Prince's bass player BrownMark takes us inside the Purple Rain tour, the hysteria of the hit movie, choreography onstage with The Revolution and wardrobe disagreements with the boss. We also get a unique insight into the recording process of one of Prince's most famous songs - "Kiss". Essential listening for fans and music lovers.
Summary, themes and chapters
1mins - Memories of First Avenue and the debut performances of Purple Rain.
5mins - Choreographing Prince & The Revolution and the changing face of the band.
8mins - Movie premieres, wardrobe disagreements, concerts and 'craziness'.
11mins - Prince and poducer bands: Mazarati; The Time; Vanity 6 and The Family.
13mins30s - 'Too much too young is not a good thing' - the pressures of stardom on tour.
18mins - The full story of how one of Prince's most famous songs was recorded.
24mins15s - Being fined for missing notes, and working for one of music's most demanding bandleaders.
27mins - Meeting the expected standards, and the parting of the ways.
Mark was still a teenager when he joined Prince's band to play bass. A key member of Prince and the Revolution, early gigs saw him supporting The Rolling Stones before going on to be part of Prince's 1999, Purple Rain and Parade tours. He left the purple kingdom in the mid 1980s for a solo career with Motown records, before later going back to what he described as a normal life. Mark is also known for his work with the group Mazarati and still tours with the Revolution to this day.
Last year he documented his formative years in the book Inside the Purple Kingdom. Mark Welcome.
Thank you for having me.
The Purple Rain album, large chunks of it, were actually live takes of songs that were performed in a club in Minneapolis called First Avenue in 1983. That performance, understandably given that Purple Rain became such a cultural phenomenon, has become a kind of myth and legend. You rehearsed a massive amount of material and you were often thrown in at the deep end. What are your memories both leading up to that concert and the actual night itself?
Prince was always recording. We had recording trucks that followed us around every day at sound check. I played Purple Rain so much I could be sleeping and playing, I could go in the lunch room and make a sandwich and be playing it. We played it so much that it was second nature to us. We could be playing a game of chess while playing that song and, and he would constantly record because you never knew where the magic was going to come from. So what Prince was notorious for doing is constantly recording, and this keyboard park might have come from a whole different recording from a different time. Or this bass part might have come from a different recording, from a different time because it's all multi tracking and you can fly, chop cut, slice through whatever you want and manipulate it once you have it. And a lot of times he would go into the studio and redo a lot of parts. So, I think First Avenue was definitely the trial to get the crowd's response on this new music. And I definitely think First Avenue was the trial to expose the Prince world to Wendy, the new member of the band, to see how they were going to take her...and they loved her. Girl power man, her and Lisa came in and they just became like an item on that tour and that whole concept was marketing genius. It was excellent the way he took that whole Wendy and Lisa thing and branded it. So I think First Avenue was just the testing ground to see how it was going to work, and what needed improvement, versus what didn't need improvement. Because if you listen to the solos and even some of the breakdowns, it was different in the First Avenue version in comparison to the album. They're not the same. So I know that's what a lot of journalists and a lot of people want to believe, but it's just not true. It was the foundation, definitely. But that music comes from a lot of different recordings, and we did a lot.
I watched a bit of the Live in 1985 concert. I think it was one of the official releases from the Purple Rain tour and it's really striking how hard the band works - because you're all dancing in unison and you're doing all this incredible stuff. You know you're all moving in motion to Let's Go Crazy and I forget which song it was Mark, but there's this incredible thing where you're sort of dancing, almost like popping your bass. You do this thing with your bass, like you flick it around your neck or something. It's hard for me to describe, but if people have seen the concert, they'll know what I'm talking about. You know, I didn't realize, it's only recently when I was reading up about you and discovering that you actually had some input into the choreography for those shows and that, Prince would sometimes ask your opinion on such things. What's your brief reflection on that, because I think that's quite interesting.
I will set another record straight. I did all the choreography for Prince and The Revolution period. I never choreographed Prince, you know, who can choreograph Prince? But Prince like the way I danced and played, so he asked me from the point where The Revolution really started in '83-84 when Dez left and Wendy came on board. He asked me specifically to choreograph the band and he said he wanted everybody moving. And so I would create these dances that were really simple. At first they were very difficult and you know, they couldn't catch on. So I had to create movement that was really simple, but from an audience perspective it would look really cool, and in uniform - and then Prince would yay or nay it. He would come in and 90% of the time he was like, oh that's dope, that's dope, okay, okay. 'Show me how you do that, show me what we're doing', and then I would teach it to him, and then he would take it to a whole other level, you know. Prince always had to be on top, so he would take it to a whole 'nother level, and it looked so awesome from the audience perspective. And then he would have Roy Bennett, the lighting director, choreograph the lighting according to the movement. So everything was choreographed in our show, when you came to see us, everything was choreographed - all the way down to every light spinning or something you know? And so yeah, contrary to popular belief, no, Prince did not choreograph his band, Brown Mark did. Prince choreographed Prince, and fell in step with what the band was doing. That's what made it so powerful. Again, it was a work of unity. You know, it was a collaboration, my style with his style and that's what made that stuff work. And even a lot of stuff I remember, he used to give a lot of dance steps to The Time. I would be doing a dance step, you know, and next thing you know I'd go to The Time's rehearsal, and I was like -'you just took that' - and he had The Time stepping, you know. So these concepts came from me early on when I got in the band.
