Music: Prince guitar solo at a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony became a milestone
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The Day Prince’s Guitar Wept the Loudest
On March 15, 2004, George Harrison was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. As part of the ceremony, an all-star band performed “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” Mr. Harrison’s best-known Beatles song. The group featured Tom Petty and two other members of the Heartbreakers, as well as Jeff Lynne, Steve Winwood, Dhani Harrison (George’s son) and Prince, himself an inductee that year. Marc Mann, a guitarist with Mr. Lynne’s band, played Eric Clapton’s memorable solo from the album version of the song. But Prince, who essentially stood in the dark for most of the performance, burned the stage to the ground at the song’s end.
His three-minute guitar solo is a Prince milestone, a chance to see him outside of the purple-tinted (for once, he is dressed in red) context of his own meticulous studio craft. This was Prince the Lead Guitarist — those chops apparent on songs like “Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?,” “Electric Chair” and “When Doves Cry” were given free range to roam. And when he tossed his instrument into the air at the very end of the song, it never appeared to land; it was almost as if Mr. Harrison had grabbed it himself in midair to signal, “That’s enough of that.”
Several people who were onstage or at the ceremony that night recalled Prince’s involvement and performance. These are edited excerpts from the conversations.
JOEL GALLEN (producer and director of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony) My dream right from the start was, imagine if I can get everybody up onstage at the end of the night to do “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” and Prince comes out and does the guitar solos. I wrote basically a personal letter to Prince, care of his lawyer.
George Harrison was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. As part of the ceremony, an all-star band performed “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” Mr. Harrison’s best-known Beatles song. The group featured Tom Petty and two other members of the Heartbreakers, as well as Jeff Lynne, Steve Winwood, Dhani Harrison (George’s son) and Prince, himself an inductee that year. Marc Mann, a guitarist with Mr. Lynne’s band, played Eric Clapton’s memorable solo from the album version of the song. But Prince, who essentially stood in the dark for most of the performance, burned the stage to the ground at the song’s end.
His three-minute guitar solo is a Prince milestone, a chance to see him outside of the purple-tinted (for once, he is dressed in red) context of his own meticulous studio craft. This was Prince the Lead Guitarist — those chops apparent on songs like “Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?,” “Electric Chair” and “When Doves Cry” were given free range to roam. And when he tossed his instrument into the air at the very end of the song, it never appeared to land; it was almost as if Mr. Harrison had grabbed it himself in midair to signal, “That’s enough of that.”
Several people who were onstage or at the ceremony that night recalled Prince’s involvement and performance. These are edited excerpts from the conversations.
"While My Guitar Gently Weeps" Video by Rock & Roll Hall of Fame
JOEL GALLEN (producer and director of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony) My dream right from the start was, imagine if I can get everybody up onstage at the end of the night to do “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” and Prince comes out and does the guitar solos. I wrote basically a personal letter to Prince, care of his lawyer.
I got a call from one of Prince’s guys, a week or two later, saying that Prince was in L.A. and he wanted to have a meeting with me. He said, “You know, I got your letter, I liked the idea, I’m going to listen to the song a few times, and I’ll get back to you.”
A couple weeks later his security guy called me again, and said, “Prince would like to meet with you again.” He said he definitely wants to do the song, he’s definitely going to do it. Both in the initial meeting and the second meeting, he did talk a lot about what we’re going to do with the music, who’s going to own the music — he was concerned like, if he does this, who’s going to own the performance? He wanted to make sure that his performance was not exploited without his knowledge.
TOM PETTY (shared lead vocals with Jeff Lynne on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”) Olivia Harrison [George’s widow] asked me if I would come along and induct George. I was told, “Well, Prince is going to play too,” and I was like, “Wow, that’s fantastic.”
Look, we got Prince here willing to play lead guitar. Why should we give him an eight-bar solo? Over a solo that — the Beatles solo, everyone knows it by heart and would be disappointed if you didn’t play that particular solo there. And Prince was a great fan of George’s, and the Beatles in general, but I think he particularly admired George. I think George would have liked it a lot.
