it was tough. It was tough, as you
know for anybody, anybody playing, you know, who had black skin,
forget about what styles you played to get on MTV.

(21:37):
David Bowie famously, you know, petitioned them and challenged them.
And I think it's a great triumph that MTV covered
the premiere of Purple Rain. Just a couple of years later,
here was a station that they wouldn't even play black music,
and now they were celebrating maybe the first ever black
musical with a lead that was an heroic figure.

Speaker 1 (21:56):
Absolutely. Now Gail Chapman as somebody who spoke with She
was the band, but not long. Her leaving the band was,
as you call it, a watershed moment in Prince's career.
What was her reason for leaving the band and how
was it a watershed moment for Prince?

Speaker 2 (22:12):
Yeah, so I was very fascinated by Gail's story because
it is always presumed in all the biographies that she
left because of religious reasons. She was very religious, which
she agrees that she was, because Prince would, you know,
French kisser during the famous song head, which is dealing.
You don't need to be felle Ney to figure that out,
and he would make her wear scantly clad clothes, and

(22:35):
she was very conflicted about his sort of conflation of
sexuality and religiosity, which he did very very strongly around
that time and even after she left the band. But
that wasn't the case. She said she felt very very
pigeonholed as a human being in that group. Because I
mentioned the all in thing. He was very very cognizant

(22:55):
and maybe unfairly sold because she's a woman, about her weight,
about her hairstyle, about everything. He picked out, all of
her clothes. It got to be the point where she
just felt like she was like a living doll for him,
and she wanted to be a serious musician and she
wanted to do other things. She said, she told me
straight out, maybe I did leave too early, maybe I
was being two impetuous, I was young, but she felt
like she did need to leave. She left because of

(23:17):
her creative soul and because she just wanted to get
her identity back. So she left for that reason. But
why it's watershed is here comes Lisa Coleman from Los Angeles,
child of a wonderful musician who played with the Wrecking
Crew and played on the Beach Boys records and all
other records, and also a woman who was steeped and

(23:40):
grew up with seeing the Jackson five at a you know,
at a barbecue, and you know, Rita Coolidge used to
babysit her and she would just see, you know, sliding
the family stone, come walking down the street. So she
was fully already steeped by the time she met Prince
in the music business. She finds out he needs a
keyboard player, and the story of the two with them

(24:00):
meeting where he picks her up at the airport and
because they're both super shy, they don't say a word
to each other. They go to his lakeside house. He
points at the piano without saying a word. You can
almost imagine this. She sits down, and of course she's nervous.
According to her, He goes upstairs to call management and
tell them this is not gonna work out. Man, this
woman hasn't set a peep to me. I don't know
anything about her. Then she starts playing this Mozart piece,

(24:24):
and Prince jumps up, hangs up the phone, grabs his guitar,
runs down, and she says, from the first chords they connected.
How did they connect? Not from talking, not from arguing,
or sexually, or philosophically or spiritually. They connected through music.
She goes, from that point on, I was his sister,
and I followed him anywhere he wanted to go. And

(24:46):
he said the same of her. She is my other side.
When she plays. She I'm a great piano player, and
Prince was. But there was something about Lisa's style and
the way she caressed this pian Ano's keys and it
just from the very first it blew him away. And
because she was precocious and she loved to dress sexy

(25:07):
but be wild, and there was never a problem with
the two of them ended up in the sack because
she was gay, and she challenged his thought process, challenged
his religiosity growing up as a Seventh day Adventist. Like
I said, his father was very stringent, very religious, so
it stuck with him. So there was something about Lisa
brought him a little bit more out of the cocoon
that I think Gail could have ever done, or be

(25:29):
honest with you, Eric, anybody could I think I write
in the book it was almost like she was genetically
engineered to be Prince's sidekick because female yin to his yang.
And it's just a beautiful story. Their story is one
of my favorite things to write about. It was one
of my favorite things to write about in the book.

Speaker 1 (25:48):
Booked on Rock podcast We'll be back after this.

Speaker 2 (25:51):
Be right back with a snack, Jack, go go away.

Speaker 1 (25:55):
Now. Andre Simone exits the band in nineteen eighty one
to pursue a solo career.

Speaker 2 (26:00):
It was a fade of company. Andre said, from the
very beginning, I want to be in a band. I
want to be in the Rolling Stones, You want to
be in Jimi Hendrix and the Experience. But he's not
a nut. This was his best friend. They both talked
about being stars since they were eleven years old, promised
one another. Whoever made it first, the other person's coming along.

(26:22):
So there's sort of like this personal ton team between
these guys. And he didn't feel an obligation, but it's
an opportunity and he took it. He was his bass player.
He said, I'll play with you for the group, for
the entire three record contract you have with Wonders. And
he did. He did. He played all the way through
the famous Dirty Mind Tour, through all those clubs. I

(26:43):
was talking about rock clubs, disco clubs, funk things. But
he always really wanted to go off on his own.
And also this should not be forgotten, and I talk
about it indepthly in the book. Prince's idea of playing
with a band, what he called the jam time called
wood shedding, what he liked to do for hours and hours.

(27:04):
Sometimes we spill into sound checks or after hours clubs.
Sometimes you know, back at warehouses that he built. He
liked to build song structures, especially funky ones out of
out of you know, different basslines people came up with
with different you know, keyboard parts, and you know, yes,
the argument is he didn't give credit all the time
where credit is due. Now, on the other side of that,

(27:24):
he gave credit completely to people like Morris Day and
Vanity six and Apollonia six when they had no reason to.
He wrote all those songs, but he he was creating
this mythos around the Minneapolis sounds. So you know, for instance,
the story goes Simone wrote the baseline to controversy boom
boom boat, Oh, don't don't boom boom, and that they

(27:48):
just called it, you know, Andrea's tune, Andrea's baseline. Well,
Prince went home and he wrote a song. That's what
a song is. It's not boom boom, that's a bassline.
You can't copyright a baseline. There's no melody in that.
But it's a grow you know. And it would have
been nice for him to give Simone the credit, but
he was, you know, produced arrange written by Prince, and
that happened a couple of times too many for Andre

(28:10):
and I think years.

Speaker 1 (28:11):
Later he wrote a hit single for Andre. Prince did
right in the eighties.

