Why Stevie Nicks walked out during Prince’s ‘Purple Rain’ premiere
Joining Fleetwood Mac in 1974, Stevie Nicks and her romantic partner Lindsey Buckingham helped rejuvenate the band’s sound, adding a more chart-pleasing pop-rock aesthetic. By the time Rumours arrived in February 1977, the band was soaring under the full beam of global acclaim. At the heart of this astonishing album was the tumult of intra-band infidelity and spiralling drug use, which both helped and hindered Fleetwood Mac.
Entering the 1980s, Nicks looked to spread her wings by pursuing a solo career to allow more air time for her lyrics and some much-needed breathing space from her bandmates. She shot straight to number one with Bella Donna, her debut solo album of 1981 and retained a similar level of commercial success with 1983’s The Wild Heart.
During Nicks’ rise to fame, an artist from Minnesota known as Prince had begun to bake a name for himself too. As we know, Prince’s influence would realise its full potential in 1984 with the arrival of the album Purple Rain and its like-titled movie. However, the Purple One had intended the title track and inspiration for the movie for Nicks’ voice.
Prince sent his first draft of ‘Purple Rain’, a ten-minute country instrumental track, asking her to write lyrics and sing over. Despite feeling deeply honoured, Nicks was rather apprehensive in the face of such an undertaking, given Prince’s popularity at the time. “I listened to it, and I just got scared,” she said. “I called him back and said, ‘I can’t do it. I wish I could. It’s too much for me.'”
Despite this letdown, Nicks and Prince remained close, and the latter once again showed his admiration for the former when he used ‘Edge of Seventeen’ as inspiration for ‘When Doves Cry’. “I saw him many times after that,” Nicks recalled in an interview with The New Yorker. “We’d play Minneapolis, and he’d come and pick me up after my show. And we went to his purple house one night, and we wrote a song. It’s not a great song, but it’s fun because we wrote it.”
“When Purple Rain came out, I went to the premiere, and I watched up until the part where he slapped Apollonia [Kotero] across the face really hard,” Nicks continued. “That definitely wasn’t the Prince that I knew, and that just freaked me out.
“I got up, and I walked out and went into the really beautiful bathroom of the Chinese Theatre, and I just sat in there for the rest of the movie. After it was over, there was a big massive Purple Rain party somewhere, and he said, ‘So what did you think of the movie?’ And I said, ‘Well, when you slapped Apollonia, it freaked me out, and I went and sat in the bathroom.'”
Although Purple Rain was quasi-autobiographical, The Kid was an exaggerated character based on Prince. “He was not happy,” Nicks continued. “He said, ‘You left? If you had watched the end, the slap would’ve made sense to you. I was, like, fighting for my life during that part.’ And then, over the next two years, I watched it, and I understood what he meant. You know, there was a reason for it.”
Although Nicks remained close with Prince until his death in 2016, she recalled the 1980s as a somewhat dissonant period for their friendship due to her worsening drug habit. “But, you know, the eighties were pretty bad drug years for me,” she continued in the same interview. “And Prince was very not into drugs, and the fact that he ended up being on a lot of pain medication just blows my mind because he was so against it, and he gave me so many lectures about i”t.
Adding: “I’d talk to him every once in a while on the phone, and we’d talk for hours, and he’d go, ‘You gotta be careful, Stevie.’ And I’d go, ‘I know, I know.’ And now that he’s gone, I’m really just so sorry. My one regret with him is that I did not call him up one day and say, ‘Listen, I’m just coming in; I’m gonna fly in and come over to Paisley Park and just hang out with you for two days. Because I just would love to see you.’
“That’s what I always tell people. Remember, every single day of your life, the people you love could be gone tomorrow. If anybody can take away from what we’re talking about right now, it’s the fact that life is very fragile. You can’t count on ever having a lot of time left.”
Watch Stevie Nicks tell the story of how she first met Prince below.
