Turn Down the Music and Read: Let’s Go Crazy
It wasn’t until I was all the way back in Oakland at the end of July that the fog lifted enough for me to realize: the two books I bought to read at my dad’s bedside this summer were stories about celebrities who died in 2016. I’ve already recommended On Bowie by Rob Sheffield, a book-length love letter to David Bowie. Now I’ll do the same for the second book which I devoured last weekend – Let’s Go Crazy: The Making of Purple Rain, by Alan Light, which came out in 2014. Before…you know.
Light, whose music bona fides include stints as editor-in-chief of Vibe and Spin magazines, tells the story of how a musician with rather limited commercial and artistic success at the start of the ‘80s basically believed himself into becoming a supernova in 1984. While Light didn’t speak to Prince for this project, he’d interviewed him many times over the years and weaves those archival interviews into those of people who did give him lots of access, including Wendy Melvoin, Lisa Coleman, and the movie’s director, Albert Magnoli.
The book is richly detailed and takes its time in exploring the relatively short expanse between when Prince said, “I want to do a movie,” and when that movie made it into theaters and made him a household word. Each song, each scene, each character is described in loving depth that will be welcome to anyone who has spent significant time wondering, for instance, why Appolonia gets back on the motorcycle after Prince tricks her into purifying herself in Not-Lake-Minnetonka. (Answer: because he’s Prince. And you would have done the same.)
But first, you have to get over the fact that the book is written as if Prince were still alive, because he was at the time this book came out. Honestly, I struggled with Chapter One. Every time Light says something like, “Prince says” or “Prince does” in the present tense, I would just overturn the book on my lap and think, “NO HE DOESN’T, NOT ANYMORE” and then gaze into the middle distance. It’s especially hard to read Light’s pronouncements about what will or won’t happen to Prince in the future, the kind of conjecture that’s easy to throw around when you think people will be around forever.
Once I got over that, though, I truly enjoyed this book. Before he was a music writer, Light was a dorky teenage Prince fan like the rest of us, and the book is a nice balance of both the music insider’s view and the fan’s reverence for the movie and the music. Whether he writes about being transfixed at hearing “When Doves Cry” for the first time on the radio, or picking the right purple accessory the first time he’s going to see Prince play live, or bonding with college class mates freshman year over how many times they’d seen the movie, he’s basically describing moments from MY teenage life. (Or moments from Ann Imig’s pre-teen years, as she once relayed so winningly here. )
When I’d finished the book, more than anything I just wanted to sit and listen to the album all the way through. Luckily, it happened while I was in Austin staying with my sister in law and her boyfriend who is a huge audiophile and whose vinyl collection is the Eighth Wonder of the World. James stationed me carefully between two speakers on Saturday night and, much like the old Maxell commercial, I just sat back and let the music blow me backward for 45 minutes (yup, that whole album is 45 minutes. Seems longer, in a good way, right?)
Later we hit Waterloo Records in Austin and I bought my own copy on vinyl. I cradled that thing on the Southwest flight home more carefully than I did the girls when I used to fly with them as babies. (Hey, babies are bendy, but a record isn’t.)
Bowie’s gone, Prince is gone, Dad’s gone.
Thank goodness the ability of books and music to carry us away is eternal.
If you didn’t realize it before you read this book, you’ll understand how zealously Prince protected his intellectual property, and that meant – and means – aggressively removing illegally shared videos from YouTube as soon as they go up. About the only live performance of this song you can reliably find is when he played Purple Rain in the pouring rain at the Super Bowl aka The Best Halftime Show Ever.
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