“A lot of what I do I learned from him”: The artist who taught Prince everything about the guitar
Anyone considering stepping up to Prince during his prime would be competing for second place. Not every concert has to be a showcase for technique or anything, but as soon as ‘The Purple One’ strapped on his guitar and got behind the microphone, nothing else mattered in the world other than watching him strut across the stage. Even gods aren’t perfect, though, and Prince admitted that one of his guitar idols came from all the way back in Minneapolis.
Looking through Prince’s guitar moments, though, he always seemed to have a musical cornucopia of ideas whenever he played a solo. Most of the time, he could play the kind of pseudo-funk groove that made James Brown records work so well, but the minute that you weren’t looking, the guitar break for ‘Let’s Go Crazy’ would come in and put every other heavy metal guitarist to shame.
Because of all the genres he worked in, Prince knew when and where to show his stuff. He had already fine-tuned his penchant for pop tunes by the time of Purple Rain, so the rest of his career involved him taking his guitar into different areas, whether that was the massive genre-jumping on Sign O’ The Times or when he started working on projects like The Rainbow Children, where he went into jazz.
That kind of talent doesn’t really need a band behind it, but even after The Revolution disbanded, The New Power Generation had more than their fair share of highlights. Despite Prince still holding down the fort, Sonny Thompson was a huge get on the local scene, serving as the bass player during the early 1990s and keeping Prince rolling into the next decade.
Although the bass player is never really known as the best player in a rock context, he’s essential to why Prince’s ventures into New Jack Swing work so well. No matter how many times people wanted to hear Prince play the hits, the fact that ‘Gett Off’ worked so well is because of how much of an earworm Sonny T dials in on the bass.
But before Prince had inherited the prestige of his name on the charts, he thought that he wouldn’t be half the guitarist he was if not for Thompson, telling Guitar World, “I thought Sonny was God. Sonny was my hero. A lot of what I do on guitar, I learned from him. I’d go over to his house, and we’d play records, and he’d show me things on guitar.”
Then again, Prince would never have to worry about being a carbon copy of Thompson by any stretch. Despite everyone under the sun drawing comparisons between him and Jimi Hendrix, there are traces of many different guitarists in his arsenal, whether that be Eddie Hazel on the funk tracks, Carlos Santana on the soulful tunes, and even the raw stomp of Jimmy Page in their hard rock tracks.
But Prince’s high praise for Thompson is more than a simple complement to one of his bandmates. It was to help raise up the immeasurable talent that never actually left Minneapolis after the purple afterglow faded.
