Prince, "When Doves Cry"
I woke up Thursday morning with “When Doves Cry” (Apple Music, Spotify) in my head. I must have dreamt about it—it was playing over a PA, over a car radio, something—but I can’t remember the details. As I explained earlier, see “Smash It Up,” I don’t often remember anything about my dreams, although I have done a better job of it since I wrote that post. Seems like if I walk myself through the dream just after I wake from it, I’m able to make at least some of it stick. But I didn’t do any of that work on Thursday, so who knows why the doves were crying.
I can say that I had Purple Rain on the turntable all day Wednesday, so this didn’t come entirely out of the blue.
From the day we first got cable TV, Prince was a fixture in our childhood. “Little Red Corvette” (YouTube) and “1999” were regular plays on MTV. The videos weren’t high concept, but they were still worth a watch, because they involved prime-if-not-peak Prince performing with the rump of his best backing band, soon to be dubbed the Revolution. It occurred to me just now that both videos were probably shot on the same day; it’s the same stage set, and the band are wearing the same clothes. Only Prince could pull off that calf-length purple lamé jacket—if purple lamé is actually a thing—over a shirt trimmed with white lace. The lights are super-bright and they splash off his hair and jacket for a late-era glam effect.
Watching “1999” again just now I noticed that the guy on keys is unaccountably sporting OR scrubs. Maybe they’re just a comfortable wear under the lights.
Back in those days we heard things about Prince. Scandalous, unelaborated things, like His live shows are X-rated. No one we knew had ever been to a Prince concert, so we had to imagine what he got up to on stage, when he wasn’t subject to the strictures of cable TV. Word was out, too, that Wendy and Lisa were lesbians. That’s them playing keys together on “1999,” most definitely not wearing scrubs. As far as I can remember, Wendy and Lisa were the first self-identified lesbians I ever heard of. That probably explained why they were gathered up so close on the same synth, but I had to wonder if Prince was playing up this particular side plot. They were a couple, sure, but that didn’t mean they had to be joined at the hip all of the time, or for that matter doubling up on one instrument.
Anyway, I loved these videos and loved these songs.
I had Prince and Michael Jackson tied together in my mind almost immediately. This doesn’t make tons of sense musically, but back then so many of us carried in our heads some dumb ideas about race and what kind of music artists got to play, based on their skin color. But it was definitely true that Prince and Michael were the same kind of out-of-the-ordinary for me on MTV, first because they weren’t playing the sharp-cornered new wave music I was primarily tuning in to see—Flock of Seagulls, Eurythmics, Duran Duran, Modern English—and second, because notwithstanding that fact, I was sold on both of them. For a good while, at least until Madonna and Springsteen brought their acts to MTV, Prince and MJ largely defined the narrow category (for me) of Not New Wave/ DO NOT DISCARD. So naturally they were paired up in my mind.
Then Purple Rain happened. It was the summer of 1984—June 25, to be precise: forty years ago almost to the day. Finally, a record to rival Thriller. Synchronicity had battled bravely in the latter half of ’83, but in the end it had capitulated, like all the others. Maybe Sting, Stewart, and Andy were playing the role of Horatio on the bridge, buying time for Prince to gather his troops and stage his Revolution. The Internet tells me that in fact Back in Black and Born in the USA sold more copies than Purple Rain. Even so, when I look back on the ’80s, it’s Thriller and Purple Rain that stand astride the decade, two all-swallowing colossi blotting out the sun.
“When Doves Cry” came first, with “Let’s Go Crazy” (Apple Music, Spotify) hot on its heels. These songs sound like nothing but summer to me. When I hear them, I’m back wrapped in a beach towel on a lounge chair in Warren, Ohio. Hot FM 101 is playing over the PA by the snack bar, and now I’m on the move, skipping barefoot over skin-searing pavement to plunk down two quarters for a Snickers bar. Turns out there was a ton of great music on the radio between and around these choice cuts from Prince & the Revolution: “Borderline” (Apple Music, Spotify), for example, and “The Reflex” (Apple Music, Spotify) and “Time After Time” (Apple Music, Spotify) and “Eyes Without a Face” (Apple Music, Spotify)—hell, this was the summer of Night Ranger and “Sister Christian” (Apple Music, Spotify). But for me the summer of 1984 conjures up two principal images: Carl Lewis on the gold medal podium and Prince reclining in a bathtub.
