I have to correct u on something.....Dez Dickerson played guitar during the 1999 Tour not Wendy and was part of the Revolution. Dez left the band after the 1999 Tour.





>(a number of articles, including an interview with Alan Leeds
>and Dr Fink to come...)
>
>http://www.popmatters.com/pm/special/section/lets-go-crazy-celebrating-25-years-of-purple-rain/
>
>*cue church organ*
>
>”Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to celebrate this
>thing called life ...”
>
>... and thus begins one of the greatest pop culture phenomena
>of our time.
>
>Back in the summer of 1984, Purple Rain was more than just a
>movie: it was a genuine experience, a transcendent multi-media
>event that celebrated commercialism and creativity in equal
>measure, turning a mid-level R&B singer into an overnight
>superstar and international sex symbol. At one point during
>that year, Prince had not only the Number One movie in
>America, but also the Number One album and the Number One
>single. In fact, when Purple Rain entered the album chart at
>peak position on August 4th of 1984 (displacing Bruce
>Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A., of all things), it wouldn’t
>vacate that spot until January 19th of the following year.
>
>Yet all these accomplishments all wind up leading us to one
>very simple question: why?
>
>The truth of the matter is simple: Prince picked the prefect
>time to perfect his art. Though unfairly relegated as a
>straight-up R&B singer for his first few years, a few people
>could already pick out the fact that the barely 20-years-old
>Prince Rogers Nelson had talent that wasn’t exactly easy to
>classify: aside from the fact that he played every instrument
>on every album he ever produced, his mixture of genres was
>remarkably unconventional. 1979’s Prince had numerous
>hard-rock overtones, and the genre-busting 1980 disc Dirty
>Mind was a lo-fi explosion of new wave, classic rock, and
>synth-based soul experiments. With 1983’s 1999, however,
>Prince had finally found a way to meld his experimental pop
>tendencies with more “commercial” song structures, resulting
>in the first two major mainstream hits of his career (the
>title track and “Little Red Corvette"), each become
>substantial radio staples at the expense of absolutely
>nothing: Prince’s sexually-charged lyrics—always a point of
>controversy—were still kept front and center, pushing the
>envelope of what was considered “acceptable” radio play
>without compromising Prince’s increasingly-insular artistic
>vision.
>
>During 1999‘s subsequent tour, however, Prince—in the midst of
>also writing and producing acts like Vanity 6 and Morris Day &
>the Time—had finally assembled a backing band that could keep
>up with his own incredible abilities: the Revolution. With
>drummer Bobby Z., bassist Mark Brown, keyboardist Matt Fink,
>and guitar/keys duo Wendy Melovin & Lisa Coleman, Prince was
>finally able to stop worrying about playing everything
>himself: he had a found a group of creative individuals who
>were able to open his mind to new sounds and styles. During
>this time, he also expressed interest in starting a movie
>project based on his life. After numerous financial hurdles
>and personnel mishaps (protégé starlet Vanity very famously
>left the project just prior to filming, leaving Prince to cast
>the unknown Apollonia Kotero as his own love interest),
>filming went underway for Prince’s own faux-biopic, starring
>himself in the lead role and featuring nothing but brand new,
>completely unheard songs. Even with 1999‘s relative chart
>success, Warner Bros. was predictably nervous about how the
>film would fare.
>
>As the multiple hit singles, Grammy wins, and Best Original
>Song Score Oscar later proved, this was one of those rare
>gambles that paid off in droves.
>
>Purple Rain is more than just a movie, however, and far more
>than just an album. The track “When Doves Cry” was a
>revolutionary, avant-garde single that rewrote the playbook on
>what pop songs were supposed to sound like, “Darling Nikki”
>was the track that set Tipper Gore on a personal vendetta to
>clean up pop music (ultimately resulting in the Parental
>Advisory stickers that pepper albums to this very day), and
>that’s not even counting the contributions that Purple Rain
>has made to fashion, the rock-film genre, and sales of purple
>motorcycles the world over.
>
>Some 25 years after it was released, PopMatters proudly
>celebrates Purple Rain in its entirety, looking at it from
>every angle: over this week, you’ll see a track-by-track
>dissection of the album, looking at Purple Rain in the context
>of Prince’s short filmography, analyzing the movie’s effects
>on the fashion world, that so-called “Minneapolis sound” that
>the film helped popularize, a deep psychological examination
>at the supposed rivalry between Prince and Morris Day, the way
>that Prince was able to transcend genre and move even a crowd
>of metalheads during one writer’s live performance experience,
>how his music was able to band together some Florida skinheads
>in a shared love of his genre-busting funk, a look at how
>Prince created his masterwork out of an anxiety of influence,
>and—to top it all off—we interview Prince’s long-time manager
>Alan Leeds and Revolution keyboardist Matt Fink about their
>experiences during the peak of Purple Rain‘s popularity.
>
>So strap yourself in, and—as The Kid himself would say—let’s
>go crazy ...