Speaker 2 (28:16):
The dance Electric Right he wrote for him. Yeah, a
few years later after he left and he was having
some trouble and the interesting he has an interesting story.
So Prince was taken in the Anderson home where he
had nowhere to go after his father kid him out
and Missus Anderson took him in. She had six kids,
I think I'm right about that, and her ex husband,
ex husband that she took care of. Plus she volunteered

(28:37):
at two or three centers for the homeless and for
wayward kids. And she took this kid in and she
wasn't trying to, you know, take advantage of the fact
that he was a superstar, that he was a superstar
in waiting. All she wanted was to take care of
this kid. So when Andre was having a little trouble,
you know, getting a hit, he asked his mom to
give Prince a call, and she called him and what

(29:00):
they used to call around the neighborhood, Queen Annie got it,
got Prince on the phone and she said, you give
my boy a song, help him out. Prince did gladly,
and that really, really kindled their friendship again, and they
remained friends until his death. Off and on they would
meet and play basketball or chat. And Andre said, and
this was true of everybody who was in the revolution

(29:21):
or the bands leading up to the revolution. You could
get behind that facade that he put up in strange ways,
game of checkers, basketball, ping pong, swimming, talking, you know,
just sitting by the fire, you could break down those barriers.
And every time they'd come back, he would reveal that

(29:42):
side of himself, just for a few minutes to them,
and then he would go back being Prince.

Speaker 1 (29:46):
Right, Well, let's talk about well the replace. The replacement
bassist is Mark Brown. He replaces Andre, and he, like
you say, it wasn't long before he was fully immersed
in the Prince boot camp. How tough could Prince be?

Speaker 2 (30:04):
Very much so he was toughest on Brown, Mark Mark Brown,
He called him Brown Mark, and forever known that way publicly.
Mark Brown was but nineteen when he was in a
few bands in the area, and Prince knew of him,
and he wasn't showy, and he was kind of tall
and brooding the way Andre was, so he kind of
you replaced the whole look. He was into the looks
and he needed that kind of image in the visual

(30:26):
very important to him, and he told him right from
the beginning. Bobby's he told him when picked him up
at his job. He was working at seven to eleven,
playing music at night, and he said, are you sure
you're ready for this? Are you sure? And of course
you know, Mark Brown's a guy. I got a chance
to play a prince. And he meets Prince, and Prince
he plays for him for about maybe two songs fifteen minutes,

(30:48):
and Princes like, fine, I just want to know you.
And he starts to ask him all his questions and
again presses him, are you sure this is a big deal? Yes, yes,
take the weekend think about it. So of course, Mark says,
comes to the first rehearsal, he listened to all the
songs all night, didn't sleep all the songs off the
first couple of albums, goes in, He's playing. He's about

(31:10):
ten minutes into this first jam. Prince kicking him in
the ass with his his healed feet and why and
Prince is going play the bass, play the bass, and
Brown marks, isn't it what I'm doing? So he sends
him home and somehow he calls his mother in tears

(31:30):
Mark and she says, well, maybe he means listen to
what he's doing on the record, try to get inside
of it. She sort of tutored him, and he did.
He listened to them again and somehow they kind of
revealed themselves. Hit the style. Bobby Z always said he
had a certain drumming style. So when he laid drums
down on a record and Bobby had to recreate it live,
he knew that there was certain accents he put on

(31:50):
the one, or symbol crashes on the three. He did
things that you wouldn't normally do as a drummer because
Prince was, you know, a multi instrumentalist, where Bobby Z
was the trained drummer and similar to to Mark Brown.
So when he came back, he got it and Prince
smiled at him, and from that point on he was in.
And how about this one? He plays one warm up

(32:12):
gig was then Sam's then becomes the famous First Avenue
which I visited and described. I got a great core
of it again thanks to Andrea and everybody at First Avenue.
Take me backstage. I'm looking at set lists and the
stick you know, the long stickers that they put on
the on the on the boards where it says Matt
Prince guitar and very year.

Speaker 1 (32:31):
Yeah, yeah, this is where the song Purple Rain is
recording was recorded.

Speaker 2 (32:35):
Yes, yes, nineteen eighty three. But yeah, getting back to
so they introduced Brown Mark to you know, a couple
of hundred people, and his very first professional gig is
opening up for the Rolling Stones in front of nearly
one hundred thousand people in LA and it's one of
the worst stories in the history of entertainment.

Speaker 1 (32:53):
Well, those first three albums without the Revolution, that would
be the self titled Well Let's say for You and
seventy he ate the self titled album seventy nine Dirty
nine in nineteen eighty and then Controversy in eighty one.
So four albums without actually the Revolution credited. They're on
nineteen ninety nine, nineteen eighty two's nineteen nine to nine
album the title track Iconic. But this also has the

(33:16):
track that you say is Prince's first truly indestructible recording,
Little Red Corvette, And this is an example of where
we hear the unveiling of the Revolution, specifically Des Dickerson's
guitar solo. You say it symbolized the culmination of the band.
Edict talk about that and how this album marks the
beginning of the revolution era.

Speaker 2 (33:37):
I think that's a great story, Eric, because Des Dickerson
and when he went to audition at Dell's Tire shop
in North Minneapolis, in this cool little area where Prince's
father used to play, which is very symbolic. He was
a shredder. He was known of a rock guy. He
played a new wave bands and rock bands, and he

(33:58):
was known as a real He could play. But when
he shows up, he's being demure. He heard Prince. He heard
this leads on there. He knew this guy could play,
so he just eased in. And then when Prince pointed
at him and said give me something, then he gave
him something. Prince was impressed by that. He was all
in from the very beginning. He understood he was a
prose pro. So he rewards and Prince rewards him. In

(34:21):
nineteen eighty two, it's his voice you hear first on
the song nineteen ninety nine, you hear him first, and
then Lisa Coleman along with Jill Jones, who was new
to the conclave that he was building in Minneapolis, and
then you hear, Prince, those are the voices you hear
that open up the record and open up the song.
Nineteen ninety nine. The second song, which was at that

(34:42):
time the biggest Prince hit, was Little Red Corvette. He
gave him the solo and he led him solo, and
it's an iconic solo. It was I think it voted
in the top one hundred guitar solos from Guitar Player magazine.
Blah blah blah. But that's Deez Dickerson, and that was
a way for Prince to reward him, as he would
do with say Matt Fink, who came up with the

