How a 1985 ‘Purple Rain’ concert would define the career of Prince
Some concerts seem to forever live in the memory and can be considered either the pinnacle of an artist’s career or the point at which it all began to make sense. For Prince, that concert would have likely been the March 30th, 1985, at the Carrier Dome in Syracuse, Sicily.
Prince’s soundchecks had been vital during the tour as they allowed his band’s members to get into the groove before the real action took place. Keyboard player Lisa Coleman noted, “We would go on for three or four hours. We would get there and just start jamming. Or Prince would already be there with a drum machine going and playing bass, and he’d look at us to come and fall in'”.
The venue had been decorated in Prince’s signature purple flowers, with a steady stream of dramatic smoke pouring across the stage whilst lasers shone through the mysterious built-up mist. Prince had just released the album that would cement his place in rock’s rich tapestry, Purple Rain, though the ensuing tour would make him one of the game’s legends.
Drummer Robert Rivkin noted the preshow ritual. He said: “We’d all gather in Prince’s dressing room, in a circle, and either he would speak, or he would point to one of us, and we would speak of the night. I can remember everybody seemed to rise to the occasion and had very inspiring words against the backdrop of twenty thousand screaming people waiting for us”.
“There was always that final moment of togetherness before we hit the stage,” Rivkin added. “We didn’t ever just go out there without first connecting to each other and looking in each other’s eyes and Prince checking us out and us checking him out”.
As the curtain began to creep up slowly just before the show, a mysterious yet small figure stood entranced in the fog and shadow. Then, out of nowhere, the band got stuck into ‘Let’s Go Crazy‘, and the audience followed suit, some 38,000 of them. The concert had also been one of the first pay-per-view musical events.
Lisa Coleman said: “Prince was our conductor. We took our cues from him. He spoke a lot with his face. You had to rely on that a lot. A lot of the time, he can’t control it, so you learned what was pleasing to him and what frustrated him. And then he did like the ugly funky face when you did something he liked. That was always a good high”.
The show would go down in history, and the live album of the concert has just been made available for streaming. Check it out below, along with video footage.
