coveted that. She was—and is—so good and so singular. He loved that.” Coleman appreciates the praise, calls herself “a classically trained hippie with an experimental jazz streak,” and mentions how she could either move toward something avant-garde (“He counted on me to do the unexpected”) or something deeply funky and righteously repetitious. “It was weird hearing that I was good with the groove, but that was necessary for us to be so around him. I remember one night at the end of “Controversy,” jamming so hard and good, that we hit a height of perfection that made me cry—hysteria or joy that I felt as if I would explode, a whirling dervish high, a runner’s high where everything floats effortlessly. We could play an eight-bar groove for hours while he worked out his guitar lines, playing with his microphone, or even his dance steps. We were like a machine. We became integral to every aspect of him.” This is where the problems may have come in for the Revolution, as with such dizzying heights—artistically and commercially after the mega-platinum success of Purple Rain —to maintain, Prince may have balked at going forward. “He definitely got bored of having to play Purple Rain all the time, which is why he released Around the World in a Day so soon during that tour,” recalls Brown of the psych-pop effort, quick to share that ninety-eight percent of its tracks had already been recorded immediately following those of Purple Rain . “You could tell he was in a hurry after going back-to-back with Rain , World , and Parade ,” says Z., who believes that Prince just wanted to move beyond whatever he was doing by any and all means necessary. “I think he was sick of his sound. Or bored.” “Lisa’s harmonic conflicts started getting more twisted, clusters of notes start getting lovelier and not ugly sounding—she changed him,” says Melvoin, hanging in mid-air. Were things getting too intense with Prince too reliant on the Revolution? “He never confided that in me,” says Fink. “Prince didn’t discuss much with me beyond music. However, I did try to dissuade him from going ahead with any wrong decisions like busting up the Revolution. Unbeknownst to me at that time, Mark Brown had already decided to leave the group in order to pursue a solo career and had signed to Motown Records.” Coleman believes that intensity of the Revolution may have just caught up to him unexpectedly, “because we had talked about doing so much more as a unit in the future.” She understands artistic restlessness and Prince’s relationship to stretching his boundaries. “We were so mutually involved in everything, on such even footing and moving forward, that there was no moving backwards—not for him, not for us. We were equals and were going to move forward in every way, or he could just fire us all and play with musicians he could control completely.” Without raising her voice, Coleman seems sad and angry at any notion of going backwards—not the lingerie or the show-business aspect of Prince’s past endeavors. “He worried about that because he loved the show-biz aspect of it all, and we weren’t trying to be outrageous anymore,” says Coleman. “We were maturing, and my level of outrageousness was focused more on the musical, on that level of theatricality. What Prince wanted to do was get theatrical, but not so much musically, and certainly without us. And maybe I don’t blame him. It was a show-biz decision. Look, the Revolution maintained purity and naïveté because Prince was all we knew. We started with Prince at a young age, and developed our egos and thick skins with him. We earned it—any other band that came after us, well, it was cake for them. Prince knew that in the Revolution he had a mirror that showed no other—that reflected him in every way. Maybe he just got tired of what he saw.” .
Brown likens what the Revolution was to Prince was like actors in a film, and not necessarily Purple Rain . To Prince, “I think [we] were like the cast of the original Star Wars with a Han Solo, a Princess Leia, [and] someone had to be a Chewbacca,” he laughs. “He had us blocked and staged in his imagination.” With Melvoin and Coleman, things were trickier when it came to assigning roles that could involve skimpy, sheer lingerie. “Hmm, assigned probably isn’t the right word,” notes Melvoin. “He had a strong relationship to his own ideas of being a ‘rock star.’ He did, however, put the Revolution together and chose each one of us, not because we were a blank canvas. Each of us came to the table with self-possession and strong personalities. Sonically and visually, I believe Prince knew that we were all aspects of himself. Musically, though, that translated in a singular way when playing together. I might never have been comfortable with wearing lingerie, but I was comfortable being his female counterpart onstage. That was important to him.” Coleman wasn’t exactly thrilled with the notion of teddies and garter belts (“I thought a bra, no shirt, and a jacket was sexy enough— funky, progressive, and risqué”), but did appreciate the outrageousness of it all. “That was a challenge though, to nudge each of us out of our comfort zone while highlighting who we were,” she says. “He pushed and pushed to see how far he could go, how far we could go, and that put fire and energy into everything we did.” That Melvoin and Coleman were a gay couple, was—as Lisa noted previously—the cherry atop the icing of a very sexy sundae. With audiences already wondering if Prince was gay (“He loved that part of his mystique,” notes Coleman), having lesbian musicians coupled up in the Revolution was something to take advantage of. “We were so embracing and validating of his way in the world that [our relationship] created a beautiful atmosphere for him to be whoever and whatever he wanted to be,” states Melvoin. “It had to be a happy accident for him—like, ‘Wow, this is my whole Black-White, male-female, gay-straight philosophy come to life,” says Coleman. “That he had two women that were gay in his band was as if he had the jackpot.” Melvoin goes beyond the gay and color spectrum to include her own Jewishness into the mix of being part of a crazy, hungry group of misfits, not unlike Fleetwood Mac, Prince’s ideal band model. According to Bobby Z., “When we first started at Warner [Bros.], they sent us all its product, and he really focused on that married-divorced, man-woman model. He got his Fleetwood Mac in us.” Fink goes on to say that, along with the music, Prince wished to pursue the notion of inclusivity and harmony. “For all his reliance on kink, he wanted to put that societal notion forward, that this rainbow nation was his playground.” Each Revolution member can easily focus on his or her favorite, most challenging musical moments: Melvoin selecting “When Doves Cry” for its complexity, Fink choosing “Purple Rain” for its epic emotionality, Z. mentioning “Darling Nikki” because its rhythmic interplay was nearly impossible to tackle onstage, and Brown fingering “Alexa De Paris,” because it was “a baaaaaaaad song that proved all we could do.” What each member agreed upon, however—almost at once—was Coleman’s sound and how it was so devastatingly original (“She was like a butterfly flitting,” says Fink) that it frustrated Prince like no one else could. “Because he couldn’t ever do what she did,” laughs Melvoin. “He could do what rest of us did, kick our ass, and out-do us a hundred times over. Not Lisa. Lisa is a very tricky musician. She didn’t study how to be Herbie Hancock, Arthur Rubenstein, or Sly Stone on the Hammond. She was just Lisa, studied only Lisa. And Prince could never approach or emulate or touch that. He had to admit that. He
47
Made with FlippingBook - PDF hosting