Morris Day and Prince in ‘Purple Rain.’ (photo: Warner Bros.)

Forty years ago, on July 27, 1984, Purple Rain hit theaters and turned Prince Rogers Nelson into a movie star. But another cast member, the Time’s Morris Day, practically upstaged him.

Considering the longstanding competitiveness between Prince and Day, it’s interesting that Prince allowed Day to steal the show as Purple Rain’s comic foil. But it turns out that it was a humorless acting coach hired by Prince who almost foiled Day’s chances.

During an interview with me promoting his autobiography, It’s About Time, Day recalled that during the cast’s group acting classes in preparation for Purple Rain, “I kept cutting up. Every time they gave me a skit to do, I would make everybody laugh or do something silly. And this acting teacher, he didn’t do a good job. He kicked me out of class. He said, ‘You need to spend your time at the beach or something, because you’re just disrupting this class!’ So, I got kicked out. But I guess I got the last laugh, because that same cutting up that I did in there, that I got kicked out for, is what worked for me.”

It was Purple Rain’s young director, Albert Magnoli, who noticed Day’s comedic skills and realized his silver-screen potential. “Albert, he sat down and we did the whole script. He’s like, ‘What would you say here?’ And so, then I rewrote all of my lines, and I got to do things the way I wanted to do them. He was smart for doing that.”

So, what was the best line that Day came up with? “‘How’s the family?’” he answered with a sly laugh. “So many people were mad at me about that line!” However, Day didn’t mind Prince casting him as a sassy villain. “I thought it was perfect. It was fun. I didn’t want to be the good guy. I always want to be a bad guy in movies. I wanted to carry a machine gun or something, shoot up some stuff. I didn’t get to go as deep as I wanted, but I got a nice taste.”

Another scene-stealer in Purple Rain was, of course, the Time’s Jerome Benton. The half-brother of original Time bassist Terry Lewis, Benton had initially worked with the band as a bodyguard and valet before becoming Day’s onstage sidekick, famous for their primping mirror routine. Day reveals that, much like his “How’s the family?” zinger, that now-iconic and often-imitated mirror act was also unplanned.

“We had recorded ‘Cool’ and had added it to the show; it was on the radio, roasting on the charts. And we were at rehearsal and I get to the part, ‘Somebody bring me a mirror,’” Day recalled. “And all of a sudden, Jerome appears. He snatched a mirror off the wall somewhere, and he appears in front of my face holding up a mirror. And it was just one of them moments, one of them ‘a-ha!’ moments.

“Everybody just stopped and we were just looking at each other and it was like ‘Oh, we going to keep this. You in the band now.’”

Morris Day & the Time performed two songs at Minneapolis’s First Avenue club in Purple Rain, “Jungle Love” and “The Bird,” and both became top 40 hits. The latter even popularized another Time shtick, the group’s arm-flapping dance craze. That dance was all Day’s idea, after watching cartoons on the Time’s tour bus.

“I don’t know if you used to watch The Flintstones, but they had an episode where everybody was doing ‘the pterodactyl,’” Day chuckled. “So, it was just on from there; we started doing that onstage.”

However, at first Prince tried to stop “The Bird” from taking flight. “We were on tour with Prince and that was the time where we started to kick his ass a little bit [outperform him] onstage, and he wasn’t liking that!” said Day. “So, we started doing the Bird [dance] and he said, ‘You can’t do that, Morris’ — he said it because he also did a [vocal] thing that was like this bird screech, whatever noise it was, and ours was too close to his. But of course, if he told us ‘don’t do it,’ we were going to do it more! So, we got in this big altercation about that. We kept doing it. It led to almost a fight — but not hand fight.”

Eventually, though, Prince came around. “Next thing we know, he brings over a groove to me and he wants me to listen to it. Guess what? It’s the song ‘The Bird,’” Day grinned. “And I’m like, ‘Oh, so you didn’t like it that much, huh?’”

That being said, neither “Jungle Love” nor “The Bird” were included on the all-Revolution Purple Rain soundtrack, oddly. (Both songs were ultimately credited to co-writers Day, the Time guitarist Jesse Johnson, and “Jamie Starr,” aka Prince.) Regarding this omission, Day said with a shrug, “That’s my question. That never got answered. But I have a feeling why. I think that would’ve really catapulted us sales-wise and visibility-wise even more. It was what it was.”

The above interview is taken from Morris Day’s appearance on the SiriusXM show “Volume West.” Audio of that conversation is available on demand via the SiriusXM app.

Tonight on #VolumeWest — @lyndseyparker sits down with funk legend and Minneapolis Sound pioneer @TheMorrisDay to discuss his fantastic new book #OnTime: #APrincelyLifeInFunk at 5:00pm PST / 8:00pm EST! pic.twitter.com/0C2izRR0ZV

— Trunk Nation on SXM Faction Talk Channel 103 (@TrunkNationSXM) October 18, 2019