Legendary tour manager Alan Leeds joins Musicians Reveal with Joe Kelley for an incredible deep dive into life on the road with some of the greatest artists in music history.

Having worked with Prince during his most iconic years—including the Purple Rain era—as well as James Brown, Alan shares unforgettable stories from behind the scenes of legendary tours.

In this conversation, he discusses:

• Managing Prince’s tours during his global peak
• The chaos, precision, and intensity of life on the road
• Working with James Brown and the realities of touring in the early days
• The making of the Purple Rain era and Minneapolis music scene
• What it takes to manage some of the most demanding and creative artists in history

From sold-out arenas to last-minute chaos, this episode offers a rare look inside the world of touring at the highest level.

About Musicians Reveal with Joe Kelley:

A long-running interview platform (est. 1982) featuring legendary and emerging artists from funk, R&B, soul, and beyond. The show was spotlighted by Prince in 2004.

Ingson.com it is 4:35. Joe Kelly here with the Upper Room.

Hello to all our TV watchers of the show right now at channel 65 and also listening@wvof.org we wanted to have this next gentleman on for several years. He's familiar to a lot of our listeners as one of the top tour managers for some of the biggest artists in the music history.

Prince, James Brown, Maxwell and d'. Angelo. He's a music historian, a great writer, by the way, and we're going to talk with him about some upcoming things, I'm sure.

And he's a brother of Eric Leeds, who's been a guest of our show several times. His name is Alan Leeds. And we welcome to the Upper Room with Joe Kelly and wvof. Alan Leeds. How you doing, Alan?

I'm well, thank you.

So you're buried under snow. Nothing new. And do you get used to it out in Minnesota?

You get very used to it. Although this year it is kind of something new. We've had a little bit of snow this year, but it's been a very light winter by our standards.

This was a bit of a shock today.

So you grew up in the Pittsburgh area, right?

Actually, I grew up a little bit of here, there and everywhere. I was born in New York, spent very early years there. My father was in retailing.

So as his career grew, we moved around with him and spent a few years in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where I got indoctrinated to this kind of weather. And then junior high and high school was in Richmond, Virginia.

Oh, okay.

Which was probably the most influential of the places that I lived in terms of how I ended up musically and my taste in music and so on. And then, yes, I did pass through Pittsburgh.

As a matter of fact, I went to college in Pittsburgh for a couple of years before going on the road with James Brown.

Now, you mentioned Virginia having such a big influence on your musical taste. What was key to that?

The key really, I think, was the timing. At that point. Richmond was very much a part of the old sixties soul music chitlin circuit.

And right dead in the middle of it, in fact, because, you know, in the days when artists traveled by car, station wagon, van, bus, whatever they could get to get from, you know, one town to the next, you know, we were dead right on I95. So anybody coming out of Washington, D.C. headed south, passed through Richmond.

And in those days where artists worked 12 months out of the year, you know, we had shows all the time.

And because I happened to be there at a time in life where I was, you know, just junior high, then high school and so on, you know, that's a very formative time for most people, taste wise.

And I was exposed to music there that I probably wouldn't have been as exposed to in Milwaukee or perhaps even in New York actually, just because soul music belonged to the south. And that's where it was embraced first.

And it's also where ironically, despite the civil rights chaos that was going on at the time, it also crossed over in the south first now. So there was a lot there for me to digest.

Growing up, did you listen to a lot of radio down there? What were some of your favorite shows if you got into it?

Yeah, I was a radio fanatic. My uncle, who was still in New York, was actually program director of Winds W I N S in New York in the 50s.

Still going strong there.

Yeah, exactly.

So and then later he moved to the west coast and he was program director and station manager of KDA Y for a while in Burbank and a couple other stations on the West Coast. So through him I had a bit of an interest in radio.

And of course every time I, you know, I'd go to New York several times a year, I was, you know, even though we were moving around, I always considered myself a New Yorker, even though it was really a stretch to say that. And so I was familiar with WWRL, WLIB, you know, the big AM, R&B stations of that era.

And of course on, on the top 40 side, wins, because that's where my uncle had been. And you know, he had all those legendary DJs working under him. Alan Freed, cousin Brucey Murray, the K. All those guys were originally at wins.

And I, you know, as a kid I met them and would go visit my uncle at the station, meet the DJs and he always load me down with free records, which would be great things for a kid. So I think my favorite radio station was the one I pretended to have at home because I had all these records.

Oh yeah, right.

So it was like I'd get home from school and before I had my jacket off, I had the record player on. Uh huh.

So. So did you let Eric play a few of his own records?

Yeah, he was definitely part of it.

Uhhuh. Right.

As a matter of fact, as kids at one point we, they gave us, my parents gave us a little walkie. Really, really primitive.

I mean you gotta remember this is early 60s primitive walkie talkie thing of some kind that was battery operated and you know, had a range of about 10ft, you know, I mean if you were outside shouting range, it was also outside the range of the walk talking. So it kind of made you wonder why you had it in the first place. Yeah, but.

