Prince, a crash course
Eric Clapton was asked about how it felt to be the world’s best guitarist.
His response: “I don’t know. Ask Prince”.
News of Prince’s death broke Thursday afternoon, and at 1:57pm MTV switched to playing nothing but Prince videos, from Purple Rain onward. The network apparently never plays music videos anymore, so that fact was wryly celebrated among the Prince generation. After all it was MTV that made Prince (and Madonna and so many others), and they that made MTV.
It is more difficult than I would expect to find Prince videos online. Apparently his people are aggressive about DCMA-ing bootleg videos. The Guardian printed this list of The 20 best Prince songs you’ve never heard, but most of those seem to have been taken down. At at his last couple of shows, Prince covered Bowie’s “Heroes” for the first time, but these videos, too, have been pulled.
One that remains is a TV tribute version of “While my Guitar Gently Weeps” with Tom Petty, Steve Winwood and George Harrison’s son. The rendition plods until Prince’s guitar solo burns it down in the final chorus. I had no idea.
Then there is Prince’s astonishing 2007 Super Bowl halftime show, performed in a Miami downpour. Here’s the full show without commentary. Starting with “Let’s Go Crazy” he covers “Proud Mary” backed by a marching band, Hendrix’s version of “All Along the Watchtower,” transitions to “Baby I’m a Star” and wraps it all up with a sing along of “Purple Rain.”
It was pouring the morning of the game, a Miami-will-rain-forever kind of downpour, and the producers nervously called Prince. It’s raining, they said. It’s raining a lot.
— I see that, Prince said. Can you make it rain harder?
“You can’t be both Elvis Presley and Miles Davis”
In a 1996 New York Times interview, Prince said: “I feel like a regular person, but I listen to this and wonder, where did it come from? I believe definitely in the higher power that gave me this talent. If you could go in the studio alone and come out with that, you’d do it every day, wouldn’t you?”
