“OPEN YOUR HEART, OPEN YOUR MIND”
IT is Christmas morning 1984 and Prince is still working. Music’s newest superstar has certainly earned the right to a day off. Six months after its release, Purple Rain is more than halfway through a 24-week run at No 1 in the States, while the arena tour of the album has been breaking box office records all over the country since it began in early November.
On December 23, Prince and The Revolution rolled into Minneapolis, to play the first of five homecoming holiday shows at the St Paul Civic Center. “On Christmas Eve we had a matinee concert,” recalls Prince’s engineer, Susan Rogers. “Prince had asked to have a mobile recording truck there to record the show. From there, we drove the truck away and pulled it into the driveway of his home on Kiowa Trail, Chanhassen. He and I stayed up all night, Christmas Eve into Christmas Day, and continued to work on his next LP. New Year’s Day, Christmas Day, Thanksgiving, birthdays – it didn’t matter. He would work.”
On Boxing Day, he was back on stage in St Paul. Already chafing at the constraints of a highly choreographed live show, his creative energies were being deployed elsewhere. As the tour rolled on, he worked on new material at every stop. Earlier in December he had debuted a stunning new song, “Condition Of The Heart”, at Rosemont, Illinois. “Raspberry Beret” and “America” joined the set in February. He riffed on “Temptation” during the encore jam, and honed “The Ladder” during soundchecks. After shows, he would either keep playing in a local club or go to a nearby studio to record new music.
The Purple Rain phenomenon climaxed with a show in front of 53,000 people at the Miami Bowl, rechristened the Purple Bowl, on April 7, 1985. Two weeks and one day later, Prince unveiled his next album, Around The World In A Day. By then, he had already started work on its follow-up, Parade. “I spent five years working for James Brown, who was similarly prolific and self-motivated,” says his tour manager, Alan Leeds. “But Prince made James Brown seem lazy. It was a freak of nature.”
Those expecting the new album to be a consolidation of Purple Rain were in for a shock. Thirty-five years after its release, Around The World In A Day remains one of Prince’s most remarkable handbrake turns. Having proved he could make an album designed for the masses, he duly crafted a daring art-music statement for the connoisseurs.
Released at the height of his fame, it remains one of his most musically adventurous endeavours. Tired of touring, dazed and a little frightened by the quantum leap in his celebrity status, he turned his back on commercialism and instead embraced psychedelic pop, orchestral soul, Eastern exoticism and a tapestry of avant-garde musical textures, wrapped in rainbow colours and utopian themes. For once, sex takes a back seat. On Around The World In A Day, all you need is love.
Aligning himself to The Beatles and Led Zeppelin rather than Madonna and Michael Jackson, his immediate rivals in the pop charts, Prince ensured his artistic evolution and longterm creative freedom. It signified how the rest of the ’80s would play out for the decade’s most innovate musician. “This was the record that would really show whether or not he was going to be a legacy artist,” says Matt Fink, keyboard player in the Revolution. “The sales weren’t huge compared to Purple Rain, but he was regrouping to establish his legacy, as not just a guy who made hit records, but an artist who would be around for decades.”
The album captures something else; something more poignant. “For me, it represents the last of Prince’s innocence,” says Susan Rogers. “He wrote and made most of those songs before his world really blew up and elevated him to the next level of stardom. The Prince I saw during the making of that record was someone who still hadthat had gone. He became a new person once he experienced this higher level of success – by necessity.”