But you know what I did was I set it up in my bedroom and then ran it across the hall to his bedroom. And I would broadcast and pretend to have a radio station and my audience was one.

Right, right, right.

And if he didn't like the music I played, he just walked across the hall, bang on the door.

That's it.

Like play something else.

Our special guest, if you just tuned in. Legendary tour manager, writer and I. I call you music historian because you so much knowledge and been so many places.

Alan Leeds out of Minneapolis, St. Paul area. And it's 4:41 here. Alan Leeds. And you talked about a guy who we've loved his music for years and James Brown, you got involved.

Tell us about the introduction to Mr. James Brown.

Well, I had in high school I befriended a guy who was a weekend disc jockey at a radio station in Richmond known as want. It was an AM station and actually a daylight station, but it was the leading black radio station in the city at the time.

And I kind of bogarted my way into a part time job with no pay as their record librarian, basically just to get my hands on the record because I knew they'd have duplicates.

I figured if this guy was my buddy and he let me go through the records and I could point out how many duplicates they had taken up space, some of them would end up in my car on the way home. Anyway, one thing led to another. I ended up being on the air with a little air shift on that radio station.

And here comes James Brown to town for a show that the station was promoting. And you know, just one of many shows that we promoted. Meaning we, meaning the radio station, not me personally at that point.

And it was always an opportunity to meet these artists. So I had already met people like Jackie Wilson and Otis Redding and the Drifters.

In fact, Curtis Mayfield was in the original impressions were the first artists I met. And you know, so I'm like a pig and slop because I'm just loving this. By now my love of the music had eclipsed any serious designs on a radio career.

I didn't really take radio as something I wanted to do all my life.

It just seemed like it was a really good entree into an industry that I might not otherwise be able to get close to, which was this touring music business.

So anyway, James Brown was coming to town and I begged the program director to let me go to the hotel where he was staying and interview him in order to hype the show and so on. And the guy warned me, said, well, you know, he's a pretty touchy guy. He's a funny guy.

You know, one day your best friend, and next day, you know, just very, very kind of irrational, impulsive guy. So, you know, tiptoe a little bit if you're going to go interview him because you haven't dealt with anybody quite like him yet, right?

So I basically went over this hotel and I was, I was scared out of my mind, just shaking this little pimply faced white kid, you know, outside this hotel room door with this big clunky tape recorder. And this really attractive woman answered the door and let me in and asked me if I wanted something to drink while we were waiting.

And finally she said, Mr. Brown, I'll see you now.

And I kind of thought that would mean that he'd walk out into this living room of this hotel suite, but obviously what it meant was I was supposed to go in, into this other room, which turned out to be the bedroom. And here he was like laying in bed. It was like the middle of the afternoon. And you know, these are guys that work and travel all night, right?

This is before he had his Learjet. So he was probably, you know, traveling by station wagon or limousine or something, which is what most of the guys did in those days.

I mean, we look at them as stars because they've become such icons, right? But you know, this is way before they had customized tour buses. And the life on the road really was, was pretty, pretty spartan and common.

But any rate, here he was laying in his bed, propped up on all these pillows, and all I saw was hair, man. Because this is back around the time of the Tammy show. And it was just like, oh my God. You know. Anyway, that was the first meeting and it went well.

And you know, after that, whenever he would do a show anywhere within like a hundred miles of Richmond, I was there.

Whether it was Washington or Baltimore, Norfolk, Roanoke, all these different places, I'd be chasing after him and, you know, tried to buddy up to everybody in the band and everybody in his organization because it just, something about it said, this is where I need to work right now.

No, when you, when you met James and everything and you said you kind of gave, you know, you, you were ready, you're not ready to do a lifetime career of radio. Did you have it figured out that you were going to Run somebody's tour and did any concept go at that.

Point, I didn't have anything figured out. I just knew I didn't want a real job. I wanted to be around this stuff. The music just took me places nothing else could take me.

It really started all about the love of the music and the love of the music and how it made me feel. Led to trying to figure out the people that made it, you know, what was so special.

There had to be something really special about people who could make this music and could do this to other people, make ordinary people feel this way. Whether it's happy or sad or whatever it is that a particular song makes you feel.

That artistic gift that enables the creator of this music and the performer of these musics to make a person feel the way they do. So. So it was kind of a fascination with that. And I just knew I wanted to be around it. And, and, and quite frankly, there were other aspects too.

I remember going to one of the first shows that I saw in a theater.

That was one of those old reviews where they had 10 or 12 acts and one headliner, a lot of one record acts, and maybe you did maybe 10 minutes on stage, and then there'd be a headliner who would do 20 or 30 minutes. And that headliner might be a Jackie Wilson or a James Brown, that somebody, Sam Cooke, somebody of that high caliber.

And hearing that stuff come to life, you know, in a theater with good acoustics and a big band and then the dancing girls that would come out in these short outfits and, you know, to a young high schooler in the 60s, which were pretty innocent times, this was hot stuff. I'm like, oh my God, wait a minute.

