The moment Billy Gibbons met Prince for the first time: “I’d just like to talk guitar”
Prince was proof that, yes, you could be all things to all men. If you wanted a singer, he was one of the most expressive and versatile around. A dancer? He could move with the best of them. A producer? He could make any record hit. A songwriter? Do you even need to ask? An actor? Let’s move on. The problem was, as was most often the case if you asked Prince, that people couldn’t handle the true width of his genius. Some aspects of his greatness went underrated until much later in his life, most notably his unbelievable prowess on guitar.
Now, true devotees of His Royal Badness will be aghast at this. After all, how could you listen to tracks like ‘I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man’, ‘When Doves Cry’ and a little-known B-side of his called ‘Purple Rain’ without noticing the astonishing guitar work on display? However, from the perspective of a filthy casual, it can get a little lost in just how incredible everything else is.
This wasn’t Van Halen, where they knew that Eddie’s playing was the only really noteworthy thing about them as a band, so they shoved it front and centre. Everything about those records hits like an absolute train, so picking out his stellar fretwork above everything else is difficult. Y’know who also felt this way? Rolling Stone magazine snubbed the Purple One from their 2004 list of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time.
Prince, a famously chill individual who didn’t know the meaning of the word grudge, took this personally. Mere days after that issue’s publication, he decided to show them exactly what they were missing at their founder Jann Wenner’s side hustle, The Rock And Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony. If you’re the kind of music obsessive who frequents this website, you know exactly how he did this.
Several of his friends were paying tribute to the dearly missed George Harrison by playing his classic Beatles track ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’. Jeff Lynne, Tom Petty, Steve Winwood, and Harrison’s son Dhani were steering home a sterling version of The White Album highlight before Prince decided to release the hounds, doing absolutely filthy things to a leopard print Telecaster while Dhani looked ecstatic (Petty less so).
One of the people discovering Prince’s true guitar genius was a man in the audience who could share that title, ZZ Top axman and talking beard Billy Gibbons. He spoke candidly about this in an interview, saying that the solo “caught him off-guard, so [he] started listening intently.” This was just as well because not long after that gig, he had his only encounter with the great man after a Top gig in Manhattan.
While trying to find a place to eat, Gibbons says, he saw “a new place had recently opened, there was great fanfare, I saw Brazilian looking dancers on top of the bar, the music was so loud that I thought ‘I gotta go.’” Almost as soon as Gibbons entered the building, someone tapped him on the shoulder and told him someone wanted to speak to him. That someone, sat alone at a table, was Prince.
Prince welcomed him, and according to Gibbons, “He said, ‘I’d just like to talk guitar.’ And I said, ‘You’ve come to the right place!’ I said, ‘Now, knowing you as a guitarist,’ which I had not known before, ‘let’s peel the onion!’” Peel the onion they did, talking away until the early hours of the morning. Just before Gibbons left, he had to ask one more question.
He asked, “Can you teach me how to play that guitar figure that opens up your great song ‘When Doves Cry’? And he said, ‘Well, I fell into it by accident.’ He said, ‘I haven’t been able to play it like that ever since!’ He said, ‘Let’s go learn it!’” With that in mind, maybe it’s ok that it took a while for the world to really notice Prince’s guitar skills. After all, they sometimes seemed to skip his mind too!