CRAIG INCIARDI (Curator at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum) I’ve seen every induction performance from ’92 to the present, so that’s like 24 shows. On a purely musical level, a technical level as far as musicianship, that performance seems like the most impressive one.
GALLEN We get to the rehearsal the night before the show at the Waldorf Astoria. Prince’s rehearsal was actually earlier — he rehearsed his big 10-, 12-minute medley that opened the show. He was having all kinds of audio problems, I remember he had his own monitor engineer that his camp had hired, and I think Prince fired him during the rehearsal because he couldn’t get the sound right. After that he went back to his hotel, and I said, “You’re going to come back at 10 o’clock tonight, that’s when we’re going to rehearse the finale,” and he says, “I’ll see.” [Laughs.] He didn’t give me any guarantees, he just said, “I’ll see.”
The Petty rehearsal was later that night. And at the time I’d asked him to come back, there was Prince; he’d shown up on the side of the stage with his guitar. He says hello to Tom and Jeff and the band. When we get to the middle solo, where Prince is supposed to do it, Jeff Lynne’s guitar player just starts playing the solo. Note for note, like Clapton. And Prince just stops and lets him do it and plays the rhythm, strums along. And we get to the big end solo, and Prince again steps forward to go into the solo, and this guy starts playing that solo too! Prince doesn’t say anything, just starts strumming, plays a few leads here and there, but for the most part, nothing memorable.
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STEVE FERRONE (drummer for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, who played at the 2004 ceremony) I had no idea that Prince was going to be there. Steve Winwood said, “Hey, Prince is over there.” And I said, “I guess he’s playing with us?”
So I said to Winwood, “I’m going to go over and say hello to him.” I wandered across the stage and I went up to him and I said, “Hi, Prince, it’s nice to meet you — Steve Ferrone.” And he said, “Oh, I know who you are!” Maybe because I’d played on Chaka Khan’s “I Feel for You,” which is a song that he wrote. I went back over and I sat down behind the drum kit, and Winwood was like: “What’s he like? What’d he say?”
Then I was sitting there, and I heard somebody playing a guitar riff from a song that I wrote with Average White Band. And I looked over and Prince was looking right at me and playing that song. And I thought, “Yeah, you actually do know who I am!”
GALLEN They finish, and I go up to Jeff and Tom, and I sort of huddle up with these guys, and I’m like: “This cannot be happening. I don’t even know if we’re going to get another rehearsal with him. [Prince]. But this guy cannot be playing the solos throughout the song.” So I talk to Prince about it, I sort of pull him aside and had a private conversation with him, and he was like: “Look, let this guy do what he does, and I’ll just step in at the end. For the end solo, forget the middle solo.” And he goes, “Don’t worry about it.” And then he leaves. They never rehearsed it, really. Never really showed us what he was going to do, and he left, basically telling me, the producer of the show, not to worry. And the rest is history. It became one of the most satisfying musical moments in my history of watching and producing live music.
INCIARDI You hear all this sort of harmonics and finger-tapping, sort of like what you’d hear Eddie Van Halen do. He runs through all these different sort of guitar techniques that are sort of astonishing. You hear what sounds like someone cocking a shotgun. There’s all these strumming power chords that really, really connected. Then he plays his version of the Eric Clapton solo. He evokes Eric’s solo in very sort of truncated fashion. As he ends the song, he plays this flourishing thing that sort of ends up sounding a little bit like Spinal Tap, but in a good way.
PETTY You see me nodding at him, to say, “Go on, go on.” I remember I leaned out at him at one point and gave him a “This is going great!” kind of look. He just burned it up. You could feel the electricity of “something really big’s going down here.”
FERRONE Tom sort of went over to him and said, “Just cut loose and don’t feel sort of inhibited to copy anything that we have, just play your thing, just have a good time.” It was a hell of a guitar solo, and a hell of a show he actually put on for the band. When he fell back into the audience, everybody in the band freaked out, like, “Oh my God, he’s falling off the stage!” And then that whole thing with the guitar going up in the air. I didn’t even see who caught it. I just saw it go up, and I was astonished that it didn’t come back down again. Everybody wonders where that guitar went, and I gotta tell you, I was on the stage, and I wonder where it went, too.
