Music Reviews

Remaster Class – Prince: Purple Rain

Mike Mettler | Jul 12, 2024

Left to right: 1984 Warner Bros. CD/LP, band shot from 2017 NPG/Warner Bros. 3CD+1DVD booklet, 2023 NPG/Warner Records picture disc.

In the summer of 1984, two ascending musical forces vaulted themselves into the megastar stratosphere on a parallel tract that would be virtually impossible to duplicate today. Bruce Springsteen upped his own iconography by touring stadiums in support of Born in the U.S.A., a perpetually catchy album whose underlying message actually served to tear down the tenets of the American mythos. At the same time, Prince and The Revolution dominated the charts with Purple Rain, the ostensible soundtrack to the low-budget box-office phenomenon of the same name that chronicled the rise of “The Kid” and his killer Minneapolis-bred band, despite their respective struggles with a myriad of mental and physical obstacles alike.

Because Purple Rain was so ubiquitous that fateful summer and beyond, I actually bypassed buying the June 1984 Warner Bros. LP until about three years later when I became obsessed with my still-favorite Prince album, March 1987’s Paisley Park 2LP set, Sign o’ the Times. For collector’s purposes I obtained the 1987 Warner Bros. Redbook CD (or should that be Purplebook?), but I really only listened to Warner’s subsequent 1991 CD and 2008 digipak CD, respectively.

As for the wax, I recently picked up the 2017 Warner Bros. limited-edition picture disc LP for the collection, and the 2021 NPG/Warner Records purple vinyl edition for playback. Sometimes color vinyl can be a bit wonky, but that purple LP delivered the unbridled fury of the full-on squeal of Prince’s balls-out, show-stopping guitar solo denouement on “Let’s Go Crazy” (Side 1, Track 1) as well as the raw-nerve harmonies and strings-laden emotionality of “Purple Rain” (Side 2, Track 4).

The definitive version of Purple Rain remains the 2017 NPG/Warner Bros. 3CD+1DVD Ultimate Collector’s Edition, which boasts the 2015 Paisley Park remastered version of the original album on CD1, 11 tracks subtitled From the Vault & Previously Unreleased on CD2 (“The Dance Electric” is 11 minutes of pure funk magic), and 15 single edits and B-sides on CD3 (the extended version of “Erotic City” is as sultry as ever). Live at the Carrier Dome, Syracuse, NY, March 30, 1985 comprises the DVD, featuring the band fully en fuego at an of-era peak.

Naturally, I would hope the powers that be at NPG HQ will reissue this collection in its entirety as concurrent multidisc vinyl and CD/BD box sets, akin to what they’ve done in recent years with their elaborate multiformat boxes for October 1982’s 1999, the aforementioned Sign o’ the Times, and the New Power Generation-incarnation gem, October 1991’s Diamonds and Pearls. Seeing how D&P received the Atmos treatment on BD for its 2023 reissue, Purple Rain deserves proper 360-degree deployment. Just think of how the height channels would handle Matt Fink’s Memorymoog burbles and synth swoops on “I Would Die 4 U.”

1984 Warner Bros. cover, back cover of the 2017 NPG/Warner Bros. 3CD+1DVD set.

To this day, I remain endlessly fascinated that there is no bass whatsoever on Purple Rain’s lead single and instant No. 1 multiweek smash, “When Doves Cry.” Who better to ask about the song’s lack of low-end content than Revolution bassist Brownmark — and that’s exactly what I did when we sat down together in The Revolution’s Atlantic City dressing room in August 2017. “That was one of those songs Prince brought to us after he had already been in the studio,” the bassist recalled. “He came to me directly because he didn’t want me to feel bad about it. He said, ‘Now, you’ll notice there’s no bass.’ And I said, ‘Uh, well, yeah!’ He said, ‘Don’t think it’s because of anything you did.’” Was Brownmark bothered by Prince’s, er, bass-less decision? “No, because it really sounds great,” he replied. “It had never been done before. After I listened to it, I said to him, ‘You know, you’re right. Even if it had bass, it wouldn’t sound good. It would wreck the song.’”

Once Prince and The Revolution began performing “Doves” live — which you can both see and hear on the Carrier Dome DVD — and Brownmark finally got to add his own stamp to it. “Live, I put some rumble on it — and it fills it up greatly,” he noted with a smile. “Here, I’m what you call a ‘ghost-note’ player. I was notorious for that back in the ’80s, and Prince likes that. He always did. It’s basically all feel — but you’ll never figure out what I’m playing.”

Purple Rain shot Prince and The Revolution into the realm of international superstardom, and they continued to work together on and off in various incarnations essentially up to his untimely passing in 2016. As of June 21, we now have an Atmos-ized spritz of Rain available through certain participating digital services — for one thing, you’ll absolutely cherish going to church in the height channels on the dearly beloved update of “Let’s Go Crazy” — with a Blu-ray edition scheduled for release sometime later this year. In the meantime, let’s go nuts and bask in the collective zeitgeist glow of The Kid and his impeccable band, for this is what it sounds like when Prince’s very soul cries.

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