Prince @ 1st Avenue 8.3.1983

The 1983 concert took place at First Avenue in Minneapolis. A year later when the club was featured in Purple Rain (the movie), the venue would be changed forever. In 1983 however, it was perfect for hosting a newly minted Prince & The Revolution. Prince had been performing with some of the band members for a while, but the show was the debut of guitarist Wendy Melvoin who would continue with the band until their dissolution in 1986.

But back on track – the 1983 show (August 3rd, to be more exact) was the first public live performance of Prince & The Revolution. The concert was a benefit for the Minnesota Dance Theater Company. It was also the first time the band would perform several of what would become their signature tracks, most importantly Purple Rain.

Everyone knows the song. Play the first few chords and you’ll have everyone around you singing along. But in 1983 that wasn’t the case. Instead you had a capacity crowd silenced by the song’s first performance. This is one of only a handful of bootlegs of this track that does not have the crowd going nuts; instead they listen to the song and literally see history in the making. Obviously they can’t sing along, the song is new. So instead they listen; Seeing Prince at his absolute rawest in a tiny club with bad sound, sweating his ass off for the Minnesota Dance Theater Company. And melting off faces with one of his best guitar solos.

This live show made up the basis for several Purple Rain tracks, including the title track, I Would Die 4 U and Baby I’m A Star. Prince’s vocals are spot on with how you know them – because they were recorded from a mobile truck outside of First Avenue. Add in a few overdubs and there you have it, one of the best selling albums of the 80s.

Regardless of how you view Prince now, back then one thing was clear – his name was Prince, his favorite color was purple, and he was a bad motherfucker.

First Avenue, August 3rd, 1983

Wendy Melvoin is fresh from high school. She is a wearing a V-necked sleeveless top, and patterned shorts. She is playing the first chords of a new song on her purple guitar, opening chords that she wrote, a circular motif with a chorus effect. Wendy is eighteen nineteen and she has the high cheekbones and diffident confidence of a Hollywood upbringing. She half-smiles at the faces that crowd close to the low club stage. This is Wendy’s first gig with the new band, and the song she is playing is Purple Rain, and nobody in the audience has ever heard Purple Rain before because this is the night that Prince and the Revolution record the song.

Maybe Wendy is half-smiling because she is thinking about the time when she was thirteen years old and she snuck out of the house with her twin sister, Susannah, to hang out at a club called Starwood. The sisters danced, and then the DJ played a piece of bubblegum funk with a coy gushing lyric about the Soft and Wet qualities of a lover. The song made Wendy stop dead. She ran up to the DJ booth and asked, who is that girl singing, and the DJ told her it was not a girl but a boy called Prince. I think that half-smile of hers is in appreciation of the irony that she was once a fan of the man she now shares the stage with.

We hear Prince, his harsh guitar cutting across Wendy’s. We don’t see him yet. Purple Rain has a long introduction. The sound guy keeps scuttling around in the stage front. Wendy sees someone in the audience and smiles full beam. Her hair tumbles over one eye in a quiff, and there is a sheen on her breastbone from the heat in the club. It’s August and nearly ninety degrees in there; when Prince appears behind her, she regains her cool.

The lights make it appear as Prince is wearing a radioactive purple shirt. He comes to the mic too early, and briefly backs away, his eye-make up dark patches in a deep purple stage light, sweat glimmering on his cheekbones, and his hair asymmetrical and tumbling over his eyes, just like Wendy. Her smile, his seriousness, they complement one another, brother and sister, nothing sexual.

The gig is a benefit for the Minnesota Dance Theater. Prince and the Revolution are taking dance lessons and their tutor suggests the gig as a way of supporting the financially challenged theatre; because Prince is a local lad, born and raised in Minneapolis, a city he will always come back to, he agrees to play.

