Read Online Let's Go Crazy by Alan Light - Free Book Online Page B

makes a decision out of pure passion, he is right, and you have to defend him for all you’re worth.”
    â€œWhen he said it was going to be bigger than Saturday Night Fever —he had that burning desire—I was like, ‘Sure, why not?’ ” says Jill Jones. “It didn’t seem crazy because I had the background, growing up with the Gordys, where anything can happen. But I also really admired the fact that he didn’t have any real help, that his mind put all these people together.”
    â€œPrince had to make it happen, he had no choice,” says Susannah Melvoin. “He was compelled, and he knew how to make everyone else feel that compulsion, too—and that was the weird part. How did he make us all fall under his spell? You got sucked in, and sometimes that was great and sometimes it was really crappy. On the periphery, it didn’t make sense, but inside this world of his, there were a lot of people who wanted to make it happen.”
    Whether Cavallo and the rest of the management team ­really believed in the idea, the ultimatum Prince laid down left them with no choice but to deliver. “It was right out of the blue, but it didn’t surprise me,” says Cavallo. “It was worth so much money to me, because if he didn’t re-sign with us, it would’ve been a tragedy. We had such a big fucking hit with this guy, and I knew how big he would be. I knew that in person he was unstoppable; he was so good, he works so hard, his shows are so precise. It was something to see.”
    The marching orders were spelled out very clearly by Prince to Cavallo. “He said, ‘It’s gotta be a major movie; it can’tbe with one of [your] gangster friends’ or something. I don’t have any of those—I went to Georgetown University, I’m not a mob guy! But anyway, whatever his fantasy was, he says, ‘It has to be with a major studio, my name above the title’—basically, ‘Warner Brothers presents Prince in his first motion picture.’ Think how carefully he thought about this.”
    Dez Dickerson remembers Prince saying, “If it’s just me and Chick [bodyguard “Big Chick” Huntsberry] in the snow with a camcorder, I’m going to make this movie.”
    Meanwhile, at the conclusion of the 1999 tour, Prince decided to make one more personnel change in the band, which would prove to have a major impact on the direction of the movie. His relationship with lead guitarist/primary onstage foil Dickerson was fraying, for a number of reasons: Dickerson didn’t want to take as much direction from Prince; he wanted to work more on his own music; he was a Christian and was increasingly uncomfortable with Prince’s lyrics. (He was also probably still annoyed that Prince used his home phone number as the title and hook of the Time hit “777-9311.”) Prince sat him down and told him about the plans for the movie, and that it would require a multiyear commitment to ride out the project—a commitment he didn’t feel he could make. “That was the bottom line,” Dickerson says. “I just couldn’t see myself doing that for three more years.”
    â€œBy the time I came on that tour, Dez was on the outs,” says Leeds. “The band that I was introduced to when I came aboard was, ‘There’s the band, and then there’s Dez—Dez is a pain in the ass. He’s got his wife with him, she stirs him up;she doesn’t like Prince, Prince doesn’t like her. He demands his own dressing room; sometimes there’s venues where there’s not enough rooms to accommodate him and that becomes an issue. He doesn’t have to come to sound check, you’ve got to kiss his ass to get him to do that; it’s just bad.’ So everybody was fed up with Dez.”
    â€œDez just walked himself out of the job,” says Jones. “Dez was the only one who was