Why ‘Purple Rain’ Led Prince to Turn His Back on the Superstardom He’d Manifested

(Photo: Richard E. Aaron/Redferns)

After your masterplan succeeds and so many of your dreams come true… then what?

That is a question a 26-year-old Prince may well have been asking himself after “Purple Rain” transformed him into a global superstar virtually overnight (or whatever passed for “overnight” in 1984). While his rise was gradual — “Purple Rain,” released on this day 40 years ago, was Prince’s sixth album — there’s no disputing the remarkable speed with which his fame skyrocketed during the summer of “Ghostbusters,” the Los Angeles Olympics and “Born in the U.S.A.”

Granted, musical careers, like nearly everything else, moved more gradually back then. But that’s also how Prince revealed himself. Launched as an R&B loverman with 1978’s “For You,” he began incorporating pop, new wave, heavily NSFW lyrics and other influences over the next few years. As one of the first Black artists to be featured on then-new MTV, his epic “1999” album and its videos showed a Prince that few outside of his fan base had seen: “Wow, did you know he could dance like that? And look, he can shred on guitar too!” That album’s slow build from its October 1982 release set the stage for “Purple Rain,” thanks to video play and hard touring, the pressures of which would inform the inter-band conflicts featured in the film — not to mention the blazing rock music he would adapt for this phase of his career, and which brought him to mainstream white audiences.

“Purple Rain” was launched brilliantly: “When Doves Cry,” its unique and unforgettable lead single, debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on June 2 at No. 57, then rose unusually rapidly (for the era) to No. 1 in just over a month, beginning its five-week reign on July 7 — a week after the album was released. The “Purple Rain” album’s climb to the top was even faster: Supercharged by the single’s success and the growing buzz around the forthcoming film, it debuted at No. 11 on the Billboard 200 on July 14 and reached the top on August 4 — a week after the film opened in more than 900 theaters across the U.S.

The film, with its electrifying musical performances by Prince and the Revolution and its themes of triumphing over adversity (and one’s own demons), galvanized the entertainment world for the rest of the year, won an Oscar and reaped nearly $70 million at the box office — compared with its $7.2 million budget. Meanwhile, the album remained at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 for six months, won three Grammy Awards and spawned five hit singles, including another No. 1 (“Let’s Go Crazy”) and a No. 2 (“Purple Rain”). The album is estimated to have sold at least 25 million copies worldwide, although the real number is likely much higher: It was certified 13 times platinum in the U.S. alone in 1996, the last time anyone bothered counting.

When Prince and the Revolution finally took the stage to launch the “Purple Rain” tour in Detroit on Nov. 4, beginning a sold-out seven-night stand at the Joe Louis Arena, they were almost literally on top of the world.

But rather than embracing that fame — to which he’d dedicated his and many others’ lives pursuing — Prince began rejecting it almost as soon as it was his, with odd statements and behavior, meandering onstage speeches about religion, thuggish activity from his bodyguards, a fake retirement from concerts, and not least being the only major celebrity to decline an invitation to take part in the all-star charity single “We Are the World.” He capped it all off, less than a year after “Purple Rain”’s release, by dropping “Around the World in a Day,” a new album that almost seemed designed to alienate as many fans as possible.

Prince had always cut an unusual figure and rarely played the pop-star game. But even by his standards, this was a lot.

“Purple Rain” was “my albatross — it’ll be hanging around my neck as long as I’m making music,” Prince said years later, adding in a separate interview that it was “in some ways more detrimental than good. It pigeonholed me.”

The claustrophobia of such massive fame was only part of the problem: Far more significantly to him, it made him feel trapped creatively as well.

“I nearly had a nervous breakdown on the ‘Purple Rain’ tour because it was the same every night,” Prince told the Chicago Tribune in 2012, adding in a separate interview with Icon, “I was doing the 75th show, doing the same thing over and over, and I just lost it. I said, ‘I can’t do it!’ I knew I had to get away from all that.”

“Prince was tired of basically playing the movie every night,” guitarist Wendy Melvoin told Variety in 2022.

