Minneapolis’ ‘Purple’ tour
MINNEAPOLIS — About 20 minutes into the 1984 movie “Purple Rain,” we find The Kid, played by Prince, standing in front of Apollonia (played by Apollonia Kotero) near the embankment of a lake. After Apollonia asks Prince for career help, he says that she first must pass the initiation.
“What initiation?” she asks.
“For starters, you have to purify yourself in the waters of Lake Minnetonka.”
Apollonia looks to her right, considering the challenge. A few seconds later, she’s disrobing. Just as she plunges into the water, Prince says, “Hey, wait a minute! That’s n— ”
But it was too late. When she emerges from her “purification,” climbing out of the lake, Prince, a sly grin on his face, says, “That ain’t Lake Minnetonka.”
I arrived in Minneapolis to take the proverbial plunge into Prince’s world. Specifically, I was putting myself on a self-guided “Purple Rain” tour of the city that he helped put on the music map.
There was no better time to celebrate the Minneapolis-set movie and its lauded soundtrack. After all, this summer marks the 30th an- niversary of the release of “Purple Rain (the album in June and the film in July).
The plot of the film is fairly straightforward: A talented up-and-comer (The Kid, a thinly veiled Prince) falls for Apollonia, a singer who has come to the big city seeking success. At the same time, she’s being courted by The Kid’s nemesis (played by Morris Day). It’s a tale of breaking free of the past and of redemption.
The movie earned Prince an Oscar for original song score. Rolling Stone magazine ranked the album “Purple Rain” as the second-best record of the ’80s, and Entertainment Weekly proclaimed in 2008 that it was the best album of the last 25 years.
Since then, Prince and Minneapolis have become nearly synonymous. Yet if an alien landed in this city of 400,000 knowing nothing of its famous son, finding signs of the Purple One would not be easy.
But scratch the surface and Prince is everywhere — from a chef I talked to at the buzzy restaurant Travail Kitchen & Amusements who was Prince’s private chef to the friend of a friend who once was his hair stylist to the guy I met in a cafe who was convinced Prince is really not human.
A self-guided “Purple Rain” tour would not be complete without visiting First Avenue & 7th Street Entry, the downtown club where most of the movie’s scenes were shot.
Manager Nathan Kranz walked me around, pointing out things that have changed since 1984 (“there was a bar there, the VIP room on the balcony we created solely for Prince is gone”) as well as the private path the diminutive musician takes — through a side door, down a hall, up the stairs to the balcony — when he wants to see a band.
We stepped outside and he pointed to Target Center, the basketball and concert arena, across the street, as well as a building under construction. “There was an alleyway there which was in the movie and the hotel where Apollonia stayed was meant to be where the Target Center is now.” (The scenes shot outside of that hotel were shot, in fact, in L.A.)
The “Purple Rain” tour was turning out to be a tour of what is no longer there. Minneapolis has a proclivity, it seems, for tearing down the old and raising the new.
As I found out when I met with Kirk Hokanson, who worked as the location scout for the movie.
“To be honest,” he said when we first met downtown, “we didn’t think ‘Purple Rain’ was going to be that big of a film. But then Prince won an Oscar and we were like, ‘Wow!’ ”
With a thick three-ring binder he’d unearthed in his apartment — the binder he worked from when he was scouting and on set — we set out to find as many sites as we could.
With 1st Avenue as our starting point, Hokanson took me down an alleyway where Morris and Prince fought over Apollonia (between North 1st Avenue and North 2nd Avenue and North 4th Street and North 5th Street), the club in northeast Minneapolis where Apollonia’s band debuted (507 E. Hennepin Ave.), and the house where Prince’s character lived (3420 Snelling Ave.).
Some of these spots are also listed on the self-guided “Prince for a Day” tour ( www.bit.ly/1sskwrF) created by the city’s bike-share program, Nice Ride.
On my last morning in Minneapolis, I woke feeling as though I had one more thing I needed to do. I grabbed my car keys and swimming trunks.
About 30 minutes later I was standing in front of Lake Minnetonka, the chilly air slapping my skin.
And with that, I jumped in. The water was arctic cold.
As I crawled out, a man in his 50s suddenly appeared.
“What do you think you’re doing? That’s freezing!” he barked.
“I’m purifying myself in the waters of Lake Minnetonka,” I said.
The man cocked his head to the side, as if he were questioning my sanity.
It was 30 years in the making, but since Apollonia failed to do it, someone had to pass the initiation.