You mean the people in the band and the MC and the roadies, they get to ride the bus with these chicks every night? I'm like, this is even better. Not thought it was right. Right now there has to be a gig here somewhere.

Now, how about to the point where you were actually hired by James Brown and what responsibilities did you handle?

Actually, I got hired as a publicist and that lasted for about a month. I had ended up in Pittsburgh as my family moved up there. And I was majoring in journalism at a school in Pittsburgh called Point Park College.

And James Brown was scheduled on his, you know, never ending tour to come through Pittsburgh. And I got a call from one of the guys who worked for him.

And at this point, I'm still chasing them around whenever they're, as I said, whenever they were in a 100, 200 mile radius I was in the car and hanging out at the shows. So even though I was out of radio and was a full time student, I was still, you know, kept my. Kept my feet in the door in the James Brown world.

Anyway, so lo and behold, they had a Pittsburgh show coming up and they needed somebody to babysit the local promotion and ask me if I had the time and interest to do it. Of course, the answer was yes. So part of that was writing some press releases that I managed to get published in the local newspaper.

Not because the press releases were anything significant, but because the entertainment editor of the paper happened to be a friend of my father's.

Oh, okay.

Came in very handy.

Oh, yeah.

My father was a prominent retailer in the Pittsburgh area and had a lot of juice, so it came in very handy.

Oh, yeah.

So long and short of it, James Brown came to town to do the show. The show sold out. He was impressed with the promotion, and he's like, my God, what did you do that, you know, we. We've done well in Pittsburgh.

We never sold out this arena before. What did you do? So I showed him the clippings of all this stuff I'd managed to get planted in the paper, and he was like, bowled over. He was just.

I mean, black music that hadn't crossed over in a big way still wasn't getting, in fact, really rock and roll music in general, let alone R and B, didn't get respect from the daily newspapers outside of a handful. I mean, maybe the New York Times and a couple of others, but. And the Washington Post perhaps.

But in a city like Pittsburgh, there's, you know, the entertainment editors of the papers tended to be old school guys who were really just there to get free tickets to Broadway plays when they came through town.

Right.

And they didn't give a damn about James Brown or know anything about him. He was just another one of these screaming guys that my kid buys his record.

Right, Right.

You know, they didn't really get it. So as a result, Brown wasn't accustomed to getting that kind of coverage in a legit daily newspaper. So he was really bowled over.

So then it ended up two weeks later, he called and said, hey, I know you're in school, but you want to come to work for me? And I'm like, what school? What's a school? That was that.

Yeah. So. So when did you take over responsibilities of managing his various tours.

Oh, about a year later, what happened was I worked for him for about a month and I did publicity releases and called newspapers in all the cities where the show was heading, trying to duplicate what I had done in Pittsburgh. Unfortunately, my father didn't have friends at all the other newspapers.

It's a little difficult.

The success wasn't quite as consistent.

We have the same problem here. Yeah, you know, yeah, but.

But in all honesty, I did have some success because the other thing I realized was that because those papers didn't traditionally cover black music, nobody reached out to them.

So the fact that somebody who spoke English actually got on the phone and called these guys in places like Hartford or Springfield or Providence or Mobile, Alabama, doesn't matter where.

The fact that you actually picked up the phone and reached out to these guys and followed it up with professional looking publicity releases and press releases was something they weren't accustomed to. So I actually did get a lot more play than probably anybody thought we would. And the fact was, Brown was an interesting guy to write about.

He'd been political, he'd been involved in a lot of different things, of course, from the riots after the Martin Luther King assassination, his involvement with cooling some of that down. So, I mean, there were aspects to him that were of interest to almost anybody if you would just present it properly. So I did get a little play.

But long and short of it was Brown had hoped, unbeknownst to me, to get King Records, to whom he was signed at the time.

And King Records was an old independent label that was based in Cincinnati, had been very successful from the 40s through the 60s, but had fallen on kind of hard times as the independent labels began to fade away in the late 60s, which was typical of the whole industry. And really all they had left was James Brown. And he had pretty much hijacked half the building for his own offices.

And most of the records King released were productions of his and they were completely dependent on him for revenue. So he had hoped to convince the president of King Records to pay my salary and it became an issue. So the long and short of it was I didn't get paid.

So after about a month it was like, well, son, I'm sorry it didn't work out, but, you know, see you later. Oh, this is not good. You know, I mean, I had quit school and, you know, my pals at school give me a going away party.

They were envious because, like, how many kids quit school to go to work for a rock star? You Know, this was like a big deal. I'm like, oh, my God, I can't go back to Pittsburgh. How in the world could I do that?

Yeah, right.

So I actually got in my car and drove right through Pittsburgh and kept on going to New York where I knew Kool and the Gang, who had had one hit single. And I ended up working for them for about two months. And that was kind of a blessing and a curse because the job really didn't pay.

