David Rivkin was a pop Zelig figure, someone who popped up in often unexpected places throughout local and national music history. After the triumph of Purple Rain, the Twin Cities became the center of a major-label feeding frenzy. In addition to Jam & Lewis and Prince, a slew of their associates also became go-to hitmakers.

Rivkin, aka David Z, who died on Sunday, Aug. 2, at 78, was the most commercially successful of these associates. He made hits with Jody Watley and Fine Young Cannibals, locals the Jets and Fargo’s Jonny Lang, and later went full-time into making blues records, winning a Grammy for his work with Etta James.

But it is for his years with Prince — and Rivkin was in that camp long before stardom kicked in — that Rivkin is best known. It helped that Prince began pushing David’s name in the credits during this period. His name appeared in the trade ads for The Family’s self-titled album as its co-producer and arranger, and Prince credited him as the arranger of the early-1986 No. 1 hit, “Kiss.” Recently, Rivkin was involved with the Super Deluxe Editions of Prince’s early classics.

Rivkin grew up in St. Louis Park, starting in the mid-’60s as a folk fingerpicker but was quickly playing rock. “I had several bands,” he told the Truth in Rhythm podcast in 2021, and in them, he was a hotshot lead guitarist. He also worked in the promo department for the A&M Records office in Minneapolis. For four years, he lived in Los Angeles, working as a staff songwriter for A&M, where, as he put it, he would “write songs for people who didn’t write songs. It was kind of a limited market.” Among Rivkin’s writing partners was the country-rock legend Gram Parsons; Rivkin co-wrote a song on Parsons’ 1973 solo album, GP.

When he returned home, Rivkin became a recording engineer, making demos with local bands at ASI Studios in North Minneapolis; he also mixed sound for KQRS's live concert broadcasts. One of them was an early performance by the Suicide Commandos that was later issued as The Legendary KQRS Concert 1976.

It led to a call from Sound 80, an audiophile studio near downtown Minneapolis, that had originally opened as a classical shop, but was branching out. “They wanted the rock business, and they could see that I did a lot of it. So they brought me over,” Rivkin says in Dave Kenney and Thomas Saylor’s Minnesota in the 70s.

Not long afterward, Owen Husney came to Sound 80 asking about sprucing up a demo for his new client, a Black Northside group called Grand Central. “The band members consisted of 16-year-old Prince, André Cymone on bass guitar, and Morris Day on drums, and although they sounded decent, nothing really happened as a result of that demo,” Rivkin said in 2013.

Rivkin worked on that demo and another one after it, after Prince had left the group. When Prince signed to Warner Bros., Rivkin accompanied him to Los Angeles to record his debut. “Back then, I was just a beginner, and Warners wanted a reputable engineer to work on the first album,” Rivkin said. “So I got the guy who used to cut my songwriting demos at A&M, Tommy Vicari, and later on, Prince then had me fly out to the Record Plant in Sausalito [California] to record his vocals.” (Rivkin’s younger brother Bobby became Prince’s longtime drummer.)

Two years later, Rivkin worked with songwriter-musician Steve Greenberg and vocalist Cynthia Johnson on a tart, beepy little number that cried out about feeling trapped in the blah Midwest. To test it out, they brought new mixes of it to a downtown St. Paul disco, Oz. “We wanted to know why Donna Summer's records sounded so good [at the Oz]," Rivkin said. “We wasted a lot of gas doing that.”

Not according to the ledger, they didn’t: “Funkytown,” credited to Lipps Inc., topped the Billboard Hot 100 on May 31, 1980: the first Minnesota-recorded No. 1, and David Rivkin’s first hit.

But it wasn't the only recent national breakout from Minneapolis: “I Wanna Be Your Lover” and “Funkytown” had hit the charts back-to-back. “Those two songs blasted open some sort of reality hole in our wall here, because everyone for 15 to 20 years before that had said, ‘We got to get a national record happening,’” Rivkin told Billboard.

Rivkin didn’t record with Prince again until 1982, on “Delirious.” Then in 1983, Rivkin sat in a truck outside First Avenue the night Prince recorded “Purple Rain,” “I Would Die 4 U,” and “Baby I’m a Star.” Prince would overdub the bass lines on the finished tracks — it hadn’t recorded well live — but as Rivkin told Jackie Renzetti of The Current in 2016, “Those versions were almost exactly what he did live … It was incredible; I mean, little did I know it was gonna be that big of a recording. Prince was really not a well-known figure back then. This is the kind of recording that launched him into superstardom.”

About the album, Rivkin told The Current on another occasion: “When it came time for the movie, I cheated and put a crowd from the Minnesota Vikings in the audience track.”

The runaway success of Purple Rain brought the flood: Between 1985 and 1990, Billboard would note that a new record sounded like it came from Minneapolis more than 40 times. And Rivkin reaped the benefits.

“For a long time, Prince had been talking about forming his own record label,” he said. “One day, he called me and said, ‘There’s a group that I’ve just signed and want you to have something to do with.”

