Prince, Tom Petty, Steve Winwood, Jeff Lynne & Dhani Harrison – While My Guitar Gently Weeps
2004
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Best comments
1.“Prince is the type of dude who shows up to school in a cape... but then actually flies.”
More comments
- 2.“I think Prince's guitar needed a cigarette after that.”
- 3.“Who's still sitting here waiting for Prince's guitar to come back down?”
The story
March 15, 2004, the Waldorf Astoria in New York. George Harrison was going into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame posthumously, and his people lined up to play The Beatles' While My Guitar Gently Weeps: Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne, his old Traveling Wilburys bandmates, plus Steve Winwood, Harrison's son Dhani on acoustic guitar, and Prince, who was being inducted the same night. Olivia Harrison reportedly had to be talked into letting Prince play, since he wasn't a close friend of George's.
In rehearsal, Jeff Lynne's guitarist Marc Mann played the middle solo note for note like Eric Clapton's original. So Prince told producer Joel Gallen to let Mann keep that one, and he'd take the ending. According to Gallen, they never really rehearsed the ending.
Then Prince steps up. About three and a half minutes in, he starts from Clapton's solo and stretches it into something long, wailing and fast on a butterscotch Tele-style guitar. He leans so far back off the stage that a stagehand has to shove him back up, and he keeps playing. He smiles, throws the guitar straight up in the air and walks off. It never comes back down on camera. Petty's drummer Steve Ferrone said he never saw who caught it.
When Prince died in April 2016, the New York Times had Petty and the others tell the story, and the clip went everywhere that week. A tribute where the guest stole the show, and the guitar vanished with it.
