By the time Purple Rain blew up, the Twin Cities had been a bustling, pivotal part of the nationwide music business at large. I don't mean in regard to bands or recordings, though prior to Prince there were a handful of hit singles and albums from Minneapolis — "Surfin' Bird," "Action Woman," Blood on the Tracks, "Funkytown," yadda yadda — it's a familiar litany. Instead I'm going to focus on one of the secret roads to Purple Rain, some of the backroom companies that made this a lucrative place to be in the music business even if you didn't actually make any music yourself.

The oldest of these companies, of course, was 3M, Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing, founded in 1902, which began making magnetic sound recording tape shortly after World War II, invented videotape in the fifties, and began investigating digital sound recording in the seventies. 3M's Scotch audio and videotape was an industry standard: A 1983 ad from Radio & Records read, "We play more often on MTV than Billy Joel, David Bowie, and Men at Work combined." In February of 1984, Billboard reported, "NASA announced that 3M would be the first nonaerospace company to do material processes research on the Space Shuttle, meaning that 3M will be trying to create entirely new materials in space. Their commitment to the Space Shuttle is part of a long-range plan leading to 3M eventually working on the permanently-manned space station."

But the record biz had used tape since it was available. T-shirts, buttons, and posters of rock performers, on the other hand, had long been available, but usually only while on tour. That began changing in the early seventies, when Winterland Productions in San Francisco, whose clients included The Grateful Dead, The Doobie Brothers and the Jefferson Starship, needed to do something with their leftover concert merchandise and began hiring salespeople to offer them to record shops. "Before we were an industry," one Sacramento rock-merch distributor said, "somebody would pull up in front with his trunk full of posters. Then you'd never see him again."

The early eighties saw a sharp rise in the number of these ancillary items put on sale; Winterland's Dell Furano credited Michael Jackson, Duran Duran and the Police as aiding the proliferation of the merchandise. "You take the Police, that have sold five million albums," he says. "They've played in front of a million and a half people. That's three and a half million fans that have never made it to a concert . . . A lot of the younger kids' parents will not let them go to a concert, and they have no way to obtain the merchandise." By 1982, Cash Box reported, "rock and roll merchandise began to find its way into a larger sector of the retail community. Major retailers and chains like The Gap, J.C. Penney and Spencers began to actively sell this type of product."

Beginning in 1979, Prince had given his T-shirt, button, and poster business exclusively to Nice Man Merchandising, which had been founded that year in Minneapolis. Larry Johnson was a Spencer, Iowa, native who'd started as a concert promoter. In 1979, he started Nice Man with Toto as his first client. Prince signed on second — he always hired local. It started off small: "We silk-screened everything by hand the first year, and we grossed about $100,000," Johnson told Billboard.

By 1984, things had changed substantially. That year their roster included the Thompson Twins, A Flock of Seagulls, R.E.M., Men at Work, the Fixx, John Cougar Mellencamp, and Echo & the Bunnymen, in addition to Toto and Prince. "Men at Work had been our biggest account until this point," Johnson said. "But Prince and the Thompson Twins will surpass them." Nice Man was riding high on Thompson Twins because they were about to play eighty dates on tour.

The August 25 issue of Billboard reported that Nice Man had "tripled volume" since Purple Rain's debut. "Orders haven't been gigantic," vice president Tony Ratchford said, "but there's been a tremendous amount of interest" in Purple Rain merch. Which he estimated would account for between 30 and 40 percent of the firm's gross sales in 1984. And Prince hadn't begun touring yet — that wouldn't begin until November fourth. In the meantime, Nice Man had to purchase a new computer because all the invoices streaming in had overwhelmed it. They'd also had to install "several new phone lines" that August to keep up with the demand.

By 1984, Nice Man was grossing six million a year. The firm employed a dozen in the office and warehouse and 120 sales reps stationed around the U.S, with fifteen sales companies also involved as well as a pair of telemarketers, one of them the Minneapolis-based Roellco handling mail orders. Nice Man also bought local — their tour T-shirts were manufactured by T-Shirt Inc., whose warehouse space sat next to Nice Man's. (Mass merchandise and retail orders were taken care of by another T-shirt manufacturer, the Classic Co., of Fort Wayne, Indiana.)

And T-shirts were becoming very big business — particularly in hard rock and heavy metal. Motorhead, for instance, were thought to sell more T-shirts than records. And 1984 was "the boom year" for button sales, Billboard reported. "Unlike the record business, which has the RIAA to certify sales, there's no organization that monitors which T-shirts go gold or platinum," Deborah Frost wrote in Rolling Stone. "Many have . . . some bands are getting as much as $1 million advances for T-shirts and assorted merchandise. Other sources say the figure, for an established heavy metal band, is $250,000. A new band without strong hype or a strong gimmick may get $25,000. The successful heavy metal band will sell a T-shirt (or football jersey) for $10 to $14 to at least 50 percent of the audience." Unfortunately for Nice Man, Prince's management gave the Purple Rain T-shirt business to a larger manufacturer after the Billboard profile ran, according to former First Avenue general manager Steve McClellan, who knew Johnson professionally.

The other backroom business the Twin Cities excelled in was record distribution. "There's a large amount of geography with relatively small population," as David Lieberman put it. He was the head of Lieberman Enterprises, the second largest rack jobber in the U.S. A rack jobber, or "service merchandiser," would own one rack — a shelf for displaying LPs and singles — at someone else's store, say, a grocery shop. That rack would be the jobber's responsibility for stocking and upkeep. This was lucrative and important business, even if much of what wound up in those racks were cutouts. Remember, as 1984 began, New York City was still beside itself over the first multifloor Tower Records shop, which had just recently opened. The music-retail superstore was still in its infancy. People bought records at grocery stores.

Lieberman became rich off distribution — they serviced more than 2,500 outlets nationwide, as well as diversifying into fast food, vending machines, coin-operated amusement games, jukeboxes and pinball machines, and videotape distribution. They weren't the only ones. In October 1983, another local distributor, the Navarre Corp., opened, founded by Eric Paulson, who'd been an executive at the now-shuttered rockjobber Pickwick, also a Minneapolis company. Paulson described its first year as "exploding": already they were handling over one hundred labels and counted Target, Lieberman, Musicland, and Great American Music among their clients. "We're doing eight figures in our first year of business, which is about 75 percent over our original sales projections," Paulson said. It's also worth mentioning here that, as Jon Bream wrote in an overview of the Twin Cities' music business, "the area accounts for about 20 to 25 percent of all records sold in the U.S." Not distributed, sold.