In 1983, Prince is an international star, thanks to 1999 and Little Red Corvette. He has released five albums in five years, from when he was eighteen years old. He has so many songs he forms other bands like The Time and Vanity 6 to play them, he is an impresario and a producer and he is also only twenty-three years old, not so far away from the poor black kid who stood outside McDonald’s just to smell the food he couldn’t afford. His instinct for self-reliance, his tendency to be dictatorial, has been blindsided by these two sophisticated young women, Wendy and, on her keyboards, her lover, Lisa; for the first time in his life, he will collaborate in a meaningful way.

For Wendy, Lisa and Prince, this time is like going to college. They hang out together, play each other music. Lisa has a great sound system in her car, and she takes Wendy and Prince for a drive. The two young women introduce Prince to music he has never heard before – Gustav Mahler, the English pastoral of Vaughan Williams, the experiments of Joni Mitchell and Peter Gabriel. It’s an education for him.

The crowd at First Avenue, their faces straining against one another, receive the brief benediction of a wavering spotlight: to them, Purple Rain doesn’t sound like any song that Prince has played before: the tight electronic funk, his harsh and weird sex songs, the soul ballads in which he asks for forgiveness – Purple Rain is something new, something different. They don’t know how to react. In fact the crowd is so muted that when this recording is prepared for the album, the engineer loops some crowd noise taken from a football game to give it some life.

What do great songs sound like the first time we hear them? Can you remember that feeling? When Bob Dylan heard The Animals’ version of House of the Rising Sun, he got out of the car and ran around it again and again he was so excited. The first time you hear a great song is so rare, and it can never be repeated; watching the crowd during this first performance of Purple Rain, I see that look on a few faces, a silent shocked awe. On the twenty-seven other recordings of Purple Rain in my iPod, the moment the first chord is strummed, the crowd cheer, acknowledging the anthem. They become a congregation, keen to be guided through the Purple Rain, and that has its ecstasies, even if it involves cigarette lighters held aloft, and hands waved in the air. But to hear silence flowing back from the audience, no singalong because they don’t know the words, is to eavesdrop on the shock of the new.

The lyrics of Purple Rain suggest the singer has wronged someone, harmed them inadvertently. In the context of the Purple Rain film that someone is Prince’s girlfriend; in fact, in a rather literal outtake from the film, Prince and his girlfriend have sex in a barn at dawn, and the water streaming down from the roof sheathes her naked skin, which is then struck by the dawn rays, so that she appears to be bathing in a kind of purple rain. Music video directors in the 1980s could be very literal; if Bonnie Tyler sang “turn around bright eyes”, then we would see a boy with very bright eyes turning around.

What does purple represent to Prince? Purple is a gateway colour, a transition from one stage to the next, the colour of dusk and dawn, magic hour between day and night. Purple is also a mix of pink and blue, a boy and a girl. I’m not a woman, I’m not a man. I am something you will never understand. Prince casts himself as androgynous as a tactic of seduction, a conventional hetero offer with a side order of feminine sensitivity, or at least, what a twenty three year considers to be sensitivity. Purple is also the colour of royalty, and he is a Prince. The sub-editors of the Sun will pun Purple Rain into Purple R.e.i.g.n. Or is it the purple of Jimi Hendrix’s Purple Haze? All of these possible meanings are burnt away by the guitar.

The solo is a messianic ejaculation, an absolving, annihilating ecstasy. The sky was all purple and there were people running everywhere, sang Prince, predicting the millennial panic of 1999. He even wrote a song called Ronnie Talk To Russia Before It’s Too Late, a trite bit of rockabilly agit-pop that called for Ronald Reagan to negotiate with the Soviet Union, a sentiment he was to express more succinctly in the high-pitched childish voice in 1999 that asked, “Mommy, why does everyone have a Bomb?” The sky is all purple because it is on fire, and what follows is a quenching of that destruction.

Purple Rain is the redemptive baptism on the night of the apocalypse, forgiveness for the terrible sins committed by the singer and by us. Prince is clear that we are all implicated. Times are changing. It’s time we all reached out for something new, and that means you too. He is our messiah, so he tells us in another song on the album, I Would Die 4 U. You say you want a leader but you can’t seem to make up your mind I think you better close it and let me guide you to the Purple Rain.

