Skip to main content

Watch a New Director’s Cut of Prince’s Blistering “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” Guitar Solo (2004)

Recently, I was walking with a young relative who, upon passing a mural of the late Prince Rogers Nelson, looked up at me and asked, “who is that?,” whereupon my eyes grew wide as saucers and I began the tale of a musical hero who conquered every instrument, every musical style, every chord and scale, etc. It was a story fit for young ears, mind you, but mythic enough, I guess, that it inspired my relative to stop me mid-sentence and ask in awe, “was he a god?” To which I stammered, caught off guard, “well, kind of…..”

Humanly flawed though he was, Prince comes as close as any recent figure to musical divinity in the flesh. He seemed to conjure and create effortlessly, ex nihilo, never seeming to tire and always looking as though he just stepped off of a cloud. Now we know a little more about the source of some of that serenity, but it diminishes his legend not one bit. If not a god, he was at least some sort of wizard.

Prince’s famously epic live solo at the 2004 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony in the star-packed jamboree cover of George Harrison’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” holds up as a wondrously succinct case in point to show the children. Now, the performance has been re-edited in a “director’s cut” by the broadcast’s original director Joel Gallen. Thom Dunn at Boing Boing quotes his explanation: “there were several shots that were bothering me. I got rid of the dissolves and made them all cuts, and added lots more close ups of Prince during his solo.” (See the original below.)

“Fortunately,” notes Dunn, “Gallen preserved the disappearing guitar at the end.” No one knows to this day where the guitar went, not even Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers drummer Steve Ferrone, who was on stage behind Prince at the time. The stunt was unrehearsed, and so was everything about the solo — no one had any idea what was going to happen, a frightening prospect on live television but a risk one must take, I suppose, when working with the Purple One.

In 2016, Gallen told The New York Times the story, worth quoting in full, of the performance’s rehearsal, a moment of private humility from Prince behind his live bravura show onstage.

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.

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.

No, kid, he wasn’t a god, just a guy who could do things no one else could. He was a genius.

via Boing Boing / Laughing Squid

Related Content: 

Prince Plays a Mind-Blowing Guitar Solo On “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”

Watch Prince Perform “Purple Rain” in the Rain in His Transcendent Super Bowl Half-Time Show (2007)

Prince’s First Television Interview (1985)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

Watch a New Director’s Cut of Prince’s Blistering “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” Guitar Solo (2004) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/33nJeSp
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

Howard Zinn’s Recommended Reading List for Activists Who Want to Change the World

Image by via Wikimedia Commons Back in college, I spotted A People’s History of the United States   in the bags and on the bookshelves of many a fellow undergraduate. By that time, Howard Zinn’s alternative telling of the American story had been popular reading material for a couple of decades, just as it presumably remains a couple more decades on. Even now, a dozen years after Zinn’s death, his ideas about how to approach U.S. history through non-standard points of view remain widely influential. Just last month, Radical Reads featured the reading list he originally drew up for the  Socialist Worker , pitched at “activists interested in making their own history.” Zinn’s recommendations naturally include the work of other historians, from Gary Nash’s Red, White and Black: The Peoples of Early America (“a pioneering work of ‘multiculturalism’ dealing with racial interactions in the colonial period”) to Vincent Harding’s There Is a River: The Black Struggle for ...
Post a Comment
Read more

1,100 Delicate Drawings of Root Systems Reveals the Hidden World of Plants

We know that plants can inspire art. If you, personally, still require convincing on that point, just have a look at Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants , the drawings of Ernst Heinrich Haeckel , Elizabeth Blackwell’s  A Curious Herbal , and Nancy Anne Kingsbury Wollstonecraft’s Specimens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba — not to mention the paintings of Georgia O’ Keeffe — all previously featured here on Open Culture. But those works concern themselves only with plant life as it exists above ground. What goes on down below, underneath the soil? That you can see for yourself — and without having to pull up one of our fine flowering (or non-flowering) friends to do so — at Wageningen University’s online archive of root system drawings . “The outcome of 40 years of  root system excavations in Europe,” says that site, the collection contains 1,180 diagrams of species from  Abies alba (best known today as a kind of Christmas t...
Post a Comment
Read more