I guess the Purple Rain Tour was your Beatlemania moment. Are there any experiences, or is there one moment around the Purple Tour that sums up the whole craziness of that experience, of packed out stadiums, the group selling multi platinum albums, and you had a movie out. What are the things that, when you reflect on it, really sum it up?
That was a weird time period. I think it was more the movie and the Premiers, the after parties - that's where you really saw the craziness. But when it came to actually the concert itself, it was the pinnacle. We had Wendy now, and it was a whole different element - the audience reaction was phenomenal because for most of the people in the audience, this was the first time that they'd ever seen Prince. See from the 1999 album, I would say Little Red Corvette moving forward, that was a whole new audience. That was a whole new audience from the audience we were used to. And so when Wendy came on, that's all they knew - a lot of people didn't know who Dez (Dickerson) was from that point on, because Wendy kind of filled in that slot and it was girl power, you know. It's like, whoa, you know, there's a girl in the band, dressing sexy and she's getting down, you know. So you know, the whole concept shift and then Prince started paying more attention to the female element. And so everything started to change as far as our live performance, and even what it looked like. So as far as the craziness, and you know, that pinnacle of success, I saw it more in the movie frenzy than I did in the concerts. In terms of the tour we only went on the road for less than six months, I mean, he pulled it off, but then he was bored and we had been working on this album for three years. He was done and he pulled that whole tour and I was like - wait a minute, this is a world tour! We could go around the world and then some with this, this right here. But he was bored. He was like, no, no, we're going to do something bigger and better. And he had this whole Under The Cherry Moon thing, and he was already working on this Beatles thing, you know, Around The World In A Day and all this craziness. And had us dressing up like the Beatles. He he actually had me in wardrobe, trying to fit me in, what do they call it? Waste-less hip huggers. Hip huggers! Can you believe that? I'm a dude. He had me in hip huggers and they were making hip huggers for me, but you know my butt was too big. I ripped right out of the things. You know I was like, no this ain't working bro. Yeah man, and in the front the cut was so low, you know you can see my pubic hair! So I was like no man I can't wear this, and then they had these big bell bottoms. He said no you just put a chain around your waist and it'll be sexier. I was like, look man you do that, let me put some real pants on. So you know we had wardrobe fights all the time man, everything was changing. He was on to a whole 'nother trip.
In the early eighties - people who've read up about Prince and followed his career - will know that he was very interested in writing music for other groups. So The Time were a well known rival from back in the Minneapolis days, you had Vanity 6, Apollonia 6, The Family obviously, and working with you guys in The Revolution. And I know that you worked with, and were a founder member of the group Mazarati.
I had Mazarati, Georgio Allentini, I worked with Troop, I had a whole bunch of bands that I was trying to form. And to your observation there about Prince, he and I had all different bands. It's the only way to get it out your head - all that music - you got to get it out. And especially when you start dabbling in different genres. It's like I just put together a group, just put together a band - they were called producer bands back then. And that's what we would do. We would put together producer bands. They didn't really have a group, but we made it look like a group. It was really us doing all the music. I, you know, I played drums like Prince, I play keyboards, guitar, bass, and so we would do producer bands. We did all the music and just put faces in front of it and then sold it to the record label. That that's how it was done. And it's a way to get all of that out of your head so that you can move forward with what you want to do. And so that's what Prince did with The Time. That was his funk side. He knew he didn't want to go funky, he wanted to go rock, pop rock. So let me create The Time and that's my funk. You know let me create Vanity 6 and all these sexy songs that won't work for me, I'm gonna put on them, you know, and that's what he would do. That's where all these groups came from, The Family, and then he started producing people like the Bangles and all kinds of folks.
You mentioned The Time there, and you went on tour with Prince and The Time. I think the perception of Prince publicly is that he was a pretty clean living guy, but you mentioned in your book that there was a moment where you were very, very young and stardom was thrust upon you. I just wondered if some of the guys in the band either drank or took drugs, how did the pressure kind of manifest itself? I know that you kind of had a little bit of a moment with the pressure of just so much success so young.