(35:03):
Dirty Mind title track keyboard part. Prince plays it on
the record, but he gives you know, think credit, and
he gave the wild solo and he kills it on
the song I mentioned earlier ahead on that record. So
he would give little ballbles like this to the band
and make them feel part of the recording processes, even
though it was ninety eight percent him. But nineteen ninety

(35:25):
nine is very much, to use your word from earlier,
what ashed moment for Prince, because all the tracks are
about six seven, eight minutes nine minutes long, and it
sort of reflects what I was talking about earlier, that
jam edict where he would get him all in a
room and they would play and he would say, what
you got, Matt, what you got Lisa, or in some

(35:46):
ways he'd say, this is what I got, and they
would enhance it and they would build these tracks and
you could kind of feel that, and songs like Automatic
and Lady Cab Driver and Let's Pretend We're married, And
even in the big hits like nineteen ninety nine and
Little Red Corvette, both of them have vamps at the end.
They don't just fade out, they fade out in a single.
But if you listen to those on the album, you
got that whole outside chicken scratch thing with pay for

(36:09):
nineteen ninety nine and Little Red Corvette goes into that
real kind of groove jazz thing where he sort of
just does these vocal catalystmics at the end and these
strange sounds come in and it's very ethereal, and it's
extremely it's extremely indicative of what happens when you play
with other people and you understand the people you're playing with.

(36:31):
So yeah, and technically they weren't announced from the stages
the Revolution on that tour, but it's the first time
it does appear on a record, and it was the
first time I think they really because Dirtymind was recorded
as a demo in his own house. It wasn't even
supposed to be released. But nineteen ninety nine is his
first foray into real pop stardom, and you know the
band was right there with him.

Speaker 1 (36:53):
Booked on rock podcast, We'll be back after this, I swim.

Speaker 2 (36:57):
I'll make it up.

Speaker 1 (37:00):
Revolution prints the band the Era is the book author
James Campion as our guest. So the success of nineteen
ninety nine's album is evident in the numbers. His first
top ten album, It peaked at number nine. Title Track
reached number twelve, Delirious reached eight, Little Red Corvette peaked
at number six, and it sets up what is the
peak of Prince's commercial success. Purple Rain released in nineteen

(37:20):
eighty four, number one album twenty four consecutive weeks at
the top of Billboard, when Doves cry Let's Go Crazy
both number one, the title track number two I Would
Die for You number eight, twenty five million copies sold worldwide.
This does not, however, include guitarist Dez Dickerson. What happened
with Dez and who replaces him?

Speaker 2 (37:42):
Well, the dead story is very very interesting. He says
he had a religious experience along the road in nineteen
eighty and he was extremely conflicted, not unlike a little
bit Gail Chapman, but he really was the one that
was conflicted about Prince's again conflation of rigil religious themes.
You know, he says the Lord's prayer in the middle

(38:03):
of controversy and sexual very very deep sexual themes in
some cases, in some songs, he kind of joins them together.
And you know, he wrote very very stark songs about
incests and sado masochism and you know, threesomes and homosexuality
and bisexuality. And he was very open, more open than

(38:23):
any of an artist of his time and maybe ever.
And so he was conflicted about that Dez. But also
Dez really wanted to be in that club rock band,
just like Simon. You know, he wanted to It was
getting a bit show busy for him. I think I
call one of the chapters show biz, and it was
just everything choreographed, big shows. Princes started to incorporate the

(38:46):
LM drum machine into the show. So poor Bobby Z
had to learn how to play drums, acoustic drums, with
the electronic drums, with all the backing tracks. It was
a lot for Dez, and I think he just started
to not show up to rehearsals or be a little petulant,
and Prince started to see that, and that doesn't fly

(39:08):
in Prince world. But because Dez was almost like an
older brother figure and really helped him. And I mentioned
earlier about that Rolling Stones show that they opened for
the first brown Mark show. We didn't get into that,
but it was such a disaster. They were booed and
they were throwing garbage at them, and Prince went home.
But it was Des Dickerson, not Mick Jagger, not the
you know, any of the people that ran the whole
thing could get Prince back on that stage, but Des

(39:30):
Dickerson did, so there was some kind of symbiosis between them.
And then in his memoir, Dez says, look, I just
had had it. He was drinking a lot, he missed
his girlfriend, whom he wanted to marry. He had this
religious experience and it just he couldn't square what was
going on with his lifestyle, and so he sort of
squeezed out. Well, he leaves on his own accord, and

(39:51):
Prince tries to help him in the music business, as
he did with Andre, but once again it's just like
this weird. That's why say I wrote it in a
novel style, because it's almost like a Greek arc. This
guy was, he always fell backwards into stuff. Here comes
Wendy Melvoyn, eighteen years old, wonderful, instinctive guitar player, another

(40:12):
daughter of a studio cat who played with Tom Waits
the Beach Boys, played on tons of stuff, who was
in the Wrecking Crew too fit. You can't make this
stuff up. And she's right there, and she's Lisa Coleman's lover.
The two of them grew up in La and now
they're together, they're partners, and she slips right in and

(40:33):
they love her. The band is completely revitalized by her presence.
The whole Dez Dickerson thing, which was kind of a
bummer because they loved Dez, but he was such a
dower figure towards the end that it just worked out famously,
And of course it's Wendy and Lisa from there on.

Speaker 1 (40:47):
In I'd Love You talk about Prince carrying around a
purple notebook with movie ideas in it for months now,
you say the film's music. Prince leaned on the revel
more than ever before for the film's music. Talk about that.

Speaker 2 (41:04):
Yeah, that's and that's funny. People always refute the Purple
Notebook story, but I won't let a good story. Oh yeah,
that's too good. But yeah, clearly, I mean they are
the stars just like him of the movie. He made
sure they were in there. As my good friend Rob Sheffield,
who wrote the forward to this, I love you Rob.

(41:25):
He pointed out in his forward he didn't have to
put those people in that movie. He didn't could have
been all about him, but he wanted it to be
about the band, and he wanted it to be about
the time that's in there, and even put Daz Dickerson
in there in his new band, The Modern Airs after
Dad's left. So it was an all inclusive sort of
family as the band band of the family. But as
far as making the music, yes, they played all that.
He wanted that stuff to be live, to sound like

(41:47):
a band. It had to do it to work in
the film, but also to work in his new persona
as a rock god. He went from sort of underground
sexual Marauda so that the person that runs on the
fringes expealists and explorer of sounds and styles right down
the middle to nineteen ninety nine Big Star on MTV.