It was around this time I got my first Walkman, so I bought my copy of Purple Rain on cassette. The tape was a gorgeous light blue, just barely off-white. Band name and album title were rendered in a jagged calligraphic script I used to practice writing out on three-hole punch paper. These days, with our Apple Music subscription, my kids can play any of 100 million songs over their phones. What’s missing for their generation isn’t just the experience of an album (more on this below) but of album as object—a treasure you can own, hold in your hands, and show your friends. It’s blue! I love that color. Then at some point the plastic case cracks and you feel like someone stabbed you in the chest.
God knows where this cassette is now. I’m back in Warren this weekend, visiting my parents. There’s a possibility it’s stowed away in a box in their crawl space, but the far more likely answer is they junked it twenty years ago, when they moved out of our house on Springwood Trace.
Still, though: I was fortunate to have the tape as long as I did. My sister bought a copy of the Time’s Ice Cream Castle around this time. The Time of course feature in the Purple Rain movie, and Prince produced their album. And by “produced,” I mean he played most of the instruments and wrote most of the songs, leaving the vocals to Morris Day and the occasional guitar and drum track to Jesse and Jellybean. I was dimly aware of a connection between Prince and the Time, but more than anything I just dug their two singles, “Jungle Love” (Apple Music, Spotify) and “The Bird” (Apple Music, Spotify). Problem was there was a song in between these two on Side 1, called “If the Kid Can’t Make You Come” (Apple Music, Spotify), and that was enough for my mom to confiscate Ice Cream Castle. It just disappeared overnight.1
My sister had to explain to me where her tape had gone and why, because at age 10 I had no idea what Morris Day was getting at with that song title—or for that matter with Prince-penned lyrics like Do you wanna straddle my brass? My take-home from the loss of Ice Cream Castle was that if the Time were off the table for song lyrics I didn’t even understand, then what chance did I have to keep hold of Purple Rain? But against all odds,2 Jeanine never came for my Purple Rain cassette. Every morning, when I woke up with that tape still in my possession, I thanked my lucky stars.
This all makes sense, with the benefit of hindsight. I’m a parent now, too, and I’m quite aware I don’t have the time or the energy to vet everything the Cultural Firehose is spraying at my kids. That Time song was crying out to be censored based on its title alone, so that my mother could call the question simply by reading the printed text on the cassette. By contrast, she would have had to sit down and listen to “Darling Nikki” (Apple Music, Spotify) like Tipper Gore did, to know it was trouble. And as I said, by this time I had a Walkman. With headphones.
I knew every song on this record inside and out, and early enough in my life that for decades now I have treated them all as if they were baked in the cake. If at 10 years old I wasn’t considering song lyrics and the adult content they were suggesting—or expressing outright—then I was in no position, either, to appreciate what went into the songs musically. Sure, I watched the videos, sang the songs, gleefully recited the opening to “Let’s Go Crazy”:
Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called “life.” Electric word, life—it means forever and that’s a mighty long time …
And I knew every note of the extended guitar solo at the end of that song, too. I just had zero appreciation for the level of compositional genius and skill it took for Prince to play it. In fact, I took Prince’s guitar play for granted for most of my life, really until he took that solo at the Rock Hall, during the live cover of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” with Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne that we all remember, because it floored us.
It helped that the song ran for three and a half minutes without any Prince involvement—so that when he was suddenly there, unloading, we could understand just what he brought to the world when he strapped on a guitar. On Purple Rain, those guitars are every bit as good, but you hear them from the jump and throughout the record. If you’re not careful, you could get used to them. If you’re a preteen fixated on early ’80s synth music, your brain might disregard them completely. Neither of these is an acceptable path.