Looking at what he had achieved in his career up to the point of this gig is incredible when you think about it.

This is one of those shows that i wish i could go back in time to attend. There are landmark gigs dotted throughout his career, some on tours, some aftershows, some are one off's, but this gig has to be up there as one of the shows that a lot of Prince fans wish they had witnessed.

How great it would be to have this show untampered with on dvd in pristine quality.

Top thread Oldfriends......

[Edited 8/25/10 8:09am]

I was there! Great night!

sonicfreak said:

I was there! Great night!

I know it was ... (wasn't there, I've seen the footage) ...

Funny, I watched this gig again yesterday

Great article, and this concert has always been one of my all-time favorites. The Purple Rain performance always leaves me puzzled though

The first seconds sound quite funny, due to the quality of the video I've got, but after that Lisa seems a little out of tune to me. Does anyone know why it sounds that way? The sound guy was pretty busy, but it could be the quality of the video as well.

Then Lisa gets this big smile over her face, that instantly disappears the moment she sees Prince. I know she was supposed to look that cool way she did, but the moment gives me goose bumps when I think about how much a control freak Prince is...

Then Prince starts to play the guitar and it sounds like a bloody mess He then stops, goes to the mic and realizes he's too early. When he starts to sing, the song slowly improves.

The overall concert was great, but to me (especially the start of) Purple Rain didn't seem to come easy. Any thoughts?

OldFriends4Sale said:

Prince @ 1st Avenue 8.3.1983

Benefit Concert For The Minnesota
Dance Theater Company

1.Let's Go Crazy
2.When You Were Mine (Dirty Mind)
3.A Case Of You
4.Computer Blue
5.Delirious (1999)
6.Electric Intercourse
7.Automatic (1999)
8.I Would Die 4 U
/Baby I'm A Star
9. Little Red Corvette (1999)
10.Purple Rain
11.D.M.S.R (1999)

The energy of this show is/was truly electric, every song you could just tell someone majestic was happening

Anyone who tries to downplay the 'Purple Rain/Reign' is a silly person and can't be a real fan.

Back then he picked cover songs that just blended perfectly with his sound/music A Case of U was so steamy and felt like a Beautiful Ones, the rendition of Purple Rain was just awesome

Those were the Days of Wild

Just want you to know how much I enjoy your threads. Always well written, fully detailed, and supplied with rare photos and video stills. You have a way about you and the way you present your threads that makes me reminisce and takes me back. I appreciate you and you are one of the few that still makes this particular site interesting to visit. Thanks OldFriends4Sale. You're in my book

PEJ said:

Just want you to know how much I enjoy your threads. Always well written, fully detailed, and supplied with rare photos and video stills. You have a way about you and the way you present your threads that makes me reminisce and takes me back. I appreciate you and you are one of the few that still makes this particular site interesting to visit. Thanks OldFriends4Sale. You're in my book

You're definately welcome PEJ

This stuff is definately Purple History

If we don't keep it fresh and alive who will right?

I would KILL A MAN to go back in time to've been here aswell

to me it is the quint essential bootleg next to small club.....

Very nice thread

I love how wild and in his element he looked, another reason I love the PR era

and that futuristic look the leather jacket with the spikes on the shoulder

PEJ said:

Just want you to know how much I enjoy your threads. Always well written, fully detailed, and supplied with rare photos and video stills. You have a way about you and the way you present your threads that makes me reminisce and takes me back. I appreciate you and you are one of the few that still makes this particular site interesting to visit. Thanks OldFriends4Sale. You're in my book

Well said, Pej and I couldn't agree more. I go weeks, months without getting on here and then when I do, you can always be counted on to have a cool, informative thread going. (same with scififilmnerd) . Worth sifting through a lot of the same ol' shit that never changes on this site to get to the kind of class stuff you put up on here! Nice work!