(42:08):
And now he's going to his own film and control
all of the narrative. He's gonna tell his story, even
though eighty percent of it its total bull, but he's
gonna tell it in his way, make his myth, and
he's gonna include them. And in order to do this
and pull it off, you know, the first, the last,
I think read, the last forty minutes of that movie
is just music, and it's incredible, and people would cheer

(42:28):
in the theaters because it was like a concert, and
the band had to be great, and he had to
make those songs live. So they recorded Let's Go Crazy Live,
and as you mentioned earlier in a show in August,
on August third, nineteen eighty three, they recorded a live
show at First Avenue, I Would Die for You and
Maybe I'm a Star. So they recorded those two and

(42:49):
then they recorded as an encore that night the Purple
Rain that you hear on the record, and that only
works if they do it as a band, and it's
the first record that says the Revolution. And if you
ever see Purple Rain today, and I'm sure there's some
human beings somewhere breathing that has not seen this, but
if you haven't put it on before the lights go up,

(43:10):
when the Warner Brothers label fills the screen, you hear
the guys say, ladies and gentlemen, the Revolution, no printing
the Revolution. That's pretty damn cool.

Speaker 1 (43:22):
Booked on rock Podcasts. Will be back after this.

Speaker 2 (43:26):
So okay, I mean you know where we are. Tell
your brad.

Speaker 1 (43:32):
Andre Swinson was on this podcast to talk about it
the books that she wrote the fortieth anniversary of Purple Rain,
and I believe she was the one who was talking
about at the end of that song because the song
was so new, the audience wasn't sure what to make
of it or how to respond, so they inserted Minnesota
Vikings crowd sounds at the end. So when you listen

(43:57):
to that's that's you're hearing an audience at a minnesot
Vikings game.

Speaker 2 (44:00):
Part of it. It's funny too, because there there's something
about the end of that song and that record Purple Rain,
where you know, just hear Matt and Lisa just fluttering
making rains and you could just almost hear people just
kind of talking and leaving the building. It it's like
a weird sort of vibe to it. You know that

(44:21):
I love but yeah, and I love you Andrea. Thank
you for everything you did for me.

Speaker 1 (44:27):
Oh he did.

Speaker 2 (44:28):
He was a great, great help in this book.

Speaker 1 (44:30):
Let's go crazy. Let's talk about this one because you
said it embodies the all in edict. Yes, does this
song exist without the Revolution's contributions?

Speaker 2 (44:39):
Now? I don't think so. I really, I think I
try to make the point in this book. I'm sorry.
Except for really dirty mind. I think he recorded Prince
with the idea of having a band, so we had
a band in mind, and he says this great thing.
There's a quote I have from him when he was younger.
He said when he played each instrument, when he played
all the instruments, he played it as if he a

(45:00):
different guy. On bass. He was the drummer. So he
knew that this was his chance to be a drummer
and get a drum track down so he can impress,
you know, the singer songwriter. So he put himself in
that mindset. So when you listen to those songs, it
sounds like a band. Dirty Mind does sound like a
band too. When You Were Mine absolutely does Dirty Mine.
There's There's a Sister, which is a blistering punk song,

(45:23):
Head which is an incredible funk song. Those all sound
like a band, but it's it's clearly him, stark pure,
even when he gets into controversy in this Like I mentioned,
Des wrote the bassline to Controversy Dot dez Andre and
later on he had the band play on Jack You Off,
the last song on the record, So there are elements.
And I think a lot of songs like do Me

(45:44):
Baby were better live than on the record, and I
know that's sacrilege and I love his recording of that,
but they just killed that every time I think on
that tour in future tours. But definitely not anything on
Purple Rain, including Darley Nicky, which is all him. But
again that's a live, live sounding tune and they recorded

(46:04):
Computer Blue live, and they recorded a lot of that
stuff live as a band. But they inspired him. So
if they're not on the recordings, Brown Mark said he
needed human beings so we could hear the human feel
of it and then recreated in the studio and he
did that beautifully. But yeah, I think the central theme
to my book, Eric is that I don't think any
of this music during this period, save maybe most of

(46:27):
Dirty Mind, and that's most of but there's still some,
you know, Matt fink on there and Lisa Coleman's voice
could be made without these collaborators.

Speaker 1 (46:36):
When doves Cry does not have a bassline, why did
you decide to leave it out? Because he did try
putting a bassline in, I think at first didn't like it.

Speaker 2 (46:46):
Well, I just want to make this point. I was
not old enough to hear Sergeant Pepper's when it first
came out. I heard that fantastical, mythical, groundbreaking record. Ten
years later I listened to a midnight recording of it,
or on its twentieth anniversary in nineteen seventy seven. I
was a freshman in high school. But I tried to

(47:07):
put my mind in what it must have been like
to hear that as a kid in the sixties. And
then you go and look up with everything that was
going on at the time, and it's completely a different animal.
But I was alive when Dove's Cry, and let me
tell you, nothing sounded like this. Nothing. It was completely
an original thing, but it really It had what rock

(47:29):
getar at the beginning, classical piano at the end, sort
of sol motown trills on the piano. The backbeat was
very much in the style of soul and funk at
the time. So it wasn't completely you know, as I'm saying,
out of nowhere, but all those things messed together. How

(47:50):
he put that together is extremely original, and it's extremely biographical.
Talks about his relationship with his mother and his father
in there, which is exactly where it was when he
as a kid, and his fear of becoming like them,
which he had a lot of them in him, and
the fact that it had to be stark and almost
cold but right in your face. It had to hitch

(48:11):
it and it did. It hit all of us. It
was huge, biggest song of the year nineteen eighty four,
and the bassline for him, just warmed it up too much.

Speaker 1 (48:20):
Yeah, and he had That's how brilliant he was as
an artist.

Speaker 2 (48:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (48:25):
Just the thought that he that that put you know,
that crosses his mind because just this is unthinkable for
a dance song, a pop song to not have a bassline. Yeah,
So the guys in the Revolution must have been like,
what are you doing?