I learned at a very young age that too much is not good. It made me understand, especially rich kids, a lot of your rich Hollywood kids that come up in movies, kids that come up with that fame and stardom. I really realised the struggle because I was only 19 years old when I joined the band, and it was just in my face. By the time I was 21/22 I was dealing with, you know, a million dollar bank accounts and fancy cars and the whole shot - not from Prince, but from my own hustle. I learned how to really dig into the industry and find the pockets that made the money. But what came with that is a lot of just, a lot of chaos, absolute chaos because you when you're young your mind is not ready for that kind of management of affairs. And so when you have groupies and you have fans and you have managers and business people, executives all coming at you from different angles, wow. You know, you you realize that you got some power. There was one point where I was like, I could go into a restaurant and I could control the narrative. I remember once, to give you an example, the uh Timberwolves frequented a restaurant I frequented, and I'll never forget when all the players came in this specific time. They were at my table, I had my own booth in the back, because I was a regular and it was my booth. They would move people from my booth when I showed up. That's the power of celebrity. See the Timberwolves with the some of the players are sitting there, I walk in and they say, oh mr Brown, okay, hold on a second. And they went and they moved them, they moved them out of my table and resat them. So when I came in to sit down they came over and shook my hand and stuff. They said we were wondering who's coming in here that we're getting moved from the table, we're the Timberwolves, you know? And we're getting moved from our table, so we were like, who the heck is this walking up in here? And then they saw it was me. And so it's insight in the world of celebrity, where you really start to hold a lot of power and you can abuse it, or you can use it to the benefit of others, you know. I think with Prince and the Revolution some of the other guys couldn't handle that as well as some of the others, you know. And then you start drinking, you start doing dope, you know cocaine. Some of the other things that started showing up on the tour, I knew about them only because of my position with security. They were most of my friends, most of the security I grew up with. I got them hired and so I knew all the inside stuff. I knew all the junk that was going on in the background. There was a lot of drugs floating around. A lot of drugs. Fortunately I never got into the drugs but I really got into, you know I started drinking a lot. I had to become sober because I really got strung out with the alcohol abuse. Some of the others, you know, a little too much powder in the nose. And I know Prince had struggled after I left with substance abuse, I'm not sure what he was using, but he was able to clean himself up. When I was in the band Prince was clean, he didn't do anything.
There's a myth and a legend around the song Kiss. Rather than me ask you a long winded question I think the leap off point is, did Mazarati write the song Kiss? And can you tell us the story in brief, of the evolution of that song?
It's a simple story - here it goes for the record - because you know, there's a lot of stories out there. Prince gave me a cassette tape with an acoustic guitar on it, and he was singing, he almost sounded like bob Dylan. I mean it was like (sings) '...you don't have to be beautiful, to undress me...', that's how it went. And I was like, dude what do you want me to do with this? He said it will be different. It would be different for them (Mazarati). You know, they need a song like this. And I said 'no they don't'. And so me and him went back and forth with that. And he said just do it. Just try it. I said okay, okay, because you can't say no to Prince, He's gonna keep hounding you. So I said okay. I took it in the studio, me and Dave Rifkin, because he was my engineer at the time. And I said, I can't do nothing with this. I said I got to funk this up. I gotta put some brown stank on it. So I came up with the drums first. You know I played the cassette and I was like okay wait a minute. That feels good. Right? So I laid the drumbeat and then I grabbed my bass and I put this rumble on it, you know I got my little rumble technique. Bassline went (sings) so I was like, okay, now we got something popping. Now it started to feel good, right? And then there was this keyboard program on the DX7 that I loved and it's called the log drum. And so you know, (sings again). So it felt good. And so I started putting that in there, and then I called Screamer - he was the guitar player for Mazarati. I called him in to lay the acoustic guitar down, you know the way Prince did? It was so boring, it wrecked the whole groove, it ruined it. So Dave Rivkin had this great idea to key pax it and a key pax is a gated unit that you trigger things off of. So he put the hi-hat part into the key pax as the trigger, and we filtered the guitar into the key pax. And so the outcome was that it did that (sings the beat of the song Kiss and the drums/bass) thing that made the song so distinctive. We were like, this is the bomb. And then the next day we call the guys and do some background vocals. Prince walked in and he heard that you know, and he was like - 'Mark, where are you going?', I said 'I'm about to go on dinner break'. Prince said - 'I'm just gonna do some work on it...and when you get back', he said 'just come see me'. He took the whole reel off of the two reel, he took it and he was in studio. I come back about 3-4 hours later, and he's like, I saw that smirk on his face and he was like, 'come in the studio I want you to hear something'. And he said, 'sit down, sit down'. And I sat down, and I was like, what's going on? He said, you know, it's a good song but you know I think it would be better for 'us'. And I was like, 'us?', 'what do you mean us?'. You 'ain't never said us before, what are you talking about us? So you mean to tell me that you want to put this on Prince and The Revolution and I'm gonna get some writing credit? And he said, 'yeah, you know I'll take care of you', and I was like, mmm okay, let me hear it (sings intro). And then all of a sudden his voice came in, I was like, oh, that's it. I knew it was a hit, an instant hit. It wouldn't have been a hit on the Mazarati album. It would have been a great song, but it wouldn't have been a hit. It was Prince's sexuality that made that song work. And so I knew it was a hit instantly. And I had to go back and tell the guys we lost the song and that didn't sit well with them. You know, they really got angry because I mean, it was banging. I think Questlove, you know, Ahmir who does the Jimmy Fallon show, the drummer from The Roots? He's a DJ. He has the original version, and he plays it all the time, the Mazarati version. And so you can hear that it was banging back then. So you can hear that. It's pretty much the same song. Just a little more rhythmic. But when Prince put his thing on it you know, we knew we lost it, and we weren't getting it back. And that's how the song Kiss was born.
