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Revolution members reflect on pop’s Prince

By Greg Kot, Chicago Tribune
Published: April 22, 2017, 6:00am

Friday marked the one-year anniversary of Prince’s death, and the band with whom he worked most closely in his 1980s heyday, the Revolution, is still reeling from it.

The musicians — guitarist Wendy Melvoin, keyboardist Lisa Coleman, drummer Bobby Z, keyboardist Matt Finks and bassist Brown Mark — have reunited for a tour to celebrate their friend’s music, but it’s also part of their grieving process.

“It’s our shiva,” Melvoin says. When the quintet did three tribute shows in September at First Avenue in Minneapolis, where they recorded most of the soundtrack for “Purple Rain” with Prince in 1984, “the first night was devastatingly depressing. By night three there were smiles, you could feel a weight being lifted from the room. Then we walked off stage, collapsed into each other’s arms and wept.”

At 57, Prince was known for clean living, but suffered from chronic hip pain. He began using a potent painkiller, fentanyl. On April 21, 2016, he was found dead in his Paisley Park recording studio.

Though the members of the Revolution had not worked with Prince in decades, they remain the band that he called his personal “Mount Rushmore,” Z says, because of the critical role they played as musicians and even songwriters during his creative peak, 1980 to ’87. In separate interviews, Melvoin, who has been successfully collaborating with Coleman as Wendy and Lisa on TV and movie scores for decades, and Z, who began working with Prince in the ’70s and remained one of his most trusted confidants, discussed his death and how they processed it. Here are some edited highlights of those conversations:

Melvoin: No one saw it coming. I was in my backyard on the phone with NBC and I was getting ready to fly to New York. And then the phone goes “ding ding,” and it’s Bobby and he says, “Prince is gone.” I went from this mood of happiness to, “I have to go.” I conferenced in Mark, Lisa and Matt, and we conferred with and consoled each other. We all went to Minneapolis two days later. At least 100,000 people were outside First Avenue and on the street.

Z: We knew then that playing was going to be part of our recovery, grief and mourning. I personally needed time. It was such a huge shift because I’d known him since I was 19 (in 1979). We wanted to start at First Avenue because that was ground zero, it was the mecca that we needed to return to.

Melvoin: (After the First Avenue shows) we got calls from booking agents to do more. Lisa and I have careers in film and TV music, and we each have a kid. We decided after our season with TV this spring, we will do these dates and see what comes of it.

• On the early days of Prince and the Revolution

Z: There was a grand plan. He wanted this band that was his Sly and the Family Stone. He was also paying a lot of attention to Fleetwood Mac. He was very intrigued by Stevie Nicks, the mix of voices. He wanted a band like that. We were a rock band with (early collaborators Dez Dickerson and Andre Cymone, who went on to solo careers), then a multicultural, utopian, uptown, black-white-Puerto Rican thing, and his lyrics came alive. “Purple Rain,” his ultimate song, is the six of us, it works because of that. … He got tired of us because we drove him nuts and he basically became a solo artist after that with a backing band. But when he was in it, he loved it. It challenged him and pushed him.

Melvoin: When Lisa first met him (in 1980), she saw a Barbra Streisand-Kris Kristofferson “A Star is Born” poster on his wall. He had this cheesy, naive, dreamy quality. She was a teenager and already a session musician from LA — we were well-seasoned. Lisa sees this poster and thinks, “What have I got myself into?” And he’s looking at this hippie chick from L.A. and thinks the same thing. Then he hears her play. She had and still has a musical vocabulary that is instinctual to her and unique to her that he could never do. He wanted that badly. What Lisa and I were able to do, we gave him permission not to feel insecure about what he wanted in his life.

Z: The six of us, after going through “Purple Rain,” Prince called us “Mount Rushmore.” There is no way to go through something like that and not feel close forever. It’s like winning a Super Bowl, a major life event so crazy that only six of us knew what really happened. He obviously didn’t like looking back, period. It was always, “Look at what I’m doing now.” Always moving. But for us mere mortals, looking back at these masterpieces that we get to do now in a different way, this music we created with him — it’s something we need to do to heal together.

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