Forty years ago this summer, Prince scored his first No. 1 album on the Billboard 200. Purple Rain, the soundtrack to his hugely successful film, also earned him a couple of Grammy Awards and an Oscar for best original song score.
In this session, World Cafe correspondent John Morrison talks about the album, and film, that raised Prince’s career to another level and helped build his mythology.
“It’s kind of like a messy, not-so-sympathetic story. It leaves me wondering how much of it is true and how much of it is fiction,” Morrison says.
He also talks about how there’s another timeline, where the titular song isn’t even a Prince song at all.
“Prince originally wrote ‘Purple Rain’ as a country ballad for Stevie Nicks to sing,” he says.
This episode of World Cafe was produced and edited by Kimberly Junod. The web story was created by Miguel Perez. Our engineer is Chris Williams. Our programming and booking coordinator is Chelsea Johnson and our line producer is Will Loftus.