Prince:
U.S. Tour November 1982-March 1983
Rolling Stone, June 4th, 1987

On the evening of March 28th, 1983, three of the most distinguished stars in modem pop appeared at the Universal Amphitheater, in Los Angeles. Two of them, Bruce Springsteen and Stevie Wonder, were there for the show. The third, Prince, was the show.

That night - and every night during the five-month-long 1999 tour - Prince opened the show with his song "Controversy," dancing across an eight-foot-high catwalk, cast in sultry silhouette against giant Venetian blinds with his guitar hanging gunslinger style at his side. With long, curly forelocks dangling over his right eye, he slid down a fire pole in his violet trench coat to belt out "Let's Work" and made love to an invisible partner on a huge brass bed for the orgasmic finale of "International Lover." Amid billowing clouds of smoke and the funky metal thunder of his five-piece band, the purple potentate of party rock also did James Brown splits, cooed sweet nothings in a tingly Smokey Robinson falsetto and torched his message of world peace and steamy sex with explosive Hendrixian lead guitar.

Prince would not firmly establish his chart dynasty until 1984, with the Purple Rain movie and soundtrack album. But drummer Bobby Z, who recorded and toured with Prince until last year, maintains that the 1999 tour "was the setup for a major victory. It was a small battle that led to a major international conflict." In the wake of the 1999 shows, Prince's album of the same name went platinum and begat two Top Ten hits, "Little Red Corvette" and "Delirious."

The 1999 revue, which featured Prince's proteges the Time and his lingerie-clad girl group Vanity 6, also became a kind of traveling laboratory in which Purple Rain was eventually hatched. "From the beginning of that tour, the film was in planning;' says guitarist Dez Dickerson, who left Prince's band before filming started. Screenwriters accompanied Prince on the road throughout the tour, Dickerson says, and bits and pieces of Purple Rain songs could be heard during sound checks.

The staging of 1999 live - especially the suggestive use of silhouetting during "Controversy" and the mattress-humping climax to "International Lover" - provided a particularly revealing look at Prince's sharp dramatic instincts. According to Roy Bennen, Prince's production designer since the 1981 Dirty Mind tour, "He wants to keep that street-level soul in his performance, but he wants to make a big production out of it at the same time." Bennett notes that Prince came up with the brass-bed idea for "International Lover" after he nixed Bennett's original suggestion - a first-class airplane seat, reclined back, with a real woman in it, ready for the taking. "Prince felt we had to be careful not to be so suggestive that it would upset people," Bennett says. "He'd be the one to say we had to be careful about going too far."

In addition, Prince had all of the shows on the 1999 tour videotaped. Each night on the tour bus, he would screen the video of the evening's performance and, if necessary, hold a post-mortem with the band (Dickerson, Bobby Z, bassist Mark Brown and keyboard players Lisa Coleman and Matt Fink).

Bobby Z says that there was a warm, familial air backstage and on the road: "That was definitely a laughing tour. There were a lot of good jokes." On the last date, at Cincinnati's Riverfront Coliseum, Prince's band engaged the Time in an epic food fight that started during the Time's set - We had cans of shaving cream that we fired at them," says Dickerson - and continued backstage before turning into full-scale war at the hotel

Dickerson claims, however, that the accelerating success of the 1999 album and tour created noticeable tension within the Prince camp. Part way through the tour, Prince rented his own separate tour bus. And Dickerson complains of "a lot of unhealthy attitudes. The band stayed the same, but it was all this extra stuff, the cats around us."

Yet with each passing show, there was no question that the world was finally ready to party with Prince all the way to 1999. Dickerson fondly recalls the few minutes of every night "that passed between leaving the dressing room and walking out to the stage, hearing the sound of the crowd screaming for us. That's not something that was unique to this tour, but there was an intensity to it that we'd never experienced before. We could see we were at a turning point."