"Prince was very excited," The Revolution’s drummer Bobby Z remembers of the night they introduced Purple Rain to the world. “He was saying, ‘We’re going to make history.’ That’s what he was pushing us to do.”
Prince and his newly christened band were in the dressing-room of First Avenue, the black-painted lobby of a former Minneapolis bus depot which Bobby recalls as a “revered” stage for the city’s musicians. While Prince regularly tried out new songs there, on any given night in its smaller annex, The Replacements, Hüsker Dü or Soul Asylum might be playing too.