Speaker 2 (48:39):
Well, everybody was everybody, buddy. The only person who's who
supported him was Magnoli, the guy who directed Purple Rain,
because when he put it under the montage, because that
wasn't in the record till the end, so Prince had
already moved on and was doing stuff around the world
in the day. That's why it's got such a sparse
and wild and wide sonic spectrum, because all the stuff
was already in the camp for Purple r But Magnoli

(49:00):
came back to him and said, hey, listen, Albert Magnoli.
He's like, I need I need this tune for this,
for this montage that has Prince regretting all these things
he's done in his life, so we could get redemption
and then go on and win the girl and and uh,
you know, impress the first Avenue crowd and all that stuff.
And so Prince went back and did this, which is incredible.

(49:21):
He did it on command, and he did it brilliantly,
and when Magnolia put it into the film, it worked.
He got Prince's idea. So management, band members, friends, family,
other music, nobody got it, and it didn't matter because
Prince just knew. And boy the hell did he ever know.

Speaker 1 (49:40):
Booked on Rock podcast will be back after this?

Speaker 2 (49:43):
All his life vital, He looked away to the future,
did the horizon never his mind on where he was.

Speaker 1 (49:55):
Find the bookdown Rock website at bookedown rock dot com.
During all the back episodes of the show, the latest
episode in video and audio links to all of the
platforms where you can listen to the podcast, plus all
the social media platforms were on Blue Sky, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok,
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Find your local independent bookstore, find out all the latest

(50:18):
hot rock book releases, and before you go, check out
the booked on Rock online store, pick up some booked
on Rock merch. It's all at booked on rock dot com.
The global success of that film and the album that
it put prints on a level of fame that few
have reached. You'd be talking Madonna, Michael Jackson level. You
could say Taylor Swift nowadays.

Speaker 2 (50:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (50:39):
What affect did the pressures of that kind of fame
have on Prints and the family unit that was the
revolution after Purple Rain?

Speaker 2 (50:47):
Yeah? Well, great question, Eric, and I know I'd write
quite a bit about this in the book. And thank
you for reading it obviously, but I should say one
thing and you'll get it. Only the and Elvis Presley.
I've ever had the number one song, to the number
one album and the number one movie in America at

(51:09):
the same time except for Prince Roger's nonsense. So already
that's biting off a lot more than you could chew.
And Prince wanted to be a star since he was
in middle school, and he planned it, and he massaged it,
and he erected it, he manipulated it, he did it
all and he brought his troops with him. The only
problem with that is that Prince is a restless and

(51:31):
I talk about it all the time, constant evolving being
in his spirit and his art and everything. He could
never stand stasis. And when you do a movie and
you do all those songs, Bobby Z said, those songs
are so perfected because he had the time. Up until then,
Prince put out a record every year, and he would
do so for the rest of his career, except for

(51:54):
nineteen eighty three because he was working on the movie
and the soundtrack to Purple Rain and all the videos
that came along with that. So he was already feeling
a lot of pressure, and it was a slow moving train.
You know. At first they put out uh when Doves Cry, Oh,
it's got no baseline. I don't know about this BAM
number one everywhere, huge, biggest single of the year. Here

(52:17):
comes the album. I don't know. He's a rock. He's
gonna lose some of his maybe his black audiences. A
BAM number one all over the place. Then the movie
comes out, Well, who the hell is this guy? Who
the hell is Prince? What right does this guy have
to put his name at the top of a BAM
number one movie in the country. So it's all coming
way even though he's built it up, it's way fast,

(52:37):
and it's it's making him feel like he has to
be the kid character. And I'm sorry, a whole generation
of people are gonna remember him from that film or
as that character, and that was his doing, but it
was too much for him. By the time he goes
on tour, he's already recorded almost the entire Around the
World in a Day album, which is the one after that,
and he's already recorded an album for the Time for Sheila.

(52:59):
He all all these characters around him, He's way ahead
of the thing. And now he's got to be this
character he was a year ago, and that is torture
for Prince, and it really showed throughout the entire tour.
At some point he just quit and he told the
band that's it. I'm going to look for the Latter,
which is a song that he wrote with his father
about heaven and everything that was recorded a couple of

(53:22):
days before with the revolution while they were on the road,
and when everybody asked them, what the hell does that mean,
he said, well, you know, sometimes it snows in April,
so he really didn't have any answer to this. But
the pressures just crushed him and no one could understand it,
and he started to isolate himself more and isolate himself
more and interact with the band less and not be

(53:43):
on the bus with them looking at tapes of the
concerts and not joking around. And because they was such
a coastlinent unit. And for a while, because Prince was
dating Wendy's sister Susannah, he kind of lived with Wendy
and Lisa there in their place and they'd get together
in this warehouse and it was like a club, you know.
They did everything together. They played sports together, and they

(54:04):
went to movies together, and now he was isolated and
he was a big star. We've seen this story a
million times. It's like the story of every biopic ever written,
but it's true in the case of Prince. But it
was because he was such a restless, creative soul. He
couldn't take just Purple Rain for two years. And he
had to do it. He had to get all those
singles to be in the top ten, to get all

(54:26):
of those human beings to come see that movie, to
get to be the biggest tour of nineteen eighty four
into eighty five. He had to do it, but he
hated it. He wanted to do something else.

Speaker 1 (54:37):
Immediately he was asked to be part of We Are
the World. He said no. Why did he decline?

Speaker 2 (54:42):
Well, I think that anybody asking Prince now, I remember
this was not well known information then, But in my research,
you're gonna ask a guy who's never been produced. When
he was eighteen years old, he was his own producer.
He's gonna work for Quincy Jones. And now I know
he loves Quincy Jones and Quincy Jones as a master,
but that's not gonna fly. He never sang in front
of anyone. How he always sang was microphone hanging above

(55:06):
the board. He would kick the engineer out, He'd kick
everybody out and record all his vocals by him side.
Never recorded a vocal after the age of seventeen with
anybody in the room.

Speaker 1 (55:17):
That is amazing.

Speaker 2 (55:18):
He's gonna sit with forty six people and sing a
song written by another person. That's never gonna happen. And
he's gonna sing a song by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie.
He's never sung a song in front of anyone, and
since he's seventeen years old, and he's never sung another
song by another artist except for a case of You Live,
and only once by Joni Mitchell. So you're gonna put

(55:38):
Prince who's never done the three things you have to
do to be on weird with the world, sing in
public with other people, sing another person's song, and just
show up with all those people. It's completely against his psychology.