Summoned to L.A., Prince handed Rivkin the keys to Mazarati: “I went there, walked into Sunset Sound, and he said, ‘You’re going to produce this group called Mazarati.’ That was the first time I’d been labeled a producer, which I’m very grateful for.”

At one point, Rivkin said, “Prince gave me this demo of him just playing straight chords on an acoustic guitar — one verse and one chorus — while singing in a normal pitch; not the falsetto that’s on the finished record. To us, it sounded like a folk song, and we were wondering what we could do with it. No way was it funky. Anyway, starting with a LinnDrum, I programmed the beat and began experimenting.”

What he came up with, he added, “was a really unique rhythm that was unbelievably funky but also impossible to actually play.” Prince liked it so much he took it back. “Kiss” became his third No. 1 single. Mazarati, the engineer added, “were pissed. Prince had promised everyone a share of the songwriting credit, but that never happened and they were kind of mad about it.” (The song also had an eminently strange afterlife.)

Rivkin would continue to work with Prince on and off through Diamonds and Pearls, in 1991. He also stepped back into the fray to remix some tracks for 1999 (Super Deluxe Edition), as well as doing a full remix for the 1985 Syracuse show released as Prince and the Revolution: Live.

But David Z could write his own ticket, thanks to his production of the self-titled debut album by the Jets in late 1985. The Jets were a family act from Tonga who were performing in suburban Minneapolis hotels under the name Quazar when they signed a management deal with Don Powell, a former Motown executive who’d worked with Stevie Wonder.

In 1986, The Jets yielded two top-five pop hits, the giddy bubblegum freestyle of “Crush on You” and the ballad “You Got It All.” That year, the Minneapolis Sound took over the charts — see the Billboard Hot 100 for May 24, 1986 — with a landmark nine Twin Cities-recorded songs, the most ever. The name David Z was on Nos. 18 (“Crush on You”) and 30 (“Kiss”).

Soon, Rivkin was working with a lot more people. He worked on Sheila E.’s self-titled third album and on Jody Watley’s self-titled solo debut, both in 1987; the latter yielded the smash “Lookin’ for a New Love,” whose sharp-elbowed groove was “the Minneapolis sound” in excelsis, piling on orchestra hits, slap-bass, and keyboard-horns, a sound as seemingly shoulder-padded as Joan Collins on Dynasty.

In 1989, Rivkin was behind another No. 1, this time for the British pop trio Fine Young Cannibals. “We said, ‘Get Prince for us, we’ll work with him,’” the group’s Andy Cox told Rolling Stone. Well, how about his engineer? the band’s label suggested instead. David Z would work on three tracks from FYC’s second album, The Raw and the Cooked, including its smash hit, “She Drives Me Crazy,” which the group originally called “She’s My Baby” before Rivkin suggested they change it.

It helped that Rivkin had a good, reliable local studio to work in: Paisley Park. “Studio 2 was mine,” he said, “and I ended up working there for about eight years, bringing in my own business on the strength of people wanting to work at Prince’s studio.”

But “the Minneapolis Sound” had a sell-by date. By mid-1990, Rivkin would say: “The big rush is over. Everyone is settling down. We’re all still here, and we’re still doing records. It’s not going to go away.”

In 1991, Rivkin made a canny swerve, hiring on to helm Wisconsinites the BoDeans’ Black and White, issued in spring 1991. BoDeans guitarist Kurt Neumann explained to Billboard, “Our listeners seemed to be more of a radio-listening audience. And we're not that alternative a band that we spread totally by word of mouth . . . Radio didn’t really seem to understand our last record, Home, so we thought David Z could take our music and interpret it a little better for listeners.” After all, he’d helped do the same for the weirdo one state over.

Not long after, Rivkin left Minneapolis for Los Angeles. “I did a Big Head Todd and the Monsters record that was pretty big,” he said on part two of the podcast, referring to 1993’s Sister Sweetly. “Then after that, I got requests for all kinds of companies and people to do the same thing. They wanted their record like that, and after about two or three albums, I went, ‘This is the same s**t I’ve been doing. I did the original, you know? I want to do something new.’”

Or maybe something old: At “a blues convention in Memphis,” he said, “I ran smack into Isaac Tigrett and Gary Belz, who were just starting the House of Blues. They had the clubs, and now they wanted to do a label . . . and they hired me.” He enjoyed cultivating this lane. “It’s a good market to be in because it’s not trendy,” he added. “It doesn’t come and go with what’s popular.” In 2004, Rivkin won his only Grammy Award, for mixing Etta James’ Blues to the Bone, the winner for Best Traditional Blues Album.

Once, when asked to define the Minneapolis sound, he called it “the sound of ignorance. It’s made up in an isolated atmosphere. We don’t steal from someone in L.A. or New York. From the songs to the licks to the engineering techniques to the cheap mikes that we use, we’re so different from everybody else.”