Through the late ’80s and the ’90s and the aughts and the teens, I shunted Prince into the pop category, right alongside MJ again. He had singles that hit—I liked “Raspberry Beret” (Apple Music, Spotify)3—but never at the level of the standout tracks on Purple Rain. That mapped on Michael’s career trajectory after Thriller. Also, fame, wealth and power got to both of these two, causing them to retreat from public life into eccentric habits. The parallels were too easy to draw, at least at the surface level, and if you were lazy like I was, you didn’t take the time to dig deeper, to look into what Prince was getting up to musically. It’s said 1987’s Sign o’ the Times is every bit as good as Purple Rain, if not better. But it wasn’t alt-rock, so it was out of sight and mind for my peeps and me.
We were of course aware that he wrote “Nothing Compares 2 U” (Apple Music, Spotify). All of us probably undercounted how much of that drop-dead gorgeous recording was owed to Prince’s songcraft, versus the studio arrangement and Sinéad’s heart, soul, and voice. When she published her memoir a few years ago, Sinéad included a story about an evening she spent with Prince. She related that sometime after “Nothing Compares” hit #1 in the charts, he invited her to his house in Hollywood. He greeted her warmly at the door, but the situation deteriorated when he asked her to join him in a pillow fight and began battering her with “something hard” he’d slipped into his pillowcase.
Any sensible person would see that this story sits at perfect equipoise between truth and falsehood. Based on what we know about Prince, it’s entirely plausible that he would have invited Sinéad O’Connor to his house in order to thwack her with a sackful of, I dunno, soap bars. Based on what we know about Sinéad, it’s entirely plausible that she would make up a story this outlandish and defamatory about Prince. The truth is unknowable, which is what makes this story so delicious. It’s Schrödinger’s Pillowcase. The alleged participants have departed for the Afterworld, and none of us left behind in this life will ever collapse the wave function toward the true truth.
I’m realizing now that I spent too long paying too little attention to Prince. Too long relegating his songs to ’80s hits playlists, considering his idiosyncrasies, and ultimately missing the point. This is an instance where the Turntable comes to my rescue. Now that I’m building a vinyl collection, there are certain albums I need to buy, because it’s downright improper not to own them. Purple Rain is classically one of these records. And so last April I bought a vinyl reissue on South Street in Philadelphia, when Florian and I were driving down the coast looking at colleges. That record finds its way to the platter, I dunno, every four to six weeks. When it does, it never fails to make my day.
So now I have all these songs back toward the front of mind, for the first time since they came and went in the summer of ’84. And on our latest road trip together—this time westbound to Ohio, starting Thursday night—Florian and I spun up Purple Rain over the car radio. Florian was talking about how much he loves music, how he seeks out and samples and stockpiles songs into vast libraries on Apple Music, while knowing comparatively little about the artists. I told him not to sweat it so much: it’s the music itself that makes your life that much richer and more interesting. Dorking out on rock history is a niche pursuit, and far less important. So say my read counts, at least.
Now that said, I added, the way the streamers pull songs out of LPs and sort them by hit count and popularity—that’s something to try to correct for. There’s a real virtue in playing an entire album straight through beginning to end, as the artists intended—or used to. From there we got to talking about the great albums, precious few of which Florian has ever heard played front to back. There’s nothing like a long road trip, for fixing that, I said. And I put on Purple Rain; I had it on the brain, after all, after waking up to “When Doves Cry” earlier that day.
Riding down the Mass Pike with the radio on, I really listened to the record, for the first time in … well, probably ever. I listened to it the way you do when you’re playing the record for someone else, you badly want them to like it, and you’re wondering whether they do. So you actively try to hear it through virgin ears, as if for the first time, and suddenly you’re picking out sounds, riffs, solos, backing tracks—nuances you’ve heard hundreds of times and cycled into memory, yet somehow never gave their due attention.