Speaker 1 (55:54):
Now that backfired on him because people probably thought he
was looking down at it like this is not worth
my time, and that's not what it was. In fact,
he offered something to Quincy. He said, let me record
something here and I'll send it to you.

Speaker 2 (56:09):
Yeah, like a guitar. He said, let me go to
the different studio. But that was what they were trying
to do camaraderie. Leave your ego at the door. Prince
had an ego that was embedded in his psychology. He
would he I am fully convinced he did not belong
in that room, despite the fact that two is of
his most The two paragons of his life when he

(56:30):
was younger, except for James Brown, was Ray Charles. His
first teacher music teacher worked for Ray Charles and told
him about Ray Charles and how he crossed over and
did country music and anything he wanted. He controlled his
own publishing, all the things Prince wanted to do, and
Stevie Wonder whoeverybody said he was the new one who
he played all the instruments on his record. They were there,
so you would think just to be in their presence,
but it just wasn't in him. Now. The thing that

(56:53):
made that worse was he sent she'll e there in
his stead, and they don't want Hill so y badly.
Then he lies and says he has the management, lies
and says say he's sick. And then after winning the
awards on the American Music Awards, he goes out partying
in public, and then when the paparazzi tries to take

(57:13):
pictures of him and his entourage, he sends his bodyguards
out to wrest the film from them, excuse me, and
they beat him up. Now, he didn't ask them to
beat him up, but that's what happened. It was in
all the papers. So not only does he show up
to the world he's out partying. It looks so bad
and he doesn't even tell it, doesn't even tell the
band or his management. Nobody knows. They find out at

(57:34):
three in the morning when they get phone calls from newspapers.
So it was such a huge deal, and he was
all the myths, all the stories that because Prince Gott
talking to the press in nineteen eighty, all the stories
started to come out. He's a freak, he's a jerk,
he's up his own ass. All that stuff came out
and it was hard to deny with anyone around, and

(57:55):
it was a terrible, terrible look. But he did. There's
a great postcri to this. He did write a song
and give it to the album We Are the World,
and performed a version of it on the day that
they had live aid in July of eighty five for
the Tears in your Eyes, which is a religious kind
of song, a connotation to to Jesus's feeding the loaves

(58:18):
and the fishes, feeding the multitudes. Of course, with the
feeding Africa, we should say for young people, we Are
the World was a song for African famine relief. So
here is Prince on at his own time in a
hot studio trailer outside of one of the venues he
played at two in the morning with Susan Rogers's engineer

(58:39):
putting this song together, as she said, with stale chips
and salami sandwiches and warm soda. When all those people
who sang and we Are the World got fully fifteen
thousand dollars cater and they all had limos, and they
were in a great A and M Studios being produced
by Quincy Jones. So that's a kind of a nice
little thing where Prince was like, you know, I'm going
to give this. I'll take this shit, but I'm gonna

(59:01):
give this song and let's move on. But it took
years for him to get over, for a lot of people,
including his fans, to get over that snub.

Speaker 1 (59:10):
Booked on rock podcasts, We'll be back after this think
about the future. Hey, guys, thanks so much for checking
out the Booked on Rock podcast. If you've just found
the podcast, welcome. If you've been listening, thank you so
much for your support, and make sure you tell a friend,
a family member, share on social media and let people

(59:30):
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Wherever you listen to the Booked on Rock podcast, run Amazon, Apple, iHeart, Spotify, Spreaker,
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episodes on the Booked on Rock YouTube channel. Find it

(59:51):
at Booked on Rock. Thanks again for listening. Now back
to the show. Two more albums featuring the Revolution, nineteen
eighty five's Around the World in a Day with two
of my absolute favorite print songs, Raspberry Beret and Pop Life.
I love those two songs. Then you have nineteen eighty
six's Parade with Kiss the Big Single, another great song.

(01:00:11):
How much did the overexposure of Purple Rain influence those
next two albums? I mean you touched upon it. He
was ready to move on. But it's drastically different around
the world in a day. I mean it's sonically different.
He's moved on with the different snare drum sounds. I mean,
everything just has a different vibe to it.

Speaker 2 (01:00:29):
Absolutely, And he spoke to characters a lot of people
right right, it's very psychedelic, so a lot of people
started talking about it. It's his Sergeant Peppers blah blah blah.
But very much like Sergeant Peppers, where the Beatles became
so famous, they went inside themselves and created a new
band so they wouldn't have to be the same old
mop Tops. And that's kind of a Prince Dave with
around the world in the day. He tells stories of characters,

(01:00:53):
you know, all the mister McGhee and the farm and
pop life running through or you know the characters in
tam or the devil in God and arguing in Temptation,
and you know, the Preacher, and that he does a
great job of kind of kind of absorbing himself in
character writing. And with Parade, he just went completely weird.

(01:01:15):
That was a strange departure. A lot of jazz string arrangements,
deep funk, a lot of Wendy and Lisa's stuff in there.
Once again. I was there working at Record World in
nineteen eighty six when that record came out, and nothing
in the world sounded like this. This is right in
the middle of gated drums and big sounds and echoey guitars,
he comes up with the data sounding record You're Ever

(01:01:36):
Gonna Hear just absolutely sounds like he came from another planet.
So he was again constantly and will never stop even
after he disbands the Revolution, he will never stop experimenting
for the rest of his career.

Speaker 1 (01:01:48):
Oh absolutely, yeah, never stop. The thing is, at that
time still MTV and radio was they were embracing anything
that he would give to them, and so he was
still getting the hit singles. Kiss was a big yeah,
number one yeah, number one single. You write quote. The
story of the Revolution ends as it began, with Prince's
default position, a constant state of evolving mixed with a

(01:02:11):
prince absolute when struck by a notion, there was no
reasoning with arguing against or stopping him. When does the
revolution era officially come to an end and what led
to Prince cutting ties with them? Matt Fink was the
last to leave.

