Author Talk – ‘Revolution: Prince, The Band, The Era’

360°Sound sat down with James Campion, author of the new book, Revolution: Prince, The Band, The Era (out now on Backbeat Books, an imprint of Bloomsbury). Campion is a columnist, essayist, and associate editor for the pop culture magazine The Aquarian Weekly. He is also the author of books on KISS’s Destroyer, Warren Zevon, and The Beatles’ “Hey Jude.”

Revolution is a detailed exploration into Prince’s most acclaimed and commercially successful era, the years with his backing band The Revolution, which spanned from roughly 1982 to 1986. The book traces the story of Prince’s humble beginnings to The Revolution’s rise to becoming the biggest band in the world with hit singles, albums, films, and tours. In this exclusive interview, Campion discusses his novelistic approach, how Prince benefited from having a band, and what he hopes younger generations take away from the book.

Editor’s Note: This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity. Scroll to the bottom to view the full video interview.

360°Sound: The book is well-researched and journalistic, yet it reads like a novel with a largely chronological narrative. Why did you choose to take that approach?

James Campion: It was inspired by my friend Rob Sheffield from Rolling Stone. That’s why he wrote the foreword. He was very inspirational in getting me to try something new. Normally, when I do books, I do all the research and interviews, and I kind of combine everything. Then I start to write, and I let the story unfold. This time, I did a lot of research, but I started to write, and I filled in where I could. It was a creative exercise, and it was a new way to write, and I really enjoyed it a great deal. I may try it again, but I had never done it in this way before. I think it very much does read like a novel.

Although Prince is viewed as this singular creative force, playing all the instruments, arranging, and producing, your book makes the case that the band has been an integral part of his music from the early days. Why was having a band so important to Prince?

He was named after a band, the Prince Rogers Trio, which was his dad’s band. And he had his earliest bands in middle school and high school. He always loved that camaraderie and collaboration. He loved to hear different sounds coming at him, and he parsed that stuff so well. I write about him being a solitary entity in the book. For his first three or four albums, it’s him playing all the instruments, producing, arranging, and performing. But even back then, he played each instrument as if he was part of a band. He would say that when he went to play the bass part, he thought to himself that he was the bass player. He thought he had to add something to the song. When he was the guitar player, he had to lay down a tasty lick to make the singers sound good.

All those things sort of formulated how he thought, but he always returned to having band members all the way back to high school and his early days in the trio with Bobby Z and André Cymone, some of his original band members, all the way through the early incarnations. I call all the bands “Revolution,” which is the title of the book. Of course, it becomes officially the Revolution by the time they get to Purple Rain, but all the way up until then, he’s building this team, this family.

Prince had a tough family life when he was young, and he was able to choose the people around him that he could trust and who would reflect his music and his image and his theories about race and sexuality and religion. They were a very tight-knit group. And you could see it right off the bat when he would do his music videos. His very first video for “I Want to Be Your Lover” is just him, and you see Warner Bros. is trying to sell just him.

From that point forward, all the way through the Revolution, there was always the band with him. Whenever he performed on TV, be it American Bandstand, The Midnight Special, or SNL, the band was right there with him. He was different from a lot of his contemporaries, like Madonna or Michael Jackson, who had backing bands that just went on the tour. These were people who were in Minneapolis with him, practicing and building an act and helping him write the songs.

For people who are not too familiar with the Revolution band members, please give a little introduction to each of them and why Prince thought they were special.

I talked to a lot of twenty-somethings, and they don’t know how important Prince was, how big he was, how huge Purple Rain was, and how influential he was in getting Black artists on MTV and creating this hybrid group of Black, white, male, female members, and writing about subjects that, up until him, were completely taboo. The people he surrounded himself with were not only immensely talented, but they were young – late teens, early 20s – just like him.

He built this group – I call it a gang, or, most importantly, a family. Gayle Chapman, who I spoke to for the book, was the first female keyboard player, and he would continue to add keyboard players that were females for many years. After that, Lisa Coleman replaced her, and she was almost like Prince’s sister, his opposite member. She brought along Wendy Melvoin, who replaced Dez Dickerson, the guitar player. Dickerson was interesting because he was a Black artist who loved rock and roll and white music.

Bass player André Cymone was a childhood friend of Prince’s, and he left after a couple of albums. He brought in Mark Brown, who was 19, and Wendy was 18. They were very young, but they were very talented. And they were all in from the very beginning. They really embraced Prince’s idea of “us against the world and “the power of we.” You could see how that arc happened for him and took him to the very top of everything. He was the centerpiece of pop culture in 1984 with Purple Rain.

What do you hope that young readers take away from your book?

Everybody knows who Elvis Presley is. Everybody knows who the Beatles are. But Prince, not so much. I think he belongs in that pantheon. And the reason why I say that is twofold. Number one, all three of those artists had the number one single, the number one record, and the number one movie in America at the same time. That’s three people, and Prince is one of the three. And number two, like the Beatles, Prince wasn’t just a pop star. He changed the paradigm of music. He changed how we look at music, how we look at Black music, white music, new wave music, soul music, and funk music. He was his own entity, and he kept changing all the time. Like David Bowie, he was a constant shape-shifter. It’s important for other generations to see that and understand it.

Music can get a little antiseptic these days. And it’s not just me, the old fart saying it. There are a lot of younger people who are sick of Auto-Tune, sick of how many beats per minute a song has to be if it’s released in the summer, as opposed to during the holidays. Algorithms and all these things kind of suck the life out of music. Well, if you go back and listen to Prince’s stuff, as [The Revolution keyboardist] Matt Fink said, there are always mistakes in there. There are pitch issues or rhythm things, because he kept it natural. And I think that continues to resonate today. I hope that when young people discover this music, they will be happily surprised at how great it sounds, even today. This stuff still sounds fresh.