OldFriends4Sale said:

Prince @ 1st Avenue 8.3.1983

Benefit Concert For The Minnesota
Dance Theater Company

1.Let's Go Crazy
2.When You Were Mine (Dirty Mind)
3.A Case Of You
4.Computer Blue
5.Delirious (1999)
6.Electric Intercourse
7.Automatic (1999)
8.I Would Die 4 U
/Baby I'm A Star
9. Little Red Corvette (1999)
10.Purple Rain
11.D.M.S.R (1999)

The 1983 concert took place at First Avenue in Minneapolis. A year later when the club was featured in Purple Rain (the movie), the venue would be changed forever. In 1983 however, it was perfect for hosting a newly minted Prince & The Revolution. Prince had been performing with some of the band members for a while, but the show was the debut of guitarist Wendy Melvoin who would continue with the band until their dissolution in 1986.

But back on track – the 1983 show (August 3rd, to be more exact) was the first public live performance of Prince & The Revolution. The concert was a benefit for the Minnesota Dance Theater Company. It was also the first time the band would perform several of what would become their signature tracks, most importantly Purple Rain.

Everyone knows the song. Play the first few chords and you’ll have everyone around you singing along. But in 1983 that wasn’t the case. Instead you had a capacity crowd silenced by the song’s first performance. This is one of only a handful of bootlegs of this track that does not have the crowd going nuts; instead they listen to the song and literally see history in the making. Obviously they can’t sing along, the song is new. So instead they listen; Seeing Prince at his absolute rawest in a tiny club with bad sound, sweating his ass off for the Minnesota Dance Theater Company. And melting off faces with one of his best guitar solos.

This live show made up the basis for several Purple Rain tracks, including the title track, I Would Die 4 U and Baby I’m A Star. Prince’s vocals are spot on with how you know them – because they were recorded from a mobile truck outside of First Avenue. Add in a few overdubs and there you have it, one of the best selling albums of the 80s.

Regardless of how you view Prince now, back then one thing was clear – his name was Prince, his favorite color was purple, and he was a bad motherfucker.

First Avenue, August 3rd, 1983

Wendy Melvoin is fresh from high school. She is a wearing a V-necked sleeveless top, and patterned shorts. She is playing the first chords of a new song on her purple guitar, opening chords that she wrote, a circular motif with a chorus effect. Wendy is eighteen nineteen and she has the high cheekbones and diffident confidence of a Hollywood upbringing. She half-smiles at the faces that crowd close to the low club stage. This is Wendy’s first gig with the new band, and the song she is playing is Purple Rain, and nobody in the audience has ever heard Purple Rain before because this is the night that Prince and the Revolution record the song.

Maybe Wendy is half-smiling because she is thinking about the time when she was thirteen years old and she snuck out of the house with her twin sister, Susannah, to hang out at a club called Starwood. The sisters danced, and then the DJ played a piece of bubblegum funk with a coy gushing lyric about the Soft and Wet qualities of a lover. The song made Wendy stop dead. She ran up to the DJ booth and asked, who is that girl singing, and the DJ told her it was not a girl but a boy called Prince. I think that half-smile of hers is in appreciation of the irony that she was once a fan of the man she now shares the stage with.

We hear Prince, his harsh guitar cutting across Wendy’s. We don’t see him yet. Purple Rain has a long introduction. The sound guy keeps scuttling around in the stage front. Wendy sees someone in the audience and smiles full beam. Her hair tumbles over one eye in a quiff, and there is a sheen on her breastbone from the heat in the club. It’s August and nearly ninety degrees in there; when Prince appears behind her, she regains her cool.

The lights make it appear as Prince is wearing a radioactive purple shirt. He comes to the mic too early, and briefly backs away, his eye-make up dark patches in a deep purple stage light, sweat glimmering on his cheekbones, and his hair asymmetrical and tumbling over his eyes, just like Wendy. Her smile, his seriousness, they complement one another, brother and sister, nothing sexual.

The gig is a benefit for the Minnesota Dance Theater. Prince and the Revolution are taking dance lessons and their tutor suggests the gig as a way of supporting the financially challenged theatre; because Prince is a local lad, born and raised in Minneapolis, a city he will always come back to, he agrees to play.

