The performance was captured by David Z, who had pursued a career as a songwriter and recording artist in Los Angeles, but had returned to his native Minneapolis as an engineer and producer. Another argument for the live recording is that several of these tracks would be featured as live performances in the film Purple Rain, taking place in the same club. The cheers, clapping and whistles are all present on the extended coda of the album version, which runs close to nine minutes long. The premise was a benefit for the Minneapolis Dance Company, which assured a relatively weak turnout and a manageably sized audience that would provide the intimacy and immediacy that would electrify the recordings without going over the brink to mark it as a live concert recording. The First Avenue club in downtown Minneapolis had been the locus of the city’s bubbling music scene, a career crucible for acts including The Replacements, Soul Asylum and Hüsker Deü, as well as Prince, who headlined there, riding on early hits like “Dirty Mind.” (Minneapolis was a fairly progressive place, but most local black artists, including Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, preferred a venue called the Nacirema Club - “American” spelled backward.) Instead of taking the new songs into the studio, Prince instead opted to do them as a live recording. Prince’s rocket would be fired from an odd launching pad.

gave Prince the creative and economic momentum to propel him for the next quarter-century. The combination of a slate of brand-new songs that meshed R&B, soul, pop and hard rock with a reinvigorated band, The Revolution - featuring Lisa Coleman and Wendy Melvoin (who would go on to their own music and scoring successes as Wendy and Lisa, aka Girl Bros. But as emotionally wrenching as “Purple Rain” is, in all of its incarnations, the track was the nose cone of a very precisely guided missile assembled by Prince - who had already had chart successes with hit singles like “1999,” “Little Red Corvette” and “Delirious.” It was very deliberately intended to take him to true superstardom, and it worked. The film of the same name still lands in most Top Ten lists of music-themed movies, and it graphically fills in the details of family strife and artistic angst painted by the song’s sparse lyrics.

“Purple Rain” was destined to be a Number One single and would pull its eponymously named soundtrack LP to the same position on the album charts when it was released on June 25, 1984. This year marks the 25th anniversary of the track that is, perhaps, most emblematic of the entire Minneapolis music scene.

Westlake audio studio manager 1978