About the Author

Allen Beaulieu was Prince's photographer and friend beginning in the late 1970s. He photographed three album covers and toured extensively with the artist. Dez Dickerson is a guitarist, singer, songwriter, producer, and record executive and was a member of the Revolution with Prince from 1978 to 1984. He currently runs Pavilion Synergies, a social marketing and music entertainment company. Jim Walsh is a writer, columnist, journalist, and songwriter from Minneapolis and writer of the liner notes for the 1995 Prince album The Gold Experience and author of The Gold Experience: Following Prince in the '90s. Eloy Lasanta has carved out a niche for himself as a Prince Rogers Nelson historian in the world of music fandoms. As YouTuber "Prince's Friend," he is aligned with the mission of keeping Prince's legacy alive.

Reviews

With 200 pages of beautifully printed shots, Minneapolis photographer Allen Beaulieu's Prince coffee-table book is A-U-T-O-matically definitive. Many iconic images are present and accounted for, including the covers of Dirty Mind and Controversy and their accompanying singles, plus press shots and inner-sleeve images from 1999. But what really elevates Before the Rain is an intimacy you simply can't find anywhere else. Beaulieu, Prince's main photographer from 1979 to 1983, catches the maestro not only hard at work and relaxing backstage but full-on goofing off; no other Prince tome has pink-hued color test shots of the Purple One with a red bandanna on his face, pretending to suck his thumb. The multi-page spread of Prince and his band before and after their notorious 1981 opening set for the Rolling Stones--during which the audience pelted them with garbage--is nearly a documentary in itself.
--Michaelangelo Matos, author of The Underground Is Massive and Can't Slow Down: How 1984 Became Pop's Blockbuster Year-- "The Best Music Books of 2018"

"Allen was like another member of the band. He was the only photographer that I ever remember just hanging around with us. Prince trusted him more than anyone since, I think. Al was allowed to be around in the dressing rooms and at rehearsals. . . . He was there in beginning, and we were really close, and he was a punk like we were. I am so glad to see someone unearthing his stuff."
--Lisa Coleman "Working with Al was very natural; it flowed. The magic of how Al worked--and I think it's the thing that really appealed to Prince--is he had a way of conducting things along without being overbearing or reducing people to action figures or something. It was very organic, and he managed to pull something out of this disparate set of human beings."
--Dez Dickerson