GALLEN I still feel like people don’t realize what an amazing guitar player he was. As a rock guitar player, he can go toe to toe with anybody.
PETTY It’s funny because just a few days ago, he was in mind all afternoon, I was thinking about him. And I had just been talking with Susanna Hoffs of the Bangles — he wrote their “Manic Monday” song. She was telling me the story of that, of how she came to have that song and meet Prince. And I was thinking about him a lot that day, and I almost told myself I was going to call him and just see how he was. I’m starting to think you should just act on those things all the time.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/28/...l-of-fame.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0
On March 15, 2004, George Harrison was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. As part of the ceremony, an all-star band performed “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” Mr. Harrison’s best-known Beatles song. The group featured Tom Petty and two other members of the Heartbreakers, as well as Jeff Lynne, Steve Winwood, Dhani Harrison (George’s son) and Prince, himself an inductee that year. Marc Mann, a guitarist with Mr. Lynne’s band, played Eric Clapton’s memorable solo from the album version of the song. But Prince, who essentially stood in the dark for most of the performance, burned the stage to the ground at the song’s end.
His three-minute guitar solo is a Prince milestone, a chance to see him outside of the purple-tinted (for once, he is dressed in red) context of his own meticulous studio craft. This was Prince the Lead Guitarist — those chops apparent on songs like “Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?,” “Electric Chair” and “When Doves Cry” were given free range to roam. And when he tossed his instrument into the air at the very end of the song, it never appeared to land; it was almost as if Mr. Harrison had grabbed it himself in midair to signal, “That’s enough of that.”
Several people who were onstage or at the ceremony that night recalled Prince’s involvement and performance. These are edited excerpts from the conversations.
JOEL GALLEN (producer and director of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony) My dream right from the start was, imagine if I can get everybody up onstage at the end of the night to do “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” and Prince comes out and does the guitar solos. I wrote basically a personal letter to Prince, care of his lawyer.
George Harrison was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. As part of the ceremony, an all-star band performed “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” Mr. Harrison’s best-known Beatles song. The group featured Tom Petty and two other members of the Heartbreakers, as well as Jeff Lynne, Steve Winwood, Dhani Harrison (George’s son) and Prince, himself an inductee that year. Marc Mann, a guitarist with Mr. Lynne’s band, played Eric Clapton’s memorable solo from the album version of the song. But Prince, who essentially stood in the dark for most of the performance, burned the stage to the ground at the song’s end.
His three-minute guitar solo is a Prince milestone, a chance to see him outside of the purple-tinted (for once, he is dressed in red) context of his own meticulous studio craft. This was Prince the Lead Guitarist — those chops apparent on songs like “Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?,” “Electric Chair” and “When Doves Cry” were given free range to roam. And when he tossed his instrument into the air at the very end of the song, it never appeared to land; it was almost as if Mr. Harrison had grabbed it himself in midair to signal, “That’s enough of that.”
Several people who were onstage or at the ceremony that night recalled Prince’s involvement and performance. These are edited excerpts from the conversations.
"While My Guitar Gently Weeps" Video by Rock & Roll Hall of Fame
JOEL GALLEN (producer and director of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony) My dream right from the start was, imagine if I can get everybody up onstage at the end of the night to do “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” and Prince comes out and does the guitar solos. I wrote basically a personal letter to Prince, care of his lawyer.
I got a call from one of Prince’s guys, a week or two later, saying that Prince was in L.A. and he wanted to have a meeting with me. He said, “You know, I got your letter, I liked the idea, I’m going to listen to the song a few times, and I’ll get back to you.”
A couple weeks later his security guy called me again, and said, “Prince would like to meet with you again.” He said he definitely wants to do the song, he’s definitely going to do it. Both in the initial meeting and the second meeting, he did talk a lot about what we’re going to do with the music, who’s going to own the music — he was concerned like, if he does this, who’s going to own the performance? He wanted to make sure that his performance was not exploited without his knowledge.
TOM PETTY (shared lead vocals with Jeff Lynne on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”) Olivia Harrison [George’s widow] asked me if I would come along and induct George. I was told, “Well, Prince is going to play too,” and I was like, “Wow, that’s fantastic.”
