Prince Destroys for the Ages
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: While My Guitar Gently Weeps
If you haven’t seen it already, make sure you are sitting down. Last week, a director’s cut dropped of Prince absolutely destroying at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004. The original version of this legendary performance went up, as did so much phenomenal Prince material, shortly after His Royal Badness departed for Darling Nikki’s Big Castle in the Sky. I have a lot of YouTube clips I tend to come back to over and over, especially after a few drinks have me craving the familiar and a guaranteed payoff. This is at the top of the list. It has been viewed over 100 million times. I might have contributed 100 of those myself.
It’s 2004 and George Harrison is being inducted into the Hall of Fame. The producers have drafted Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne of ELO, friends and bandmates to Harrison in The Travelling Wilburys to split the vocals. They then strike on the inspired choice of asking Prince to do the Clapton solos, Prince being inducted himself, earlier in the evening. The result was explosive. Now the clip has been reworked to better highlight the fireworks. The Los Angeles Times reports:
Last week, seemingly out of the blue, veteran TV producer Joel Gallen, who directed and produced the original Hall of Fame broadcast, uploaded a re-edited version of that performance with a simple comment: “17 years after this stunning performance by Prince, I finally had the chance to go in and re-edit it slightly — since there were several shots that were bothering me. I got rid of all the dissolves and made them all cuts, and added lots more close-ups of Prince during his solo. I think it’s better now. Let me know what you think. Joel.”
It was a project that didn’t get off to an auspicious start. The logistics of getting a bunch of busy rock stars in the same room to rehearse on a truncated timeline is challenging but they managed to get them all there. And then Jeff Lynne’s guitarist Marc Mann went on autopilot and boxed out Prince.
During rehearsals, Marc Mann, who plays guitar with Lynne, took over, knocking out a note-perfect recreation of Eric Clapton’s original mid-song solo.
“And we get to the big end solo,” Gallen says, “and Prince again steps forward to go into the solo, and this guy starts playing that solo too!”
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.
Before we get to the performance, a little grace note:
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!”
The song commences. The arrangement is amped to anthem. Instead of a tinkle of piano and high-hat, the keyboard is coming in chords and the whole band is in the mix immediately. We start with Tom Petty’s eerie, reedy alto which is a fine match to the multitrack self-harmony of Harrison’s original vocal. These ad hoc superbands at award ceremonies can be a bit of a dog’s breakfast. Trying to do a crisp arrangement of a classic while having six different players strumming in unison can leave you with a muddy muddle. This particular performance has five guitarists, two percussionists, two people on keyboards, and (blessedly) one on bass guitar, but this is off to a good start. Jeff Lynne, sporting a sporty Kangol dad hat, comes in with his own eerie, reedy falsetto and you realize why the guy from a forgettable 70s AOR band, a band that was nearly a novelty act, was invited into a band with Tom Petty, Bob Dylan, George Harrison (a Beatle, let’s not forget), and Roy (muthafuckin’) Orbison. When you are in a band where Tom Petty is the least legendary member, other than yourself, you are in pretty good company. Lynne sounds fantastic and really ups the game, improving upon the original.
It keeps chugging along, with Petty and Lynne trading vocals back and forth. Steve Windwood has some nice organ fills. Dhani Harrison is holding his own on acoustic guitar. Marc Mann, as mentioned, is nailing the Clapton solos. Some dude is very expressively playing the congas with a tambourine there in the back. We’ve seen Prince standing off to the side, dutifully strumming along. And then … at the 3:20 mark, we see Dhani Harrison, George’s son, looking towards Prince, nodding and then grinning in anticipation of what’s about to be unleashed.
Prince is wearing a stylish 1920s-inflected pin-striped black suit with a scarlet silk shirt and bowler. A post-modern zoot suit. It’s one of the most stylish, least ridiculous get-ups we’ve seen him in. He looks fantastic. Petty whines, “While my guitar gently weee-eee-eeeps …” and Prince steps in, center stage, and starts to shred. He begins in Clapton-mode and then quickly, seamlessly starts to run through one guitar technique after another in a master class of improvisation, culminating in an astonishing, blistering set of harmonic pinches (4:03). Prince gives Harrison and Petty a grin as if to say, “You have no idea what you are in for.” He’s not wrong. He barrels on, through one barrage after another. At one point he cocks the guitar like a shotgun and blasts away.
It’s almost too much, this business of stealing the show, but for the fact that Prince seems to be playing for the sheer joy of it. Perhaps to honor George Harrison, perhaps just for his own soul. If he’s hotdogging, he seems to be hotdogging for an audience of one, Tom Petty. As if Petty were the only one there legendary enough to fully appreciate just how good what he’s laying down really is. Over and over, as we get his guitar O-face, he’s looking right at Tom Petty. “Check this out, Tom Petty … Now check this out, Tom Petty … Tom Petty, check THIS out!”. It would be indulgent and selfish if it wasn’t just so fucking transcendent.
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.”
In the middle of a second round of Eddie Van Halen-style weeping guitar, he turns his back to the crowd and, much to the delight of Tom and Dhani, does a trust fall off the stage. Never fear! He’s placed a bodyguard there to catch him and set him back on his feet. We are made starkly aware of his bantam stature, which, in its way makes the towering nature of his power all the more impressive. The performance is just over six minutes long and Prince’s solo takes up half of it. If he felt slighted by Mann stealing his solos in rehearsal he got his revenge and then some.
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!”
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.
THEN. THEN! Then he executes what might be the most gangster move anyone has made with a guitar since Jimi Hendrix lit his strat on fire at Monterey in ‘67. As he brings three minutes of dragonfire soloing to a close, he promptly unstraps his MadCat Telecaster*, you’ll miss it if you aren’t paying close attention, and quietly throws it straight up into the air and it … disappears. The guitar fucking dis…a…pears. That guitar had been rode hard and put away wet … but with a David Copperfield twist.
FERRONE: 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.
He then pimpwalks offstage while everyone else is taking their bows and he disappears before the others have even taken their guitar straps off.
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* Technically, the MadCat is not a Telecaster, it’s Tele-style guitar made by Hohner.