Matt Thorne Quotes

America" came from a massive jam,' Wendy told me. 'We were playing and rehearsing for hours and hours and we hit on this one groove that we continued to play for five hours, and then subsequent days afterwards we kept referring back to it, and then Prince came in and did that "America" solo and started singing and it turned into the song we know. To this day, we can put that track on and feel that band's energy and feel what we were like at our best together – a fucking freight train. No one was like "psst … psst … psst", like those cats he plays with now. It was just a massive freight train, and no one moved from the tracks. I'm really proud of that song. It's a perfect representation of Prince and The Revolution.

I have a lot of problems with fifteen-minute jazz-funk jams as well. I don't care about instrumental prowess. I don't care about quick-thinking improvisational skill. At all. I'm a songwriter and I'm familiar with Cage and I couldn't really care about what notes people can think of quickly. It doesn't interest me and I'm astounded that it interests other people still. Improvisation is what you do in the process of making something better.

Bob Cavallo remembers early on in the process, 'We were at odds with each other. Our contract was up; five years had gone by since Purple Rain. We met at the Four Seasons with his lawyer and his accountant, me and Steve Fargnoli to discuss some kind of rapprochement because he had fired us. Basically he said, "I'll work with you again but you've got to help me make this movie." I read the treatment and said, "This could be an interesting thing," and I said, "I'll try to put you together with some young hip writers and maybe we can come up with a script quickly, 'cause this is pretty detailed." And he went, "What are you talking about? That is the script." It was thirty pages. And he said, "I'm going to shoot it, I know exactly how to do it." So I said, "Maybe we could get this on Broadway for you. Would you be interested in that?" And he said, "No." Now he was pissed that I didn't think this was a good enough script, so we shook hands and that was the end of it. Then, about a year later, we were suing each other. But even when we sued each other, it was kinda funny. I said, "How could you not pay me?" He said, "How could you sue me?" He said, "You can't have my children, those songs. You're gonna give your involvement in those songs to your grandchildren?" And I said, "Yeah, I put ten years of my life into you, and you sucked all the air out of the room. I couldn't really manage anybody else except for your friends.

Steve Durkee had left not on friendly terms, which is not unusual in the Paisley world.

Among the many ecstatic notices, Robert Christgau, the self-appointed 'dean of American rock critics', put it best, in a review that would still be being quoted when he left the Village Voice twenty-six years later: 'Mick Jagger should fold up his penis and go home.

Wendy goes further, and although she has worked with him on several occasions since the disbandment of The Revolution – and wanted to emphasise to me that though she was feeling down on him the day we talked, her feelings about him fluctuated (Lisa adding that if he walked into the room now, they'd both give him a hug) – sometimes she did feel annoyance. 'People wanna talk about him all the time, and I'm happy to, but sometimes it's hard. Yeah, he was great, he was better than most, but he's not now.