Look, we got Prince here willing to play lead guitar. Why should we give him an eight-bar solo? Over a solo that — the Beatles solo, everyone knows it by heart and would be disappointed if you didn’t play that particular solo there. And Prince was a great fan of George’s, and the Beatles in general, but I think he particularly admired George. I think George would have liked it a lot.
CRAIG INCIARDI (Curator at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum) I’ve seen every induction performance from ’92 to the present, so that’s like 24 shows. On a purely musical level, a technical level as far as musicianship, that performance seems like the most impressive one.
GALLEN We get to the rehearsal the night before the show at the Waldorf Astoria. Prince’s rehearsal was actually earlier — he rehearsed his big 10-, 12-minute medley that opened the show. He was having all kinds of audio problems, I remember he had his own monitor engineer that his camp had hired, and I think Prince fired him during the rehearsal because he couldn’t get the sound right. After that he went back to his hotel, and I said, “You’re going to come back at 10 o’clock tonight, that’s when we’re going to rehearse the finale,” and he says, “I’ll see.” [Laughs.] He didn’t give me any guarantees, he just said, “I’ll see.”
The Petty rehearsal was later that night. And at the time I’d asked him to come back, there was Prince; he’d shown up on the side of the stage with his guitar. He says hello to Tom and Jeff and the band. When we get to the middle solo, where Prince is supposed to do it, Jeff Lynne’s guitar player just starts playing the solo. Note for note, like Clapton. And Prince just stops and lets him do it and plays the rhythm, strums along. And we get to the big end solo, and Prince again steps forward to go into the solo, and this guy starts playing that solo too! Prince doesn’t say anything, just starts strumming, plays a few leads here and there, but for the most part, nothing memorable.
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STEVE FERRONE (drummer for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, who played at the 2004 ceremony) I had no idea that Prince was going to be there. Steve Winwood said, “Hey, Prince is over there.” And I said, “I guess he’s playing with us?”
So I said to Winwood, “I’m going to go over and say hello to him.” I wandered across the stage and I went up to him and I said, “Hi, Prince, it’s nice to meet you — Steve Ferrone.” And he said, “Oh, I know who you are!” Maybe because I’d played on Chaka Khan’s “I Feel for You,” which is a song that he wrote. I went back over and I sat down behind the drum kit, and Winwood was like: “What’s he like? What’d he say?”
Then I was sitting there, and I heard somebody playing a guitar riff from a song that I wrote with Average White Band. And I looked over and Prince was looking right at me and playing that song. And I thought, “Yeah, you actually do know who I am!”
GALLEN They finish, and I go up to Jeff and Tom, and I sort of huddle up with these guys, and I’m like: “This cannot be happening. I don’t even know if we’re going to get another rehearsal with him. [Prince]. But this guy cannot be playing the solos throughout the song.” So I talk to Prince about it, I sort of pull him aside and had a private conversation with him, and he was like: “Look, let this guy do what he does, and I’ll just step in at the end. For the end solo, forget the middle solo.” And he goes, “Don’t worry about it.” And then he leaves. They never rehearsed it, really. Never really showed us what he was going to do, and he left, basically telling me, the producer of the show, not to worry. And the rest is history. It became one of the most satisfying musical moments in my history of watching and producing live music.
INCIARDI You hear all this sort of harmonics and finger-tapping, sort of like what you’d hear Eddie Van Halen do. He runs through all these different sort of guitar techniques that are sort of astonishing. You hear what sounds like someone cocking a shotgun. There’s all these strumming power chords that really, really connected. Then he plays his version of the Eric Clapton solo. He evokes Eric’s solo in very sort of truncated fashion. As he ends the song, he plays this flourishing thing that sort of ends up sounding a little bit like Spinal Tap, but in a good way.
PETTY You see me nodding at him, to say, “Go on, go on.” I remember I leaned out at him at one point and gave him a “This is going great!” kind of look. He just burned it up. You could feel the electricity of “something really big’s going down here.”