It didn't pay at all. I was allowed a commission on what I could book. If I could book them gigs, I could get a commission. And they let me sleep in the offices.

So, yeah, I guess by New York standards, it wasn't a bad job. I mean, remember, I'm still a kid out of college. You just looking for a way to break in. So I did that for a couple of months.

Then I got a call from one of the guys in James Brown's office who said, look, we've sorted all this out. Somebody at King Records had misled James. He's really mad.

And meanwhile, the assistant tour director had been fired or quit or whatever, and there's an opening. Would you come back? And. And I was kind of leery because now I'm hearing it from somebody else, not from James. And.

And yeah, I was like, okay, fool me once, but twice.

Yeah, right.

But the long and short of it was, shortly thereafter I got a call from James himself. And he said, son, there's a job. If you want it, get on a bus and meet me in Rochester tonight.

The show happened to be in Rochester, New York that night, doing a one nighter. And he says, if you're in Rochester tonight, you got a job. If you're not, I take it you don't want the job and the subject.

And you, you took that ride to Rochester, right?

I got on.

I forget if it was Amtrak or Graham, but whatever got me to Rochester, I got there and I got to the show about halfway through, and I left Rochester on this Learjet with him. So it was, you know, from sleeping on a desk in. In Gene red's office on 57th street, flying out on a Learjet, it was a little confusing.

Now, how many years did he. When was the last time you managed one of his tours?

74.

Okay, 74. So you did a bunch of.

Not too long after the payback and that whole bit, and then things kind of went askance, but it. But, you know, it had played out.

It had been five years at that point, and five really, really interesting years from the Bootsy Collins years to the return of Macey O. Parker and Fred Wesley. And, you know, so we went through a lot of phases, most of which he was an arena headliner.

So it was, you know, a lucrative and exciting kind of time. And it just played out. It was like, okay, time to do something else.

Well, we're going to get into a track from the artist you spoke of, the legendary James Brown. He's still doing tours, comes down to New York and Connecticut once in a while. Allen Leeds from Minnesota is our special guest.

We'll come back and speak more about Alan and all the great things he's done over the years, including managing Prince during some of his most prolific and. And out in the public years. This is from James Brown, Talking Loud and Saying Nothing.

Right.

Great music from James Brown, Talking Loud and Saying Nothing. Co written James Brown, Bobby Bird.

And speaking of our special guest, Alan Leeds, legendary tour manager and the next person, well down the line who he was working with, the guy who used to cover this song in concert, Talking a lot of Saying Nothing. Prince. You've heard Prince's version of it, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So obviously Prince has studied and been a fan of James Brown over the years.

What was your first introduction to Prince? And eventually working with him during some. Actually, probably his biggest tour ever, Purple Rain.

Well, the Prince thing, I mean, it's interesting because I've been so blessed, as you and I were discussing just a minute ago off mic, I've been so blessed to work with a lot of artists that I would have been fans of anyway, but the only one I really sought after was James Brown. All of the rest of them just kind of like, just. I don't want to say dropped in my lap, because I don't.

I guess, you know, on one hand, I say you make your luck. I'm a believer in that.

That there's only so much luck and coincidence in life that a lot of it, you may not realize you're doing it, but you do kind of put yourself in the path of the bus before you can run over.

Right, right.

You know, and I guess the Prince thing was kind of like that because I was out of the business for a few years, then got back in it, strangely enough, as a tour manager for Kiss.

Oh, okay. Yeah.

Not the radio station.

Kiss. Arm and.

Which is, you know, a little bit. It's. When you look at my resume, it kind of stands out, you know, after you've seen like.

Like James Brown, George Clinton, Bootsy's Rubber Band, Harold Melvin, the Blue Notes Kiss.

Right, right.

But at any rate, they became, you know, very good friends of mine for that, for that year.

And apparently they had been through more than one road manager at the time and having trouble finding somebody that, you know, where the chemistry was a fit. So anyway, long story short, this guy came to me one night and he said, hey, this Kiss tour is ending next week. What are you doing afterwards?

And you know, like most freelancers are some going home and wait for a call. And he's like, well, you don't have to if you don't want to. The Prince gig is open, I can hook you up.

And here again, it was a case where, you know, my wife and I had been listening to Prince music for a couple of years and, and I must admit, I hadn't been a fan from the very beginning, but then girlfriend had dragged me to a show against my will. And this was actually the Controversy Tour early in the Controversy tour.

And this then girlfriend dragged me to the show and I was of course blown away. And you know, from that point on, became a fan. And you know, here's a guy saying, hey, do you want to go work for him? And I'm like, well, yeah.

And well, he's, he's kind of difficult. It's pretty quirky. And I'm like, look, you don't have any idea. I know what difficult is. Okay, Right.

What difficult is, is going home with no paycheck.

Yeah.

Waiting for the phone to ring. That's what's difficult.

Yeah. Right.

I ended up back in New York at that point in life and went back to New York.

