Fort Mill man was the lights behind Prince’s ‘Purple Rain’ heyday

Jeff Sochko got the word in a text message from his daughter; unconfirmed rumors had just started to spread that Prince had died suddenly. A quick online search revealed police activity around Paisley Park, the pop star’s home recording studio in Minnesota, both men’s home state.

“I thought maybe someone had died, but it was someone who worked there,” Sochko thought.

But after speaking to friends in the music industry, people who worked closely with the artist and were in a position to know.

“They said it was true.”

A few hours later, Sochko – now a Fort Mill-based photographer who shoots part time for The Herald – was going through his mementos from Prince’s heyday, the 1984-85 tour in support of the “Purple Rain” album.

Sochko was at those shows, working for the lighting crew that accentuated Prince’s music. Even today, he remembers it as one of the biggest tours he’s ever been on, with 13 tractor-trailers pulling into arenas where Prince would play for weeks, selling out night after night.

Sochko’s job was to call the spotlights at each show, making sure the elaborate light structure changed in time with the beat of “Let’s Go Crazy” and “Darling Nikki.” He and other members of the crew would plan the choreography of the light show in advance of each performance.

“Then a manager would say ‘oh no, no, change this,’” Sochko remembers. “Later, Prince would drive a car up to the stage like he was at a drive-in, make some comments, and it would usually go back to the way it was.”

“Purple Rain” wasn’t Sochko’s first time working with Prince. He worked some early Prince shows at Minneapolis’s Capri Theater years earlier, but this tour was a different level of production. As the tour went on, the effects crew and Prince began to spend more time planning how the light show would go each night.

“I remember at one point during a song, I think it was ‘Erotic City,’ he said he wanted the lights to go all blue,” Sochko said. “I said, ‘At that point, the song’s really heating up. Don’t you want them to go all red?’ And he looked at me and smiled and said, ‘You’re the professional. What do you think?’ And I said, ‘I think they’re going all red.’”

That crystallized Sochko’s opinion of Prince as an artist, who was more involved in production decisions around his shows than other acts of the time.

“He really appreciated my artistic direction,” he said. “He realized the lights could convey the emotion of the song.”

At one stop in the tour, Prince got sick and asked for a chicken broth to be brought to him during the break before the show-closing “When Doves Cry.” Then for a while it became Sochko’s job to come to the stage with the sick star’s food.

“It was weird,” he said. “I said, ‘Here, hold Prince’s soup.’ ”

Among his memorabilia from the tour – a purple tambourine engraved with “Love God,” a Prince and the Revolution jacket with his name sewn into it that hadn’t seen the light of day in 30 years – is a string that holds a tour pass and laminated marriage proposal from Sochko’s then-girlfriend.

“I wore that around my neck every night,” he said.

Even though he stopped touring when he settled down with children, Sochko still has strong feelings for the man and his music. One of his fondest memories is the surprise concert Prince threw in the midst of the tour at a poor Detroit-area grade school.

“These were kids who probably felt trapped in the lives they had there, and then Prince shows up at their school and does the ‘Purple Rain’ show for free,” he said. “That kind of stuff didn’t get as much media attention, but he really was an incredible human being.”

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This story was originally published April 21, 2016 at 7:31 PM with the headline "Fort Mill man was the lights behind Prince’s ‘Purple Rain’ heyday."