FERRONE Tom sort of went over to him and said, “Just cut loose and don’t feel sort of inhibited to copy anything that we have, just play your thing, just have a good time.” It was a hell of a guitar solo, and a hell of a show he actually put on for the band. When he fell back into the audience, everybody in the band freaked out, like, “Oh my God, he’s falling off the stage!” And then that whole thing with the guitar going up in the air. I didn’t even see who caught it. I just saw it go up, and I was astonished that it didn’t come back down again. Everybody wonders where that guitar went, and I gotta tell you, I was on the stage, and I wonder where it went, too.
GALLEN I still feel like people don’t realize what an amazing guitar player he was. As a rock guitar player, he can go toe to toe with anybody.
PETTY It’s funny because just a few days ago, he was in mind all afternoon, I was thinking about him. And I had just been talking with Susanna Hoffs of the Bangles — he wrote their “Manic Monday” song. She was telling me the story of that, of how she came to have that song and meet Prince. And I was thinking about him a lot that day, and I almost told myself I was going to call him and just see how he was. I’m starting to think you should just act on those things all the time.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/28/...l-of-fame.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0
He is one of the greatest to ever do it
That guitar solo was a statement to Rolling Stone Magazine and the music industry in general. The previous year RS magazine came out with the top 100 greatest guitarists. Prince was left off that list for unknown reasons. How a industry publication like RS left out an all-time great like Prince is a mystery. I believe Prince took that opportunity at the RRHOF to show RS magazine that they were sleeping on him. Prince has never commented on this, but I firmly believe that he was intentionally making a statement. Just peep the way he walks off stage. Throws the guitar and struts off stage. He's the G.O.A.T.
I skimmed the article and what I find amazing is that even established artists are in awe of Prince.....The G.O.A.T.
Mannnnnn, I can't believe I've never seen that clip! What a gift on the anniversary of Prince's death to see/hear him cut it up like that! I'd say he's the most underrated guitarist of all time, but according to Clapton..somebody asked him (Clapton) what it felt like being the greatest guitarist ever, and he said, "I don't know, you'd have to ask Prince."
RIP, brother
RIP, brother
I dont care what nobody says...Prince played the shit outta that solo. He is the GOAT, bar none. Funny thing is that several of his band members said how awkward and great it must be to have your bandleader (prince) be able to play your instrument better than you. I personally have seen him play lead, bass, piano and drums...and HE KILLED EACH ONE. Fucc outta here...HE IS THE GOAT!
I can look at that video a million times and never tire of it
Quote from Youtube:
I have always heard how great Prince was as a musician and really never understood why. Growing up in the south and being a lover of all types of music including hard rock, heavy metal, and even classical I really was never introduced to Prince. I heard When Doves Cry and Purple Rain of course but still never really understood why everyone considered him a musical genius. Then today I decided to watch this video just to see what these musicians could do with a truly great work of music. I feel like I have been deprived all my life of one of the greatest musicians of my generation and now that he is gone I am truly upset that I will never get to appreciate him in a live concert. I only wish I knew how truly gifted this man truly was before he died, I have seen some of the greatest guitarists of my generation play in live venues for the past twenty years and can honestly say I have never seen any of them play with the amount of passion and skill that Prince does during that guitar solo. I am sure that George Harrison would have been proud and only hope that future generations understand that this kind of performance cannot be duplicated ever. He was truly playing from the heart and unintentionally made every other musician on that stage look like they were backup musicians to his performance. Now I have to go back in time and learn as much as I can from all of his past performances if for no other reason than to appreciate his skill. I have never more wrong about a musician than I was about this man, many people have called him the Mozart of our generation and I laughed at them, pointing out that at the age of 5 Mozart was writing complete symphonies. Well I was completely wrong, he truly was a musical genius like Mozart and I look forward to listening to his music. I also look forward to seeing whoever has the guts to give this man the tribute that he deserves, it might even take multiple musicians just to replicate the kind of sound that came from that single guitar. Also what happened to the guitar that he threw at the end of the performance? The camera angle was a little off so I couldn't see who caught it but I bet that lucky person is enjoying the story of how he or she caught the guitar that played that solo.
