Prince was arguably the most gifted musician of the second half of the last century, but he didn’t make it easy to be a fan.
He’d charged headlong to the top of the charts and pop culture with a hurricane-force level of talent, savvy and ambition, but once “Purple Rain” made him the global superstar he always knew he would be, he started messing with people — especially his newer fans. Sure, he still had massive hit singles — at least for the next few years — but his music and public profile became progressively stranger and harder to connect with until, by the mid-1990s, all but the most devoted fans had given up.
Of course, he changed that narrative later in life, but although many of his ideas were years or even decades ahead of his time — selling music online, digital subscription plans, bundling albums and merchandise with tickets, and most of all, the importance of creators owning the rights to their work — his execution of those ideas was often controversial, confrontational, confused or confusing (or all four). Writing “Slave” on his face and changing his name to an unpronounceable symbol during the 1990s might have been a profound statement on artists’ rights in his mind, but it was nowhere near as understandable to the average human as Taylor Swift’s methodical explanation of the same issue as she fought for ownership of her music 30-odd years later. Prince’s music during those years wasn’t much easier to understand.
But for a few glorious years in the mid-‘80s, his pop instincts and musical innovation were in glorious synch, and that’s the exact period captured in the 1987 “Sign O’ the Times” album and tour, and the concert film of the same name, which is being shown in IMAX theaters for the first time for one week only, starting Friday (August 29).
“Purple Rain” might have been the blockbuster, but this era was the sound and vision of a genius exploring just how far his creativity could go — and you can see him reveling in that creativity in this electrifying document from that 1987 tour, which is almost universally considered one of the greatest concert films ever made. In fact, at the time of its release in 1988, it spawned such overheated press quotes as “This is without a shadow of a doubt the greatest concert movie ever made” and “Makes Michael Jackson look nailed to the floor.”
Why is that, and why is the IMAX version of “Sign O’ the Times” so essential for even casual fans? After all, the film is almost entirely focused on that album — even though he played such classics as “1999,” “Let’s Go Crazy” and “Purple Rain” on this tour, they’re not included in the movie (probably because he’d released a full-length concert video including them just a couple of years earlier). Based on an advance screening in New York last week, there are several reasons: Let us count the ways…
a) First and most importantly: It captures Prince at the absolute peak of his powers as a performer, singer, songwriter and innovator, with one of the greatest bands of his career — notably Sheila E. on drums and vocals, singer/keyboardist Boni Boyer, a horn section and dancer/singer Cat Glover. As always, he reveled in making very difficult things look effortless, peeling off virtuoso guitar or keyboard solos while singing, dancing and conducting the band at the same time. At one point he does a kind of crabwalk on his back across the stage, goes into a full split, then slides back up into a spin; at another, he slides across the floor between the legs of the limber-limbed Glover and pulls off her skirt with his teeth.
Like all Prince concerts, it was an elaborate production, with multiple costume changes — this visual era’s themes included the colors peach and black, peace signs, arrows, hearts and fringe — a multi-level stage and lots of neon lighting.
b) The “Sign O’ the Times” album, more than half of which is performed here, is not only Prince’s creative masterpiece, it has plenty of hits — “U Got the Look” was a No. 1 single, after all — and is a dazzling grand-slam of his talents and versatility. There’s sunny pop in “Play in the Sunshine” and “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man,” funk grind in “”U Got the Look” and “Hot Thing,” current events (and blazing guitar work) in the title track, boisterous R&B in “It’s Gonna Be a Beautiful Night,” and a sort of rock-gospel ballad in “The Cross.”
And even though the album had been out for just a couple of weeks when the shows were filmed, its songs (many of which would not be performed again for years, if at all) take on a new dimension in the live setting. The show starts off with just Prince and Glover performing the title track, but during the martial-drum segment at the end, the vividly costumed bandmembers strut onstage like a marching band, and from there the show’s energy is explosive. The joyous keyboard hook of “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man” sounds even more exuberant when played by his horn section, and “Forever in My Life,” which is just a spare, soulful groove on the album, gets overhauled into an almost gospel raveup in a live setting, complete with churchified testifying from Boyer.
c) The film was out of circulation for decades and hasn’t been widely screened in theaters for almost 40 years. Starting in the 1990s, Prince became so committed to owning and receiving fair compensation for his creative work that he simply took some of it off the market — including this film. After its initial run it was available on VHS and briefly on DVD, but when Prince decided the financial model wasn’t working for him, he simply made it unavailable, along with most of his music videos. In fact, for the first dozen years of YouTube and similar platforms, he employed a legal team to issue takedown notices every time a fan would upload his videos, which meant that those videos and this fantastic film could only be found on old DVDs or virus-laden overseas video platforms. That may have protected his work in some ways, but it also meant that at least two generations of music fans couldn’t see this remarkable film (or countless hours of videos and concert footage) without laborious research.
d) It sounds and looks so much better. The restored sound is glorious, popping out of the speakers with a clarity and punch that previous versions — i.e. VHS and DVD copies and shaky bootleg online footage — can’t touch. And although the film quality of the IMAX version is grainy — it was made in 1987, after all — and toward the very end of the film it seems that some of the source video may have been slightly damaged (you see some speckles, like on old newsreels), that’s a minor quibble — just don’t expect a Peter Jackson level of restoration.
It’s also not 100% a concert film — while the tour’s four final dates were filmed and recorded in June 1987, Prince was apparently unhappy with the much of footage and reshot the entire show at his Paisley Park soundstage with a few hundred extras serving as the audience, so a large percentage of the film is culled from that reshoot. Likewise, there are brief dramatic interludes between some of the songs related to a paper-thin plot about Cat fighting with her boyfriend and pursuing a dalliance with Prince, and the performance of “U Got the Look,” featuring Sheena Easton, is actually a separate music video filmed on the set and inserted into the middle of the concert as a sort of dream sequence.
But will you care much about that while watching the film? Probably not, because…
e) It’s the closest you’ll get to seeing a Prince concert today. There may have been better singers, dancers, instrumentalists, performers and visual artists — but absolutely no one combined those talents as vividly as Prince did. Those of us lucky enough to have seen him at his peak remember how exhilarating — and what a monumental sensory overload — those shows were. Three of these musicians — Glover, Boyer, and of course the man himself — are no longer with us, so it won’t be happening again.
Technology has a long way to go before it can fully recapture the feeling of a Prince concert — but “Sign O’ the Times” comes close …