My Life in the Purple Kingdom

July 1, 2020

BrownMark, the bassist for Prince from 1981 to 1986, with writer producer Uhrich, takes readers on the roller-coaster ride that was the first part of his life. Raised by his hardworking mother, BrownMark grew up in a racially divided Minneapolis, where early on he became fascinated by music. The funkster performed with his hometown band, Phantasy, and enjoyed a meteoric rise as a 19-year-old from a local music talent to part of Prince's band, which opened for the Rolling Stones on tour. He describes his transformation from Mark Brown to the flamboyant BrownMark under Prince's guidance and the joys and tribulations of fame and life on the road during multiple tours and the filming of the influential Purple Rain (1984). BrownMark ends by discussing his band project Mazarati, his disenchantment with Prince after the Under the Cherry Moon film/tour (1986), and his signing with Motown Records. Throughout, the bassist treats Prince evenhandedly as a nattily dressed, hard-driving, charismatic, and sometimes duplicitous musical genius. VERDICT This page-turning memoir, while focusing on the artist's early days and ignoring the past 30 years of his life, will appeal to BrownMark's fans and general music enthusiasts.--David P. Szatmary, formerly with Univ. of Washington, Seattle

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2020
The bassist for Prince during the Purple Rain era provides glimpses into the kingdom. BrownMark--who was born Mark Brown in 1962--describes his rise from a single-parent home in a city of racial discrimination (Minneapolis) to success with the musical supernova. Yet there were plenty of bumps along the way. For example, in 1982, even a big raise only brought his salary to $425 per week; later, he quit after discovering that his Purple Rain Tour bonus that he'd imagined might be $1.5 million was in fact only $15,000. Those looking for a memoir awash in sex, drugs, and the seamier sides of Prince's private life will instead discover hard work and rigid discipline under a stern taskmaster, an artist who became what he was through minute attention to detail as well as genius. The author ably chronicles his own life growing up Black in a city so White he thought of it as a "Scandinavian Mecca." As a boy, his family didn't have a TV, and his early experiences playing music involved a makeshift guitar constructed out of a shoe box and rubber bands. Before he auditioned for Prince, he had never been to the suburbs, and before he joined the band, he had never been on a plane. His life changed dramatically at a time when the world of music was changing, as well. Disco was breaking down walls between Black and White, and punk was bringing a new edge and urgency. As Prince's star was ascending, he demanded the full spotlight and resented any response his young bassist was generating. The author left the band in the mid-1980s feeling that he lived "in a world of filth, greed, and deception." Still, the connections and impressions he made as a member of The Revolution launched his career, and he notes that "working with Prince was like going to the finest music school in the land." A memoir of vivid detail and understandable ambivalence.

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