Speaker 2 (01:02:27):
That is correct. Matt stayed on for tours. Yeah, he yes,
brad Mark to stay, but he was very upset about
a lot of things, not the least of which is
is after Prince gave him the Kiss demo, which was
kind of like a country, did he he helped to
develop it into what it was. And Prince, you know, again,
just like other situations with Simone or Morris Day, maybe
promised him, according to him, that he would give him credit,

(01:02:49):
did not, So he was already rankled. I think at
that point he was just on retainer, so he was
or he was getting paid a salary. He wasn't in
the band quote unquote When and Lisa wanted more money,
he always said he would take care of them, and
he did to a certain extent, but they didn't really
have lives. They wanted to buy a house, They had
to live in an apartment or a hotel that was

(01:03:09):
right next to where he recorded in chan Hassan, where
he would eventually build Paisley Park Studios and where he
would live and where eventually he would die and everybody
which just overworked. I think he wanted to move in
another direction, because that's what he did. He was a
constant state of evolving as you read there, and the

(01:03:31):
dust up with Wendy and Lisa. I think because of
his trust issues since he was a kid with his
mom and his dad, because he loved them so much,
banned his family family as the band. He felt like
they should just take what he gave them and be
happy with it and be in love with him, and
they're all in love and blah blah blah. But they
were like, look, we need more money, we want our
own place, and that they not almost They quit before

(01:03:53):
the Hit and Run tour, which is the first time
I saw Prints in nineteen eighty six at the Garden
before they went to Europe and Japan. The two of
them quit. Not a lot of people know this, and
Bobby Z talked them back into it and they came back.
So Prince already saw cracks, and he already had an
idea where he wanted to go, but the way he
did it was so symbolic and so strange and dam

(01:04:14):
quite frankly, a little mean, where he just he's playing
the last show in Japan. He's playing the guitar solo
for Purple Rain, and he throws his guitar down and
the roadie comes out and grabs it, and he throws
it down again, and he gives them both a look,
and Lisa looked at Wendy and they both put their
finger across their throat and they said, that's it now. Lisa,

(01:04:37):
since she'd been with him and she was the sister
from nineteen eighty, would not even believe it until he
finally told them. But to his credit, he all he
went to visit each one of them, and he talked
to them and told him what he wanted to do.
He called Bobby his brother, and he could never have
done it without him, and he asked Matt Fink if
he wanted to stay, and Matt ended up staying, but
was still very upset that his family had left. But yeah,

(01:05:00):
that was the end of the revolution. It was announced
by Joni Mitchell a couple of months later publicly, and
we were all as fans, just shocked because you could
see the progression as each record became more and more
ensconced in that style. And then of course he released
The Side of the Times, which we all thought was
again a solitary entity. Oh, he's going back to those
old ways, and that was his opus. I think that's

(01:05:22):
his greatest record, and I think it's the greatest record
of the nineteen eighties, but probably seventy percent of those
songs were written with the help of Wendy and Lisa
and Brown Mark and Matt Think and they were on
a lot of those. He took them off because he
wanted to start fresh. And again, maybe a little mean spirited,
a little myopic, but yeah, that was the very, very
sad ending to a great era.

Speaker 1 (01:05:44):
Well, I wasn't going to finish with one more question,
but I'm going to sneak in one more because I'm
really curious now after you said that, what do you
think of his music post revolution in the nineties the
two thousands didn't seem to get the tension that it
did back in the eighties.

Speaker 2 (01:06:01):
Yeah, no, Eric, it was great. I was a huge fan.
I saw Prince play about a dozen times over the years.
Never missed him. Loved all those records for whatever they were.
You know, I wasn't a huge fan of Graffiti Bridge.
I thought the Batman thing was okay. At the time,
I was like, what is he doing? But then later
on that album actually grew on me. Absolutely adored Love Sexy.

(01:06:23):
That was one of the greatest tours I ever saw.
I did it in the round Chilean drums. Levy seesarm
based brilliant band. I saw his new tour, another brilliant band.
I love the Symbol album absolutely. I think Dimes and
Pearls has got to be in his top five of
all time.

Speaker 1 (01:06:40):
Just about to say that, yeah, that's with the new
power generation. Really song Diamonds and Pearls is beautiful. Cream's
on there.

Speaker 2 (01:06:49):
Yep, great album. So I love all that stuff. But
I concentrated on this for two reasons. When Prince died,
I was asked to do his eulogy. He died on
a Thursday. My deadline was Friday. So I just regurgitated
a couple of thousand words. And I noticed that most
of what I wrote about was my twenties in the
nineteen eighties, and not because Prince was very famous then,

(01:07:11):
or because I'm a white guy and he played a
lot of white cross silver music, which I think a
lot of fans who are African American or maybe may
feel that way. Please don't. I wrote about it because
in many ways, when Prince died, it was like when
John Lennon died. For people in the sixties, it's like
my youth died. I realized it right, then it's gone.
It was already gone. But now that he was gone,
and you would never play Purple Rain again, it really

(01:07:33):
hits home. And I find that, as you said, he
was the center of the universe. If he wasn't, he
was knocking on the outside and changing the paradigm of
pop music, race, gender styles. He was so important eric
to the music business, to the way we evolve as
a country and a culture, in politics, whether sexual, racial,

(01:07:59):
all that stuff. He was so important. He never was
that important. Again, he was still great, and again he
had a few missteps and he had the whole symbol thing.
And I support her the whole time I went to
go see him play.

Speaker 1 (01:08:12):
Yeah, only think of that he was fighting for artists
as much as he was fighting for himself. Again, people
read that the wrong way. People read that as if
he was being arrogant and conceited. But he was basically saying, look,
artists are getting ripped off here.

Speaker 2 (01:08:27):
Damn.

Speaker 1 (01:08:28):
The slave written on his face was right, they were slaves, slaves.

Speaker 2 (01:08:33):
It was a little much for some people because he's
a multimillionaire.

Speaker 1 (01:08:36):
But that's him, yes, Prince, but controversial, he.

Speaker 2 (01:08:40):
Said, right. He never does halfway measures but he always
said for them. I write about it in the book.
He always wanted to release as many albums as many.
That's why he had other bands like The Time and
The Family. We didn't get a general incredible because he
couldn't do it. They wouldn't let him. It's too much,
you're getting oversaturated. They would use those those music marketing terms.
But he didn't care. He wanted to create. I have
to keep going, evolving, moving, and you couldn't convince them otherwise.