And about six months after the tour ended, I got a call from Stephen Farnoli asking me if I was interested in coming to Minneapolis and been here ever since. Yeah.

Did you as a tour manager, did you went on every date on the tour, you had to be there?

Yes. Yeah. As a tour manager, you're very much there. You're there before the show starts and you're there after it ends.

Now, to organize artists such as Prince and James Brown, then what were some of the key duties you had on the dates on the tour?

Well, when I first came with Prince, it was basically as a road manager, which is kind of part of. And all these titles are, in some cases they're interchangeable and the bigger the tour, they're not so interchangeable.

Generally a tour manager is a more senior position.

Road manager reports to the tour manager, but that's assuming it's a big tour, meaning stadium or at least arena size, where the responsibilities are great enough that you need more than one person. When I first came with Prince, it was a road manager job. And I don't guess there really was a tour manager per se.

But anyway, rhetoric aside, the bottom line is most of it is travel. And basically you're responsible for getting, for getting everything from point A to point B.

And that does not include in most cases the equipment, because that's what your production manager does.

Your production manager is responsible for the physical show, getting it moved and getting it up and then tearing it down, getting it in trucks and getting it to the next city. That's what a production manager does. A tour manager does the same thing, but he does it with people.

Okay, now you work relentless touring. I mean, Prince and James Brown have done so many dates in such short time, keeping the performers, I mean, healthy and able to go on stage.

Have there been some close calls when they just couldn't to go on stage to do their shows? And what's that like for you to, to make things run right?

It can be a real nightmare. I mean, I've got a James. I, I gotta tell you, Prince was always pretty health conscious.

And I'm hard pressed to think of any dates in the years that I was with Prince where we really canceled because of illness. Probably just once or twice, right?

Oh, that's great.

That's right.

But I don't remember.

Yeah.

However, I do remember a case with James Brown that was kind of funny. It's never funny when somebody's really sick. But we had a show in Providence, Rhode island, just one of many, many one nighters.

And at that point he had been in New York the day before and was planning to fly up on his Learjet to do the show. That particular Evening. It was a Sunday evening, and I was home. The James Brown gig was a little different because it was.

It really had more to do with booking and promoting the gigs. And I wasn't always at the shows. This was a case where I was not. And there were several of us that were responsible for keeping the tour moving.

And, you know, we'd alternate. One guy would go out on the road one week, and then I'd come out the next week, that kind of a thing.

And we'd alternate between the road and the office. At any rate, long story short, I was home.

It was a Sunday, and around noon, I got a call from one of James's aides, one of his personal assistants, telling me that he had gotten very, very sick. And he was almost delirious with fever. Had a fever of like 103 or 104. Couldn't keep food down. His throat was raw.

He couldn't barely talk and just was like. It sounded like a horrendous case of flu or maybe even lightweight pneumonia. Who knows?

But they had called the doctor and be on standby because I can't. The guy can't get out of bed and walk across the room to the bathroom. So I'm thinking, okay, we're gonna have to cancel the show.

Now, the sooner you cancel the show, the more money is safe. Because as soon as the venue opens up and your ticket takers and police and ushers and everybody report for duty, then they're on the clock.

So I'm balancing the economic pressure of canceling as early as possible with waiting to make sure that he's not going to get up and go do this show. And the doctor comes and visits him. And then I get another phone call a couple hours later.

The doctor gave him a sedative because he was so upset, and so he couldn't. Something to calm his stomach because he couldn't hold anything down. And the doctor told him stay in bed for at least two days.

And I'd also learned that James wife was flying up from Georgia to be by his side, that she was concerned maybe he should be hospitalized. So at that point, I took it upon myself to cancel the show. Brown obviously couldn't even come to the phone.

So I called Providence, and this is a Sunday now, so it's not easy to reach people had to call radio stations and find the right numbers to get somebody on a Sunday when switchboards were closed and so on and so on. Call the venue, you know, so there's a lot of phone calls, and not to mention Find our road manager who was already there with the band setting up.

And this is before cell phones. So it's not so easy reaching everybody and somehow you manage, you do. And you've now canceled the show. And it's around 5:30, 6 o'. Clock.

So I call back to the hotel in New York where he was staying just to see how he was. And his wife answers the phone and I said, How's Mr. Brown? And she says, I don't know, I haven't seen him. I'm like, you haven't seen him?

Well, no, I just got here but he's not here. I'm like, he's not there. He'd gotten up and flown to Providence.

Oh wow.

So I've now canceled the show. This guy got out of a sick bed to get on a flight to go do a show that's now been canceled. So I'm like, okay.

I think my days as this employee are over. About to get a very ugly phone call. And that's when I learned is like, you know, I learned a lot of things that night.

One was never ever cancel a show without hearing it directly from the artist.

Yeah, right.

And also I learned that the old school guys, it's like the show must go on is more than a slogan. It's it's really. I mean this guy was not going to cancel that show. It was amazing.

Great stories from Alan Leeds talking about James Brown and Prince and we're going to talk more with his days with Prince and you know, really exciting times. Several tours. We'll get into a song right now. This is from the title track.

