Saturday, April 15, 2017

Prince and the Revolution "purple rain"

In 1984 I was twelve years old.  My blossoming hormones had not missed Appolonia. It was and is a fantastic movie with arguably the best soundtrack ever.  I had spent a morning playing Dungeons & Dragons at my friends house.  We spent the morning with dice, graph paper and off-brand soda pop.  The three of us wrangled with whatever module we had managed to get our hands on for a few hours before  my friend had to leave.  I retired to my buddy's basement where their record player was and we listened to #princeandtherevolution sing about things we had no grasp of.  We were definitely excited by "darling nikki" but really were too naive still to fully grasp how filthy that song really is.  We played the backward vocals back word by disengaging the record players belt by leaving the speed knob stuck between 33 and 45rpm.  Maybe we were seduced by the hedonistic world of Prince, maybe rock and roll is actually the devil's music or maybe we were just dumb but it was then that we decided to sample the booze in my friend's  father's fully stocked basement bar.  We were innocently enough just trying to sample what all the hub bub was about.  Why were certain brands in George Thorogood songs?  We sipped and reeled from many of the bottles as "baby I'm a star" egged us on.  We didn't realise we would end up getting smashed.  In hindsight we were really just that dumb, but at the time that outcome hadn't occurred to us.  We got drunk goofey.  We knew we had to get away from the scene of the crime and tried to ride our bikes to the playground behind the elementary school.  We repeatedly crashed and fell.  We were unfamiliarly dizzy and without any of our faculties.  We pushed our bikes and laughed and drool spit our way to the end of our street where we ended up just sitting on someone's front lawn and rolled around laughing.  I don't remember how long it took us to sober up and I know we never got caught, which amazes me really.  The episode was a PMRC wet dream.  That Prince record is some powerful stuff.

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