![]() ![]() Following its predecessor, When Doves Cry, to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 – where it became Prince’s second No.1 hit – it also topped the Black Singles and Dance/Disco charts in the US. Helping to kick-start Prince’s purple revolution, Let’s Go Crazy was issued as a single, with the altogether more carnal Erotic City on the B-side, on 18 July 1984, just a week ahead of the film’s premiere. “He basically punched into the middle, added a new middle, which brought it to its length.” “My original draft of Let’s Go Crazy was much different” “So I had to go to Prince and he had to elongate it,” Magnoli explained. As the film’s director, Albert Magnoli, told Prince historian Duane Tudahl for the book Prince And The Purple Rain Era Studio Sessions 19, after seeing Prince and The Revolution perform Let’s Go Crazy at First Avenue he immediately knew it was “the perfect song to open” the movie – but it was too short. And Prince loved it.”Įventually released on 12” as a seven-and-a-half-minute Special Dance Mix, this longer version of Let’s Go Crazy was created specifically to fit the Purple Rain movie’s opening montage. “I just started randomly smacking the piano not really intending to play anything. “At first I tried to do something melodic, but because the song was called Let’s Go Crazy, I thought I should do something that was out there,” Fink told Vibe magazine in 2014. Known for his stage outfit of medical scrubs and stethoscope, keyboardist Matt “Doctor” Fink later recalled coming up with his chaotic piano breakdown, edited into the song when Prince needed an extended version. “He would spend so much time with his band, pulling their ideas. “He loved that,” Susan Rogers explained to this author of the way Prince would bring ideas to the group and let each member find their own parts. “It’s sort of Disneyland, but it’s talking about life before death. ![]() “The more we played it, the more it developed into a sparkly, tough song,” Revolution keyboardist Lisa Coleman told Minneapolis Star Tribune’s Jon Bream in 2017. “I just started randomly smacking the piano. Having drilled the song for months, from its churchy intro to its bluesy show-tune outro – with drummer Bobby “Z” Rivkin using electronic drum pads to trigger two sets of Linn LM-1 drum machines – Let’s Go Crazy had undergone a revolution of its own after Prince and his band finished with it. But while Prince would debut much of the Purple Rain album at that show – using the live recordings as the basis for the record’s closing trio of songs, I Would Die 4 U, Baby I’m A Star and Purple Rain – he hadn’t quite captured Let’s Go Crazy as he’d intended.įour days later, back in rehearsal in a converted warehouse in St Louis Park, Prince and his group nailed it “top to bottom” in just one or two takes, as his then studio engineer, Susan Rogers, told this author for the book Lives Of The Musicians: Prince. Prince had taught Let’s Go Crazy to his band, soon to be christened The Revolution, in the summer of 1983, honing it across rehearsals until it was ready to open his landmark 3 August 1983 concert at Minneapolis’ First Avenue club. “The more we played it, the more it developed into a sparkly, tough song” And it was recorded in just a couple of takes in a warehouse in Minnesota. With its opening organ part creating a sermon-like atmosphere, Let’s Go Crazy smuggled Prince’s quest for salvation into a five-minute pop-rock manifesto whose thematic resolution would be delivered when the Purple Rain song brought its parent album to a close. Sure, inciting fans to “go crazy” while reminding them “we’re all gonna die” picked up directly from where 1999 left off, but a more cryptic refusal to “let de-elevator bring us down” contained his new song’s deeper message. It also made clear that Prince had broadened his world view since exhorting listeners to party in the face of the apocalypse with 1999. Pointedly placed as an introduction, the song was a clear statement of intent from a man about to catapult himself to fame in the summer of 1984. “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called life.” Opening both the Purple Rain album and movie, these were the first words many Prince fans would hear him say. ![]()
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