Actually not the title track, but is the name of his studios up in Chanhassen, Minnesota still there? Right, Paisley Park, Absolutely.

Yeah.

And we'll come back and talk with Alan Leeds. And this is WVF Fairfield and that's Prince and the revolution from around the world on Dave Paisley Park.

Alan Leeds, tour manager for Prince, James Brown, d' Angelo Maxwell and Prince.

We we I, I cut you off with a question about, you know, James Brown Prince, but you know, you moved to Minneapolis, have been there since the explosion with Purple Rain. Talk about your duties. Were you working? We have seen you in the Purple Rain movie a couple times in there.

But what did you do during the Purple Rain movie and that tour? Wow, what a job for you.

Well, it was a handful, but it was kind of interesting because in a sense, it was kind of like a tour manager off road because I was still coordinating the movements of all of these people. And a lot of the responsibilities were very similar to what I would do on a tour, except that it didn't involve being in hotels.

You actually went home to your own bed every night, which was kind of nice.

Okay.

But we had. When I got here, they were in the midst of preparing for the movie.

And when I say preparing, it was, you know, Prince was still dealing with the script. I don't even. In fact, Albert Magnolia hadn't even been officially hired yet.

Prince was still going through ideas as to who would direct it and who was going to help him finish the script, because he had what he thought was a finished script.

But the film people they were dealing with all said no, that it wasn't what a final script should be from a, you know, from a cinematic standpoint, which, you know, might be understandable. There's somebody who's never written a screenplay before, which is a kind of specialized art into itself.

But at any rate, long story short, I got here and they were already involved in dance lessons, choreography lessons, and they had made a deal. When I say they, I'm talking about Cavallo and Ruffalo and Farnoli, who were Prince's managers at the time.

And, of course, Prince himself was pretty actively involved in the decision making, naturally. So they had. They had a drama coach that was working with everybody on a regular basis.

They had dance instructors at the Minnesota Dance Theater downtown that were doing kind of a very gymnastic kind of approach to dance that was really just about loosening people up and getting them accustomed to moving around the way they might on screen. Because certainly you didn't need to teach Prince of the time how to dance, you know. Right. But. But nonetheless, these were all different operations.

So we had. And we had, of course, as you said, the triple threat. We had. We had what was still Vanity 6, because she was still there.

The Apollonia thing hadn't happened yet. And Morris and the Time. And of course, part of the drama there was.

Who were going to be the new Time members, because Jimmy and Terry were definitely out. And there was a lot of drama about how they were going to get replaced and. And who was going to choose the replacements.

And, you know, so that was an undercurrent that was going on.

And then all three groups were rehearsing, musically rehearsing new songs from the upcoming albums, which were going to be the Purple Rain related albums, most of which were finished.

I mean, there were, you know, the fans who pay close attention to that stuff, know that Doves Cry and several of the other songs weren't recorded until kind of the last minute. But quite a bit of the music that ended up in the movie had already been recorded by the time I got there, so they were already rehearsing.

So I was coordinating the rehearsals of the three different groups, the dance lessons downtown, the sittings with the drama coach, and all of this. So it really was kind of like playing traffic cop and then making sure everybody.

The disadvantage of being at home was that when you're on tour, everybody's in one hotel and pretty reachable because nobody's going to stray. But so far.

So if something comes up and you suddenly need somebody an hour early for a sound check, it's not too hard to find everybody in a hotel in Tulsa, you know, but when everybody's at home, it's a lot different because people just don't pay as much attention to the clock at home. It's just too easy to get distracted.

There's kids, there's wives, there's girlfriends, there's cars that need gas and lawns that need cut and mothers who want to visit, you know, so you got everybody at home. Keeping the schedules and keeping everybody punctual was a real headache.

So initially, that was pretty much what I was doing, was just juggling everybody's schedules around.

Now, Prince, you know, from the press and people work with him, has always kind of had the reputation being a micromanager. And in every aspect of how he's presented and what's going on in his career, is that true?

And was it really, really demanding as a tour manager and employee for you?

Yeah, very much so, but in a very positive way, because as much of a micromanager as he was, and assumedly still is, he was so doggone creative that, you know, preparing for a Prince tour was a very tiring task.

I always thought that the rehearsals and the preparation were more exhausting than the actual tour itself, because once you're on the road, you develop a kind of routine and a chemistry, and everything kind of falls into a rhythm where, you know, you're going to have two or three show nights and then a day off, and then you're going to move and, you know, but. And the life on the bus, in the hotel, you really develop a kind of tour rhythm.

After a week or 10 days, it sets in, and your body clock adjusts to the odd hours and everything else Makes an adjustment, and it's fairly easy because the rest of your life is totally outside the cocoon. A real full blown tour really becomes a cocoon in the sense that it's a kind of surreal existence. You don't really know what else is going on.

