Purple Rain did not immediately hit the heights when it was released in June, 1984, but once Prince’s classic sixth album gathered momentum and hit the top spot in the US charts, it took some shifting. It’s 40 years ago this weekend since it went to Number One on the Billboard 200 and it stayed there for 24 weeks. Speaking to this writer a few years ago, Bobby Z. and Brown Mark of The Revolution, Prince’s backing band at the time, said they could feel something huge was brewing as they made the record. It had been a long time coming, they said.
“It started from humble beginnings - at Mark’s first gig, we were booed off the stage supporting the Stones,” recalled drummer Bobby Z. “Lisa has a good comment that Prince had to win over that Stones audience that booed him off in order to become this crossover icon and he did. It had steps. The Purple Rain movie definitely paused his process, so it was a lot of lead up to the movie and then shooting a movie and then the rehearsal for the tour and then the tour. Purple Rain is a diamond because it had that three-year window that made him pause. Otherwise, as you know, the guy was on fire, he wanted to release an album a month and Purple Rain was when things finally got a moment to breathe in Prince world and look what happened, it was Purple Rain.”
“I knew there was nowhere to go but up with us as a band,” added bassist Brown Mark. “I’ll never forget after 1999, the power I felt when we did the Minnesota Music Awards. I never forget the feeling when I walked out on that stage, I felt invincible. When you get to a point in your career that that’s how you feel, then there’s no way but up. You don’t go backwards, you keep going up. And here comes Purple Rain - boy, we were powerful as a band, we were a freight train, nothing could stop us, there’s nothing we couldn’t do. Prince was on fire. He wanted to prove, ‘I am the Prince, I am the king’.”
Bobby Z. said Prince’s status in their hometown of Minneapolis, Minnesota, would only grow with time and in the future, people will look back and recognise his genius. “They celebrate Mozart in Vienna 400 years later and I was just thinking the other day that they’ll probably be celebrating Prince in Minneapolis 400 years from now,” he said, “so it’s pretty amazing to have been in the original lifetime and take the journey with him.”
