[troutman]

Bobby Z shares his Purple Rain memories on the album’s 30th anniversary

http://blog.thecurrent.org/2014/06/b...h-anniversary/

It was 30 years ago today that Prince and his band the Revolution released Purple Rain, still the best-selling album to come out of Minnesota. The record came out just over a month before the film of the same name would hit theaters, and the singles “When Doves Cry and “Let’s Go Crazy” quickly climbed to the top of the charts.

Few would argue that the album not only propelled Prince to his highest level of fame but also attracted attention to his hometown of Minneapolis, so much so that the style of music played on Purple Rain became one of the most clear-cut examples of his famed “Minneapolis Sound.” But what exactly was it about the nine tracks on Purple Rain that made the album so iconic?

“I think he was really ahead of what the ‘80s were about to become,” says Revolution drummer Bobby Rivkin, who is known on stage as Bobby Z. Rivkin was responsible for performing some of the most compelling and forward-thinking rhythms of Prince’s early compositions, and he’s helped to carry the Minneapolis Sound torch forward with his now-annual Benefit 2 Celebrate Life fundraising concert that takes over First Avenue this Saturday.

“The Minneapolis Sound is very simply Prince,” Rivkin says. “And the discovery he made of synthesizers doing horn parts—taking synthesizers and giving those horn stabs like what James Brown used to do with horns. When you think of the ‘80s, the horn stabs and the punches were done on these Oberheims and all these cool new synthesizers. Everybody else started imitating it. And that’s what we know now as the Minneapolis Sound: Prince in the studio by himself with drum machines and synthesizers.”