MNPLS PLS

some rambling on the twin cities

Yesterday, while I was busily procrastinating from various things I might’ve been doing otherwise, I came across this website: https://1001albumsgenerator.com. My understanding is that it is a site that has aggregated all of the albums listed in the book “1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.” You sign up for an account and every day, when you visit the site, it will assign you one of these 1,0001 records. The idea, I suppose, is that you will listen to your assigned record and process it in some meaningful way. These sorts of lists, by their very nature, tend to be weird and skewed and subjective — even if they, as this list purports, are designed by a “panel of music critics.” What do music critics really know, amirite? There is something, though, to critical consensus, even it’s only a product of a kind of cultural hive mind, and so I signed up for an account.

My first record, yesterday, was Tres Hombres by ZZ Top. I did as instruced; it was a solid listen, top to bottom. I believe we have a copy of this on vinyl in the Decemberists’ backstage listening rig. The cover was familiar. I grew up hearing Eliminator-era Top around my dad’s house. Like most of his generation, my boomer dad had A+ music taste in the 60s and 70s; things get a little squirrely once he hit the 80s. In the intervening years, I’ve grown to appreciate early ZZ Top; Tres Hombres, as far as I can tell, is the band working at their 70s peak.

Today’s suggestion was Prince’s Purple Rain. This album happens to be the first Christmas gift I independently bought and gave my sister. I’m sure I was given guidance, but I have a distinct memory of picking out the LP from the stacks at Henry J’s, wrapping it, and putting it under the tree. I was ten; I was in 4th grade. My association with this record was that it was naughty, that there was something deeply forbidden inside of it, and that Prince was some kind of sex alien. I never owned the record myself, but I have got to know it pretty intimately by a kind of osmosis from my sister’s playing it around the house and by the fact that most all of the songs became standalone, ubiquitous hits through the 80s. It is a calling card of my generation to be able to recite, word for word (or at least until the music kicks in), the whole preamble at the top of “Let’s Go Crazy:” “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today…” etc etc.

In my adult years, I’ve come around to this album and I’ve learned to get into Prince as an artist — though I would never label myself a fan. It became a curiosity, mostly, that Prince shared hometowns with two of my favorite bands from my teenage years, The Replacements and Hüsker Dü. There is some apocryphal tale that the Replacements threw all of their master tapes into the Mississippi upriver from Paisley Park; they imagined Prince fishing the tapes from the river and learning what “real music is.” Being the snobby, embittered teenaged music fan I was, I ate this up.

My guys

Of course, one ages and begins to appreciate music that one smirked at as a kid. Those Replacements master tapes are shedding their coatings in the mud of the Mississippi and I think Prince was none the wiser of their existence. Purple Rain is a stone-cold classic. My revelations about the record listening to it this morning are chiefly this:

• It is super weird.

• Sonically, it holds up! The drum sounds, the sort of thing that usually relegates a record to the garbage dump of history, certainly have that 80s sheen to them, but there’s a lot of other, wild stuff going on. I can imagine someone listening to “When the Doves Cry” through studio monitors in 1984 and *losing their minds*. It sounds like the future.

• I always thought the line in “Darling Nikki” was Nikki started to “cry” and not “grind.” All these years. Mishearing it as “cry” did not serve to make the song less naughty-feeling — rather, it seemed strange and beguiling. What was going on with Nikki? Why this veil-thin separation between sexuality and despair? TBH, “grind” seems a little basic in comparison.

• “Purple Rain” is a very, very good song.

More on that: I did a bit of a deep dive on that one, the title track of the record. I’ve definitely done this before; everything I discovered about it seemed vaguely familiar. Always good to refresh, though. I’ve always found it wild that three of the songs on the record, including “Purple Rain,” were recorded live at First Avenue in Minneapolis. It never occurred to me as a kid that they were live — they sound so polished. They don’t sound live — the only crowd noise you hear is at the very end of “Purple Rain,” when the guitars are dying away and the string section is playing these angular phrases over the noise. I don’t remember when I learned these were recorded live, but I have always assumed they were heavily doctored in the studio. Maybe a drum track from the original recording remained; maybe a section of the keyboard. Everything else must’ve been overdubbed, right? I mean, that vocal — that can’t be live. Right?

In fact, the whole take exists online — there is a video of the performance that would be the basis for the album version of “Purple Rain.” And it — remarkably — sounds pretty much like what we hear on the album. Check it out:

Ok, a couple things: in this day and age, you might get away with importing that vocal take and matching the sound in the studio. Doing that, you could fix any issues that might’ve cropped up during the show: maybe something was pitchy, maybe you didn’t hit a line quite like you’d hoped to. But I think this is the real thing — I think what you’re hearing is the actual, untouched vocal take from Prince. They edited out the extra verse, sure, but the rest is as you hear it. I find that pretty remarkable. Stands to point out, too, that this was guitarist Wendy Melvoin’s first show with the band. She was nineteen years old. And look at that video, look at those chord shapes she’s flinging around the neck — this song is B flat, which is not a very guitar-friendly key. I’m surprised she didn’t sprain a knuckle. Absolute legend.

My other guys, as seen on Mike Watt’s wall

Of course, First Avenue was also ground zero for another eruption of music that was happening in the Twin Cities. While Prince was playing in the big room at First Ave in 1983, Hüsker Dü and the Replacements were filling the room around the corner at the 7th St Entry. Hüsker Dü has a box set coming out later this year chronicling a big chunk of their live work in 1985, including a show at First Avenue — and Rhino is doing a big reissue of The Replacements’ magnum opus Let It Be. I once saw these worlds, the worlds of Prince and of the Hüskers/Mats, as being perfectly separated, cleaved between what was on the radio and what wasn’t. My feeling now is that it is all genius, fueled by whatever was in the water in Minneapolis in the 80s.

Purify yourself in the waters of Lake Minnetonka!

I’ve got some shows coming up, some with the band (+ symphonies!) and some solo. All tix are available at decemberists.com/tour. Come on out!

10/10 - San Francisco, CA - The Decemberists with the SF Symphony
11/01 - Seattle, WA - The Decemberists with the Seattle Symphony (SOLD OUT)
11/06 - Portland, OR - The Decemberists with the Oregon Symphony
11/07 - Portland, OR - The Decemberists with the Oregon Symphony
12/17 - Los Angeles, CA - CM Solo
12/19 - Los Angeles, CA - CM Solo
12/20 - Los Angeles, CA - CM Solo