In the year that has passed since Prince returned to the mothership, a lot of material has found its way to YouTube and elsewhere that the legendary performer, if still alive, would have made sure was immediately removed. While finally being able to dig into Prince's stockpile of unreleased music has made many a Prince fan giddy, the ever-present downside is that the only reason any of this is possible is because Prince is not here to put a stop to it.
One could even go so far as to say that this tasty 3-CD/1-DVD expanded edition of Prince's 1984 tour de force Purple Rain, with one full CD of unreleased material from the period fresh from "the vault", would not have made it past the Purple One, who seemed to regard the vault as off-limits to all but him during his lifetime, it would appear.
All of this begs the question: Did Prince intend to keep the contents of his vault secret for the duration of his life, only to be plundered after his death? Was he stockpiling material so that, in the event of his untimely passing, his career could continue unabated?
Far-fetched? Sure. Improbable? Not so fast.
The brutal truth is that even those who claim to have known Prince well had no idea what the man was up to most of the time, beyond simply being insanely musically prolific. If anybody would have methodically and painstakingly planned out his own post-life career right down to the letter and then laid the necessary bread crumb trail so that those who found it would unwittingly oversee its release to his exact wishes, it would be Prince.
And if the first part of that grand plan was the expanded edition of Purple Rain, this first real taste of "the good stuff" from the vault is bound to prove the man a damn genius all over again.
Granted, if you're familiar with tracks that have popped up on bootlegs in the past, you'll no doubt be familiar with about half of the "Vault" CD, but certainly not in their newly mastered state by Bernie Grundman, who mastered the original Purple Rain.
The remaining tracks feature, at the very least, full versions of familiar songs "Father's Song" and "We Can Fuck" that have never been heard by anyone, anywhere, anyhow as well as "Electric Intercourse" (see clip above), "Possessed", and "Katrina's Paper Dolls".
The DVD resurrects the long out-of-print VHS title "Prince And The Revolution LIVE!", which this writer hasn't viewed since renting it from a local video store back in '85.
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it came from THE VAULT