The Bangles – Hero Takes A Fall

Prince Jumped Onstage at the Fillmore and Played a Solo on It — That Night Was the First Time the Band Had Ever Met Him

When the Bangles took the stage at the Fillmore in San Francisco sometime in 1984, they had been warned Prince was in the audience. The knowledge made them nervous. What happened next was that Prince, who had already seen the band perform at the Palace in Los Angeles and had watched the video for “Hero Takes a Fall”, walked onstage unannounced and played a guitar solo on the song. He had learned it. Susanna Hoffs recalled it precisely: they had never really met him until that night, but he already knew the song, jumped on, and played what she described as an amazing solo. That encounter is the foundational event of the Bangles’ commercial story. Prince subsequently wrote “Manic Monday” for them. Without the trajectory that began with “Hero Takes a Fall”, the chain that led to a number two single, “Walk Like an Egyptian” at number one, and “Eternal Flame” topping charts on both sides of the Atlantic does not exist in the form it took. The song that started all of it never charted in the United States.

Susanna Hoffs and Vicki Peterson wrote “Hero Takes a Fall” together, from a concept with roots in classical literature. Peterson explained the thinking in a Songfacts interview: they were working along the lines of Greek tragedy, the idea that the hero always has a flaw — an Achilles heel — that ultimately takes him down. In this case the context was romantic, the song addressing a man whose arrogance had made his downfall inevitable. Hoffs described it as a milestone in her collaboration with Peterson: they had sat down with a specific intention — something with a good beat that would be genuinely fun to play live — and the song that resulted was strong enough to become a debut single. The first recording sessions for All Over the Place began in December 1983, after producer David Kahne had finished work with Romeo Void on Instincts. Tracking took place largely at Skyline Recording in Topanga Canyon. Kahne’s approach to the debut was precise and demanding — the band later described sessions as often joyless under his pressure — but the resulting album preserved more of the Bangles’ jangle and garage energy than its successor would.

Columbia Records released “Hero Takes a Fall” as a single one week before All Over the Place arrived in May 1984. The song had been a college radio staple during the band’s climb through the Los Angeles Paisley Underground scene — a loose community of 1960s-influenced guitar bands that included the Three O’Clock, the Long Ryders, and the Dream Syndicate — and the college radio circulation of the single gave the album its audience and the band its touring base. It peaked at number 96 in the UK and did not register on the US Billboard Hot 100. Columbia, sensing something in its European appeal, remixed the track and rereleased it in January 1985 to coincide with the band’s first European tour. It still failed to chart. The song’s cultural footprint, such as it was, came from a music video shot on San Francisco’s Market Street in May 1984, directed by David Rathod, in which the band navigated various scenarios as mannequins came to life. Hoffs appeared in a French maid outfit. The video circulated on the nascent music television channels and, specifically, reached Prince.

The Song That Unlocked the Decade

The Bangles had formed from classified advertisements placed in the Los Angeles weekly paper The Recycler in December 1980 — one from Hoffs, another from a housemate of the Peterson sisters, which Vicki Peterson answered. The group played originally as the Colours, then the Bangs, discovering another band held that name only after a trademark check, and renamed themselves the Bangles in a Mexican restaurant on the way to Las Vegas. They recorded a self-titled EP in 1982 on Miles Copeland’s Faulty Products label, plugged in and played with minimal production intervention, and spent three years developing their sound in the underground clubs of Los Angeles before Columbia signed them. The transition to a major label brought Kahne and the commercial pressures that came with him, but also the resources to put a single in front of a national audience. What Columbia could not have anticipated was that the single’s main beneficiary would not be the chart but a private audience of one in Minneapolis.

The Bangles opened for Cyndi Lauper and Huey Lewis and the News on the strength of All Over the Place — the exposure brought them new audiences at arena scale without the benefit of a charting single. “Hero Takes a Fall” remained in their live set throughout, generally toward the end of the show, and had already become a reliable crowd-mover by the time Prince played a solo on it at the Fillmore without introduction. His interest in the Paisley Underground extended beyond the Bangles: he later signed the Three O’Clock to his Paisley Park label and recorded Around the World in a Day in a related burst of 1960s-influenced experimentation. “Manic Monday,” written under the pseudonym Christopher, reached number two on the Billboard Hot 100 in April 1986 — held off the top spot by “Kiss” by Prince and the Revolution, a chart coincidence that both parties likely noticed.

What the First Single Left Behind

The 2008 reissue of All Over the Place on Wounded Bird Records added the single remix of “Hero Takes a Fall” as a bonus track, and the 2010 Cherry Pop reissue included the Grass Roots cover “Where Were You When I Needed You,” which had been the original B-side. Critics who returned to the album in retrospective assessments — AllMusic’s Mark Deming rated it 4.5 out of 5 stars, calling it easily the Bangles’ best and most satisfying LP — consistently pointed to “Hero Takes a Fall” as the sharpest writing collaboration on a debut that announced a band capable of considerably more than they were given credit for at the time. Robert Christgau awarded the album an A− in the Village Voice in October 1984, citing “familiar heart-stopping harmonies” and a confidence he found convincing. The song that opened the album, the song Prince jumped onstage to play, the song that never charted in America — the Bangles’ commercial story began here and went somewhere entirely different. Which is more or less what a Greek tragic hero would have appreciated.