I have always heard how great Prince was as a musician and really never understood why. Growing up in the south and being a lover of all types of music including hard rock, heavy metal, and even classical I really was never introduced to Prince. I heard When Doves Cry and Purple Rain of course but still never really understood why everyone considered him a musical genius. Then today I decided to watch this video just to see what these musicians could do with a truly great work of music. I feel like I have been deprived all my life of one of the greatest musicians of my generation and now that he is gone I am truly upset that I will never get to appreciate him in a live concert. I only wish I knew how truly gifted this man truly was before he died, I have seen some of the greatest guitarists of my generation play in live venues for the past twenty years and can honestly say I have never seen any of them play with the amount of passion and skill that Prince does during that guitar solo. I am sure that George Harrison would have been proud and only hope that future generations understand that this kind of performance cannot be duplicated ever. He was truly playing from the heart and unintentionally made every other musician on that stage look like they were backup musicians to his performance. Now I have to go back in time and learn as much as I can from all of his past performances if for no other reason than to appreciate his skill. I have never more wrong about a musician than I was about this man, many people have called him the Mozart of our generation and I laughed at them, pointing out that at the age of 5 Mozart was writing complete symphonies. Well I was completely wrong, he truly was a musical genius like Mozart and I look forward to listening to his music. I also look forward to seeing whoever has the guts to give this man the tribute that he deserves, it might even take multiple musicians just to replicate the kind of sound that came from that single guitar. Also what happened to the guitar that he threw at the end of the performance? The camera angle was a little off so I couldn't see who caught it but I bet that lucky person is enjoying the story of how he or she caught the guitar that played that solo.
STEVE FERRONE (drummer for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, who played at the 2004 ceremony) I had no idea that Prince was going to be there. Steve Winwood said, “Hey, Prince is over there.” And I said, “I guess he’s playing with us?”
So I said to Winwood, “I’m going to go over and say hello to him.” I wandered across the stage and I went up to him and I said, “Hi, Prince, it’s nice to meet you — Steve Ferrone.” And he said, “Oh, I know who you are!” Maybe because I’d played on Chaka Khan’s “I Feel for You,” which is a song that he wrote. I went back over and I sat down behind the drum kit, and Winwood was like: “What’s he like? What’d he say?”
Then I was sitting there, and I heard somebody playing a guitar riff from a song that I wrote with Average White Band. And I looked over and Prince was looking right at me and playing that song. And I thought, “Yeah, you actually do know who I am!”
So I said to Winwood, “I’m going to go over and say hello to him.” I wandered across the stage and I went up to him and I said, “Hi, Prince, it’s nice to meet you — Steve Ferrone.” And he said, “Oh, I know who you are!” Maybe because I’d played on Chaka Khan’s “I Feel for You,” which is a song that he wrote. I went back over and I sat down behind the drum kit, and Winwood was like: “What’s he like? What’d he say?”
Then I was sitting there, and I heard somebody playing a guitar riff from a song that I wrote with Average White Band. And I looked over and Prince was looking right at me and playing that song. And I thought, “Yeah, you actually do know who I am!”
Solo was cool, seen much better ones form him.
Propers to a great Super talent!!!
damn, lol.... dude had Stevie Winwood starstruck, and Stevie been around since like 1965 all up in the mix
STEVE FERRONE (drummer for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, who played at the 2004 ceremony) I had no idea that Prince was going to be there. Steve Winwood said, “Hey, Prince is over there.” And I said, “I guess he’s playing with us?”
So I said to Winwood, “I’m going to go over and say hello to him.” I wandered across the stage and I went up to him and I said, “Hi, Prince, it’s nice to meet you — Steve Ferrone.” And he said, “Oh, I know who you are!” Maybe because I’d played on Chaka Khan’s “I Feel for You,” which is a song that he wrote. I went back over and I sat down behind the drum kit, and Winwood was like: “What’s he like? What’d he say?”
Then I was sitting there, and I heard somebody playing a guitar riff from a song that I wrote with Average White Band. And I looked over and Prince was looking right at me and playing that song. And I thought, “Yeah, you actually do know who I am!”
REMEMBERING
Prince Rogers Nelson
June 7, 1958
Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.
