By Matt Owen, Guitar World | 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.
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Read more here:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/music/news/prince-s-iconic-while-my-guitar-gently-weeps-solo-was-an-act-of-revenge-for-being-left-off-rolling-stone-s-100-greatest-guitarists-list/
Photo: Prince