Like the tumbling tom toms at the beginning of “Take Me with U” (Apple Music, Spotify), which Wikipedia confirms Prince himself played, along with every other instrument on the track, except for the strings and finger cymbals. Per the full list, that’s two Oberheim synthesizers, an acoustic guitar, the bass, a Simmons electronic drum kit, a programmable drum machine, cymbals, and tambourine. Dude was omni-talented.
Like that awkward moment in “The Beautiful Ones” (Apple Music, Spotify), when Prince puts it all on the line, then pulls back: Oh baby, baby—if we got married … would that be cool? We’ve all been there, fumbling through a courtship, overshooting, biting our tongues. It’s a relief and a treat, even, to see Prince in the same vulnerable position. Could he be human, too? And of course by the end of the song he’s writhing around on the ground—literally: watch the movie—serving up one of the most powerful vocal performances ever laid down to tape. Sex god once again, after a brief mask-slip.
Like the elaborately arranged “Computer Blue” (Apple Music, Spotify), which is three songs in one and leaves you wanting more every time. I could go on about the guitars on pretty much every track on this record, but I especially dig them here. Toward the end of this one, Prince has jacked up the distortion and is absolutely shredding. There comes a point when he has wrung all he can out of his guitar, so he shifts to voice and delivers yet another of those screams. Is there anyone in rock history who could scream with Prince’s abandon and control? Glorious.
Like “Darling Nikki” assessed on its true merits, without getting lost in its adult themes or worrying that your mother or Tipper Gore is waiting around the corner to pluck the album from your hands. Playing this again now, on the far side of three years of drum lessons and three subsequent decades thrashing out beats on my kit, the steering wheel, my desk at work, I can appreciate how perfectly stomping and dropped-out and funky the drum track is here. And that’s not to mention the downright raunchy guitars and whatever is happening in the low register starting at 2:40—rhythm bass? synth and sequencer?—that sounds positively industrial.
And finally, “When Doves Cry.” Florian: This is Prince? I love this song. Starting with a scrumptious guitar lick, before the drums and synths surface and beat back the strings. There’s a mechanics to the arrangement, a grim and haunting cycle of repetition that the lyrics carry forward in the chorus, speaking of distance and dysfunction perpetuated across the generations:
How can you just leave me standing, alone in a world that’s so cold? Maybe I’m just too demanding. Maybe I’m just like my father: too bold. Maybe I’m just like my mother: she’s never satisfied. Why do we scream at each other?
The chorus is notably and intentionally soulless in its rendition. Played and sung by rote, as if by the autonomic functions of a brain. The key to this lock, or so Prince believes, is personal, physical intimacy—a living, breathing body to warm his world. In the verses he pleads for this: Dig if you will a picture of you and I engaged in a kiss. The sweat of your body covers me—can you, my darling, can you picture this? Evidently she can’t, at least per the damned and damning chorus.
Now here’s Prince fighting back still, trying new strategies. First with a second vocal track, attacking the drone and simple meter constraints of the chorus, injecting emotion and force. Then the guitars are back—always his best weapon, scratching and clawing now over and around the down-cycling drums and synths, willing them at least briefly out of their trance in a climactic moment. Maybe the intimacy was achieved after all. The song ends with a swirling synth solo. I don’t know what to make of it. It’s clear Prince was able to break free from these grabbing currents, for at least a moment. Did they pull him back under in the end? I can’t say.
What I can say is this was always so much more than a Top 40 song in the summer of 1984. I’m just forty years late in seeing that.
Jeanine is sitting next to me right now while I’m writing this post. She’s contesting that this ever happened. You and your sister tell these stories about me, she says.
Incidentally, another hit single in the summer of 1984 (Apple Music, Spotify). Not my favorite Phil Collins track personally. Give me “In the Air Tonight” (Apple Music, Spotify) or “Take Me Home” (Apple Music, Spotify), any day.
I published a poem in my high school’s literary journal that may have been cribbed from/ inspired by the sharp turn at the end of the chorus here. I think I love her. Perfect.