The lyrics: “I think Prince had experienced something”
Other lyrics from the song were also alluded to in the scene, as The Kid’s father accuses his wife of being “a goddamn sinner” (lyric: “You’re just a sinner, I am told”), demands acknowledgement for his role in heating the house (“Be your fire when you’re cold”) and laments what he sees as a lack of belief in his own artistic talents (“All I really need is to know that you believe”). As a measure of the ways in which Prince was exploring not only his life but also his psyche with Purple Rain, I Would Die 4 U also draws upon his religious beliefs, its opening verse touching upon themes of forgiveness, with later verses framing the song’s narrator as the Trinity of Christian religion: God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit. “I’m not a human, I’m a dove,” Prince sings, hinting at a transcendence that his onetime guitarist Dez Dickerson felt lay at the heart of the song.
“I think Prince had experienced something,” Dickerson told cultural critic Touré, speaking for the book I Would Die 4 U: Why Prince Became An Icon. “I think he had a moving experience with respect to the idea of who Jesus is, or was, and he wanted to express it in a song. It’s not a very cloaked lyric. It says what it says: He’s saying he is Jesus.”
That was wasn’t all Prince was saying. With its opening lines, “I’m not a woman/I’m not a man/I am something that you’ll never understand,” the song also calls to mind the androgyny that was central to Prince’s image and which would see fans embrace him as one of the most pioneering LGBTQ+ musicians in history. “I am something that you’ll never comprehend,” he sings later, underscoring the mystique that he cultivated throughout his career, and which the Purple Rain project enhanced, even as it brought elements of his life to the big screen.
The recording: “Something special in the energy”
As with Prince’s plans to make a feature film, I Would Die 4 U dated to at least 1982. That February, he ran his band through a lengthy jam on the song’s main riff during a soundcheck for a show on the Controversy Tour. More than a year later, with the Purple Rain movie in pre-production and the members of his new backing group, The Revolution, in place, I Would Die 4 U would be refined during rehearsals at the former pet-food warehouse in St Louis Park, Minnesota, where Prince developed some of Purple Rain’s songs and finessed his live show.
Speaking to Vice more than 30 years later, keyboardist Matt “Dr” Fink would recall the difficulties he had in playing the song’s bass part, noting that it was possible – at a stretch. “Sometimes I would get off rhythm a little bit because you had to be so spot on, and you had to play it with two hands!” he told Keith Murphy. After Prince asked why he couldn’t use one hand for the bass and one hand for the song’s chords, Fink told him to find out for himself. “I said, ‘You try it.’ But neither one of us could do it.”
Writing in Prince And The Purple Rain Era Studio Sessions, Duane Tudahl explained how one of Prince’s recording engineers devised a workaround: “It was decided to sequence some of the keyboards, so Don Batts created a cutting-edge system that could be triggered by [Revolution drummer] Bobby Z during the live performance” of the song. With this new kit in place, Prince and The Revolution debuted I Would Die 4 U, along with four other Purple Rain songs, at a benefit concert held at Minneapolis’ First Avenue club on 3 August 1983.
Talking to this author, for the book Lives Of The Musicians: Prince, Revolution keyboardist Lisa Coleman described the gig as “super intense and dark and sweaty”, with “something special in the energy” as they kicked off with the future Purple Rain opener, Let’s Go Crazy, and ripped through a mix of established classics and previously unheard songs which were being recorded on the spot. Sparse-sounding and running to a little over two minutes, Prince’s performance of I Would Die 4 U came complete with hand gestures that he would reprise in the Purple Rain film and which would soon be repeated back to him nightly by the thousands of fans that packed out the arena venues he was now commanding.
“I think he wanted to see what he could get, he wanted to see his band work out,” studio engineer Susan Rogers explained to Prince fanzine Uptown in 1994, speaking of Prince’s decision to record the First Avenue show. “He wanted to get as much as possible that he could use.” Taking the tapes to his favoured recording studio, Sunset Sound, in Los Angeles, Prince overdubbed and extended I Would Die 4 U’s basic live track across the end of August and early September, during a string of sessions that would also see him work on the First Avenue recordings of Baby I’m A Star and Purple Rain’s title track. Have effectively nailed Purple Rain’s three closing songs in one single performance, Prince arguably got more than he’d ever imagined from this crucial performance.