In 1983, Prince is an international star, thanks to 1999 and Little Red Corvette. He has released five albums in five years, from when he was eighteen years old. He has so many songs he forms other bands like The Time and Vanity 6 to play them, he is an impresario and a producer and he is also only twenty-three years old, not so far away from the poor black kid who stood outside McDonald’s just to smell the food he couldn’t afford. His instinct for self-reliance, his tendency to be dictatorial, has been blindsided by these two sophisticated young women, Wendy and, on her keyboards, her lover, Lisa; for the first time in his life, he will collaborate in a meaningful way.

For Wendy, Lisa and Prince, this time is like going to college. They hang out together, play each other music. Lisa has a great sound system in her car, and she takes Wendy and Prince for a drive. The two young women introduce Prince to music he has never heard before – Gustav Mahler, the English pastoral of Vaughan Williams, the experiments of Joni Mitchell and Peter Gabriel. It’s an education for him.

The crowd at First Avenue, their faces straining against one another, receive the brief benediction of a wavering spotlight: to them, Purple Rain doesn’t sound like any song that Prince has played before: the tight electronic funk, his harsh and weird sex songs, the soul ballads in which he asks for forgiveness – Purple Rain is something new, something different. They don’t know how to react. In fact the crowd is so muted that when this recording is prepared for the album, the engineer loops some crowd noise taken from a football game to give it some life.

What do great songs sound like the first time we hear them? Can you remember that feeling? When Bob Dylan heard The Animals’ version of House of the Rising Sun, he got out of the car and ran around it again and again he was so excited. The first time you hear a great song is so rare, and it can never be repeated; watching the crowd during this first performance of Purple Rain, I see that look on a few faces, a silent shocked awe. On the twenty-seven other recordings of Purple Rain in my iPod, the moment the first chord is strummed, the crowd cheer, acknowledging the anthem. They become a congregation, keen to be guided through the Purple Rain, and that has its ecstasies, even if it involves cigarette lighters held aloft, and hands waved in the air. But to hear silence flowing back from the audience, no singalong because they don’t know the words, is to eavesdrop on the shock of the new.

The lyrics of Purple Rain suggest the singer has wronged someone, harmed them inadvertently. In the context of the Purple Rain film that someone is Prince’s girlfriend; in fact, in a rather literal outtake from the film, Prince and his girlfriend have sex in a barn at dawn, and the water streaming down from the roof sheathes her naked skin, which is then struck by the dawn rays, so that she appears to be bathing in a kind of purple rain. Music video directors in the 1980s could be very literal; if Bonnie Tyler sang “turn around bright eyes”, then we would see a boy with very bright eyes turning around.

What does purple represent to Prince? Purple is a gateway colour, a transition from one stage to the next, the colour of dusk and dawn, magic hour between day and night. Purple is also a mix of pink and blue, a boy and a girl. I’m not a woman, I’m not a man. I am something you will never understand. Prince casts himself as androgynous as a tactic of seduction, a conventional hetero offer with a side order of feminine sensitivity, or at least, what a twenty three year considers to be sensitivity. Purple is also the colour of royalty, and he is a Prince. The sub-editors of the Sun will pun Purple Rain into Purple R.e.i.g.n. Or is it the purple of Jimi Hendrix’s Purple Haze? All of these possible meanings are burnt away by the guitar.

The solo is a messianic ejaculation, an absolving, annihilating ecstasy. The sky was all purple and there were people running everywhere, sang Prince, predicting the millennial panic of 1999. He even wrote a song called Ronnie Talk To Russia Before It’s Too Late, a trite bit of rockabilly agit-pop that called for Ronald Reagan to negotiate with the Soviet Union, a sentiment he was to express more succinctly in the high-pitched childish voice in 1999 that asked, “Mommy, why does everyone have a Bomb?” The sky is all purple because it is on fire, and what follows is a quenching of that destruction.