Died April 21, 2016 (aged 57)
Chanhassen, Minnesota, U.S.
Prince Rogers Nelson
June 7, 1958
Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.
Died April 21, 2016 (aged 57)
Chanhassen, Minnesota, U.S.
Michael Putland/Getty ImagesPrince (1958-2016)
Prince Can't Die
He doesn't live on through his music. We do.
Carvell Wallace 04/22/2016
I am lying on the floor of my room, 12 years old, listening to music. I am an only child, and I spend a lot of time in solitude. I talk to myself and fantasize that I’m very popular, very famous, very beautiful. I have books and matchbox cars and tapes, all of which I use to fuel these dreams. The cars are my dolls, acting out elaborate stories of love and loss, fame and heartbreak with them: This Jeep wants to date this drag racer, but the dragster still has feelings for the police car. It’s a sticky situation. Things take a turn when it is revealed that the police car was just using the dragster to get to her wealthy best friend — the heiress Cadillac — and fleece her for her family fortune. Heartbroken, Dragster runs into the waiting arms of Jeep, a down-on-his-luck rock musician with a heart of gold. This victory in love inspires Jeep to write and perform a new song on the spot about how love is as vast as the mountain, as boundless as the sea. It is exuberant. It is raucous. The choreography involves all the cars.
Sometimes on these days, I run out of energy or stories to tell, and nothing plays but the music. I am slightly sweaty and fatigued from jumping around, flying cars through the air and breathily mouthing lines like “I love you. I’ve always loved you.” And so all that’s left to do is lay my body on the dark-green, stained, scratchy polyester carpet and let the music wash over me. I stare for a long time at the picture on the cassette box of the man who is making that music, and I let him wash over me too.
The tape I am listening to is Parade. The front cover shows a black-and-white Prince emerging from a glowing, bloodless background, a poor excuse for a tank top hugging his torso like a bandage, his hands lifted to frame his face as though he himself can’t believe his own beauty. The font, thin and sans serif, is a delicate fantasy of how Americans imagine 1930s France. The record is, in fact, about France, and it functions as the soundtrack to Prince’s second movie, Under the Cherry Moon, about a pair of black hustlers from Florida running gigolo scams on rich dames along the French Riviera until one of them makes the fatal mistake of falling in love for real. It's a movie about black men living a European fantasy.
The fact of the movie itself is another fantasy. Prince and his sidekick, played by the devastatingly dark-skinned Jerome Benton, are not the faces we are used to seeing beautifully shot in black-and-white, smartly dressed in tuxes, softened by Vaseline lenses, with the shadows of window panes and horizontal blinds deftly laid across their bodies. Yet here they are, carving out an unassailable place for blackness in the bedrock of classic noir. It is not an apologetic blackness that seeks to be indistinguishable from whiteness. It is a loud blackness, a celebratory one that drinks too much and pounds the table and struts down the street with a thousand times more swagger than any 5-foot-1-inch man deserves. (Can anybody on the planet look better simply walking than Prince?) It is a blackness of a thousand dimensions. In one scene, his character is holding forth about the cosmic nature of love. In another, he's posted up in a claw-foot tub, bathing himself in water and sunlight, wearing nothing but a bandolero hat and playing with a toy boat. In still another, he is drunk and dry-humping the air, yelling obscenities at a former lover and her new partner. His blackness is unchecked and complex, layers of angry masculinity on a bed of rose petals and women’s perfume. His blackness is a golden fitted backless bodysuit on the taut, coiled frame of a bantamweight boxer.
If the movie is an imaginary world, the music is as real as it gets. Parade is the sound of a band and recording engineers who know exactly what the fuck they’re doing. Prince keeps the best psychedelic elements from the cartoonish and underappreciated Around the World in a Day but returns to the adroit classical and jazz-inspired composing that elevated Purple Rain two years earlier. Parade is full of ballads with chord progressions that take you left when you thought you were going right; French lead-ins and lo-fi effects that shouldn’t be funky but still are; drums replaced with buckets, snares played backward, and heavy bells treated as high hats. Other songs trade on lush, complex arrangements with horns and flutes that slowly devolve into noise, only to rise again in new, dark, serpentine melodies. By the end of the album, the sound is so unapologetically maudlin that you can’t help getting caught up. When Prince plays music for you, you are always being held close.
