If you want emotion , try speaking to four grieving, yet excitable musicians baring their collective soul on one conference-call line over the course of several hours (Coleman would speak separately after this, with Melvoin and Fink offering additional information in secondary interviews). The reunion tour is why “we’re gathered for this thing called life,” teases Bobby Z., quoting from Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy,” discussing how each managed to keep loose psychic contact with each other since Prince’s dissolution of the whole. Each of them mentions how no one can or will replace Prince in their hearts, or in their upcoming stage show. “We hope the audience sings along,” says Brown. Each Revolution member recalls where they were and how they heard of Prince’s death as if they were boomers reminiscing about the passing of John. F. Kennedy. “I was on the nineteenth song of my own album when I heard,” says Brown. “I stopped immediately, put the thing on hold, and haven’t looked back yet. This new adventure of the Revolution tour is too intriguing.” Fink was also working on music for a new streaming service in his office/studio when he saw a news report that someone had been found dead at Prince’s Paisley Park complex. “I immediately thought of Prince—but didn’t know for sure—figured ‘no way,’ then found out from a friend in the police department that it was him. My blood ran cold.” Wendy and Lisa are no longer romantically involved, yet remain a duo who score and record soundtracks for film and TV music (they won an Emmy in 2010 for their work on Nurse Jackie ), and happened to be in the studio working on sounds for Jennifer Lopez’s police drama, Shades of Blue , when word of Prince’s demise reached them. “It really didn’t seem possible, a dream perhaps, then—” Coleman trails off. Drawn together for the first time in years (they’ve reunited several times without Prince since he parted ways with the Revolution, the last time being 2012), the three Minnesotans joined Coleman and Melvoin in a hotel room in Minneapolis to “hold each other” (a collective response) and grieve their friend and bandleader. “Things moved so quickly after he died that we weren’t part of any formal ceremony,” notes Melvoin who also claims that the Revolution weren’t about to jump into the myriad tributes to Prince immediately following his passing. “The timing had to be right. It had to be unique and apart from everything else. We had to feel this,” says Fink. Feeling this , uniquely and apart from everything else, is how each player of the Revolution wound up playing at Prince’s command. Technique was needed, but vibe was way more crucial to the then- baby-faced Prince. Everyone is short on dates and specifics but long and deep when it comes to emotional muscle memory. Mark Brown laughs at how absolutely raw he was when he got to Prince, and how the guitarist—a notoriously demanding taskmaster who shifted tempos, literally, with a drop of a handkerchief—would command precision while insisting each player to be themselves and push him. “When I came on board, André had already been with him for a minute and played bass a certain way,” says Brown. “Prince never said why he hired me after all those other auditions, but I think it’s because I was primal, that I had that Sly and the Family Stone rumble. He wanted someone who could play like him, but he also wanted someone who could take him higher, push him, help him to evolve.” Once Prince trusted that you had your sound and direction toward inventiveness and vibe down cold, he was set free to create, “to dress up whatever he wanted on guitar,” stresses Brown. “That was his focus.” Bobby Z. was working as a studio drummer at producer Chris
Moon’s Moon Sound Studios in Minneapolis when Prince recorded his earliest tracks there in the late ’70s. Moved by what he heard and witnessed from the young artist (“The first time I met him, he seemed truly mysterious, reptilian even”), Bobby Z. purposely went to work for Prince’s first manager, Owen Husney, and quickly became Prince’s “driver, gofer, and seeing-eye dog” during the daytime and jamming partner during the nights. “I wore him down, or he wore me down,” Z. says and laughs. “He never slept.” Two years of driving and schlepping paid off: Bobby became Prince’s official drummer and the first real Revolution member. Coleman’s story of how she got to Prince—then eventually dragged her then-girlfriend Melvoin into the fold—is far funnier when told in full. “He already had a female in his band [Gayle Chapman] in 1979, but their personal relationship was falling apart, so she left.” Like Dez, Chapman was religious and probably didn’t dig simulating fellatio during “Head” while onstage. “Yet, he still wanted a woman in the band,” says Coleman. “That was a big part of his vision. I’m still in high school, mind you—just graduating—and my best friend happened to get a job with his management in Los Angeles. She tells me about this opening in his band and for me to make a tape of myself, which I had never really done before.” It’s important to note that both of Prince’s non-Minneapolis Revolution members—Wendy and Lisa—were the immensely talented daughters of in-demand L.A. studio musicians and Wrecking Crew members: respectively, pianist Mike Melvoin who played and/ or arranged for Frank Sinatra, John Lennon, and the Jackson 5; and percussionist Gary Coleman who played for Barbra Streisand and Marvin Gaye. “I’ve known Lisa since we were in diapers,” says Melvoin. “I was, however, too young to join her first band with her brothers, Waldorf Salad.” There’s also the fact that Around the World in a Day is littered with members of the Melvoin and Coleman fams, and that Wendy’s twin sister, Susannah, was engaged to Prince in the mid-’80s, allegedly the focus of his “Nothing Compares 2 U.” Of all the interpersonal connections, Brown laughs and says, “It’s like going down a rabbit hole.” Back to Coleman: “I sent this tape to Prince of me singing and playing piano, and he received it on his birthday. Immediately, he sends for me to come to Minneapolis to play. He even picked me up at the airport. Remember, I’m pretty shy. Absolutely, I’m shy, so I probably looked down a lot. Apparently, that bothered Prince on the spot that I wouldn’t look him in the eye. He thought this was so weird that when I got to his house and he pointed for me to go into the basement where the piano was, he jumped on the phone to his management to complain; something like, ‘I don’t know if it’s going to work out with this weirdo.’ Then, as he’s on the phone, he heard me playing, and he told management, ‘Forget that.’ So, I dodged a bullet. I could have been sent home immediately all because I didn’t look at him.” The eccentric Prince and the overly demanding Prince rarely come into play during these conversations. What did come to pass was the discussion of image—the questionable notions of sexual preference, the androgynous manner of glam Victoriana that was his costuming— when it came to being onstage, as well as being “the movie band,” says Brown, referring to Purple Rain . “People really found us with that film,” he says. “We became superstars just like Prince.” In many ways, what would become the visual image of the Revolution came naturally, and in league with who each player was. “I never saw someone who looked like a doctor, moved like a robot, and played like a demon,” says Bobby Z. of Fink, who adds, “Doctor Fink is a character role that I came up with back in 1980. I was always happy with being the guy in scrubs, because Prince loved it and the scrubs are comfortable onstage. Even now, on tour, I will always be the Doctor.”
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The iconic Purple Rain –era Prince and the Revolution. Photo by Larry Williams, courtesy of Warner Bros.
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