In the triumverate of '80s pop icons -- Madonna, Prince, Michael Jackson -- the Purple One holds a unique appeal that still crosses racial lines and music genres.

Is it funk? Is it rock? Is it R&B?

Who cares? That didn't matter to the thousands who saw Prince 30 years ago Saturday at the Summit. For six nights, he, the Revolution and opening act Sheila E. brought a blend of sexiness, raunch and religion to the Bayou City.

Forget Purple Rain. This was a Purple Torrent.

"Prince is the (Jimi) Hendrix of the '80s," 19-year-old Dawn Harber told Houston Post reporter Hope E. Paasch. "The dude (Prince) can play the guitar. He can sing, he's sexy. His music is sensual (like Hendrix) but in a different time span."

Harber might have been on to something with the Hendrix comparison. From Marty Racine's Jan. 11, 1985, review in the Houston Chronicle:

Like Little Richard of the '50s, Jimi Hendrix of the '60s and George Clinton and his Parliament/Funkadelic episodes of the '70s, Prince has tapped into a common groove among two cultures that would 99 percent of the time never share an arena-sized attraction. This was a hip, classy crowd that came to dance on the funk and squeal on rock 'n' roll lead guitar. White folks for decades have used black (R&B) forms to shuffle their music; when a black artist turns around and uses those white interpretations as augumentation, then you've got something going.

The Post's Bob Claypool wrote the concert had the potential to be "the hottest show on the road at the moment." But after starting his show with "Let's Go Crazy," "Delirious," "1999" and "Little Red Corvette" the show kinda, well, meandered a bit.

[U]nfortunately, there's a long, totally self-indulgent middle portion that features Prince doing a lot of solo noodling at the keyboards, even doing a few stagy monologues with God (most of this talking is muffled in such a setting anyway). This segment seems to drag on forever, and the result is that the audience (on its feet from the very first song) finally does the unthinkable -- it sits down, not so much out of attentiveness as from simple boredom.

Things turned around by the end, Claypool noted, as Prince rolled out "Darling Nikki," "When Doves Cry" and "I Would Die 4 U."

But don't think Prince and the Revolution would just come into Houston for a few days, play a few songs and leave it at that.

Plans were afoot for Prince and crew to turn Rockefeller's into a purple paradise for an Apollonia 6 video.

"They were going to paint the place all-purple, put in carpets, and the even wanted to paint the Rockefeller's limo purple," Collen Fisher, Rockefeller's general manager, told Claypool. "They were going to put a bathtub upstairs and make some purple bubbles."

For the trouble, Rockefeller's would have received $3,000 as Prince and crew covered the renovation costs.

In the end, alleged disputes within the Prince camp nixed those plans.

In a less-publicized move, Prince and the Revolution staged a free concert for handicapped children at TSU.

"He really brought the whole show over there, the smoke, lights, everything," Russ Simons, project coordinator at the Summit, told Claypool. "The show was for handicapped, blind and deaf kids, and he did the whole thing at his own expense."