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Purple rain debut Seems like the best quality I've heard of this? Anyone care to chime in? | |
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Didn't a soundboard of that come out last year or 2019? I forget. [Edited 12/16/21 13:06pm] Sorry, it's the Hodgkin's talking. |
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I love the 1983 Dance Benefit show rendition
Prince & the Revolution @ 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 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."
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