(01:09:03):
So triple albums, double albums all over the place. So yeah,
he was still experimental. He was still raising eyebrows, he
was still tilting his head. It took him a while
to do embraced hip hop, and he finally did and
he did great things with it. But he will never
I mean, he was so and that's why let me
just finish with this, Eric, if I could, I wrote
this book for other generations. The older I get, the

(01:09:25):
younger people are you know. I do this tour in
the East Village for the punks, for these for the
Punk seventies tour period for these middle of these high
school kids that are in a private school called Pingre
here in New Jersey. Every spring, and I love it.
I love all the professors, I love the kids, but
I can't say the clash. I gotta show pictures. I

(01:09:46):
gotta explain who they are. I gotta explain who Blondie
is the Ramons. Never in a million years that I
ever think I'd have to do that, but of course
I do. I'm sixty two years old now, I'm gonna
be sixty three in a couple of days. There is
a lot of things have happened since then, and I try.
I keep up with it, writing for music, for magazines
and stuff like that, but people forget. I've asked twenty
somethings Prince, what do you know about him? Oh? Yeah,

(01:10:07):
he's a guy, has hit, he had songs, he was
in a movie. They have no idea. I hope this book.
I hope this book will show them how important and
how huge and how influential and paramount his career and
his music, and how important the revolution was to him.

Speaker 1 (01:10:25):
Well, yeah, and I was going to finish by asking
you about that. Sometimes it snows in April segment there
the personal experience for you, all right, A good way
to sum up the memory of Prince in his time
with the Revolution. If you could just share that story
of your visit to Paisley Park.

Speaker 2 (01:10:40):
Yeah, if you haven't been, you should go. And I
got to go with Andrea, whose name is in there
on the plaques, and she helped that. She went to
visit Prince when he was alive there several times, and
she was very pregnant at the time with her second child.
And everybody's doing great, but she was very emotional and
it made me emotional. And you go everywhere around in there,

(01:11:03):
and you go to a studio and they play you
snippets of print songs, and the sound system is so good,
and they're so clear because they're not like finished mixed versions.
You feel like you're in the room with them. And
they play a verse or two of sometimes the Snows
and April, which he recorded on the date in nineteen
eighty six, in which he will die in twenty sixteen,

(01:11:26):
thirty years later, which really hits you in the chin.
And to hear when he and Lisa joking around with
him before they start, and then they start doing this beautiful,
gorgeous song about death and about April, right the month
he died. In the very building in which he died
is a lot to take in and then standing next
to his friend who missed him very much. So it

(01:11:49):
was a very emotional period, a very emotional journey for me.
And I'm so glad I got this book out, and
I'm so glad I get to tell these stories and
talk to you, Eric, because nobody it takes me through
my timeline of my books better than you.

Speaker 1 (01:12:02):
Honestly, I appreciate that.

Speaker 2 (01:12:04):
Man. You take me through it, buddy, and it makes
me relive it. And I hope, of course, I hope
to sell books, but I just want people to realize
that when I write these things, it takes me two
years of my life and then a year for it
to come out with the publisher, between the covers, art
and buying rights for this and that it's the one
joy I get is that I could effusively tell the

(01:12:27):
stories of great artists that I love and maybe share
that with some people.

Speaker 1 (01:12:31):
And this book is out there forever now, somebody could
be discovering this book ten years from now, twenty years
from now, thirty years from now. Yeah, So that's the thing.
Revolution prints the Bandy Era out now. Find it wherever
books are sold. Look for at your nearest bookstore. And
you can always find your nearest independent bookstore at bookdo
on rock dot com and people can reach out to
you James online where you are a social media monster

(01:12:56):
on Instagram mostly I think right, that's your yeah, go to.

Speaker 2 (01:12:59):
I love it's a good Yeah at James Campion on Instagram,
at fear No Art on X. I just joined that
Blue something. This guy you on there, I gotta hit you.

Speaker 1 (01:13:07):
I am, I got it. I have like five followers,
so I use the support. It's a slow building.

Speaker 2 (01:13:14):
And then you could find me at James Bartolameo Campion
at Facebook and there's a Facebook page for Revolution Uh
and Jamescampion dot com where you can read all my
writings and the Prince eulogy if you'd like, if you
listen to the to This podcast, which everyone should, and
you could also order a book for me directly. I
will sign it to you and mail it out to you. Unfortunately, Eric,

(01:13:36):
I should announce. I used to offer free shipping, but
shipping costs and material costs like everything else, are through
the roof and I just can't. I mean, it's killing
me my bottom line for the books because I don't
get free books. I only get five comps. I buy
the books at at price and then hopefully I get
a couple of books out of it, but at least
I get to sign them for people. People ask me
to write little inscriptions in there for their birth This

(01:13:58):
has been a great one. A lot of people for
their birthday, our wives birthday for and they want me
to write all this stuff about song lyrics. It's just
a joy to do. Really.

Speaker 1 (01:14:05):
I asked you myself. My nephew. My nephew texts me
and he says, Lisa, his wife, Lisa's Lisa's uh stepdad
is a big Beatles fan. And I was wondering if
you know any authors that that can maybe you know,
sign a book, a Beatles book. And you were the
first person I thought, and I said, I've got somebody.
I'll reach out so you maybe look real important. Because

(01:14:27):
he's like, oh man, this is so cool. Man. He
loved it. He loved it. That's the that's the book,
by the way, on Hey Jude, thank you.

Speaker 2 (01:14:35):
It was a great it was a great honor. It's
always honored to sign people put inscriptions in there, especially
for friendly and friends, and and it's just again paying
the forward sharing. Uh, Miss Prince so much missed that era,
like we all miss our youth and the first time
we heard the songs, whether it's Prince songs or Beatles
songs or Van Allen songs or anything, you know, it's
it's a part of our DNA and we love to

(01:14:56):
share it. And that's what rock writers are, you know,
we always say it. We just music at heart. We're
music writers and we just want to get the next
UH mixtape out there and and invade your mind and
hopefully introduce you to some of new stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:15:09):
You haven't got to keep that legacy alive. James Campion,
Thanks man as always a blast to have you on.

Speaker 2 (01:15:15):
Eric, keep doing what you're doing. It's really great work.
Peace everybody.

Speaker 1 (01:15:26):
That's it. It's in the books.

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Purple Reign: Prince and The Revolution Uncovered [Episode 315]

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