Lisa Coleman and Wendy Melvoin: Ladies in Waiting

“Like ‘Head’?” Wendy says, laughing. “People do it. It exists.”

“It’s all in the name of good music,” adds Lisa.

And what about romance? “I like to keep my personal life personal,” says Lisa with an air of distaste.

“I love Bugs Bunny,” says Wendy, ever in front with a lick. “I’d marry him if he were alive. He’s just so Hollywood.”

Most of Hollywood still seems to be sipping lunch at Musso & Frank’s, but Wendy checks her watch and realizes it’s time for the sound check. The bill is paid, and everyone clambers back into Wendy’s rented BMW for the trip to the Universal Amphitheatre.

As they wait for the afternoon call to the stage, Wendy and Lisa relax in their dressing room. On the couch lies a paperback of hard-to-do crossword puzzles and a copy of The Twilight Zone magazine. Wendy is musing over a piece of plastic that looks just like an American Express platinum card. Shaking her head, she points out the words Hard Rock Cafe where the American Express legend should be. The embossment on the bottom left of the card says Wendy, just Wendy. “This was just sent to me, unsolicited, in the mail,” she says. “This card allows me to butt in front of anybody in line at the Hard Rock Cafe. Can you imagine the kind of person who would use this?”

Wendy drops the card and lights some incense to chase out the room’s sweat-sock smell. Lisa lights a Merit. On a table sits an uneaten basket of strangely colored and oddly shaped cookies baked by a fan who spied them shopping for books the day before. “Give some to Prince,” pleads the note that accompanied the questionable edibles backstage, “please.”

An aide walks in and announces, “Prince wants you onstage ASAP.” As Lisa walks down the stairs and through the wings, she says, “I nicknamed Prince ‘Fearless,’ as in ‘Fearless Leader.’ ” As in Rocky and Bullwinkle.

On the stage, Lisa and Wendy strap and plug themselves into position – Lisa back in her dark apartment with a little smile and her head cocked slightly; Wendy in front with a wide grin, next to Prince in the fully lit, empty auditorium. Gone are the days when Fearless Leader put his friends through all-afternoon sound-check jams that could last as long as that night’s concert. Clean-cut, dressed in a resplendent black suit and a white ruffled shirt, Prince faces the band and orders up a tune. The Revolution begins hammering.

“Okay,” says Prince, “Sheila comes in here.” Cut. “Is Sheila here yet?” he asks. Momentarily, Sheila E. strides in, stage left, in sunglasses and a trench coat. She and Prince huddle for a second, then the maestro barks, ” ‘Controversy’! Ready!” The band is pounding again. “Come on, stay in beat,” says Prince. “I’m listening.” Perfection is found in a few measures, and the band carries on with the song. Prince then announces, “End of ‘A Love Bizarre.’ Check it out.” He jumps offstage and runs up an aisle, both listening to the sound and practicing an audience run he will perform that night.

“Can we lose that low range somehow?” he asks. “Let me hear the bass out.” Perfection again, then into the Revolution’s new single, “Kiss.” Prince pauses. “I think finger cymbals would be better. Now when we film videos tomorrow, we’re going to drag it out so everybody will get their chance to be in it.” With that, he heads offstage. Wendy unstraps herself from the guitar, Lisa unplugs from the keyboard, and they head back upstairs for dinner.

Wendy is fighting for terms to describe her and Lisa’s relationship with Prince. They aren’t his toys or minions; he’s not their boss or master. Together they form a musical ménage that has alchemized new multiracial forms of funk rock out of both talent and (they say) deep-dish love.

“We tell Prince we love him all the time,” says Wendy. “He always gets all embarrassed and doesn’t know what to say. We tell him to tell us the same thing so he goes, ‘Uh, okay, yeah, I love you too.’ It’s silly, us all being so intense about it and swooning over each other, but it’s meaningful. Not that the rest of the band doesn’t understand Prince – they do. We’re just a bit more spiritual with him.”

The three have a silent language, adds Lisa. “When Prince says something funny at rehearsal,” she explains, “he knows who will understand and where to look for the smile. And it’s always there. And we know where to look for that smile too.”

Like Tom Landry checking out field conditions ten minutes before the season’s opening game, a quietly wired Prince roams the grounds backstage. Walking down the corridor, he pays as little attention to the greenroom dollies as Landry does to the Dallas Cowboys’ cheerleaders.

Prince disappears through the wings and heads anonymously into the audience to watch Sheila pound out her tunes. The walls are shaking out there; the crowd is swaying, its eyes centered on Sheila and her neon drumsticks. No one pays heed to the clean-cut guy in the nice black suit who has melted into their midst. While Prince cases the joint from the bleachers, the Revolution is upstairs getting made up in its two dressing rooms.

The men’s quarters are crowded with faces both familiar and new. In recent months, Prince has added six new members to the band: Eric Leeds on sax, Matt Blistan on trumpet, Mico Weaver on guitar and three guys whose job it is to work to the side of Prince as a Pips-like dance line. They are Greg Brooks, Wally Safford and Jerome Benton – Morris Day’s hilarious valet and mirror holder in Purple Rain and the only Revolution member to appear in Under the Cherry Moon. “We’ve got a much bigger sound now,” says Lisa. “And we’re a lot more funk oriented, that’s for sure.”

In one corner, Revolution drummer Bobby Z and keyboardist Matt Fink, tied for second in the race for Most Famous Jewish Rock Star Ever to Come Out of Minnesota, are discussing whether the Yiddish word for “gizzard” is pipik or pupik. In the shtetl, the chicken gizzard was a delicacy saved for the head of the household on Friday night. In suburban St Louis Park, Minnesota, however, the word now generally is spoken by parents wondering why their son has hair down to his pipik. Or is it pupik? Matt, in his green doctor’s scrub suit, thinks it’s the latter. Bobby Z finally agrees.

While the guys get made up, dope smoke wafts down the hallway. “You know how much trouble we’d get in if we did that?” one new member of the honest-to-God drug-free Revolution says, laughing.

Across the hall, Wendy explains the band’s pharmaceutical habits. “There is absolutely no person in this band involved with drugs,” she says vehemently. “We’re real militant about that. Fortunately, it happens that everybody in the band got together and felt the same way. There are a few people in the organization who are into the drugular lifestyle, but you can’t help that.”

“This band’s going to last a long time because we’re all going to live a long time,” Lisa adds softly. “The headline Keyboard player found dead of drug overdose sounds boring and pathetic to me.”

Sheila is finishing up onstage now, whipping the crowd out of its seats as she beats a first encore. The entire Revolution meets for a moment, agrees on the key for the first song, “A Love Bizarre,” then hustles downstairs, just offstage. Huddled in the darkness like a high-school basketball team about to take the court, the musicians fidget and limber up.

One encore for Sheila. Another. One more. The curtain comes down again, and the crowd sees the shadow of scurrying feet. Something is happening. The curtain goes up, the Revolution is in place, and the disbelieving screams start. Prince smiles, Wendy smiles next to him, and in her apartment, Lisa cocks her head, finally relents and smiles, too. The first chord is an A, and the unceasing screams leave no doubt that the real king, his queens and the purple court have finally returned.