Purple Rain is the redemptive baptism on the night of the apocalypse, forgiveness for the terrible sins committed by the singer and by us. Prince is clear that we are all implicated. Times are changing. It’s time we all reached out for something new, and that means you too. He is our messiah, so he tells us in another song on the album, I Would Die 4 U. You say you want a leader but you can’t seem to make up your mind I think you better close it and let me guide you to the Purple Rain.

"We dont have a Prince in Minnesota...we have a king!"

Great show ... I still need the concert ticket from that show to add to my collection of Prince stubs

Electric Intercourse that night was another that even though it was the 1st time hearing it for the crowd it had a strong undercurrent that charged the air.

OldFriends4Sale said:

Electric Intercourse that night was another that even though it was the 1st time hearing it for the crowd it had a strong undercurrent that charged the air.

I wonder why that song was never officially released. It could have easily been a b side or even just a song on Purple Rain.

PEJ said:

OldFriends4Sale said:

Electric Intercourse that night was another that even though it was the 1st time hearing it for the crowd it had a strong undercurrent that charged the air.

I wonder why that song was never officially released. It could have easily been a b side or even just a song on Purple Rain.

I know, but even each single release had killer B sides for Purple Rain

and since the Beautiful Ones replaced the space in the movie, I don't know where he could have put it. Actually with a touch here and there it could have gone on Around the World in a Day, I would have taken that over Temptation. Even though I loved hearing Eddie M's sax sound on there.

Electric Intercourse

I feel some kind of love 4 U
I don't know your name
This is the kind of love that takes 2
I want U and I'm not ashamed

Cuz baby, U shock my wild
With a sexual electricity extraordinaire
Come and take advantage and undress me
I don't even know U, I don't even care

I feel some kind of sexual courage
Tell me do U feel it 2?
Our bodies wanna be 2gether
Girl, I wanna be with U

Electric is my body, baby
I'll shock U with my lips
Darling, don't U know
Your Technicolor climax is at my fingertips?
Hear me, baby

Electric intercourse, electric intercourse (Wake up, Wendy!)
Don't U wanna?
Electric intercourse, electric intercourse
Don't U wanna make love, sweet love, my love?

Mash it

Electric is my body, baby
I'll shock U with my lips (Yes I will)
Darling, don't U know
Your technicolor climax is at my fingertips
Baby, no no, listen 2 me

Electric intercourse, electric intercourse
Don't U wanna?
(I say this)
Electric intercourse, electric intercourse
(I say the first intercourse, I say the first one)
Don't U wanna make love, sweet love, my love?

Yeah

Electric intercourse, electric intercourse
Don't U wanna?
Electric intercourse, electric intercourse
Don't U wanna make love, my love, sweet love, yeah?

Don't U wanna?
Electric intercourse
Don't U wanna make love, yeah?

Auntee Emm {x2}

he could have put it on the b side of this [img:$uid]http://www.akw0960.plus.com/2964.jpg[/img:$uid]

I JUST LOOOOOOOOVE THIS CONCERT!

PEJ said:

he could have put it on the b side of this [img:$uid]http://www.akw0960.plus.com/2964.jpg[/img:$uid]

Yeah your right, that was released as a single. Forgot about that one PEJ

With a blow out album like PR he could have released Possessed, God the Love Theme(US)

littleredcorvette said:

I JUST LOOOOOOOOVE THIS CONCERT!

Yeah that's that raw magic, you just don't get anymore

This is no copy cat music.

GREATEST show ever..Amazing..Loved it.

OldFriends4Sale said:

PEJ said:

he could have put it on the b side of this [img:$uid]http://www.akw0960.plus.com/2964.jpg[/img:$uid]

Yeah your right, that was released as a single. Forgot about that one PEJ

With a blow out album like PR he could have released Possessed, God the Love Theme(US)

all great songs especially possesed

PEJ said:

OldFriends4Sale said:

Yeah your right, that was released as a single. Forgot about that one PEJ

With a blow out album like PR he could have released Possessed, God the Love Theme(US)

all great songs especially possesed

Thanks!!

was listening to the rehearsal version of A Case of You and forgot that this was a cover. It just sounded like a song Prince & the Revolution would make at the time