A documentary that may never be released has shed new light on Prince’s famous While My Guitar Gently Weeps guitar solo from the 2004 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, which was reportedly performed in part to spite Rolling Stone magazine.
Prince’s legendary career was filled with plenty of iconic onstage electric guitar moments, but the night he was finally inducted into the Hall of Fame is especially notable.
On that night in February 2004, Prince joined Tom Petty, Steve Winwood, Jeff Lynne and Dhani Harrison for a cover of While My Guitar Gently Weeps, during which he ripped through a powerfully moving solo.
It was long seen as an exemplary display of Prince’s guitar prowess, and while that still holds true, it seems there is slightly more to the solo. In a feature recently published by The New York Times Magazine, which focuses on Ezra Edelman’s new nine-hour Prince documentary, that night is cast in a new light.
As the documentary reports, Prince’s solo was “an act of revenge” designed to spite Rolling Stone, who had left the musician off its 100 Greatest Guitar Players Of All Time list the year before his RRHOF induction.
His response to being omitted from the list? Unleash a guitar solo so epic that it would forever live on in the memory of music fans, and cap it off by launching his guitar in the air. It would become one of Prince’s enduring guitar legacies.
As The New York Times Magazine reports, “On its face, it’s a supreme expression of Prince’s superiority and bravura. But the film gives it a new context. Questlove, on the screen, talks about his disbelief, the previous year, when Rolling Stone made a list of the 100 greatest guitar players of all time, and Prince was left off it.
“Prince nursed these kinds of slights, and his commandeering of the stage – at an event associated with [founder] Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone – was, in part, an act of revenge. There’s spite and aggression in the performance. But there’s also pain – in his wincing face, his apartness: a small, soigné Black man onstage with these rumpled white rockers.”
Those who shared the stage with Prince that night knew they were witnessing history.
In 2016, following Prince’s death, Petty told The New York Times, “You see me nodding at him, to say, ‘Go on, go on.’ He just burned it up. You could feel the electricity of ‘something really big’s going down here.’”
Prince’s solo clearly made quite the impression, and Rolling Stone avoided making the same mistake when it came to assembling its recently updated list of the 250 Greatest Guitarists Of All Time.
Published last year, that list put Prince in 14th place – a huge improvement after being completely left off the lineup two decades ago. That new list wasn’t without its own controversies, though, and was called out for having omitted a number of indisputable game-changers.
The release of Edelman’s nine-hour Prince documentary is currently in doubt. As The New York Times Magazine reports, the artist’s estate is attempting to block it, worried it will tarnish Paisley Park’s reputation.
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