The concerts during the “Purple Rain” tour reflected that unease. Extravagantly staged, with elaborate lighting and costumes and fake flowers and props, the show was confusingly paced: He opened with an overwhelming volley of five of his biggest hits — “Let’s Go Crazy,” “Delirious,” “1999,” “Little Red Corvette” and “Take Me With U,” which most artists would save for the first encore — before quickly losing momentum (and often the audience) with a drawn-out segment of deep cuts, unreleased songs, long and seemingly pointless instrumental or spoken interludes, a meandering piano medley and a slightly off-color bit where he pretended to masturbate his guitar’s neck, finishing with it shooting water out of the neck.

He then jacked the energy back up for the finale with a battery of “Purple Rain” cuts, concluding with an extended jam on “I Would Die 4 U” and a finale of the title track that could stretch on for more than 20 minutes. There was plenty of excitement during the show and the tour — at the Feb. 23 show in Los Angeles, he was joined onstage by Bruce Springsteen and Madonna — but it made for an uneven and at times unsatisfying experience for fans, and critics gave the tour decidedly mixed reviews, often calling it self-indulgent, excessive and underwhelming.

The tour was also exhausting, a two-hour-plus set, an average of six nights a week, for six months — with just a ten-day break in the middle — and more than 100 concerts, along with multiple afterparty and charity performances, awards shows and recording sessions.

After six months of Purple Mania, the cracks began to appear. The most significant one came in January, when he declined an offer to take part in the superstar-studded “We Are the World” charity single to raise money for famine relief in Ethiopia. He was the only major artist to decline and his response was received poorly, especially because he was in Los Angeles at the time — the recording took place immediately after the American Music Awards, where he and the Revolution had performed — and went to a nightclub instead. While he donated an unreleased song to the song’s companion album (as well as a video of it that aired during the Live Aid broadcast that summer), the damage was done. Making matters worse, while leaving the nightclub that night, his bodyguards roughed up a photographer — who, to be fair, was attempting to climb into Prince’s limo — resulting in a lawsuit.  

Then, during a brief break from the tour just a few days later, he flew to London to accept an award at the British Phonographic Institute’s BPI Awards. Rather than a traditional awards-show saunter down the aisle, Prince was led to the stage in bulldozer fashion by one of those same bodyguards — the 6’8” Chick Huntsberry, who also appears in “Purple Rain” — and, by way of an acceptance speech, said only, “All thanks to God, goodnight.” The display did not endear him to the caustic British tabloid press, which reported that he was heard muttering as he left the country that he should have been “showed more respect.”

The tour ground on through February and March — including nine nights in Los Angeles, six in San Francisco and New York — before reaching its climax: In a first-of-its-kind event, the March 30 concert at Syracuse, New York’s Carrier Dome was broadcast via satellite to an estimated 12-15 million people across Europe (and later released on video). But despite the dazzling showmanship — and what members of the Revolution told Variety was one of the best and most “concise” shows of the tour — it’s still quite indulgent and uneven: He’d play one verse of “1999” or “Take Me With U” before leading the band on long vamps or charging off into a less-familiar song; the piano medley seems to have more talking than singing. On the other hand, the beginning and end arguably had too much of a good thing: He stretched out “When Doves Cry,” “Baby I’m a Star” and “Purple Rain” so long that the three songs’ combined time is more than 40 minutes.

“Hello Syracuse and the world,” he said at the top of the show. “My name is Prince, and I’ve come to play with you.” Few could have suspected that in three days, he’d be saying goodbye.  

On April 2, just five days before the tour’s final date at the Orange Bowl in Miami — held on Easter Sunday — Prince announced via a statement from his manager, Steven Fargnoli, that he was “withdrawing from the live performance scene for an indefinite period of time,” with that concert being “his last performance for an indeterminate number of years.” Fargnoli’s statement continued, “I asked Prince what he planned to do. He told me, ‘I’m going to look for the ladder.’ I asked him what that meant. All he said was, ‘Sometimes it snows in April.’” (Both of those cryptic statements were titles of songs from his next two albums, which were days and a year away from release, respectively.)

Before he left the stage at the end of that Easter Sunday concert — for which the Orange Bowl was inevitably renamed the “Purple Bowl” — Prince told the audience, “I have to go now. I don’t know when I’ll be back. I want you to know that God loves you. He loves us all.”