And now we're going to have the audio to prove it forever Mark! That's the good news. Now listen, I wanted to ask you a question about Prince as a bandleader. If you love music and you've watched some of your performances, you mentioned James Brown as one of the all time greats. You see footage of you playing in The Revolution where Prince calls out 'give me 25' and the band will have to give him 25 hits. I just wondered, James Brown was famous for fining his bands, you know, docking them money. Was Prince mean to you for missing notes or were you ever fined or anything like that? What were the worst things that he would do as a band leader?
He was beyond mean when it came to that. I mean, I've talked to some of the other band members just to find out how he treated them and you know, they all said they would get fines and stuff, but he would never take the money. He took the money from me! See when I got fined, he took the money. That's where half of my rumble technique came from. I learned to ghost note. I really learned how to ghost note so that I wouldn't get caught off guard, because sometimes I did not hear him or see him when he would say, you know, jam in B flat. I didn't hear that. All I heard was 'jam!' so I would just start rumbling. It didn't matter what key I was in, I would just start rumbling and nobody knew, and then once I was in the groove I would listen so that I could hear what key they were in. Then I could fall right in the pocket, but I had to do that to keep from getting fined so much, because you know I'm the bottom end and believe me if I made a mistake, he heard it. Sometimes he would throw up three fingers which means "bam-bam-bam!", but from my angle I only saw two fingers so you know I would hit it twice, and then everybody else in the band would hit that third note. But because I was rumbling he didn't know if I was hitting it or not. So I had to learn ways to keep from getting fined. We were on tour and we were learning new stuff at sound check, and I remember once I lost a week's pay. It was over $1200 I lost in fines because I just kept messing up and boom, he was just on a roll that week. So yeah, Prince Prince fined you...don't let anybody tell you different. That joker could fine you. Some people's memories don't serve them well, but when that money comes out of your pocket, my memory is very clear.
I read an interview on Rolling Stone's website with Levi Seacer Jnr who played with Prince in the later years, after your good self. And he said in the article that Prince could play exactly like the record and beyond. And if you couldn't do that then you wouldn't get a plane ticket to join the band, or, you'd have to get a plane ticket home. When you joined the band was Prince quite clear early on, on the sort of standards that he expected - and how difficult was it to match those standards of playing?
I never had that problem with Prince. You know it's interesting because Levi was on guitar and I was supposed to be the bass player, and Sheila E was the drummer. And then of course Miko Weaver on guitar too. I turned it down because I was at that point in my career with Prince where I was done. You know, I mean, he had made so many promises that he broke that I, you know, enough was enough for me. We were still cool with each other, but it's just you know, I had to depart. I noticed though when he put that group together they were a very talented group of musicians, but very controlled by him. They didn't really have the freedom we had in The Revolution. In The Revolution we were able to create, we became part of the creation of the sound. Sign of the times was, I'd say, almost 50-60% The Revolution. But you could tell he made that shift back to being a solo artist, where in The Revolution it was Prince and The Revolution. It was a band like Fleetwood Mac or Sly and The Family Stone. So it was a different concept, and because it was a different concept the attitude was different as far as our ability to play and learn things. If there was a song that we were writing we all wrote it together, and a lot of people don't understand that. A lot of the stuff from The Revolution days was stuff we all wrote. You know, he just took the credit for it of course because he was the boss, and that's just how it ended up in the end. But we all contributed to these recordings and that's why it sounds the way that it does. With the N.P.G. (New Power Generation), it was more, okay learn this part, so I think that's probably what Levi was talking about - you had to play it the way you received it. He didn't want all of this fancy stuff, fancy licks and things. He didn't care how good you were, he wanted to just keep it basic, keep it simple. I hope that answers your question.
Join us in part three where Mark talks about going back to a normal life, shares his favourite memories of Prince, and their final conversation. Hit subscribe for future episodes, and follow us on Instagram at SJBLee. You can also listen to the show on Apple podcasts, Spotify or Amazon Music.