After Prince died in 2016, a bunch of Prince videos suddenly flooded onto YouTube. These included both the legit, MTV videos, which Prince wasn’t allowing on YouTube before, as well as crazy bootleg recordings of various Prince concerts.
Among these, you can now find the original live recording of Purple Rain.
It turns out the album version, the same one that’s in the movie, was really recorded live in 1983 at a benefit concert in Minneapolis. I find this pretty incredible — but it’s a testament to how tight of a band Prince ran and how crazy talented they all were.
I think there are a bunch of persuasion and influence lessons that could be squeezed out of this whole story and the live performance that Prince and the Revolution put on. But for today, I want to give the persuasion stuff a bit of a break — something I called “persuasion bleach” in an earlier email.
Instead, I just want to share with you the original live recording of Purple Rain.
If you’re not a Prince fan, this probably won’t be meaningful to you and you will want to pass. But if you do like Prince or at least his particular song, then this original version is definitely worth a look and listen. Here it is if you’re curious:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kE8gScJGfa4