You see the same people, you sleep with the same people, you travel on a bus with the same people, you fly on a plane with the same people. You go to work, you go to play, you go to eat. It's always the same people. So you don't really have a whole lot of input from the outside world.

You don't know who the president is. You don't know what the weather is. You know, you lose track of your family. Everything. The rest of the world is just not real.

The only thing real becomes this, this, this tour cocoon that you're part of. So once that rhythm kicks in, it's not so hard.

Now, you did several tours, the Purple Rain tour and the Hit and Run tour and Love Sexy did as well, right?

Yes. Yeah. Yep, yep, yep.

How. How about one of your favorite tours that you just look back and said Prince was on his game and everything went real smooth. Anything stand out?

See, it's hard to separate them because they were all very special in different ways. I mean, Love Sexy was something I was just proud of from a production standpoint.

You know, by then I had gotten a little more involved in other aspects of the shows and sitting in on the meetings and designing things.

And not that I was the designer, there were other people who deserve the credit for that, but I was just more involved in the creative part of things and seeing things come to life. And. And the Love Sexy show was so state of the art from a production standpoint that, you know, that, that I hold dear.

The Hit and Run tour was probably the most fun just because it was really fun to do these kinds of surprise shows and not know where you're going to be three days from now.

Right. Kind of what he's doing now.

Exactly, exactly. So there was a. There was a certain attraction to that because we were me. Prince was so hot at the time that.

And not to downplay the impact he has today because he still causes a fuss wherever he goes. No question.

But at that time, I mean, it was like, you know, if we decided we were coming to Cincinnati unannounced, it was like, you better put extra. Don't. Don't give any police the night off.

I remember, I remember sleeping out for Purple Rain tickets and at the Nassau Coliseum and they had the Mounted policemen and windows were crashing. It was. It was.

Yeah, it was crazy.

Yeah, it was nice.

Yeah, it was really crazy. So. So, you know, knowing that you're part of this, this crazy machine that's causing all this hubbub, there's a kind of.

Kind of decadent fun in that, you know?

Right.

You know, until somebody, God forbid, somebody gets hurt or something happens, there's no fun in that ever, anywhere. But, you know, it was. It was an experience for all of us.

And doing the hit and run thing, being able to sit back and kind of cackle to yourself that you're one of three people on the planet who knows where all hell's going to break loose tomorrow morning, you know, that's kind of fun.

Right? How, how about the. These days. Do. Do you keep up on Prince's latest music and you stay in contact at all with him?

I'm not. I can't really say I'm in contact because, you know, Prince has never been the kind of guy to just call and say, hey, how's it going?

You know, been bowling lately.

Yeah.

I mean, this isn't. This isn't who he is.

Right.

But, you know, up to date with his music. Reasonably so. I mean, I've seen a video of the Brit Awards, which I thought was terrific. Of course, I saw Saturday Night Live.

Right.

I love the song. What is it? Fury?

Yeah. Fury. Yeah.

Yeah, that's. That's like. I think that's a classic Prince song. I don't know. I'm good. Time will tell. People telling me I'm a little too excited over that one.

But of what? Of the three or four songs that I've heard from this album thus far, that's my favorite. That's the standout.

But.

But I like everything else I've heard, too. I mean, let's face it, this is a guy who's a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant composer with a very unique gift.

And, you know, I mean, I've been privileged to be in situations where you're in a hotel suite or in his living room where, you know, after a glass of wine or a long day, and he sits down with just a group of people who are around, might be girlfriends or, you know, whoever happens to be in the house and just sits down and starts to sing and play at a piano for fun. And, I mean, it's mesmerizing.

Right.

And you never get used to it. It's never to the point where it becomes old hat.

You know, no matter how many times it happens, you're just staggered at how he can just stop a room and it could be something like just jamming on, talking loud and saying nothing or with his band. Or it could be sitting at a piano suddenly breaking into a Joni Mitchell song. You know, I mean he has that kind of gift.

So it's, it's, it's kind of hard not to pay attention.

You're talking about all the tours and, you know, when things ended with Prince. Let's catch up on what's been going on since then and current day.

I mean you've, you've, you've talked about an upcoming book, you've been working on a James Brown book. A couple books probably. What's the latest for you?

Well, the latest is I'm actually working with a film major film company in la. Imagine Entertainment, Ron Howard, Bryant Grazer's outfit has the rights to the James Brown story.

And I guess in the post Ray walk the line world we're in today, everybody's looking for the next great biopic.

But at any rate they have the James Brown story and Paramount is involved and they've brought me and a couple other people whom I have great respect for, Nelson George, the writer, and a couple other people that you wouldn't necessarily know in his consultant. So that's something that it looks like I'm going to be involved in for quite a bit of this year on some level anyway. I'm not just sure.

We're still trying to figure out who's going to do what, when and how.

But.

That'S probably the most immediate thing. And you know, I have been doing a lot of writing. Coming off the road has enabled me to really concentrate and catch up on that.

I had a book that was about half finished that sat there for five years because I just never was home long enough to unwind and concentrate on, you know, Shakespeare.