I am a child in my bedroom listening to Parade, and I am thinking about the last time I saw my mother. It was two years earlier, when I went to visit her in Los Angeles. She took me to see a matinee showing of Purple Rain. When we emerged from the theater into the late-afternoon summer light, she was beside herself, shaking her head and talking a mile a minute. She got that way when something was good. She had a heart that exploded when it touched beautiful things. She was singing the songs, smacking her teeth, and recounting her favorite scenes to me or no one in particular. We walked to the car together while she chain-smoked cigarettes and praised whatever god had been responsible for what we had just seen. She was just 30 years old — a child. I know that now, but I didn’t then. I said nothing, just tried to walk close enough to feel the warmth that emanated from her body. Whatever this feeling was she had, it was love. Prince had given his love to Purple Rain, Purple Rain had given its love to my mother, and now I was hoping my mother would give it to me. This is why we see movies. This is why we make art: to be reborn, to have love course through our veins and make us bold. The stretch of Sunset Boulevard we were walking looked just like the scene outside The Kid’s Minneapolis club. That afternoon, Hollywood became a beautiful landscape, a living rock club that blended with the movie still running in my head, the visions of graffiti and lace, of velour and the sweat of beautifully played rock on a man’s bare chest. My mother, holding my hand and singing Prince’s songs to me.
That summer ended, as all summers do. I returned alone to Pennsylvania and to the enormous, dark, far-reaching winters that she had left behind. To be a child alone in a room, playing with cars and stories, hearing every single note of Parade is an experience I’ll never have again. Growing up is a series of things dying.
This is why I needed Prince: because he celebrated garish, goofy, unrestrained emotion. He made it OK to slouch dramatically over a piano and blink flirtatiously while trying to look sad. He made it OK to be a fantasy version of your own self. It’s not that he denied the true meaning of pain. It’s that he thought it better for pain to be beautiful.
That’s what I thought about when my mother died 21 years later, while I held her hand and sang songs to her. I thought about how she was so overwhelmed seeing Purple Rain that afternoon that she almost couldn’t talk. I thought about how her body was not big enough to handle all the feelings she had, and that maybe now, having been freed from it, she can feel a lot more things with fewer limitations. Maybe that’s a good way in which things couldn’t be the way they once were.
Death doesn’t make sense to any of us, does it?
It’s too soon to talk about Prince in the past tense. He created something so permanent and beyond that we will never be able to fully get rid of it. To say he lives on in his music is not enough. Better to say that we live on through his music. All I know for sure is that there is a part of me that is totally unafraid to imagine and feel and make things up; a part of me that fills to the point of breaking just by the way the third note of a triplet seems to bend, causing the whole song to sigh; a part of me that cries by candlelight and makes flirty eyes with myself in the mirror. A part of me that would be afraid of what you think of me, if I weren’t too damn beautiful to care. A part of me that can never be killed, because I’m too great to ever truly die. I learned that from listening to Prince alone in my room. I learned it from holding my mother’s hand while his music vibrated through her body.
Proved he was the best in that room. Eric Clapton's comment regarding Prince after that was priceless.
damn...what's crazy is I dreamed of dude yesterday and he was wearing that hat in the dream.
Well, you have Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson and many more. Go back and listen to the old rhythm and blues and you will be amazed how much Rock artists bit off of Blues players. Rhythm and Blues is the father to Rock n Roll."One of"?
That performance reclaimed rock and roll back to its rightful owners and originators, Black folks. It was a symbolic open-handed, fatal slap to white supremacy in music.
Purple is the color of royalty. His Royal Badness wore red that night though - as if drenched in the blood of all those guitarists whose heads he cut off that night.
The shame is prince never really got his props for rock music or his guitarmanship (yeah I made that word up..lol) in philly WMMR barely plays any of princes more rock tunes...lets go crazy ever once in a while....and only AFTER he died did they play his solo on my guitar gently weeps..
The GOAT of what??????????????
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