Prince’s legendary Syracuse concert gets official release

Photo of American singer Prince, taken in February 1985 on stage in Paris. Image: AFP/Pascal George

A concert of near-mythical proportions — Prince at the peak of his powers in Syracuse during the 1985 Purple Rain tour — is getting an official release on June 3, the late singer’s label said Wednesday.

Many icons of the 20th century have a concert that has gone down in music lore: James Brown at the Apollo Theater, Jimi Hendrix at Monterey Pop, Kurt Cobain unplugged in New York.

For Prince, who died in 2016, it is the show in Syracuse at New York’s Carrier Dome, on March 30, 1985.

“Listening to the Syracuse concert again… we sound like a rocket taking off,” said BrownMark, bass player of The Revolution who accompanied Prince at the time. “It was powerful. I attended a lot of concerts but I have never seen anything like it.”

At the time, the concert was broadcast live by satellite and released as a movie. Low-quality bootlegs have been circulating ever since.

But now the performance has been remixed from the original tapes taken from “The Vault,” the collection Prince kept at his Minneapolis home and which keeps fans supplied with a steady stream of posthumous releases.

One track, “Let’s Go Crazy,” is already available for streaming, ahead of CD, vinyl and Blu-ray versions from Sony’s Legacy Recordings and Prince’s estate in June. JB

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