keyboards on tour and singing “Head” on Dirty Mind with Prince. Melvoin joined the Revolution, first in 1982 for the album 1999 (the first time “the Revolution” appeared on an album cover of his) as a background singer at the insistence of Coleman. Melvoin jumped in on guitar when Dickerson left Prince’s employ for religious reasons, and the Revolution blossomed in full, truly starting when this lineup made its live debut on August 3, 1983, at Minneapolis’s First Avenue club, recording on and touring through Purple Rain , Around the World in a Day , Parade , and bits of Sign “O” the Times before Prince dissolved the Revolution in Japan on September 9, 1986. “That’s classic Prince,” notes Melvoin. “We’re classic Prince.” Their funk matched his funk. Their acquaintance with the synthesizer-heavy new wave was as up close and personal as his. Their gauzy level of gender-fuck sexual playfulness matched his, guided by his hand, of course. They played their asses off, inventively, for him, while turning him on to new sounds, and Prince gave them a high point to live up to. “I don’t really think he had ever fully listened to the Beatles until Matt and I played him Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band ,” says Bobby Z. “Wendy and Lisa presented him with jazz like he’d never heard. Classical and experimental music too; I mean, Lisa played sitar and flute as well as piano.” Listen to Prince pre–Wendy and Lisa. Then listen to him after, à la the Revolver -like Around the World in a Day and cabaret jazz elements of Parade . “He gave to us, and we gave to him in a free-flowing exchange of ideas,” continues Z. Sure, Prince was dashing and inventive without the Revolution. The Black Album , most of Sign “O” the Times , even a latter-day work such as the James Brown–ish Musicology : These aren’t with the Revolution. “He sounded great on records without us, like Diamonds and Pearl s,” notes Fink. “Some of the players after the Revolution could kick my ass,” says Melvoin. “But those don’t really sound like him,” notes Fink. “He doesn’t sound like Prince. Who knows why?” Is Fink inferring that Prince doesn’t sound like Prince because the Revolution wasn’t there? “No, he just doesn’t sound like my Prince.” The Revolution together with Prince: the sum of their funky, rocking, sensualist parts meant so much more as one grooving unit. There was charm, childlike wonder, and theatricalized naïveté. Prince had other bands after the Revolution, but never one that was a physical and psychic extension of everything that he was, such as this quintet. “I mean, he’s had a lot of great players in his time, but none with the innocence and naïveté and growing pains we had with him,” says Fink. “We grew up together while working,” says Coleman. “We were young and came up as one,” says Melvoin. “It’s an intangible, really, oblique in its way, but we just worked together, lived together, were together.” This same older and wiser crew leapt quietly into the fire of tribute when Prince passed; first playing Prince’s Minneapolis’s original home base, the live venue First Avenue in September 2016, with a sold- out country-wide tour bringing them to the sad and hungry masses throughout 2017. “We’re offering catharsis, not only for the audiences who loved him, but to ourselves, each other, because we were his family,” says Melvoin. “We’re emotional. We’re hurting. We need a place to land.”
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