Prince’s Iconic Rock Hall Guitar Solo Had Some Spite Behind It
Prince has had many incredible live moments in his career, but one that is often brought up is his guitar solo during an all-star jam of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” at the 2004 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony.
The jam served as a tribute to George Harrison, who was inducted into the Rock Hall as a solo artist that year. Prince was also inducted in 2004, and so was Steve Windwood as a member of Traffic. Prince and Winwood joined Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne and Dhani Harrison for the remarkable cover.
If you thought Prince stepped up his game in that moment, you’re not wrong. As it turns out, he sort of had something to prove during that performance.
The New York Times Magazine recently published a lengthy feature about a nine-hour documentary about Prince directed by Ezra Edelman that may not get released. In the doc, this 2004 Rock Hall performance is explored. Apparently, Prince made a point to really tackle his epic three-minute solo in response to being omitted from a 2003 list published by Rolling Stone about the greatest guitarists of all time. (The Rock Hall was co-founded by Rolling Stone co-founder Jann Wenner, who happened to be inducted into the Rock Hall in 2004.)
The New York Times Magazine notes, “Prince nursed these kinds of slights, and his commandeering of the stage — at an event associated with 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.”
Following Prince’s shocking death in 2016, The New York Times did an oral history piece about this performance and Prince’s solo. Petty told the outlet, “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.'”
At the end of the performance, Prince threw his guitar up in the air, but the footage from the performance doesn’t show the guitar coming back down. It’s a mystery that has stumped even the people on stage. Heartbreakers drummer Steve Ferrone told The New York Times in 2016, “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.”
As of publishing, two versions of the performance — the original and a 2021 remaster — account for 131.8 and 29.7 million views, respectively, on the Rock Hall’s YouTube channel. The original version is the most-watched video on the channel.
