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Fact #141054

When:

Short story:

Prince begins his 97-date Purple Rain tour with seven sold-out shows at The Joe Louis Arena, Detroit, Michigan, USA. By the time the tour ends, over 1,692,000 tickets will have been sold.

Full article:

Matt Fink (keyboardist) : That was closest thing to The Beatles that I've ever experienced. It was just insanity.

Eric Leeds (saxophonist) : The purpose of the show was to do the movie in condensed form, without the actors and without the plot. He ran the tour like it was the Marines.

Susan Rogers (engineer) : Prince travelled with a mobile truck all the time. I think he has every show he's done on tape. He would often wait until after a show, when the hall was empty, and just jam with the band, to see if anything came out of it. Soundchecks were recorded too, for the same reason.

Alan Leeds (tour manager) : I’m sure it was fun playing the music for a while, but this is a guy who never stopped rehearsing, so they were all tired of playing the songs long before the tour started - they’d been playing them every day in rehearsals for a year, and the crew had been hearing them every day for a year.

Also, there was a decision made to basically replicate the movie as much as possible. For the sake of the audience, that’s what you had to do; it’s what you were selling. A no-brainer. But what it also meant was a very constricting set, because the show was so theatrical, it left no room for spontaneity - in wardrobe, in choreography, or in the music. All the theatrical aspects of it made for a great production, but essentially it was a Broadway play with no give or take, with the exception of the encores, where he could stretch out. We paid a lot of overtime in a lot of buildings, because the only time of the night when he had any fun was the encores, which could go on for hours.
(Source : https://medium.com/cuepoint/when-purple-rain-came-falling-down-2f0babc363b9#.r82butgu4)

Wendy Melvoin (guitarist) : Things started cracking during the tour.

Eric Leeds : That tour really closed the book in that chapter of his life, though. After that things started to open up a little. He had accomplished what he wanted to accomplish and that gave him the opportunity to grow.