Just a couple of weeks after that “last” concert, he dropped “Around the World in a Day,” which was just about everything “Purple Rain” wasn’t: self-indulgent, psychedelic-tinged and unfocused, with many religion-themed lyrics and a closing song that ended with a fake conversation with God. The album featured two of his all-time classic songs in “Raspberry Beret” and “Pop Life,” but they were the only ones that came close to pleasing most fans — and critics’ response was perhaps most vividly summarized by the late Greg Tate in Spin, who wrote, “Perhaps it’s inevitable, given a career built as much on calculated mindfucking as mindblowing music, that Prince would choose to follow the best album of his career with the most bewildering, if not the worst.”˜

Given all that, perhaps it’s not surprising that the purple wonder was wearing out his welcome in less than a year. While “Raspberry Beret,” one of the defining songs of the summer of 1985, and its sunny video kept his star aloft, the bad press had become enough of an issue for the man — who had always hated interviews and had not done one for nearly six years — to sit down with Rolling Stone for a cover story that published in September of 1985.

“There have been a lot of things said about me and a lot of them are wrong,” he told writer Neal Karlen. “I don’t mind criticism, I just don’t like lies. I feel I’ve been very honest in my work and my life, and it’s hard to tolerate people telling so many lies.”

While many felt the interview made him seem awkward and isolated at the time, in retrospect Prince comes off as unexpectedly normal and even lonely, as he acknowledges that his fame had cut him off from a lot of his friends and his bandmates (the latter of whom he went on to say he loved more than any band he’d ever been with, even though he’d fire all of them but one, without notice, within a year).

“Sometimes it gets lonely here,” he acknowledged. “To be perfectly honest, I wish more of my friends would come by. A lot of the time they think I don’t want to be bothered.”

He responded vigorously to the negative reaction his album had received. “Do you know how easy it would have been to open ‘Around the World in a Day’ with the guitar solo that’s on the end of ‘Let’s Go Crazy’?,” he said heatedly. “Do you know how easy it would have been to just put it in a different key? That would have shut everybody up who said the album wasn’t half as powerful. I don’t want to make an album like the earlier ones. Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to put your albums back to back and not get bored?”

And that, presumably, was his end game: a reset.

Prince would be back onstage exactly two months after that “last” performance at the Orange Bowl, playing a loose birthday concert with the Revolution in Minneapolis. By the time of the Rolling Stone interview, he was already deep into the next chapter of his career. Constantly writing and recording, he’d completed work on an early version of his next album, “Parade,” as well as several side projects, and would soon depart for the south of France to shoot his next film, “Under the Cherry Moon.” The film was a box-office and creative disaster, but the album was a hit, thanks to one of his all-time classic singles, “Kiss” — and he’d launch his next tour just over a year after the Orange Bowl. The period that followed was arguably the most creative of his entire career, climaxing with his 1987 masterpiece “Sign O’ the Times,” which spawned another No. 1 single with “U Got the Look.”

Prince’s cat-and-mouse game with fame would continue for the rest of his career. Sometimes he embraced it wholeheartedly, like with 1991’s multiplatinum “Diamonds and Pearls” album and his triumphant 2004 “Musicology” tour. At others, he seemed to distance himself from it as much as possible, releasing many mediocre or just plain terrible albums, refusing to play hits in concert for the decade leading up “Musicology,” and with strange looks and statements that made his ‘80s oddness seem ordinary. Prince could make it very, very challenging to be a fan, and while relatively few of the millions who’d come on board during his early career stayed with him, nearly a million and a half came back for that 2004 tour alone, not to mention the 200-ish shows he’d play after that.

And for sometimes better and often worse, no matter what he sounded or looked like, it very rarely was like what he’d done before.

“A great source of inspiration for me has been the notion that creating new music is like meeting a new friend,” he said when accepting a lifetime-achievement American Music Award in 1990. “And with that in mind, I tend to try to create something I’ve never seen before. I guess I like surprises,” he smiled at the crowd. “I hope you do too.”

Key sources: Alan Light’s “Let’s Go Crazy: Prince and the Making of ‘Purple Rain,’” Per Nilsen’s “Prince: A Documentary” and Duane Tudahl’s “Prince and the ‘Purple Rain’ Era Studio Sessions 1983 and 1984.”