I'm not, but at least I can, you know, I went to school so I can't really semi literate, but I'm the kind of guy where I, I'm not a professional writer and have no training as such, so I've really got to be in the right mindset to work on. So it's, it's, it takes a lot longer than it should. I get a lot of teasing from people who have read a couple of chapters of this book.

Like 10 years ago I said, oh, still working on the book?

Well, I always said when Prince was inducted in the Rock and Roll hall of Fame, either yourself or your brother Eric would have been great to do the induction because you Know, you have such a great take with words and, you know, all the experiences, but we know how they do things over at the Rock and Roll hall of Fame and stuff like that.

Yeah, but you know what, though? I understand that too, though, and I think that when you've got other artists, it's a way to link the.

It's a way to link the generations of the artists. And, you know, an age where a lot of young artists tend to stick their nose up at those who came before them. It's.

It's always cool to see, you know, young artists paying, you know, giving proper credit, credit where it's due. So I'm not mad at seeing an Alicia Keys or Outkast giving Prince props. I mean, he deserves it from them as much as a million other people.

But I think actually that's what the party calls for. I'm not mad at that.

Now, I'm going to ask you the tough question. Question. See. See if you want to answer this. James Brown and Prince in a split competition, who do you have money on in their prime?

Wow. Depends. What's. What. What are you trying to. What. What constitutes a victory?

Oh, okay.

You know, singing, dancing. No, no, no, no.

So many, you know, I mean, the splits. Dancing splits.

Oh, dancing splits. James Brown.

James Brown.

Okay, James Brown. In a heartbeat. Okay, in a heartbeat. But. But I saw him in the early 60s. Believe me, Prince didn't want to come around him.

Wow.

Nobody did.

Uhhuh.

No, because it was more than splits. It was like splits and flips out of it. And it was like stuff that would have won the gymnastics in the Olympics.

It was stupid stuff, you know, like, how did he do that? You know? Yeah, no, I think when it comes to that, you know, I mean, Prince can do splits.

Now.

The other thing about James's music, it was like his. His moves back then.

And obviously I'm talking about his early years where he was at his creative peak when he was inventing this stuff, you know, as opposed to recreating it. His moves were so musical that it was almost like they were part of the band. It's almost like you could hear the split song, you know what I mean?

It was like they just made sense where and when you did it. And I think in generations, post soul music generations.

And I'm with no disrespect, I'm including Prince in that, that sometimes the choreography is just there for the sake of the choreography. It's like, hey, I can do a split.

That'll keep people's attention and that'll make this exciting and take the excitement level in the audience to the next level. But it isn't necessarily musically timed. It's, you know, it's kind of like window dressing. It isn't really something that's part of the music.

I'm not even explaining this well.

No, no, I understand what you're saying.

The moves just made more sense with James because they just went with the music and with people. And I don't want to pick on Prince.

With Prince and even Michael Jackson or Usher, a lot of times you just see moves and say, okay, boy, those are cool moves. But did they really have anything to do with the song? Not necessarily.

Words from Alan Leeds and, you know, it's been a real honor to have you on the show. And hopefully you can come to the studio when you come to New York. I'm sure you travel all the time.

I would love to do that, man. It'd be fun. You do such great work. And it's just so cool to have people, you know, in the media, too.

You always hear people hollering and screaming about the media, but, you know, you can't isolate media. It means so many things to so many people.

And they have guys like you doing what you're doing and supporting the music and giving love to the artists. And I hope Prince fans aren't hard on me for what I just said about split.

No, I think they'll be understanding.

This has been fun.

Yeah.

Had to say something controversial to keep the. Keep the emails coming.

Yeah, you got it. You got it. Especially when we're re airing. Get the press out on some of the highlights of the interview.

There you go.

We wanted to get into something, and this guy, he's a real great friend of the show. He's been on several times. And Eric working on a new record.

Eric is always working on new music. He's been hibernating, too. Maybe he's got a little Sly Stone in him, I don't know. But I'm gonna put Eric and d' Angelo together.

Well, we'll have the revival tour, right?

Did you guys make it. Did you guys make it down to Florida this year?

No, actually. Okay, well, I spent a lot of time in Florida over the summer last year because my parents had made a move and it was, you know, they're.

They're just need a little help with. With moving and stuff, getting settled in and so on. So I did spend some time there, but not. Not this winter.

Oh, okay. Well, we'll play something right now. This is from your brother's album, things Left Unsaid.

And we'll go with a song co written by Prince Aguadilla and Alan Leeds. Thanks so much, Joe.

It's been my pleasure. Yeah.

If you just tuned in, Alan Leeds, legendary tour manager and music historian, he's got. So we just touched on a little bit of what you've been through and still going through interesting music during Minneapolis Music Month.

But we'll have him back again and we'll be re airing this interview in its entirety in the next couple weeks for three days and three nights at Upper roomwithjokelly. Com. Thanks, Alan.